Filmography
May. 14th, 2009 08:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_lady_lilyYou Don't Mess With The Zohan
We were both in a filthy mood and this was on instant watch, what do you expect?
Actually, I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised by this. I'd seen the trailers, thought it was going to be vile and avoided it like the plague. However, it managed to walk a very fine line between funny and offensive - especially impressive considering the subject was based on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The protagonist is an Israeli trained killer who has escaped to the United States to follow his dreams to be a hairdresser; he must work for a Palestinian hair salon and try to keep his cover.
It sounds like it could be bloody awful - and it could be. But it isn't. Sure, it's not a great film, but it manages to be very knowing about its subject. It never pushes too many boundaries. It's good natured. I was trying to explain it to G, and came up with this as an explanation.
There is a plot-line that revolves around a goat. Zohan, the protagonist, took a goat from one of the Palestinians who recognises him in New York. This goat, a beloved goat, is much mourned, and its loss spurs this man to try to catch Zohan. Now, in a typical film of this genre, when the show-down between the man and Zohan came to pass, the response to the line 'I loved that goat!' would have been along the lines of 'so did I - he was delicious'. But it wasn't. The goat, in fact, was returned to the man, and in the reconstituted Israeli/Palestinian mall paradise upon which the film ended (don't ask), the man and the goat were reunited, with the cry 'goat rides for all!'
That's the difference. There was a lack of cruelty here that so many other films of this Adam Sandler kind thrive on. There were no scenes that made you go 'eeeeeewwwwww' and want to look away from the screen. There was a base level of good humour and faith in human nature.
Now, it is still a Very Silly Film, with a Very Silly Plot, but the script isn't bad and the acting is as good as you'll get in the genre. Three and a half stars, and you could do worse than settle down with a bowl of popcorn if it comes on the telly.
Noises Off!
Not a great to say about this, as it is a reasonably faithful adaptation of the Michael Frayn play with which some of you may be familiar. I'm a great fan of the play, and was drawn into this by the thought of Michael Caine playing the director. There's been a little bit of nudging about to make the plot work for a film - they've shifted the whole thing to the US stage so it finishes up on Broadway, and there's a framing narrative of the director being worried that it will all go wrong on opening night and recalling the three scenes that the play is made up of. Other than that, as far as I can tell, they use Frayn's script pretty much intact (apart from changing a couple of place names to American rather than British ones).
There are some nice uses of the medium of film for visual comedy, so it doesn't feel like a cheezy film of a play as it so easily could have done. However, the rather soppy neat ending takes away the bite of Frayn's original, and there's just something... wonderful about seeing such a meta play on a stage in front of you that you simply don't get from the film. So I think this definitely gets four stars because the script is so darn good, but it's never going to substitute for a live production.
Michael Caine is quite good, though.
Love and Death
I don't know very much Woody Allen, so this was the first attempt to remedy some of that - and, honestly, I don't know why this wasn't among the films my father played on a frequent loop during my childhood. It would have fitted in perfectly. Mind you, it is a heavy, heavy pastiche of Tolstoy-era Russian literature, and since I read enough of that at the beginning of the MPhil year to actually get most of the jokes, perhaps the wait wasn't such a bad idea.
Allen stars as a slightly dim hero, and Diane Keaton is his cousin who he will eventually marry. There are battles (and the battle scenes, honestly, are rather like the interminable chaos one reads in Tolstoy, only amusingly so, and that's saying something). There is a rapacious Russian countess and her trigger-happy lover who challenges Allen to a duel. There is a plot to assassinate Napoleon. There are scenes of Domestic Russian Family Life (TM).
It's all a fairly good-natured bit of fluff, to be honest, with a reasonably funny script that riffs quite heavily on Jewish stereotype jokes, and is a perfectly harmless piece of its time. The intellectual engagement of knowing something about the material it was mocking added a slight frisson for me, but it's hardly like you won't get it without reading War and Peace first. (Crime and Punishment will be quite sufficient.) It really does look rather dated now, but I think that's more because it's very much a film of its time (and looks it) rather than anything else. Three stars.
We were both in a filthy mood and this was on instant watch, what do you expect?
Actually, I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised by this. I'd seen the trailers, thought it was going to be vile and avoided it like the plague. However, it managed to walk a very fine line between funny and offensive - especially impressive considering the subject was based on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The protagonist is an Israeli trained killer who has escaped to the United States to follow his dreams to be a hairdresser; he must work for a Palestinian hair salon and try to keep his cover.
It sounds like it could be bloody awful - and it could be. But it isn't. Sure, it's not a great film, but it manages to be very knowing about its subject. It never pushes too many boundaries. It's good natured. I was trying to explain it to G, and came up with this as an explanation.
There is a plot-line that revolves around a goat. Zohan, the protagonist, took a goat from one of the Palestinians who recognises him in New York. This goat, a beloved goat, is much mourned, and its loss spurs this man to try to catch Zohan. Now, in a typical film of this genre, when the show-down between the man and Zohan came to pass, the response to the line 'I loved that goat!' would have been along the lines of 'so did I - he was delicious'. But it wasn't. The goat, in fact, was returned to the man, and in the reconstituted Israeli/Palestinian mall paradise upon which the film ended (don't ask), the man and the goat were reunited, with the cry 'goat rides for all!'
That's the difference. There was a lack of cruelty here that so many other films of this Adam Sandler kind thrive on. There were no scenes that made you go 'eeeeeewwwwww' and want to look away from the screen. There was a base level of good humour and faith in human nature.
Now, it is still a Very Silly Film, with a Very Silly Plot, but the script isn't bad and the acting is as good as you'll get in the genre. Three and a half stars, and you could do worse than settle down with a bowl of popcorn if it comes on the telly.
Noises Off!
Not a great to say about this, as it is a reasonably faithful adaptation of the Michael Frayn play with which some of you may be familiar. I'm a great fan of the play, and was drawn into this by the thought of Michael Caine playing the director. There's been a little bit of nudging about to make the plot work for a film - they've shifted the whole thing to the US stage so it finishes up on Broadway, and there's a framing narrative of the director being worried that it will all go wrong on opening night and recalling the three scenes that the play is made up of. Other than that, as far as I can tell, they use Frayn's script pretty much intact (apart from changing a couple of place names to American rather than British ones).
There are some nice uses of the medium of film for visual comedy, so it doesn't feel like a cheezy film of a play as it so easily could have done. However, the rather soppy neat ending takes away the bite of Frayn's original, and there's just something... wonderful about seeing such a meta play on a stage in front of you that you simply don't get from the film. So I think this definitely gets four stars because the script is so darn good, but it's never going to substitute for a live production.
Michael Caine is quite good, though.
Love and Death
I don't know very much Woody Allen, so this was the first attempt to remedy some of that - and, honestly, I don't know why this wasn't among the films my father played on a frequent loop during my childhood. It would have fitted in perfectly. Mind you, it is a heavy, heavy pastiche of Tolstoy-era Russian literature, and since I read enough of that at the beginning of the MPhil year to actually get most of the jokes, perhaps the wait wasn't such a bad idea.
Allen stars as a slightly dim hero, and Diane Keaton is his cousin who he will eventually marry. There are battles (and the battle scenes, honestly, are rather like the interminable chaos one reads in Tolstoy, only amusingly so, and that's saying something). There is a rapacious Russian countess and her trigger-happy lover who challenges Allen to a duel. There is a plot to assassinate Napoleon. There are scenes of Domestic Russian Family Life (TM).
It's all a fairly good-natured bit of fluff, to be honest, with a reasonably funny script that riffs quite heavily on Jewish stereotype jokes, and is a perfectly harmless piece of its time. The intellectual engagement of knowing something about the material it was mocking added a slight frisson for me, but it's hardly like you won't get it without reading War and Peace first. (Crime and Punishment will be quite sufficient.) It really does look rather dated now, but I think that's more because it's very much a film of its time (and looks it) rather than anything else. Three stars.
