Quills
Miss Congeniality
Deuce Bigelow, Male Gigolo
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Quills
Totty rating: 6 out of 10 (Joaquim Phoenix's bare chest under a cassock. Yum. Also quite a cute French bloke on a horse.)
Ach, it's so frustrating when a great idea gets messed up in its execution. And particularly frustrating when it's as near to real success as Quills. The basic premise is that the Marquis de Sade (Geoffrey Rush), near the end of his tempestuous career, has been sent to the insane asylum at Charenton, more as a way of keeping him out of circulation than anything else. He's still busy turning out screeds of his filthy and violent porn, which is being published to such success that, when it's brought to Napoleon's attention the Emperor decrees that he must be put to death.
Instead of this drastic solution, a psychological hatchetman is despatched -- a doctor (Michael Caine) who has had great success torturing recalcitrant patients into a state of zombiehood with a sort of Spanish Inquisition-style shock therapy. Caine finds a happy, hippie regime at Charenton, run by a young, sweet-natured Abbe' (Joaquim Phoenix) who is, however, unaware that de Sade is managing to smuggle his manuscripts out of the asylum for publication, with the help of Kate Winslet, a laundrymaid who Phoenix is teaching to read.
Naturally, Phoenix is also unaware that his protegee is busy using her new-found skill to read de Sade's porn to the rest of the workers at the asylum, who lap it up (as it were) with great excitement.
Potentially, then, a great set-up for a lot of drama, plus the discussion of Big Ideas. Among these:
- a writer's inability not to write: de Sade's is presented as a violently physical need which will send him mad if NOT met. The doctor and the priest's increasingly-frenzied attempts to stop him, and de Sade's ingenuity at finding new ways to write - with his blood and even his shit when his pens (quills, yup, there's the title) are taken from him, provide some of the best and most powerful scenes in the film;
- the naturalness of sex and the dangers of repression (poor Joaquim is of course mad about Kate, and vice-versa;
- what society defines as madness; they've bunged de Sade into an asylum with rapists and arsonists simply because they don't know what else to do with him;
- women's sexuality, presented as just as potentially dark and erotic as men's; de Sade's tales of gory sex are exciting and liberating to both Madeleine (Winslet) and Caine's innocent young convent-educated wife.
However, after having raised these questions, the film botches many of them. In showing de Sade's writings as liberating to women, why on earth did it choose to use only the examples of women being raped and tortured by men? Absolutely everyone gets shagged six ways in de Sade -- men, women, goats, you name it. It would have been much more believable to quote a range of his writing -- he was a real revolutionary sexually, not just the tired old purveyor of rape-the-virgins-and-the-prostitute stories that Quills focuses on to the exclusion of everything else.
It makes Caine too much of a one-dimensional baddie (he treats his wife appallingly in bed, as one would have predicted -- it would have been much, much more interesting to have made him more sophisticated sexually than that).
For plot reasons, it allows both Caine and Phoenix, both of whom are supposed to have at least some common sense, to ignore the presence of a really nasty piece of work in the asylum who ought to be under much closer supervision than he is. And in its ending it tries to tie up every single loose end into an over-neat knot, which not only makes the film at least twenty minutes too long, and implausible to boot, but messes around with history and imposes a horribly formulaic feel to a film whose beauty lies in its glorious unpredictability.
I won't give away crucial events in the film, many of which are genuinely surprising, but I will also say that it ends by betraying Madeleine's wonderful, free-spirited sexuality in a way that pissed me off tremendously.
Still, everyone involved in it is superb; it looks wonderful; and there are also a LOT of scenes of Joaquim Phoenix in a cassock in various states of undress which make it worthwhile viewing alone for anyone who likes that kind of thing. And who doesn't?
Miss Congeniality
Totty rating: 6 out of 10 if you like Benjamin Bratt. I don't much (no sexual charisma, or, as our grandmas would have put it, he has no IT) but he has a great bod and you do get to see him in a swimming costume and being beaten up repeatedly by Sandra, which is fun for all you pervo boys and girls out there.
Rather surprisingly, this is actually a really funny, cute film which doesn't lie back and rest on its one central premise - dowdy FBI agent Sandra going undercover as a Miss USA contestant -- but has really worked on its script to provide genuinely amusing comedy moments all the way through. A worthy recipient of your $9.50 or whatever our non-US-based readers are paying. I was expecting to be slightly offended by its celebration of socially sanctioned T&A, but Sandra's a smart girl -- she produced this -- and the film manages to avoid that almost completely.
Actually, it spoke to a view which my generation was still struggling with when I was in my teens and early twenties, the idea that in order to be taken seriously as a working woman you can't dress up like a girl, flirt, and have FUN. I notice that this is still prevalent among some younger puritans -- I got slagged off by a younger female crime writer the other day for "being sex-obsessed, wearing short skirts and flirting madly". I say let's have it all. Sandra's heroine learns that she can be a girl AND an FBI operative, and good on her.
There are enough jokes about bad eating habits and thin girls starving themselves (Sandra desperately hides two doughnuts in her bra when she's banned from eating anything but celery by Victor, the pageant coach hired by the FBI to whip her into shape) to counteract the parade of skinny chicks on pedestals. The only flaw is the total obviousness of the baddie -- but hell, this isn't an Agatha Christie adaptation. I saw this film by myself one evening to cheer me up after a really shitty day and by God, it worked. Embrace it with open arms and let it make you feel good. That's what it's there for.
Video Picks:
Deuce Bigelow, Male Gigolo
(Totty rating: 2 out of 10. One big Latin gigolo bloke with too much hair. Not much cop.)
If you haven't already gathered from the title that this is a very, very silly film, let me assure you that it is. Very, very funny too and a better date video than 17,000 meet-cute films with Ben Affleck and Sandra Bullock (DON'T rent Forces of Nature, it's atrocious and you don't even see Ben Affleck naked when he does his strip in the gay club. Not that I care much about seeing Ben Affleck naked, it's the principle of the thing that bothers me). It's not even that tasteless. It's just a dumb, silly film which everyone involved with obviously enjoyed making tremendously. And, if you accept the silliness, you'll enjoy it too.
Did I mention already that it's silly?