29 July 2005
by Jasmine Park
One of the most delightful films of last year, The Triplets of Belleville accomplishes what so few films do today - a lovely, disorienting sense of timelessness. The story unfolds with increasing bizarreness: A grandmother lives in a crooked house next to an elevated train with an obese dog and her orphaned grandson, who grows up to become an Adrian-Brodyish Tour de France cyclist. One day during a race, he is kidnapped by French mobsters and dumped into a betting ring on cyclists doped up on red wine (naturally). The grandmother tracks them to the city, which resembles a mash-up of Paris, New York, and London, and rescues him with the help of the titular triplets, three squawky harpies who sing in a nightclub accompanied by a vacuum cleaner and a refrigerator. Triplets exists in a dimension that, rather like Canada, seems a lot like ours, and yet not. It's filled with throwaway cultural references to Glenn Gould, Django Reinhardt, and 1920s Parisian nightlife, while visually resembling the macabre drawings of Edward Gorey. Yet in feeling, it recalls Miyazaki's Spirited Away (2001) - both films, like the best children's stories, are beautiful, frighteningly imaginative, and imbued with an ineffable melancholy.
A bit of throwaway film by Ridley Scott - small, slick, and incredibly derivative. Nicholas Cage continues the slow, difficult trek towards career redemption with an earnest performance as Roy, an obsessive-compulsive con artist who starts the last job of his career with his partner, Frank (Sam Rockwell), just as he discovers he has a teenage daughter, Angela (Alison Lohman). What a coincidence. Scott effectively captures a certain humid South-Beach-motel lifestyle, and Lohman absolutely glows onscreen, but the film buckles under the weight of its recent various influences, which, incidentally, are an exercise in con artistry themselves - starting with David Mamet's 1987 mini-masterpiece House of Games, which was knocked off by the 2000 Argentinian film Nine Queens, which was more recently knocked off by the American version Criminal (2004). And of course, there's also the original father-daughter-heist flick, Peter Bogdanovich's only good film Paper Moon (1973). In any event, there are worse ways to spend two hours than with Matchstick Men, or any of its second-class cohorts, for that matter, but you're better off just seeing the originals instead.
I had long suspected that Napoleon Dynamite was a "20-something-former-nerd guy" movie long before I saw it; little did I know that it's also a shitty movie. Yes, this does throw into question the taste of its legions of devoted fans, so let me be the first to say it: If you loved this movie, your taste sucks. Its smug pastiche of '80s nostalgia and its now-ubiquitous "Vote for Pedro" slogan are pathetically obvious examples of hipster-huckstering aimed at the wannabe-cool, Urban-Outfitters-clad, Death Cab for Cutie-loving demographic. The film's only faintly credible innovation is probably not even purposeful - it inverts the classic little-guy-overcomes-odds-and-wins trajectory by choosing a spiteful, stupid, high-school loser as its hero. But at its core, it offers little more than a poor man's take on Wes Anderson-meets-Todd Solondz that shamelessly attempts to shoulder its way into the annals of nerd films while lacking all the subtlety and heart that fuel the genre. Fundamentally, the nerds we love in film don't deserve their lots in life - that's why they're unfailingly precocious and dryly witty in the face of idiotic peers, broken homes, and mid-teen crises. Napoleon (Jon Heder), on the other hand, draws laughs only because he comes so goddamn close to certifiable retardedness. With his perpetually half-open mouth, knuckle-dragging slouch, and inexplicably nasty temper, he is one of the most loathsome characters to be anointed the "hero" of any film, and I say this knowing that films like Patch Adams (1998) and I Am Sam (2001) exist. The only reason I made it through to the end was to say definitively that I hated every minute of it. (Yep, hated it, just in case you missed that.)
The Triplets of Belleville
Nicholas Cage and Alison Lohman in Matchstick Men
Jon Heder in Napoleon Dynamite
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