(diaryland) May 25, 2001 - 6:38 p.m.

The Man Who Cried

Yesterday, I went to see the above movie. As Michele pointed out before it started, there were stacks of chicks in the audience. This should have raised immediate alarm bells, but it didn�t.

Well, first of all, there were two men who cried in this movie. And neither of them cried very much at all.

I generally like Sally Potter. She is an awesome director. She directed Orlando a few years back and I laughed my arse off about as much as I did when I read the book. She got all the silliness and the self-effacing melodrama quite right and it was fun. But The Man Who Cried wasn�t very fun at all. It was one of those grand chick-flicks with scenery and unbelievable hardship and all that sort of thing. While I really admired Sally Potter�s ability to stick all the bizarre bits together in Orlando just right, this film was kinda stilted and the separate episodes in the story just kept to themselves and didn�t feel like making friends with any of the other episodes. Christina Ricci is the main person in the story and while she looked very nice indeed and spoke with an admirable English accent, she was, well, boring. She never raised her voice, even when she was supposed to. She had to look kinda vague all the time. Unfortunately, she had to say some pretty daggy dialogue. She basically sounded as if she just wanted to get the accent right and forget anything extra. Johnny Depp was her love interest and seriously, I do not want to see a chick root a guy almost twenty years older than her, even if it is Johnny Depp. His entire function in the film was to look as pretty as possible which he did not do very well. He seriously looked like he needed something to do and was obviously bored out of his brain. He�s one of my favourite actors and does stupendously well in things like Ed Wood or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but here he was obviously told expressly not to act at all and just pose a little bit every now and then. There was no chemistry between the two lovebirds. I don�t know why people keep putting them in movies together.

On the other hand, Cate Blanchett was allowed to look very pretty and she was allowed to act. She acted a lot. I just knew she was the sort of person to be in a Sally Potter film, and she worked very well, even with a silly Russian accent. She kept making ridiculous faces which got the understated humour thing like in Orlando happening. John Tuturro was also allowed to act, and he was great too. I don�t know how he managed, but his evil Italian Opera Bastard character still managed to be a wee bit likeable. He�s a very versatile guy. He can be a bowling alley god, a loveable redneck, whatever. And he is different every time. So he�s just fine here. No challenges.

So the movie is about War and looking for your Dad and Very Big Things like that. There have been so many films made about Jewish people running away from the Nazis that there didn�t really need to be another mediocre one that says the same things � �It was very scary.� �There were some close scrapes.� �Someone I knew got killed.� Cabaret had some of the same things in it but it was much more cleverly done. Now that was a great movie. Schindler�s List et al have made the whole thing feel much more real. The Man Who Cried was quite simplistic in this area. It was Genocide Lite(TM). �Oh, no � the loveable old chick who was my only true friend has been taken away!� �Oh, dear - a Nazi killed some Gypsy kid!� You know how in Star Trek there�s always some disposable nameless crew member who gets killed by a poisonous space-happening about five minutes into the show? It was like that. So convenient. You didn�t see any blood. I don�t understand why I got to see a pointless moist sex scene but what appeared to be driving the story � the Christina Ricci character�s search for her lost Jewish identity � was so timidly and amateurishly handled. Oh, well. And of course she found her dad in the end. Tears all round. But, golly � I could do without the soft focus and the slow motion all over the film. Yuck.

But it was OK. I still like Sally Potter.

I really like sitars.