Multiplex movies in Jakarta: The year in review
Multiplex movies in Jakarta: The year in review
By Jane Freebury
JAKARTA (JP): Dangling from cliff faces with Sylvester Stallone, tumbling down white-water rapids with Meryl Streep, or re-creating a real-life incident with a scary flight on a disabled craft to the moon and back with Tom Hanks, Hollywood has performed death-defying stunts at the movies this year. Thrills for the audience with the stars for company.
Jakarta is home to the action movie and its sibling the action-adventure. As with any film genre, there are examples of the good, the bad and the lousy. You decide on the percentages!
In Jakarta this year there was some good action and adventure, with films like Clear and Present Danger, River Wild and Apollo 13 -- especially Apollo 13 -- on the silver screen. Giving you something to think about while you react viscerally to a stream of precipitous situations, without stopping for pause -- the die- hard formula of the action movie.
No incidents in mainstream cinema in Jakarta '95 -- no bannings and no censorship controversies. What a surprise to see Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction here. Same active ingredients (lots of meat and gristle, regrettably), same production techniques (fast and furious), but something there was different.
This film won the 1994 Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, probably the apogee of international art house film festivals. It also received an Oscar for the Best Original Screenplay. Hollywood production has always been a producer-led enterprise, making it distinct from, say, the European production scene. Quentin Tarantino, laden with talent as a screenwriter and director, brings an intelligence quotient to his screen narratives that transcends the trashiness of his subjects, such as the well-planned heist that ends in bloody mayhem for the burglars (Reservoir Dogs, definitely still his best film); a madcap, impromptu hold-up of people dining at a restaurant (Part 1, Pulp Fiction). Pulp like this holds it own against texts with far loftier concerns. Back to Tarantino shortly.
Fashionable as it is in some quarters to knock Hollywood as an encroachment on indigenous social and cultural values, the critique evades an important point -- that Hollywood is the cinema, and that there is no other global cultural industry or entertainment institution to rival it. Bombay might be big but its influence does not travel any large distance beyond India and her millions. Okay, Hong Kong action has an overseas presence but let's face it, it's slight compared to Hollywoods slick products that are simultaneously released right around the world to millions of satisfied consumers.
The U.S. entertainment industry, a massive export earner, is the textual and institutional system, which each and every filmmaker around the world either emulates or parodies, celebrates or opposes. Like the social institution of language, Hollywood cinema is a cultural institution and a shared language which all must enter before they are allowed to innovate. Love it or hate it, filmmakers can never quite leave it, for if they do they risk leaving the audience behind.
This being said, press reports are coming in that 1995 has not been kind to Hollywood. Box-office receipts are down. Anticipated successes like Judge Dredd and Johnny Mnemonic did not deliver, despite major star props Sylvester Stallone and Keanu Reaves. Prominent science fiction writer William Gibson as screenwriter and artist Robert Longo as director were imported from their fields to work on Mnemonic, but even with this outside talent there was insufficient zest.
An adaptation of the comic strip 2000 AD on which Judge Dredd is based had been long awaited but, in the event, failed audience expectations. Not because it was a case of another cartoon brought to life, another Batman, or another Dick Tracy, but because the film's treatment of the key character sank the movie.
Joel Schumacher's Batman Forever fared better. Having the backdrop of Gotham City already credibly established in the public imagination probably helps. Attention on the key character, Val Kilmer's Batman, was deflected to others -- a plausible Robin (Chris O'Donnell), an impossible villain in Jim Carrey's Riddler (who can rattle off his lines almost as whipper- snipper fast as Robin Williams), an asymmetrical Tommy Lee Jones sidelining, and an aerobicised Nicole Kidman as Dr. Meridian. Good value.
Drama
Human drama came to Jakarta in Tony Scott's Crimson Tide and Frank Darabont's The Shawshank Redemption, both solid respectable films, sacrificing possibilities for more action for a little psychological complexity and a bit of socio-historical detail.
Crimson Tide with its smart script -- apparently extensively re-written by Quentin Tarantino, although the screenplay is credited to Michael Schiffer -- pitted 1950s values (embodied by Gene Hackman) against 1990s values (oozed by Denzel Washington). Shawshank was an unexpected modest pleasure. Though both these films had the requisite active ingredients to make a big and noisy action movie -- a number of people in a confined space (i.e. submarine and prison) with the possibility of an implacable killing force unleashed -- both developed into taut dramas.
Die Hard with Vengeance jumped into action mode before you'd settled into your seat. A bomb went off straightaway and let up was refused until the final credits. A nutter called Simon (Jeremy Irons again) had McClane running all over town taking telephone calls to answer riddles about bombs set to go off. Too fast and furious this time, I much preferred Die Hard the first. Die Hard with Vengeance lacked the intensity and intelligence of its predecessors and was at its most rewarding when people were talking -- when Bruce Willis was sparring verbally with Samuel Jackson about race and power relationships.
Samuel Jackson was impressive in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction too. Because of its wit and intelligence and cineliteracy, not because of its action and extreme violence, this film was among the best films screened in Jakarta in 1995. This is Jakarta's B-grade staple fare in terms of content, but turned smarter, more knowing and nastier, anti-humanist, nostalgic and self-referential, fairly scudding along but with a formidable screenplay at the waterline and a lot of talent on deck.
Quentin Tarantino's acceptance in the mainstream is symptomatic of Hollywood's interest in the independent filmmaking strain, in its search for innovation. As Hollywood has appeared to depend too much of late on its capacities for spectacle, its star machine and on its overseas audiences to make a profit it probably needs to import talent such as Tarantino pronto to offset a decline in quality and competitiveness of product. Tarantino's next film is eagerly awaited. He has yet to write substantial roles for women in his films -- aside from Patricia Arquette's Alabama in his screenplay for True Romance. Will he write women in next time?
A substantial role was scripted for Demi Moore in Disclosure. This was the thinking person's Fatal Attraction, which involved a sophisticated and realistic debate about issues of sexual harassment and gender politics. It probably looked like soft porn from the sales pitch, but it was a lot more than that. River Wild was much less satisfying, action and adventure aspects aside. Meryl is such an excellent actress it was a pity to see her carrying a very so-so movie.
Failures
There was a time when films with obtrusive style, such as the avant-garde, were sure to be commercial failures, because form has traditionally been subordinate to content in the movies. Luc Besson is one of a new generation of French filmmakers who, like colleague Jean Jacques Beineix (Diva, Betty Blue), owe much to the codes of advertising and to the iconographies of pop culture.
The success of his film Leon has brought this director closer to the mainstream still. Besson's The Big Blue and Subway earned him a reputation as pure stylist, but postmodernist cinema needs a political and cultural dimension to prevail. Good looking, witty cinema it may be, but for those who knew him before, Besson hasn't come a very long way since he began in this same vein. His 1985 film Subway was better.
Sam Raimi's The Quick and the Dead looked good too, betraying a fascination with surface effects. Self-conscious style and visual quotation from other westerns made me recall the preferred past pleasures of Shane and The Searchers. Former Evil Dead director Raimi had stars to work with -- Sharon Stone, Gene Hackman -- but lacked the substance of a strong script, with ideas.
Forrest Gump is a reprise on recent United States history through the vehicle of the life story of an individual. But how can a such person, lacking understanding of or motivation for his participation in historical events help explain the currents of change that swept the West during those years?
Gump had the good fortune to take part in every significant moment of recent history -- except the space race, covered elsewhere, in Apollo 13. Gump was the first film since Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf to attract 13 nominations for the Academy Awards. It took out six, and with this Hollywood slipped two steps back since Philadelphia.
Kevin Costner was hero of his world of water, moving around his oddly-shaped catamaran with prodigious agility, fending off ugly villains. But, apart from the feat of having brought it all off without a glimpse of landfall (until the conclusion), the set construction and the exaggerated malice of Dennis Hopper, the film didn't have a lot to recommend it. Good effects. Poor script. The Waterworld extravaganza wouldn't have lost anything from a little jauntiness. Long before Kevin Costner headed off after things had been put to rights, you realized it was just a big romp after all. Why didn't he ?
Mel Gibson in his directorial and starring roles in Braveheart managed a wink and a nod to the audience - did you catch it?
Braveheart had other virtues too -- a good script which developed the relationships between hero, the leading lady and others to good effect and some fine tensely dramatic moments were established with slow-motion camera and taut editing. A rousing good movie.
Films like Wolfgang Petersen's Outbreak and Roger Donaldson's Species sowed their unsettling seeds and activated audience paranoias. Some terrible things happened to the body -- a site of chaos -- in these two films. Both were creditable films, but heavy-going along with all those action movies. For other pleasures we turned to Robert Altman's Ready-to-Wear (Pret-a- Porter) -- wonderful to see Marcello Mastroianni again -- to laugh instead, at the expense of others. And we turned to Gillian Armstrong's handsome and wholesome Little Women for the pleasures of good performances from Susan Sarandon and her "girls", and subtle consideration of women's concerns.
A Walk in the Clouds drifted into Jakarta at year's end. It was directed by Alfonso Arau whose previous delightful Like Water for Chocolate told of love and longing in the kitchen. But this latest film is a Mexican telenovella, with a gentle heroine who tries to hide her pregnancy from her family. Keanu Reeves (who was not responsible), a gringo, then wanders into her life via a family-owned vineyard -- and suffers many indignities on her behalf. When all is lost to the family in a fire which engulfs the entire plantation, Keanu recovers a single remaining live root. Brandishing it aloft, he steps forward to save the day -- which he does. What a disappointment after Like Water for Chocolate!
Had there been an art-house cinema in Jakarta in 1995 there might have been a window for other films as yet unscreened here. Films such as Blue Sky, D'Artagnan's Daughter, Ed Wood, Death and the Maiden, Muriel's Wedding, The Madness of King George, The Neon Bible, Shallow Grave, The City of Lost Children, The Postman, Six Degrees of Separation and The Silences of the Palace.
Anyhow, the year is not quite over and you can still get to GoldenEye. James Bond, you and the cinema, are back in business.
Subentra, the sole distributor of Hollywood movies in Indonesia, was approached for a complete list of the films screened at Century 21 this year together with a list of the top ten films at the box office to date. Subentra declined, citing negative film reviews printed in The Jakarta Post.