Blog From The Bench

Walk the Line (James Mangold, 2005)
I guess it's naive to suggest that Mangold et al should be embarrassed for copying Ray so directly, what with the hazy flashbacks and family angst which serve to represent the personal torment which fuels art but haunts the artist, who is lonely despite the adulation of millions, etc. Although all of that is such hoary biopic convention that it might not have anything to do with Ray after all. Unlike the Ray Charles film it has a focus of sorts, which is good, but there's just no there there, everything about the Johnny/June relationship is leaden and transparent and trite; Witherspoon charms, but charming is different from acting, and her character is boringly noble and wise and long-suffering.

King Kong (Peter Jackson, 2005)
My reaction seems to differ from a lot of people's, in that I found the first hour appealingly goofy, and the jungle sequences tedious excercises in gross-out action, as Jackson tries to one-up himself by creating ever-grosser beasties for a good half-hour longer than necessary, an enterprise I don't find all that interesting for even a few minutes-- also the portrayal of the savage natives is so over-the-top as to be squirm-inducing. The last hour is a fun popular allegory of imperialism, and the Ann/Kong relationship is kind of moving, but it seems that Jackson lacks the heart or imagination to do much with it; you can tell he's much more comfortable creating slimy oozy things, and the emotional moments wind up mawkish (see also the excruciating Hobbit-bonding moments strewn throughtout all of Lord of the Rings and especially the last film of the trilogy).

Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005)
Bad stuff first: it never quite achieves the visual grandeur it should, perhaps because of choppy editing, and the storytelling seems clumsy in the middle, relying on a sort of shallow Hollywood shorthand to cram twenty years into an hour or so (Anne Hathaway is a careerist bitch because we see her hunched over an adding machine, a brief winter-wonderland sequence suggests married bliss, etc). But still, wow: Heath Ledger is remarkable, a bottomless confusion and torment and barely-suppressed anger suggested in his smallest gesture--- it's really a towering performance. And the narrative clunkiness aside, the heart of the matter is treated with a poetically sad grace and restraint. For me this is this year's Million Dollar Baby, a reminder that the ancient genres can still work, that a movie doesn't have to be formally innovative to be emotionally true; it might seem perverse for me to defend this movie as old-fashioned when it's causing such controversy, but I don't mean the content so much as the lack of irony, the belief in a very traditional kind of storytelling technique.