You Kill Me

Hit men make good stories. The Sopranos may be the best proof of people’s fascination with mobsters while Grosse Pointe Blank and The Matador are very entertaining and well-done movies with hit man as their main character. You Kill Me is the newest screen offering about a hit man who acts pretty much like you and me except for his deadly profession.

Frank (played by Ben Kingsley) is a professional hit man and an alcoholic living in Buffalo, New York. Lately his drinking has started affecting his job performance. He botches an important job because he sleeps through it. His uncle, the Polish mob boss, sends him to San Francisco to dry out. He attends AA meeting, works in a funeral parlor, befriends a fellow AA attendee and falls in love with a radio ad saleswoman Laurel (played by Tea Leoni).

I have to admit that this movie didn’t grip me right away. When I first saw Frank drunk during the job, I yawned and quickly dismissed it as another Matador-wanna-be dealing with a hit man’s mid-life crisis. However, 15 minutes into the movie, it gradually catches my attention and won me over. Screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely write great dialogues full of double entendres and clever word play. All the characters feel real and the plot lines are all well developed. Director John Dahl does something usual with the film’s location – San Francisco. It is not the usual warm hip Bay area town. Instead it has the same grainy look as cold and boring Buffalo. It works perfectly in this movie since for Frank, any place all looks the same to him. Only people make a big difference for him.

Frank is one of the most interesting characters so far in this year’s films. He is a perfectionist at his job and actually the hardest critic on his own sloppiness caused by over-consumption of alcohol. Even though his line of business may be frowned upon by most people, he does not consider his profession much different from anyone else’s. When he is not doing a job, he follows strict moral code and is socially awkward. The movie is really more about him beating the bottle than anything else. It is hard to mix a hard subject matter with comedy, but Dahl and his screenwriters handle it well. At no time does Dahl try to get a cheap laugh out of any of the alcoholic struggles. He also doesn’t get melodramatic with Frank’s on-and-off wagon battles.

The movie’s two star, Kingsley and Leoni, shine brightly. Frank may remind people of Kingsley’s role as a brutal gangster in Sexy Beast. These two roles alone prove Kingsley’s wide acting range. He does equally well in drama and comedy, never forcing either. Leoni is also from the school of not-overacting comedies. She is not into physical comedy and conveys all the humor purely by her deliverance of lines and an expressive face. One actor who truly surprises me here is Bill Pullman. He is always a good character actor, but here he also shows his comedic side big time. He completely slips under the skin of Dave, a pompous yet cowardly real estate agent. His character is despicable, hilarious and pitiable, all in one.

Unfortunately You Kill Me may not be heard in this summer blockbuster season. It is a little gem that deserves to be discovered by more filmgoers.

Divided We Fall (on DVD)

World War II has provided endless fodder for filmmakers around the world. It is still by far the largest human tragedy in scale. 2000’s Divided We Fall from the Czech Republic is another on-screen exploration of human relationship during that tumultuous period. It was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at 2001 Oscar and lost to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Divided We Fall tells a story of a childless couple trying to hide the son of their former Jewish employer near the end of World War II. The movie treads in the gray area between good people and bad people and doesn’t have any one-note characters. Husband and wife Josef and Marie are kind but also scared of the Nazi occupiers. Their heroic act is motivated both by their sympathy for their Jewish friend, David and later their fear that if David is found by the Nazis, they could have traced him back to their house and thus puts them in danger. Josef’s ex-colleague/friend, Horst, is a Nazi collaborator. He has some piggish behaviors while at the same time exhibits unusual bravery at critical times. The leader of the underground resistance, on the other hand, tries to have the Nazis arrest David when he comes for help.

Many critics have said the movie skirts between comedy and tragedy. Granted director Jan Hrebejk does try to put some light music and humorous touch to many situations in the movie, but I did not find any of them funny. Certain things, after knowing the horrific facts about them, simply cannot make people laugh. Roberto Benigni’s disastrous Life is Beautiful proves that. I think Josef in the movie sums up the situation best for Divided We Fall: “abnormal circumstance does strange things to normal people.”

I love the prologue of the movie. Hrebejk quickly introduces the background in a few short scenes that are titled 1937, 1939, 1941, and then we settle into 1943. When David shows up again on screen, his ghostly appearance in contrast to his earlier looks is still shocking even for an audience who is used to watching all the holocaust footages.

One missing part for the movie, maybe it can be made into a separate movie, is the strong anti-Semitic sentiment that existed in East Europe long before Nazi occupation. Hrebejk and his fellow scriptwriter Petr Jarchovsky do not address the ugly racial resentment among their countrymen that helped Nazi to purge the Jews.

Divided We Fall is not one of the greatest World War II movies ever made, but it offers a sober experience on how horrible war is and how strong the human spirit can be.

Evening

Some day, there will be a serious summer movie about all the Big Issues (life and death, love and loss) that satisfies a thought-provoking audience’s appetite and counter-balance all the explosive-packed, CG-aided, testosterone-heavy summer blockbusters.

Evening is not that movie. It has many wonderful moments but as a whole is disappointingly unsatisfactory. As Ann Grant (played by Vanessa Redgrave) is on her death bed, she looks back on her life and in particular, one fateful weekend of some 50 years ago.

In her flashback, young Ann is played by radiant Claire Danes and Danes is the main reason to watch this movie. She is not a traditional glamorous Hollywood beauty, but her freshness and vivacity light up the screen and in all her scenes I couldn’t take my eyes off her. The film is based on Susan Minot’s same-name bestseller and adapted by her with the help of Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours. I have not read the book, but the movie feels like there are too many loose ends and it should be much tighter structurally. Also this is one film that should be told in a straight-forward way instead of frequent flash-backs. Honestly I don’t care much about the life of Ann’s two daughters. Their squabbles are trite and familiar. Whenever I just got interested in the goings-on during that fateful weekend, director Lajos Koltai would pull me back to Ann’s deathbed and the clash between the sisters downstairs. After a while it gets pretty frustrating.

There are some major character inconsistencies and mind boggling plot points. The fateful weekend in Ann’s life occurs when she goes to her best friend Lila’s wedding. She is one of the bridesmaids at the wedding. Lila’s little brother Buddy, has apparently been in love with Ann ever since he met her, but Ann brushes off any romantic suggestions by others and considers Buddy merely as her best friend. Only in movies and books can a person be so blind. It is also very obvious that Lila does not love her new husband, but is actually in love with Harris whom Ann is also immensely attracted to upon their first meeting. It seems awfully insensitive for Harris and Ann to publicly display their affection right in front of Lila and Buddy at Lila’s wedding reception, especially since Harris and Ann have only known each other for maybe a day or two, and let’s not forget it, that they are Lila and Buddy’s best friends, best friends just don’t do things like that.

Koltai has been a cinematographer for nearly forty years and his experience shows in this picture. The coast of Rhode Island captured in this film is absolutely gorgeous and the contrast heightens the tragedy. Evening also features some beautiful music. At times the theme melody gets a bit overbearing, but overall Jan A.P. Kaczmarek’s composition touches on the right emotional tone. The soundtrack for the movie is a must-have for jazz and old pop fans. It contains such standards as Time After Time and I’ve Got the World on a String. Danes amazes me with her rendition of Time After Time and she strikes all the right poses of a seductive cabaret singer.

Evening has an impressive a female cast including two pairs of mother-daughter teams. Redgrave’s daughter Natasha Richardson plays her older daughter Constance in the movie and Toni Collette as the rebellious younger one Nina. Richardson’s face looks like one-cosmetic-surgery-too-many; her expression is pretty much frozen on her face. Even though she is the older sister, her face looks unnaturally smooth compared with Collette’s age appropriate lines and bags under her eyes. Meryl Streep plays old Lila and her daughter Mamie Gummer is the young Lila. There are some strong resemblances between mother and daughter, and Gummer holds her own in a stellar cast and gives a bittersweet performance. Streep has only one major scene with Redgrave at her deathbed, but that scene is one of the best written ones in the movie. In their short conversation, they dispense some hard-earned wisdom about life and death, love and loss.

The movie would have been a wonderful journey if the filmmakers had let Danes and Redgrave lead us through Ann’s whole life story. Instead, Redgrave spends most of her time in a morbid upstairs bedroom. At the end of the movie, I was grateful that the camera cut away to the serene Rhode Island coast rather than entering Ann’s bedroom for the umpteenth time. I secretly wished to hasten Ann’s death. It is not Redgrave’s fragile and deflated Ann I want to remember; it is Danes’ brilliant and confident Ann I would like to keep in my mind. And that is the major flaw of this movie: too much lament, not enough zest.

Paris, je t'aime

The new movie Paris, je t’aime is comprised of 18 5-minute segments each directed by 20 world-renowned filmmakers and performed by a crossing-generational and multi-national cast. It is a perfect tour map for anyone interested in exploring this city of light, but as a film, it is widely uneven with a few gems shining among a bunch of pebbles.

The idea is a clever one – having 18 famous Paris locations as titles for 18 stories that all involve love of some kind. It would have been a perfect paean for the city of love, but sadly the 5-minute time frame has really tripped quite a few talented feature-length film directors.

Some segments such as Montmartre, Quais de Seine (directed by Gurinder Chadha, it probably could have been more fun if Chadha had brought to it some lightheartedness from Bride and Prejudice, another movie on interracial relationship she directed) and Pere-Lachaise (directed by Wes Craven, I can’t believe I would say it, but I prefer his scary movie than this romantic attempt) are dull and clichéd.

Some segments, I simply don’t get it. With the exception of the homo-eroticism common in his movies that I also perceived here, Gus Van Sant’s (director of Good Will Hunting) Le Marais puzzles me. What does he exactly want us to walk away with? Richard LaGravenese also does not enlighten me with the love-hate relationship between an old stage couple in his segment Pigalle. The only thing in Faubourg Saint-Denis that reminds me of Tom Tykwer’s brilliance in Run, Lola, Run is the fast editing style, but the story doesn’t make any sense to me.

The Coen Brothers’ (collaborators of Fargo) Tuileries is promising in the first couple minutes. Steve Buscemi is an apparent sex-starved American tourist unnerved by all the references of love on his tour book and some wild hanky-panky between a young couple waiting for train on the opposite side from him. It would have been perfect if the Coens used the five minutes to concentrate on exploring Buscemi’s emotions observing all the people waiting for trains on that platform. However, the Coens turns the segment quickly into some bizarre love provocation and it is just way over the top.

My favorite director Alfonso Cuaron (director of Children of Men) disappoints me by writing a predictable character in his segment Parc Monceau. No portrayal of love will be complete without a vampire love story. Vincenzo Natali’s Quartier de la Madeleine is merely vampire genre exploitation and nothing more. Olivier Assayas’ Quartier des Enfants Rouges is semi-interesting, but he clearly needs longer time than allowed five minutes to make a much compelling story.

Then there is a truly weird one: Porte de Choisy. I am actually quite insulted by this segment done by Christopher Doyle. Doyle is a strange choice among all these first rate directors. He is mainly a cinematographer and only directed one Japanese movie before this short one in Paris, je t’aime. In his segment, Monsieur Henny tries to sell some hair products to Madame Li, a sexy, karate kicking hair salon owner. The Asian women are all portrayed completely based on centuries-old Western male fantasy about Oriental women with a modern twist – lotus blossom - dragon lady dichotomy: lusty shrews.

Now it may be time for me to talk about the ones that I love. Walter Salles’ (director of The Motorcycle Diaries) Loin du 16eme should be used as an example for anyone attempting to create a believable story with five-minute time. Salles has only one character: a Hispanic immigrant who leaves her baby behind in a day care every day to care for a rich baby. Talented and beautiful Catalina Sandino Moreno (from Maria Full of Grace and Fast Food Nation) plays the girl. There is no unnecessary exposition. Everything is explained by the girl’s action and surrounding. All the feelings are expressed on Moreno’s wonderful face. When she sings the same lullaby to these two different babies, her facial expression has said it all.

Isabel Coixet’s Bastille does something totally opposite of what Salles does in Loin du 16eme. She crams a man’s life story into a short five-minute time frame and renders audience surprising satisfaction. It is narrated by a voice-over and feels like a fable about love. In the end, we are touched and entertained at the same time. She also picks a perfect Paris location: what place other than Bastille can be better to tell a story about love and death.

Nobuhiro Suwa’s Place des Victoires tells a story of grieving mother coping with the loss of her son. It is heartbreaking but delivers a strong faith at the end. Of course, having the always reliable Juliette Binoche play the female lead helps a lot.

Sylvain Chomet transfers his genius from his marvelously imaginative animation feature The Triplets of Belleville into a short five-minute live segment featuring two mimes. It wonderfully combines the icon image of Paris art scene with the icon image Paris represents to the world – love. It also espouses the idea to embrace nonconformity.

Oliver Schmitz’s Place des Fetes tells the story in flash backs and connects all the dots at the end of the five-minute. I admire it for both his technique and the moving story.

My absolute favorite of the 18 segments has to be Alexander Payne’s (director of Sideways) 14eme Arrondissement. He achieves something unthinkable: he brings ordinariness into a city that is anything but ordinary. Carol (played by Margo Martindale in an Oscar worthy performance), a lonely middle-age American, always dreams about going to Paris. She finally saves enough money and even takes French lessons to prepare for her trip. When she practices her French to ask for a restaurant to eat, the kind Parisian answers her in struggling English and pointed to a Chinese restaurant. That one scene alone can serve as a social commentary and character study peppered with Payne’s trademark dry sense of humor. Like in all his other movies, Payne always manages to bring smile to your face while tears are welling up in your eyes. I believe Carol’s final comments about her feelings toward Paris will echo with many of us non Paris-residents. It is said so eloquently yet so unpretentiously. It would have been a perfect ending for this movie, however, for some unknown reason beyond me, we are treated to a group of shots to show us the relations among some of the characters in different stories and what they are doing when the night falls on Paris.

I only wish that Payne could make his next feature length movie completely in Paris.