Film

The panel discussed the years films.

(Edited highlights of the panel's review taken from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight Review.)

BONNIE GREER:
The biggest noise was going to be the Tarantino, because he hadn't made a film in years and years and years. He was bragging about it saying it was great. Then they went to China, then they cut it in two, all this mess. It's a masterpiece. I am saying this not as a Tarantino fan, I'm not really into Tarantino but what I loved about this film was the kind of conceit. The conceit is that you get women, Lucy Liu, Uma Thurman doing Clint Eastwood and Lee van Cliff in a Fistful of Dollars. To put that in that kind of reference, in that very masculine world, send them on a naked revenge drama. Every frame is beautiful.

WARK:
It was like a giant video game.

GERMAINE GREER:
Except that, who likes Lara Croft? It's boys, not girls. And the whole point about these women was that they were castrating. What was it they were doing? They were chopping things off and every time they chopped things off blood flowed in gallons. It was very stylised, very oriental in that way, but I thought in the end utterly threadbare. I was bored to tears really.

MORLEY:
The fourth film by Tarantino is the smartest, stupidest film you are ever going to see. Basically he's a fanzine nerd that has 14 million dollars to make an edition of a 60s Ironside. It's filled with that kind of cliche. He keeps telling us, "Isn't this bit great and isn't this bit great," and it piles up and it piles up

WARK:
Is an event like a Tarantino film, in itself, something to mark?

PAULIN:
I liked the last one. I have forgotten what was its title?

EVERYONE:
Jackie Brown.

PAULIN:
I liked that. It was a very interesting film. This one, I thought, no, while American soldiers are shivering in Iraq and trembling, here is America as the new samurais, ruling everything. The fetishisation of the weaponry, of the swords and the terrible violence in it. Then I thought, in a way, this is a film which is saying Hillary Clinton should run for the White House.

WARK:
In a yellow suit!

PAULIN:
Interesting! Up to a point.

WARK:
I want to pick up on the writing and turn to you, Paul. There is a complete absence of writing in the film you particularly liked, Adaptation.

MORLEY:
Adaptation is a piece of great writing, for film. I have been missing that in a lot of Hollywood movies, where the writer is absent, replaced. In a way even Tarantino, to a certain extent. It's a series of set pieces, it's a series of things which are becoming much more visual, a lot of things to look at, great rides, but the writing is gone. Adaptation is a wonderful example of writing a film. And the whole point is that Charlie Kaufman, has been given this job, which is true in real life, to adapt a Susan Orlean's book about looking for orchids in the deep American South. And in Being John Malcovich, he's a slightly crazed lunatic. It's sort of Terry Gilliam meets Salvador Dali. And he panics about this and the whole film becomes his panic about how to adapt this movie that isn't really his cup of tea.

BONNIE GREER:
I think he is the greatest screen writer in the world at this moment in time, consistently, but the film sort of disappears up itself at the end. There are moments in it where it's stunning, but then it just sort of vanishes.

MORLEY:
But the great thing about that is he puts his twin brother in there, Donald Kaufman, Nicholas Cage plays both roles. Charlie Kaufman panics. Donald Kaufman wants to write it in the classic way of writing a big blockbuster. And it disappears and what I liked about the fact that it disappears, up the clichés, is that the cliches may well be that he was planning the clichés, I even enjoyed it that far.

WARK:
One of the things that was so good this year was to see a transformation and the transformation was 8Mile, and it was Eminem coming from a homeboy to this Hollywood star. And he played that surprisingly well.

PAULIN:
Yes, I thought it was a terrific film. It seems like a long time ago. It was at the beginning of the year but it was very, very powerful, continuously interesting in what it did with white identity and taking on the whole working-class experience. The really poor white experience in the States was marvellous. A great film.

BONNIE GREER:
But he was like a zombie through the whole thing. If you have Curtis Hanson directing you, you are going to be able to do a great film. I have a problem with Eminem, because again it's the notion of he is the white guy and he's going to be the biggest, baddest rapper and all of these people are supposed to look at him at the end

MORLEY:
It's like an Elvis movie.

GERMAINE GREER:
But it did create this amazing world of oppressed people who have this amazing creativity and the white boy with his big white ass is trying to get into this world which is alive compared to the moribund world that he comes from of trailer trash. The usual objection is made, "Eminem wasn't really trailer trash," but the truth of the matter is that he is alive to the extraordinary potential and the extraordinary richness of this ignored environment. Practically every American film we see tells us about the consumerist lifestyle. It doesn't matter if they are supposed to be poor, or black families living God knows where. They have all the consumer durables, all the cars in the drive. We suddenly go to rock bottom where all the people have is their wits.

BONNIE GREER:
But the whole film is like Rocky 2003, basically.

WARK:
Tom, I know you want to champion Mystic River this year?

PAULIN:
I thought Mystic River was a great tragic movie. Clint Eastwood has mellowed. It was so powerful. You were just gripped by this awful anxiety and grief throughout. It was a brilliant film.