Flick of the Day: The Name Of The Rose

It is often strange how the careers of actors and directors tend to move in cycles. When you’re up, you’re up and studios seem willing to make almost anything your name is attached to no matter how awful (See the early career of Colin Farrell).  The flip side of course is that when you are out of favour, you can’t get a film made for love nor money. While accepting his Oscar earlier this year, Ben Affleck noted how his career had been affected by negative publicity and indeed how he felt like he would never work again.  Of course the cycles come and go and I’d like to think that if somebody is talented they will continue to find work. One such example would be the star of today’s flick, Sean Connery. Now of course Connery is enjoying a well-earned retirement with a hard fought reputation as a screen icon. However, it was not always thus.  In 1986 when Jean-Jacques Annaud was casting his adaptation of Umberto Eco’s surprise bestseller, Connery’s name was one of the last on the list. The studio would have preferred to have cast almost anyone other than him and when he was cast Columbia pulled their financing. This is perhaps not surprising given where his career was at the time.  He was on quite a streak of failures stretching back to 1979’s misbegotten Cuba and including an ill-advised and unofficial return to James Bond in 1983’s Never Say Never Again.  Included in this period is something called Sword of the Valiant: The Legend of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight which I will admit to knowing almost nothing about beyond its thoroughly awful rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Connery was eventually cast in the role of William of Baskervile, a Franciscan monk and intellectual who strives for knowledge while Europe is in the dark ages. Together with his young disciple Adso, ably played by a very young Christian Slater, William travels to a Benedictine Abbey in the mountains of northern Italy. Upon his arrival, it becomes apparent that all is not well with the monks. One of their number has fallen to his death from a tower above the library which the abbey is famed for. The Abbot, played with characteristic understatement by Michael Lonsdale, asks William to investigate the death. Together with Adso he sets about the desk with a zeal for finding the truth. Along the way he attempts to impart something of his knowledge to the naïve Adso. However as further deaths begin to occur, William realises that he is in a race against time to catch a killer intent on covering his tracks before the arrival of the evil inquisitor Bernardo Gui with whom William has a complicated history. He quickly becomes drawn into a plot involving a lust for knowledge, sexual power and the very nature of religion.

Half the battle in any production such as this is having a good story around which to build your film. In this case Umberto Eco’s superb novel is rich in detail and atmosphere and offers a bounty for any film adaptation. Annaud’s tone is consistently dark throughout which feels to me to be in line with the novel and helps to create an atmosphere of dread as it sweeps through the Abbey. The monks are men of learning and language who live in splendid isolation from the squalor of the peasants who live outside their walls yet they are if anything equally immoral if not more so than the flock they seem to despise. Ultimately nothing is black or white and all of the monks are cast in shades of grey.  The film also deviates from the book in avoiding great detail of the ecclesiastical split between the different orders of monks and how it had affected the Church at the time, something that while interesting would not make for thrilling viewing.

Of course it helps to have a great cast and in this regard the film’s cup overfloweth.  For all the travails around his casting, Connery is nothing less than superb in the role of William bringing wit and charm to the character. Plaudits must also go to the then hilariously young Christian Slater who really makes you wonder how all that talent was pissed away over the years.  Ron Perlman is almost unrecognisable as the brutish grotesque Salvatore and he is joined in the cast by the likes of F. Murray Abraham and the gorgeous Valentina Vargas.

A commercial failure in the US, the film became a runaway success in Europe including being the highest grossing film of the year in France. For Sean Connery it marked the start of a welcome return to form. He would close out the decade with hits like The Untouchables, The Presidio with a young and irritating Meg Ryan and of course Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade and The Hunt for Red October. Such is the nature of career cycles .  

Flick of The Day: L.A Confidential

The work of American novelist James Ellroy is notoriously hard to adapt for the screen, written as it is in short staccato sentences with dense plotting involving numerous strands and characters. This is its strength as fiction but obviously harder to carry onto the big screen. If this in done badly, you get a flop like Brian De Palma's The Black Dahlia, if done well, you get today's flick of the day, L.A Confidential one of the best films of the 1990's and a multiple Oscar winner.

L.A. Confidential

Apart from a great script from director Curtis Hanson and Brian Helgeland which successfully reduces the scope of Ellroy's novel while still retaining the core story, the other main strength of this movie is a cast to die for. Russell Crowe is a violent yet good hearted Detective Bud White, James Cromwell is his Machiavellian commanding officer, Captain Dudley Smith. Guy Pearce is Edmund Exeley an up and coming strait laced star of the LAPD. Kevin Spacey, is Hollywood Jack Vincennes, an amoral cop to the stars. Kim Basinger is Lynn Bracken, a high class call girl whose career is managed by millionaire Pierce Morehouse Patchett, a brilliant turn from David Strathairn and finally Danny DeVito as the sleazy magazine editor Sid Hudgens.

Set in 1950s Los Angeles, the film opens on Christmas Eve when a group of drunken detectives attack some newly apprehended suspects in an event the press dub, "Bloody Christmas". Thereafter in an attempt to clean up the force, the top brass seek to prosecute the officers involved. Keen to move up, Exeley agrees to testify against his own colleagues, making him a hated figure while Bud White and Jack Vincennes refuse. The film then follows the rise and fall of these three detectives and their boss, Captain Smith. They become embroiled in the investigation of a shocking massacre at a late night coffee shop that may or may not involve organised crime. However all is not as it seems, and  an intricate plot leads to a great twisting conclusion involving drugs, prostitution and police corruption that goes to the very top. 

With a plot dense enough to match the great of the genre like Chinatown or The Big Sleep, this is a great detective yarn. Hanson has managed to perfectly capture the glamour and sleazy underbelly of post-war Los Angeles. Down to a tee, everything feels perfectly of the period in terms of fashion, decor and location. It sucks you into the period and tells a great story.The film received 9 Oscar nominations but lost in almost all categories due to the unstoppable juggernaut that was Titanic. It is shocking now to think that a film as poorly written and acted as Titanic outshone this picture but such are the unknowing ways of the Academy. One of the few awards it did win was for its screenplay, adapted as I've said by Hanson and Helgeland which is well deserved as the film is endlessly quotable.

Bud White: Merry Christmas. 

Lynn Bracken: Merry Christmas to you, officer. 

Bud White: That obvious, huh? 

Lynn Bracken: It's practically stamped on your forehead

This really is a must see film, combining a great cast with a fine script to produce a really old-fashioned actor driven movie, the kind that studios either don't want to make or are unable of making. They seem more and more interested in producing thrash in a 3D glaze with each passing day. I am no luddite and have never been against the use of advancing technology in cinema but it should not be at at the expense of basic storytelling. It is telling that this film lost out to effects driven schlock like Titanic, telling and disappointing. A great film.

Flick of The Day: All The Pretty Horses

The first thing that must be said about this film is that it is not a great adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel, leaving far too much of his rich prose out of the tale it tells, that said such is the quality of McCarthy's work that it would be almost impossible to fashion a film under 3 hours in length if you were to really adapt the novel truthfully. So it proved for film-maker Billy Bob Thornton, who's first cut of the film ran somewhere between 3 and 4 hours in length. Producer Harvey Weinstein forced Thornton to eventually cut this down to the sub 2 hour running time it was released with. This protracted editing led many critics to hate the film before they had seen it and it was eviscerated both critically and commercially, grossing only $15m of its estimated $50m production costs. That said, the film is far better then those figures would imply.

All the Pretty Horses

Matt Damon is John Grady Cole, a sixteen year old cowboy from Texas who upon the death of his grandfather decides to head south of the border with his best friend, Lacey Rawlins. They head to Meciso in search of adventure and the kind of cowboy lifestyle that has disappeared from Texas by 1949. In Mexico, they soon befriend a young boy named Jimmy Blevins who has a stolen horse and little else to his name. There is more to Blevins then meets the eye but the pair choose to take him at face value. After a run in with the law,  John and Lacey get work on a ranch for a wealthy landowner, where John quickly falls in love with the ranchers daughter, Alejandra played by the beautiful Penelope Cruz. Before long, their adventures with Blevins catch up with them and they find themselves in a brutal prison. John ultimately tries to move heaven and earth to get back to Alejandra.

Billy Bob Thornton has created a film that is visually stunning, with some gorgeous wide shots of the wild landscape that spans the border between Texas and Mexico. He shows a real understanding for zeitgeist in which the story is set, however there is one major jarring flaw and it is do with the editing. It is obvious throughout that this is a four hour film that has been cut to two hours, all of the scenes particularly those on the ranch and in the prison have a truncated feel, as if we are missing out on a whole lot of detail. Too many fadeouts and short scenes. This is a terrible shame because what is there is of the first order and once can't help but feel there is a modern classic sitting on the cutting room floor.

Matt Damon gives the kind of measured performance we have becomes accustomed to seeing over the years, capturing the heartbreak of his experiences in Mexico. He and Henry Thomas are aided in their performances by a fine script. 

Doña Alfonsa: In the end, Mr. Cole...we all get cured of our sentiments. Those whom life doesn't cure...death will.

In the end, the film is a reverential elegy to a time that has long since past. It captures a true sense of what the west and does so solidly if unspectacularly. Whether you are a fan or not of Cormac McCarthy's work, this is a film well worth seeing for it is a great story, with strong leads to carry it through. It is just a shame it is not all it could have been.

Flick of The Day: The Royal Tenenbaums

Wes Anderson is the film making equivalent of Marmite, people either love or hate his work which is some of the most stylish in Hollywood today. All of his work from Rushmore to Fantastic Mr Fox are borne of the same unique style and idiosyncratic sense of humour. This creates a world in which Anderson can then tell the story, and as a viewer you either fall in love with his vision and design of the world or you don't. I would be in the former category.

The Royal Tenenbaums (The Criterion Collection)

The Royal Tenenbaums is perhaps Wes Anderson's most complete film. Combining one of his best scripts, written with Owen Wilson, with one of the great ensemble casts assembled in modern cinema. Gene Hackman, in one of his finest performances of a career filled with fine performances, is the family patriarch, Royal Tenenbaum, a feckless and conniving rogue who is estranged from his wife, the ever beautiful Anjelica Huston and his three "genius" children, Ben Stiller as Chas the business mogul, Gwyneth Paltrow as Margot the playwright and Luke Wilson as Richie the tennis pro. Add to this, Owen Wilson as a childhood friend of the Tenenbaums, Danny Glover and the always brilliant Bill Murray and you have a very fine cast, all who excel with Anderson's fine script.

Narrated by Alec Baldwin, the film is laid out like a novel, with chapters and a cast of characters. We learn of the three Tenenbaum children and their early success's and their later inability to adapt to the adult world, unhelped by the lack of a father figure with Royal estranged from the children. As part of his own machinations, Royal suddenly decides to take an interest in the family and attempts to worm his way back in to their hearts under the auspices of a terminal illness. Things work their way out in the end. Of course, there is a lot of humour along the way and the film's own personal style carries the tale along. When we meet the Tenenbaums as adults, they are a shadow of their former child genius selves. Gene Hackman has some of the best lines and steals most of the film.

[about Margot's play] 

Young Chas Tenenbaum: What'd you think, Dad? 

Royal: Didn't seem believable to me. 

[to Eli] 

Royal: Why are you wearing pajamas? Do you live here? 

Young Richie Tenenbaum: He has permission to sleep over. 

Young Chas Tenenbaum: Well, did you at least think the characters were well developed? 

Royal: What characters? There's a bunch of little kids dressed up in animal costumes. 

Young Margot Tenenbaum: Good night, everyone. 

Royal: Well, sweetie, don't get mad at me. That's just one man's opinion.

It's entertaining because Royal really is an irredeemable shit, and Hackman has great fun with the character aided by an excellent script. Its obvious that Anderson has a love for his characters and this shines throughout the film which is possessed of a warm heart. 

All in all, this is a great film with a stand out central performance from Gene Hackman aided by a fine ensemble cast and one of the best comedy scripts of the past ten years.  It pulls you into the unique world of the Tenenbaums and like all great films, you may not want to leave at the end. Anderson has never bettered this film though I still retain a soft spot for both The Life Acquatic and Fantastic Mr Fox.

Flick of The Day: Wonder Boys

Film-maker Curtis Hanson followed up his Oscar winning crime drama, LA Confidential, with another adaptation in this small, fun literary comedy, set at an unnamed Pittsburgh University. The film chronicles a lost weekend in the life of novelist, Prof Grady Tripp, as his life falls apart around his ears and anything that can go wrong does go wrong.

Wonder Boys

Michael Douglas plays strongly against type, shedding his leading man image to play a scruffy, likeable professor suffering from writers block who spends his free time smoking marijuana. Struggling to write the follow up to his best selling novel of 8 years previous, his wife leaves him, his agent comes to town in search of the novel, all while Grady tries to keep one of his students out of jail. This all occurs during a weekend in which a literary festival, Wordfest, takes place on the college campus. Grady struggles to keep all of these balls in the air while events take one hilarious turn after another.

Douglas is fantastic as Grady Tripp, trying to maintain a calm exterior as things collapse around him. The script is peppered with numerous one liners of Douglas has some of the best:

Grady Tripp: I don't know. I'm still trying to figure out how to tell the Chancellor I murdered her husband's dog.
James Leer: You?
Grady Tripp: Trust me, James, when the family pet's been assassinated, the owner doesn't want to hear one of her students was the trigger man.
James Leer: Does she want to hear it was one of her professors? 

Grady Tripp: ...I've got tenure.

He is though part of a fine cast with Robert Downey Jr as Grady's deranged New York literary agent, out to have a good time at anyone's expense. Tobey Maguire stands out as the oddball student who goes off the rails over the course of the weekend, his natural standoffishness giving the character a peculiar but touching and endearing quality. Rip Torn also stands out as the narcissistic blow hard author, Quentin Morewood.

This is a very funny film, the dog assassination stands out in particular, but it does have a warm heart at its center. Grady eventually manages to get his life in order and like all great stories, the loose ends are tied up but not before we meander through a demi-monde of oddball characters, each bringing their own little part of the tale.

A commercial failure on its original release, this film deserves to be seen by as wide an audience as possible for it has a fine, funny script, and some great characters, which is more then can be said for so much of the current Hollywood output.