Black Death is a poxy title for a movie. It tells you little about its content, except when it is set – the Middle Ages – and that it is about a killer disease. The twist of director Christopher Smith’s fourth film is that a rag-tag group of knights led by Sean Bean believe that the plague has its source in a village where savage practices are said to take place. “Kill the source and you’ll end the death.” Bean’s seven “same old guys” – quiet one, boastful one and so on – are led by a monk (Eddie Redmayne) who, in the tradition of Christian Name of the Rose Slater cannot keep his cassock on.
As we know from such films, loose cassocks cost lives. The monk’s desire to rendezvous with his girlfriend leads the knights to a run in with a group of bestial bandits, who deplete their number. The crocked crusaders eventually find the village where the plague has not reached. There they encounter an imperious woman (Carice Van Houten) who has impossibly white skin and a neat line in getting men to renounce God. At this point, in a movie that falls between so many stools – horror film, road movie, debate about the power of belief – it is practically a worktop, I could have done with an M Night Shyamalan-style twist. There is one of sorts – the obvious kind involving reincarnation.
Ultimately this German-backed film – not a British production in spite of the cast, which includes David Warner in a cameo – is about the battle of the sexes, with neither side coming out on top. I was reminded of a David Byrne lyric circa 1989: “No one knows how it started/God knows how it’ll end /The fighting continues Women Verses Men”. Minus the samba beat, of course.
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She’s Out of My League, the latest “bad-good taste’” comedy – naughty words but conservative morals – has actually been gathering dust in Dreamworks Studio’s vault for a couple of years. It is simultaneously an advert for the city of Pittsburgh, featuring scenes at a Penguins ice hockey game and the Andy Warhol museum, and a scathing portrait of airport security. Given last year’s failed attempt to detect an airplane bomber in the US, you can see why its release was delayed.
Jay Baruchel plays Kirk, one of the less lecherous security guys who owe their jobs to September 11, who refuses to give event planner, Molly (Alice Eve in her American debut) a hard time complying with security regulations whilst she is on her way to New York. Molly has just ended a relationship and wants to date a guy “who can’t hurt her”. She chooses Kirk, who cannot handle dating a woman who is several points higher up the dating scale than he is – although he has no idea about her webbed feet. His co-workers exhibit various reactions from outright cynicism to a belief in the morality of Disney movies, especially Beauty and the Beast. Eventually in true saccharine manner, Kirk learns that if she (Molly) “believes he’s a 10, then he’s a 10”.
The film boasts two scenes that pay homage to, but place it well below, such “bad-good taste” comedies as There’s Something About Mary and American Pie. To prepare for his big date, Kirk shaves his pubic hair and has difficulty finishing the job. Later he ejaculates prematurely in Molly’s lounge just as her father (Trevor Eve, Alice’s real-life dad) comes home. If you had not seen the other movies, you might possibly be amused. The line that got the biggest laugh at the screening I attended is when a passenger is told: “Go shit in your hand”.
The predictability of the plot pretty much freezes your responses. So when Kirk plays a game of indoor hockey against his far more athletic brother, watched by their respective girlfriends, you know he will win. There is the usual casual misogyny that you expect. Kirk has a male support group that the women who work at the airport – notably his ex-girlfriend – do not. When Kirk breaks up with Molly and his ex wants to get back together, the contrivance is insufferable. It is quite unusual in a Hollywood movie for a male hero to curse his dad without a corrective or caveat. Kirk’s father chose not to send him to college, but to buy a swimming pool instead. One of the writers evidently forgot that the film was set in a bleak industrial city.
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Woody Allen used to joke that he had been hired to turn the musical My Fair Lady back into Pygmalion. Actually, he has been making versions of George Bernard Shaw’s play for more than 20 years. In 1989’s Crimes and Misdemeanours, his television producer character educates his niece and coins the film’s only memorable line: “The last time I was inside a woman was when I visited the Statue of Liberty”. Six years later, in Mighty Aphrodite, he played a sports writer attempting to “normalise” brassy prostitute Judy Cum (Mira Sorvino).
Now, in Whatever Works, his first New York-based film since 2004’s Melinda and Melinda, he is at it again. Here, his grumpy and acid-tongued alter ego, Boris Yelnikoff (Larry David, who can do Woody Allen better than Allen himself) takes in a stray 17-year-old Southerner (Evan Rachel Wood) he finds outside his apartment. Predictably, they fall in love. So what’s new? Not much, at least until the second half of the movie. We hear Groucho Marx singing over the opening credits – “Hello, I must be going”.
Boris complains about the bleak state of the world – never mind the jungle in Heart of Darkness, check out the front page of the New York Times. He teaches children chess – then slaps them if they irritate him. He talks to the camera – even in company. Friends remark on his “fourth wall” asides. The relationship between balding Boris and the girl young enough to be his adopted daughter is somewhat autobiographical, but there is the faint hope that Woody might bring some insight into a cross-generational relationship. At least he’s not prurient. There are no awkward kissing or bedroom scenes. Indeed, he posits the relationship in a general thesis about love, which forms the film’s title. There is the pervasive feeling that Woody Allen does not challenge himself enough. He barely puts in the one-liners. Whatever Works is another minor work in two decades of minor works.
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I wish more auteurs would do what writer-director Todd Solondz does in his fourth feature, Life During Wartime. No, not use a Talking Heads song as a title. Rather, frame their preoccupations in a topical historical context. One of the strands of this comedy-drama deals with a 12-year-old boy, Timmy (Dylan Ryder Snyder) ,wanting to forgive his paedophile father, William (Ciáran Hinds). He compares this to loving a terrorist. Its big theme, skewed through the prism of the families of three disparate sisters – disparate housewives – is America coming to terms with who those oppose its very existence.
Significantly, one of the sisters, Joy (Shirley Henderson) works with ex-convicts. Allen (Michael Kenneth Williams), her African-American husband with whom she has a failing relationship, is a former criminal. Trish (Allison Janney) is simply content to describe her ex-husband, William, as dead. She forms a relationship with an older man, Harvey (Michael Lerner), who wants to die in Israel. The third sister, poet-turned screenwriter Helen (Ally Sheedy) lives in Los Angeles She forgives Joy for her part in casting her out from the rest of the family.
Solondz excels at awkward conversations. Timmy grills Harvey over his marriage plans, specifically asking if he is a paedophile. Recalling Timmy’s mother’s description of a paedophile as “laying hands on a child”, Harvey’s attempt to console the boy has comic-horror results. Trish also describes sexual pleasure in the arms of Harvey to Timmy, when replying to the question: “Why is your face red?” A ghost of a former suitor (Paul Reubens) visits Joy, then repeatedly curses her in excessively foul language when she rejects him, even at a bar mitzvah. A woman (Charlotte Rampling) who meets William in a bar simply wants to know that “he’s straight”. She does not begrudge him dipping into her purse.
Most of the characters are recognisable from Solondz’s 1998 film Happiness, but are here played by different actors, giving the film a formal freshness. You feel that Solondz is making one long film, almost a soap opera, with some experimentation thrown in, as in his last feature, Palindromes, with the same character played by different actors in each segment. His aesthetic comfort zone is a lot more compelling than most. Black Death Director: Christopher Smith She’s Out of My League Director: Jim Field Smith Whatever Works Director: Woody Allen Life During Wartime Director: Todd Solondz
