Cinematic Excursions
You wait ages to see a film with Anna Paquin in, and two come along at once. Actually it was a coincidence that she was in the last two films I’ve seen: 25th Hour and X2.
25th Hour is the first Spike Lee film I’ve ever seen. I was impressed, as he refuses to let his films be formulaic jelly-mould cash cows. Edward Norton, as always, gives a fantastic performance — this time as a drug dealer who has one more day of freedom before being jailed for seven years.
His character, though undoubtedly a person who profits from others’ misery, comes across as a generally nice bloke, something that John (Hen Night Lorna’s fiancé and my cinema companion for the evening) found to be a little unbelievable. A reviewer at IMDB.com thought the character, Monty, was rather like Norton’s character in Fight Club. I don’t know, as I haven’t seen it. I thought it was like his character post-imprisonment in American History X, not the soulless, apparently evil pusher of most people’s imaginings.
Last night we saw X2, which sounds like a bus route, but is in fact a very good film. There are so many sequels out at the moment or coming soon, and they usually fail to live up to the first film, but X2 succeeds in continuing an impressive, action-packed storyline with a thinly-veiled message about xenophobia.
While in the first film the delineation between the good guy and the bad was quite clear, in X2 there are more shades of grey. Lacking this moral absolutism, and with the death of one of the main characters, the film is much darker than its predecessor, and there is more violence, more senseless-yet-sanitised killing. This doesn’t make it a bad film, however; the filmmakers wanted maximum reach, so the violence isn’t graphic. But by hiding the grim reality of what guns and bombs do to the human body, do we just produce society to think that there is no consequence to violence?
Anna Paquin: go see. Twice.