The Hip Opinion

David Mamet turned into a very interesting (if not always good) film artist, but his Heist has one of the worst plots of any movie in 2001.  Amoral and almost a potboiler, it revolves around the machinations of thieves acted by Gene Hackman, Danny DeVito and Delroy Lindo.  It boasts some excellent dialogue, however:  “She could talk herself out of a sunburn.”  The first words out of Hackman’s mouth when he and Rebecca Pidgeon are ready to pull a job are “Nobody lives forever.”  “Frank Sinatra gave it a shot,” replies Pidgeon coolly.  Peculiar language for a caper movie–which is good.  Perhaps the film should be seen just for its dialogue.

Alas, it has flaws besides plot problems, though, such as a clumsily directed sequence in which Lindo gets tough with a couple of  cheatin’ fellow robbers.

Stick with Mamet’s The Winslow Boy and even State and Main.  You’ll do better.

Cover of Heist

I decided to watch I Know Who Killed Me (2007) on DVD because a critic, Jim Ridley, at the Village Voice liked it and opined that moviegoers shouldn’t have overlooked it. 

He’s nearly right.  For over an hour this horror film by Scott Sivertson, starring Lindsay Lohan, is an intriguing bundle of nasty realism, and it does have the damaged Lohan’s magnetism.  It’s unfortunate, then, that this flick which Ridley says was “sold as torture porn” ends up as weak as contemporary torture porn.  The last one-third is rushed and ludicrous, with Sivertson’s flashy, gimmicky style always present.  It could have achieved a gory marriage of Hitchcock and David Lynch, but no.  I know what killed it.

I Know Who Killed Me (Image via RottenTomatoes.com)

The heroes of Western novels sure have a lot of problems.  Martin Kelso, for example, is buried in difficulties and turmoil in Lewis B. Patten’s The Tarnished Star (1963), another sapid oater by the author of A Killing in Kiowa.

But . . . no problems, no drama.  Once again, a conflict between homesteaders and cattlemen proceeds apace, but Patten usually avoids predictable action and even boring, tiresome characterization.  E.g., Kelso’s father is a sheriff and a legendary man, but Kelso has to painstakingly push him to enforce the law against the hostile cattlemen.

Star is short and not actually conclusive, but it’s likable.  Just as fun as Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. 

Image via Wikipedia

The French director Robert Bresson, whose 13 films are currently being shown in a New York City retrospective, was a Christian artist without being a Christian man, i.e. a bona fide Christian believer.  His cinematic style usually leaves me cold, although not in two great pictures he released during the 1950s:  Diary of a Country Priest (from the Bernanos novel) and A Man Escaped.  Here, the man who was raised a Catholic presents protagonists who receive significant mercy from God, in films as spiritual as they are austere.  After that, however, works appear in which some spirituality arises, but mostly there is wan despair over the world’s violation of innocence–expressed through a flat, eccentric style.  Even the very interesting and compelling Au hasard Balthazar (1966) is not quite what it ought to be.  The “automatic, affectless performances” (Nick Pinterton, The Village Voice) Bresson demanded of his cast do the film no favors.

All the same, the two masterpieces I mentioned above–and 1945′s The Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne–prove the level of brilliance in Bresson before he took what I believe to be a regrettable turn for a Christian artist.

(The photo is of Robert Bresson.)  

Image via Wikipedia

On Little Children (2007):

Kate Winslet is commanding but never hammy.  All the anxiety, ambivalence, femininity, and intelligence of the character of Sarah in this Todd Field movie Winslet supplies.  She’s the best thing in it.  An adaptation of a Tom Perrotta novel (which I’ve never read), Little Children doesn’t make the grade, though.  Winslet’s suburban wife becomes an adulterer in this almost dated tale of unhappy suburban sinners, and what ensues, I’m sorry to say, is a forced, uneasy denouement in addition to an uneven tone.  The film is inferior to the same director’s flawed but worthwhile In the Bedroom (2001).  I disagree with critic Dana Stevens that Perrotta, who co-wrote the screenplay, “is a natural match” for Field.

Field has an artistic eye, after all–he uses depth of field as though he invented it–and his scene creation is better than the script.  No doubt LC was not the novel he should have filmed.

Cover of Little Children