Dirty Pretty Things

[zerocool41]

I just walked out 10 minutes ago...very good stuff...i was pumped reading eberts 3.5 star review, but then became disenchanted after hearing a few of you trash it as being average.  i thought it was very good, and that audrey was a main role even if not 'the main role'....that asian fella was good..i'd like to have him be the phillip baker hall of my movies..but maybe i'm handing out choice roles to quickly...anyway..3.5 stars is my review also..it was excellent..but not overly memorable...so there..

[MacGuffin]

For the most part of the movie I kept thinking, "What's the story here?" I felt the beginning took a long time setting up the characters and situations. But it I think it was saved by Chiwetel Ejiofor's performance. He was worth watching, and nicely supported by Sergi Lopez's portrayal of Senor Juan.

[Cecil]

meh.

"we are the people who drive your cabs, clean your rooms, and suck your cocks?"

"gobble gobble"

hmm. tough choice

[MacGuffin]

Countless films have shown London, from its seedy underbelly to the posh comforts of Buckingham Palace, but few have paused long enough to acknowledge the invisible culture that keeps the city running smoothly. They are the legions of illegal immigrants who work in every major metropolis, the people who, for lack of any alternative, are reduced to thanklessly carrying out the tasks no one else would consider.

"We are the people you do not see," announces one such man, a Nigerian doctor named Okwe who now slaves around-the-clock as a cab driver and hotel clerk, in the film Dirty Pretty Things. "We are the ones who drive your cars, clean your rooms and suck your..." Well, you get the picture. Okwe wants to blend in, to escape his past and start over in his new home, but all that changes when he discovers a human heart in one of the hotel lavatories.

Director Stephen Frears' latest rips back the wallpaper to reveal a world of secrets and deception. It's a provocative foundation for a thriller and a fitting follow-up from the director of My Beautiful Laundrette (Frears has also directed such Hollywood class studies as Dangerous Liaisons and Mary Reilly). Now, see five films that Frears admires, movies that have inspired him to tell the stories no one else would in a way that no one else can.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To Be or Not to Be
(1942; dir: Ernst Lubitsch, starring: Carole Lombard, Jack Benny)
The actors in Dirty Pretty Things are not the people you usually see in British films. I mean, Hugh Grant isn't in it. They're European actors, and that was a privilege, getting your hands on people you don't normally get to appear in British films. Zlatko Buric, the man who plays the doorman, is a Serbo-Croat actor. I showed him To Be or Not to Be, the great Lubitsch film, and said, "You remind me of a character out of this film." Nobody knows about that film anymore, although it's rather interesting really. It's a satire about Hitler and the invasion of Poland. I never saw Mel Brooks' [1983 remake of] To Be or Not to Be, but in the musical version of The Producers, you can see the links very clearly between Mel Brooks and Lubitsch. In particular, there's a song which is in the musical but not in the film called "Heil Myself." When the actor who is playing Hitler in To Be or Not to Be comes on stage, everyone says "Heil Hitler," and he says, "Heil me." Lubitsch made comedy out of dark subjects. The blacker the subject, the funnier you have to be, or the funnier you can be.

Chungking Express
(1994; dir: Wong Kar-Wai, starring: Takeshi Kaneshiro, Brigitte Lin)
I'm a great admirer of Wong-Kar Wai. I look at his films, and I don't know how they're made. I'm beginning to understand: They take a long time. It was only when I worked with somebody younger that I was able to learn how Wong-Kar Wai makes his films. I don't mind admitting the things I don't know. I was taught by cameramen. Cameramen played a big part in my life. I've worked with cinematographer Chris Menges for years [they first collaborated on Frears' 1971 feature debut, Gumshoe]. Had I known what I now know, I would have shot the film differently, perhaps more in the style of Wong Kar-Wai. I just admire him. He has a gift for observation, knowing what to look at and then how to pitch it. Anyone who can generate that sort of tension – and I don't mean tension in the sense of, "Oh, is he going to be killed?" but just tension in what you're going to see next -- you have to admire because, in a sense, that's all you're doing as a director. You make the film and only then do you find why you made it, what you were trying to work out.

The Hustler
(1961; dir: Robert Rossen, starring: Paul Newman, Jackie Gleason)
I love The Hustler, The Sting, con-man films. I've really survived on my wits, so I suppose films about people who survive on their wits appeal to me. Although I've never particularly thought about it, I can see that there would be a connection to movies like that. If you make films that don't follow the mainstream, you have to be quick on your feet. The Hustler was about a guy who was quick on his feet who eventually got caught. Fast Eddie Felsen sets himself up as a sort of entrepreneur, trading in his own talents until he runs into trouble. I'm simply saying that my life has been quite similar, the desire for independence. I don't see myself as a hustler, but I can see that I've lived life on my toes. The Paul Newman character doesn't become a doctor or follow some sort of established path. He actually sets himself up as a kind of maverick.

Stagecoach
(1939; dir: John Ford, starring: Claire Trevor, John Wayne)
Maybe that's why I like westerns. They're full of maverick characters, sheriffs who go in to clean up towns or whatever it is. I was very influenced by John Ford, but I didn't see his films until later. They were films I was taught about and came to love (I was brought up on British war films, with submarines limping home and all that). If I had mentors, those mentors would have been directors Lindsay Anderson and Karel Reisz, and they were both great admirers of Ford's films. Stagecoach is a terrific film. In making it, Ford refashioned the world. I always thought this film, Dirty Pretty Things, was like a western. This man, as it were, rides in to town. He wasn't allowed to use guns or any of the things that people in westerns use, but he shares their ambiguous past and makes a rather heroic figure.

Rules of the Game
(1939, dir: Jean Renoir, starring: Nola Gregor, Marcel Dalio)
In Dangerous Liaisons, the score consists of two kinds of music: classical music played on a spinet and a more modern sort of Franz Waxman sound. Once, I was reading the script of La Règle du Jeu and realized that Renoir had done exactly the same. He banged two things up against each other. Dangerous Liaisons was all about wigs. Americans didn't like appearing in films where people have those funny things on their heads because they thought they looked sissy, effeminate. I remember there was a day when John Malkovich came on in sort of a pink, punk version of one of these wigs, like a Mohican almost, and I said, "Blimey, why don't you wear that wig more often, you look so fantastic in it?" Why am I telling you that story? Because it's about banging the classical and the modern up against each other, which produces a sort of dramatic tension. And I remember reading that in La Règle du Jeu and thinking, how flattering, I've done exactly what Renoir had done and discovered what an effective formula that is.