Possible Sunshine in a Plotless Year

Anyhow, with the 2003 film year officially over, we look ahead to a new annum of quality cinema. So far, I’ve been pleasantly surprised, with anticipated stinkers like Miracle and The Dreamers turning out fully palatable. Golden Globe winner Osama, was a bit muted in tone, but nevertheless a sharp portrait of Taliban-era Afghanistan. The biggest revelation of all, though, was my unexpected admiration for The Passion of the Christ, which exceeded my admittedly low expectations to emerge as one of the more meaningful films I’ve seen in quite some time.

This coming spring looks to be unusually entertaining due to the long-awaited blossoming of a crop of big-name indies. The March 19th release Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is tops on my list; I’ve watched that trailer a dozen times over and it still discombobulates me whenever I see Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet bathing in a kitchen sink (why is that sink so big?) or Mark Ruffalo and Kirsten Dunst dancing in their underwear (why is Kirsten Dunst not more often dancing in her underwear?). Throw in Charlie Kaufman, the most reliable screenwriter functioning in Hollywood today, and the inspired use of ELO’s “Mr. Blue Sky,” and already saliva stains are appearing down my shirt.

To put that horrible image behind us, I’ll move on to another pedigreed work of lofty repute, Dogville, which is coming to Boston sometime early in April. The high-wattage attention Nicole Kidman brings to this project will make it bound for the kind of mainstream controversy Lars von Trier’s past work has generally avoided with low-key casting. But as the movie features no intercalary song-and-dance numbers to revivify his Dogme formula, I’m not expecting anything vastly different from his previous similarly themed films—which I don’t suppose is such a bad thing.

Tom Hanks needs to win an Oscar for The Ladykillers. The Sexy Beast-meets-Duplex premise seems pretty flimsy, but when Hanks starts guffawing like some maniacal demon clown and demanding “waffles forthwith,” I begin giggling uncontrollably.

I also want to direct your and our four readers’ attentions to some of the less heralded fare that might only show up at Coolidge Corner or Brattle. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring tells the story of a single Buddhist monk and the five stages of his life that he experiences upon a floating monastery in the middle of a lake. The seemingly innocuous conceit hides some darker material, which apparently entangles him in some violent child games and ardent love affairs. The visuals, provided by South Korean director Kim Ki-Duk, are supposed to be amazing and the press stills alone are masterfully framed compositions.

Jim Jarmusch (Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai) is also releasing a visual stunner, the black-and-white Coffee and Cigarettes. The movie’s basically a collection of shorts he’s made over the past decade and a half, where a bunch of random famous people sit around and chat. These people include the White Stripes, Roberto Benigni, Iggy Pop, Cate Blanchett, Steve Buscemi and, in a single conversation, RZA, GZA and Bill Murray. Will probably appeal to Waking Life fans or anyone whose wondering what the hell Wu Tang has to say to Carl Spackler.

But of course, the bulk of my movie cash is saved up for all the popcorn I’m buying when Hollywood pulls out the big guns. Based on the really killer trailer, I’ve got some high hopes for zombie-filled remake Dawn of the Dead, which will hopefully maintain the satirist attitude of the original while avoiding the general tedium of last year’s 28 Days Later. Kill Bill: Volume Two is supposed to be more Tarantino than the first one, though at this point, I’d be pretty content just to see Bill killed. There’s also some small part of me, a stray Y chromosome, perhaps, yearning against its best judgment to see Troy. I mean, for Christ’s sakes man, look how many CGI ships they’ve fit into that CGI sea.

Oh and apparently, there’s another Benji movie coming out. Remember Benji? He saved lives a lot, even though he was a dog, which is a generally stupid animal.

And that’s just in the spring. Before I finish off with my breakdown of the explosive duds of the summer and hopeful Oscar contenders of the winter (a list which, last year, would have included sure things The Human Stain, The Alamo and The Missing), I’m curious as to your take on the past two months of film, and what you’re looking forward to most in the months ahead.

BEN SOSKIN: Thanks for your gracious congrats on my Oscar predictions, which even I wasn’t expecting would be so accurate (do I get extra points for guessing the breath spray?). Honestly, though, I wish that I had missed in more of the categories—it wasn’t worth sitting through four hours of foregone conclusions just to get gloating privileges.

Well, I’m glad one of us is excited about the coming year of films. A couple of months ago, I dug into upcomingmovies.com’s long, long list of 2004 releases and hardly found any movies that I was much looking forward to; thank goodness I’ve made the jump from film junkiedom to political junkiedom.

This year, the only movie that I’m guaranteed to line up for on opening weekend is July’s Anchorman, in which Will Ferrell brings his Goulet voice (and its accompanying egomania) to the big screen.  People who have seen the script have said that Anchorman could be a modern classic, and so far they’ve been proven right by the clip reel on the movie’s website (Ferrell to his dog: “You pooped in the refrigerator? . . . . I’m not even mad!  That’s amazing!”). In the fall, Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Twelve should be a romp, and I’ll probably check out Martin Scorsese’s star-laden Howard Hughes biopic The Aviator, Oliver Stone’s Alexander, and Terry Gilliam’s The Brothers Grimm.

But as for the spring, I’ll be there with you for the second Kill Bill, even though Quentin’s coasting.  And I’ll be there too for The Ladykillers, even though the Coens have been batting around .333 since Barton Fink; I’m sick of paying $10 just to hear George Clooney use “hydroelectric” as a verb, or to hear Jon Polito emphasize the wrong syllable in “dry cleaning.”

Thanks for giving a shout-out to Coffee and Cigarettes, which should be a fun time; I saw the Tom Waits/Iggy Pop short in a VES section once and loved its casual humor, so I’d bet that the feature will be a good time, too.

I haven’t seen much the past couple months, and what I have seen has been Oscar catch-up.  Last Monday, I went down to Kendall and saw Monster and The Fog of War back-to-back.  I thought that Fog of War was a cutting stunner, right up there with The Thin Blue Line as the best Errol Morris I’ve seen.  I mostly saw Monster because it was shot in my hometown—my sister thinks that the film’s skating rink is the same one where we spent a lot of Saturday mornings back in elementary school—so I appreciated the film more for that than for its piss poor plotting or Charlize’s courageous stunt performance.

I won’t see The Dreamers because I’m not big on Bertolucci, and I won’t see Eternal Sunshine because I’m not big on Charlie Kaufman (“I can see your sadness” ranks as 2002’s dumbest line not written by George Lucas). I’ll probably also skip Dogville, because I’m not inclined to check out another Von Trier, even if he’s spinning Our Town.  If I have to watch a Dogme man reinterpret Thornton Wilder, I’ll wait for Thomas Vinterberg to take a deranged stab at The Matchmaker.

BEN B. CHUNG: First off, I’m a bit dismayed that as a fellow admirer of cinema, you’re not “big on Charlie Kaufman.” The man’s an unequivocal genius and the fact that his scripts have attracted the attention of such brand names as Nicolas Cage, Jim Carrey and Meryl Streep (in a supporting role, no less), makes his work all the more admirable. I defy you to name another working screenwriter who has invented a film premise as consistently innovative as Being John Malkovich, a screenplay as audacious as Adaptation, or a plot structure that is as simultaneously accessible and convoluted as Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.

Also, in defense of the line, “I can see your sadness” (I apparently have more invested in this debate than even I expected), you seem to forget its context. It was delivered by an immigrant worker whose imperfect English was intended to make it sound somewhat stilted, excusing any loss of impact derived therein. I present to you another line from Adaptation that single-handedly trumps any off-day Kaufman offerings, when Donald Kaufman describes the screenplay he’s working on: “So the killer flees on horseback with the girl, the cop’s after them on a motorcycle and it’s like a battle between motors and horses, like technology vs. horse.”

But I seem to have derailed my train of thought quite a bit and will now dive into 2004’s other promising offerings. The summer months will be slightly less clogged with redundant sequels than in years past, though general quality hardly seems a guarantee. I’m expecting solid laughs from Eulogy, a dysfunctional family comedy starring Zooey Deschanel, an exceptionally talented ingenue who’s been looking for a bigger vehicle after working wonders in minor classics Almost Famous and All the Real Girls.

The third Harry Potter looks substantially better than its two predecessors, likely due to acting lessons for li’l Radcliffe and the capable direction of Alfonso Cuaron, who could probably turn See Spot Run into a haunting examination of the human soul with vague sexual undertones. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow has been apparently sitting on the shelf for some time which immediately sends up warning signals, but the outlandish, late ’30s detective comic visuals in the trailer suggest a full realization of the powers of CGI technology. A safer bet will be Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset, a continuation of the Before Sunrise story nine years after Jesse and Celine first meet on that train to Vienna.

I will try to keep the ink spilt on 2004’s inexorable dreck to a minimum, but I must mention the worst-looking film of the year, The Whole Ten Yards, an inexplicable sequel to 2000’s marginally successful Matthew Perry/Bruce Willis buddy vehicle. The film’s preview features a mulleted, apron-donning Willis vacuuming in bunny slippers as he scolds Perry for touching his chickens. So many questions, so very little interest in the answers.

As usual, the year’s end is rich with prestige films that studios will cast out as juicy Oscar bait. One of my most cherished films, The Manchurian Candidate, is being remade with Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep on board. Though remakes of classic films are only occasionally successful, this pedigree will guarantee at least a vastly entertaining mess (I can hear those Gus Van Sant Psycho violins now).

Michael Mann has yet to strike out and he has Tom Cruise and Mark Ruffalo for the cabbie-in-peril thriller Collateral. The reliable Johnny Depp also tries for a second consecutive Academy nod in J.M. Barrie’s Neverland, as the titular author of Peter Pan. And finally, Michael Moore’s Bush-bashing documentary Fahrenheit 9-11 will sparkle as the Winged Migration of 2004. “Kerry/Moore 2004” has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?

BEN SOSKIN: On Kaufman’s alleged greatness: the very same year that Adaptation came out, there was a wonderful Scandinavian film called Songs from the Second Floor that managed to be audacious, innovative, accessible and convoluted all at once. But the ease or difficulty of such a feat shouldn’t be the issue here: Kaufman, along with “creative” filmmakers like Wes Anderson and Darren Aronofsky, have proven that audacity and innovation don’t automatically beget relatable characters, untiresome plotting, or, as I alluded to with the “sadness” line, thematic grace; if Kaufman didn’t want the line to be trite and heavy-handed, he should have found a different way to express the sentiment behind it.

Not that there are a lot of people who can consistently write Grade-A dialogue for the above passel of purposes; one of the only ones who’s currently working is Richard Linklater. Which is why I’m overjoyed that you uncovered Before Sunset, whose predecessor was everything that Lost in Translation could’ve been. I think Linklater’s been hit-and-miss for a few years—School of Rock aside, Tape underwhelmed me, and all that Waking Life had going for it was innovative presentation (there’s that dubious “I” word again) and enough aimless, useless philosophizing to fill a semester of Moral Reasoning lectures—but I am very pumped for the Ethan/Julie reunion. It’s the next best thing to the Brief Encounter sequel that we never got.

Like you, I love The Manchurian Candidate, and, like you, I’m apprehensive about the remake; I don’t think that Jonathan Demme’s flair can compensate for a script written by a guy whose past credits include The Sum of All Fears and Doc Hollywood. On the other hand, I don’t think that remakes are necessarily bad, especially with the right cachet; I was fine with paying top dollar to see the Psycho remake, for example, because I couldn’t pass up the chance to see William H. Macy and Julianne Moore slotted into a Hitchcock movie. I would also enjoy a shot-by-shot North by Northwest remake starring Jeff Bridges and Reese Witherspoon, or a do-over of The Birds starring people who could act.

And not that you asked, but I actually didn’t mind The Whole Nine Yards; I thought it had a lot of the same good scene-by-scene, line-by-line timing that its no-name director brought to My Cousin Vinny, and I may be one of the few people who thinks that Matthew Perry is the most talented Friend (I know, that’s like declaring that there’s a tastiest diet soda).

—Staff writer Ben B. Chung can be reached at bchung@fas.harvard.edu. Staff writer Ben Soskin can be reached at bsoskin@fas.harvard.edu.