Category: Directors Si

Hostage (2005, Florent Emilio Siri)

Hostage, towards the end, plays a little like a Die Hard movie, which isn’t surprising, since Doug Richardson did write it (he also wrote Die Hard 2) and Willis, who’s good in Hostage, is usually best in… well, Die Hard movies, actually. Like those films, Hostage lets him emote and he does a good job with it. When he’s doing the sly, wink-wink Bruce Willis, which he only does two or three times in Hostage, he’s irritating. But this film does contain one of his better recent performances.

I saw the film for director Siri and from that aspect, it was a little disappointing. There are some great shots, but Hostage‘s story constraints (hostage situation in a mountain house) don’t really allow for much. The scenes when the story’s away from the hostage situation, especially at the beginning, are much better. The house scenes are all nice and fine, but they aren’t interesting, much less dynamic.

The film attempts to complicate a hostage situation with a couple quirks–first, Willis is a burnt-out hostage negotiator turned small town police chief and second, the hostage is a mob accountant so the mob takes Willis’s family hostage. Obviously, the latter is going to affect the story a great deal, but Willis’s traumatic experience, shown in the opening, has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the film, or even his character. He could have just given up on L.A. because the small town has good fishing and it wouldn’t have made a difference. The problem with the second situation–which makes it feel like that Die Hard sequel–is Serena Scott Thomas, who plays Willis’s wife. She’s so inept, it’s impossible to feel any empathy for her. The rest of the cast is fine. Ben Foster’s great as a psychopath, even if the role is a little undercooked, writing-wise. Of all the people in the film, he’s the one who gets the most to do and he takes advantage of that situation.

As far as mediocre, harmless Bruce Willis thrillers (that lost 1990s genre) go–Hostage is a fine return to form. Its greatest fault is when, scene-to-scene, there’s some potential and then the film doesn’t follow through. Usually, all that potential’s from Siri, but there are some really nice character relationships in the thing, and the finite story-time–maybe ten hours–don’t let them resolve. But, still, it’s harmless, even if the opening credits are an unbelievably stylized eyesore.

1.5/4★½

CREDITS

Directed by Florent Emilio Siri; written by Doug Richardson, based on the novel by Robert Crais; director of photography, Giovanni Fiore Coltellacci; edited by Olivier Gajan and Richard J.P. Byard; music by Alexandre Desplat; production designer, Larry Fulton; produced by Bruce Willis, Arnold Rifkin, Mark Gordon and Bob Yari; released by Miramax Films.

Starring Bruce Willis (Jeff Talley), Kevin Pollak (Walter Smith), Ben Foster (Mars Krupcheck), Michelle Horn (Jennifer Smith), Jimmy Bennett (Tommy Smith), Jonathan Tucker (Dennis Kelly), Marshall Allman (Kevin Kelly), Serena Scott Thomas (Jane Talley), Kim Coates (The Watchman) and Rumer Willis (Amanda Talley).

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The Nest (2002, Florent Emilio Siri)

It’s a French remake of Assault on Precinct 13, but with a healthy mix of disaster movie sentimentality (just as visible in, say, Die Hard, as in The Towering Inferno). That sentimentality isn’t bad, it’s a reward. You watch this incredibly manipulative film and then, in the end, you get some pretty music and some sense of human achievement. The Nest takes it further, however, finding moments of reprieve (not just for the viewer, but for the characters) during the story. I can’t remember how I found it, probably through some review of the actual Precinct 13 remake, but whatever I read about it, in terms of reviews, really fouled up my expectations, because the IMDb “critic” made it sound like it had a twist ending. It doesn’t.

The Nest has a really long set-up–over a half hour–and it’s very well-made, not just compositionally, but also in the character dynamics and the general feel of the film. It’s so well-made, I had that moment where I was sorry it wasn’t two hours, instead of being fifteen minutes shy or whatever. But then I realized it couldn’t sustain itself. Finite narratives are finite for a reason. They can’t hold too much or they’re going to burst. The Nest never even comes close to the bursting point, maybe because of its setting. Instead of being in a small confined space, the film takes place in a large confined space, a warehouse. Because of the storytelling economy, the warehouse never seems too big; people move around and they weren’t necessarily in the same shots as other people. The physical space lets Siri compose his shots wide, instead of claustrophobically, because The Nest is not a small, claustrophobic intensity movie. It’s more like… well, Die Hard. Or even Die Hard 2, just because there’s a big budget and a war criminal.

A lot of the film’s strength comes from the cast and what they have to do. I remembered Samy Naceri from Taxi and he’s a movie star and he’s a good one, holding everything together nicely at the beginning. But his friendship with Benoît Magimel becomes important and the film’s attention to it is particularly good. The main cop, Nadia Farès, is good too and she’s got the central action hero role here so, really, she doesn’t have much to do. The enigmatic ex-firefighter night watchmen, played by Pascal Greggory, is probably the film’s most compelling character, just because it gives the viewer very little and Greggory does such a good job.

When I think of French action movies, I think of Luc Besson (in fact, I was shocked he didn’t produce The Nest or something–at least during the credits, after it started I could tell he didn’t, just from the film’s maturity). Pointing out The Nest is superior to American action movies is useless, but it’s still a singular achievement. It’s a good action movie, well-directed and well-acted (another modern rarity, that combination), and it’s narratively sound….

I’m so glad I didn’t let the IMDb clowns scare me away from it.

3.5/4★★★½

CREDITS

Directed by Florent Emilio Siri; written by Siri and Jean-Francois Tarnowski; director of photography, Giovanni Fiore Coltellacci; edited by Christophe Danilo and Olivier Gajan; music by Alexandre Desplat; production designer, Bertrand Seitz; produced by Claude Carrere, Guillaume Godard and Patrick Gouyou-Beauchamps; released by Pathé.

Starring Samy Naceri (Nasser), Benoit Magimel (Santino), Nadia Fares (Laborie), Pascal Greggory (Louis), Sami Bouajila (Selim), Anisia Uzeyman (Nadia), Richard Sammel (Winfried), Valerio Mastandrea (Giovanni), Martial Odone (Martial), Martin Amic (Spitz), Alexandre Hamidi (Tony) and Angelo Infanti (Abedin Nexhep).

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The Black Windmill (1974, Don Siegel)

The Black Windmill features Michael Caine and John Vernon shooting it out with Uzis. I’m sorry, I’m wrong. They’re shooting it out with MAC-10s. It’s an absurdity worthy of Siegel’s directorial protege Clint Eastwood–actually, Eastwood might have been paying homage to Siegel’s choice of lunacy here in Blood Work (when the serial killer happened to have an M-16 handy). Without Eastwood the star, however, Siegel is lost. The Black Windmill is excruciatingly boring. Something about the way it’s shot makes it unpleasant to watch. It’s too muddy and Siegel’s out of place shooting in London. He feels like he’s shooting a tourist film, not something natural.

Shockingly, the film does offer one of Michael Caine’s finest performances. Really. The script occasionally fails him, especially when it comes to the story between him and his wife (played by Janet Suzman, who fluctuates). It’s too short on the character relationship and too heavy on the bad intrigue. There are some nice performances in the film–Donald Pleasence is great as Caine’s suspicious, clumsy, neat-nick boss. Joss Ackland shows up for a few minutes and is real good. John Vernon is terrible. I once tried watching this film… ten years ago, probably, and Vernon’s scenes probably made me turn it off. He does accents (poorly) and then he’s just in the film far too long. John Vernon is fine, so long as he’s not around too long. He’s around way too long in The Black Windmill.

Some of Siegel’s work–just the shot construction–is really nice. The action scenes are mostly crap, just because he’s so out of his element, but he takes a sensitivity to the actual relationship between Caine and Suzman–Caine’s a spy whose son is kidnapped (it makes no sense, which is why I didn’t bother bringing it up earlier)–and it’s a sensitively I’m not used to seeing from Siegel. It’s a sparse sensitivity, but I would have loved to have seen more. Instead, there’s three or four chase scenes and a shootout. With John Vernon and Michael Caine and machine pistols….

Superman Returns (2006, Bryan Singer)

My expectations for Superman Returns were incredibly high (especially since everything Bryan Singer’s done since The Usual Suspects with the exception of the “House” pilot has been dreck). Three stars. I don’t bother putting star ratings on The Stop Button, since whenever I see them in reviews, I look at them and then at not the review. Also, the New York Times doesn’t do it. Watching the previews for Superman Returns, I realized Singer wasn’t just making a sequel to the originals, he was structurally remaking the first Superman. That prediction proves true, but it’s not a bad thing. The first Superman film has a fine structure and it isn’t as though Returns was ever going to be as good as the first film. For moments during the film, it seemed like Superman Returns might get up to that three star level. The film runs two and a half hours, so there’s a lot of time for it to make up for early faults. During the first hour and a half, Singer cuts between Superman and company and Lex Luthor and company, which doesn’t work particularly well and there are major dips because of the pacing–and it takes a long time for Superman and Luthor to seem like they’re in the same film. The Luthor scenes have a comical, winking with the audience feel, while the rest doesn’t.

On an episode of “Boston Legal,” there was a line about winning a case in the closing testimony–going on and on and on until you’ve won the jury over. Singer implements that practice in Superman Returns. It doesn’t exactly have multiple endings–in fact, it doesn’t really have one–but he goes on and on until he’s gotten the film to where he can let it go. Singer obviously loves the film he’s made and there’s a lot to love about Superman Returns. While it never achieves the wonderment of the original film, the flying scenes in this film are breathtaking. Green screen special effects and computer compositing have finally gotten to good spot. But that ending trouble, it isn’t something inherent in the film, it’s all because of Singer’s structuring. Superman Returns has some great scenes, but whenever–with one exception I’ll get to–Singer deviates from that appropriated Superman structure, the film gets long.

As for the cast… Brandon Routh is fine. He’s good as Clark Kent and fine as Superman. Here’s the problem. Not enough Superman–and when there is Superman, Singer doesn’t let Routh do much. I wonder if there was a trust factor involved–I’m sure Singer wasn’t willing to let Routh end his career. Kate Bosworth is adequate as Lois Lane, but Superman Returns reconfigures her character so much, she’s not really Lois Lane anymore. She’s been domesticated. Margot Kidder’s Lois Lane never had long hair because she would have thought it too much of a fuss. Bosworth looks like she spends as much time combing hers as Marcia Brady. James Marsden plays Lois Lane’s fiancé, one of Superman Returns’s best innovations, and he’s actually really good. His action scenes are the exception I talked about before, where he shows human heroism, which nicely offsets the guy who can lift continents. I’d only seen Marsden in X-Men and thought he was the pits, but he gives the second best performance in Superman Returns. The first is Parker Posey. She’s great (she’s also been on “Boston Legal,” though not in the episode I was talking about). Kevin Spacey occasionally has fun as Lex Luthor, but he never embraces it like Gene Hackman did. I kept waiting for him to do it and it kept seeming like he would, but it never gets there. The rest of the supporting cast is fine, but not worth name-checking.

While my fiancée has no interest in ever seeing Superman Returns again–as she told me in no uncertain terms–I’m curious how a rewatch might affect the experience. I imagine it would have a positive effect, but I’m not sure how much (no matter how many times I watch it, for example, John Ottman’s score will never get better). For this entire post, I’ve been trying to figure out a way to lambaste Singer’s Ripley into the lava shot, which might have been all right, if the music weren’t so overbearing, but I’m having trouble–but now I think it’s the music’s fault. The music stops working at a certain point in the film. It stops relying on the John Williams score and it starts to sound cheap. Leaving the Williams score behind is a bad idea, given Superman Returns’s agreement with the audience is solely based on the images the score conjures and breaking that agreement is what gets Superman Returns into the most trouble. And the little kid. The little kid gets real annoying.

While the film didn’t earn the three I wanted, it did get two and a half, which isn’t bad–even with all the problems, it’s still Superman.

Charley Varrick (1973, Don Siegel)

Walter Matthau hated Charley Varrick. He must have been stuck in a contract or something. It’s understandable why he did, however. Matthau’s whole image is one of the likable curmudgeons. Varrick casts him as a gum-chewing (for that Matthau effect) bank robber… who doesn’t do it because he needs the money, but because crop dusting has been taken over by big corporations. He loses his wife (the driver in his bank robbing crew) in the first few minutes of the film–it’s impossible to like her or particularly care, since she just got done shooting two people–and then, with the character’s only possible sympathy coming from his recent widowing, Matthau beds a woman a couple days later (after threatening to kill her). I can imagine Matthau had some problems with the film–it’s the most amoral thing I’ve ever seen. There are no good people in this film, with the exception of a few law enforcement personnel (who the film doesn’t want the audience to sympathize with) and a black family (who, interestingly enough, the film does want the audience to sympathize with). It’s unbelievable.

I’m not sure if Siegel knew what was going on while he was making it–I kind of doubt it, given how virtuously he defended it in his autobiography–but I think, reflexively, the filmmaker knew… In many ways, Charley Varrick is Siegel’s worst film, just because there’s no excuse for the badness. He had a good screenwriter (Dean Riesner) and a fantastic supporting cast. Andy Robinson and John Vernon are both excellent. Joe Don Baker–who Siegel knew the audience would like more than Matthau–plays a redneck Mafia hit man, who’s a complete piece of shit (but revels in it) and is the most entertaining part of the movie. Women are inexplicably drawn to Matthau, but, for whatever reason, one can believe they’d go for Baker. Oh, and the hit man’s name is Molly. So, obviously, Reiser and Siegel spent more time on that character. Robinson, who played the psycho in Dirty Harry for Siegel, showed a lot of promise as a comedic leading man (which, regrettably, never happened). It doesn’t help when the film spends fifteen minutes making him appealing, only to turn him into another pat bad guy. The disconnection may come from Riesner’s writing style on Siegel’s films–he and Siegel would lay out all the scripts (by various writers) and cut paste what they liked. I have no idea whether or not they did it on Charley Varrick (my copy of Siegel’s autobiography is in storage somewhere) but it feels like they did.

Some of this film–the beginning–features some excellent work from Siegel. Beautiful camera movements, a great crane shot… but it all disappears by the middle of the film. Actually, once the film stops centering on Matthau, it gets a lot better. When Universal released Varrick on DVD a couple years ago, they did it as part of their pan and scan classics of the 1970s series–a bunch of eclectic releases no one would want pan and scan. I had the laserdisc so I didn’t get upset, but Varrick’s got a really good reputation and I think a decent DVD release would have led to a (deserving) critical reevaluation of this film. It’s rather offensive and pretty lousy. The supporting cast (and the bland, not-badness of the scenic writing) make it watchable, but I can’t imagine a reason to watch the film again.

Coogan’s Bluff (1968, Don Siegel)

In my youth, or until Entertainment Weekly misquoted me about it, I used to opine that film entered the modern era in 1968. I cited films such as 2001, Once Upon a Time in the West, and Bullitt. Coogan’s Bluff, released in October 1968 (who doesn’t love IMDb for release dates?), sort of goes against that assertion (which I’ve long since abandoned anyway).

Coogan is an anomaly in Eastwood’s filmography and maybe just in film in general. It’s not a Dirty Harry film–though Siegel’s direction is similar in both pictures–in fact, Dirty Harry was more of an identifiable character than Coogan is in this film. But Coogan is a character study… It’s incredibly different and almost impossible to explain. While there’s a chase scene, there’s also Eastwood getting beat-up a bunch (see, back in the 1960s, people could beat up Clint Eastwood, not anymore… he’s pre-iconic in Coogan), then there are these long, delicate conversation scenes between Coogan and his romantic interest (how did Susan Clark not take off as a dramatic actress? I half blame it on Universal and half on marrying the football guy). I think, in the end, I only decided it was a character study because we–the audience–aren’t privy to the most important time in the film. They just don’t show us….

Another interesting aspect is to see Eastwood’s progression as an actor. In Coogan’s Bluff, away from the Western setting, he’s obviously missing something. He found it quick though, given Dirty Harry and Play Misty and The Beguiled. But it’s a ballsy role–he gets his ass kicked all the time. The majority of his time is spent causing trouble and trying to get laid. It’s not surprising no one knows how to market this film today, post-marquee Eastwood.

Films like Coogan’s Bluff really spoke to me when I was a teenager because they did something different. Coogan doesn’t speak as loudly as it did–maybe it does, I can’t remember–but there’s some beautiful stuff in some of this film. Unfortunately, the Lalo Schifrin score works against it sometimes. So do the scenes when it’s too apparent they filmed on the Universal backlot, though the syncing is excellent in other parts of the film. And who thought the Cloisters would ever be used as an action showdown?

The Killers (1946, Robert Siodmak)

When it comes to film noir, more than any other genre, I always wonder how some of these films got their sterling reputations….

The Killers isn’t too bad. It never gets as good as the opening, the adaptation of Hemingway’s actual story (it was a Nick Adams story in fact). The rest, with insurance investigator Edmond O’Brien explaining the killing, well… O’Brien is really good and so’s Sam Levene. It’s nice to see Levene in a full role, even if it is a sidekick role, it’s a central sidekick role. There’s a nice relationship between O’Brien and Levene and it makes the film seem a lot more innovative than it really is. Well, maybe innovative isn’t the right word. Special might be. Their relationship makes the film seem special. And the film isn’t special.

The failing is the concentration on one deception that has nothing to do with why Burt Lancaster accepts death in the beginning of the film. Oh, did I spoil it? I shouldn’t have, it’s kind of famous. There’s no pay-off with Lancaster. He’s around, but his character doesn’t do much. It’s impossible to feel anything for him, because we don’t get to see this man’s real struggle. The real struggle isn’t in the film, it’s in a five-year stretch the film ignores.

To some extent, I’m being harder on The Killers than it deserves. If I’d paid any attention to Movielens, I would have seen it didn’t predict a super-rating for the film, but The Killers is one of those films from my period of blind film snobbery. When it aired on TV, I knew someone recording it for three or four people. It was a big deal. Incidentally, Criterion’s release isn’t very good. I know it’s an older release, but film restoration–just the garden variety digital kinds–really makes it look terrible in comparison to current releases. I wanted The Killers to be good. Instead, it was a really, really long a hundred minutes. Really long. LONG.

But the Hemingway stuff… Great stuff.