Pennies from Heaven (1978, UK/1981, USA)

Wow. Where to start?

I’ve been reading Nathan Rabin’s My Year of Flops blog (and if you love bad movies, you should be, too), and it’s brought a number of things to my attention, among them the cinematic masterpieces Alone in the Dark and Mindhunters, which I rented for, uh . . . research purposes. Uh-huh. Research.

A little while back, Rabin’s blog reminded me of a movie I saw once when I was in high school, or perhaps even junior high - Pennies from Heaven. Pennies made quite an impact on me back then - despite my realization that the whole thing was kind of a mess, I found it utterly gorgeous. Several of the production numbers were burned into my brain, in particular the slinky tap dance to the titular song and Christopher Walken’s pimp striptease to “Let’s Misbehave.” Yes, you read that right. Go rent it RIGHT NOW.

What I didn’t know then was that Pennies was a remake of a 1978 BBC miniseries starring Bob Hoskins. The BBC mini is the real deal – dark, ugly, and utterly fantastic. Dennis Potter wrote the Depression-era story of a traveling sheet music salesman, Arthur Parker, who is so unsatisfied by his wife and his life that his only means of escape is his fantasy life – surreal sequences where he and other characters dance and lip-synch to jaunty songs of the 1920’s and 30’s. On one of his sales trips, Arthur comes across a young schoolteacher who he takes advantage of and subsequently abandons. I’ll keep quiet about what happens after that, but I will say that no one ends up terribly happy.

Potter’s original script is so deep and thorough that the idea of compressing 7.5+ hours of story into less than two hours must have been horrifying to him. It turned out to be pretty horrifying to everyone else, too, as no one was terribly interested to see Steve Martin as a randy, lying, cheating, no-good music man who occasionally breaks out into Busby Berkley-esque production numbers. But both versions of Pennies are very much worth the time and energy, although often for different reasons. The BBC version has a better cast overall, and Hoskins brings an animal lust to the role that Martin can’t evoke. It’s obviously deeper and slower, and has a lot more meat to it. But the American remake is tantalizingly flashy, and, as I said before, gorgeous. The cinematography and the production design push the envelope and accomplish what the lower-budget original couldn’t – its cinematic feel makes the divide between reality and fantasy at the core of the story really pop. It also circles back to how Depression-era media – particularly songs and movies – were so jarringly different from the lives of average men and women in both America and England.

That America-England thing is something that I’m still chewing over (how well does the story really translate from one national identity to the other?), as well as the dynamics of how the schoolteacher came about her radical change of character, and what exactly the itinerant accordion player has to do with the whole thing. There’s a lot going on in Pennies. The miniseries is certainly a time investment, but is generally much more successful as a whole than the film is. But the film delivers in certain areas that the original only touches on . . . let's call it a stand-alone companion piece. Watching the two back-to-back has thus far been one of the best movie experiences of my year.

Manufactured Landscapes (2006, Canadian)

Aesthetically, Manufactured Landscapes and the photography of Edward Burtynsky are gorgeous, but subject-wise, they're often horrifying. Landscapes follows Burtynsky as he works on images for his 2004 book, Burtynsky - China. Thus, the primary subject of the film is also China, and how the nation's rapid expansion into the manufacturing industry has impacted not only the indigenous landscape, but that of the world.

Burtynsky says that he is more interested in showing these human-made landscapes than he is in moralizing or politicizing them, and when the film likewise concentrates on the images, it's at its best. But when it relies too heavily on Burtynsky's narrative or on the human cost of Chinese expansion and Western consumerism (such as in a late segment on land ownership in Shanghai), it feels as if the filmmakers are beating the message home. Burtynsky's images can speak for themselves, and Landscapes will probably make you think long and hard about the next iron you buy, or what happens to your laptop after you discard it.

28 Weeks Later (2007, UK/Spanish)

I originally planned to steer well clear of 28 Weeks Later, as I love the original, and a sequel that doesn't involve any of the original players nearly always spells doom. However, there were some interesting, even positive, reviews during the theatrical release, and Robert Carlyle is always fun, so why the hell not?

Unfortunately, my original wariness was probably the correct response. Despite the presence of Carlyle, Rose Byrne, Harold Perrineau, and Idris Elba, the story puts two children front and center, which is NEVER a good thing in a sequel. The Mummy Returns, anyone? (Yes, it's a cheap shot, but this is a zombie movie we're talking about here.) Despite a promising opening - Carlyle saves himself from an attack by leaving his wife and a little boy in the hands of the infected - and a very political plot thread that compares the refugee return to London to the aftermath of Katrina, this is really just another zombie chase film, and the material was much, much stronger the first time around.

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007, USA)

I wanted to like Before the Devil Knows Your Dead, what with its great cast, intriguing premise, and near-legendary director. But I ended up feeling that the film was less than the sum of its parts, somewhat ironically echoing a sentiment one of the main characters voices about himself.

Before the Devil is Sidney Lumet's latest film, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke as brothers in dire emotional and financial straits. Andy (Hoffman) suggests to Hank (Hawke) that all of their problems (which are great in number - troublesome wives and ex-wives, creative accounting, drug addiction, alcoholism, etc.) could be solved through thievery, specifically by robbing the small suburban jewelry store owned by their parents (Rosemary Harris and Albert Finney). Naturally, everything goes very, very wrong very, very fast, and both brothers find themselves spinning further out of control in the wake of a botched heist.

The narrative is told in boomerang style - Lumet presents one character's experience of a piece of the story - Hank before the robbery, Andy before the robbery, Charles (Finney) after the robbery - but does so with such distracting, out-of-style transitions that the whole device feels cheap. Better to have dispensed with the post-production effects and have gone with a simple fade to black, as it's not really the narrative style that's the problem here.

So what exactly is the problem? The film is filled with very good performances - Hoffman, as usual, can do no wrong, and Hawke does a nice job of using his pretty-boy looks to suggest a man who never made good on his early promise. Finney is great, as is Marisa Tomei as Andy's flighty wife. There is great texture and feeling to individual scenes within these character's arcs, but the whole thing doesn't hang together quite as it should, partly because it's uncertain what the story is really about. Does Andy act so horribly because daddy never really loved him? Really? Is Hank an immature, whiny loser because he's the baby of the family? If the filmmakers were really trying to sell these little family dramas, perhaps a heist film wasn't the vehicle of choice.


Note - This is filmsnack's 100th post! Thanks to everyone for reading.

The Wind that Shakes the Barley (2006, Irish/UK)

There are few things prettier than Cillian Murphy, but one of those things just might be the Irish countryside. In Ken Loach’s Palm D’Or-winning film, The Wind that Shakes the Barley, both are on heavy display, as Murphy plays one of two brothers whose involvement in the IRA struggle of the 1920’s illustrates the tensions within the Irish resistance movement.

At first, the sanitized violence of Barley bothered me. Despite a lot of death, there’s virtually no blood – but then, having just re-watched Pan’s Labyrinth, perhaps I simply had another type of film in mind. The real meat of Barley is not on the battlefield, but in the ideological shifts that take place within the central group of characters. During the course of the film, the foundation of the movement is questioned in such a way as to show how revolution is a constantly shifting thing. This makes the end all the more heartbreaking.

I’m just starting to get into Loach’s work (I wrote a review of Ae Fond Kiss in Filmsnack’s inaugural month), and though I’m not terribly familiar with the bulk of his films yet, I think Barley is a good point of entry. It’s fairly straightforward in form – an historical war film – but surprisingly deep in content. I will, however, issue a warning – I had to watch most of the film with the subtitles turned on, because the Irish brogue is thick, and the sound overlaps quite a bit.

Eastern Promises (2007, UK/Canadian)

Warning – this post is all about the end of Eastern Promises, so I’d only suggest reading it if you’ve seen the movie or don’t care about being spoiled.

Overall, Eastern Promises felt like a practice run for A History of Violence. Many of the same themes are explored, but not with the depth seen in Violence. One thing in particular really bugged me about Eastern, and ended up impacting my feelings about the movie as a whole. At the end of Violence Cronenberg treats the audience to a view of the normal American family sitting down to dinner. Everything looks perfect, but if you’ve sat through the entire film, you know that this is just a veneer for the ugliness underneath. It’s a great moment, and one that he can’t recapture (or doesn’t choose to) in Eastern.

The last scenes of Eastern strive for a similar family structure. At the water’s edge, right after tipping the balance of power and rescuing the baby at the center of the film’s conflict, Nikkolai (Viggo Mortensen) and Anna (Naomi Watts) share a kiss, the baby held closely between them. It’s another perfect picture of family unity, but here, with the reveal that Nikkolai’s character is more good guy than bad, it feels like a suture, like a triumph, and not the hollow victory at the end of Violence.

What’s really problematic is what comes after. Anna has apparently taken the baby in as Nikkolai returns to the Russian underworld to destroy it from within. They are separate, but the illusion of the perfect family remains. Anna raises the baby with the help of the older generation – her English mother and Russian uncle – and all is sweetness and light. Too much so, I thought, as the whole thing is skewed so gender-normative that it doesn’t gel with the rest of the film, and particularly with Anna’s character. Throughout the movie, Anna has been the tough broad – unafraid to challenge men, riding the streets of London on her father’s motorcycle, and dressed in denim and leather when she’s not wearing her work scrubs. True, she is a midwife, and she has lost both a baby and a fiancé, but there is nothing about Anna’s character that demonstrates this late show of femininity. In that final scene, Anna is dressed in a light-colored sundress patterned with flowers, and she takes the baby out into a sunny courtyard to play. That single kiss with Nikkolai has changed her, rendered her softer – I missed the ass-kicking Anna of the movie, and didn’t feel that this motherly, wifely figure was any sort of real replacement.

I found it somewhat odd that Cronenberg made this choice – his use of the wife in Violence was nowhere near as simple, and I can’t recall another female figure of his who has been reduced in this way. In general, I enjoyed the bulk of Eastern - the performances are strong (particularly the magnificent Armin Mueller-Stahl), and the whole thing rips along at a great pace. The fact that it lacks the depth of Violence doesn’t render it any less enjoyable, but the easy out at the end certainly does.