Salt

There's a fresh spy-fi franchise to welcome to the ranks of Bond and Bourne. Hotel-keeping's three golden rules may be "location, location, and location"; spy-fi-making's trio are more complex: plot, plot, plot. Without them, top-rated stars, directors and editors (and photogenic locations) are wasted. Salt made a good start with a screenplay that was almost too cleverly plotted.

It also had an ideal star lead in Angelina Jolie, seeming to revel in her best action-adventure role since Lara Croft. The director, Australian Phillip Noyce, had an ideal track record too (the Tom Clancy/Harrison Ford Jack Ryan thrillers) and he'd directed Jolie happily before (The Bone Collector). One film editor was a double Oscar nominee (Briton Stuart Baird) whose recent work included Casino Royale; the other skilled editor, John Gilroy, had earned high marks for Michael Clayton. The producers then signed up an Oscar-winning cinematographer Robert Elswit (There Will Be Blood) and commissioned original music from another veteran multi-award-winning talent, James Newton Howard. Another golden rule had been obeyed: splurge on top behind-the-scenes professionals.

Writer Kurt Wimmer's recent credits for original and adapted screenplays include Street Killers, Equilibrium and Law Abiding Citizen. In Salt, he amalgamated many spy-fi themes, doing so at a frantic pace that precludes audiences from having time to recognise plot devices from Missions Impossible, North Korean settings, and action-thrillers featuring murdered loves, moles, triple agents, high-speed auto chases, full-facial masks and vengeful secret agent societies. It was no surprise to learn that Salt was originally designed for Tom Cruise, and that yet another veteran talent, Brian Helgeland, was employed to adjust the screenplay for Jolie.

At the end of the movie, the extent of the movie's trickery becomes clear. Could one really have even half-believed that Jolie would be able single-handedly to out-trick and out-kick cohorts of FBI, CIA and modern KGB agents, set out to assassinate two presidents, withstand water-boarding, be a mistress of all martial arts and have a Russian father-figure, a spider-loving German husband and a cute dog? Yes, Salt is a successful live-action animated movie.

Ever-reliable supporting actors completed its winning package: Liev Schreiber as the Washington ally, and Nigerian-Briton Chiwetel Ejiofor as the secret agent primed to be Jolie's partner-in-justice in a well-deserved sequel.

Eat pray love

A Brad Pitt company co-produced Eat Pray Love, the adaptation of a chick-lit memoir that Julia Roberts identified as an ideal vehicle to drive. The book was written by Elizabeth Gilbert, an American freelance writer who obtained a publisher's advance large enough to finance a year's travel and research for Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia. That's the sort of market-savvy title that gets optioned by publishers, pushed on the Oprah show (twice) and turned into a chick flick.

Gilbert self-portrayed herself as a miserable travel-feature-writing wife who has an affair, gets divorced, and sets off to find her true inner self through flings with great foreign food (Italy = Eat), eastern spirituality (India = Pray) and swarthy men (Indonesia, specifically Bali, where she doesn't meet an Indonesian, but a more market-acceptable rich Brazilian = Love).

It is assumed that Gilbert knew exactly what her three chosen foreign lands represented: dream destinations for frustrated female readers of chick-lit. Conveniently for simple readers' memories, each chosen country begins with a capital I, and the resultant egocentric puff-pastry literary confection slid into the best-seller lists for more than three years, which it might not have done if she'd ventured on a diet-conscious cook's tour of Iceland, Iraq and Iran.

Commercial considerations have been a writing industry staple since long before Dickens mastered the craft. Gilbert's goulash of popular ingredients is akin to many other escapist fantasies, and its success ensured the attention of Julia Roberts. One might have expected Jennifer Aniston to be a prime casting option, but one thing (Mrs Brad Pitt) or another (box-office credibility) may have scotched that idea.

Julia Roberts is good at driving vehicles; although her acting machine has only a few gears (stare, frown and wistful smile) she uses them well to coast around any dramatic corners she meets in a screenplay. There are no corners in the shallow screenplay designed by writer-director Ryan Murphy, previously best known for his creation of TV's Nip/Tuck and Glee. Jennifer Salt, an older Hollywood hand, worked on Nip/Tuck and assisted Murphy in writing this feature film debut.

A small squadron of good actors waste their talents in support of Roberts: Billy Crudup (the husband who doesn't meet her needs), James Franco (the lover who doesn't ditto), Richard Jenkins (the father-figure pal in her Indian ashram) and Javier Bardem (the Brazilian romancer she beds in Bali). Actresses also appear here and there, and it's demographically convenient that Roberts' character has a black best friend (Viola Davis). When no one else needs to be on set, Roberts strides meaningfully or mournfully through pretty locations, whining to the audience. She is saved from being the most cringe-making person around by an ever-smirking dentally-challenged 9th-generation pseudo-Balinese fortune-teller whose tourist-English pop-philosophy would curdle coconuts and make Jackie Chan look and sound like Lord Olivier.

Elizabeth Gilbert is either a very shrewd writer or a tedious narcissist. Or, to be fair, both. In real life, she found a new life-partner and created another best-seller, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage. A cynic will assume the book's title came first.

Funny games (2)

Austrian writer-director Michael Haneke won the Best Foreign Film Golden Globe in 2010 for The White Ribbon. It was such a starkly menacing B&W depiction of pre-Nazi Germany that its failure to win that year's Oscar caused surprise. Maybe the following quotation [in Wikipedia] from Haneke's writings helps explain the deliberate rejection by so many Oscar voting members:

"My films are intended as polemical statements against the American 'barrel down' cinema and its dis-empowerment of the spectator. They are an appeal for a cinema of insistent questions instead of false (because too quick) answers, for clarifying distance in place of violating closeness, for provocation and dialogue instead of consumption and consensus." [From "Film as catharsis"]

Maybe Hollywood also never forgave him for his US$15-million 2007 English-language replica of his U$5-million 1997 German-language psycho-thriller, as Funny Games U.S. It doesn't so much empower its audiences as strip their souls naked, forcing them to see themselves as voyeurs and puppets. European film-makers often do that; Hollywood doesn't. It enjoys making Cape Fears, Saws, Hostels and Elm Streets galore, but they are not designed for audiences to look deep into mirrors of self-loathing. American movie-goers are trained to expect endings that are happy, virtuous, up-beat and escapist: Good triumphs and Evil is vanquished. Reality is different, and Funny Games rubs its audiences' noses in that brutal fact.

Naomi Watts executive-produced the remake, in which she stars as Ann, a rich housewife arriving for a summer vacation with her husband George (Tim Roth) and young son at their lakeside estate. Their neighbours are entertaining a pair of young men, one of whom walks over to borrow some eggs. When his pal enters the scene, he admires a golf club, and uses it to slaughter the family dog (off-screen) and break one of George's legs. The family will die in a time-limited game, the polite young men announce. Lacking any background music and with no sudden nasty shocks, the expected tension and horror do not materialise, and Haneke soon explains why not.

One of the young men makes occasional to-camera comments, preparing his audience for one of the nastiest directorial tricks; it slaps Hollywood conventions in the face. Does the audience expect a "plot development"?, one of the killers asks ironically.

The only visible difference between the two films is the decision to dress both the white-gloved young men (Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet) in white tennis shorts in the US version; in the original one of them wore black shorts. The four lead actors in the US production are not as effective as the German-speaking cast, and the whole faithful re-make (including set design details) is impossible to justify.

Watts (Welsh-Australian) and Roth (Brit) lack the somewhat patrician air of their German counterparts, and Pitt (The Dreamers) doesn't display the menacing maturity of the original. He and Corbet are barely credible as fresh-faced psychopaths, but they (and Haneke's dialogue) do manage to side-step an audience's inevitable assumption of homo-eroticism or incestuous brotherhood. They also, maybe coincidentally, remind an audience of the deadpan faces of the repressed children in The White Ribbon.

Haneke has created two movies out of a slim plotline that's only worth a 30-minute short or staged play. He spun out his material with long static shots that heightened neither cinematic tension nor dramatic intensity. The opening's sunlit aerial shots hold great promise of a nail-biting psychological horror show, but one of Haneke's characterless killers deliberately sneers at an audience which expects promises to be kept, even if they're false.