Not the movie of the week: Frightening flops and fabulous flicks

By Shaun de Waal

Shaun de Waal’s movie reviews are masterpieces in the genre of reviews, and have become celebrated for their wit and insight. The collection includes almost 100 reviews – of classics and trash, blockbusters and art films – organised by theme. The defining South African book about close-ups, red carpets and sad endings.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tafelberg
• Release date: Jul 25, 2011
• ISBN: 9780624058526

Book preview

NOT THE MOVIE OF THE WEEK

Frightening flops and fabulous flicks

Shaun de Waal

Janet: I’ll take Cary Grant myself […]

Mrs Atwater: Oh, he was thrilling in that new thing with Bergman, what is it called now? The Something of the Something … No, no, that was the other one, this was plain Something – you know, it was sort of, you know…

Rupert: It’s right on the tip of my tongue.

Janet: Mine too. It was just plain Something, I’m sure. I adored it!

– Rope (Alfred Hitchcock, 1948)

Introduction:

The passion of the film critic

There are two utterances I suspect all movie reviewers dread. Certainly I do. The first is when people say, admiringly and enviously, You have a fantastic job! (I’ll come back to that). The second is when they ask, in all innocence, What’s good that’s on? What should we see? I am tempted to reply, and sometimes do, I don’t know. What did I write in the paper?

For this query presumes that I have an instant hit parade in my head – even just a hit parade of one. This is very flattering to my mental capacities, but unfortunately at this point in the conversation I go blank. Suddenly I cannot remember what I reviewed last, whether I liked it or despised it, or even recall the last movie I truly felt I could recommend.

There is also the danger that an outright recommendation leads to later recrimination: What on earth did you like in that ghastly mess you encouraged me to go and see? This goes for casual comments (often much blunter than reviews) as well as for reviews, and nowadays the internet provides space for anyone to tell me I’m blind, stupid or plain dilly. Which they do. (Though thanks for the compliments, too, folks.)

My reviews are not about a simple yes/no response, the kind you might produce as you scan the list of what’s on at the Cinema Nouveau. An interesting review, at any rate, is more than that. I often say that my purpose in writing a review is not to get the presumptive reader to see a movie or to stay away; my primary job is to write something interesting. Hence, in this volume, I have selected reproducible reviews on the basis of the writing rather than the movie. If there are important movies that came out on my watch but are omitted from this book, it is probably because I didn’t think my reviews of them among my best. And some movies, sorry to say, I really should have written reviews of and didn’t, or not full-length ones. Why, for instance, did I end up writing only a shortie, as we say, of Tsotsi in 2005? This is surely South Africa’s biggest international success ever, and a film I esteem highly, but I didn’t write more than 150 words on it. We must have had a feature up front in the Friday section of the paper, by someone else; I don’t remember. In other cases (The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, for example), a movie didn’t get a review of its own but was subsumed into a piece about a number of movies being released round year-end.

Which raises another issue in the life of a film critic, beyond the ordinary vicissitudes of putting a newspaper together on a weekly basis, negotiating the practicalities of pages (it’s too long, it’s too short …). That is, what you review and what you don’t. It’s useful that the Mail & Guardian’s publication date coincides with the usual Friday release date for movies, but that’s not to say there is a perfect exactitude in all selections. Staying on top of the ever-changing schedules of screenings and then release dates can be hard: one doesn’t always end up with a reviewable movie in hand in any given week. If I were a full-time film critic, like some lucky Londoners, I’d be willing to go to everything – or so I tell my bosses. But movie-reviewing has always been a part-job for me, and I have not always been able to schedule myself as efficiently as I might. Anyway, who wants to see everything? It’s hard enough to catch up with the many, many good movies one hasn’t seen.

And that’s another small cross a critic bears – I suppose it might really be a film-buff thing, or a kind of film-buff oneupmanship. Perhaps people just like to try it out on film critics. That’s when they mentally find some great movie you haven’t seen, and can then exclaim with gleeful mock-wonder: "What d’you mean you haven’t seen The Spirit of the Beehive? How can you be a movie critic if you haven’t seen The Spirit of the Beehive?" – pick any appropriate title. I smile, grit my teeth, and promise that one day, some day, I will see that great masterpiece and become a proper critic.

My list of movies I really must see before I die, or go blind, or lose my marbles, whichever comes first, is lengthy and getting longer by the day. In this era of wide availability on DVD and internet purchases, they just keep coming at you. At the same time, there are many movies I’m proud or at least happy not to have seen, and that stretches from Schindler’s List to The Sound of Music. Maybe I’ve seen too many already, and there are certainly many that I don’t particularly want to see at all by the time the scheduled screening arrives. It can require a stern effort of critical detachment to watch a screeching, banging actioner towards the end of a long day’s work, or for that matter an earnest based on a true story picture on an early Friday afternoon when you’re anxious to be getting on with the rest of your life. All in all, I’d say, at least two thirds of the movies I see for review are barely worth the trip to the theatre. This is a weird paradox, perhaps exemplary of the age: I feel like I’ve seen too many movies and at the same time too few.

Like so many people, I was entranced by cinema in childhood. I can still recall childish enthusiasms (Tarzan, The Gunfighter, QuoVadis) as well as being mildly traumatised by certain scenes – the stampede in King Solomon’s Mines, for instance, and the massed wounded and dying in Gone with the Wind. (I must’ve been about eight years old.) In those days, you still hired 16mm prints for home projection. Later, there was always the drive-in and Ster City.

At university, I signed on for what was then called Drama and Film, the most useful imposition of which was the necessity of seeing and reviewing the movies shown every Monday night in one of the bigger lecture theatres in Wits’s Senate House Basement. Every Monday night, even after I’d stopped doing Drama and Film, I went off to SHB to see whatever was showing, frequently without knowing what the hell it would be. Thus I was exposed, if that’s the right word, to examples of classic film noir, to Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu, to Welles’s Macbeth and Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (see pages 180-181), to The Round-up, The Year of Living Dangerously and Private Vices, Public Virtues.

In my honours year, I signed on for a course in film studies as offered by what was then the English department; its rationale, I seem to remember, was a focus on the adaptation of literary works to the screen. But it went way beyond that: one of the teachers of the course, Brian Cheadle, thought it would be beneficial to examine several movies by Jean-Luc Godard, none of which were literary adaptations.

In fact, in that year I was the only honours student doing the course, but its chief lecturer, Stan Peskin, was fine with that – and we both liked the idea of not having to stick to any particular curriculum. He suggested I spend the first term watching Hitchcock movies, as a grounding in film language (and a very good one), as well as anything and everything the English department and the Wartenweiler Library had to offer on video. Much of that year was thus spent happily watching movies at Wits. I did manage a few essays, too – something on Brian de Palma’s Dressed to Kill, his reworking of Hitchcock’s Psycho; something on the intelligent way John Fowles’s novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman had been adapted to the screen; and a close reading of a passage in Godard’s Alphaville.

After university I had to avoid the South African army. In London I discovered the glories of the repertory cinema – we’d had only limited versions of that institution in South Africa, with the golden oldies trotted out by The Victory (especially Garbo movies and screwball comedies such as Monkey Business, with Diva on regular repeat) and the festivals that took place at Yeoville’s Piccadilly, not to mention the odd Hillbrow fleapit. Sadly, such cinemas are a thing of the past in South Africa, though the brave venture of The Bioscope in Main Street, Johannesburg, seems to stand a good chance of reviving the idea. We do need more than just the latest commercial releases. In London in the late 1980s, the Everyman in Hampstead, the Scala in Charing Cross and the Ritzy in Brixton turned up treasure troves of cinema for me: I could go and spend most of the day watching Pasolini’s Trilogy of Life, say, all three in a row, or a Werner Herzog mini-fest, or a homage to Humphrey Bogart, or – at the Ritzy – African films such as Sarraounia, which weren’t going to make it to the southern tip of Africa any time soon. (They still don’t get here.)

Back in South Africa, I started working at what was then The Weekly Mail in 1989. I reviewed a movie here and there, but mostly that was an appendage to the main job, which was compiling the entertainment guide; the paper had the late William Pretorius, writing under the pseudonym Fabius Burger, as its chief critic. Still, I got to see a lot of movies for free, and Stan Peskin’s awesome personal collection of videos supplied a steady stream of more to watch. Nowadays you can find almost anything on DVD, from Greed to Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter.

The Weekly Mail became the Mail & Guardian in the early 1990s, and we cycled through a few changes of film critic. In 1998, I temporarily took over from the usual critic while he went into rehab. The rehab didn’t take, so I was given the job permanently and have held it ever since. (I have had help from others in reviewing movies I couldn’t get to, or movies that were evidently not aimed at my demographic. The paper’s annual intake of trainees has been an enthusiastic support. I also have the luxury of being able to lift reviews from The Guardian of London when necessary.)

This book, then, is a sampler of the fruits of that tenure. My passion for cinema remains strong, despite the crap movies a film critic has to endure. As I say in one of the reviews, at least I have the privilege of being able to trash those crap movies in print, which is some compensation for having to sit through them. And hence, too, the title given to the movie column in the paper. Many publications go with the traditional Movie of the Week format to mark the lead review in any given edition. I felt, though, that often I was writing a lead review about a movie that absolutely did not fit that designation. I was always a bit confused by, for instance, The Guardian’s insistence on tagging its lead review Film of the Week, even if the reviewer thought it was rubbish. So, as an alternative to the Movie of the Week tag, I invented Not the Movie of the Week, in the tradition of the great British TV satire, Not the Nine O’clock News, and later Robert Kirby’s mock-newspaper satire, Not the Mail & Guardian. After all, there seemed more Not the Movie of the Week reviews to be done than for Movie of the Week. Blurring that division a bit, I also invented an intermediate category, Not Quite the Movie of the Week, and sometimes we play with variations on that idea too – contrasting, say, Adventure of the Week with Art Movie of the Week. At any rate, Not the Movie of the Week seems to have become something of a catchphrase, and so it becomes the title of this book, even though many of the movies reviewed here are treated in the most positive terms.

I leave it to the reader to work out whether any particular review reproduced in this book was published as a Movie of the Week or a Not; the designation is, after all, just a quick pointer. More interesting than whether a movie is good or bad is the discussion to be had about what it means, about how its aesthetic values mesh or fail to mesh with its moral assumptions, and so on. This is the kind of thing I try to explore in reviewing any given film.

In answer to the first utterance noted at the start of this introduction, being a film critic is, if not a fantastic job, at least a good one – it’s a great writing job, at least. It enables me to talk about all sort of things that go beyond the movie itself. In this book I have grouped the selected reviews in categories that seem suggestive to me of broad themes and tendencies, but I think recurrent echoes emerge across the parts, too. Really, this is the kind of book you dip into, I suspect, more often than read large swathes at a trot, so it doesn’t really matter. I have added a little value, I hope, in the Extra features, with some commentary on actors, writers, directors or other things that seem to me interesting, as sparked by the original review. There the reader will also find a list or two (lists, so beloved of movie geeks!), and a few notes on my favourite directors – those who have shaped my aesthetic views, in some way, in watching movies and wondering what they might be trying to tell us.

Contents

Part I

Land and freedom

Black like me

Hijack Stories / Oliver Schmitz, 2003

Loving the aliens

District 9 / Neill Blomkamp, 2009

The barbarians have arrived

Disgrace / Steve Jacobs, 2009

Women on the verge

Zulu love letter / Ramadan Suleman, 2004

Gotta have faith

Faith’s corner / Darrell Roodt, 2005

A funny thing happened ...

Bunny Chow – know thyself / John Barker, 2007

A fog of flatulence

Poena is koning / Willie Esterhuizen, 2007

Pass the bull

Bakgat! / Henk Pretorius, 2008

Leg before wicket

HANSIE / Regardt van den Bergh, 2008

Flog the horse

Beat the drum / David Hickson, 2003

Hope against hope

Themba / Stefanie Sycholt, 2010

Married in the morning

White wedding / Jann Turner, 2010

A thing with feathers

Jozi / Craig Freimond, 2010

Part II

A family affair

Here comes the rain again

MONSOON WEDDING / Mira Nair, 2001

Once more with feeling

THE COLOUR OF PARADISE / Majid Majidi, 1999

The algebra of need

REQUIEM FOR A DREAM / Darren Aronofsky, 2001

Sins of the father

The Royal Tenenbaums / Wes Anderson, 2001

Teen dreams

17 AGAIN / Burr Steers, 2009

Ripeness is all

FAR FROM HEAVEN / Todd Haynes, 2002

The bold and the beautiful

Volver / Pedro Almodóvar, 2006

Part III

In the mood for love

Live flesh

ROMANCE / Catherine Breillat, 1999

Road rave

Y Tu Mamá También / Alfonso Cuarón, 2001

Teenage wildlife

Ken Park / Larry Clark, 2002

Let’s talk about sex

SHORTBUS / John Cameron Mitchell, 2006

All about my childhood

Bad Education / Pedro Almodóvar, 2004

Skin flick

MYSTERIOUS SKIN / Gregg Araki, 2004

Love in Greeneland

THE END OF THE AFFAIR / Neil Jordan, 1999

Kiss kiss bang bang

MONSTER / Patty Jenkins, 2003

Resident evil

ANTICHRIST / Lars von Trier, 2009

A lion in winter

Venus / Roger Michell, 2006

Part IV

Heavens above

Blood sport

THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST / Mel Gibson, 2004

Oh, for God’s sake

BRUCE ALMIGHTY / Tom Shadyac, 2003

Is it AD yet?

THE NATIVITY STORY / Catherine Hardwicke, 2006

The devil’s party