Bull's Eye

This was the summer when the movies were so bad, people were reduced to complaining about a Mel Gibson film they hadn't seen. Maybe his yet-to-be-released picture about Jesus would turn out to be awful--or maybe not--but at least it sounded as if it might be worth an opinion. How many seconds of conversation could you wring from the actually existing blockbusters? Much of what I saw in the multiplexes this summer I let pass unremarked in these pages, since (wrack my brains as I might) I could find nothing much to say about films such as The Hulk, except that it had very strangely transformed the Bad Dad into a burned-out Berkeley hippie, or Pirates of the Caribbean, except that Johnny Depp had given a very similar performance, in better company, in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Not that the summer was a complete loss for big studio movies. While Finding Nemo was busy making a bundle, it also upheld the honor of American commercial movie-making; and if you had a 4-year-old at home, it set loose many hours of talk, some of which might touch upon the movie itself. But what Finding Nemo did, it accomplished virtually single-finned. The summer's other wounded-animal epic, Seabiscuit, achieved a smidgen of critical honor but no great success. I ran across few people who were burning to discuss it; and there were none who cared to join me in pondering the unjustly maligned Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle. (Where, among the critics, was this film's Jacques Rivette, ready to declare that the proof of its director's genius lay simply and self-evidently in what you saw on the screen?)

So, with relief, I now mark the close of summer, and do so with news of two films from far outside the American commercial apparatus. They are the first features of young, talented filmmakers whose pictures are now opening in the United States after winning prizes at international festivals (where the young are marked as talented). The cheaper of the two movies (in all senses) and the better, Suddenly (Tan de Repente), comes from Argentina, where it was written and directed by Diego Lerman, based none too literally on the novel La Prueba by César Aira. The grander, more impressive-looking film, Carnage, comes officially from France but is also (by the wonders of co-production) from Spain and Belgium, where it was directed by Delphine Gleize, based on some odd ideas that were knocking around in her head.

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