Movies: March 2008 Archives

When Kevin Spacey's character, Mickey Rosa, declared, partway through 21, that his young protégé Ben had a brain "like a Pentium chip," I did a double take. First, did I hear that line correctly? And second, was it an indicator that this was a period piece set 15 years ago, when "Pentium" was cutting-edge technology, instead of Intel's budget CPU line? Or was it just ersatz "geek talk" from a pair of screenwriters who wouldn't know a GPU from the GPL?

If you can imagine a cinematic cross-breed implicating David Lynch, P.T. Anderson, and Saturday Night Live in its interspecies couplings, you'll be on the way to understanding what Richard Kelly – the moody auteur whose major achievements to date are the brooding metaphysical horror-comedy Donnie Darko and the screenplay for Domino – has wrought with his satiric science-fiction opus, Southland Tales. It's a rambling, baffling, multi-story yarn about a movie star (Duane Johnson, still better known as The Rock), a porn star (Sarah Michelle Gellar, still better known as Buffy), a couple of soldiers recently returned from Iraq (Seann William Scott and Justin Timberlake), and a 2008 presidential bid by the Eliot/Frost ticket (Kelly dots his screenplay with well-known quotes from both T.S. Eliot and Robert Frost), running against Democrats (ha!) Clinton and Lieberman. The Internet and interstate travel are both under government-mandated lockdown, the U.S. Army has invaded Syria (and god knows where else), and a rift in the space/time continuum has opened near Lake Mead.

Love Songs, Christophe Honoré's musical trifle about loves lost and lorn on the streets and in the apartments of Paris, doesn't come into its own until around the halfway point. The story about a girl, a boy, and a girl living together in the big city is basically a beautiful, sophisticated soap opera punctuated by the occasional musical number. The threesome of Ismael, Julie and Alice is fairly well played by the brooding Louis Garrel (best known as Eva Green's creepy brother Theo in Bertolucci's The Dreamers), Ludivine Sagnier (the bombshell from Ozon's Swimming Pool), and Clotilde Hesme (new to me, though she appeared with Garrel in Regular Lovers, directed by the famous elder Garrel, Philippe). A plot twist at around the half-hour mark throws the relationship into disarray, but the film doesn't find its emotional core until the gentle, boyish-looking Erwann (Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet) shows up, crooning sweet nothings at Ismael until the latter succumbs — it's the first time any of the film's songs feels more than utterly perfunctory.

In Michael Haneke's shot-by-shot remake of his 1997 extreme-cinema landmark Funny Games, only the performances and the language have changed. The editing, shot compositions, and, to some degree, the art direction are nearly identical — even the Long Island location doesn't seem far removed from the European country homes seen in the original. Somehow, though, the English-language version seems easier to take. That may be partly because I long ago had my own argument with the director's conflation of cinema and reality, rejecting his assertion that indulgence in screen violence is necessarily injurious to the spectator. Haneke has moved on since then, making several films that I regard as something close to masterpieces, so it's frustrating to see him spending so much time repeating himself. My original review of this one still stands, and is mostly applicable to both versions of the film. But here are some thoughts on the differences between them.