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The Business of Strangers (2001)
Business, not personal
A number of other users have commented on the implausibility of Julie's being prepared to spend any time with Paula, still less to believe Paula's allegation against Nick, given that Paula has so quickly revealed herself to be untrustworthy. To take just the most obvious example, in the sauna Paula reveals that she has gone through Julie's medication and that this is something she always does. Clearly it's unthinkable that Julie could have any confidence in Paula's reliability after that. Julie's behaviour is odd, to say the least, and I'd like to suggest an explanation.
Julie is indulging a fantasy of loss of control, with Paula's assistance. If this sounds implausible, consider the following exchange. At a crucial point, Paula expresses surprise that Julie hides from the security guard: "I thought you wanted to get caught. You know--the excitement of being exposed and humiliated. Maybe a little rough stuff. I mean that's why we're here, isn't it?" Julie retorts that they're there because Paula is a profoundly disturbed young woman. Paula's reply is significant: "Oh, please. If you were a man you'd see a dominatrix twice a week. All CEOs have one. But we're women, so we don't do things like that. We express issues of doubt and control differently."
Julie certainly has "issues of doubt and control". When a board meeting is called without her knowledge, she assumes that it's because she's going to be fired. When instead she's promoted to CEO, the sense of anticlimax is palpable. She's going to celebrate, but how? Before the promotion, her job title was Vice-President but in fact she was just a highly effective but insecure salesperson. What's changed? Why, in these circumstances, would Julie wish to act out a fantasy of loss of control? I suggest that we often fantasize about what we fear most -- to reassure ourselves that we could cope with it if we had to.
(So-called SPOILERS from this point on. Don't read any more if you don't want to know what happens.) Because it is just a fantasy, Julie never actually loses control. That's why nothing very bad happens. Julie loses money that she can apparently afford, but she doesn't get caught, fired or arrested and in the end she knows that no permanent damage has been done to Nick. (Is Paula to be believed about the number of Valium she'd given Nick? Why on earth would she suddenly start telling the truth at that point?) Finally, she's not going to change her life. "Take this job away and I'm not sure what's left." It's the fact that Julie doesn't change that accounts for the dissatisfaction of a number of reviewers. The reviewer on film.guardian.co.uk, who reviewed this film in the same week as Baise Moi, described it as Baise Moi Lite, presumably because the antics that we watch have no real consequences. In that respect, this film reminded me a little of Fincher's The Game (1997). The status quo is left undisturbed. There's something a little smug about the ending.
I have to say, however, that this is a much better film than The Game. It's better because, while Nicholas Van Orton's power and wealth are beyond question, Julie's are relative and precarious. The status quo that is apparently restored (and that was never actually under threat) was a much less comfortable one to begin with. There is something at stake, though it isn't what you might have thought at first.
The people who've suggested that Paula acts as she does out of a desire for revenge are wide of the mark. She may be appalling and selfish, but she's not stupid. If she wanted to punish Julie, she could do a better job than this. When she threatens to start singing, Julie apparently calls her bluff. But there's no reason why Paula should have been bluffing. When she tells Julie that she has almost nothing to lose by being caught, the reasons she gives are valid. So why doesn't she sing? Because Julie is the boss -- or perhaps, the client -- and the boss gets to decide how far the game will go.
Consider the kind of person Paula is. She's young and pretty, she meets a business person in a hotel bar and almost the first thing that person does is buy her the most expensive drink available. Not long after, the business person gets her a room in the hotel. A little later, Paula says that she watches porn movies "all the time", adding "It's fascinating to see how men view sex." These two statements are not linked by a "because", but it might be implied. If it is, the suggestion is that Paula takes a professional interest in what turns men on. Paula takes "money jobs" because what she considers to be her real work, writing "non-fiction short stories" for small literary magazines, doesn't pay (I mean that literally). In the second-last scene, Julie lies on the bed, pretending to be asleep, and watches while Paula removes the money from her wallet. Clear now? Paula is, in effect, a part-time prostitute. Because women "express issues of doubt and control differently", there's no point in her trying to use handcuffs and a whip on Julie. She has to exercise her imagination a bit more but she's prepared to do that, for a price.
Watch Paula when Julie approaches her in the hotel bar. She's constantly sizing Julie up, trying to figure out whether she wants to do "business" and if so, how far she wants to go. That, I think, is the point of the exchange in the lift about the strap-on: Julie is making it clear that she's looking for a good time.
Starship Troopers (1997)
See it again
When I saw the posters and reviews for this film I thought I'd hate it. In fact, if it hadn't had Verhoeven's name on it, I'd never have watched it. As it is, having seen it three times or so on tv, I can safely say that it's easily my favourite among those of his films that I've seen (Robocop, Total Recall, Showgirls, most of Basic Instinct -- all on tv) and one of the few films made in the last fifteen years that I'd be happy to watch again and again.
It's been described as an antiwar film and as a satire on fascism. It seems to me that it's something much more specific: an examination of how wartime propaganda works, in the shape of a successful attempt to create a working piece of propaganda. It is propaganda, moreover, that advertises its deceptiveness but still gets us to watch.
Why, first of all, are people from Buenos Aires, with surnames like Rico, Flores and Ibanez being played by square-jawed, "perfect" Aryan types? Because all the Nazis who fled to South America after WWII have overrun the population? Or because we're being shown a highly idealized picture, calculated to make the protagonists' appeal as wide as possible. Pretty obviously the latter, I'd say. The obvious discrepancy between the actors and the characters is just one of many indications in the film that what we are watching is not trustworthy.
The way the enemy is presented is typical of propaganda, too. The bugs are stupid and vicious and attack out of sheer malignity. They have no intelligence and their behaviour is irrational. Then it becomes impossible any longer to hide the fact that the bugs are capable of laying effective traps, so the line changes: now most of them are stupid and vicious, but there are a few "brain" bugs, who are directing them and who are particularly dangerous.
Carl assures everybody that a captured "brain" bug feels fear. How does he know? Through telepathy, no less. In fact, everything we "know" about the enemy is filtered through Carl and people like him. Did the bugs really destroy Buenos Aires? How can we be sure?
However, in spite of all the warnings that we should doubt what we see, we can hardly avoid getting involved in the stories of the protagonists. Those stories are basic, almost archetypal and are calculated to engage our sympathy even while we know we're being manipulated. Propaganda needs to work even when it's obvious that it's propaganda.
Denise Richards may not be much of an actor (although she was perfectly adequate in Wild Things) but she's well cast here, as the bland, happy, smiling math genius and hotshot starship pilot. She's just about perfect, and that's exactly what the part requires.
Swordfish (2001)
Cheeky and funny first scene, the rest is nonsense
I like the first scene. Gabriel Shear (John Travolta) is sitting in a coffee shop, talking to two men about movies that feature hostage taking. He's talking in particular about Dog Day Afternoon, the best such film. Shear's big beef with films of this type is their lack of "realism". What if the hostage-taker had started killing hostages from the word go; how long would it have taken the authorities to concede his demands? Shear sounds like he is pitching a movie to two producers. This impression is reinforced by the fact that we know that Travolta has played Chilli Palmer in Get Shorty. Then the shot opens out. We start to see Gabriel Shear's idea of what a more "realistic" hostage movie would be like.
This scene is cheeky because what follows is in no sense more realistic than Dog Day Afternoon. In fact, it's pretty much exactly what you'd expect from an action movie produced by Joel Silver, more's the pity.
The protagonist, Stanley (Hugh Jackman), is supposed to be one of the two best crackers in the world. He's on parole and not allowed to touch a computer, but is induced to take part in Gabriel's plot because he needs money to fight for child custody. (His daughter's step-father is a producer of porn movies.) The film provides further, and redundant, proof that there's no way to make cracking (or hacking) visually exciting or dramatically interesting without resorting to gross misrepresentation.
In an interview on the DVD, the director, Dominic Sena, explains that the look they were going for for Travolta's character was "cool" and "European". The image of a fat man in a baseball cap talking about going for a cool, European look, brilliantly exemplifies the dishonesty and misguidedness of this film.
Gun Shy (2000)
Gender/genre confusion
In an interview on the DVD, Sandra Bullock describes this as "a chick-flick for guys". Since she was the film's producer, I'd say that was a reasonable guide to what the filmmakers were aiming at. Certainly, somebody's a bit uncertain as to the film's genre. My local Blockbuster had the DVD in the "Action" section but, while it has two set-piece shootouts, one near the beginning and one at the end, this is not a film that has much in common with Face/Off or Die Hard.
Charlie Mayo (Liam Neeson) is an undercover DEA agent whose bosses are very keen that he should single-handedly close down a Colombian drug cartel. However, Charlie has been betrayed and has narrowly escaped being killed, and as a result has lost his nerve. He starts to attend a group therapy session, where he meets a number of unhappy business types. What they've all got in common is fear. Charlie's fear is of dying in a hail of bullets, but he is sympathetic to the other members of the group, who mostly fear losing status.
There's a lot of bonding, revelation of true feelings and "surprising" reversals of expectation. Most of it's pretty unsubtle but strong performances from Neeson, Bullock and Oliver Platt help.
The best things about the film are plot-related. The Colombian cartel has billions of dollars that it needs to launder. Platt plays Fulvio, the terrifying but incompetent son-in-law of a Mafia don who is providing unspecified services to facilitate the laundering, and taking a substantial cut in return. A scene that I particularly like cuts between three different meetings, one between Charlie and his bosses, another between Platt's character and his don and the third between the Colombians. While Charlie vainly insists that the deal has to be abandoned because he can't hold it together, Fulvio reassures his father-in-law that, despite the problems, Charlie can hold the deal together. Unfortunately, the plot is apparently of secondary importance to the writer/director who provides a perfunctory and unsatisfactory resolution. One funny plot development near the end is completely wasted.
Suspect (1987)
Preposterous plot and mismatched actors
I'm surprised that the comments on this title are generally favourable. I went to see the film when it was originally on release, just because Liam Neeson is in it. I think it was his first Hollywood film, but he'd done some excellent TV work in the UK before that. Though his character is the suspect of the title, he has a disappointingly small role.
I found the film completely risible, for two reasons. First, there's Cher. I can't think of another actor who's so irritating to watch. She seems completely out of place beside the likes of Neeson and Dennis Quaid. Second, and more importantly, the plot is preposterous. Cher's character, a defence lawyer, cooperates with Quaid's, a juror, to investigate the case she's trying. Reputable lawyers do not communicate with individual jurors outside the courtroom. Ever. Even a disreputable lawyer would do so for one of only two reasons: bribery or intimidation. The courtroom unmasking of the real killer was way over the top and added to the impression that the whole affair was not to be taken seriously.
No Way Out (1987)
Yes, Costner did make a good film before Thirteen Days, and it wasn't Bull Durham
I've seen this about four times and it keeps getting better. It's based on the novel The Big Clock by Kenneth Fearing, which was previously filmed with Ray Milland. The plot premise, already present in Fearing's novel, is brilliant: a woman, the lover of a powerful man, has been killed. The powerful man appoints his own investigator to find the presumed killer (who has also been the woman's lover) before the police do. The catch is that the investigator is himself the man he is meant to be hunting. He has to stall the investigation without appearing to, while the evidence that implicates him is inexorably being piled up under his nose.
In this version, a few more complications are added to the basic situation. The powerful man is David Brice, the Secretary of Defence. Brice is determined to stop the development of an expensive new submarine, and as a result the CIA and an influential senator are looking for a way to destroy him. To explain the investigation, Brice pretends that the man they are looking for is Yuri, a legendary (or mythical) Soviet sleeper in Washington.
The rest of this comment contains what I refuse to call SPOILERS, because they're not intended to damage but if anything to enhance people's enjoyment of the film. However, they assume that you've already seen it.
When I first watched this film, I didn't realise to what extent Brice is a relatively good guy, and Farrell a villain. Brice doesn't intend to kill or hurt Susan, though of course he was wrong to hit her. In Cold War terms, he's a dove and Marshall and Duvall (who want the building of the submarine to go ahead) are hawks. By sending the computer printout to Marshall at the end, Farrell makes it more likely that the hawks will win.
That's not to say that Brice is perfect. He goes along with Pritchard's plan to murder "Yuri", but this happens while he is still in shock at Susan's death. Because we've been identifying with Farrell all along, we tend to resist seeing clearly the full extent of his treachery. At least, I did at first. So, repeated viewings of this film, at intervals of several years, have had the effect of the gradual resolution of a moral ambiguity.