I Capture the Castle (2003, Tim Fywell)

Do the British have an unending supply of novels about wise-beyond-their-years young women (unjustly poor or ordinary, of course) who have slightly dim older sisters who can’t see love in front of their eyes while all the time these younger women suffer for their sisters’ happiness? It certainly seems so.

I Capture the Castle, the film, plays like a combination of Cold Comfort Farm and Pride & Prejudice. It’s an incredibly long film, filled with two and three minute scenes set days or weeks apart, and chock-full of bad performances. The lead, Romola Garai, is excellent–though her performance isn’t enough to recommend the film, as it’s saddled with terrible diary-writing narration (filling the diary seems to be the present action of the film, but it’s decided on later and the film never takes advantage of that reasonable structure). Bill Nighy, as Garai’s father, a troubled novelist, is great. Nighy’s often great in outlandish roles, but Castle is the best work from him I’ve seen, he’s fantastic. Also good–surprisingly, as I haven’t seen him in anything for ten years–is Henry Thomas. Well, I suppose I saw him more recently in some of Cloak & Dagger, before I turned it off.

The rest of the cast is not good. Oh, except the precocious little brother. I queued the film for Rose Byrne, who plays the dull older sister. Given the rest of the cast, she’s not so bad, but she’s not any good in Castle. Tara Fitzgerald is bad. Sinéad Cusack is bad. Marc Blucas–as Thomas’ brother–is so bad he’s laughable. Even if these actors–Byrne aside–weren’t so bad, Castle probably wouldn’t be any better. It’s so shallowly written. Ah, forgot another one–almost Superman Henry Cavill is bad too. Anyway, the writing (I assume from the source novel) gives the characters no depth and gives the audience little to identify with except the occasional humor and the dreadfulness of being a wise-beyond-her-years English young woman who’s sacrificing her happiness for her older sister’s. Her dim older sister’s.

The director lensed the film in 2.35:1, which tends to require a lot of talent when the subject matter is people. He hasn’t got the talent (from his filmography, it looks like he’s done mostly TV movies and Castle was his only chance for glorious Panavision), but the English country-side scenery is pretty. At best, Castle (along with Dirty Dancing 2) will be an odd citation in Garai’s someday excellent filmography. At worst, it’ll be Bill Nighy’s best performance.

The Rage in Placid Lake (2003, Tony McNamara)

Placid Lake is a guy, not a town. I’d never seen a trailer and I didn’t spend any time reading about it, just queueing it since Blockbuster has so very little, and I always assumed it was a town. Had I read about it, I would have watched it sooner, since Rose Byrne is in it and she isn’t in enough. Ben Lee (who I guess is a punk rock guy of some fame) plays Placid Lake. Lake has just graduated from high school. He’s been raised by his parents to be the uber-geek–in elementary school, his mother puts him in a dress to show his classmates (who pummel him) how close-minded they are. It gets little better for Lake as he gets older, and for the first half hour, the film layers the story in multiple flashbacks, which isn’t at all as tedious as it sounds. That first hour is light and fast, amusing the viewer into genuinely caring about the characters (Byrne plays the best friend/love interest-to-be), even if Lee isn’t as good an actor as his co-stars. His personality does some of the work and it’s not even his fault Placid Lake isn’t better.

Since it was dedicated to amusing me, I couldn’t discern the film’s quality in that first half hour, but once I could, I eased into the viewing experience. Placid Lake is a good film, it’s just not particularly heavy. Director McNamara knows both how to use a wide frame and how to keep the viewer entertained. Maybe since the main character survives a fall off a roof–making a full recovery–it becomes obvious the film’s stakes aren’t particularly high, it’s just going to be an enjoyable experience. Oddly, instead of concentrating on the love story, the film moves away, concentrating on the character’s self-image. Lake goes to work in an insurance company, welcoming the soul-sucking experience. All the self-awareness of office culture feels a little bit too much like Office Space and, well, “The Office.” It’s a wink-wink joke–Placid Lake likes work in the office–nudge, nudge. But it’s always agreeable.

This shallowness–and it’s not too shallow, the pat message about being one’s self gets shot down in a few ways–hurts a lot of the performances in the film. Since it’s called The Rage in Placid Lake, there’s never enough between Byrne and her father (played by “Spider-Man” Nicholas Hammond), but there’s also not enough in Placid’s office. He has an office manager, played by Christopher Stollery, who gives a deep portrayal as a seeming alpha male who has sold himself out… and is all too aware of it.

Whatever the film’s problems, it’s still quite good and I only wish it were more readily available, particularly since Byrne is so damn good in it.

Oh… and having a theme based on (without credit) Blind Faith’s “Can’t Find My Way Home” doesn’t hurt either…

Blind Horizon (2003, Michael Haussman)

Okay, here’s a hint: if your choice of titles are Blind Horizon and Black Point, go with Black Point. Black Point isn’t a good title for Blind Horizon, which might be an impossible-to-title film, actually, but Blind Horizon has nothing to do with the film. There are no poignant horizon shots and Val Kilmer isn’t blind in it (though I assumed he was).

Blind Horizon is a decent little film though. I had, of course, hoped–given Neve Campbell and Kilmer in the film–I’d get a family drama. Instead, Blind Horizon is an amnesia thriller. Since it was Val Kilmer and I rarely eighty-six a Val Kilmer movie (it’s happened, though, it’s called Hard Cash), I stuck with it. Certain aspects of the film are incredibly predictable–it’s a thriller, after all–but there are also some nice moments and some nice twists that I didn’t get until I sat to consider them.

Sam Shepherd’s in it and he’s good (but Shepherd’s always good, he just plays the same guy) and Amy Smart’s really good in it. Though I’ve seen a couple films she’s acted in, I try to avoid her films like the plague. But she’s good. Actually, Blind Horizon has a lot of nice performances, particularly Noble Willingham–who you’ve seen before, but never in a role like this one. Fortunately for the film–which makes no sense whatsoever–these strong performances carry everything through.

I still want a Kilmer/Campbell family drama. It’d be nice.

The Classic (2003, Kwak Jae-young)

So, starting The Classic, I was expecting a lot. Kwak did My Sassy Girl and Windstruck and he’s probably my favorite modern romantic comedy filmmaker. Now, Kwak can do anything… My Sassy Girl had a “surprise” ending that shouldn’t have been a surprise, except I was so wrapped up in the film I wasn’t thinking and Windstruck had an ending that only worked if… Well, I won’t give that away.

And, The Classic seems like it’s a romantic comedy at the start. There’s a lot of quick summary, establishing the main character. But then, slowly, almost so slowly I couldn’t tell, it became a melodrama. And Kwak can’t do melodrama.

There’s a lot good about the film. The acting is all good–Son Ye-jin plays two roles, mother and daughter, and I couldn’t tell it was the same girl until I started wondering and paying attention to that sort of thing. The direction, in nice 2.35:1 widescreen, is great. It just doesn’t have the writing to back it up. With Kwak’s romantic comedies, he can get away with a lot of “oh, come on,” because the genre allows for it. The melodrama doesn’t like “oh, come on” scenes. The “oh, come on” scenes are what have turned ‘melodrama’ into a pejorative.

It’s a long film, 130 or so, and I knew what was going on from about ninety-five, but it never pissed me off, which says a lot about what does work. I’d been avoiding The Classic for months and I wasn’t sure why, given that I thought Kwak could do no wrong. I hate it when my movie-quality clairvoyance is right, because it never turns out to have positive results. Except maybe The Thin Red Line. That one was fine.

Oh, and Mystic River. I knew about Mystic River too.