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Wednesday, 17 March 2010 |
Paul Greengrass tries his level best to direct the hell out of - and thus hopefully compensate for the deficiencies of - Brian Helgeland's script, an in-name-only adaptation of Rajiv Chandrasekaran's non-fiction bestseller Imperial Life in the Emerald City:
This book tells the bureaucratic story of Iraq's Year 1, the year after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, when the United States was the legal occupying power and responsible for the country's administration.
The primary mechanism for that work was the Coalition Provisional Authority, headquartered in the Green Zone, a blast-barrier-encased compound created around Hussein's Baghdad palace, on the west bank of the Tigris. Chandrasekaran, The Washington Post's Baghdad bureau chief during this period, catalogs a lethal combination of official arrogance and ineptitude behind those walls that doomed Iraq to its bloody present every bit as much as insufficient military manpower did.
{Michael Goldfarb, 2006 New York Times review}
Promising material - but what we end up with is an old-fashioned star-vehicle for Matt Damon as (fictional) Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller, a straight-arrow rebel-in-khaki crusader-for-good who quickly realises that something is wrong with the WMD 'Intel' and determines to do something about it. This brings him into contact with various two-dimensional "characters" on either side of the goodie/baddie divide, interspersed with action-heavy sequences in various hazardous corners of the Iraqi capital.
These scenes are hyper-kinetic and shot with wobbly hand-held cameras, with a chargingly urgent score that at times sounds like off-cuts from Michael Mann's Heat. Indeed, the whole mood, aesthetic and approach of Green Zone now feels rather desperately over-familiar (Rendition, The Kingdom, Body of Lies, The Hurt Locker, etc etc). And one senses that Greengrass - whose films are generally only as good as their screenplays allow - has exhausted his particular directorial box of tricks. From Bloody Sunday to Bourne Supremacy to United 93 represented a steep upward ascent; from United 93 to Bourne Ultimatum to this represents a similarly sharp downward decline.
Green Zone is never exactly dull, and there's one brief spell of genuine quality thanks to a fleeting cameo from real-life Iraq veteran - now Texas politician - Allen Vaught that briefly recalls Ben Sliney's as-himself performance in United 93. But for the most part there's a general impression of capable professionals dutifully but pointlessly going through the motions, rather like Miller's crew as they conduct their fruitless searches for WMD.
Neil Young
17th March, 2010
¦ Reel cinema, Newark, UK, 16.Mar.10 (£5.80) ¦
* US/UK/France/Spain; copyright-dated 2009.
I thought it was there but it just brought me down
Ripped the magazine open, it brought me round
Green grass was clear in the boundary zone |
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Sunday, 07 March 2010 |
Exit Through the Gift Shop is ostensibly a documentary about a Los Angeles-based Frenchman named Thierry Guetta, who went from obsessively filming the nocturnal exploits of street-art/graffiti notables such as Shepard Fairey to becoming an overnight-sensation modern artist himself, despite having little or no talent himself to speak of.
But after a little while we wonder whether the whole thing is in fact some kind of elaborate put-on, and that the Guetta is as "real" as his artistic alter-ego 'Mr Brain Wash.' In any case, do we really need another exposé of the modern art scene, analysing the hems and stitches of the latest emperor's new clothes?
Monsieur l'empereur himself is a somewhat annoying presence, burbling away via interview clips presented in boilerplate talking-head style - indeed, complete with arch voiceover from Rhys Ifans, Exit Through the Gift Shop, while amusing and occasionally stimulating in its multi-layered ideas and self-referentialism, is surprisingly conventional in its approach to supposedly confrontational and transgressive material. Or is that part of the point/gag/joke, to which only the filmmakers themselves are privy?
The most "original" element is the fact that (in accordance with those original Dogme 95 tenets laid down by Lars Von Trier and co) no director is listed, even though an opening credit announces this to be 'A Banksy Film', in reference to the enigmatic Bristolian graffiti/street-artist who supposedly pops up (with face obscured and voice vocoded) as one of Guetta's collaborators/influences. But if this really is Banksy's directorial debut, it's so far away from the cutting-edge smartness of his usual output that he really should stick to the day-job (or rather night-job) from now on.
Neil Young
7th March, 2010
¦ The Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle, UK, 7.Mar.10 (£7.00) ¦
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