New Guest Oeuvre: George A. Romero (see sidebar)

Really quite into this. Keep on commentin' on...

Key Personnel: Sigourney Weaver

Veneration of all things Sigourney Weaver, probably my favourite American actress of the 1980s and 1990s, began on a first VHS viewing of Alien, was cemented by a follow-up experience of Aliens and then another and another, remained undiminished for every second of the criminally underrated Ghostbusters II (OK, I was 12), and had me looking forward to Alien³ as if Renée Maria Falconetti were returning to the role of Joan of Arc and intended to kick some serious ecclesiastical ass this time. Throughout that curious dirge of a sequel I found Weaver as riveting a presence as ever, so much more fearsome running down those prison corridors, somehow, than the alien itself, and so much more determined to claim the franchise as her own, to kill it off, even to resurrect it, six years later, on her own indomitable and fiery terms.

Alien³ is much more a Sigourney Weaver movie than it is a David Fincher movie or even an Alien movie, in a odd way, and for all its gaping flaws — wilfully ignored amid the inconceivable excitement of getting to see it, underage, with my dad at an industry preview screening about which my younger brothers were not at all happy — the film still strikes me as an important statement in its genre, a statement that was Weaver's to make and that she made with a self-sacrificial pride every bit as ballsy as the character deserved. If this series was going down, she was going down with it, basically. She's lacked hits ever since, unless we count the delightful Galaxy Quest (1999), in which she spoofed exactly the sort of role she'd refused to let Ellen Ripley ever become; I think she's extraordinary in Alien: Resurrection (1997), meanwhile, even when the movie's gloopily assaulting her with all manner of unwelcome bolted-on conceits and geeky Joss Whedon-ness. But her reign as the dominant feminist icon in late 20th-century blockbuster cinema appeared to be over, and I for one am still in mourning.

In between, I consoled myself by getting to grips with the other Weavers: bowled over by her sinewy dramatic work in Gorillas in the Mist, I forgave the movie every sin — it commits many — for allowing her to push Dian Fossey to the outer limits of audience sympathy and still make us feel the full, gutting force of tragedy at the end. Was this her, too, this smashingly strident comedienne Oscar-nominated in the same year for Working Girl? And then the fierce, bony empathy of Death and the Maiden, on which more below. Weaver's range as an actress has always impressed me enormously, and I think it's at least the equal of her Map of the World co-star Julianne Moore's; Weaver couldn't pull off the tiny emotional calibrations of a Safe, perhaps, but nor could I imagine Moore summoning the sheer fortitude, the regal poise, or the haughty, acidic outrage to do Weaver-like justice to any of the underlisted.

Five of the best:

1. Death and the Maiden (1994)

More tightly-wound and combustible than ever, Weaver stomps all over Polanski's somewhat dour film of Ariel Dorfman's play, which got a minuscule theatrical release in Britain and is still maddeningly hard to track down. Her Paulina is the whole point: damaged, dangerous, and so ferociously right that we bow our heads for doubting her sanity in the early going; that she can be this right and still this sadistic makes the second half all the queasier, and it's a performance that never for a second sentimentalises the unsightly psychological scars of victimhood or the savage, self-lacerating joy of revenge. Honestly, how an actress could have pulled out of the wreckage of Alien³ with more galvanic force and determination to prove her "serious" mettle, I couldn't say, or how one of the weakest Best Actress fields in Oscar history failed to clear space for work this sensational.

2. Aliens (1986)

Space was cleared here, on the other hand, in a "shock" genre nomination that was no shock to anyone who actually saw Aliens, which Weaver owns like a single mother owns a loudly squalling child: far more primally, that's to say, than any of her co-nominees owned their own dainty little femme-pics. Try wresting this movie away from her, just try. Ellen Ripley was suddenly not just worth rooting for but worth dying for — a magnificent bitch, a ball-breaker, an LGBTA icon to arm up with flamethrowers and go to the grave with. That "A"s for alien, by the way, as the slimy buggers seemed hardly any less smitten — an entire species dying to procreate with this one woman. They can get in line, right?

3. Gorillas in the Mist (1988)

Speaking of inter-species procreation, it gets worryingly intense in the forest glades of central Africa here, as Weaver's Fossey goes about forging a much more intimate bond with the apes than any of the token humans in her orbit, or Bryan Brown. It's the rare performance in a weak-ish biopic which is good enough on its own to make the movie worth going back to, again because of its obsessive, alienated quality, and because there's something unnervingly (poly)sexual in Fossey's very aloofness: check out the almost Darwinian contempt with which she dispatches her horny young assistants.

4. Alien: Resurrection (1997)

She's the saving grace here, of course, but way more than that: even as the movie's dissolving into gooey silliness, she gets big chances to take Ripley into fascinating new territory and plays them for all they're worth. Acid may be coursing through her veins, but I guess we always knew that; "I died", on the other hand, is a very Whedon punchline, but she delivers it with the kind of throwaway comic timing Sarah Michelle Gellar can only dream of. It's the scene in the cloning room (not the naff writhings of the finale) that really pushes the mythology forward a final notch, and golly if she doesn't make it genuinely potent and upsetting. All these half-formed Ripleys: what's left of her, even in this one? Weaver seemed to be asking the question.

5. The Ice Storm (1997)

All that overworked ice imagery and Joan Allen chipping away at the cube tray; but it's Weaver who wouldn't thaw under the Saharan sun here, and her Janey Carver is the movie's most resolutely hard and uncompromised creation, not to mention its best casting. She seems to steer miraculously clear of all the worst, most programmatic tendencies of James Schamus's screenplay; when I think of The Ice Storm, which is not that often, to be honest, I think of Weaver twirling car keys, and then the rest of a vague, complacent, underachieved movie being whipped into shape by her every appearance.

And one of the worst:

Imaginary Heroes (2004)

Here, she's sucked, unavoidably, into utter smugness. Dan Harris's movie is such a stale, self-congratulatory slice of Ordinary People-Lite picket-fence therapy drama that not even Weaver can burst through its grim lacquer. We'll move swiftly on from her truly embarrassing pot-smoking escapade in this, and hope for bigger and much better things around the corner. All hail Sigourney!

Guest Oeuvres

A new feature I'm going to stick in the sidebar: complete (or nearly complete) rated oeuvres of major filmmakers. I'll rotate them every week or so, and I'm starting with the Coen Bros. This is to prompt discussion, mainly, so do stick agreements/disagreements/your own lists/whatever in the comments sections...

It's the funny funny feeling down... in your heart

This is a junebug. And this is how much I like Junebug.

Bask in this, guys

I love my fellow blogthren. This is perhaps an uncharacteristic show of feeling — and I'll try not to mention a single movie while I'm at it — but there wouldn't be much point to this whole business if the people checking out this blog weren't such a thoroughly remarkable and, frankly, adorable bunch. I'd like, firstly, to thank the three pints of Kronenberg I just had down the street. I'd like to thank Nick, without whom this thing would simply not exist, and who is, as well as an unimprovable human being in just about every respect, my favourite thinker and writer, on films, books, and the whole thing, in the English language. Literally. I'd like to thank Webloge, who knows who she is (which is more than I do) and puts up with all manner of flatmate shit that would send most people screaming out into the London night. I'd like to thank Nat R for being so thoroughly generous with his time and wit, linking over to me from his genuinely stellar site, and all sorts of things. I'd like to thank David S for keeping at it and never being too shy to stick up for his opinions, which literally worry me coming from someone of his modest age: how've you seen all this stuff? Damion for having a terrific blog I fail to check out nearly as often as I should do, par 3182 for being the most brilliant ironist in the smallest space, Dr S for being so obviously marvellous (and 30 today! or is it yesterday already?), ginger for taking such articulate and thoughtful interest in everything I blog about, and all you relative newcomers like ali and goran and javierag and (hey!) mylo. And anyone else I've forgotten in my half-pissed state. Sorry! You all rock. I've no idea where this came from, but you still rock.

See Junebug, by the way.

x

Tristan + Isolde = King Arthur — (romance + excitement)

King Arthur — (romance + excitement) = — (romance + excitement)

You do ye olde math.

Be afraid... be very afraid

I haven't yet blogged about my favourite performance on the West End stage in the past year or so, and, as I walked past the poster for the umpteenth time on my way home tonight, I realised that it's about time. Anthony Page's revival of Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was nominated for a sheaf of Tonys on Broadway, but its single win was absolutely in the right place: Bill Irwin's George is breathtaking. He seems to seep onto the stage, this thin, grey man who you hardly reckon is going to stand a chance against Kathleen Turner's blowzy hurricane of a Martha, but there's something instantly deadly beneath his self-effacing urbanity, and an instinct for self-preservation — through the slow setting of traps, the maliciously delayed rolling out of the same old score-settling strategies — that you realise is, in a horrid kind of way, his life's work. There's such dry wit and intelligence to this performance, and yet such a vivid sense of a tragically shrivelled worldview: Irwin gives us a man who has somehow pinned himself inside his own smirking vocabulary. I loved the way he lets drop his punchlines — "That's just blood under the bridge" — with the faint but unmissable smugness of aperçus he's rehearsed to himself a million times over. I loved his gangly command of the stage, his slightly ghoulish rictus when there's a big point to be scored and he knows it. Irwin's face on the billboards never fails to elicit a smile from me, a shake of the head, and, a few paces further down the street, a shudder.

Shooting Dogs

Completing this week’s Michael Caton-Jones double-header, the BBC-funded Shooting Dogs couldn’t quite be called a feel-good Rwanda movie, but it’s a feel-better one, not so much bringing home the impact of genocide as framing it and sticking it tastefully on the wall. Where Hotel Rwanda and Sometimes in April had the dramatic heft to elicit, in their different degrees, the apposite feelings of helplessness and outrage, Shooting Dogs limits itself to displaying them; our white, Western audience identification figures aren’t sensibly off to the side here but up close, frontal and quivering. Imagine Cry Freedom with both lead roles played by Kevin Kline, or ponder again the ideological evasions of The Constant Gardener and The Interpreter, all part of this same worthy but unexacting genre of African apology cinema. Questioning our own desire to make a difference is all very well, except when it ends up dignifying the viewer with a capacity for heroic empathy more than it properly confronts us with the cost of our inattention; sober and sermonical, Shooting Dogs spends 90 minutes setting John Hurt’s weary priest up as a convenient martyr in white robes, lets Hugh Dancy’s idealistic teacher off the hook for at least trying, and culminates, egregiously, with forgiveness and something close to gratitude. C

Basic Instinct 2: Brisk Shag

Oh yes. It's terrible in ways both profound and choice, folks: the first turkey since Killing Me Softly, or maybe Equilibrium, that I think I'm going to be actively recommending to everyone I know. There will be Basic Instinct 2 DVD parties round our flat in three months' time, you just know there will. I don't want to spoil too many treats, but the movie is deliriously, off-the-wall bad in ways that only crazy-tawdry production-line sequels to already dire films can be: self-parodic from the off, cretinously illogical, and kitted out with unimprovably absurd performances. I'm not entirely sure when it was that Sharon Stone turned into a scowling waxwork, but she's got the job for life, as far as I'm concerned; David Morrissey, as the hot-shot psychologist being lured into her web, ages about 12 years trying to smuggle out his dialogue, and the gallery of supporting “characters” makes the average Mel Brooks film look like peak-period Eric Rohmer. It’s the kind of movie in which Charlotte Rampling, playing a lesbian shrink called Milena Gardosh, is unable to answer a crucial phone call because she’s plugged into a Hungarian-for-Beginners tape — swotting up on that family background, perhaps? — and indeed the kind of film in which every single character has a “past record” instead of, you know, a past. Pauses between lines are pregnant with embarrassment, mainly because we know another line’s coming, and it might just be even worse. (“Too many questions, too many answers, no one gets laid” — Stone’s problem with psychiatry, in a nutshell.) The Gherkin, becoming the de rigueur London landmark for filmmakers who have no idea what the hell they’re doing here (see also: Match Point, V for Vendetta) thrusts upwards into the City skyline and gets, about fifteen times, the biggest giggle for a phallic symbol since the climactic red lighthouse in In the Cut. “What happened?” asks Morrissey, entering the bedroom of a sleazy journo (“Urbane Magazine”) who’s been throttled by a bondage strap. Er, he slipped? And so on, and so on. I’m giving it its own grade twice, because it’s golden turkey, fortissimo terrible, and it shouldn’t be missed. FF

Key Personnel: John Williams

OK, this is an admittedly perverse inaugural choice for a series about the undersung. Williams, Mr 45 Oscar nominations and counting, is not exactly wasting away in his need for mainstream validation, in a field where as ripely innovative a talent as Alexandre Desplat (Birth, The Beat That My Heart Skipped, Syriana) has yet to score his first nod. But I’m starting as I mean to go on, in another sense, because I want to make the point that Williams is both over- and under-rated, to fend off the perpetual backlash, and give him his due. The Academy might lap up his stodgiest work on the stodgiest movies (The Patriot, Amistad, you know the drill) with a maddening lack of discrimination, but Williams-bashers — and there are plenty out there — are all too often guilty of the same misjudgement: quick to lump his scores together when they least deserve to be, and too slow, I think, to appreciate his quicksilver versatility and experimental verve on the right project.

Williams has been both helped and harmed by his career-long association with Spielberg. Harmed, because (a) he’s the go-to man for a samey, funereal low-brass worthiness à la James Horner when Spielberg’s tackling his Big Subjects (Saving Private Ryan, Munich) and (b) his inexhaustible melodic fanfare on the fun stuff (Jurassic Park, say) can get a little… exhausting. But he’s been helped along the way by Spielberg’s own peculiarly neurotic attempts at genre-hopping, since it’s when the director’s been somehow least in control of his own movies — as a couple of the choices below attest — that Williams has often jumped up and most radically surprised us.

Five of the best:

1. AI: Artificial Intelligence (2001). Bubbling up with a genuinely weird fusion of techno-creepy, ambient and plangent sound, Williams’s score guides the movie through long passages of crawly ambiguity, and then pushes us into florid but equally untrustworthy realms of persecution and moist-eyed fantasy. Even when the film seems to break free of Spielberg’s grasp entirely, plumbing terrain more compellingly unresolved than anything he’s consciously alighted upon in his career, the score — perhaps its composer’s most virtuosic ever, in showcasing his underappreciated magpie fluency in all manner of seemingly batshit-incompatible idioms — comes along exhilaratingly for the ride.

2. Jaws (1975). Instantly reinventing what film music could achieve as a motor for suspense, synchronising itself ingeniously with Verna Fields's editing rhythms, and giving sharks a soundtrack for ever, this borrowed its throbbing semitonal attack from Stravinsky and probably gets more concert-play these days than The Rite of Spring.

3. The Empire Strikes Back (1980). A score that stands in the same relationship to Star Wars as its movie: more bristling, more fervent, tinged with doom, dread, loneliness, the prospect of the abyss. And the classic “Imperial March”, first heard here, is a black-booted fascist stomp like no other.

4. Catch Me If You Can (2002). The film’s hardly essential. But, if few knew Williams could revive the spirit of Henry Mancini so jauntily, even fewer could have expected this score’s curiously sinister, pensive undertow, its sad and petering hesitancy. It’s light jazz with daddy issues.

5. Nixon (1995). The third and best of Williams’ three collaborations to date with Oliver Stone, this uses ruminative nostalgia to hoist Nixon on to his own wobbly tragic platform, getting misty-eyed about his childhood, surveying where he could have gone, mourning his own epic failures. It digs open a necessary soft centre for the film’s self-aggrandising, self-analysing subject.

And one of the worst:

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002)

Williams as self-plagiarist for hire, barely reorchestrating the first film’s sticky bouquet of themes and adding limp and dreary little doodles for the new characters. Someone gave him a shot in the arm for The Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), which had a fresh feel of Hallowe’en gamesmanship and a thoroughly amusing, tick-tock urgency. As opposed to this, which made the titular chamber about as mysterious and enticing an aural environment as a smelly old gents.

I'm feeling kindly...

Two of this week's UK releases are real growers. I'm upgrading André Téchiné's lucid and moving Strayed to a B+ — I still think the final reel's flawed, but I'm going to be going back for another look — and John Turturro's Romance & Cigarettes to a B—, because it's a total mess with wonderful things in it, and I'm finding it hard to shake.

In other news, Inside Man is a Spike Lee film for people who don't like Spike Lee films, into which category I rather neatly fall. It often stalls, and it's all a teeny bit crude and trumped-up, I have to say, but I marginally prefer its businesslike genre housing to the interesting but overpraised and seriously trumped-up 25th Hour.

Looking forward to everyone else's thoughts on these.

#1: (drumroll) The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick, 1998)

Because I'll cut the crap. It makes me feel glad to be alive.

#2: The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)

Because it's the real space odyssey.

Technical torment

Blogger's being boring and not letting me post photos right now, so you're going to have to wait for the top two at least till tomorrow, folks. Can you bear it? In the meantime, I've just finished reading an amazingly clever and bold stage adaptation of The Talented Mr Ripley by Phyllis Nagy, which has inspired me to read a whole load more plays in the coming weeks. Handy thing, having a theatre critic as a flatmate: you get tons of them on tap! Thanks Maxie! Next up is Caryl Churchill's A Number, then Nagy's Never Land, then Martin McDonagh's The Beauty Queen of Leenane.

Also, I have an idea for the next ongoing feature after the top 100 is put to bed. I'm going to pick random film people from all walks of the profession and discuss their work. If that sounds unenticingly vague, it'll get more specific soon, and, anyway, I quite like the idea of not being constrained under any particular heading or topic. I'm just going to sound off about people. People I rate. We'll call it Key Personnel.

I may also have to do a "Reevaluating" jobbie on The Double Life of Veronique, which I had an unexpected allergic reaction to this morning. I'm pretty convinced it's an overrated nightmare, for reasons I'll explain in more detail when I get a moment. But it has a lot to do with the cinematography. Back soon!

#3: Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966)

Because it unselfs you in a fractured mirror.

#4: Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)

Because it's Hitchcock pushing us to the furthest limits of his artistry.

#5: The Godfather and The Godfather, Part II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972+1974)

Because it's not cheating, it's common sense.

#6: The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942)

Because it's a dream from which we wake too early.

#7: Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986)

Because it asks us to look down.

#8: Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrick, 1957)

Because it's matchless, Sidney.