Cynical Cinema

There have been many little indie films that have done well with the theme of vigilante justice.  And some bigger-budget ones that haven’t done so well.  The main reason the big budget ones have done poorly (aside from the amazing Death Wish 4, which arms Charles Bronson with a rocket launcher at what appears to be a retirement home) is that they are merely jacked-up versions of the low-budget movies.  And the low-budget movies usually work because vigilante justice is something that is best served in grainy, gritty film-making.  The best of the bunch was Death Wish, which was the first of it’s kind and really changed the genre.  The next-best was Boondock Saints, which was incredibly stylish and managed to infuse Tarantino-esque cool, great lead performances, and some quality humour into a movie that changed the genre further.

Then there were the also-rans.  A ton of also-rans.  Death Wish 2, 3, and 5.  Hero Wanted, Death Sentence, and The Brave One.  And many, many more.  Outlaw fits somewhere in the middle, and at the same time it manages to change the genre once more.  A tight, gritty little film out of Britain, Outlaw is a film about five people who have, in one way or another, been the victims of violence.  As in every vigilante justice movie, the violence that finds these people is arbitrary, and goes completely unpunished.  The only way to get retribution is to go after those thugs that wronged them.  Also, as in every other successful vigilante movie, there is a cop who is helping them all out (Bob Hoskins). 

But that’s where the similarities end.  Because it is a group of people setting out to see justice done, and not just a lone gunman a la Charles Bronson, many different stories are told.  Sean Bean plays a soldier who has returned from Iraq to find his wife being unfaithful, and is unable to function in real society.  He meets a creepy weirdo security guard in his hotel, who sees all his guns and starts to idolize him.  This security guard has dreams of vigilantism, and recruits other people to join the cause.  Those people include a young man who has been beaten by a group of thugs because they thought he was gay, and another young man who has never been attacked but who lives in constant fear of the possibility.  And the last member of the team is a district attorney whose wife and unborn child have been killed as a warning for him to drop the case of a local gangster.  His story is tough to believe, that he would join this angry mob and completely turn his back on everything he believes, while still seemingly maintaining a rational mind. 

But that’s one of the things I like about this movie.  The characters, in a lot of ways, don’t make any sense.  Their motivations are clear, but their reasoning for going through with this gang violence thing is not.  Although Sean Bean is a military guy, an experienced soldier, we never get the sense that he is particularly good at it, and although he is the de-facto leader of this group because of his time in Iraq, he doesn’t really seem to have any real leadership skills, and he isn’t that impressive a fighter.  I like that because it’s realistic.  And I also like the other characters and their doubts and their sometimes half-assed participation in the project. 

That being said, for a movie that is more character-driven than action-oriented, there is not quite enough explanation for the actions of the individual characters.  I understand the initial anger and the desire for revenge.  But from there, I don’t quite know where these characters are going.  The two characters that make total sense to me are the soldier, who is doing this thing because he desperately needs something to do, and the psychopath who is doing this because he likes being involved in the violence.  But the others remain in a murky sort of quasi-morality that is never really resolved.  Hoskins, also, is an enigma, as the cop who helps them because he wants to see justice done, but who seems at other times not to care about his own job or catching criminals at all.

All in all, though, Outlaw is a solid, tight, gritty little indie movie that is unlike any other vigilante justice movie ever made.  And that’s a good thing.  It came out on DVD September 2nd, from Peace Arch Entertainment.

The first five minutes of The Tracey Fragments are all over the place. Pictures in pictures, fragmented story, bizarre “fragmented” filming. And while you have no idea what’s going on, it makes you want to watch. What’s happening? All we really know is that Ellen Page is wearing only a shower curtain, at the back of a bus, searching for her missing younger brother, who thinks he’s a dog. Which all seems very interesting, and really made me excited for the rest of the movie, when it was going to turn into a traditional narrative and explain the story, and stop with this bizarre fragmented filming. And it does explain the story. But it doesn’t have a traditional narrative. And the fragmented editing does not stop. Ever. In the whole movie.

I don’t mind unconventional narrative. I don’t mind jumping through time, disjointed stories, or bizarre filming techniques. But this was too much. Too much weird, most of it seemingly for the sake of being weird. Her father is a jerk, her mother is a seemingly catatonic chain smoker, there is a creepy pimp, a hooker on a bus, a new hot boy in school who looks like Lou Reed, a bizarre transvestite psychiatrist, high school bullies, George Strombolopolous, a big fat clown at a birthday party, a crow, a lowlife named Lance from Toronto, a bar fight, a peeler bar, a crazy drunk who stands on his head, a strange sit-com intro out of nowhere, a rapist, and a ton of other weird things. All of this thrown at us in fragments, in picture-in-picture style, with overwhelming results. We have no idea what to focus on, which I suppose is the point.

But then we get to the end, which is incredibly sad and rotten and brutal, but it doesn’t carry the emotional resonance that it should, because we’re so offput by the strange filming style throughout the film that we really don’t have anything invested in any of the characters. Her little brother is cute, sure. And Lance is basically a good guy. And we like Ellen Page (Tracey) just because she’s Ellen Page and she’s always pretty awesome. But what should be a terribly devastating end to a movie just feels disconcerting and irritating. And I was kind of sorry I’d sat through the entire movie just to get there.

The movie isn’t terrible. It’s artsy and well-acted and ambitious. But it’s almost impossible to watch, and it’s almost impossible to connect with any characters. I think there’s a good movie in here, but Bruce McDonald, the director, is trying so hard to be artistic that he loses sight of what that good movie really is. McDonald has done some really good work in his Canadian career - Highway 61, Hard Core Logo, but here he is just reaching too far. The Tracey Fragments is ambitious and interesting, but it isn’t good. It comes out tomorrow, July 8th, from Alliance Films.

Persepolis is the story of a young girl named Marjane growing up in Iran, under the regime of the Shah.  She is precocious, cute, and to a degree bilssfully unaware of the repression that surrounds her.  Her family is a fairly forward-thinking one, with strict ideas of honour and morals, but not one of those crazy-religious repressive families that have become the stereotype.  Her mother is a free-thinker and a stong, independant woman, as is her grandmother.  Her father and his brothers are tough-minded, and willing to take their beliefs to the limit.  When the war with Iraq begins, however, and the Islamic revolution takes over, Marjane’s world view is drastically altered.

 An outspoken girl, there are some scenes which resonate powerfully.  There is one where she speaks out in her university about the new rules that are all of a sudden penetrating into higher education.  If girls can’t wear makeup, because it might arouse the boys, why can’t they wear baggy pants either?  Baggy pants are the fashion right now, and they hide the female form, whereas tight pants show it off.  So is mandating tight pants a decision that was made based on the proper way for girls to behave, or is it because they are against fashion in principle?  A simple, yet powerful scene in a movie that is absolutely crammed with simple and powerful scenes.

The cartoon is almost entirely in black-and-white, which is terrific.  It creates a sort of oppressive atmosphere in a place and time where oppression is the order of the day.  As Marjane grows into womanhood, and starts to question the world around her more and more, she starts to listen to music.  Music that has been banned by the government - it starts with ABBA.  Then ABBA sucks, you gotta hear the Bee Gees.  Eventually this grows into a love for Iron Maiden, perhaps informed more by a form of conscious rebellion at the oppressive society than by an actual love for heavy metal.

Marjane moves to Europe to escape the Iranian craziness, and quickly finds that the nuns she lives with there are, in their own way, as repressive as the Iranians.  A real fish out of water in Europe, she finds that it is tougher to be a stranger in a free land she doesn’t know than it is to live in oppressed land that she does.  Upon her return to Iran, she reconnects with her family, especially her grandmother, who imparts many wise life lessons, and enables Marjane to define herself in terms of her heritage and sociocultural identity. 

Since the whole movie is told through the eyes of this young girl, and then the young woman, hers is the only perspective we see, and it is fairly bleak.  Her perspective, in turn, is informed only by her own personal history, and the cultural and religious background of her upbringing.  Through war, turmoil, executions and horrible oppression, we get two stories, both of them harsh, but both of them fantastic.  The one of the horrors visited upon Iran by the Islamic revolution, and one of a young girl trying desperately to find her place in the world - her world and also a foreign world. 

Something I feel I should add - she has a few experiences with men throughout the film, and I felt, in watching it, that the end could be irritating.  Like, one of those endings where if she just finds the right man, everything will be OK.  And thankfully, the movie does not go down this obnoxious path.  It remains as constant in it’s themes and purpose as Marjane would herself hope to be.  Persepolis is based on the autobiographical graphic novel written by Marjane Satrapi, and she collaborated on the screenplay as well.  She shows herself to be a very courageous woman, laying her sould completely bare, warts and all, up on the screen to tell a story.  A wonderful, smart, funny, poignant and powerful story.  Rent this movie.

The first 20 minutes of In Bruges are absolutely hilarious. Minutes 20 through 25 are heartbreaking and suddenly, crazily brutal. And the last 82 minutes are hilarious and brutal. And all 107 minutes of this movie are joyously, darkly, utterly fantastic. In Bruges has got to be an early candidate for best movie of 2008. It’s beginning to end fantastic, it never stops being side-splittingly funny, and at no point does it ever half-ass anything, shy away from offensive subject matter, or compromise itself in any way. And this movie could well be considered offensive. To everyone. Blacks, whites, natives, Irishmen, Americans, Belgians, and especially the Vietnamese. Fat people, pregnant people, Christians, tourists and especially midgets and dwarves. And boy, is it ever funny.

Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson star as Ray and Ken, two Irish hitmen who have just carried out an assignment in London that has gone horribly wrong. Their employer Harry (Ralph Fiennes) has sent them to lay low in Belgium, in a tiny town called Bruges. Bruges is actually a real town in Belgium, one of the prominent “World Heritage Sites” of UNESCO. It’s a famous town because most of the buildings and structures from the medieval era remain intact, and because, like Venice, it is one of the few canal-based cities in the world. There are roads and plazas, but for the most part people get around on the canals. Bruges features dozens of museums, concert halls, festivals, theatres, and sightseeing locations. And that makes the town an absolutely wonderful place to set a movie filled with such coarse language, gratuitous drug use and graphic violence.

Brendan Gleeson gives an absolutely mesmerizing performance as Ken, the hit man who is completely enamored with this quaint little antique town. His glee at seeing the sights is as charming as Bruges itself. Farrell, on the other hand, absolutely hates the place. He hates the tourists, he hates the sights, he hates the quaintness and the charm. And he has never been funnier in his life. On top of his hatred of Bruges, he has an obsession with midgets, (and their tendency to commit suicide in disproportionate numbers), abuses many substances, and is himself suicidal. There is real pathos in his character, and through all the jokes and the ridiculous situations and the violence, he manages to convey a real sense of pain, loss, and heartbreak in his character.

There is certainly violence in this film, but it’s all first-rate violence. And by that I mean that it’s violence played for laughs, then violence done to tear-jerking effect, then violence for the sake of violence, and then violence for the sake of emotional effect. And it’s all letter-perfect. In fact, just about everything in this movie is done to perfection. The recurring themes - suicide, dwarves, honour - could have seemed very contrived in lesser hands. But in this case, every theme fits perfectly into the scope and tone of the movie. A tone which is sometimes dry, sometimes ironic, sometimes totally insane, and always, always, totally ballsy. This movie does not hesitate to break any taboos, to push any limits, to test any outrage the audience might feel.

Gleeson and Farrell are amazing together. They have the sort of relationship Jules Winfield and Vincent Vega had in Pulp Fiction. And many parts of this movie - especially the dialogue and the drug use and the violence - are very reminiscent of Pulp Fiction. And these two Irish hitmen are every bit as funny and interesting as Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta. And then - Ralph Fiennes shows up! Fiennes, one of the great actors in movies, is playing a psychopathic character that is unlike any other he has played in his career. And yet, he is perfectly cast for the role. While his arrival on the scene seems to forecast a darker, less humourous turn to the movie as it reaches it’s bloody peak. And it certainly does get even darker once Fiennes enters the picture, but amazingly, it actually gets funnier too!

In Bruges is that rarest of movies that manages to be dark, comedic, dramatic, violent, charming, sweet, bad-ass, action-packed and clever all at the same time. It even throws in a little romance. This is the first great movie of 2008, opening in limited theatrical release in February. It made a total of 8 million dollars in North America, 21 million worldwide. The Love Guru, which by all accounts is an absolute pile of crap, made 14 million in it’s first weekend. But then, how many people watch the great films at the box office? In Bruges was the film debut for writer and director Martin McDonagh, who is one of the great talents to watch in movies. Some day, In Bruges will be remembered the same way people remember Reservoir Dogs. As the brilliant first film that launched a brilliant career. And you can pick up this wonderful movie today, July 1st, thanks to Alliance Films.

          “Cruising Bar” is a French Canadian movie from 1989 that comes out on DVD tomorrow, June 10th, from Alliance Films.  It’s a film by Robert Menard that stars Michel Cote in four different roles.  All four characters are heading out to the bars in an attempt to pick up women.  One is a self-centred obnoxious yuppie named Charles, one is an annoying stereotypical nerd named George, another is an irritating sleazy married auto-parts dealer named Gerry, and the last is a mulletted junkie loser named Patrick who is broken-hearted over his breakup with his girlfriend.  So…there are the four main characters - Patrick, Gerry, George and Charles.  These are the names that appear on the English subtitles.  However, the names the characters are given on-screen, in French, are Jean-Jacques, Gerard, Patrice and Serge.  Do the subtitle people really think that English audiences can’t understand French names? 

          Apparently, no.  Even the title, “Cruising Bar”, gets a bizarre translation into English on the DVD box - why not call it “Cruising Bar” in English as well?  It’s already an English title.  But it gets “translated” to “Meet Market”.  Which is odd, but not as odd as the subtitles themselves.  Not only are the actual names of the characters changed, so is virtually everything else.  The yuppie snob meets a woman who says quite clearly (in French) that her name is Louise.  It shows up on the screen as “Julie”.  A bartender offers him an O’Keefe.  The screen says Coors Light.  A woman tells him she runs 160 kilometres a day, to see if he’s paying attention.  The screen says 90.  Fifteen years becomes sixteen years.  And the actual French dialogue is quite a bit different than the English subtitles, and if you understand French, you’re way better off switching them off altogether.  It’s like someone created the words on the screen with the sound off.  It’s two different movies. 

          As the movie goes on, we see the yuppie being obnoxiously yuppie, the nerdy guy being irritatingly nerdy, the sleazy married guy being over-the-top in his sleaziness and his married life, and the junkie being an annoyingly desperate loser.  It’s great that Michel Cote can play all four characters so convincingly (it really did take me a long time to realize it was the same actor in all four roles), but they are all so annoying that it grates.  Do they really have to ALL be such obnoxious over-the-top caricatures?  And really, although there are four stories going on at the same time, we really don’t care at all about any of them, because we don’t like any of the characters.  The yuppie goes to a snob bar.  The nerd goes to a punk bar (remember, this movie was made in 1989 - 1989 “punk” was a cartoon in itself).  The sleazy guy hits a sleazy low-rent motel bar, and the junkie with a mullet goes to a regular disco. 

          The only story that’s compelling even a bit is that of the poor, put-upon nerd who just can’t get it right as he moves from the punk bar to a country bar where they won’t let him in.  But even the bars are stereotyped as badly as the characters.  He ends up in a gay bar, and the stereotypes come flying out.  One thing I absolutely hate in movies is the idea that a guy who gets turned down by even the ugliest women in the world, because of his appearance and personality, will be hit on by gay guys.  Like the idea is that gay guys will try to sleep with absolutely anything where women would never go.  Don’t gay guys have standards too?  Not only that, but the most offensive stereotype shows up at the end, when the big, tough, muscled biker gay guy shows up, and chases the nerd around the room, presumably to have sex with him against his will.  And the big “payoff”?  The grand finale, the punch line of the movie?  Gay rape.  Get it?  Hahaha, he isn’t even gay! 

          But the night ends badly for everyone.  Gerard’s wife shows up (in disguise) at the bar he’s cruising, and he unwittingly picks her up and takes her to the room he’s rented for the night.  Again…hahaha.  Only this time the camera doesn’t show us, the viewer, her face ever.  Are we to believe that we, the people watching, would recognize her, while her own husband wouldn’t?  At any rate, there isn’t much to recommend this film.  It’s Canadian, Michel Cote flexes several of his acting muscles, and…there is a guy with a terrific Joe Dirt mullet.  Other than that, I got nothing. 

One of the weirdest movies in a long time is coming out on Tuesday. Alliance Atlantis is releasing the New Zealand movie Eagle vs. Shark, which at first I thought was a movie trying to piggy-back on the success of Napoleon Dynamite. You know, some high-school weirdo who doesn’t make any sense and is gloriously nerdy and weird somehow makes us smile while failing at everything. When Eagle vs. Shark began, I thought the basic premise was going to be Napoleon Dynamite grown-up. The main characters are mid-thirties Napoleon Dynamites who have never managed to get over that awkward, geeky, socially maladjusted stage in which Jon Heder found himself in that “classic” film. My initial reaction was geez, I’ve MET people like this. I KNOW these people. But then a little while later, I realized two things. Number one, I do NOT know these people. And that’s not because they don’t exist, but rather because I would never meet them. These are the kind of people who meet only each other in life. Also, this is not a Napoleon Dynamite rip-off. These characters stand on their own and are unique.

Lily is a cashier at a fast food restaurant, and she is not friends with any of her co-workers, who all look at her as though she is some kind of freak. And, in a way, she is. She is definitely the kind of oddball who would find it hard to make friends at work, since she would have just about nothing in common with anybody else. The one person with whom she does have some things in common is Jarrod, a frequent customer at her restaurant. Lily has the hots for Jarrod, who has the hots for one of Lily’s co-workers. This is in itself fairly indicative of Jarrod’s level of social awkwardness as well. Any person in their mid-thirties who has the hots for a fast-food employee is one of two things. Deluded, since they think because the girl’s job sucks, she must be as big a loser as he is and they would be a great match. Or two, a creepy stalker, because the reason that girl has such a crappy job is that she is sixteen.

Of course, Lily and Jarrod hook up, in one of the most awkward but sweet scenes in movies. This quickly becomes a relationship, of sorts. Jarrod is still that high school loser, making up stories and obviously lying about himself and his family so he’ll seem cooler. Lily, on the other hand, is just a weirdo, so starved for affection and social contact that she will believe just about anything Jarrod (or anyone else) says to her. They bond over a video game (big surprise) which leads to more bonding, which very quickly leads to a trip to Jarrod’s home town, where Lily gets to meet his family. The reason for Jarrod’s visit to his home town, however, is not to see his family, but rather to take revenge against the high school bully who used to torment him. You see, Jarrod believes that now that he is an adult, he is finally cool, and finally a real man, and can now beat up this guy who used to pick on him. Of course he is wrong. He is not cool.

I won’t give away the rest of the film, since I think it is worth watching, but I will say this. Jarrod’s family is irritating. When you have a weirdo like Jarrod carrying the picture, and Lily is as strange as he is, the people around them shouldn’t be equally strange. If he had a regular, normal family, then his strangeness would be accentuated. Instead, the scenes in his home town feel like a giant assault of weird on us, the viewers. There is just too much strange to handle all at once. Remember the second Ace Ventura movie? And how the African people were just as weird as Jim Carrey? Remember how that really sucked? Well, it doesn’t suck as much here, but it becomes obnoxious pretty fast.

I do recommend Eagle vs. Shark, because as far as romantic comedies go, it is not that romantic and not that comedic. It’s a movie that exists in it’s own little world, and that world is a charming and pleasant, if excessively weird, one. It is not a movie that could have held my attention for two hours, but at a tight one hour and 28 minutes, it is just long enough. It ends just before it gets too obnoxious to continue. Well done!

Rocket Science is another in a seemingly endless series of teenage-angst indie artsy movies. It comes on the heels of Rushmore, The Squid and the Whale, Thumbsucker, and many others like it. These movies all have common plot points and characters. The central character is usually a young man who is having trouble with his adolescence, and who has one major flaw that is holding him back, or causing him grief. In the case of Thumbsucker, that one problem is fairly obvious. In the case of Rocket Science, it is a painful stutter. Hal Hefner has a habit of stuttering. The characters that surround this main character, especially his family, are usually quirky if not outright lunatics. No exception in Rocket Science, as Hal lives with his older brother, a creepy weirdo who also happens to be a kleptomaniac. His mom chases away his dad, then hooks up with the weirdo judge who lives next door, then chases HIM away. That judge has a strange, quiet, homosexual son, who seems to be Hal’s only friend. That is the major failing of Rocket Science. The movie is not content to simply make Hal’s family a bunch of freaks, so is EVERYONE else in the movie.

Hal is pretty much an outcast at school. A realistic one, in that no one is giving him wedgies and cramming him in lockers and so forth, they just ignore him. One day, a young woman approaches Hal and recruits him for the debating team. Hal is taken aback, what with his obvious disability when it comes to speaking. But this is the first girl, we would assume, who has ever talked to him, and he immediately falls head over heels in love. This girl, Ginny Ryerson, is a master debater. Apparently, in high school debates, the best debaters talk at one million miles an hour. This makes sure that no one listening to those debates has any idea whatsoever what they’re saying, and the judges I guess assume that they are being eloquent and brilliant, and give them points. Or something. This motormouth thing caused me to really dislike Ginny right from the start. You understand why Hal is so into her - she’s hot, and she talks to him. But for the movie watcher, she is irritating, and you really don’t want her to be the heroine of the picture. It comes as a big relief when she does something really heinous, so you can hate her for her actions as WELL as for her personality.

Ginny’s family are strange, hardcore, uptight weirdos. The family across the street are even stranger - their son is a cross-dressing, sexually twisted little pervert, and his parents are similar. The first time we meet this family, we see the parents engaged in some kind of bizarre sexual therapy that involves playing The Violent Femmes’ Blister In The Sun on the cello. There are two big problems with Rocket Science. First, there is just too much weird surrounding this kid, and he seems like the normal centre of the movie in comparison. And second, his stuttering makes it tough to sit through certain points. You constantly root for him to break out of the stutter and just spit out his thoughts, and when he doesn’t, it’s a little painful to watch. But all that aside, this movie is actually very good. The dialogue is clever, crisp and moves along at lightning speed (except when it is being stuttered), Reece Thompson is excellent as Hal, and the ending is tremendously satisfying in a very non-Hollywood sort of way. If you can get by the stuttering and the weird, you will really enjoy this very smart movie.

Rocket Science comes out this coming Tuesday, from Alliance Atlantis.

Once is a film I watched yesterday, as my girlfriend lay around sick after she got home from work. I wanted to watch 12:08 East Of Bucharest, but she was not awake or feeling well enough to pay attention to subtitles. Which was fine. Once was in English. Only, once it began, I still needed to put on subtitles until I got used to the accents and the Irish brogue. Since most of the movie is music, the subtitles became fairly funny. There would be instrumental parts that still, apparently, needed subtitles, so the screen would say “note note”. Well, it would have little pictures of musical notes, but I can’t find that emoticon. I suppose this was for the hearing impaired who may watch the film. My advice here is that this film is NOT good for the hearing impaired. Most of it is music, and it’s the music that carries the movie. The main character is played by Glen Hansard, the vocalist and guitarist for the Irish rock group, The Flames.

The Flames must be very good, and I plan to pick up one of their albums to find out, because Hansard is fantastic in this movie. Not just as a musician and singer and songwriter, but as an actor as well. He is effortlessly charming, and totally believable as a man hurt by a former lover. His co-star, Marketa Irglova, is terrific also, and the chemistry between the two is palpable. Once is as simple as movies get. There is a connection between two people, they come together through music, and they do some stuff. That’s it. There really is nothing more to the film, and the songs aren’t Bob Dylan-earth-shattering material. But the songs are perfect for the film in that they are simple, they drive the story on their own, and the movie gives them plenty of time to be felt. Each of the songs in Once is very good, and each one is given it’s full three minutes of screen time, in what could easily have been cheesy Patrick-Swayze-on-the-beach-type 80s montages. But they aren’t. It’s the simplicity of the shots along with the simplicity of the music that works. There is one long tracking shot of Iglova walking down the street for four minutes while the song plays. And it really works.

The ending frustrated my girlfriend a bit, but then, so did the rest of the movie. I give her a pass on that one, she’s sick. The film is so full of goodwill, it’s so charming and heartwarming, that no healthy person could really hate it. For those of you who have seen Lost in Translation, Once is as close to that film in tone as any other. It is not as good, but few films are. It is funny, it’s sweet, and it’s immensely enjoyable without resorting to the big finale where they record an album and land a gig, and then the screen fades out as they play Wembley Stadium or anything pretentious like that. There is also none of that irritating will-they-or-won’t-they get together garbage that comes from sitcoms like Friends and such. It just is what it is, and what it is is terrific.

Margot At The Wedding is about a woman named Margot who goes to a wedding. It comes out from Alliance Atlantis on Tuesday the 19th of February and it’s sort-of worthwhile. Margot is played by Nicole Kidman, who is a very uptight, scathingly bitter-tongued ice queen. She drags her son along with her to her sister’s (Jennifer Jason Leigh) wedding to unemployed musician Jack Black. The dialogue is very smart, the acting is terrific, and the family is believable. The big problem with the movie is the lack of likeable characters. Kidman gets to her sister’s place, and immediately makes herself unlikeable as she attacks everything around her, questioning her sister’s choice in a husband, exacerbating the war between her sister and her neighbours, and visiting the man with whom she is having an affair. Jennifer Jason Leigh has just figured out she is pregnant, but hasn’t told anyone yet. She tells Kidman, who then tells her son, who then tells his cousin, who then asks her mom about it. The whole family harbours intense bitterness and hard feelings toward each other, much of which is not fully explained in the film.

A lot of scenes ring very true, especially in the little details. My favourite little detail is when Jason-Leigh’s young daughter tells Jack Black he has to hide his King Crimson album. It is the In The Court Of The Crimson King album (shown below), and I have had to do the same thing myself. It was initially up on the wall with the rest of my favourite vinyl albums. Welcome To My Nightmare, The Kids Are Alright, Johnny Cash at San Quentin, Over-Nite Sensation, The Melodians Rivers of Babylon, and King Crimson. But I had to take it down, because my wall of albums is in the area downstairs where the kids play, and it really freaked out our 8-year-old. I can certainly understand why. This is just one in the many small details in Margot At the Wedding that ring so very true. Which is an indication of the intelligence of the movie. And some of these scenes are very funny, especially the Jack Black scenes. This is the kind of movie that suits him best. Where he is not the centre of attention, where he does not have to carry the comedy all on his own, but where he can add understated fat-sloppy-guy comedy to understated prim-proper-people type scenes. Think of the scene in High Fidelity where he laments the fact that the customer does not own Blonde On Blonde.

But Margot at the Wedding can only go so far on wit and intelligence and fine performances. For most movies, that should be enough. But the one adult character who is actually likeable is John Turturro, as Kidman’s husband, and he shows up for about two minutes of screen time. So by the end, the movie’s message is a decent one - no matter how lousy things get, or how lousy life is, you always have family to count on. But after watching the whole thing, you think “not THIS family!” These poor kids! Jennifer Jason Leigh is a space case, Nicole Kidman is a passive aggressive, unfaithful, clingy jerk of a mother, and Jack Black is a slovenly, childish, out of control deviant. (Which is funny, but not exactly laudable.) You wouldn’t wish this family on anyone, and you end up feeling pretty sorry for the kids. With more Turturro, this movie could have potentially been a 9/10. As it stands, it is very smart, but tough to watch in parts. And it jsut feels like a standard, well-written, indie dark comedy with nothing new to say.

Death At a Funeral feels so “indie” that it makes me cringe. However, it makes me cringe with laughter, and that, I think, is OK. It’s a British comedy in the grand tradition of low budget British comedies, the idea that humour can be found in even the least-likely-to-be-funny situation, in this case a funeral. Rupert Graves and Matthew McFayden star as Daniel and Robert, brothers who are hosting their father’s funeral. There is of course a good deal of sibling rivalry, but they are attempting to set this aside in the interests of their family, and specifically their mother, who is grieving with them. Many other interesting characters show up, including wheelchair-bound, angry old men, drug users, creepy stalkers and the standard cast one would expect from a British comedy such as this one. People get accidentally “dosed” with hallucinogenic drugs, they strip naked, other people end up with poop on themselves, and the standard funeral-comedy pratfalls ensue. If such a thing exists.

Overall, there is not much new about this film. It is well-written, but not exceedingly so. It is well-acted, but none of the performances are earth-shattering. Well, except for one. Once again, I am absolutely blown away by the talent of Peter Dinklage. Dinklage is probably best-known as the children’s book author who beats up Will Ferrell in Elf. He is a dwarf, and is therefore typecast. Hollywood is very good at casting regular actors as tiny people, (think Martin Short in that god-awful movie Clifford) but there is little they can do to cast dwarves as regular-size people. But Dinklage has a massive talent, and it would be great to see him in roles other than that of a little person. But of course, this won’t happen, so he must wait for appropriate roles in order to shine. The first of those roles was in the terrific film The Station Agent in 2003, a role which resulted in a lot of critical acclaim for Dinklage, but a very small audience. He was wonderful in that movie, and he is, once again, the best part of Death At A Funeral.

He plays the former lover of the deceased old man, and attempts to blackmail the brothers into giving him some of the inheritance money. Either they write him a cheque, or he will show everyone the salacious pictures of their homosexual relationship. This leads to many standard comic pratfalls, including another accidental drug-dosing. I won’t ruin the film by explaining how it came about, but the scene where Dinklage emerges from the coffin in the middle of the service is one of the funniest I have seen in a long time. My step-son made me rewind and play it several times, it’s that good. Death At A Funeral would be an extremely standard indie British comedy were it not for the talents of Dinklage, but his involvement raises the level of this movie from merely “standard” to “quite good”. Perhaps some day the movie industry will find a way to get Dinklage more involved in feature films, but I don’t think that’s likely. I think the best we can hope for is that his talent, now so well recognized, will be the catalyst for film makers to start writing parts designed specifically for him, and perhaps we will see dozens more excellent indie films with real roles for Dinklage and other dwarves in the near future.