jürgen fauth’s muckworld

A booby-trapped tale of wartime love and guilt, adapted from the great Ian McEwan, who has been mining the darker recesses of desire since First Love, Last Rites (1975). Joe Wright directs an excellent cast — Keira Knightley, James McAvoy, Romola Garai, Vanessa Redgrave, and newcomer Saoirse Ronan — in what begins like a standard period piece but ends up transcending the format with a sharp-eyed inquiry into the power of fiction to destroy and redeem; I haven’t been able to get this movie out of my head. Atonement opens on December 7; if you haven’t read the novel, I highly recommend staying spoiler-free.

Atonement. Joe Wright, 2007. ****

Instead of the spoilerish trailer for Atonement, here’s a clip from Andrew Birkin’s 1993 movie based on McEwan’s The Cement Garden, starring Charlotte Gainsbourg:

Marcy already reviewed Ang Lee’s latest, so I’ll limit myself to one point: Lust, Caution is continuing evidence that unsimluated sex is making inroads into mainstream films and more traditional styles and genres. Hardcore fucking in serious movies started out, of course, with the French (Romance) and pretentious art movies both domestic (Brown Bunny) and international (Battle in Heaven, 9 Songs). Then came Shortbus, which I consider a watershed movie because it was the first to successfully integrate real sex into a relationship comedy. Likewise, Lust, Caution, an otherwise old-fashioned spy drama with surprising turns, absolutely relies on graphic sex as a decisive element for both plot and character. The story simply wouldn’t add up if we hadn’t seen what happens between Tony Leung and Wei Tang during the NC-17 scenes. Lust, Caution opens today.

Se, jie. Ang Lee, 2007. ***

When the director of Showgirls, Basic Instinct, and Robocop takes on a story that begins like The Diary of Anne Frank, you can bet your sweet ass that the heroine is going to shoot and screw her way out of trouble until she finally makes it to a kibbutz. Black Book, which did big business in Holland and arrives here with the cachet of an acclaimed foreign film about the Holocaust, would be plain-old kitsch if it didn’t cash in on the suffering of millions to get its low-brow action-adventure kicks. The word for this is Shoahxploitation.

How titillating is Black Book? At cliffhanger pace, Rachel (Carice van Houten) flees from her bombed-out hiding place, and Verhoeven runs down a comprehensive checklist of World War II tropes: endless narrow escapes through attics, trunks, and caskets, barges that get the Apocalypse Now treatment, resistance airdrops, backroom operations, midnight raids, botched kidnappings, prison breakouts, firing squads, and tense passport controls: “Papiere, bitte!” Oh no, we’re carrying secret microphones and suitcases stuffed with Jewish gold!

Plenty of machine-gun violence leads to gleeful close-ups of mass graves, and Verhoeven doesn’t skimp on the sex, either. When good men are imprisoned, it’s clear that somebody must sleep with the occupiers to free them. Graphic Jew-on-German action follows, and in one extended scene, our dedicated heroine colors her pubic hair to fool the Obersturmbannführer (Sebastian Koch). In turn, drunken fascist swine piss in front of their whores, and our heroine has to vomit a little. And you know if there’s a shitbucket, Verhoeven won’t be satisfied with a simple close-up: somebody has to dump it out over someone else, preferably a naked woman.

I can’t even begin to tell you how tired I am of movies where the murderous villains carry my father’s name, and the Nazis in Black Book are about as three-dimensional as the ones in Indiana Jones. With Starship Troopers, Verhoeven himself created a compelling satire of fascism. There is a entire tradition of very good and very necessary movies about the Holocaust and the Resistance, but is it asking too much that they grow more insightful rather than more graphic and exploitative? Black Book pretends to bring news about duplicity and treachery and the odd bedfellows that wartime makes, but it’s obvious that nothing gets Verhoeven as excited as the cold steel of a Nazi gun against hard Jewish nipples.

Zwartboek. Paul Verhoeven, 2006. *

• Here’s the trailer

Hadn’t seen this “greatest of foreign noirs” (Bogdanovich) in a good long while, and so I expected the angles and the shadows, Orson and the cuckoo clocks, the Prater and the sewers, the exquisite Graham Greene plotting and cutting repartee, but I had forgotten just how masterfully it all fits together. The German-language bit players are all fantastic, especially Paul Hörbiger and Hedwig Bleibtreu. The last shot got me good, and I have a new favorite line, too: “I had no idea there were snake charmers in South Texas!” Makes The Good German look especially pointless in retrospect. Muckworld trivia: I used to work for a Hispaniola Honorary Consul.

The Third Man. Carol Reed, 1949. *****

• More Graham Greene
• The Third Man on Criterion DVD
• If you haven’t seen the movie, this clip will spoil it. If you have, it’s going to make you want to see it again:

Pretty good. Robert De Niro directs a terrific cast in a story that outlines the creation of the CIA from the thirties to the Bay of Pigs, with Matt Damon as stoically loyal spy. Angelina Jolie, Alec Baldwin, William Hurt, Billy Crudup, Timothy Hutton, Keir Dullea, Joe Pesci, John Turturro, and Michael Gambon make the nearly three-hour running time fly by, and it’s not until afterwards that you wonder about certain plot points. And how often do you see two movies on the same day where people try to buy their way out of Berlin by selling rocket scientists? Opens December 22.

The Good Shepherd. Robert De Niro, 2006. ***

[tags]film, 3 stars, spies, robert de niro, angelina jolie, matt damon, alec baldwin, william hurt, billy crudup, michael gambon, rocket science, cia, cuba, berlin, russia, cold war, world war ii[/tags]

I was liking this a lot for the first hour or so; there are some pretty good jokes and tons of wacky characters. At 2 1/2 hours though, it *is* the bloated mess that it’s usually made out to be, and the funny gets crowded out by the pile-up of outrageousness. The climax is probably an hour long. In a way it’s tragic–a movie that features Toshiro Mifune and Slim Pickens sharing a scene ought to be awesome.