In Quiz Show, the high-minded university teacher Mark Van Doren, played by Paul Scofield, dismisses cheating on a TV quiz show by saying that 'it's like plagiarising a comic strip'. The line is presumably intended to show how simple and naive people were back in the 1950s.
For as every child of our time knows, what could be more damnable, and actionable, than plagiarising a comic strip? Comic-strip authors are now cult figures like the superheroes they create, and Jack Lee, only begetter of Spiderman and the Hulk, was one of the chief speakers last week at a rally honouring President Clinton.
Bryan Singer's hi-tech SF fantasy, X-Men , is inspired by the legendary comic-book characters Jack Lee came up with in 1963 who, at the time, were a liberal challenge to various kinds of racial, social and political prejudices of the day. Lee proposed the existence in our midst of a species of mutants with super powers who are perceived by ordinary humans as a threat to society.
These mutants are divided into two rival camps that corresponded in the 1960s to the followers of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. The calm, benevolent Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart) attempts to shape his mutants to use their gifts on behalf of mankind and to work for assimilation or at least peaceful co-existence.
His deadly enemy and former friend, the hot-headed Magneto (Ian McKellen), fed up with compromise, is in favour of a pre-emptive strike against a hostile, inferior human race. He kidnaps a McCarthy-like US senator (Bruce Davison), who seeks to register and sequester mutants, and plans to wipe out a summit conference of world leaders convened to consider the mutant problem.
Like Tim Burton's two Batman films, The X-Men is a dark work with an emphasis on pain and suffering that is more masochistic than sadistic. Magneto and the wheelchair-borne Xavier go through self-inflicted agony in the pursuit of their causes and there are constant mutilations and woundings. The special effects are impressive, and ironic use is made of Ellis Island (setting for the world summit) and the Statue of Liberty (where Magneto establishes his headquarters).
But while Stewart and McKellen lend gravitas to the proceedings, The X-Men lacks the humour that made the similar, but more ambiguous, Men in Black such a delight.
Tolstoy was probably right in saying that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. But in the movies, dysfunctional families the world over act much like each other. Which is to say when gathered for weddings, birthdays and funerals they fight, go in for figurative and literal blood-letting, drag skeletons from cupboards, get maudlin drunk and try to put tiny plasters on the old wounds they've opened up.
Patrice Chéreau's Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train is a superior example of the horrific family reunion picture, in this case for the funeral of the 70-year-old minor painter, Jean-Baptiste Emmerich (a silent Jean-Louis Trintignant), who insists that his body be taken from Paris and buried in the world's largest cemetery in his native Limoges.
The film's first act takes place on the train where the friends, relatives and hangers-on of the exploitative, bi-sexual artist bicker and backbite as they recall their association with the deceased.
Meanwhile, the body is being transported south in the back of a car driven by an Algerian male nurse who had been his lover. 'Is it legal to carry a coffin in a private vehicle?' someone asks.
At Limoges, the painter's long-estranged twin brother (a more vocal Trintignant) is there to put everyone at ill-ease, and in the absence of a priest at the graveside, an elderly intellectual reads a poem by Stevie Smith and the dead man's embittered nephew (Charles Berling) makes a speech about how much they'd all been hated by the man they've gathered to bury.
More of the same ensues in Act Three, the wake in the family mansion, and because it's so wild, the effect is exhilarating rather than depressing. The actors confidently inhabit their characters and the picture looks good and has a stunning final helicopter shot of Limoges and the necropolis from the air, accompanied by the adagio from Mahler's Tenth Symphony. Generally, however, there's far too much music on a soundtrack that includes songs by Charles Aznavour, Björk, James Brown, Nina Simone and the Doors.
Me Myself I is a lightweight Australian comedy in the style of Peggy Sue Got Married and Closing Doors , starring Rachel Griffiths as a single career woman in her thirties.
While pondering her fate, Griffiths suddenly meets in some kind of parallel universe the version of her younger self who married her university sweetheart and settled down as housewife and mother.
The doppelgänger leaves her to cope with this new world in a Sydney suburb and the jokes are none too funny, especially those about potty training, helping a 10-year-old to fit her first tampon, and learning how to insert a diaphragm when you've become used to using condoms.
The charming Griffiths, who's like a restless Australian version of Juliette Binoche, almost makes it bearable.
Himalaya , the first feature film by Eric Valli, a French documentarist resident in Nepal, is a slow, ravishingly beautiful picture. A sort of Asian western, it's about the rivalry during a long, arduous journey over the Nepalese mountains between a village elder and a young drover with aspirations to become chieftain of the community.
This is in effect Red River with yaks instead of steers and there's even a sensible woman to mediate between the men, the role Joanne Dru has in reconciling John Wayne and Montgomery Clift in Hawks's film.
The heroes of Robert Jan Westdijk's Siberia , a flashy Dutch comedy, are two nasty young layabouts who exploit foreign female backpackers in Amsterdam, sleeping with them, stealing their money and ripping the identity page from their passports to keep as souvenirs. Neither gets his just deserts though a Russian girl rumbles their scheme.
I left this nasty picture reflecting that as students of law and medicine study legal and medical ethics, similar courses should be made obligatory in film schools.
Ring , one of the most popular Japanese pictures of recent years, is a mildly intriguing horror picture in which a Tokyo TV reporter investigates an urban legend about a strange video cassette that leads anyone seeing it to die within a week.
The story turns out to be true, and risking their lives, she and her ex-husband follow clues that lead to an offshore island and a witch's curse. Ring brings to mind the first hour of Lost Highway but lacks the haunting power of David Lynch's film.
