Spank's LFF Diary, Saturday 13/11/1999
3.30pm: Summer Of Sam
Nobody ever accused Spike Lee of being a subtle filmmaker, but Summer Of Sam is so unsubtle as to be verging on the Alan Parker. This is an absolute piledriver of a movie, hammering across its story of New York in 1977 with relentless energy. This was an eventful summer for the Big Apple: sweltering heat, power brownouts, riots in the streets, punk and disco fighting it out on the dancefloor. And through the middle of all of this wanders Son Of Sam, a homicidal maniac who shoots brunettes through the head with a .44.
As Lee keeps insisting, this isn't the story of Sam, but a fictional story about how the lives of New Yorkers were changed by him. Sam's killing spree contributed to an already unstable atmosphere within the city: the film focusses on how it affected the Italian-American community in general, and two friends in particular. Hairdresser Vinny (John Leguizamo) is freaked out when he just escapes being killed by Sam, as he thinks it's a warning from God to stop cheating on his wife Dionna (Mira Sorvino). His pal Richie (Adrien Brodie) has picked up on what's happening in punk in the UK, and is going around town with an increasingly worrying array of bad haircuts, worse clothing and unspeakable attempts at an English accent. When the community starts to take the law into its own hands over the murders, anyone who stands out is a potential suspect, and Vinny is worried that his friend stands out more than most.
Visually, it's Lee's usual impressive mix of styles, from the hard-edged realism of the streets to the grainier, out-of-focus fantasy inside Sam's head. (It's fascinating that the most ludicrous bit of the movie - an inspired cameo by John Turturro - turns out to be a matter of documented fact.) Aurally, it's a little less assured: some of the sound mixing in the early stages of the film makes the dialogue virtually inaudible, Terence Blanchard's orchestral score is unnecessarily bombastic, and the disco-packed soundtrack strives just a little too hard for effect (Don't Leave Me This Way plays during a break-up scene, for God's sake). The NY punk scene looks and feels right, and two of the best sequences play out to the sound of Richie's favourite band The Who, but even that becomes counter-productive: your horror at the final explosion of violence is tempered by your excitement about it being cut to Won't Get Fooled Again.
Thanks to some good acting from all concerned, particularly Adrien Brodie as the faux Brit punk Richie (possibly more sympathetic to a British audience than an American one?), the tension builds inexorably throughout the second half of the film, after a somewhat rambling first hour. Although it doesn't have the impact of Do The Right Thing, it has a similar sense of impending apocalypse as the heat, fear and anger all combine, just waiting for one final incident to push everything over the edge. If there is a duff performance in the film, it's Lee's own cameo as a TV reporter: it gives an in-jokey air to a movie that's trying to be taken seriously. Stay behind the camera, Spike. Please.
6.15pm: Les Convoyeurs Attendent
Labelled somewhat unfairly as "that Belgian movie about opening doors" (and I'm probably more guilty than anyone else of that), Les Convoyeurs Attendent turns out to be a lot more than that. The much publicised door-opening is merely the most visible sign of the fragile mental state of Roger Closset (Benoit Poelvoorde). Roger works as a photographer for the local paper, running around town on a motorbike taking pictures of accidents and disasters. Desperate for his family to break a world record so they can win a car, he picks the record for door-opening and closing (around 42,000 times in 24 hours), and hectors his son into training for it. Meanwhile, his daughter is making friends with their next-door neighbour, who races pigeons.
Benoit Mariage's film is a clever little study of parental obsession: it's based around a great starring performance by Benoit Poelvoorde, last seen as the serial killer in Man Bites Dog. This role offers similar opportunities for wild mood swings, as Roger turns from caring parent to terrifying lunatic in the space of a few seconds. The story hits the door-opening contest about halfway through, and after that takes a slightly more conventional turn: though the film still has a few surprises to spring on us, with a wry dark humour pervading throughout without ever turning the characters into mere caricatures for a sick joke. And there are some lovely visual moments, notably a pigeon race in which several hundred of the birds are launched straight at the camera in a few seconds. For once, this is a foreign film with British distribution already arranged (via Artificial Eye), so look out for it in British arthouses soon.
8.45pm: Whatever Happened To Harold Smith?
Standing in the queue for returns for this film, a man I've never met before approaches me and asks if I have a web site. He turns out to be FilmFan, whom I only know from frequent exchanges of correspondence on the Talking Film bulletin board. I ask him how he recognised me. He tells me. If none of the people concerned have been arrested by the end of the Festival, then maybe I'll tell you too.
The screening itself is quite a buzzy affair, attended by most of the cast and crew: the film is apparently "wet from the lab" having only been finished on Thursday afternoon, and this is the first time anyone has seen it. Bizarrely, on the same day as Summer Of Sam, it's another film set in the seventies hinterland between disco and punk, with the cobbled streets of Yorkshire standing in for Manhattan (the opening strut down the street to the Bee Gees is an immaculately executed spoof).
It's the story of teenager Vince Smith (Michael Legge), who lives with his dotty grandfather Harold (Tom Courtenay), slutty mother Irene (Lulu), and bad magician brother Ray (Matthew Rhys). Problems begin at home when Harold sees Uri Geller on telly and starts trying out his own magic powers that he's kept dormant for years: at a magic show for an OAPs home he stops all the watches in the place along with three people's pacemakers. The law firm Vince works for takes on Harold's murder case, but it doesn't seem to help Vince's chances with fellow worker Joanna (Laura Fraser). Until he discovers punk rock...
It's all too easy to coast on the seventies nostalgia wave, but Whatever Happened To Harold Smith? does it with such wit and attention to detail that you can't help but be swept along with it, thanks to a sharp script by Ben Steiner lovingly directed by Pete Hewitt. The design and fashions are all cheesily accurate, and there's a great selection of contemporary punk and disco tunes on the soundtrack. Tom Courtenay hits just the right note of bemused enchantment that the film requires, helped by support from a whole string of cameos that'll be instantly familiar to us oldsters who were actually there at the time. Best comment at the Q&A was, without a shadow of a doubt, Stephen Fry's dislike of having to play a character that jogged a lot: "I'd rather suck turds from Colin Welland." You watch, you'll all be saying it tomorrow.
Notes From Spank's Pals
Being John Malkovich
Ken - One of the films I really wanted to see when I read the festival brochure. Unfortunately the only evening performance sold out (Spank managed to catch the matinee, but I couldn't spare the time off work) so many thanks to the LFF for scheduling an extra perfomance. It's my favourite film of the festival so far. The real joy is how surreal it all is. I can't help but wonder just what the writer (Charlie Kaufman) was on when he came up with it all. John Cusack plays a puppeteer who busks on street corners showing sexually erotic dramas but attracting audiences of children. Tiring of the lack of monetary success and of being beaten up by angry parents, and on the prompting of his wife (an unrecognisable Cameron Diaz obsessed by a menagerie of animals, particularly a chimp who has issues with childhood), he accepts a job on the 7½th floor of a building. This floor is (naturally) between the 7th and 8th floors but has to be reached by stopping the lift between floors and levering the doors open. It has a headroom of less than 5 feet. The companies on the floor use it because of the low overheads! It is on this floor than he finds a portal into the head of John Malkovich, the exit from which is on the New Jersey Turnpike. After that things get really weird.
Summer of Sam
Old Lag - A good fun movie, though I had to cover up my eyes at the final beating up of one, for the middle class, of the most interesting and punk characters of the film. Really, as pushed, as by some old lag NY TV type, just an enjoyable story. The key theme between the central love couple was one that I could not relate to, and I wondered who would. The male hero delivered only minimalist conventional sex to his wife of two years, a sexy and pedestaled shop window 1977 disco glamour wife, because of some strange Italian convention, whilst he sought anal and other sex from various affairs. Quite disciplined in a way for a man, but why could he not effectively explain to his divorcing wife? Smoke and all sorts of other confrontations were going on from eg Spike Lee as a news reporter, but that was about it. In the 70's, hated the fashions, and still do, apart from the V bummed fringe skirt worn by the heroine, who is being fumblingly moved for an Oscar.
Ken - Every film festival has a let down (some have several) and this is it. It's directed by Spike Lee (please take note of that if you're the editor of the LFF Souvenir guide, which for some reason repeats the credits for The Straight Story instead of this) and is set during the long hot New York summer of 1977 while the 'Son of Sam' killings take place. The Son of Sam was a madman who committed a series of slayings. There isn't a single identifiably sane person in the entire movie however, so no wonder it took the police so long to discover who the 'Son of Sam' really was. The insanity can be put down to the combination of drugs, the heat (the film refers to temperatures of 102 to 105 degrees - obviously they mean 102 to 105F which translate into English as 39 to 41 degrees) and presumably the threat of this stalking killer. Most of the action centres around a group of Americans of Italian descent. Spike Lee got a lot of criticism for not casting black actors, and possibly for that reason there are scenes which have no relationship to the rest of the film and may have been grafted on as an afterthought. These are TV interviews with a black community in Brooklyn (where Spike Lee himself grew up) about the killings to "get the darker perspective" despite the fact that all the victims appear to be white and the number of killings by Son of Sam is small compared to the total of black people murdered throughout New York.
November 14th 1999
| <-Back to LFF '99 Index | Return to home page | Forward to Sunday 14/11/1999-> |