Directed by: Richard Shepard
Starring: Hope Davis, Pierce Brosnan, Greg Kinnear
Rated: R for strong sexual content and language.
Parental Notes: This is not a film for kids. It's aimed squarely at adults, and if the explicit sexual content and language didn't keep youngsters away, the adult, sophisticated nature of the film would. This probably isn't a movie youngsters who love James Bond will enjoy.
Pierce Brosnan has been James Bond since "Goldeneye" in 1995. Sure, he had other roles, but many of them, particularly Andy Osnard in "The Tailor of Panama" and Thomas Crown in "The Thomas Crown Affair," were in the same vein. Now, ten years later, he's been unceremoniously booted from the Bond franchise and although he got the news midway through shooting "The Matador," it's easy to read his performance as hit man Julian Noble as a thumbing of the nose at the Bond folks.
Julian is a classic contract killer: drinks and sleeps around too much, kills without a second thought, and is suave, good with the ladies, and improbably handsome. It seems like a perfect life, but there's something about Julian that makes it clear things aren't all that great. Maybe it's the sloppy stubble or the hungover, exhausted look. Or maybe it's the way he reacts when his handler wishes him a happy birthday and he realizes that he has nobody to call for a chat. Just when it's starting to really hit him that he has no real relationships or plans for the future, he meets Danny Wright (Greg Kinnear) in a hotel bar in Mexico.
Danny and Julian are both in Mexico on business, but aside from that and their mutual desperation, they are almost entirely different. Danny is a good guy fallen on hard times. He still has his wife Bean (Hope Davis), but his son has died, he has failed to land a solid job since being laid off years ago, his business deal in Mexico is on the rocks, and a huge tree fell on his house right before he got on the plane to make the trip. Danny's afraid that if he doesn't land the deal, Bean might leave him.
Julian, longing for actual contact, strikes up a conversation, but he has lost the ability to communicate sincerely. He manages to offend Danny enough times that the beleaguered businessman finally walks off. Julian apologizes the next day and persuades Danny to come with him to a bullfight, where their talk turns to killing and Julian explains his business. Danny doesn't believe him, and Julian makes him pick someone out of the crowd and walks him through a dress rehearsal of killing the man. By the end of the night, the two are friends. When Julian turns up on Danny's doorstep six months later on the run from his employers and with a scheme to get himself out of trouble if his only friend in the world will help, Danny and Bean take him in. Bean is thrilled to meet the hired killer she's heard so much about, asking, "did you bring your gun?"
"The Matador" is an odd film. It's essentially a buddy movie, but without the sentimentality, melodrama, or explosions screenwriters usually add for excitement. We don't even get to see the most important killing in the film; it happens off-screen. This is a character study of two men and how their relationship changes them both. It has gleefully over-the-top moments, plays with our associations of Brosnan with James Bond, and edges into cartoonish territory, but the central characters ring so true that the film still works.
Brosnan's Julian is a sympathetic guy, even with all his vices and borderline psychopathy. Brosnan has the self-confident, brash air he brought to earlier roles, but he also brings out Julian's human side. Brosnan shows us a man who is utterly burned out and driven to genuine despair by living the life we've Brosnan's characters lead on TV and in movies in the past. Kinnear plays off his former roles as well, blending his goofiness and ordinariness and making Danny someone we see ourselves in. Davis holds up her end of the film against these two excellent performances. Her looks and behavior fit Bean perfectly - she's a normal woman, not Hollywood's usual version of a "normal" woman.
"The Matador" is not typical popcorn Hollywood fare. It doesn't condescend to its audience or insist on making every last thing painfully obvious. If it weren't for its cast and budget, it would be an art movie. This is a smart, fascinating film, and a must-see for anyone who likes character-driven, intelligent filmmaking.
Written and Directed by: Albert Brooks
Starring: Albert Brooks, Sheetal Sheth, Jon Tenney, John Carroll Lynch
Rated: PG-13 for drug content and brief strong language.
Parental Notes: This film will go straight over all but the most politically astute teens' heads. It's not inappropriate for younger kids - there's almost no violence and only a little drug and language content - but youngsters probably just won't find it interesting.
Explaining a joke, the saying goes, is like dissecting a frog: nobody laughs, and the frog dies. Albert Brooks' new film "Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World" examines the idea of comedy from many angles but never falls into the trap of explaining itself. It's a film about what makes us laugh, about how pointless it is to try and explain humor, about how individual humor is, and about the absurdity of the way that governments interact.
Brooks plays a character named Albert Brooks in the film, a sort of spoiled, whiny everyman. Albert's career is on the rocks, so when he is summoned to a State Department meeting, he goes. He has nothing better to do, after all. It turns out that a secret commission headed by Fred Dalton Thompson (formerly senator from Tennesee, now an actor, and here playing himself), whose goal is to help America better understand the Muslim world. They wants Albert to spend a month in India and Pakistan and write 500 pages about what makes Muslims laugh. In return, he will get a Medal of Freedom ("The nice one," one of the officials tells him).
Albert takes the gig, and soon finds himself in a tiny office in New Delhi rented for him by his two State Department liaisons, Stuart (John Carroll Lynch) and Mark (Jon Tenney). Nothing is quite as good as Albert would like, from the lack of a welcoming committee at the airport to the people who apply to be his assistant. He finds the one applicant who speaks English, can type and take shorthand, and doesn't mind that he's Jewish, Maya (Sheetal Sheth), and hires her on the spot.
The two of them take to the streets, stopping random people and asking them what makes them laugh. When this works about as well as one might expect, Albert decides to do a comedy concert in New Delhi. He figures that what the audience laughs at will tell him a lot about the Muslim sense of humor. Not a bad idea, but none of his jokes actually work. Not only are they mostly satires on things that don't really exist in India, he tells them as if they're not at all funny. Then, to complicate matters, he makes an illegal border crossing to visit some aspiring comedians in Pakistan and attracts the suspicious attention of the Pakistani and Indian governments.
Brooks is not a comedian who goes for the easy laugh. There are a handful of jokes in the film which made me laugh out loud, but most of the humor makes you grin rather than guffaw. It's subtle. Just about every joke in the film is set up and told as if it's not a joke at all. It's a strange way to make a comedy, and makes the audience a trifle uncomfortable at times, but that's probably what Brooks was going for.
"Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World" is not an easy film to recommend that people see because not only is the subject matter problematic but the style of humor is so unusual that not everyone will enjoy it. And really, that's the point: Albert's task is impossible because everyone's sense of humor is different. "What makes Muslims laugh" doesn't exist any more than "what makes Americans laugh." What makes a person laugh has to do with a lot more than religion or heritage. The best joke in the film is that at the end of the film, only the audience understands that.
--30--
One of the advantages of reviewing movies is that I wind up seeing a lot of films I probably wouldn't manage to see otherwise. I watch at least one film a week, and when covering Cinequest, San Jose's film festival, I see more like three or four films a day for a week and a half. In 2005 I sat through over 100 movies, ranging from delightful to horrible, from short (only a few minutes) to long (over three hours). Because I get to pick which movies I see most of the time, I only saw a handful I didn't care for, but I did get to see a lot of films I greatly enjoyed.
There were several films that fell in the 'classically great' pile for me The Aviator told us the story of Howard Hughes (Leonardo DiCaprio), the great pioneer in both aviation and filmmaking. DiCaprio proved once again that he can actually act when he puts his mind to it, and the whole film was a wonderful epic. Likewise, The Merchant of Venice was a wonderful retelling of Shakespeare's play, set in the right time period and starring Al Pacino in a surprisingly effective tragic performance. Brokeback Mountain was another great tragedy, showing the damage wrought by society's intolerance upon two men deep in the throes of love.
There were a number of fun, feel-good films as well. Millions, the British film about two brothers who find a huge bag of money, was charming and handled its improbably virtuous hero without being overly saccharine. Both Sahara and Mr. and Mrs. Smith were escapist action romps: one in the Indiana Jones vein with explosions, anthropology, and adventure; the other a strange cross between a romantic comedy about a failing marriage and a gangster flick about assassins. The Producers, the screen adaptation of the Broadway musical version of Mel Brooks' 1968 hit film, was a delight as well. Surprisingly, Hitch turned out to be a fun film in spite of looking from the previews and summary like another "how to fool a woman into liking you" tale. Wil Smith showed surprising heart, and the filmmakers actually offered an awkward, pudgy guy (Kevin James) as a romantic hero for once. Mad Hot Ballroom, a documentary about New York public school kids going out for a ballroom dancing competition, was heartwarming.
Of course, there were plenty of gritty films too. Sin City, the film
adaptation of Frank Miller's graphic novel series, was horrifyingly beautiful, full of black and white images splashed with occasional primary colors and graphic violence. Batman Begins was a dark take on the origins of the caped crusader, with Christian Bale providing a near-sociopathic performance in the title role. Serenity offered fans of the cancelled sci-fi series "Firefly" some closure while offering newcomers an entry into the worn, grungy world of Western-style adventure and sci-fi spaceflight.
No 2005 retrospective would be complete without mentioning Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire -- the fourth entry in the series was easily the best film adaptation so far, packing in all the necessary bits with as little change from the text as possible, while skipping over unnecessary subplots. It's going to be a long wait for the next installment.
2005 was a decent year for movies. There was plenty of schlock around, as usual, but there were plenty of gems for those willing to track them down. On the whole, it was too much of a mixed bag to define as being a year of anything in particular, but it certainly had a lot to offer moviegoers.