104 in 2009 Week 31: Contempt, Tank Girl, and Enemy Mine

Here's your Tank Girl review, Nate.

Le Mepris (Contempt)
Jean-Luc Godard, 1963

Paul, A playwrite (Michel Piccoli) is hired by a crass American producer (Jack Palance) to rewrite the screenplay for his production of “The Odyssey,” directed by Fritz Lang (Fritz Lang). Circumstances surrounding this agreement begin to tear Paul and his wife (Brigitte Bardot) apart. Also, Bardot lies around with her naked butt sticking up in the air a lot. A lot.

Contempt was Godard’s first and, really, only attempt at a big-budget (almost a million dollars!), mainstream film. The result, much to the producers’ chagrin, was only one of those two things. Fortunately, it’s also a very good movie. You may remember me gushing over the look of Made in USA last week – well, I could say basically the same things again here (perhaps slightly muted, though). Jack Palance steals most of his scenes as Jerry Prokosch, the spectacularly oily, jackass producer. I almost hate to say this about such a despicable character, but his scenes are all a delight to watch.

Contempt isn’t about Prokosch, however – it’s about Paul and Camille. Their material isn’t nearly as funny as Palance’s, but it’s much more dramatically interesting. The centerpiece of the movie is a long argument between the two, which lasts for nearly a half hour. Amazingly, it doesn’t feel nearly that long – it’s riveting and horribly painful, a masterpiece of performance and staging. Honestly, I’ve never seen the like. After this, the movie plays like a horrible, wonderful slow-motion train wreck that you can’t look away from, and ultimately leads to a climax that is simultaneously irritatingly frustrating and deeply satisfying.

So why only an 8.5? It’s been said that Paul’s troubles with Prokosch were a mirror of Godard’s troubles with the producers of Contempt, and that several elements of the movie (like the copious butt shots from Bardot) were a direct, angry response to them. There’s a slight awkwardness to the movie, a refusal of certain elements to mesh properly, that I think stems from this. The ingredients are all there, but the magic never quite happened – at least, not completely.

8.5/10

Tank Girl
Rachel Talalay, 1995

In a drought-ravaged future, a scavenger named Rebecca (Lori Petty) survives the murder of her adopted family, befriends a captured mechanic (Naomi Watts. . . yes, that Naomi Watts), declares war on The Man, steals a tank, and boom punk rock STONER KANGAROOS! Cole Porter GAAAH BOOM AAAAAAARGH Blood spurt DECAPITATED kablam KABLAM ‘Splode!!!!!!!!!!

What can I say about Tank Girl? It’s terrible in nearly every measurable regard, but there’s a really likable energy and madness to it. Sadly, this is undercut by the decision to use lots of bits of the Tank Girl comic book, from which the movie is adapted, as transitions. This does nothing but demonstrate that whatever charms the movie has, the comic had to an infinitely greater degree. Also, it’s way, way too long – or at least, it feels like it. It’s only an hour and forty-four minutes (still too long), but I would have pegged it at over two.

Really, though, the synopsis pretty much says it all.

4/10

Enemy Mine
Wolfgang Peterson, 1985

A human (Dennis Quaid) and a Drac (Louis Gossett, Jr) shoot each other down over an uncharted planet. Trapped alone, with no chance for rescue, they have no choice but to become friends in order to survive.

Enemy Mine is a decidedly mediocre movie that just kind of plods along, doing its thing, without ever getting particularly bad (until the end) or actually becoming very good. Louis Gossett Jr. does do a pretty good job buried under layers of fairly nice prosthetics, and manages to eke out some surprisingly touching moments. Unfortunately, he disappears around the halfway point of the movie. The sandpit monster is also kind of neat, and even a little scary, but only figures in three scenes.

Up until Gossett Jr. dies, I was willing to say I liked this a little bit – but once he’s gone, the movie loses its biggest asset, and not long after that, a bunch of slave-driving human miners are introduced into the plot in order to allow for more heroics and action. That’s where it really falls apart. The whole thing ends with an over-dramatic omniscient voiceover, which was a particularly odd choice – Dennis Quaid, in character, narrated most of the movie. Ideally, he could have narrated those final scenes (actually, ideally, there would have been no narration and we could have seen the events play out for ourselves. But you know what I mean). Still, it did have its moments.

4/10

Progress: 71 (Par +9)