Amsterdam

It's been a few years between drinks for madly inconsistent David O. Russell. His last film before this was Joy in 2015, and he has the pretty great Silver Linings Playbook under his belt. Now, as Thom Yorke once sang, ambition makes you look pretty ugly, and this lyric applies to Amsterdam. This is not to say it's a terrible film - it has a few very good moments - but Russell has bitten off more than he can chew with this one. And there's a lot to chew. The film is based loosely on The Business Plot of 1933 in the US, a failed attempt to overthrow the Franklin Roosevelt government and install a fascist dictator, in line with Italy and Germany.

The ambition is manifest in the breadth of the story and the amount of characters involved. Russell has at least 15 'names' to his disposal but many of them (Timothy Olyphant, Ed Begley Jr., Chris Rock, Taylor Swift, etc) get very little to do. I'll try to unpick some of the threads - it begins with a suspicious death; followed by an autopsy; another less suspicious death; then, whammo, backstory covering WW1; the coming together of the three stars; their post-war idyll in the city of the title; blam, return to present (1933) where investigation leads to rich business leaders, a retired general, sterilisation clinics, the Committee of the Five and the webbing of the reality-adjacent plot (above). Shit dude, I get it. You've so many pieces on the board that by the end, the need to smother the audience with exposition was too tempting to avoid. 

I guess the main reason people will see this film is the cast, and for the most part, they don't disappoint. Christian Bale (as Dr. Burt Berendsen) is fun - almost caricature but good enough to keep it off the ledge, Margot Robbie (Valerie Voze) brings an earnest naturalism to her role, and John David Washington (Harold Woodman) has an oddly mannered style of reading his lines but just about matches the other two. These three carry the film - there's a kind of Cabaret vibe going on with their time in Amsterdam, and they even get a bit of dancing to do, à la Godard's Band of Outsiders. This is all top larks but the film needs to move on so flash-forward they must.

The message delivered is fine - rich businessmen will work with dictators or go to war with them, whichever brings the most profit - but De Niro's climactic speech was overly simplistic, in fact his entire role was blatantly cardboard. The film really needed a tighter edit (probably at the script stage). It's way too long and we're spoon fed the answers to the 'whys' of the story, especially the unravelling of knots at the end. Perhaps worst of all though is the absolute waste of the film's one allocated 'fuck'. Seems to be a trend that American films, in order to mollify the censors, use their 'fuck' in the most egregious, most pointless spots. If a well-placed 'fuck' can't be achieved, then what hope the rest of the film?

Amsterdam is showing at Palace and Luna cinemas

See also:

As mentioned above, Bob Fosse's Cabaret (1972) and Jean-Luc Godard's Band of Outsiders (1964) are great '2 guy, 1 girl' trio films.

See How They Run

So I rocked up to the Palace cinema last week, intent on seeing Amsterdam only to hear that the session had to be cancelled for some projection reason. No harm done, I'd just finished work anyway so was thereabouts. Ah, but what's this? There's another film showing in that time slot, says the cinema staff. It's apparently in a similar vein - mysterious, rompy, witty, etc. Why not, I say, pretending to be spontaneous, though in actual fact, I'd been thinking of seeing this anyway. Oh, I forgot to mention that a seagull had shat on my shoulder on the way to the cinema, though it looked more like gozz than shite. Supposed to be good luck, so you might think that See How They Run turned out to be a brilliantly happy accident. No? No. It's not much good at all. I've been wondering how this was greenlit. Who is this even for?

The film 'ever-so-cleverly' weaves a murder around the London stage production of Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, with some real life characters like Richard Attenborough and Sheila Sim (played by Harris Dickinson and Pearl Chanda) to add to the veracity of the story. Potential perhaps, but the big issue, apart from the plot contrivances, is the tone. It's a very light, fluffy confection of a film, like a Wes Anderson remix without the symmetry or the charm. Those excellent 27 percenters, Saoirse Ronan and Sam Rockwell, headline but neither have the greatest time - I'm not sure they know how to play it - Ronan is not great at this comic whimsy shtick and Rockwell is virtually moribund. Others, like David Oyelowo and Tim Key, are slightly more suited to the film. Key, as Commissioner Harold Scott, may well be the best thing in it, and aside from always watchable Reece Shearsmith, he's the only real funny person here.

The whole hotchpotch is clogged way too clever with all the nudges and winks to camera and the playing with the form - too meta for meta. Wes Anderson alumni, Adrien Brody's plays Leo Kopernick, an American director hired to film the play. He has the thankless task of narrating the zany antics surrounding the 100th stage performance of The Mousetrap. He sometimes has to reel off things not to do in a film which suddenly, you guessed it, appear in the film. Not the most original trope, to be fair. 

Maybe I'm being too cynical (a reasonable bow to draw) but I reckon I racked up ZERO laughs for the comedy and NIL gasps for the mystery. To top it off, it almost burst the onion bag for boredom. Sadly this is an immediately forgettable film, not worth the time of its fine cast.

See How They Run is showing at Palace cinemas and the Luna.

See also:

Rian Johnson's Knives Out (2019) is a far superior example of a big house mystery, as is Robert Altman's Gosford Park (2001). And if you have to watch a Wes Anderson film, I reckon The Darjeeling Limited (2007) is the least twee and irritating.

The Night of the 12th

Here's a French police procedural that doesn't promise closure, in fact it pretty much tells us that this is based on one of France's many unsolved murders. Soon enough, that lack of climactic suspense proves to be a boon for The Night of the 12th. The audience (me anyway) can leave the 'whodunit' nature to one side and just focus on the relationships, the characterisation and the actual procedure, as well as the effects of these types of crimes.

Director, Dominik Moll (also co-writer with Gilles Marchand), takes the book by Pauline Guéna and builds the story around detective Yohan Vivès (a great Bastien Bouillon), a newly promoted captain in the Grenoble police department. On his first morning in the new job, his team are called to a town at the foot of the Alps where a young woman has been burnt to death by an unknown assailant. The usual steps are taken - ascertain victim's identity, canvass potential witnesses, inform parents, begin interviewing possible culprits - we've all seen the beats, but here is where the film differs slightly from most of the rest of its ilk. Satisfying conclusion shortfall. You'd think this might hamper a film but, aside from a slightly awkward time shift, it virtually revels in the unknowable, the mystery that, sadly is still unsolved to this day.

There are fine moments of frustration, particularly courtesy of an older detective, Marceau (Bouli Lanners), and a lot of despair in amongst the suspect interviews. The key scene is a meeting that Vivès has with the victim, Clara's (Lula Cotton-Frapier) best friend, Stephanie (Pauline Serieys). Tired of having to answer questions about her friend's lifestyle, she snaps that Clara did nothing wrong, that she was killed by a man the police haven't caught yet. It's an obvious case of victim-blaming, intended or not, and the realisation stuns Vivès. From then on, he alters his outlook, leading to run-ins with his colleagues and, a few years later, a working relationship with a judge, played by Anouk Grinberg. 

The Night of the 12th is a watchable, almost thriller, with fine performances and nuanced characters. It takes some gumption to deliver a film that clearly states there'll be no resolution, while still maintaining interest throughout, and though it lost its way a little in the final third, it's still worth a look.

The Night of the 12th is showing at Luna Leederville.

See also:

David Fincher's Zodiac (2007) is another film that rides into its lack of answers at full tilt, and Moll's excellent Harry, He's Here to Help (2000) will do you no harm.

Three Thousand Years of Longing

George Miller holds a special place in Aussie cinema, thanks largely to the Mad Max films (soon to be supplemented with Furiosa), so it might surprise folk that Three Thousand Years of Longing is only his tenth stand-alone feature - not including the excellent segment from Twilight Zone: The Movie, Nightmare at 20,000 Feet, with John Lithgow. The legendary New Yorker Magazine critic, Pauline Kael said this about Miller, in relation to the aforementioned film, "Miller's images rush at you; they're fast and energising." Well, not much has changed in the nearly 40 years since she wrote this, if anything, he's picked it up a notch with Fury Road and, to a lesser extent, his latest film. This is based on a short story by A.S. Byatt called The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye, and it stars two shining lights in Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba. 

Swinton plays Alithea, a narratologist, a collector of stories, who uncovers an odd looking bottle in Istanbul's Grand Bazaar. Back at her hotel, she inadvertently uncorks Elba's Djinn (genie), who offers her the traditional three wishes. Alithea isn't so eager to fall for any potential trick and so resists until she learns more. A conversation begins, pepping up the story with Miller's visual flourishes (Kael's noted images), with no little help from ace cinematographer, John Seale and editor, Margaret Sixel. The Djinn runs through three tales of desire, entrapment, loneliness, greed and folly, at times interrupted by Alithea, bringing us back to the more prosaic present. 

The balance of past and present, of the mystical and the modern is just about right but it's hard not to feel a bit shortchanged with these shifts, The ancient scenes are just more fun, though Swinton and Elba's sparring and eventual thawing is nice to watch. My only slight reservation in the story was the hint that Alithea's racist old biddy neighbours (coincidentally, one of them is Anne Charleston, from Neighbours!) may have been proven right about people not belonging to some places. I don't think this is what the film is trying to say but it didn't exactly sit right with me. Ultimately though, hope is rewarded, connections are developed and seemingly enhanced, and the film does its best to deliver a swirl of cinematic enchantment. 

See also:

Miller's Mad Max tetralogy (1979, 1981, 1985 & 2015) are the business, and the Ottoman setting puts me in mind of Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988), though I can't remember if it's good or just overblown.