Weekly Movie Update

Okay - here we are. Another week, another - only 3 films? Well - good ones, at least. Still working on a full 2046 review - it's coming. In the meanwhile - this isn't a bad selection.

Batman Begins - ** - better late than never, I guess... a competent, entertaining, well made film, another Batman origin story. Nothing special though, the Tim Burton Batmans and the TV series movie are still the gold standards.

The World - **** - Jia Zhang Ke is one of the best directors in the world. He has been charting China's evolution into the 21st century (and - in Platform - through the 80s as well), from below - petty crooks, disaffected youth, marginal workers - paying special attention to marginal entertainers. That’s what we have here - The World is set in an amusement park in Beijing, where we follow a handful of its workers - a dancer, a security guard, their friends - as they live. People come and go, work, party, steal, suffer, die. Spending their time in a place full of tiny replicas of the rest of the world - the Eiffel Tower, the World Trade Center (China's version are still standing, someone notes), the Taj Mahal - they are reminded daily who they are, what they have done. They have not traveled, most of them have no hope whatsoever of leaving the country - many of them haven't traveled around China - probably taking a train or bus straight from their home town in the sticks to Beijing, sleeping in basements and dangerous apartments while they work at dangerous jobs. Some turn to theft - some marry - some slip into prostitution - some leave the country (the ones with some money) - some die. Jia shows it all with his mostly impassive camera - long takes, complex articulated spaces, and the ubiquity of the park, with its miniature version of the world - interrupting this impassivity from tie to time with titles, and animations, usually inspired by cel phone text messages. It's another impressive entry in on of the strongest bodies of work of the past decade.

The 40 Year Old Virgin - *** - this is, actually, a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, it is extremely funny, very likable and generous to its characters, and full of nice little details that give it bite and depth; on the other hand, it stretches plausibility even by the standards of romantic comedies - and most seriously - it's the latest in the line of romantic comedies that are completely one sided - the man's side. It almost gets away with this by making Catherine Keener the female lead - but her presence just emphasizes the fact that she has very little to do. She's an object - she's never a subject. Now - in a movie like Broken Flowers or 2046, that might be understandable, if they did that. If they were about the man - and the women were seen only through his perspective. Those are films about the perceptions of the man. They are films, in a lot of ways, about our distance from other people - a distance the films rightfully illustrate in their style and POV. (Or - they could; in fact, 2046, especially, does a good deal more. But that's its own post, which is coming sooner or later.) But The 40 Year Old Virgin is a romantic comedy - and no, I'm not giving it a pass because it's "not trying to be a romantic comedy" - no: it is a romantic comedy. And it is a romantic comedy where only one side of the couple is given anything special to do.

There are no excuses. Films like this have an obligation to make the women in them have something at stake, as well as the men. That is the point of a romantic comedy - to present the lovers, apart at first, but overcoming obstacles to form a couple. And it is crucial, for a romantic comedy to work, that both lovers be made subjects - that both sides be given an inner life, reasons for the liaison, etc. Keener's character here, wonderful as Keener is, and interesting as her character seems to be, is not, ever, a subject. She is an object... I must also protest that she is never given the chance to be ridiculous. Everyone else is ridiculous: Jane Lynch gets to be ridiculous. Why not Keener? Damned shame....

This film is the latest in a moderately scary trend - The Wedding Crashers, Sideways - romantic comedies told almost completely from the male point of view, with flawed, if amusing, men, and women who - are presented as a kind of abstract grounding agent. It's probably not a new trend: it's probably dominant since the 40s. But these films make it noticeable, through their first rate revival of the form. But a revival that maintains, from 80s teen comedies and the like, the purely male-centered attitude. Of the three (Virgin, Crashers and Sideways), it is interesting that the one doing the best job of escaping this is Wedding Crashers - the one generally considered the least evolved. But the fact is - both the female leads in the film are given personalities - desires, wills of their own. They may be secondary, but they are independent. (Another recent comedy that does this well is Anchorman - Christina Applegate is both the sensible, grounding character - and a willful, obsessive, comic character herself - with a life, desires, will, etc.) Sideways flirts with this, but isn't as convincing as it thinks - and Virgin makes no effort. To its shame, and thus costing what otherwise might have been the best Hollywood film of the year.