A few gems manage to shine among blockbusters
By Jane Freebury
JAKARTA (JP): This, we are told, is an age of dwindling certainties. Gone is the Cold War chill to polarize global politics (Mission: Impossible, GoldenEye).
Once secure national borders and personal boundaries can now be crossed with a click of the mouse (Copycat, The Net, Fair Game). Gone missing too is the template for an uncomplicated masculinity (Up Close and Personal, The Truth About Cats and Dogs, The Crossing Guard).
Leadership is in the hands of woolly liberals (The American President, Shadow Conspiracy, Independence Day). To aspire for success can be dangerous (To Die For) and heroism cannot be assumed (Courage Under Fire). The mainstream movies tell us this? Sure they do, at their best and at their most banal.
The year 1996 (which officially celebrates 101 years of cinema) brought with it films that in themselves are a celebration of the cinema. Popcorn movies like Martin Campbell's GoldenEye and Brian De Palma's Mission: Impossible were classy action spectaculars that just wouldn't translate into any other medium. Why did we still need those 1960s heroes?
Secret weapons technology had fallen into the wrong hands (still assorted Russians), and certain American intelligence agents had lost a raison d'etre and deceived their own countrymen. But who really cared?
We were happy to be entertained on slight pretext. It was, after all, an opportunity to watch James Bond in a spectacular swallow-diving bungee jump and manning a tank in a chase through the St. Petersburg streets. It was a chance to see Ethan Hunt dangling spider-like and within a drop of sweat of being detected, while downloading disks inside a CIA vault.
GoldenEye -- glamorously and wittily staged, grand scale yet finely tuned -- brought a welcome return by an urbane James Bond in Pierce Brosnan, every bit as effective as Sean Connery. This 007 film for the 1990s (made by the director of the chilling television nuclear thriller Edge of Darkness ) could have lost its sense of self in this age of uncertainty. But no, it restored a cheerfully masculine Bond, only barely reconstructed, who gets ticked off for his sexism by his female colleagues.
Formulas
Mission: Impossible didn't bother with ticklish gender issues. It had a darker, labyrinthine and more traditional espionage quality, and was punctuated with the evergreen pounding theme music. You couldn't ask for more for your rupiah.
No smooth sophisticate, that other action hero Arnold Schwarzenegger returned in 1996 in his latest, Eraser. It had the expected cheerfully blustering violent set pieces, witty stunts and one-liners, and though some expressed disappointment with it, the action produced a familiar sense of exhilaration.
We had been eagerly looking forward to the first American studio product from distinguished Hong Kong director John Woo, but Broken Arrow didn't measure up. A few outstanding action set-pieces like the helicopter sequence were not enough to offset a shallow narrative and characterization, including the callow John Travolta villain. We have come to expect much more of John Woo.
A return to Tarantino territory in From Dusk Till Dawn (written by Quentin Tarantino and directed by Robert Rodriguez) wasn't worth the ticket or the time. A shoddy Z-grade vampire- western that Tarantino is supposed to have penned while still working at the video store. The brilliant promise of Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs of several years ago has receded to a low-water mark in gross juvenilia.
Robert Rodriguez's other film this year was Desperado. His first film was El Mariachi, a Mexican western on a guitar-string on which this year's film was based. It was witty, cineliterate and individual, but with Desperado Rodriguez has shown us nothing new. A bigger budget added nothing but more graphic violence.
Danny De Vito tried out the Tarantino formula in the mainstream, with the result of a pretty weightless Get Shorty. Why didn't we get to see Kevin Spacey et al in The Usual Suspects here on the big screen instead? It won the 1996 Oscar for Best Supporting Actor and Best Original Screenplay.
Box office
At the box office this year in Indonesia, four out of the five top movies were action films. The action genre (distinct from action-adventures like Raiders of the Lost Ark) came to the fore internationally in the 1980s with the colossal figures of Stallone. Schwarzenegger and Willis astride them, center frame. Typically, the action protagonist has to uphold justice and truth while the institutions or individuals who are usually invested with that particular responsibility are corrupt.
An impossible scenario presents itself, in which the protagonist has to pit himself against an implacable foe. This exaggerated scenario allows him to take his wild stand, and in a film such as McTiernan's 1988 Die Hard, the results can actually be breathtaking.
But this year in Jakarta audiences saw a humdrum list of indistinguishably titled and undistinguished action films such as Shadow Conspiracy, Critical Decision, Sudden Death. There were more titles about tough bastards and public enemies, dangerous prey and fair game, and about warriors in mortal combat dead on impact. It's pleasing, at least, to know that the action movie producers are running out of words, even if they haven't yet run out of steam.
However, there was Heat with nothing in its title to distinguish it from the run-of-the mill, except a hint perhaps, for those who recognized it, in the directorial signature of Michael Mann who made the elegiac The Last of the Mohicans (1993). Heat brought together Al Pacino and Robert De Niro on screen and in frame together for the first time.
Heat, at nearly 180 minutes running time, is long, and it is high, wide and epic like Mohicans. Yes, yet another film with significant violence, but this time it isn't celebratory. Instead, it takes the trouble to point out the impact this way of life has on significant others, i.e. the women involved with the three key male characters: Val Kilmer, Pacino and De Niro. They give very different voice to a very different perspective.
It is "against their better selves" that these men maintain their attachments. With a nice line in anomie, the De Niro character advises his younger partner Kilmer to "allow nothing in your life that you cannot walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you spot the heat around the corner." These sorts of life choices are questioned, and the losses they involve exposed.
Elegantly and meticulously made, with every framing in itself intrinsically meaningful in narrative terms, it showed Casino up for its one-dimensionality, and offered director Martin Scorsese an object lesson in what his film could have been. Heat stood out as a fine modernist benchmark in a welter of postmodernist trivia.
Outstanding
The other outstanding film at the multiplex in Jakarta in 1996 was Gus Van Sant's To Die For, which did a star turn for Nicole Kidman in the role of a vapid and voraciously careerist weather girl who would stop at nothing to succeed on television ("What was the use of doing anything if no one was watching?") This precisely timed satire was a delicious pleasure, with Kidman in wickedly good form as the heartless, hungry Suzanne Stone.
With a strong script, creative editing and fine buttoned-down performances all round, To Die For is a fine example of the well- managed black comedy -- would-be satirist Oliver Stone please take note! Gus Van Sant has let his hand rest firmly on the fine tuning all the while with this one and the results are, in their idiosyncratic fashion, caustic and cannily clever.
A debut from director Gary Fleder, with his Things to Do In Denver When You're Dead looked like it was going to be an independent that would deliver something different from the formulaic. It began well but stopped developing when the set-up turned into just another excuse to dispatch with as many bodies as possible.
Terry Gilliam's morose time-traveling Twelve Monkeys with Bruce Willis was strong, but not as good an indication of how clever this director can be -- in a delirious sort of way -- with difficult material. The extravagant fantasy film Brazil, that Gilliam made in 1985, screened briefly at the British Council this year. It still stands as the best brilliant example of Gilliam's ability to dazzle and surprise.
This year's remakes of classics Sabrina and Diabolique were unable to reprise the originals made by director Billy Wilder with Bogart and Audrey Hepburn (in Sabrina) and by Henri-Georges Clouzot with Simone Signoret (in Diabolique) in the 1950s. Some things are better left alone.
However, a return to old-fashioned romantic comedy in Rob Reiner's The American President worked the formula very well, managing at the same time to introduce a little contemporary relevance. Courage Under Fire (directed by Edward Zwick) was another reason to visit the multiplex this year. But when will they learn that they don't have to tack on a big finale, reasserting the state of the nation, at the end of any film that exposes a few problems?
It won't come as a surprise to know that the biggest box office success of the year in Indonesia was Roland Emmerich's Independence Day. It was diverting and it did deliver, but the success of Independence Day was a tribute to the marketing machine that turned a solid B-grade movie about how America single-handedly saves the world into the year's big blockbuster.
Twister made a similar pitch, and came in fifth at the box office here in Indonesia. Jan de Bont (director of Speed) has made little more than a big cloud of dust out of this one, with its fragment of a narrative and unengaging lead characters. At least the low body was low.
The demonic underworld of Seven infected us with a paranoia that evil is everywhere, without and within. Agoraphobia in Copycat had us share the realization that we can be got at via the PC, or simply erased, as in The Net.
But you, the collective audience, went once again for the action film, preferring these films in this order - Independence Day, Mission: Impossible, Jumanji, Fair Game and Twister. These were your choice, the top five films at the box-office in Jakarta in 1996.
But there weren't nearly enough reasons to go to the cinema in Jakarta in 1996. Available choices were frequently of low or indifferent quality. At home I would be wanting to go to the cinema twice a week, but distribution here in Indonesia just doesn't bring enough of the good movies in. Why not?
Why didn't we get quality cinema this year when the rest of the world saw Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility, Richard Loncraine's Richard III, Joel Cohen's Fargo, Scott Hick's Shine, Mike Figgis' Leaving Las Vegas, Josiane Balasko's French Twist, Carl Franklin's Devil in a Blue Dress, Wayne Wang's Smoke, Emir Kusturica's Underground, or Mike Leigh's Secrets and Lies?
Are they too expensive to buy for this market? Aren't the foreign distributors keen to sell poor performers outside their home markets to recoup their losses? Someone must be able to tell us.