The cinetrix, like most folks, sees both more and fewer films than end up discussed here, depending on the day and the hour as much as anything else. For instance, there was that two-day stretch this summer when she saw both Sunshine and Buffalo Bill and the Indians projected--so much yellow! Geraldine Chaplin = Parker Posey?--and never got around to writing about either one. And two weeks ago I saw two flicks while I was in New York, and then the quotidian closed in again. It happens.
I guess part of my difficulty is that I have less and less interest in writing exhaustive, Holden-esque reviews. If you've ended up here, then I'm willing to wager you already spend enough time in the echo chamber that passes for film criticism, too. What the hell else is there to say? I'm more interested in the fleeting.
In the case of We Own the Night, which I was fortunate to see with the Filmbrain, the anachronistic music has to be addressed. There's nothing like a slightly off aspect of the mise-en-scene to rip you right out of a story. And in the story of Joaquin Phoenix, club impressario, and "brother" Mark Wahlberg, cop, it's Blondie's "Heart of Glass" thudding in the first frames of the film while a title tells you the action takes place in 1988. I know the joint's outerborough, but does it really take 10 years for Blondie to cross over to the dance floors of Brooklyn and Queens? Seriously, folks, the most recent track you hear is Bowie's "Let's Dance," which barely post-dates MTV's debut. It's really fucking distracting, because the music communicates "clubbing and coke" so efficiently, so viscerally. Each song gets your feet tapping and your ass waggling in your seat, then your brain does the math and reacts: "Huhh-wha?" And you're out of the diegesis again. Still, nice to see Coati Mundi get some work.
Have you seen this film yet? Phoenix is very good. Makes you forget all about scenery-chewing turns like his "very vexed" monarch in Gladiator or even his slightly too reedy, God-free Johnny Cash. Better still, he has bona fide chemistry with Eva Mendes. And when's the last time you saw a name-brand coupling with heat? Wahlberg, while he looks more like he could be Robert Duvall's biological son, is far too subdued here and working the wrong blue-collar accent. But if you want to see Night, you'd better hustle. A week after I saw it in Manhattan, it landed at our local one-and-a-half-run house, which can't bode well for its staying power.
The other film I saw in New York was Control, all by myself on an appropriately drizzly weekday afternoon in a shitty theater in the East Village. My, it's purty to look at, and the musical performances throb with feral energy, but mostly it got me stuck on the physicality of Samantha Morton all over again.
Her body is startling, don't you think? Because, like Winona Ryder, her face screams gamine, but then there are these breasts and curves and it's all a bit unsettling. Which works perfectly when she's playing Debbie "happy to live forever in Macclesford" Curtis, wife of the doomed Ian. That maternal fecundity threatens to suffocate our epileptic hero just as he yearns to break free with angular Belgian babe Annick.
But it's also what makes Morton's turns as Movern Callar and even Minority Report's bald precog so good. She may look pellucid, but she's no waif. She's solid.
