Snippets 01.05

This is the January edition in the Snippets series — a slightly briefer look at the films seen during the month. Each film included in an edition of Snippets is also listed in the alphabetical film index for ease of reference.

The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996)

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The script for The Long Kiss Goodnight is reputed to have cost director Renny Harlin some $4m dollars. Given that amount of money, Harlin was probably expecting one of two things: either the script would be the best he has ever seen or it would contain enough action to fill four movies. For anyone that confuses this offering with Kiss the Girls (confuses because both films involve Samuel L. Jackson), the reality of Harlin's expectation could be guessed at; for anyone that knows The Long Kiss Goodnight in its own right, they will already be painfully aware of its overabundant tendencies.

Geena Davis plays an amnesiac family woman who happens to have forgotten she was once a secret service assassin. After employing small time private detective Samuel L. Jackson to help fill in the missing pieces, Davis starts figuring things out for herself — not least of all because an ex-target has kidnapped her eight-year-old daughter. What follows is a violent pastiche whose explosive set-pieces have so little to do with one another that their stitching together causes heads to shake and eyes to blink disbelievingly. This wouldn't seem to matter if there was any point to it, but the point seems to be that there is no point. A sympathetic reading may suggest this symbolises the fragmentary nature of amnesia and its devastating effect on the individual and their family; a less gracious interpretation would look towards the script and ask whether the $4m investment was either wise, or indeed even worth it.

Bridget Jones 2: The Edge of Reason (2004)

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The original Bridget Jones's Diary, based on Helen Fielding's whackily accurate portrayal of a mid-30s spinster, achieved a surprising effect, in that it made both the men and women of the audience happy they had seen it. For the women, Renee Zelwegger's portrayal of Bridget personified everything they hoped the heroine of their book/bible would be like, this heroine in turn representing the challenges and difficulties they face in every day of their everyday lives. For the men, there was the reassuringly simple fact that women still wanted the attention of men, no matter how successful or otherwise they were.

This surprising effect was achieved in many different ways, though primarily through the excellence of the source material. The script was well written, the plot relatively simple, the direction unobtrusive and, mercifully, the advertising tie-ins kept to a minimum: here was a film that understood the modern woman and her supposedly reluctant cinema companion — her man.

The Edge of Reason, however, contains none of the endearing features of Bridget Jones's Diary and fundamentally dishonours the relationship between itself and its target audience. Due partly to the inferiority of the source material, namely Helen Fielding's sequel, The Edge of Reason overreaches itself by extending Bridget Jones's idiosyncrasies beyond any recognisable "everyday" qualities — thus breaking the link between female viewer and their heroine — and tries too hard to build on a sound foundation that needed little work to begin with.

A simple example will suffice. In Bridget Jones's Diary, the heroine slides down a fireman's pole and knocks over a camera at the bottom of her descent, showing her "enormous arse" to the television-watching nation. In The Edge of Reason, the heroine jumps from a plane in an extended sky-diving sequence that ends with her landing in a sty of pig shit, once again viewed by anyone watching television. Thus the manner and execution of Jones's humiliation is not only extended, but distorted beyond reasonable limits of style.

Stage Beauty (2004)

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Richard Eyre is perhaps better known for his theatre work, so it is no surprise that Stage Beuaty is set in the world of theatre, in this case whilst under the rule of Charles II during the Restoration circa 1660. Stage Beauty takes as its premise the admittance of women to the realm of stage acting, their presence thus removing the need for those men that specialise in playing female roles. It is, in turn, a literal romp concerned with the processes and personalities of the theatre as well as a meditation upon sexuality and what it is to be a sexual being.

Eyre's stage upbringing is apparent in his direction: though Stage Beauty could rightly be described as a success in terms of its performances and presentation, a poor middle section serves to remind the audience that the director's medium is not film. On stage, the physical engagement of the audience with the actors provides a performance with an intimacy that is relatively easy to keep up — the ebbs and flows of a play, therefore, do not necessarily contain the sort of rhythm a motion picture contains. Nor indeed do they have to. Whilst Stage Beauty introduces a fine cast and excellent plot in its first "act" and climaxes with a terrifically dramatic stage recreation in the finale, it wanders somewhat in between, seemingly unsure of what to do with the characters for the 30 minutes or so that comprise the middle "act". Where this wandering could be accommodated on stage, the lack of physical intimacy in a cinema means that the viewer's attention also wanders, and thus the middle "act" is lost.

The Bone Collector (1999)

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Given that Denzel Washington plays a paraplegic forensics expert confined to bed, it would be inappropriate to say that The Bone Collector is nothing other than a vehicle for the well-regarded actor to see if he can convincingly portray his character, Lincoln Rhyme, through face movements alone. It is undoubtedly a vehicle for Angelina Jolie, starring in one of her first main roles and thus heralding her seemingly distant arrival in Hollywood (ahead of 2001's Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (Simon West, 2001) but after Pushing Tin (Mike Newell, 1999) with her then husband Billy Bob Thornton). The result of these competing "egos" on screen is a reasonable offering that for much of the time grips the audience with suspense until the climactic and increasingly silly end.

With Jolie playing a rookie cop enlisted by Rhyme to act as his forensic eyes and ears at the scene of a series of horrific crimes committed by the same "perp", The Bone Collector requires of itself a third dimension that requires the audience to see crime scenes as if they weren't already immune to them. Such a dimension, as well as alleviating a fairly trivial plot, is achieved by all parties involved working to the edge of their craft: on-screen, Jolie pouts and punches her way through misogynistic colleagues questions whilst Washington, in his bed, holds centre stage with remarkably restrained ease. Off-screen, director Phillip Noyce keeps the suspense suitably animated whilst the crimes themselves are of a suitably gory — and more importantly believable — nature to maintain the interest of the audience the whole way through.

If this were the end, The Bone Collector could reasonably be considered above average (average, in this case, signified by Summer of Sam (Spike Jonze, also 1999)). Unfortunately, a desperate search by screenwriter Jeremy Iacone fails to find a justifiable motive for the killer who, with his arrival heralds trivial and pointless bloodshed, jeopardises and finally accounts for the skillfully amassed suspense. All of Noyce's hard work eventually crashes around Rhymes's bed in a bloody and unnecessary mess, leaving nothing but a wholly ridiculous conclusion and a feeling that the audience shouldn't have been half as worried as they would have been at various points in the middle act. A pity, really.