Three movies that are, shall we say - on the edge.
by Chris Dashiell
Todd Haynes pays tribute to a short-lived but fondly remembered time in rock n' roll history - the glam rock period of the early 70s - in VELVET GOLDMINE. He gets the visual style down beautifully, and although his approach to plot and character leaves something to be desired, I felt that the film has a playfulness and flamboyance which makes it worthwhile.
The story is an odd mixture of elegy and wish-fulfillment. A journalist in the 80s (Christian Bale), who was once part of the glitter scene himself, is asked to do a story on the whereabouts of former glam star Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) whose career took a dive after his on-stage assassination proved to be a publicity stunt. We go back in time to witness Slade's rise and fall, along with the rock movement he helped create. One of the central aspects of the story is the relationship between Slade and American rock rebel Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor), a forerunner of punk who influences Slade's own style.
The character of Slade bears a great resemblance to David Bowie, that of Wild to Iggy Pop (with maybe a little Lou Reed thrown in). The fact that Haynes makes the two characters lovers constitutes some of the wish-fulfillment aspect of the film. Reviews have naturally emphasized the real-life counterparts, but this isn't very fair - Bowie and Iggy may be used as models, as taking-off points for the story, but this isn't meant to be accurate history. Haynes wants to highlight glam's sexual freedom and ambiguity, the way it opened the door to an androgynous cultural vision in which gay and bi-sexuality could be celebrated in rock music and style. Of course, the door promptly slammed shut again, and this is the source of the film's mournfulness and nostalgia - qualities that don't always serve it well.
Meyers has just the right look and pose to represent the style of an era - he's compelling in the musical numbers, less so as a character, but he's not supposed to be very deep, after all. McGregor practically steals the picture - singing, raging and generally screwing up with wild abandon. The duos with him and Meyers, in rock-video style, are some of the film's high points. Haynes has enlisted current bands such as Pulp, Shudder to Think, Radiohead and Venus in Furs to reproduce the glitter sound - and they succeed quite well. Add a few genuine songs of the time - from Brian Eno, Roxy Music, and T. Rex, for example, and you have a potent musical brew. I would have liked more up-tempo sounds and not so much reliance on operatic ballads, but that's just a quibble. The costumes and overall production design are a feast for the eyes.
Velvet Goldmine is best when it indulges in the same loopiness and disregard for convention as its subject - even the prologue, with Oscar Wilde being left on doorstep by space aliens, seems to fit the mood. The film's main weakness, however, is its framing device, obviously (and awkwardly) swiped from Citizen Kane, and leading up to a not-so-interesting surprise. Christian Bale seems over-earnest - I didn't believe in him as a character - and there's something too ponderous about the interviews with Slade's former intimates - as if Haynes felt he needed to add more significance to the glam phenomenon in order to justify his interest.
Even so, it's disappointing that Velvet Goldmine hasn't received more attention. There are more visual and musical riches here, and more freedom of style, than in most films out there.
I was surprised at how even the most tired "indie" plot material (e.g. drug deal gone wrong, nasty doings in Las Vegas) seemed fresh in Doug Liman's entertaining little flick GO. Chalk it up to a free-wheeling camera style (Liman shoots his own films) and smart actors. Three stories all begin at the same point in time - when one supermarket check-out clerk (Desmond Askew) asks another (Sarah Polley) to take his Christmas Eve shift so he can go to Las Vegas. The first story follows Polley as she tries to pull off a drug deal which will save her from being evicted. Next we see Askew with three friends getting himself into one disaster after another in Las Vegas. Finally we witness the saga of two soap opera actors (Scott Wolf and Jay Mohr) who are forced to become narcs, with bizarre results. All the stories weave together in the end. Polley's luckless schemer is the best of the bunch. The second story relies a bit too much on gunplay and car chases for my taste, but it has some good laughs. The third one returns to form with its portrayal of how far people can go to justify their behavior to themselves. There's really nothing profound or meaningful about Go - but the fact is, it's often very funny (tops are a couple of sequences with a friend of Polley's who takes too much Ecstasy) and it moves well, without the mechanical feeling that ruins so many comedies these days. There are holes in the plot - you don't notice them until after the movie, so who cares? Liman's specialty seems to be shiftless L.A. youth culture (he also directed Swingers), but instead of melodrama or terminal hipness he brings a humorous, detached style to the material - entertainment that, for once, doesn't feel dumb.
Sometimes I go to a movie fully expecting to like it, having enjoyed the director's previous work, with an open mind towards innovations that the film may attempt - but then, at some point, against all my inclinations, and despite the fact that the picture has so far gone pretty well - I find myself turning against it. An interesting experience, if not a pleasant one. I have no choice but to trust it.
The most recent example is David Cronenberg's EXISTENZ, or rather eXistenZ, which is the actual spelling of this science fiction horror-comedy about virtual reality games. I admire Cronenberg, and I detest knee-jerk critics like Rex Reed who condemn him simply because he depicts unsettling and disgusting things in his films. (The analogy I used in defending Crash was that not every writer should be Chekhov or Henry James - we need our Kafkas and Celines too.) eXistenZ, the first film written by Cronenberg since Videodrome, has many of his familiar themes - the modern horror of physical embodiment and the desire to escape it, the idea of an organic technology, the slippery nature of subjective reality. This time he frames his themes in a darkly comic form - there's a conscious air of absurdity about the plot of eXistenZ, which at times seems like a parody of the Hollywood techno-thriller.
Sometime in the near future, virtual reality games have become the dominant form of entertainment. People are installed with "bio-ports," holes at the base in their spine, in which games can be installed by plugging in a "metaflesh game pod." (These pods, which look like blobs of vomit with nipples on them, are one of the film's funnier aspects.) The movie opens with a demonstration of a new game called eXistenZ, by a famous game designer named Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh). The demonstration is interrupted by an attempted assassination of Geller, but she is rescued by a marketing trainee for her company (Jude Law) and then they are on the run, being pursued by her enemies, an anti-game guerrilla group called the Reality Movement. Weird indeed, but I was drawn into it, and intrigued by the film's mixture of sly humor with thriller/horror elements. The point where it goes wrong is - the game itself. Once Leigh and Law actually start playing it, the film becomes increasingly static and uninvolving. Cronenberg doesn't seem to understand the appeal of virtual reality or even just role-playing games. The "adventures" in eXistenZ involve a lot of standing around and talking, or being thrust into oppressive and incomprehensible environments without much to do. The special effects involving mutant reptile flesh are spectacularly gross, but the main feeling of this "game" is one that no actual game would ever want to inspire - boredom. The various twists and double-crosses are just tedious, pointless. Cronenberg is left playing with an "is this real or a game?" paradox for the whole picture, which seems a particularly unfruitful way to go. In addition, the point-of-view character played by Jude Law is a tiresome worrier, and Law himself doesn't have enough presence to sustain interest. Defenders might say that this a satire, and that therefore it should be held to a different standard. I wasn't expecting The Matrix- what I do expect is that a satire will have some bite to it, and that a dystopian sci-fi vision will be conceived well enough so that it has some weight. eXistenZ seems thrown together, incompletely thought out, and ultimately unsatisfying and unenlightening. I still like Cronenberg and the way he takes risks. This is just one risk that didn't pay off.
Chris Dashiell
CineScene
July, 1999