It's only
after suffering through the four-hour videotape of Bernardo Bertolucci's
much-lauded multinational production that I learned that over an hour
was shaved off for the U.S. version, which might explain why the experience
was so disorienting and fractured. Still, you'd think there'd be at least
some entertainment value when the vast majority of a film is retained,
but the truncated 1900 shows no signs that investing an extra hour
would suddenly infuse this hackneyed period piece with any artistic merit.
Chronicling the fortunes of two men born on the same day at the turn of
the century who end up on opposite sides of the bourgeois divide, 1900
finds no less than Robert DeNiro and Gerard Depardieu utterly hopeless
with their lines - which weren't all that great to begin with. It's possible
they entered into this production with the understanding they'd be subsequently
dubbed into Italian, but we instead discover how poorly scripters Bertolucci,
his younger brother Giuseppe, and Franco Arcalli could compose dialogue
in a foreign language. Nobody's character is clearly defined, the disjointed
scene progression allows for no emotional access, and it defies logic
that English is spoken by everyone in rural Italy - and some with an Italian
accent. It's so unbearably forced and stilted, not to mention hollow and
inane, you'd do better to listen to the Italian lessons over the loudspeakers
in the restroom at Macaroni Grill for more engaging dramatizations.
You
may find infuriating the contradictory behavior of the central character,
a 14-year-old girl who talks like a slut but is still in reality an insistent
virgin. Yet such ambivalence may be perfectly representative of the days
of adolescence when sex starts creeping over the horizon - it's suddenly
something we want to explore very badly, dominating all our thoughts,
but it's almost too big and threatening to actually do something about.
Lili is sick and tired of being a virgin, because such a state makes the
phenomenon of sex much bigger than she feels it should be, so she throws
herself at every opportunity to get it over with, but then she finds herself
unexpectedly sabotaging each encounter. Could it be she isn't as cynical
as she makes herself out to be, and in truth is hoping for some intimacy
with her sex? 36 Fillette threatens to lose its viewers early on,
with Lili's patent unlikeability and a poorly-timed scene where she converses
at length with a concert pianist, but subsequent events reveal her cinematic
portrait to be one of the most honest. You may not enjoy what you see,
but you'll identify with it if you ever had hormones. In French with English
subtitles.
I suppose
a film about the HIV pandemic in the African continent is beyond criticism
in many ways, since any exposure for their plight is a good thing - but
I still would've expected a more lyrical final product from Abbas Kiarostami,
whose mesmerizing
fictional output
in previous years was what enamoured me with Iranian cinema. There's little
to distinguish this film from your average PBS documentary, other than
one sequence filmed during a lightning storm - Kiarostami's always shown
a particular love for nature's simple beauty - but he somehow chose digital
video for this particular project, which is not exactly known for rendering
breathtaking imagery, so the artfulness is at a minimum. We get clinics,
singing natives, discussions with the local authorities about their prevention
strategies, it's all fairly standard, and how this less-than-poetic work
made so many critics' top-ten lists that year is beyond me. I guess this
is one to save for when your feeling socially conscious, and not expecting
ecstatic visuals - Out of Africa it's not.
The Weitz
brothers try making a movie without American or Pie in the
title, and explore what it might be like when Stifler grows older, were
he British. Hugh Grant's wealthy 38-year-old Will Freeman has no job (he
subsists more than comfortably on constant royalties from a popular Christmas
tune his dad wrote half a century ago), no steady girlfriend, and "no
hidden depth," and that's just how he likes it; charming enough to
get the occasional shag when he needs one, but largely allergic to any
personal attachments more demanding than that, he's a pig in trendy clothing,
and hardly beneath cruising for needy single mothers at support groups
(he pretends to have a toddler at home). This ill-considered charade crosses
his path with depressive vegan Toni Colette sand her misfit son Marcus,
who's a universal object of scorn at his middle school. When Colette attempts
suicide one day, Marcus turns to Will for help, and their ensuing bond
(though it's far from instantaneous) makes Will ashamed of his lifelong
idleness. The script's less memorable than Grant's brilliant decision
to play an ass for a change, and as the two boys of vastly different ages
help each other out of their socially-isolated circumstances the largely
trite conclusion is redeemed by all the funny moments that preceded it.
Amazing
that Bollywood's enormous cinematic output finds few audiences in the
West, while Satyajit Ray's, whose own productions few of his countrymen
take an interest in, can always snag an international distributor. Here
I was bored out of my skull watching Ray's final 1991 opus, about a long
lost uncle few believe to be the genuine article who reappears after 25
years to claim a substantial inheritance, whereas an Indian co-worker
lent me a copy of a recent commercial smash from her homeland, the three-and-a-half-hour-long
musical Mohabatein (Love Stories), and I was perfectly entranced.
Ironic that Ray, so celebrated in Europe and America since his Apu Trilogy
in the fifties, is hardly watched in India; the West confers status on
those filmmakers whose sensibilities match their own, disregarding whether
that weltanschaung is truly representative
of their surroundings. Agantuk was screened in France while I was
studying in Paris a decade ago, and critics everywhere named it one of
the year's best films; ten years later its scenes are still often indistinct
in purpose, overly talkative and esoteric, and plot developments take
forever to arrive. No character is sympathetic enough to help us choose
sides, and Ray eschews any dramatic revelations we might expect in a mistaken-identity
tale such as this. If you can find instead most any contemporary Bollywood
creation with English subtitles, by all means take a chance; Mohabatein
was cheesy in all the good ways, showy to a fault, and painfully glamorous
- it's a guilty pleasure where the charms are as obvious as its faults.
At least it doesn't have to compete with the burdens of expectation as
Ray's corpus always will.
Apparently
they didn't X-ray carry-on luggage back then - instead we've got a film
that examines of the insides of its all-star cast and finds a planeful
of folks with every personal problem imaginable. Of course, once Van Heflin's
bomb goes off, they've got only one thing on their minds - can "overage
juvenile delinquent" Dean Martin land this wounded Boeing down in
the worst snowstorm in six years? It seems everyone's either an adulterer,
a neglected spouse, pregnant, destitute, or simply mendacious, and it's
to Airport's credit that the script spends its first hour exploring
the characters' little dramas before the plane ever takes off. George
Seaton's no slouch in the directing department either - his creative use
of split screens saves time with visual exposition and simultaneous flashbacks
that only the cinema can deliver. (Only the costumer falls short by making
Jean Seberg look as dowdy as possible - she's virtually indistinguishable
from Helen Hayes, who's thrice her age.) Burt Lancaster's Chicago airport
is officially inadequate, Jacqueline Bisset's got splinters in her eye,
Deano's got a sudden fog to contend with, Maureen Stapleton's a mess,
and the 707's tail's threatening to snap off before long - and yet Seaton
keeps it all surprisingly restrained and methodical. (For those who've
seen Airplane! first, prepare to turn the hysteria down several
notches.) And throughout it all, the renowned Ms. Hayes (who famously
won her second acting Oscar® here almost forty years after her first)
threatens to steal the show in scene after scene - proving once again
that in a crisis, sweet old ladies might be our nation's most redoubtable
resource.
United Artists'
inferior remake of Pepe Le Moko, with second-unit footage and sets
completely lifted from the original and the lead (Charles Boyer) named,
not surprisingly, Pepe Le Moko. Though much of this is little more than
a carbon copy of its source material, Boyer's no Jean Gabin, and has to
do his brooding more explicitly as his ex-larcenist anti-hero tries to
outwit his French police pursuers in this labyrinthine northern African
city. While Boyer's all edgy, Hedy Lamarr (as the socialite who's irresistibly
drawn to him) is just a blank, and the chemistry between them is virtually
nil. Even without drawing comparisons with Pepe it's clear the
script draws its characters less than subtly, and everyone has to explain
their motivations out loud - the whole affair's just slightly too obvious
for comfort. Lamarr's hardly unattractive, even with her odd smile, but
she's a cipher at best, and in light of her previously starstruck behavior
her final betrayal of Pepe comes as both a complete surprise but, per
Hollywood logic, absolutely inevitable. A definite pass.
To quote
a comic book hero I read long ago, who discovers death's door is sometimes
revolving: "Death? Doesn't last. Never does." The same goes
with lucrative sci-fi franchises, it would seem, and we can be grateful
that the folks with the Alien copyright came up with a satisfactory
loophole to bring Sigourney Weaver back after sacrificing herself in Alien3:
a few centuries later, science succeeds in cloning Ripley from some errant
DNA - and still with the alien queen in her belly. On a renegade military
vessel, a deft Caesarean extracts the queen, and empty-nested Ripley is
left to discover an extra bonus in her latest incarnation: though thankfully
human in appearance, she also inherited all the cool parts of the alien
species, like enhanced strength and blood like acid. Thus an eighteen-year-long
series detailing the empowerment of a single woman provides wish-fulfillment
on a grand scale: Ripley is finally transformed into a superheroine with
abilities commensurate to her courage. You thought she was tough before?
When the queen starts breeding her minions and hell breaks loose on the
ship, Ripley's finally equipped to singlehandedly kick some alien ass.
Ignore Winona Ryder's attempts to keep pace; her wide-eyed stare advertises
she's out of her league in such an unironic film, and she ends up looking
ridiculous next to tough-as-nails Sigourney. Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet
keeps the chills coming without forgetting to inject the occasional punchline
like only a Frenchman can. But be prepared for some twisted surprises
- science's meddling with Ridley and her inhuman offspring affects them
both, and ironically links the two archenemies more than the past three
films ever did.
The English
language needs a new word to describe the tone of this film, and the tone
of the murderous narrator's voice reciting a litany of skin care products.
Simultaneously earnest and sarcastic, Christian Bale delivers critical
analyses of 1980's pop stars like Phil Collins and Huey Lewis while he
pounces on and dissects his victims, both reveling in his Wall Street
material excess and perfectly aware of how silly it is. Bale somehow elides
naturally from a culture of conspicuous consumption to one of uncontrollable
killing, the only thing ever startling him being how easily he's getting
away with it. American Psycho is an unexpectedly profound critique
of the 1980's scene of yuppified wealth and ambition and status, as Bale
ultimately finds himself within a culture utterly complicit in his own
moral desensitization. Just when any other movie would have the killer
meet his downfall, Bale discovers the world he's in glady swallowing up
his misdeeds to further its own greed. It's a disturbing satire, no less
squeamish to watch for playing it straight, but Bale is a thing of beauty
for us to behold, just as he himself feels ravished at the sight of a
powerfully typeset business card.
"If
one gives up living for fear of death, then living is a death," expounds
the young and handsome title character, and he should know, now that Amitabh
Bachchan's diagnosed him with late-stage lymphosarcoma of the intestine.
Amitabh's a cancer specialist who's perpetually distressed over the poverty
in the community he serves - he's trained to help people, but all he sees
is death. When the ever-perky Anand shows up and gleefully submits to
radiation treatment, writer/director Mukherjee slowly lets on that this
fearless patient harbors a secret woe that eats away at the cheerful façade
like, well, a cancer. It's intriguing to see an older Bollywood film that
features both plenty of songs and references to the repercussions of Partition,
but Anand won't exactly qualify for the shortlist of enduring classics
when the focus shifts instead to Anand's determination to play matchmaker
for his doctor before he sheds this mortal coil. There's much gnashing
of teeth at the end, but by then you may have already decided the situation
was not terminal enough.
One of
the riskier entries to the science-fiction genre, a laboratory drama,
which should be an oxymoron. A small U.S. satellite crashes in a tiny
Arizona town, somehow wiping out its entire populace without any visible
destruction, and a team of government scientists is called in to ascertain
if the satellite brought some sort of virus from space. It's possible
that the story's author, Michael Crichton, intended for its 1971 audience
to be wowed by the initial revelation of a top-secret underground Nevada
lab rife with never-before-seen technology whose various levels the scientists
tour en route to examining the microscopic threat, but contemporary audiences
will find the setting already dated and verging on camp. Once the scientific
method gets underway, however, we've suddenly got ourselves an engaging
thriller, despite the forced scene where the lab's nuclear bomb almost
goes off, which we see coming from miles away. This film is all talking
and gesticulating and 1970's fashion, but it has its satisfying plot twists,
and somehow holds up after thirty years. Prefaced by text meant to lead
us to believe the events depicted were factual, and apparently filmed
before the Humane Society made sure animals weren't harmed during Hollywood
productions.
Ron Howard's
never done anything better before or since - if AMPAS was so itching to
throw Oscars® at him, it should've
been for this riveting account of the U.S. space program's "successful
failure" in 1970. Apollo was the first live-action Hollywood film
reformatted for IMAX theaters, and the effect is murder on your nerves
when you feel as marooned as astronauts Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton, and Kevin
Bacon a couple hundred thousand miles above earth. While the wives worry
and NASA's engineers smoke their lungs to oblivion, the trio abandon their
dream of visiting the moon and try to simply get home alive when a damaged
coil in their oxygen tank causes all sorts of mayhem. (As their craft,
whose skin is only the thickness of aluminum foil, loops around the moon
and they scan an extraterrestrial surface they'll never touch, the disappointment
is palpably crushing to us as well - if anything, the film convinces us
that space travel would be the coolest thing ever.) After six days of
jiggering a CO2 filter out of spare parts and enduring frigid temperatures
and flying their recommissioned lunar module as though there's "a
dead elephant on your back," it's beside the point that we get our
boys back - the entire experience was as tense and harrowing as anything
you might live through firsthand. Howard's coherent communication of details
shows just how unglamorous an astronaut's life is, and how remarkable
these guys' safe return really was; still, despite all the film's scares,
there's no greater advertisement for the lure of the space program. (To
that point NASA had prided itself on never losing an American in space
- if that was a feasible goal thirty years ago, why does it have to be
so elusive nowadays?)
A clear
candidate to've opened the likes of the Ann Arbor Film
Festival, this black and white "amnesia melodrama" (per
the director, who spoke on the film before and after its screening at
the DIA) seemingly takes place on
the front lines of World War I, a mustard-gas-saturated dreamscape where
the Tsar's ragtag troops of multinationals and women fight the Huns and
the Bolsheviks. Say what? It bears mentioning the director is Guy Maddin,
for whom historical settings are but points of embarkation toward more
surreal destinations. Archangel's actual plot defies encapsulation,
its implausibilities taking a backseat to a fantastical and paranoid atmosphere
in which men place horse hairs on the back of their necks to ward off
goiter, others are strangled by intestines, and bunnies are unleashed
on the battlefield to distract soldiers. It's the film's formal shenanigans
that suck you in, all of which hearken back to a filmic age where the
sound's not quite in sync, the light comes from a single source, the camera
resolutely stays put, and the frame's always blurry on the edges, and
the images are always slightly jumpy. If you don't go with the flow of
Maddin's pseudo-historical and vaguely seedy visions you're doomed, for
it's the visual "imperfections" that comprise Archangel's
flickerific appeal. Maddin's not for everyone - but his eccentric neo-silent-film
aesthetic might just be the trip your eyes have been waiting for.
The Architecture of Doom (1989)
A provocative
treatise against the notion that the realms of art and morality do not
intersect, this 1989 documentary argues that Hitler's vision of Nazi conquest
was as much aesthetic as geopolitical. His National Socialist party's
central idea of "purity" would inevitably extend to the world
of artistic expression, as the party leadership was peopled with an inordinate
number of "failed artists" who disseminated fear and paranoia
by insisting the national art scene be "purified from decay."
By "decay" they arbitrarily meant "cultural Bolshevism,"
or more accurately the Jewish avant-garde, which was subsequently shunned
in favor of a fascination with antiquity and a purely Nordic spirit. From
here the film shows how Nazi-endorsed art laid the philosophical groundwork
for a new civilization, where images of physicians were celebrated (for
their role in weeding out "inferior elements" in the race, versus
serving each individual equally) as was the common laborer (to defuse
Communist impulses toward class struggle), and from there grew the impetus
to "beautify the world through violence." It's a fresh approach
to an oft-analyzed era, and The Architecture of Doom's rhetorical
strategies are sufficiently compelling; where it occasionally oversteps
its bounds is in rendering artistic evaluations as subjectively as did
the Germans, labeling various Nazi designs "amateurish," a critique
we're supposed to accept on faith.
Bruce
Willis, as the world's best (and surliest) oil driller, is sent along
with his pals into space to deposit a nuclear bomb inside an asteroid
and redirect it from repeating what happened to the dinosaurs. Threats
to human existence don't get much bigger than this, I suppose, and whereas
Deep Impact (released in the same summer) showed what happens if
we were only partially successful in fending it off, Armageddon
strains credibility and allows for the sort of heroics more befitting
to a summer blockbuster. Impact was more of a downer, yes, with
a much higher body count, but it's somehow more plausible that the pinnacle
of human achievement - defending ourselves against a "global killer"
from space - should involve great sacrifice, not a series of last-minute
rescues and the majority of the crew returning to Houston with a few scratches.
Getting off so easily only succeeds in diminishing our sense of threat,
and in the end you don't feel as though you've dodged a bullet, you feel
you've been simply watching a movie. Armageddon's disorienting
forays across the asteroid's unconvincing geography and emphasis on as-yet-implausible
technology renders it more science-fictional than its counterpart, and
when both films' hook is that such an astronomical threat could happen,
we come expecting the story to unfold in a way that is equally likely
to happen. That is what ultimately distinguishes the two films from each
other: Armageddon chooses All-American theatrics over verisimilitude,
while Deep Impact recognizes that the reality of the scenario is
all the drama you need.
As I've
said before, I wonder if I
haven't seen a few (*cough*Rififi*cough*)
too (*cough*Le Cercle Rouge*cough*)
many (*cough*Touchez Pas au Grisbi*cough*) French heist films lately
- because when their Hollywood avatars come along, I forget which is mirroring
which. Once again the actual theft is over by the first half, and the
second half deals with the messy aftermath - it's been done before and
since, but John Huston's script and director are solidly unobjectionable.
We've got Sam Jaffe as a German criminal mastermind, Sterling Hayden with
his usual bizarrely oafish delivery, Jean Hagen in a role much more serious
than Singing in the Rain's vocally-challenged silent film star,
and a gorgeous Marilyn Monroe in an early star turn that speaks of greatness
to come. Regardless of its innumerable and comparable imitators from both
sides of the Atlantic, Jungle is a respectable investment of your
time, despite its tertiary characters' dooms being telegraphed from miles
away and distractions like the realization that back then, the accused
in police line-ups could see their accusers as well - who had to die before
they figured out that wasn't the brightest idea?
This is
the amateurish flipside to Irréversible: utter nihilism
with all the shocks but no artistry. It's also a little derivative of
Thelma and Louise,
with two "liberated" and once-wronged gals fleeing the law by
car, except this pair isn't remotely likeable or scrutable. It's possible
directors Caroline Thrinh Thi and Virginie Despentes were trying to ride
the wave of New Sexual Explicitness with this tale of a jaded duo, Nadine
and Manu, shooting men and women alike on a cross-country bloodbath that
doesn't even last 75 minutes on the screen. But any political or social
statement that may be embedded among all the hardcore penetration and
on-camera menstruation is buried beneath the most cartoonish violence
(although here's something new: guys being shot to death while sporting
their erect penis in full view) and less-than-subtle juxtapositions like
footage of a sausage being cut. We do get some clear opinions in asides
like "there is no work in France" (is that how they had time
to make this film?) and some real-time meta-criticism when Nadine remarks
after offing another victim, "Where are the witty lines? I mean,
people are dying. The dialogue is crucial," but otherwise this exercise
in sensationalism (the title itself literally means "F*ck Me")
fails to have an impact. Only one scene brings what might be considered
clever commentary - as Manu gives one john a blowjob, he mimics porn convention
(and flatters his manhood) by insisting she choke, and choke she does
- and vomits all over his crotch. (That just about sums up the whole movie,
as does the opener where Nadine masturbates to abusive erotica.) Pushing
the envelope can't be done with cardboard cut-outs for characters and
unconvincing inhumanities - it'd at least have the distinction as the
most unromantic movie around if it allowed you to care one bit.
Claire Denis
transposes Billy Budd to a French Foreign Legion post in north Africa
and from the perspective of the paranoid officer who sacrifices a subordinate
for the sake of his own insecurities. Denis Lavant remains one of the
least easy-on-the-eyes actors in French cinema, but his Chief Master Sergeant
Galoup finds little of himself to like on the inside either. Almost immediately
upon the arrival of new recruit Gilles Sentain, he "felt something
vague and menacing take hold" and starts putting his troops through
increasingly demanding exercises. Galoup psychologizes himself and Sentain
repeatedly: "I was jealous," "He has something up his sleeve,"
and he interprets his inferior officer's "openness" and "calmness"
as barely disguising his true "backstabbing" intentions. While
Galoup lets his delusions get the best of him, Denis keeps her own intentions
frustratingly vague - it may be as simple as a common personality clash,
but the story never becomes as compelling as the beautiful exterior shots
of the harsh terrain and the blue coastline. (The soldiers in shorts aren't
so bad either.) Denis clearly knows how to frame a shot or how an opera
score provides a neat counterpoint to the bleak desertscape, but there
may be better ways to communicate that critical moment when the older
generation starts feeling replaceable.
Director/writer
Jean Cocteau and cinematographer Henri Alekan unleash an army of gauze
filters in this fairy tale set in France of an indeterminate era as Josette
Day agrees to serve the flinty and reclusive Beast in exchange for her
father's release, whom he caught unforgivably picking a rose in his garden.
Jean Marais' hirsute makeup job is remarkable to this day, and the magical
effects throughout his castle are decisively entrancing, but the power
dynamic between the two leads takes a peculiar shift as Beast quickly
becomes codependent on Beauty's presence, allowing her occasional visits
to her family but threatening to expire if she doesn't promptly return.
It's tyrannical in its own way, I suppose, with all the trust he places
in her, but it's far from attractive, and Beauty's inevitable change of
heart toward her "captor" is less plausible than in Disney's
animated version of the same tale. Even more adventitious are the circumstances
that change the Beast back into a dashing prince: a village hooligan breaks
into his treasury, earning the wrath of the status of Diana guarding the
riches within, and he assumes Marais' curse as the monster of the castle.
There are plenty of Cinderella-esque elements in Beauty, but when
it's a man's greed rather than a woman's love that saves the day, there's
clearly another more contemporary mindset being drawn from.
Beauty and the Beast, IMAX format (2001)
Disney's
megahit was digitally remastered for its tenth anniversary, with a new
song added ("Human Again") for an extra bonus, but this supersized
special edition may not be the most flattering arrangement. Blowing an
animated film to giant proportions only makes all too plain how the characters
on the periphery of the frame and the minor details of objects are given
much less attention than the individuals who populate center stage. The
music's still great, and the vocalizations by the likes of "Law and
Order"'s Jerry Orbach (who pulls off a surprisingly effective French
accent), Robby Benson, David Ogden Stiers, and Angela Lansbury are first-rate,
but the plot is riddled by some questionable psychology that serves only
to advance the plot - but when Belle and her feral captor have to fall
in love within 24 hours, some accelerated narrative pace is to be expected.
By the final fight scene it's hard to not be sucked in, but Disney's done
better before and since.
One can
only imagine what international audiences would make of this, sociologically
speaking. The full spectrum of American society is put on display, as
dog-lovers from disparate cultural pockets pit their pets against one
another for ribbons and clarets, and it’s about as pretty as roller
derby. They’re all good people, but wholly subject to their various
tics and neuroses, which is prime material for the actors, ranging from
Jennifer Coolidge’s virtually infantilized glamour queen to Parker
Posey’s uptight yuppie (with braces). It’s an endless barrage
of inane banter uttered by largely banal personalities, which requires
impeccable comic timing to make entertaining. I can’t tell if Show
is affectionately lampooning its characters or has a more misanthropic
agenda, nor does one come to understand the nuances of this “sport”
any better, but the narrative economy and carefully-calibrated acting
hold a vivid mirror to our foibles and frivolities.
High-quality
suspense with Ida Lupino and her mid-Atlantic accent trapped in her own
home by a clearly unbalanced Robert Ryan and his ultra-short necktie.
It's 1918, and Lupino lost her husband in the Great War; Ryan, meanwhile,
was declared 4-F and is plagued by survivor's guilt. Ryan's prone to blackouts
and mood swings and hugs the walls a lot, and when Lupino hires him to
work around her expansive house the film shifts almost immediately into
a nerve-wracker. Alternately pathetic and menacing, Ryan terrorizes his
new boss, the latest in a line of folks reducing him to "woman's
work." The saintly Lupino endures this at first because Ryan seemingly
forgets his unfriendly episodes, but when he dons her dead husband's clothes
she can barely contain her revulsion at such a profanation of her private
life and she realizes this guy's gotta go. Ryan's boyish face is frighteningly
inscrutable throughout, and we're as clueless as Lupino as to what might
set him off again - but we do know that once she escapes her house, the
last thing she should do is turn around and go back in.
Unlikely
movie star Glenn Ford (not the most photogenic of leads) loses his wife
to the mob, not realizing she was all there was keeping him from being
ill-tempered 24/7. His grief gives him license to resign from the police
force and take on an entire corrupt town singlehandedly, and he's no stranger
to playing rough. You'd think the odds would be impossibly against him,
but this is Hollywood, and we need to see that one guy can make a difference
if he just has the guts to take on the system. Director Fritz Lang fails
to wrap the noose around his hero tightly enough - his former colleagues,
for example, who are now trying to keep Ford under control, are useless
- but it still makes for a fun ride especially once he's got Gloria Grahame
in tow. (And once we realize one of the bad guys is a young Lee Marvin.)
It's just too bad Graham has to look ridiculous for half the movie with
a bandaged face - she really pulls out all the stops here, as much an
x-factor as Ford. It's like what Princess Alais says in The
Lion in Winter: "I haven't got a thing to lose - that makes
me dangerous."
One of the more endearing B movies to come around lately, this film wants very hard to keep you entertained, and it's difficult not to be won over by its good intentions. Mark Wahlberg, whose presence nearly always guarantees a good time, is a hit man who can't bear the thought of upsetting others. The film proceeds to show him how untenable that position is in his particular profession, as a series of double-crosses forces him to stand up for himself. It's all wildly cliched and insignificant, but somehow afterwards you don't resent its taking ninety minutes of your life away from you. This, I suppose, is the hallmark of successful entertainment: never claiming to be more than it is, The Big Hit hands you just enough thrills and humor and the actors ham it up enough to infuse the proceedings with sufficient dignity. It's an honest production all around, which is a rare find among a steady stream of movies hyped to within an inch of their life as the next Big Thing. The Big Hit, riding solely on charm, may not be the next Big Thing, but it is the Real Thing.
The
American answer to The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover
by way of Sundance, we find ourselves once again at the crossroads of
food and art, with adultery, deception, and vulgar restaurant patrons
thrown in for extra flavor. The difference this time is a certain degree
of humanity, with down-to-earth characters wrestling with their devotion
to each other and their culinary craft. With Big Night it's all
in the details, with staggeringly nuanced performances from everyone involved,
a screenplay that allows the character-driven plot plenty of space to
breathe, and an obvious affection for the Italian-American subculture
that struggled with its culinary identity in the face of a hungry but
unsophisticated Anglo population. There's no telling whether the restaurateurs
will succeed or fail when they lay their business on the line for one
monumental meal for a visiting celebrity, or whether their bond with each
other will survive the experience, but it's one hell of a feast along
the way. Written and directed, incidentally, by noted actors Campbell
Scott and Stanley Tucci.
An authentically
gritty setting, authentically gritty acting, authentically gritty squalor
and conflict. But if we’re to believe young Billy channels all his
frustrations through his dancing and thereby learns to express himself
transcendentally, then we’ve left the gritty behind and are instead
firmly ensconced in the unreality of the annual British export that plays
by Hollywood’s manipulative rules. Director Stephen Daldry finagles
some expert visual tricks, like when a brick walls becomes a row of police
in riot gear as Billy walks alongside, but when Billy later can’t
put into words for his enraged father (he worries for his son’s masculine
development) why he years to study dance and escape their labor-strike-paralyzed
British town and dances around him by way of explanation, it’s suddenly
indistinguishable from a domestic product, and the child’s success
is preordained. As with many commercial smashes, the film’s obvious
sentimental machinations are both its greatest flaw and its most effective
appeal, and Elliot ends up greater than the sum of its parts; it’s
hard to begrudge the film its immense popularity in its final scenes when
a grownup Billy leaps onto the stage and his father’s heart leaps
out of his chest.
I call it the NewsRadio Syndrome – being all talk. We’ve all entertained visions of realizing our most fanciful aspirations, and some of us actually take a stab at them before, or while, life’s mundane demands regularly intrude – but even rarer is the person who’s never lifted a finger to rise above their current station. In a small, claustrophobic and socially incestuous British town, Tom Courtenay’s Billy fills most of his waking moments with fantasies of grandeur and acclaim, endlessly boasting to his peers how close he is to breaking out his his actual life under his parents’ roof and as an office flack. These days it’s likely we’d be less immediately indulgent of such a delusional and idling freeloader, but Billy’s claims start to resemble pathological lying, which gradually comes back to bite him in the ass.
He’s
all talk and no action – he can’t even start his long-discussed
novel, because he can’t decide what his pen name will be. His friends
and family start to lose patience with him, and his frustrations manifest
themselves when he frequently pretends to shoot them all, leaving him
with the last word. Director John Schlesinger never fails to remind us
that real life can be just as surreal as Billy’s fantasies, with
a marching band parading through the aisles to celebrate the opening of
a new grocery store. It’s all irreverent and fanciful, and the most
incongruous element ends up being the ever-radiant Julie Christie, who
is inexplicably drawn to Billy in all his arrested development. She beckons
Billy to run away with her, and his final decision to stay either demonstrates
his usual fear of change or his courage in facing all his earlier lies.
Finally,
a film with the courage to address the burgeoning "wigger" phenomenon
- whites assuming the cultural accoutrements originally associated with
African-Americans - a form of individual miscegenation bound to awaken
any latent misgivings you might have over such a bleeding of racial boundaries.
Race clearly remains America's biggest dilemma, and watching white kids
trying to insinuate themselves into the ghetto just as its native black
inhabitants are trying to escape will not fail to confound many viewers.
Director James Toback throws together a motley cast of both professionals
and non-professionals and brews up every sort of racial generalization
you might be prone to making. Don't know why virtually every black guy
fancies himself a rapper? Don't understand what white girls see in black
men? Can't see any redeeming qualities in the 'hood? Black and White
will serve as a litmus test for the limits of anyone's multicultural proclivities.
Toback makes generous use of jump cuts, giving the film a rough and unfinished
look - he's overflowing with ideas, experimenting with various racial
philosophies via the mouths of "actors" like Claudia Schiffer,
Marla Maples, and Mike Tyson in scenes that have cleary allowed for some
improvisation. Black and White represents the first mainstream
film to break free of the niceties of politically correct film representation,
refusing to cast any of its black characters (and very few of the white
folk) as positive role models; few people will enjoy or approve of this
film, but that just means they're at least partially unwilling to confront
the issue that continues to tear this country apart.
History
written once again with lightning, though critics have pounced on this
one for failing to adequately communicate the
complete context for the U.S.' involvement in Somalia in 1992-3. Instead
the script narrows its focus to a single event within the U.N. hunger
relief/peacekeeping effort, and reduces things to a simply battle of "good"
Army Rangers versus "bad" native inhabitants of Mogadishu; when
our boys try to retrieve a couple aides to Somali warlord Aidid and one
of the helicopters bringing the soldiers into the city is shot down, the
terms of the mission are revised to suddenly pit a handful of troops versus
an entire city, and the logistical and pyrotechnical obstacles the American
combatants must negotiate are hell on our nerves. Nineteen elite Rangers
died at the hands of "indigenous personnel" trying to retreat
back to their base, and the expansive cast from Ewan McGregor (who provides
the comic relief) to Sam Shepard to Josh Hartnett (who narrates and is
supposed to act as our moral compass) to Eric Bana to Jeremy Piven communicate
the sort of courage in bleak circumstances that movies are made of. With
how often we hear about helicopters going down in Iraq and Afghanistan
it's hardly surprising to see one fail to avoid a rebel rocket; what surprises
is our military's refusal to leave behind its fallen soldiers' bodies,
and even more lives are risked going back in to fetch them - that's the
only unambiguously heroic act in this misbegotten mission. As long as
you don't think too hard about things - like how shooting down advancing
hordes of "skinnies" resembles too closely certain zombie video
games - it's one of the more gripping action flicks to come our way in
a long time, and Down far from romanticizes the life of the serviceman
in the new world order.
If there was such a thing as an African-American independent cinema during the era of classical Hollywood in the thirties and forties, this would be the closest thing to it; though films like this were backed by white financiers, the cast and crew were entirely black, and clearly had an eye on black moviegoers for its market niche. King remains intriguing by virtue of its very existence, as defrocked preacher Charcoal Johnson spearheads a Back-to-Africa movement and declares himself Emperor of the prospective United States of Africa, snookering philanthropists in the process - but the wretched acting, dubious sound quality, and questionable editing do not make this an easy historical document to watch. Director "Bud" Pollard must not have had a lot of celluloid to spare for multiple takes, as his actors stumble over lines, start over if interrupted, or even simply choose to not finish their sentences, and say clearly erroneous lines like "much obliged for your hostility" (when they mean "hospitality") or thank the Emperor "for this demotion" when they've just been promoted.
Likewise
Pollard opts for very long takes with few close-ups, which gives the impression
of mere filmed theater - and in one instance his cameraman Dal Clawson
pans right to look for a character, and finding nobody, goes left to find
him there. One wants of course to excuse the script's various non sequiturs
(announcing the results of a vote instantaneously without looking at the
ballots, or characters suddenly dying for no reason) in the interests
of multiculturalism, hoping their original intended audiences followed
the narrative signals, but the dominant sense of mediocrity is not nearly
as comedic as it sounds. Instead one should focus on how black filmmakers
chose to represent their race back in Depression times - though their
unpredictable and sometimes mobocratic behavior is far from flattering.
Suffice to say diversity courses will have a field day with a film like
this, and we can hope that one day its historical patina will override
its endless formal deficiencies.
A vengeful
Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., his family murdered by seafaring bandits, decides
the best way to beat his adversaries is to join them - and he turns out
to be a better buccaneer than any of them. This silent swashbuckler holds
up against the likes of contemporary variants like Master
and Commander and Pirates
of the Caribbean thanks to its more-than-capable star and a story
packed with both genuine scares and solid laughs. Fairbanks, Sr. is in
as good shape as any of today's action heroes, and he knows his acrobatics
(but I bet today's studio bosses would insist on a nose job). Amidst a
satisfyingly earthy Technicolor (this is the first feature film made the
with the two-strip process), he wins over - and eventually leads - a pirate
band who then get their hands on oval-faced Billie Dove, whose endangered
dignity ups the stakes in Fairbanks, Sr.'s ruse. (These are the sort of
villains who cut open a guy to retrieve a valuable ring he's swallowed.)
The ending's a bit pat, and it's unlikely our hero's swimming prowess
is as formidable as Pirate suggests, but the faux-underwater scene
(With Fairbanks, Sr. probably suspended by cables) is not to be missed,
nor the famous final sequence where Fairbanks, Sr.'s men lift him in a
chain hand-by-hand to the top of the ship.
This "realistic
documentary of unreal events" (sounds like The
Lord of the Rings series, no?) must've really blown people's minds
when it first came out. Jean Cocteau (who wrote, directed, and edited)
plumbs the lexicon of trompe l'oeil cinematography, and the creative recesses
of his own mind, in this wholly personal but definitely disorienting exploration
of the surreal, the psychological, and the purely aesthetic. A frustrated
artist is thrown through various dreamlike settings with no clear objective,
and the experience is so utterly cinematic - this is as much a testament
to the capabilities of motion pictures as to those of the legendary author
himself. There's a fanciful mood with all the statues and mirrors and
keyholes and snowball fights, but when a gun enters the picture it would
seem Cocteau's got something serious to say about the struggles of artistic
invention as well. The average viewer might find it a little too aleatory
and nonsensical, but this "ribbon of allegories" might also
contain enough thirties-era special effects to keep your kids sufficiently
entranced (as long as you tell them that putting a gun to your head in
real life is not a good thing). Comparisons with the Ring cycle
may not be too far off base, as Blood is only the first film in
Cocteau's own Orphic Trilogy - but the next installments, Orpheus
and The Testament of Orpheus wouldn't come around until decades
later.
Another
example of early African-American
cinema, this time more on the experimental and spiritual side. When
a newly-baptized Southern gal is accidentally shot by her indolent husband,
her soul must traverse the gauntlet of temptations before being granted
redemption (which must be some Christian variant I've never heard of).
As her church's choir sings at her bedside, she negotiates the streets
of some astral city that offers no shortage of iniquities en route to
the Cross. It's like the Last Temptation for laypersons, although the
allegories Blood seems to be reaching for are befuddling and resistant
to any conventional interpretation. Spencer Williams' lax directions lets
slip in errata such as a hand that reaches into the frame to shut a door
the actor failed to latch, and his script decides that his subject's reward
is to be sent back to her husband instead of to heaven - she better hope
next time he finishes the job. It's hard to believe this film came out
the same year as Citizen Kane, as
no two films could display a greater disparity of resources. You have
to admire its attempts at rudimentary special effects when the spiritual
plane makes its appearances, but Blood never really gives us a
clue what's going on, and leaves us terminally adrift.
So this
is what grants from PBS, AFI, the NEA, and Guggenheim get you - a completely
excruciating and inaccessible test of your patience. Writer/director/photographer/
producer Nina Menkes has her defenders, to be sure, but I would've enjoyed
more an hour and a half of TV snow. Shakespearean references, monotonous
military police interrogations, impenetrable bar talk, ash-covered forest
sylphs, dead bodies in the back seat, amateur male stripping contests,
Arabic gravestones, horses appearing out of nowhere - the juxtaposition
of incongruous visuals and a Memento-esque
chronology continually blocks our engagement with anything that might
approach a meaningful aesthetic experience. If this is meant to illustrate
a distinctly non-linear female perspective, as some writers have argued,
then these ladies will have to content themselves with laboring in impressionistic
obscurity, as mass appeal is all but impossible for this user-unfriendly
(as Child itself states) "hurly burly." There's a beautiful
shot of a sunset in the opening scene, but there's no piecing together
the mess that follows. (And what's with thanking Benicio Del Toro in the
closing credits?)
World War
II veteran Alan Ladd returns to the mainland to find his home life subject
to the whims of various unsavory individuals, not least his own wife,
who hardly missed him while he was gone. When his wife later turns up
dead, and the authorities place the blame on him, Ladd becomes a one-man
juggernaut trying to get to the bottom of things. Veronica Lake keeps
crossing his path and coming on strong, Willaim Bendix (as his war buddy)
copes with a plate in his head and plenty of headaches, and no one's to
be trusted as Ladd makes his way through the California underworld. Despite
a script by Raymond Chandler, the entire cast's dialogue is nothing but
artificial, just a parade of tough talk and posturing that could only
pass for conversation in some parallel noir universe. The biggest offender
is Ladd himself, who's utterly blank throughout; anyone else in the same
situation would've been upset at having their life toyed with, but Ladd,
perhaps trying to come across as congenitally stoic, ends up incongruously
bland and robotic. He's plenty tough and fearless, but there's nothing
human to sympathize with or root for. The paragon of stilt in a world
of stilted threats, Ladd's lack of range is simply the final nail in the
coffin for this misguided tour de snooze.
The legend
has it that director Wayne Wang and scripter Paul Auster had so much fun
making Smoke in 1995 that they invited all their actor friends
to come over and improvise and they just kept on shooting, the excess
footage becoming Blue in the Face. That means the results will
either be terribly cute or completely gratuitous and self-indulgent. There's
a definite spirit of fun throughout these vignettes; this virtually plotless
production comprises an ode of sorts to Brooklyn, with historical asides
giving tribute to the borough's racial diversity, the Dodgers, and its
geographic character, while various celebrities make cameos in Harvey
Keitel's cigar shop and conduct mock arguments or philosophical discussions.
Especially noteworthy are Lou Reed and Jim Jarmusch on smoking, Michael
J. Fox as a scatalogically fixated professor, Madonna performing a singing
telegram, and above all Mel Gorham as Keitel's sensual Latina girlfriend
Violeta. The credits reveal that the film is "situations created
by" everyone involved, an intriguing experiment that luckily does
not come across as completely ephemeral and inconsequential.
No one can
accuse director Jean-Pierre Melville of phoning it in, but Bob
seems put together in a haphazard, idiosyncratic way, and somehow it holds
together despite itself. I remarked when I first saw this film that it
seemed I'd been seeing lots of old French heist films lately, and my impression
wasn't far off - turns out Bob's co-scripter Auguste LeBaron also
wrote Rififi, another
Gallic yarn of an ill-fated attempt at one last caper - and strangely,
another in which the thieves practice cracking a newfangled security system
long before they go in. The death scenes are amateurish, but the twist
in Bob's final scene could not be more unexpected, or more hilarious,
and the whole affair seems an excellent example of seat-of-your-pants
filmmaking. Bob wins and loses at gambling just as easily as he wins over
and discards his ladies, but there's a moral code somewhere beneath the
laissez-faire attitude, and his ultimate failing is forgetting once again
when to walk away.
The story
may look conventional on paper - concerning a professional prizefighter's
rise and fall from glory, subject to the whims of a corrupt system - but
that same paper has enough good lines to raise it above the pack. Growing
up in the "jungle" of Manhattan's Lower East Side during Prohibition,
John Garfield's mother (Anne Revere, longsuffering as always) fears her
child's growing into a "wild animal," but his skills in the
ring slowly move his billing upwards on the posters until he's a virtual
"money machine." (Mom: "Better you should shoot yourself."
Son: "You need money to buy a gun!") Charlie had a quality girl
in aspiring artist Lili Palmer, but as he grows in stature and his bank
account swells, his new alliances start squeezing out the old ones. (When
he shows up for a date with Palmer: "Are you decent?" Palmer:
"Are you decent?") Director Robert Rossen (and assistant
director Robert Aldrich) takes pains to show how boxers are used up so
that others profit, and despite all the appearances of success, mounting
debts pressure Charlie to bet against himself and take a dive. The trajectory
may be predictable, but the script's back-flashing structure maintains
plenty of interest. Also noteworthy is how so many of this film's cast
and crew would later find their careers derailed by the HUAC witch-hunts:
scriptwriter Abraham Polonsky, Rossen, Garfield, Palmer, and Revere -
so many bodies and souls raked over the coals in the name of national
hysteria.
It's called
a "chop shop": stock brokerages that sell you interest in companies
that don't exist. It's the Wall Street version of confidence men, pitching
you dreams of easy money on the Dow, cold-calling to sell you nothing
more than enthusiasm, pretending you are making a killing on the exchange
together, and then absconding with your life savings. At one such firm
on Long Island, Giovanni Ribisi finds himself to be quite gifted at the
hard sell, validated by what seems to be a legitimate profession, and
largely oblivious to the fact he's profiting from an elaborate scam. Boiler
Room is a perfectly-timed production in an age of online trading and
an unpredictable index, but the story boils down to a son desperately
trying to win his father's approval. Ribisi finally finds something he's
good at, but is that enough when what you do is about to be busted by
the FBI? There is virtually nothing to complain about with this picture,
except for perhaps its own modesty; with such heartfelt performances by
Ribisi and father Ron Rifkin, we're left wanting more. With a cameo by
Ben Affleck that was perhaps too obviously filmed at a different time,
an indie film working around a Hollywood star's schedule.
Enid in
Ghost World would worship
this film: fill a train with confetti, neon, and musical instruments,
set it on fire, and send it hurtling off a cliff, and you'd have a good
idea of what this film's like - just don't, for the love of your retinas,
actually see it. Kathrin's so risibly awful it swings full circle
all the way to half good, with its crazy-quilt of syncopated swordfighting,
clumsily-mimed guitar-strumming, questionable fashions, and the most elementary
choreography performed resolutely unsynchronized. Pipe-smoking German
youths with a love for swing music land a job performing nightly at a
nearby hotel, and the ensuing anarchy in this astonishing entry to the
musical genre sets the bar of your expectations lower with each minute.
(Director Karl Anton willfully ignores the typical axiom that the song-and-dance
sequences should be at least somewhat motivated by the plot.) That a film
could be so devoid of talent in all areas will probably make it sound
all the more irresistible to those seeking something to spend an evening
mocking, but as songstress Caterina Valente - apparently the biggest draw
of her era, which says something about the German talent pool - jumps
from Pirates to Hawaii to Argentina all in the same number, don't say
you haven't been warned.
Illustrating
once again the dictum that a little knowledge can be dangerous, this 1950
comedy won Judy Holliday an Oscar® for Best Actress for her uncanny
rendition of a crooked scrap dealer's moll who's dumb as a stump and has
no intention of changing. "King Junk"'s ambitions take them
to Washington to wheel and deal with politicians, however, and it becomes
apparent Holliday needs some refinement. Everything that comes out her
mouth is hilariously wrong, and accented of pure street Brooklyn, and
they hire an intellectual journalist (William Holden) to open her mind
to culture and ideas. Of course her appetite for learning increases at
every turn until she realizes there's better lives out there than hers,
and that her man's little more than a "big fascist." Born
Yesterday in the meantime stands as a textbook case of impeccable
comic timing, stereotypical Hollywood excesses aside, and Judy's path
to liberation paves our way to unrestrained mirth.
How this beat Babe for the Best Picture Oscar® remains a mystery to myself and, I suspect, to Mel Gibson as well. You get epic, you get history, you get Mel in a kilt, you get all sorts of bloodshed and royal intrigue, you get romance and male bonding, you get panoramic Highland vistas and the occasional witty line - but Best Picture? Maybe twenty-five years ago. This is your basic three-hour extravaganza, not a small feat for Gibson's second directing effort, but the film does not pretend to any grandeur or earth-shatteringness. Clearly Gibson saw a story with all the Hollywood elements in place, a solid investment and a good challenge, but it lacks any subtlety or complexity - it's Spielberg lite. None of this is to downplay the film's obvious strengths or entertainment value, but the film will forevermore disappoint video store patrons who pick it up expecting that certain sense of ambition that typically wins Oscars® these days. (Is it any surprise the Academy awarded the following year's Best Picture Oscar® to the obtuse English Patient, a film that screams "Art," as if to balance out the previous year's gaffe?)
A
close cousin to Tavernier's Capitaine
Conan in illustrating the inapplicability of civilian standards to
wartime behavior, but with a more cynical bent. After a camp of British
and Australian soldiers is ambushed by guerillas in the middle of South
Africa's Boer War at the turn of the 20th century, Lieutenant Harry Morant
(Edward Woodward) demands immediate execution of the captured Boers suspected
of engineering the massacre. Morant's simply adhering to the prescient
philosophy his murdered superior Captain Hurst once articulated - "no
prisoners; the gentleman's war is over" - but it's a dictum Morant
and his colleagues end up court-martialed for upholding. It's easy to
assume writer/director Bruce Beresford's cooking up a standard courtroom
drama, as Morant's defender (Jack Thompson) argues that "the horrors
of war are committed by normal men in abnormal circumstances," but
the stakes become much graver when it's clear the mustachioed British
judges have no intentions of impartiality. The colonial powers hope to
the demonstrate to the public the even-handedness of their courts by putting
to death some of their own, regardless of the circumstances. Political
expediency overrules all notions of justice in the interests of image
repair, and Morant's gang are intended as "scapegoats of the Empire."
Morant's legal pleas, however solid, entirely miss the political point,
and not even helping defend from a Boer attack the base where they're
being tried scores them any points when they return to court. Maybe it's
all too appropriate for an Australian production to expose a "kangaroo"
court; and for Aussie audiences, seeing some of their own sent to the
gallows by the Britishers they served must be especially galling.
Brother From Another Planet (1984)
After three
films under his belt as a director (and several more as scripter or actor)
John Sayles found his first box-office success with Brother, the
reasons for which twenty years later are difficult to fathom. For being
such an experienced screenwriter, Sayles somehow cranked out one devoid
of any sense, where characters behave contrary to any reasonable expectation,
with folks either helping out or messing with the extraterrestrial who
lands in Harlem solely to serve the dictates of the plot. I guess you
have to give Sayles credit for doing his own thing, but when truly independent
filmmaking means narrative implausibilities ad nauseam and forced character
development one yearns for some formulaic studio product. The central
gimmick here is that the alien who touches down in the bleakest of Big
Apple neighborhoods looks just like a black man, and the science-fiction
aspects may be intended to serve strictly as a springboard for some urban
ethnography. Whatever the agenda, it all comes across as far too unlikely,
not least the two white guys decked all in black (Sayles and David Strathairn
- an early MIB?) who relentlessly pursue the Brother throughout
the ghetto. This film, despite its novelties, has aged decidedly poorly
- and when our hero runs past a theater showing Risky Business,
we are reminded that in the early eighties it wasn't impossible to make
commercially-successful films of enduring quality.
Abandon all hope ye who dare take on a Larry Clark film; it's hard to decide which is more dismaying, Clark's inability to shake his obsession with teen sexuality, or the fact that his films' pubescent profligates are so plausibly portrayed. Given that so many of Bully's scenes are no more than excuses for proto-pedophilic titillation - unnecessary crotch shots, all-too-frequent "sexual situations," and a gay strip club that hosts an unlikely "Teen Amateur Night" - it's all the more galling when his depictions of adolescent behavior and relationships are so spot-on. A group of fantastically dim Florida teens while away the summer with fast-food jobs, naps, an overriding languor, and what passes for hormone-fuelled romance, but among two of the boys their dynamic resembles an S&M arrangement more than a simple friendship - Nick Stahl's Bobby constantly barks orders to Brad Renfro's Marty under a very real threat of physical harm, and whereas Marty doesn't have the cojones to stand up for himself, his new girlfriend Lisa (Rachel Miner) slowly convinces him (and their other pals) that Bobby has to be offed. (What, they can't just ask him to find a new social circle?)
Our would-be
assassins talk big while planning the job, but once the deed is done,
the kids in them finally come out, with plenty of crying and freaking
out that amply shows Clark still know his human psychology. It's too bad
his subjects are so dense on top of it all - once their nerves finish
processing the reality of what they've done, they start bragging about
it to everyone, as though word wouldn't get to the police. This is when
it becomes clear Bully belongs in the comedy section of the video
store, as we watch our nation's lowest common denominators derail their
futures. It's all terrifyingly authentic and surreal and assured filmmaking,
but it's possibly no less objectionable that Clark dwells on the worst
possible scenarios when kids are left unsupervised day in day out. Bully
was based on true story, and was released without an MPAA rating, which
means adolescents today are engaging in activities they're not even supposed
to see; but if Clark's cinematic indulgences can serve as a wake-up call
for parents nationwide, maybe one day we can deride this sort of stuff
as utterly fictitious instead.
Film critics
are mistaken if they believe their sole commission is advocating for quality
cinematic creations; like Cleopatra's food taster, they must also consume
to test for poison, and send advance warning of what to avoid at all costs.
1994's Cabin Boy clearly served as little more than a tax write-off
for Buena Vista Pictures; this thoroughly inconsequential film is the
Ishtar of sailing movies, except that in this case every expense
was spared. Chris Elliott sports a mid-Atlantic accent playing a fabulously
spoiled (and bearded???) "fancy lad" just out of finishing school
who mistakenly boards the "Filthy Whore" instead of the Queen
Elizabeth and finds himself among pungent & vulgar fishermen who force
him to literally lick the deck clean. Trying to surreptitiously redirect
the ship toward Hawaii, Elliott instead navigates them into the fantastical
Hell's Bucket, rife with fearsome threats like a giant housewares store
manager armed with an equally-oversized nail clipper. Amidst transparently
cheap sets and cameos by various denizens of TV talk shows, the sarcastic
script strands itself somewhere between self-referential irony and B-minus-caliber
trash, every joke precisely mis-delivered, the final result not even qualifying
for so-bad-it's-good honors. The one praiseworthy thing about Cabin
Boy? The length: at a merciful eighty minutes, you won't have wasted
too much of your valuable time seeing what rock-bottom looks like.
Speaking as a non-Jim Carrey fan let me first get this out of the way: the man is inordinately talented, potentially a genius. But a role such as this, which not once asks for our sympathy, and in a film which not once clarifies what's at stake, was a serious misstep. We've all encountered excessively needy individuals in our lifetime, and we've all tried to handle them delicately and humanely while simultaneously easing them out of our social periphery. Director Ben Stiller must have thought that such a morally trying scenario could translate into black comedy, but spending 90 minutes trying to figure out how we'd get rid of Carrey is not our idea of a good time. The result is mentally taxing, not remotely edifying, and succeeds in canceling out any of the pleasures of Carrey's unrelenting comic onslaught. An original film, yes; a funny one, no.
It's surprising
how many twenty-first century moviegoers never knew Goldie Hawn won an
Oscar® for Best Supporting Actress thirty years ago for her role in
this comedy as a young Manhattan record store clerk in a May-December
romance with Park Avenue dentist Walter Matthau. Equally surprising is
how her achievement has become Cactus Flower's sole claim to fame
over time, but in truth it is Hawn who leaves the faintest impression
afterwards. Contrary to expectations, the film's title actually refers
to Ingrid Bergman as Matthau's secretary and nurse, a virtual old maid
who has always secretly harbored romantic feelings for her boss. To deflect
Hawn's matrimonial dreams, the incurable playboy Matthau has always claimed
to be married, and when she finally demands to meet his wife, he enlists
Bergman to play the role, a task that wreaks havoc on the older woman's
heart. What ensues is a wild coming out of sorts for the once-reserved
nurse, and we are finally made aware that one of our greatest dramatic
actresses also has fantastic comic timing. This is due in no small part
to a priceless script filled to the limit with zingers: "She said
that?" "Well, not exactly." "Okay, tell me everything
she didn't say, word for word"….."He was a premature baby
- he was born before we were married"……."I think I'm
going to kiss you." "When will you know for sure?" And
as deception begets more deception, every line has at least a double or
triple entendre. Goldie is unexceptional at best, truth be told, but the
movie is a treasure everyone should see no matter what the pretense.
Time has
actually been kind to Caligula - as the decades pass and people
forget its initial critical drubbing, the film increases in stature as
a historical curiosity. The tale is pretty standard and infinitely recycled
(see Gladiator for the most recent
rendition), the decadence is somewhat old hat (see Peter Greenaway's work),
and if you took out all the sex the remainder of the plot wouldn't hold
your interest for a second, but Caligula fascinates simply for
being what it is. Certainly the most expensive excuse for a series of
pornographic tableaux, we can at least recognize the film's historical
authenticity, as we have been repeatedly told the Romans didn't wear a
whole lot of clothes back then. The performances are fine, the sets try
hard to make up for the lack of exterior shots usually befitting an historical
epic, and the overall effect achieves what the film's parent company,
Penthouse, has been trying to say all along - sex is always in the back
of our minds, so why not just put it up front? If you want art, go see
In the Realm of the Senses; if you'd prefer witnessing one of the
financially riskiest filmmaking ventures, Caligula will satisfy,
for it more accurately stands as a piece of film history than Roman history.
The circumstances
sound eerily familiar: even though the war’s over, and the soldiers
yearn to return home, they’re recommissioned to patrol and police
and parade around the land of those they’ve defeated. This time around
it’s the end of World War I, and French troops in Bulgaria must abandon
any hopes of demobilization and attend to the post-war lawlessness that
always precedes the re-establishment of order. The economy’s in chaos,
prostitutes line the streets, and robbers in various guises help themselves
to the resources that remain. You can understand the troops’ frustrations,
fighting Hungarians and Russians when there’s no longer any “war
at home,” and whereas they grew accustomed to acting above the law
while waging war, now they find themselves subject to retroactive court-martials
for their prior excesses. Capitaine Conan prefers to abide by a relative
code of honor and practicality, and believes in his men right or wrong,
he subsequently clashes with a Lieutenant Norbert who expects his men
to stop behaving like savages the second peace is declared. Director Bertrand
Tavernier has always stood among my favorites, not least for his attention
to detail and his storytelling style that demands a slightly higher engagement
with the audience to keep up. I’m sure European audiences can bring
a deeper historical understanding to Conan, but the film’s
hardly inaccessible to us, and at the least impresses upon us how indelibly
the two world wars have affected those countries whose lands became their
stages.
The Canadian
auteur Guy Maddin is easily my biggest find of the past couple years.
Even after viewing only two films from his prodigious output, he's already
exhibited more creativity and moxie than most filmmakers can muster in
their lifetime. Whereas Tales From the Gimli
Hospital finds Maddin practicing his craft in mostly silent black
and white, Careful shows he can work with a microphone and color
with just as assuredly - and as disconcertingly. Set in a perpetually-snowed-in
mountain village where the whispering inhabitants constantly fear an avalanche,
Careful posits what the Brothers Grimm might have produced had
they gotten their hands on a movie camera. Each scene suggests a queer
and morbid underside to this quiet community, as everyone's long-restrained
passions grow increasingly aberrant and violent. It's a technicolor fairy
tale from hell, delivered unceasingly deadpan and almost innocently, and
all the more admirable for being so virtually unknown; Maddin only increases
his cachet by having never yet taken a stab at mainstream box-office success.
A weak script
built around some cool ideas. Kent Smith falls in love with Irina (Simone
Simon), a Serbian immigrant he meets by the zoo's panther cage, and only
after they marry does she confess "there's something evil in me"
that keeps her from consummating the arrangement. Director Jacques Tourneur
seeps his tale of marital frustration in a spooky chiarscuro but fails
to connect his ideas as to what's eating Irina. She's fled from "evil
things" in her past, she speaks of a Serbian legend where their ancient
King John battled his people's "ancient sin" of "atavism,"
and her lecherous shrink opines she's got "a psychic need to loose
evil on the world." How all this adds up to a lady who may or may
not be changing into a panther from time to time is never adequately addressed,
so you'll have to settle for some suspenseful atmospherics (aided by a
very quiet soundtrack) and an effective argument for long engagements.
This year's
biggest disappointment, after the coolest commercials to hit the airwaves
in some time led us to believe we were in store for a visually groundbreaking
experience. There are plenty of stunning moments for the eye, but they
are overwhelmed by the flimsiest of scripts, which both fails to establish
any sympathetic identification with Jennifer Lopez's social worker character,
and to adequately communicate the rules that govern the mental landscapes
she enters to connect with her comatose patients (via futuristic technology
also insufficiently explained). If only it were enough to behold the phantasmagoria
Lopez has to wade through to mentally reach the serial killer (permanently
knocked out before revealing where he stashed his last kidnapee), but
this is no avant-garde film, instead a Jean-Paul Gaultier runway disguised
as a thriller which provides no suspense whatsoever. The cheeseball last-minute
rescue of the (other) damsel in distress, Lopez's initial mental ambush
inside the killer's mind and ultimate deus ex machina escape, and
the insufficient time allowed to take in the film's oneiric
wonders, all of it quickly exasperates and reduces The Cell to
just another of a long line of second-rate serial killer films.
Now
that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences® has added
a separate category for Best Animated Feature (contingent annually upon
a competitive number of releases), it's time for Nick Park and his Aardman
studio to start making space on their shelf for yet another Oscar®.
Already known for his animated clay shorts (i.e., Creature Comforts,
and those featuring Wallace & Gromit), Park and crew set their sights
on some feature-length quality entertainment, and came up with a tale
addressing the plight of chickens imprisoned and exploited on a British
farm, first for their eggs, and later for their contributions to chicken
pot pies. (If Babe turned you off pork, then prepare for your kids
to refuse poultry at dinner after seeing this film.) Quoting a host of
prior classics from Indiana Jones to the Star Trek series to any
number of P.O.W. films, Chicken Run will astound with its array
of expressive physiognomies, range of gallinaceous,
characters, and deft one-liners (did you know mice say "quiet as
a fish?"). The narrative arcs are purely conventional, following
the flock's emotional ups & downs as they attempt collective organizing
and mastering various forms of flight to escape, but it all goes at a
good clip, and what matters is the detail with which Park portrays the
goings-on with what must have been painstaking effort. The film's greatest
achievement, perhaps, is the camerawork, showing that animated films can
draw from the same bag of tricks as those not photographing inanimate
objects. It's all more than worthy of notice, and with the surfeit of
substandard films released in theaters this year, more than a serious
contender for the top non-animated prize at the Oscars®, if it didn't
now have its own category.
Here’s
the most striking part of this cine-portrait of Australia’s most
popular serial killer: that antipodal nation apparently has a Crime Victims
Compensation Fund, where the government takes it upon itself to financially
support anyone who found themselves at the wrong end of a crook’s
misdeeds. Besides spending a good deal of the film wondering how such
a pension doesn’t bankrupt the country, one is also bewildered by
the many facets of Mark Brandon Read, who made a name for himself in the
last decade for being both utterly likeable, completely unpredictable,
and a thousand times more man than any of us could be. Of course, that
all adds up to everyone around him living in utter terror of him, and
as he rotates regularly between prison and the Aussie ghetto it’s
increasingly clear he views himself as a vigilante of sorts and desires
media fame above all else. With Chopper he’s apotheosized
beyond his dreams, most likely, and Eric Bana inhabits a virtually-invincible
homicidal maniac’s shoes with pluck. Not the cheeriest of films,
but definitely not dull either.
Every once
in a while there comes along a motion picture from a foreign land that,
despite its obvious roots in its homeland's unique traditions, cuts across
all cultural barriers to charm people worldwide with its universal artistic
appeal. Chunhyang, sadly, is not one of those movies. Reportedly
South Korea's most expensive and elaborate production, Chunhyang
presents an auditorium performance by one of that country's most revered
"pansori" singers; grunting and wailing, accompanied by a single
drum, he operatically recounts a tale of eighteenth-century Korea before
an enthusiastic audience that can hardly remain quiet itself. Director
Im Kwon Taek then pulls out all the stops to intermittently illustrate
the singer's words, recreating a feudal world where an aristocratic youth
falls for the beautiful Chunhyang, who despite her refinement is forever
stigmatized for being the daughter of a courtesan. They marry in secret,
he's called away to prepare for his exams to serve the King, and then
a new provincial governor comes to town demanding Chunhyang follow in
her mother's footsteps and attend to his needs. Watching her suffer for
refusing to serve two different masters, and her husband's return years
later to try and retrieve her, would all be very moving if the acting
weren't so bad, if the young lovers exhibited any chemistry whatsoever,
and the if the violence weren't so patently unconvincing. There's very
little by way of passion, and the constant overlay of the singer's narration
- sometimes even simultaneous with the characters' dialogue - will be
less than magical for many Western viewers. Indeed, the fact that the
subtitled lyrics simply describe what we can already see with our own
eyes gives our brains less to do than in, say, Dude, Where's My Car?
Though this film was most likely a smash hit for Korean audiences, Chunhyang
isn't a film for everyone; quite possibly in this country, beyond an ethnographic
curiosity, it isn't for much of anyone.
John
Irving, a master storyteller, adapts his own novel for the screen and
his signature style remains intact: you get terribly sympathetic characters,
very deep thoughts, and disparate plot elements that dovetail so perfectly
and cathartically in the end. Here we follow a young Homer Wells (Tobey
Maguire), raised in a Maine orphanage in the mid-twentieth century and
mentored to assist the resident Dr. Larch (Michael Caine) in "delivering"
(read: prematurely terminating) unwanted babies for distraught single
women. "In life, you have to be of use," sermonizes Dr. Larch,
but despite his impressive (though informal) medical skills Homer yearns
for his own adventures outside the orphanage. His wanderlust leads him
to a New England orchard where he picks apples alongside minority migrant
workers and ultimately finds a need once again for his surgical talents.
Maguire is quite possibly more deserving of an Oscar® than Caine was,
but no one more than Irving himself, who did take home Best Adapted Screenplay
honors that year. This is not an earth-shattering film, because it doesn't
draw attention to itself like, say, American Beauty does, but that's
pure Irving: quietly affecting. You could certainly do a lot worse at
the video store.
One would've
expected this Iranian film not to make it past their censors - unless
the authorities found it an effective warning toward women not to misbehave.
(As it happens, the film was initially banned until it won the Golden
Bear at Venice.) Western audiences will instead hear loud and clear a
critique of a society whose female population is subject to a host of
laws directed to the conduct of gender alone, and which all too often
leaves them in impossible situations if they leave the house. Each character
ends up in the same jail cell, some for simply walking alone on the sidewalk,
and it's hard to imagine Iran enjoys having so many stigmatized women
among them, or that it's good for the nation as a whole. As the saying
goes, when there are so many laws, there will be lots of criminals. Jafar
Panahi (director of The White Balloon) directed, edited, and produced
this almost surreal series of dead-end tales; its stark critique of a
virtual caste system based on sex would apply in more than a few Middle
Eastern countries, sadly, and women not subject to mandatory head coverings
will probably find this nothing short of otherworldly: changing the setting
from Iran to some distant land in the StarFleet Federation wouldn't be
too much of a leap.
The title
explains the film's subject, following a French girl for two hours one
summer evening, but these are two particularly heavy hours for Cleo, as
she's awaiting the results of a test for cancer. The 1962 film divides
itself into chapters of a few minutes, opening with the beautiful pop
singer visiting a tarot specialist for comfort in a stunning overhead-view
sequence that inexplicably but not unpleasantly alternates between color
and black and white. The cards do not augur favorably, though, and she
spends the next hour or so trying to lose herself in shopping, in rehearsal,
in the company of friends, and in jaunting around town before she has
to face her doctor. "As long as I'm beautiful, I'm alive," she
declares in her torpedo bra and blonde wig, even as her assorted superstitions
and the unnerving effects of numerous bizarre street performers undermine
her courage. Cleo From 5 to 7 largely takes place in various forms
of transportation exploring Paris, and has no small number of comedic
moments, such as a diverting silent film within the film included for
no obvious reason. Eventually Cleo happens upon a handsome soldier on
leave while wandering in a park, and he offers to accompany her to the
hospital to confront the inevitable, and the innocence of his companionship
reinforces the ultimate playfulness and levity of the production. Curious
how such a wisp of a film can end up feeling so indispensable.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
It's hard
to watch this 1977 film without thinking "X-Files" anymore,
but even after all these years it's still surprisingly challenging and
unique. This is quite possibly one of the few Spielberg films that demands
serious patience: we're as clueless as the protagonists in piecing together
what it is the alien visitors are up to. All at once several different
inexplicable phenomena appear around the world (long-missing WWII-era
planes and boats sitting in the African and Mexican deserts, good as new)
including Richard Dreyfuss, your average Indiana power company technician,
witnessing various small alien craft on a joyride through the countryside,
disrupting electrical power everywhere they go. Dreyfuss and others are
subsequently nagged by a baffling mental vision which this Hollywood production
somehow restrains itself from spelling out right off the bat. It's all
a slow process of increasing mystery and awe, and even when the aliens
and humans finally meet (for once, the government doesn't muck it up with
paranoid hostility like the sci-fi genre usually requires) it's paradoxically
nonchalant. Close Encounters moves with the speed of an art film,
explaining little and never bending the plot for the sake of cheap thrills,
and ending as obliquely as it began. This is as understated as Hollywood
will ever get (2001 excluded), freeing you up to simply bathe in
wonder.
Braveheart's
William Wallace without an ideology as coherent as "Freedom!!!",
but embodying the same principle, Paul Newman's Luke is aimless but good-natured,
and the film suggests this combination will help you slip quickly through
the cracks. Luke is harmless but misunderstood, simply idly squeezing
joy out of life as much as possible, and his attitude is infectious among
his chain gang mates and threatening to those in charge. What proves most
frustrating is his obvious lack of common sense - why not just serve your
short sentence dutifully and get out? - but even with what little we know
of him, it's apparent he doesn't have much outside of prison either, which
renders the path of least resistance no more sensible than any other option.
Cool Hand Luke is not about one man's winning the esteem of his
fellow prisoners, nor is it about one man's escape from prison, not is
it about one man's mistreatment by the system, though these things happen;
the film takes as casual a stance as does Luke himself. It's the subtlest
nihilism you'll ever see, whether intentional or otherwise. American film
heroes usually embody values like ambition and individuality, as does
Luke, but missing is the why of it all, and we are left simultaneously
admiring and mystified by him. Luke doesn't compromise himself once, but
because that's how he feels, not for the sake of being uncompromised.
It's a quietly radical idea, that sometimes it may be enough to burn brightly
and briefly, if pointlessly.
"A
(mostly) true story," it says in the opening credits, which will
(mostly) alienate those of us not familiar with the Depression-era Manhattan
theater scene. In the fall of 1936, we've got strikes, we've got unions,
and the Federal Theatre Project is commissioning various productions across
the country to provide work for thespians and affordable entertainment
to the masses. But fear of communism is infecting the Project at all levels,
as well as most any artistic endeavor across town, and inevitably art
and government collide. Cherry Jones is a revelation as the FTP's head,
a staunch defender of First Amendment rights and unwilling to cow to Red
hysteria. At the center of the drama is a play sharing the film's title,
which ultimately the various unions forbid its actors and crew to put
on, an irony no one expected, and a decree everyone struggles to honor.
Also notable are Vanessa Redgrave as a wealthy socialite and closet radical,
Susan Sarandon as a seductive Italian ambassador raising funds for (not-yet-an-enemy)
Mussolini, Joan Cusack as a minor FTP employee who testifies before Congress
of the perceived pervasive Bolshevik influence within her office, and
Bill Murray as a ventriloquist who names names, to his regret. Meanwhile,
Diego Rivera paints murals, the Rockefellers and Hearsts start to sound
eerily like Hitler in their desire to purge the art scene of "degenerate"
elements, and "Cradle Will Rock," the play, is finally and defiantly
staged in a lengthy final sequence that suggests a tribute to a long-forgotten
actual work, but most of us will find tedious and self-indulgent and difficult
to follow. (Director Tim Robbins couldn't have inserted some explanatory
text at the end?) The film as a whole is no less thought-provoking, though,
as is the song accompanying the closing credits - a duet between Susan
Sarandon and Eddie Vedder????
An instance
of waiting for a film to trip itself up on its own intricate plot, but
thankfully it never does. This obscure Canadian production throws several
ordinary men and women into a deathtrap of fantastic proportions, a cubical
construct of interlocking rooms, some equipped with enormously creative
ways to die, some safe. How to figure out which is which, how to get out,
and with no food or water, how much time do they have left? And just like
all the reality TV shows teach us, how long until the prisoners stop getting
along quite so amicably? It's a fascinating setup, but you figure it's
too good to last, but the film wisely avoids the one thing that would've
dispelled the mystique, explaining why these random individuals were selected
and whisked to this intricate cage. Instead we're treated to a mathematical
dilemma that'll make you wish you paid attention in school, some top-notch
special effects, and admirably restrained scripting that doesn't even
stumble when it introduces a Rain-Man-esque idiot into the group. This
thriller doesn't end remotely how you expect, and probably succeeded on
one-tenth the budget of most films of its type. Not to be missed.
Don't grab
the works of Kiyoshi Kurosawa off the video store shelf thinking he's
Akira's son or somesuch - they share as little blood as they do aesthetic
sensibilities. Here we've got an amnesiac drifter somehow connected to
a series of mysterious (and grisly) deaths committed by other, and a police
detective (Koji Yakusho, "Japan's Leading Man") who may get
more than he bargained for when he tracks him down. I'm not sure I understood
much of anything, but the chilling atmosphere more than captivated; Kiyoshi
enjoys sprinkling seemingly unrelated details (depressing lighting schemes,
misbehaving appliances, urban sprawl, impaired spouses, cryptic dialogue,
sudden visions, barren rooms, vivisected primates, sounds behind walls)
throughout the altogether disquieting narrative until we're as overwhelmed
as the detective. Don't dive into Cure expecting pat answers to
its dilemmae; simply consider yourself lucky it's a skewed world you can
walk away from when the credits roll.
It's hard
to imagine this film being added to a list that starts with The Broadway
Melody and includes Ginger & Fred, Shirley Temple, The Umbrellas
of Cherbourg, and All That
Jazz, but yes, this is a musical, and one of the best. In truth,
it's more an anti-musical, as director Lars Von Trier does everything
humanly possible to frustrate our fully taking in all the choreography
during the song & dance sequences. (My graduate "Dance on Film"
class stressed above all that the camera's responsibility toward dance
is to communicate the big picture at all costs; Von Trier instead gives
us bits & pieces, cutting from a motion in mid-stride, switching perspectives
and subjects as often as possible, and possibly excluding from the frame
a good 50% of the performers at all times. Heresy!) Though he strives
to disjoint all the dancing, Von Trier paradoxically succeeds in seamlessly
segueing from scenes of absolute horror to a cheerful musical number without
the transition feeling the slightest bit unnatural. Much credit for this
must be given to his lead actress and composer of the entire soundtrack,
the pop star Björk, all of whose songs arise uncannily out of whatever
sounds naturally occur in the scene. The songs are pure Björk, unlike
anything you will ever hear (and certainly contrary to the expectations
of most musical enthusiasts), but the film is pure Von Trier, once again
exposing us to moments of great cruelty and keeping us perpetually aware
of his hand-held camera (which is also great cruelty for some viewers).
The film's two main characters both suffer for withholding the truth from
those they love, and the outcome is terribly difficult to watch, but Dancer
in the Dark's emotional impact is inescapable. Björk may sing
that the best thing about musicals is that there's always someone to catch
you, but that's not the case when you're being hanged. Winner of the Palme
d'Or and Best Actress awards at this year's Cannes Film Festival.
A largely
shallow exercise in mood and style, which is exactly up my alley. This
1971 pan-European production predates The Hunger's equally sexy
exploration of the lesbian vampire milieu, but this work does one better
by withholding more than it reveals. The narrative reserve might prove
frustrating at times (exactly what is up with the newly-married groom's
weird family anyway?) but the film's strategy of suggesting rather than
showing doesn't detract from the aura of supernatural menace surrounding
the jetsetting matriarch Delphine Seyrig. Daughters (more provocatively
titled in Europe Red on the Lips) is all Seyrig's show, and she
will not fail to charm you, just as she slowly seduces the beautiful blonde
bride she meets at a five-star hotel in Belgium. It's an exquisite feast
for everyone on both sides of the camera, always tasteful, and surprisingly
forgotten among fans of the bloodsucker genre. If Interview With The
Vampire suggested that the world of male vampires slightly resembles
a gay circuit party, this elegant predecessor shows the ladies don't lack
for a fun time either.
If
this film's predecessor, Night of the Living Dead, ended on a racist
note, this one starts one step further: instead of just one African-American
being taken for a zombie and executed, we find a fully-armed SWAT team
slaughtering an entire ghetto of black flesh-eaters. The earth is now
largely overrun with the walking dead, and this sequel to George Romero's
groundbreaking classic follows a team of four of the living who seek refuge
in a shopping mall, of all places. There are plenty of strangely humorous
moments, but all the carnage can get depressing as the four seal themselves
in and violently clean the shops of all the zombies. In fact, when a biker
gang crashes the place and gleefully takes up thinning the zombie herd,
you feel the human race was only all too ready for a reason to start shooting
others to pieces without compunction, and Dawn of the Dead ends
up feeling like watching hate crimes. Much credit has to be given to Romero,
though, for never straying from realistic characterization, as when the
quartet figures out they can actually outrun their wobbly undead pursuers
as they weave between them on their shopping sprees. If this film hadn't
gotten to the idea first, the satirists would've skewered them later.
It’s always more than a little suspicious when filmmakers resort to making a movie about people making a movie – it smacks of a lack of ideas. I know that writers are advised to stick with the worlds they’re familiar with, but when filmmakers do the same we often get a cast of characters no one will ever identify with – rich actors, spoiled actresses, agonized artistes, stressed-out producers – all the stuff we read enough about in the tabloids but hardly know beyond their stereotypes. For diehard film buffs, François Truffaut’s exposés of cinematic techniques and numerous homages to all sorts of directors and films will thrill, and a young Jacqueline Bisset is inordinately beautiful, but for others it may come across as pretty lightweight. The film’s moral is also sufficiently unoriginal, but remains surprisingly applicable thirty years later: people in the film industry are only happy when they’re working – outside of the set their lives are a complete mess.
A
clandestine love note acts as the catalyst for discovering the truth behind
various relationships, as a suburban family drives around the Big Apple
in pursuit of one possibly unfaithful spouse. Each stop along the way
peels away a layer of (mis-) understanding between one couple or another,
and while they are ultimately hoping to confront one relative about whether
he's seeing another woman, the quest for truth snowballs into everyone's
romantic and married lives. The entire cast of this endearing production,
including Anne Meara as the matriarch and Parker Posey as her youngest
daughter on the far side of the generation gap, masterfully inhabit their
characters as they each hit a turning point and have to decide whose families
are worth fighting for. What ultimately proves false in this depiction
of a long car chase through Manhattan is the ease with which they negotiate
the crowded streets in their giant station wagon. Even if it's the day
after Thanksgiving, the ride itself should have rent everyone's nerves
to pieces.
It sure
beats a daily devotional booklet: Krzysztof Kieslowski's famed meditations
on the Ten Commandments suffer from the same moralizing limitations as
any homily, but serve as another testament to the late director's visual
inventiveness. The first episode, expounding upon "I am the Lord
thy God; Thou shalt not have other gods before me," presents a family
that trusts completely in the calculations of its near-sentient supercomputer,
a machine that assures their young son the ice on the nearby pond is thick
enough to skate on alone. The lesson of scientific hubris is made painfully
obvious when the father subsequently hears of a freak thaw that day, and
still refuses to immediately check on his son. Part two, addressing "Thou
shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain," similarly cautions
against second-guessing the powers that be; an adulterous woman finds
herself pregnant by her lover, and demands of her doctor to know whether
her comatose husband will ever recover. If he will, she must abort the
child to conceal her infidelity, but if he's forever unconscious, she
yearns to start a new life with her newborn. It's a brilliantly horrific
bind, and the dour and self-absorbed protagonist wishes for the simplicity
of tragedy to make the decision for her but understands "one shouldn't
wish for everything. That's pride." The conflict is resolved almost
too easily, sadly, but those first two installments of the ten-part film
are still a remarkable achievement for having been produced for Polish
TV during insistently secular Communist rule.
(For a review of the complete series, go here.)
Director
Renny Harlin finds a still-viable cinematic resource in our fear of what
might be beneath us as we take a dip in the ocean, and the results in
his hands are sufficiently tense. This time the aquatic predators are
a couple of genetically-enhanced sharks hungry for the scientists who've
been enlarging their brains for Alzheimer's research; and this time the
setting is on the claustrophobic side, as the sharks succeed in flooding
their captors' oceanic substation, forcing the unlucky humans to try and
find a way to the surface without prompting another feeding frenzy. The
sharks are, thankfully, believable enough, the predicament plausible enough,
and the cast are universally good sports while facing fantastically creative
ways to die. Once again, after all these years since Jaws, you'll
find yourself holding your breath and mentally kicking like crazy. With,
notably, Saffron Burrows' lush British accent, and L.L. Cool J.'s movie
star ascendant.
Oh, if we only but knew the burdens of motherhood. Tilda Swinton, back in fine form, goes into über-maternal mode and resolves to do whatever it takes to protect her underage son from blackmailers who know about his clandestine homosexual dalliances. Tilda’s already got a Navy husband away at sea, other children to ferry to their various extracurricular activities, and an elderly live-in father-in-law to look after, but she’s determined to keep this latest drama in the family and keep the ship tight and running at all times. She reeks of decency to an almost fanatical degree, firmly believing “my child, right or wrong”; she either chooses to ignore her son’s ingratitude or recognizes it as the jumble of incoherent and repressed emotions it probably is. She also underestimates the tenacity of the men harassing her for cash, but she methodically approaches the issue like it’s another item on her grocery list. Any other parent might think her son should be held responsible for his nocturnal actions – Tilda shields him so well he has no idea the trouble he’s caused – but she clearly trusts a mother’s sacrifices will win out somehow in the end. Co-directors and writers Scott McGehee and David Siegel saturate the tale with blues and grays, not least the ultramarine eyes of Swinton herself, and an explicit water motif throughout foretells the tears that are all but inevitable on Swinton’s bravely un-makeupped face. Sacrifice is indeed called for, though not how anyone expects, and that becomes yet another burden the mother must silently carry for the rest of her days – for as everyone knows, if things aren’t right with momma, nothing’s gonna be right.
Bollywood's
misguided attempt to capitalize on the global success of Lagaan
mistakes relentless gloom for high seriousness and squanders its unprecedented
budget on an insanely opulent but exasperating exercise in vanity. The
classic subcontinental tale of romantic misunderstanding (okay, so that
all Bollywood musicals are ever about) gets remade for the umpteenth time,
now with no less than Shah Rukh Khan, Jackie Schroff, Aishwariya Rai,
and Madhuri Dixit; wasting such an A-plus-list cast should be made a federal
offense. When our two lovers' families turn against each other over issues
of class, they have little choice but to respect their elders' wishes
- but the consequences of thwarted love are just as unhealthy here as
for Romeo and Juliet. Even with all the potent eroticism and hyperactive
camerawork, director Sanjay Leela Bhansali can't match the energy or suspense
of Lagaan, and what starts off as languid slowly - and I mean slowly
- degenerates into mopey. Badr and Darbar's songs and the choreography
are top-notch, but Devdas ultimately just wallows in its own misery.
Khan demonstrates during the inevitably circuitous route to reconciliation
that he's got serious acting chops, and Rai's never been lovelier, but
there's no reason for anyone to have to endure this humorless test of
our patience. It's nothing more than conspicuous consumption, and a regrettably
wasted opportunity to deepen Bollywood's market penetration worldwide.
Robert
Bresson returned behind the camera in 1977 to challenge us once more,
and the results are even more obscure
than usual. Following a small group of disaffected college students idling
around Paris, we're given a portrait in apathy that was either intended
to capture an era's zeitgeist or chastise our abandonment of a moral framework.
Either way we're simply alienated, and the central plot concern - flashing
back to explore why an impassive lad named Charles committed suicide -
fails to evoke any sympathy or intellectual interest. It's nihilism at
its most monotone, with Charles' girlfriends doing their best doormat
impressions and everyone else proclaiming the virtues of "unbridled
pleasure" but never appearing to have any fun. It's "the pleasure
of despair," says Charles to a psychiatrist as he details his ethic
of non-action, and his failure to care about what's going on around him
(Bresson intersperses the story with reportage of worldwide ecological
devastation) ultimately proves infectious for the viewers, and we start
hoping he would hurry up and find that gun.
Dogfight
(1991)
Why is it we always speak so proudly of our
boys in the armed forces as the best of their generation, yet when they're
on leave we assume they're up to no good? Dogfight will do nothing
to contradict such expectations, but the movie itself proves surprisingly
touching, and greater than the sum of its parts. River Phoenix, a marine
on leave in early 1960's San Francisco, goes hunting for a suitable date
to his troop's latest "dogfight," in which the soldier with
the ugliest companion wins a substantial cash pool. Phoenix pulls off
an intriguingly unreadable performance, but he finds himself wrestling
with his conscience after snagging Lili Taylor for the event. Taylor is
all thoughtful warmth and pre-hippie idealism, consenting to hang out
with Phoenix even after discovering the theme of the party. Their meeting
has a transformative effect on the both of them, though not in the cheeseball
ways a lesser film might settle for. Dogfight is a tight little
charmer, blessed with a winning performance by Taylor (watching her trying
to choose between dresses for the party, or ordering at a swanky restaurant
with every swear word in the book, are themselves worth the price of admission)
and a script that leaves you hungry to know where their lives lead them
next. Directed by Nancy Savoca.
It would seem the composer Marc Shaiman can do no wrong: first the South Park movie, then The Producers and Hairspray on Broadway, and now this sixties-retrofestive war of the sexes. Renée Zellweger confirms her talent as a musical performer once and for all as Barbara Novak, author of a best-selling monograph declaring marriage obsolete, chocolate as an acceptable substitute for marital relations, and sex as a diversion now girls can enjoy "à la carte." The scoffing Catcher Block (Ewan McGregor), writer for Know magazine, poses as Major Zip Martin (an astronaut with glasses?) in an attempt to seduce Ms. Novak and prove she's hardly as unconventional as she claims - that all women universally want is "love and marriage." We get rear projection, split screens, painfully authentic sixties fashions, Art Deco to the hilt, and hipsters in berets inviting you to "ask me why I mourn"; director Peyton Reed manages to duplicate the recipe of any Doris Day-Rock Hudson confection, but the homage plays it straight and avoids the opportunity to fully milk the absurdities of the genre. (When Sarah Paulson's book editor Vickie steps out of the elevator and smoke pours out like "Peanuts"'s PigPen was within, the jab at the rampant glamorization of cigarette consumption back then is almost lost.)
Love
becomes a clone, not a parody, except for when Novak and Block enter into
a cinematic consummation of sorts over the phone thanks to some more split-screen
antics - their innocent moans and thrusts are so overdone it's no longer
innuendo, it's just plain endo. Reed should've telegraphed better the
wit of David Hyde Pierce's subtly waving the vermouth bottle over his
martini, or the two different versions of "Fly Me To The Moon"
we hear when out two would-be lovers prepare for their big date - one
rendition's romantic, the other swinging, revealing their divergent intentions.
Love can, however, lay claim to possible the longest uninterrupted
big-screen monologue in screen history - and though her delivery's unimpeachable,
thank heavens Zellweger didn't get an Academy Award nomination for it,
or the interminable clip on Oscar® night would've driven everyone
away.
Remember
this film when you're playing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon - the pairing
of Melina Mercouri and Ellen Burstyn represents an intersection of two
entirely different cinematic worlds. And what a duet this is - Mercouri
plays essentially herself, an acclaimed actress returning home to Greece
for a production of Medea, and Burstyn is the American she seeks
out for research, imprisoned in a Greek jail for killing her children
- a modern-day Medea, if you will. There's some painfully clunky dialogue
at first, and some lesser actors whose under-nuanced deliveries threaten
to jeopardize the credibility of the whole production, as does writer/director/producer
Jules Dassin's oftimes pretentious narration. But Dream eventually
finds its stride as it becomes clear the two ladies share more parallels
(Melina deliberately miscarried her baby when her lover left her) and
Ellen shows us how to go from sweet to enraged on a dime. Both ladies
give indelible performances, but when we finally see Mercouri in action
as the infanticidal "eternal foreigner" (after some disastrous
rehearsals) she will rivet you to your seat. "Out of this passion
they were conceived," and by the same feelings the children are sacrificed
- it's an effective lesson - cut yourself off from the mother, and you
cut yourself off from the sons. Dassin succeeds in cogently psychologizing
an ancient tale that makes killing your kids seem almost logical - which
makes it all the more devastating.
This shared
top honors at Cannes in 1997, which must mean the competition was pretty
weak that year. Here's the story: a Mr. Yamashita learns via an anonymous
letter his wife is having an affair, and kills her and her lover in flagrante
delicto. Turning himself in to the police, he serves eight years in prison,
and upon his release, establishes a barber shop in a small lakeside town.
His only friend: a pet eel he somehow acquired while behind bars, and
prefers to any woman: "He listens to what I say - he doesn't say
what I don't want to hear." Soon he saves a girl, Keiko, from committing
suicide, and she asks to become his assistant at the shop to distance
herself from some unpleasant sort of past. It turns out she's got a deranged
mother in an asylum, a mobster ex-boyfriend with lots of debt, the same
mafioso's baby on the way, and a growing crush on her new boss. Meanwhile,
as Yamashita does his best to rebuff Keiko's romantic advances, one of
his ex-prison-mates takes up a job collecting trash in the same town,
and, jealous of his contentment, starts spreading around that the new
barber is a wife killer. Eventually all parties converge on the barber
shop, violent hijinks ensue, Yamashita goes back to jail for a year for
fighting, but vows to help raise Keiko's child upon his return. The metaphor
we've been waiting for after two hours finally arrives, as one character
remarks how Yamashita's become like an eel, raising a kid by an unknown
father (check your encyclopedia for details of the creature's breeding
habits). None of this should earn this thoroughly inconsequential film
the distinction of the best of world cinema, but it's possible jurors
were impressed by how non-foreign this portrayal of Japan comes across
- that finally, at the end of the twentieth century, the Japanese have
just as vulgar and mundane problems as the rest of the industrialized
world. (We even get a neighbor obsessed with summoning UFO's. They've
sure come a long way since Kurosawa.) It's also possible director Shohei
Immamura forgot that it's those sorts of problems people often go to the
cinema to escape.
Were
people really so eloquent a couple hundred years ago? Was every conversation
really so subtextual? And is there any surprise that there might be any
misunderstandings? Gwyneth Paltrow, as the title character out of Jane
Austen's novel, is indeed so bold as to presume she might master deciphering
people's romantic intentions toward others through such flowery and syntactically
dizzying speech, but she is soon humbled by a string of failures in the
role of Super-Matchmaker, and suspects, as a friend advises, "the
best way is always the most straightforward." Plenty of gossip and
social intrigue from beginning to end, but the stakes are genuinely trivial,
and soon the hauteur of leisure society tests your sympathy. Indeed, Emma
herself discovers that what she thought before was disinterested generosity
in arranging the coupling of others is actually keeping one's snobbish
distance from those deemed unworthy of her own affection, and as a result
her own romantic options narrow. Whether Emma finds true love I will leave
for you to discover, but I will disclose that at film's end we are treated
to possibly the most touching marriage proposal you'll ever hear. Maybe
all that highfalutin language is good for something.
There are
lots of pretty ladies shot through a constant gauze filter in this high-class
softcore classic, and the thinnest among them, Sylvia Kristel, finds herself
on a proverbial journey of sexual self-exploration in the balmy climes
of Thailand. The endless sequels may invite ridicule with their shallow
excuses for nudity and sweaty paraphilemia, but this initial entry boasts
outstanding photography and genuine character development, and constitutes
an effective document of various attitudes and ideas that were in vogue
during the swinging seventies. Just Jaeckin's very stylized romp suggests
an exotic world where the languid temperatures encourage equally languid
morals - in one instance, Emmanuelle's frenzied lovemaking with her husband
drives the entire house's staff to pounce on each other - and maintains
a fanciful enough atmosphere such that when Emmanuelle cries, and it starts
to rain, they manage to get away with it. The ending clumsily threatens
to drown in vague philosophical mutterings, and Emmanuelle's quick recovery
from a rape defies belief, but it's all pretty enough to sit through,
and almost justifies erotica as a genre worth high production values.
Once again
the Cannes Film Festival betrays its weakness for anything addressing
the Balkans or immigration issues - these must be two of Europe's preeminent
concerns these days, and by throwing both elements into his film Theo
Angelopoulos virtually guaranteed himself the Palme d'Or. This is the
quietest of films, a series of reflections by a dying and widowed Greek
writer who's trying to finish an incomplete nineteenth-century poem before
his time runs out. In between musing on Lord Byron's own truncated literary
career in Hellenica, Bruno Ganz crosses paths several times with a young
Albanian refugee who barely escapes an involuntary black-market adoption,
and through him he becomes aware of an entire subculture of abandoned
Slavic youths whose futures are much less certain than his own. He also
reflects on his failure to give his beautiful wife as much attention as
he did his books - he'd much rather relive memories than contemplate the
fact his son-in-law has sold his seaside home or the that his homeland
is swarming with illegal immigrants. Angelopoulos unspools a steady stream
of striking images, all in the service of one big cinematic sigh - it's
the end of an era for both the central character and an entire nation,
both of whom the director hopes understands the value of hindsight. Greece
has its problems, to be sure, laid all the more bare as the Olympics approach,
but it's still better to be a country everyone's trying to get into than
get out of.
Is it about
Julianne Moore's husband realizing he's gay? Turns out, no - Heaven's
ultimately a powerful depiction of upper-middle-class bigotry and racism.
Oh, and awesome clothes. Moore's an absolutely refined dream in her Oscar®-worthy
wardrobe (which carefully matches the idyllic Connecticut autumn), and
Dennis Quaid's sporting a perpetual scowl and hooking up with other guys
in theater washrooms. Their late-fifties world of perfectly gracious exchanges
shatters when she happens upon the truth behind their infrequent sex life
- and Quaid (himself Oscar®-worthy) is crushed by his failure in the
role of head of household. (Their mutual ignorance of his sexual dilemma
pretty much sums up the era.) Moore eventually bravely faces life as a
single mother but then slowly finds the whole community is scandalized
when she hangs out socially with her black gardner Raymond (the tweedalicious
Dennis Haysbert). It is a bit of leap that she'd fraternize so quickly
with Raymond - she can't have been that ignorant of society's unspoken
rules back then - but director Todd Haynes smoothly shifts to all the
neighbors' vicious talk and their hypocritical standards of decorum while
letting lie any equation between racial and sexual phobias. And regardless
of Heaven's message, it's all just too gorgeous to look at, and
a solid homage to the sweetly-suffering Hollywood melodramas of that era
that burdened their female leads with near-impossible romantic conundrums.
Where's the merchandising tie-in - I want a Far From Heaven clothing
line, stat!
Featuring World's Sexiest Anarchist Brad Pitt in yet another rabblerousing role (think Kalifornia, think Twelve Monkeys, think even his debut in Thelma & Louise), this preposterously underrated film asks some dangerously hard questions. Though it's a bit hypocritical to cast Pitt as the mouthpiece for eschewing the pursuit of glamorous consumer ideals (he looks fantastic even when caked in grime and never changing his clothes - it's like a ballerina telling fat ladies to stop obsessing about their weight), the alternative he suggests, male bonding through bare-knuckle fisticuffs ("How can you say you know yourself until you've been in a fight?"), has its perverse appeal. The ideas degenerate into a faux-military setup suggesting men simply need an authority figure, but the film's visual ideas astonish throughout. As in Seven, director David Fincher invests an ungodly amount of creative energy into every shot, and it's a shame this was lost on the audience. Films should help you see the world in new ways, and Fight Club acquits itself better than most anything out there before or since. With Helena Bonham-Carter as a walking train wreck.
You know
a movie works when it can make a resident of Michigan, a state filled
to its eyeballs with geese and their droppings, come to love the orphaned
birds in the story. Animal lovers of any sort will be easy targets for
this film where Anna Paquin, displaying the talent that won her an Oscar®
at the age of nine, hatches and raises around a dozen goslings whose nest
was threatened by nearby developers. Paquin's 13-year-old Amy identifies
not a little with the creatures, having recently lost her own mother in
a car crash and relocating from New Zealand to Ontario, Canada to live
with her estranged and eccentric sculptor father, played equally sympathetically
by Jeff Daniels. Daniels, his girlfriend Dana Delaney, and their friends
resolve to support Amy in her new role as Mother Goose, as it seems the
only thing snapping her out of her funk; the local Department of Natural
Resources authority, however, insists the birds be pinioned (i.e., deprived
of the ability to fly) unless they learn to migrate South like their wild
counterparts. Wouldn't you know it, daddy dabbles in constructing flying
machines, and we're off, tugged all the way by the heartstrings. An extraordinarily
affecting soundtrack, breathtaking photography, and not a few clever twists
of the script all contribute to an enormously powerful film; now, why
can't the geese invading my own backyard be just as cute?
A cinematic
encomium to possibly one of the most significant filmmakers in history,
provided he were real. This faux documentary by fanciful New Zealand director
Peter Jackson spins a remarkable yarn about a Colin MacKenzie, who at
various points in his now-forgotten career invented his own motion picture
camera (at age twelve), concocted a steam-powered projection system, captured
a Kiwi's first successful attempt at mechanically-aided flight months
before the Wright Brothers, released the first-ever feature-length film,
invented a means for synchronized sound, then a process for color film,
and little innovations like the first camera close-up and the first candid
camera series. It's Jackson's family friend, Colin's fictitious widow
Hannah, who unearths the long-missing reels of decaying film stock from
her garden shed, and upon its disclosure to the modern world luminaries
from Leonard Maltin to Harvey Weinstein to Sam Neill offer their praises.
Sadly Colin also achieves notoriety for his constant string of hard luck
throughout his revolutionary enterprises, from stealing 2000 dozen eggs
for his albumen film development process, accidentally filming his first
production in Chinese, being charged with lewdness for a Tahitian film
showing bare-breasted natives, accidentally pranking the New Zealand Prime
Minister during his candid-camera project, working his cast literally
to death during a Biblical epic, finding himself destitute after the stock
market crash, and inadvertently recording his own death on film during
the Spanish Civil War. Forgotten Silver is a comedic treat for
film history buffs and remarkably persuasive in covering its tracks, like
when Jackson and his troupe uncover MacKenzie's massive abandoned and
overgrown Biblical set deep in the jungle. An esoteric but amusing hoax.
From the Journals of Jean Seberg (1995)
Leave it to Mark Rappaport to squeeze so much out of such a relatively brief career; more than merely chronicling the few ups and numerous downs of Jean Seberg's twenty years in show business, Rappaport demonstrates how her cinematic experiences reflect the vagaries of the film apparatus as a whole. He's like a film studies major writing his final paper with his own camera, casting Mary Beth Hurt as a fictional current-day Seberg (had she not ended her own life at forty), looking back on "international flopdom" at age 17, her immortalization abroad in Godard's Breathless, her subsequent poor choices in French husbands and film roles, and her ill treatment at the hands of Hollywood and the U.S. government. In between we get scholarly asides on topics from Kuleshov to Jane Fonda to the filmic exploitation of women, and the interconnectedness of it all proves staggering. It's possible we come out knowing more about the motion picture complex than about Seberg herself, but the Journals' subject was never a revealing persona anyway. Seberg's "scrapbook of embarrassment" proves tragic yet singularly illuminating, and in Rappaport's hands even the most inconsequential of celebrities can become a world unto itself.
When I was studying abroad in Paris my senior year of college, I got asked out on a date to an evening festival of avant-garde short political films of the sixties and seventies. At this same time the city had just passed a municipal law prohibiting smoking in all public places (imagine as recently as the early nineties, French moviegoers filling screening rooms with smoke). To this day, my dominant memory of the evening is not any of the shorts, in all their outrage and willful obtuseness, but of the screaming that erupted when a couple in the front row refused to extinguish their cigarettes. The theater of this politicized moment surpassed any of the films that followed in entertainment value, and the long-extinct causes those shorts championed seemed utterly irrelevant compared with the debate that currently enflamed the patrons of this modest event. I expect Futz has much in common with those largely unwatchable but historically curious films, and documented a concurrent zeitgeist here in America. It’s definitely trying new things, with a skyrocketing hillbilly quotient, but ends up evanescent, absurd, minimalist, and alienating – but the French probably would’ve envied the endless metaphoric value in the scene where the cast really slaughters a pig.
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