Film
At the most thrilling moment of Ray, director Taylor Hackford slides you into some fabled rock and roll landscape, exploring the sensation of a new sound hitting the pop charts in the early 1950s and 60s. Appreciating the music of Ray Charles is an enjoyable experience; he was a pioneer, bringing gospel and rhythm-and-blues reluctantly together, never apologising.
Taylor moves the film chronologically from the take off of Charles's career around 1949, with the occasional flashback to childhood. It is exhilarating following Charles - an eerily accurate performance from Foxx - from an unsettling country band, to a blues ensemble to his first deal with Atlantic Records. Foxx gets inside the character, dynamically playing the hard-nosed businessman determined to overcome his handicap as well as portraying the sheer style of the performer.
One of the positive elements of the picture is Hackford's ability to intricately weave the story of Charles' art with the drama of his life. There is certainly a dark cloud of drug addiction looming over the piano player's musical triumphs. However, the duality of genius and junky is what makes the drama interesting and not just a sycophantic homage to the albums of Charles. Some of the arguments over fatherly duty between Charles and his wife Della Bea Robinson, played by Kerry Washington, and his girlfriend on the road Margie Hendricks, played by Regina King, are some of the most intense and riveting dramatic sequences in the film, scraping away the façade of performance and allowing the viewer to get behind the public face of the entertainment world.
Perhaps the only criticism of the film is not what issues were discussed, but with how Hackford tried to wrap them up. The film does not really end as it were, it kind of stops, after Hackford's assault on the viewer's senses in the cerebral "free from drugs" sequence and the brief shot of Charles returning to Georgia which he had left years earlier in protest of the racist Jim Crowe Laws.
In the closing seconds, the movie seemed to go the hero route, celebrating Ray Charles as a victor of civil rights. An ending more in the vein of the film's core strengths would have been far more appropriate, some vivid and alive portrait of Charles at his piano. Those opening frames of the film, hands spread over black and white keys and a foot tapping away were the right way to go.
Seeing imagery like that, it is easy to get a strange sense of nostalgia for a music that now seems only to exist on oldies stations.
The film's real masterstroke is convincingly evoking the feel of a captivating performer goading you out of your seat to dance; all he needed was a piano and a microphone.
Be offended. Be very offended. Team America: World Police is the latest offspring of the twisted minds of Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the creators of the ever-popular South Park.
Performed with puppets akin to Thunderbirds it tells the tale of a heroic team of Americans saving the world from the threat of terrorism, largely masterminded by the North Korean dictator Kim Jong II. However, in what some might say was an accurate depiction of the real world, they manage to devastate wherever they are meant to be saving.
Opening with the destruction of the Eiffel Tower and the Arc De Triomphe by Team America as they attack a group of terrorists, the mood is set for a highly amusing film.
In the tradition of South Park the film sets out of offend with a barrage of bad language, excessive vomiting and a rigorous bout of puppet sex. Alongside the more blatant humour that one expects from Trey and Parker there is a delightful lampooning of the action movie genre with the heroic songs and clichéd dialogue successfully subverted. The presentation of the puppets and the use of scale are also intelligently done, a pair of panthers stalking two Team America members are in fact a duo of black cats.
'Dicks, pussies and assholes' are how the film describes hawks, liberals and terrorists, respectively. Each side is subject to equal ridicule, the hawks with their wanton destruction, Kim Jong Il lisping his way through a song about how lonely he is and Hollywood liberals tricked into helping the terrorists carry out their evil plans. Failing to come down on one side or the other could be considered an act of cowardice, but the film delivers a message of how the world is in a beautifully crafted speech, "Pussies don't like dicks, because dicks fuck pussies, but dicks sometimes fuck assholes too."
It would be fair to say that Jean-Pierre Jeunet is something of an idealist. The cinematic world he creates is one where love conquers all, sentiment rules the day and, inevitably, everybody has a story worth telling.
With such a rose-tinted lens, it seems nigh on impossible to think that he could pull off a quirky romantic comedy set against the backdrop of trench warfare. However, in A Very Long Engagement he does just that, somehow managing to blend humour and pathos in an enthralling, vividly imagined tapestry. Mathilde (Tautou, delightful as ever) and Manech (a doe-eyed Ulliel) are a pair of blissful young lovers cruelly separated when Manech is sent to the front line during the First World War. Mentally scarred by what he sees, he wounds himself seeking a way out, but finds only a court martial; as punishment he is sent unarmed into No Man's Land to face certain death.
We then jump forward two years to see a puzzled Mathilde refusing to accept that Manech is dead, and through a series of flashbacks and anecdotal encounters with soldiers, prostitutes and private investigators, we follow her remarkable search for her lover.
The dark absurdity of war is captured through some bleak cinematography, while Jeunet's direction never loses its trademark sparkle in the movie's lighter moments. Tautou does her best to flesh out the role of a war widow, but her innate air of elfin charm never quite allows her to shake off the ghost of Amelie.
Even so, the web of idiosyncrasies created by Jeunet's stock character actors is enough to sustain interest through each unexpected twist and turn.
Jeunet infuses A Very Long Engagement with that inimitable joie de vivre that made Amelie such a treat. Frenetic action, colourful scenery and pithy dialogue is imbued with a romantic naïveté that is thoroughly winning, set against the sobering bleakness of the Somme.
Cynics might find it too much to swallow, but look past the relentless optimism and you will be richly rewarded. A guilty pleasure.
27th Jan 2005