Boy, did I have a nice weekend: no new releases whatsoever. And this week's chart remains pretty much as it did last week, with the same movies in the top five spots. The very likeable Toy Story 2 needs no promotion from me, considering the gigantic advertising campaign Disney has mounted this month, the better to force it down the nation's collective throat.
The only new movies to appear this week were limited releases pushed out for one week to qualify for next spring's Oscars, and only playing in New York and Los Angeles, where the Academy voters reside. One of them, Neil Jordan's The End of the Affair, continues the decades-old saga of movie directors poleaxed and driven insane by their attempts to adapt the novels of Graham Greene.
Look back over the last half century and count the corpses of his books that litter the film encyclopedias. The Quiet American might as well have been retitled The Really Nice American, considering the scandalous liberties writer-director Joe Mankiewicz took with the novel (Greene was outraged). And what about The Honorary Consul? The Comedians? Loser Takes All? Travels with My Aunt? The Human Factor? Once was enough for me, thanks.
The Ministry of Fear, This Gun for Hire and John Ford's The Fugitive are interesting, but they've had all the Greeney goodness boiled out of them. And I've long since gone stale on all the more respectable, supposedly successful adaptations such as Brighton Rock, The Fallen Idol and even The Third Man.
The End of the Affair was also made once before, in 1954, starring Deborah Kerr and a catastrophically miscast Van Johnson as the bitter novelist Bendrix. Jordan has it wrong too, but bassackwards instead of ass-backwards. This time it's Bendrix's lover Sarah who's played by the American (Julianne Moore to Ralph Fiennes's Bendrix), which shows you just how successfully we've tamed the British cinema's irrational, self-destructive addiction to Hollywood stars over the last 45 years. No matter that Moore is just about the best American actress alive - the role needs the best British actress alive.
It's also a problem that one of the novel's pivotal moments may or may not be a religious miracle, and I haven't seen one of those performed convincingly in the cinema since Carl Dreyer's Ordet, made the year the first End of the Affair came out.
Still, Jordan's version will go down nicely among the kind of American urban liberals who make donations to public TV stations, read no books, drive Volvos, and still think the Democratic party is left-wing. These people eat up the kind of shit that blights the British cinema: timorous, period-based adaptations of worthy, canonical novels; films that portray Old Albion as a hell of white linen, hyphenated toffs and infant chimney sweeps. They trap defenceless, not very patriotic, exiled limeys like me in bars and excitedly tell me over their White Cab spritzers how much they loved Maurice or The Remains of the Day.
The nuance-free utterances of such amateur Anglophiles always provoke me into short-lived, Evelyn Waugh-style fits of xenophobic pique, which I must manfully suppress. One mention of, say, Ryan's Daughter, and I'm tempted to shove a tape of Performance or Scum right up their video slots and say, "Watch these. Then come back and tell us how fucking genteel we are."
Also debuting briefly for Oscar consideration this week were Jane Campion's Holy Smoke and Woody Allen's Sweet and Lowdown, neither of which I've seen yet. I'm hoping that Jane Campion has returned to form after The Portrait of a Lady, her airless excursion into the kind of heritage territory that prompted my intemperate outburst above. Reviews for Holy Smoke so far have been divided between excellent and terrible, and anything that polarises critics that much is fine with me.
Sweet and Lowdown, which only opened in New York, received the sort of ecstatic reviews that greeted Crimes and Misdemeanors almost a decade ago. Set in the 1930s New York jazz world, it has Sean Penn as an untutored musical genius who's a bastard the moment he lays his trumpet down, a blackhearted cousin to the fictionalised Bix Beiderbecke played by Kirk Douglas in Young Man with a Horn.
I hope it lives up to the reviews, because his last film, Celebrity, was mean-minded and actively misogynistic, particularly the scene in which Bebe Neuwirth teaches Judy Davis how to perform oral sex with a banana. Davis chokes. Cue Heimlich manoeuvre and humiliation. Ugh.
For me the best movie of the week, and perhaps even the year, is one that won't be released until December 25. I felt very naughty seeing it, as if I was unwrapping my gifts on the sly. But Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia is all I need for Christmas this year. You can just burn all my other presents right now.
The ensemble cast from Boogie Nights appears in Magnolia too: John C Reilly, Julianne Moore (this is where she thrives), Philips Baker Hall and Seymour Hoffman, and William H Macy. Like Boogie Nights set in LA's San Fernando Valley, it builds an Altman-esque mosaic of character, tile by tiny tile, until, gradually, a vibrant, coherent sense of community emerges between the many protagonists, few of whom meet each other till late in the film.
I think Anderson is as talented a manipulator of film form as Scorsese but, unlike Scorsese, the pyrotechnics serve his story and themes, not vice versa. Anderson's character-driven, actor-friendly side derives inspiration from Altman classics such as California Split, Nashville and, particularly, The Long Goodbye, but he loves his creations in a way the frequently embittered Altman never does.
Magnolia even features Altman's favourite poison dwarf Henry Gibson, who, as a country singer in Nashville, complacently crooned, "We must be doing something right to last 200 years." And whereas Altman's Short Cuts - another teeming, Breughelesque LA movie - ends with an earthquake, Magnolia ends with one of the 10 plagues of Egypt. I wouldn't dream of telling you which one - but it's hallucinatory, insane and sublime, just like the movie itself.
