Mel Gibson
and Mark Lee trek across the Australian desert to join the famed Light
Horse Brigade in World War I, both stellar sprinters, and both soon uprooted
to Cairo to prepare for battle against the Ottoman Empire. Peter Weir's
brilliant slice of distinctly Aussie wartime experience slowly draws you
into the day-to-day details of military life, from impromptu lectures
on STDs (thank heavens they at least try to teach the boys something useful),
to their lack of respect for their Egyptian hosts, to their ambivalent
attitudes toward their arrogant British commanders. Mel's initially sent
to the infantry (the group always sent first into the machine guns) but
gets promoted to the Brigade, and when his best friend Lee's life depends
on a watch that's running slow, it's finally clear why Weir made him a
swift runner. Nothing prepares you for the devastating ending, but then
again there's no adequate preparation for a hellish war when idiots are
in charge.
An
unflinching exploration of the lexicon of survival, particularly its human
variant, i.e., during a war. Here we find post-Nazi Germans asking the
very same question their Jewish victims wrestled with upon release from
the death camps: simply because I am still alive, does that mean I have
survived the ordeal? Director Helma Sanders-Brahms presents a largely
autobiographical tale of how her mother endured the rigors of raising
a child alone as her country is being torn to pieces, and finding that
even reuniting with her soldier husband afterwards by no means guarantees
everyone will live happily ever after, or that love will conquer all.
Sanders-Brahms indicts her homeland for failing to anticipate the effect
a war, failed or otherwise, might have on families, one which turns her
heroic and tough-as-nails young mother into a petty and helpless postwar
crone. War victimizes everyone, on the battlefield or off, including successive
generations who must reckon with loved ones disabled by angst and the
burgeoning realization that their humanity and dignity died long ago.
It’s
usually those adolescents feeling particularly alienated by their peers
in high school who
plot to rise above it all by escaping to a faraway college; here we find
a new demographic, teens who sneer at their circumstances but still have
no plans beyond graduation. For Thora Birch’s Enid, her only weapon
of condescension is in judging the pop-cultural tastes of others, and
she takes comfort in believing her music, movies, and clothing choices
render her superior to all the other “creeps, losers, and weirdos”
similarly trapped in her urban-sprawl-strip-mall anywhere-town. She doesn’t
exactly nurture dreams for her future, but maybe she’d better start,
as she finds herself growing apart from her best friend and partner in
superciliousness Becky, her widowed father contemplating remarriage, and
discovering she can’t kowtow to authority figures to hold a job in
the service industry for more than a day. Enid’s convinced the fact
that she “can’t relate to 99% of the universe” is the fault
of that 99%, since they can’t appreciate her penchant for punk and
kitsch esoterica. Eventually she finds a man who does (Steve Buscemi,
whose Seymour pours every penny of his disposable income into ancient
blues records and curious items of Americana, and who has never been more
sympathetic on-screen), but she’s too used to sneering at everyone
around her, and she loses him as well. Ghost Story follows Enid’s
path towards a possible epiphany that constant destructive criticism won’t
lead you to a happy place, and though the film loses its edge as it nears
its vague conclusion, writer Daniel Clowes and director Terry Zwigoff
effectively communicate that in the real world the gallery of freaks we
always claim is “Them” just might be more “Us” than
we’d care to believe.
A black-and-white French concoction about a knife-thrower and his assistant – how can you go wrong? Oh, try tacking on a terrible cop-out of an ending, that should do the trick. Up until then this film is ecstatically charming, as our desperate but talented pair survive on the contemporary vaudeville circuit by the seat of their pants, and each time Daniel Auteuil flings his cutlery at Vanessa Paradis the exchange resembles sex in no small way – the trust level is probably just as high. Paradis in particular is a wonder to behold, with the gap between her teeth and her undereducated and needy childlike behavior. But (in the name of all that does not suck) turn the TV off when their characters part ways, or the spell will be broken even more unceremoniously by Patrice Leconte’s inexcusable direction.
The Greatest Show on Earth (1952)
Does the
title describe the circus, or the movies? How about a spectacle that combines
the two? World-class bigtop performers join Charlton Heston, Dorothy Lamour,
Jimmy Stewart, and Gloria Grahame for an extravaganza presenting the best
of both worlds. Director Cecil B. DeMille spared no expense to show the
gambles taken every day by circus folk, sprinkled with some romantic drama,
the encroachment of undesirable elements, the financial uncertainties,
and the loyalty among the thousand-plus who make the circus machine work.
It all makes for an excellent piece of publicity for Ringling Brothers
Barnum & Bailey (can you say "indomitable spirit?"), and
more jaded viewers may regard the drama as stilted, but darnit it all
works, the pageantry and daredevil feats, and more than likely you'll
eventually give in to its charms. In color no less, which was a big deal
back in 1952.
How many
times has this play been cinematically rendered, and how many Hollywood
stars through the ages have made an appearance in them? By this umpteenth
iteration the story holds no more surprises, and it’s the presentation
that has to grab your interest, and director Michael Almereyda must’ve
been fully aware of this, as he transposes Shakespeare’s formerly
Danish political, familial, theatrical, and existential intrigues to a
contemporary corporate setting. It’s a fantastically creative updating,
filled with endless product-placement and asides to security cameras,
a landmark entry to this overpopulated cinematic subgenre, and high school
English teachers would do well to consider integrating it into their curricula.
Not only does Almereyda effectively flesh out the spaces between the Bard’s
lines, but his unconventional casting (Bill Murray, Steve Zahn, Julia
Stiles, and Sam Shepard, to name a few) makes it feel like Hollywood stars
putting on an impromptu stage production on a lark between films (which
keeps it from feeling staid). It isn’t until the end that Hamlet
version who-knows-whatteenth loses control, as the Queen’s change
of heart feels false, and the final duel is as unimaginative as the rest
was mind-blowingly fresh.
The living
legend "Beat" Takeshi Kitano, as is often the case, both wrote,
directed, and edited this seventh of his films, but it may be his contributions
as an actor that prove the most fascinating. Kitano's true gift may simply
be his face, which serves as an effective example of the Kuleshov Effect
- his visage acts as a blank canvas onto which we inscribe whatever qualities
are most appropriate to the scene. Such a polyvalent expressiveness becomes
Fireworks' central asset, for the highly elliptical script gives
us surprisingly little to go on, and we follow Kitano's performance for
clues as to his character's actual fortunes. Here he's a cop with a dead
daughter and a wife with leukemia, and he eventually abandons the force
for reasons yet unclear. He seems bent on revenge on various criminal
figures, and prefers extra-legal means toward this end. While Kitano plays
fast and loose with chronology, and we take time piecing it all together,
his Nishi remains quietly powerful, never wasting energy and always sufficiently
capable of kicking whoever's ass is due for some corporal punishment.
Despite all the violence - and there's plenty of it - Fireworks
comes across as a surprisingly elegant film, adeptly capturing the poetic
little moments between the nastier ones, and what lingers in the mind
afterwards is the tenderness between a husband and wife.
Happiness
succeeds like no other movie in pushing your emotions in several directions
at once. How admirable that the psychiatrist Bill Maplewood (Dylan Baker)
is so frank and understanding in discussing the birds-n-bees with his
young son; how disgusting that he also happens to be a pedophile who drugs
and rapes neighborhood kids. The only thing missing from all these dysfunctional
proceedings is an ill-timed laugh track (remember how chilling it was
in Natural Born Killers?), and we would have on our hands the world's
most twisted TV sitcom. Happiness takes a Magnolia-esque
approach in exploring the various neuroses of three suburban New Jersey
sisters and their social circles, all of whose lives intersect in surprising
ways. Everyone obsesses over someone else, everyone wants to take advantage
of someone else, but most everyone settles for sad imitations of real
relationships. None of this may be particularly revelatory, but it's in
director Todd Solondz's presentation that new ground is broken over and
over. That it never even solicited the MPAA for a rating is wise, thanks
to certain moments featuring bodily fluids and for its stark emotional
assault on the viewer. These are characters we recognize from our own
darkest moments, and only Solondz has the nerve to finally commit them
to the screen. The Presumed Innocent-ish twist ending is a bit
overwrought, and seeing Camryn Manheim playing insecure may be a bit too
much of a stretch from how we're used to seeing her on "The Practice,"
but as a whole this film is both repulsive and refreshing in its honesty,
a combination that somehow transmogrifies into the blackest of comedies.
Definitely not for children, though at times potentially a useful corrective
to our medieval sex ed curriculum.
A remarkably
unpleasant film by a director who would later provide so much pleasure
worldwide with In the Mood For Love,
one wonders why Wong Kar-Wai bothered crafting this account of two gay
Chinese lovers who break up and reunite more times than you or I change
our underwear, and who never seem to genuinely love each other for a second.
Moving together to Argentina to make a fresh start, they encounter only
poverty and continued incompatibility. Clearly unable to move on from
each other, they instead choose to sullenly wallow in each other's company
and chain smoke through their mundane existence. Wong may have thought
over- or under-exposing or tinting his photography might visually elevate
his story, but it's ultimately tiresome watching people being so petty;
it's as if the Springercam™ tried some chiarscuro camerawork. Happy
Together, ironic title and all, is a glamorous look to an unglamorous
tale, and ultimately forgettable despite the Best Director award Cannes
handed Wong in 1997 for apparently refusing to check his light meter.
When hicks
organize: unionized miners in Eastern Kentucky in the summer of 1973 strike
for better health care, better safety precautions, and better wages, and
boss Duke Power send in "gun thugs" to intimidate them, brings
in "scabs," and things go from worse to lots worse. Barbara
Kopple would revisit the same issue in her subsequent documentary of the
Hormel strike in American Dream,
showing how this sort of discontent is all too common, but Harlan
won her an Oscar® with its earlier depiction of ugliness on all sides
of the conflict. To be sure, the miners have never had it all that good,
they're hardly the Communists their opponents make them out to be, and
you have to respect their commitment to nonviolent resistance. All their
picketing, boostering, and lung-disease bills amount to nothing until
one of their ranks finally gets killed, and the resulting sympathy vote
helps pass a contract. It's not a perfect arrangement - their union bosses
arguably sold them out by forfeiting their right to henceforth strike
at the local level - which goes to show, it's simply a matter of which
master you serve. Kopple's impressively thorough in recording the event
from start to finish, and this masterpiece of the form probably raises
more questions than it intends to - such as why, with everyone complaining
of black lung disease, do all the miners smoke like a chimney?
The only
thing keeping you in your seats in this quaint but dull film is your curiosity
as to whether Jimmy Stewart truly signed on to play both lovable and psychotic.
As the perpetually wide-eyed and friendly Elwood, he claims to have an
invisible “pookah” companion named Harvey, an oversized rabbit
out of Celtic myth, and back in Elwood’s day the stigma of mental
illness was so great that his social-climbing family can’t simply
confront him once and for all about it. While Elwood invites everyone
he meets over for dinner, his sisters plot to get him institutionalized,
and we’re dragged along constantly wondering if he’s finally
crazy or not. Everyone acquits themselves nicely in their largely stereotypical
roles, but director Henry Koster does nothing to lift the story above
its origins as a stage play, and Harvey ends up being just too
damn talky. I won’t reveal if Stewart ultimately avoids life in a
straightjacket, but I guarantee if you see this film you won’t be
far from the nuthouse either.
Psychologists will one day have to figure out what it is within us all that loves to explore big old houses. That's the lure of The Haunting, both this remake and the 1963 original, as we vicariously roam through the labyrinthine corridors and mammoth chambers of Hill House. What filmmakers need to figure out is that computer-generated effects are still, for the most part, not convincing; when Hill House's ghosts manifest themselves in the wood & metalwork, disbelief is not suspended, for we are spending our time scrutinizing each effect for credibility. Per the cinema's greatest aesthetic credo, Good Art Conceals its own Artfulness, seamlessness will be achieved only when special effects are not noticed as effects. And when Lili Taylor's character figures out too early in the movie why all is not right within the walls, and subsequently explains it all to us with an hour yet to go, all we have left to maintain our curiosity are those digital disappointments (and, of course, wondering which character will bite it next via said CGI). The original wisely avoided both obtrusive special effects and revealing all its plot secrets, which kept us in our seats, if on the edge of them. Version 2.0 panders too easily to what it thinks contemporary audiences want, and ends up satisfying no one.
Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001)
Full disclosure: Star, director, and co-writer John Cameron Mitchell was an acquaintance of mine back in the mid-nineties, by virtue of being my then-boyfriend’s best friend. In those days his Hedwig persona was commanding the stage Friday nights at SqueezeBox in downtown Manhattan, and there was talk of developing the act into a full-fledged off-Broadway theatrical production. The then-boyfriend has since become (lyricist and composer of the score) Stephen Trask's manager in Los Angeles, Mitchell himself (with songwriter Stephen Trask) saw his creation grow from off-Broadway curiosity to long-running genuine Manhattan tourist attraction (with various Hollywooders rotating through his lead role), and the best this reviewer gets of their coattails is to witness the final release of Hedwig and the Angry Inch in film form, heartened by the firsthand evidence that showbiz success is indeed within the grasp of those you once knew.
Winner of
both the Audience and Best Director awards at Sundance, Inch takes
up the reins of the once-moribund rock musical and drives it off to heretofore
unexplored lands: following the career trajectory of the “internationally
ignored songstress” Hedwig from her boyhood in East Berlin to her
transgendered arrival in the American Heartland (a sex-reassignment operation
that was only mostly successful, hence the “angry inch”), her
mentoring of a young wanna-be rock singer (who steals her songs and becomes
superstar Tommy Gnosis), and her fall into obscurity performing at restaurants
and dives with names like “Bilgewater’s.” Mitchell exhausts
the entire catalog of rock-star hairstyles and costumes as she and her
band (the Angry Inch) deliver an impressive array of original songs (by
Trask) that are both utterly jaded and yearning for love, like the title
character herself. The one-liners hurtle at you rapidfire (wait until
you see the “bishop in a turtleneck”) until the film loses steam
at the end, coasting to an obscure conclusion that still marks the whole
enterprise as an original. Like Hedwig, you may think you’ve seen
it all, but until you’ve experienced this life told in song (with
stopovers at events like Menses Fair) you haven’t fully rocked out.
Glenn Tryon plays Hiram, a Long Island cabdriver who's caught the flying bug following Lindbergh's renowned Atlantic crossing. He's enormously pleased with his "Hiram For Haste"-emblazoned vehicle, rigged with a slide for the luggage stowed on the roof, and his pet monkey Bobby is always on call in a pinch, like when he needs more peanuts (which is just about always). His latest fare is a soap-company magnate and his lovely daughter-slash-model, whom he delivers to a swanky seaside resort "where the waves were wet and the guests got soaked." Hiram comes on strong to this gal every chance he gets with a confidence usually reserved for stalkers, but the clever intertitles throughout this silent film (example: "A parachute is like a lady's corset - if the string doesn't work, everyone gets a thrill") helps us overlook its substantial narrative illogic and simply enjoy the ride when a shady stockbroker on Wall Street threatens to damage the soap czar's executive standing. Hiram ends up saving the day, but not in any way you'd predict - offering to fly the duo back to Manhattan to address their investors, Hiram takes a very wrong turn - and the unintentional stunt does wonders for their advertising (says Hiram about the natives greeting their unplanned arrival: "They don't speak English - it must be the Bronx").
You'll cackle
over such gems as a parachute with the note "if this parachute fails
to open, get in touch with us immediately" and Hiram's mid-air confession
that he's been learning to fly via correspondence course (and it isn't
until next week that he's going to receive lesson 6 - "how to land"
- so Hiram suggests "we'll have to stay [up] here 'til next week!").
The screening I attended included a series of trailers for films long
since vanished, with titles like Beware of Blondes, The Shady
Lady, and Tracked! ("starring Ranger, Dog Star")
- it was a delicious glimpse into an era when cinema was as unceasingly
optimistic as Hiram himself. And at the end, the final intertitle asks
"It's a Universal picture - How did you like it? Write your opinion
to Carl Laemmle" - can we still speak our minds to the studios these
days? The cumulative snapshot of the past is enough to compensate for
Hero's sometimes absurd storyline that asks us to believe they
all stayed in that plane for two and a half days with no water or bathrooms.
One's just gratified a print still exists - but we hope audiences won't
say the same of Gigli in a hundred years.
High & Low/Heaven & Hell (1963)
Akira Kurosawa
and Toshiro Mifune pair up yet again behind and before the camera, this
time for a distinctly Japanese take on the police procedural. When shoe-company
majority-owner Mufine is pressured to pay out the nose to kidnappers who
mistakenly snatched his chauffeur's son instead of his own, everyone treats
him as the criminal for even contemplating refusing to help. (They should
take a page from the Israeli
government, who learned early on that if you give in once, the hostage-taking
will never end.) Mifune's Mr. Gondo ruins himself financially after bowing
to this peer pressure, but he earns the esteem of the public, and the
police hope to pin an even greater sentence on the criminals out of sympathy,
if they can find them. Kurosawa's trying to illustrate how there are always
rewards for those who sacrifice for others, but to Western audiences it
may come across more as an argument for the preeminent value of conforming
to majority opinion. Once Gondo gets the moral onus off his back, though,
this becomes an entirely different movie: the law tracks their villain
to Dope Alley, where West Side
Story meets Night of the Living Dead with its narcotized
youths loitering in the alleyways in leather jackets. It's an unglamorous
peek into Japan's underbelly, and such a shift in style you wonder if
Kurosawa hasn't pasted together two different projects. High &
Low just holds together to the end, luckily, in time for one more
moral - "success isn't worth losing your humanity" - that perhaps
all nations can agree with. (At least stick around for the single instance
of color in this black-and-white film - and then stop thinking Spielberg
was so ingenious in Schindler's List.)
It's
about time we had another film presenting the unique charms of Chicagoland
(While Were You Sleeping, a good five years ago, was the last of
note), as well as a tribute to all the obsessive list-makers out there
(this critic included). What will appeal to everyone, though, is High
Fidelity's obvious updating of all the John Hughes 80's teen pics
many of us grew up with. John Cusack could well be any of his Hughes-era
characters grown up to his thirties, no longer victimized by the particular
horrors of adolescence but no less subject to all the angst of the heterosexual
dating milieu. Cusack (who co-adapted Nick Hardy's novel and produced)
is now an independent record store owner who, in the wake of his latest
breakup, decides to investigate whatever happened to his top five past
loves to figure out if he is indeed "doomed to be left, doomed to
be rejected." We're subsequently treated to a host of cameos (from
Lisa Bonet to Bruce Springsteen), a soundtrack of no less than 55 tunes,
and a constant stream of pained monologues by Cusack. (Ah, just like old
times.) The film's a bit aleatory, with no easy moral, and in the end
tough to pin down, but this is perhaps the mark of that recently-in-vogue
genre called dramedy, where it's a little heavier than expected, but light
enough to remain unthreatening. Children of the eighties, seek this film
out.
Any film
starring Judy Davis can't be all bad, but this one comes close. You can
see all the signs of Judy's mannered greatness in this 1988 Australian
production, where she plays an itinerant backup singer stranded at a beachside
campground while her car sits in the shop - the same campground where
her long-lost teenage daughter happens to be selling ice cream over the
summer. Their relation, thanks to Gillian Armstrong's painfully obvious
direction, you can see coming from a million miles away, so instead we
focus on the question: will Judy reclaim her daughter or continue to leave
her in the care of her dead husband's aging but still somewhat slutty
mother? Armstrong succeeds in sabotaging every opportunity for a moment
of true emotional impact by repeatedly leaving her actors stranded trying
to work up a good cry. Still, despite the disastrous pacing, Judy communicates
her trademark bemused-on-the-outside/falling-apart-on-the-inside demeanor
that has won over no small number of fans, but her presence can't fix
an emotionally monotone and fundamentally anticlimactic story. As in her
previous, equally tedious collaboration with Anderson, My Brilliant
Career, you feel Davis deserves much better, and is ready to burst
the constraints of such mundane productions. (See The New Age or
Husbands and Wives for the best use of her talents.) We can only
hope her Hollywood moment hasn't yet passed, after being the flavor of
the moment in the early nineties.
Think
you've given in to Hollywood's cheap appeals? Suspect your critical faculties
have all but atrophied? Do I have a litmus test for you. A wildly bland
and very expendable midwest family ends up marooned somewhere in the arid
west, where they are soon set upon by a mildly mutated clan of marauders
dressed in the most ridiculous Indian-slash-caveperson attire. Director
Wes Craven must have thought his casting choices, which include some clearly
inbred types, would be creepy enough to carry the film, but when it becomes
clear the tourists' german shepherd is smarter than any of them, it's
all you can do to pray for a bloodbath to liven things up. Craven can't
even once resort to the horror genre's cheapest ploy - having the bad
guys jump out from the darkness - and you can only wonder what the hell
everyone was thinking when they put this stinker together. Without Craven's
name on the video case, you'd easily mistake this for a student film project.
Notable only for claiming the mom from E.T. among the victims.
A cross-cultural
foray into an Italian-American subculture you may or may not find intriguing,
Household Saints is probably someone's tribute to their post-WWII
New York City childhood, but remains an insular enough document that the
rest of us feel stuck on the outside looking in at some perplexing characters.
The film's attention to detail in recreating a world suffused with heat,
food, superstition, Catholicism, and gambling is to be commended, but
it remains throughout an ethnographic curiosity that fails to connect
with any universals. And when young Teresa (Lili Taylor, playing the innocent
once again) becomes obsessed with living an austere and saintly life (a
"little flower") to the point of either having compromised her
sanity or truly seeing Jesus, there's even less for us to identify with.
The only moment of true satisfaction comes when we realize Teresa has
more in common than she thinks with her uncle Nicky, who's obsession with
Asian women earns him the opprobium of his community; both seek out the
love of an unobtainable partner and die tragically because of it. Director
Nancy Savoca happily retains a good sense of spiritual mystery from start
to finish, and Taylor's so sweet it's heartbreaking, but it's all so wholly
other and unrecognizable that little sympathy is possible. Save this one
for anthropology class.
The House on Haunted Hill (1999)
Sad,
isn't it, how hard a film has to work just to end up average. It's interesting
enough at first trying to distinguish which macabre events in the abandoned
mental hospital are the doings of the hyper-estranged spouses (constantly
trying to achieve widow/er status) or the machinations of the malevolent
building itself, but once the unhappily marrieds are finished off, all
we have to fear is some very inadequate CGI. The House on Haunted Hill
tries very hard to be stylish, with an imitation Brothers Quay opening
credit sequence and plenty of set decorations worthy of a Nine Inch Nails
video, but it all degenerates, like so many films do, to a simple run-it's-coming-right-for-us
arrangement which would fail to keep the attention of the most horror-film-naïve.
Sadder yet how much potential the film's opening scenes held for a completely
different (and much more engaging) movie, exhibiting the immense fun a
roller coaster would provide if it pretended to fall apart with you still
zooming around on it. Are you listening, Six Flags?
Though
set in 1959, this film more accurately belongs in the thirties. That's
when talking films came upon the scene, and talk, talk, talk they did,
and quickly. The Hudsucker Proxy serves as an homage to that cinematic
era, with plenty of nonstop chatter, as well as various theatrical mannerisms,
plot devices, and fashion statements we associate with Depression-era
moviemaking. In reproducing such a distinct period the Coen brothers once
again prove themselves visual wizards, but sadly, all that's going on
here is a parade of cinematic quotations. It's like watching Gus VanSant's
recent remake of Psycho, where he simply re-shot each scene exactly
as Hitchcock did: the farthest thing from original, though you can admire
the effort. Proxy therefore becomes itself a proxy for classical
Hollywood, perhaps only of use to diehard film buffs, otherwise why not
just go see one of the originals? With a game cast, including the dubiously
talented Jennifer Jason Leigh, whose continued success at finding work
is clearly her greatest skill.
Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (1978)
Ah,
the days when the veiled subtext of a painting could provoke a national
scandal and invite government intervention. Tonnerre's 1889 "L'Artiste,"
one of a series of seven paintings premiered at a salon exhibition and
the one subsequently seized by French police, would certainly qualify
as among those curiously subversive works, had it actually existed. But
director Raul Ruiz instead invents a wholly fictional historical conundrum
and piques our curiosity in the form of a fraudulent television documentary
in which an aged and weary art historian explores the various interpretative
possibilities behind this series of paintings and guesses what the now-missing
canvas might have shown. This exegetical detective work is performed by
means of various tableaux vivants restaging the scenes of the remaining
six works, arriving at a possibly occult theme connecting the series.
It's all very serious and more than a little baffling, but the intrigue
is not diminished by its abstruseness, and suggests a delicious age when
art's power and mystery and relevance in daily affairs was uncontested.
An art film about art: definitely a guilty pleasure for closet aesthetes.
Or, portrait
of a masochist. Montgomery Clift's Quebecois priest obtains in the confessional
booth valuable information toward a murder investigation, and while the
actual killer plants evidence that convinces the public Clift was the
actual culprit, Clift can't provide his actual alibi because that would
expose another longtime friend's misguided past. It's incredible that
Clift would put up with all the opprobrium in the name of following to
the letter his understanding of his job duties, but I suppose without
his misplaced convictions we wouldn't have much of a movie. (We don't
have much anyway other than O.E Hasse's fantastically creepy embodiment
of egocentrism.) It's all just slightly divorced from reality, with every
scene existing solely to prop up the film's flimsy pretexts - I suppose
there are folks out there with comparable martyr complexes, but director
Alfred Hitchcock's mistaken if he thinks that particular pathology makes
for interesting movie heroes. With Anne Baxter (for some obligatory love
scenes with Clift - although these took place before he took his vows),
Karl Malden as the detective, and Dolly Haas as the killer's wife whose
conscience you just know will get the best of her.
Boy, was
it ever a dark and stormy night, and it seems that while a condemned killer
received a last-minute hearing to re-evaluate his mental fitness and ultimate
culpability, various importuned travellers are finding shelter at a remote
and decaying motel - and then start dying one by one. The central quandary:
how are these separate events related? The hapless cast includes Rebecca
DeMornay, Clea DuVall, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Jogn Cusack, Amanda Peet,
Ray Liotta, and Jake Busey, and some are lots more suspicious than others
when the body count rises - but there are enough red herrings to populate
an entire fishery here, and while some clues are plenty juicy (a duplicate
motel across the field? Indian tombs? Cusack reading Being and Nothingness
and taking psychotropics?), other developments defy all logic - which
is itself a clue. (As one doomed individual notes, "the story's so
unbelievable it might be true.") Director James Mangold must've enjoyed
playing with our heads with this alternately deconstructed and reconstructed
whodunit, but Identity ends up being too clever by half. (Nor does
the film present a remotely plausible depiction of our legal system, which
ultimately knocks the whole shebang's legs out from under.) I suppose
Pirandello would've eaten this up, but when a film constantly rewrites
the rules we get no pleasure in trying to figure things out. At least
we've Cusack for our anchor, an actor who's developed some gravitas over
the years - it seems aging does have its benefits.
Even the
likes of Akira Kurosawa had off-days - and with Fear he tackles the madness
of nuclear weaponry with a wearying Toshiro Mifune vehicle that itself
threatens your sanity. Mifune plays an aging foundry owner who insists
his family move with him to Brazil to hide from the ever-present threat
of global nuclear conflict. His many grown children resist such an idea,
and drag him into court to have him declared incompetent and wrest him
of his controlling interest in the family business. Kurosawa not only
litters the film with the occasional longeur to test your patience, and
elides past the truly dramatic moments, but the whole production goes
overlong and heavy on the histrionics. (Oh, and apparently he has some
point to make with the boiling weather - everyone's always sweating extravagantly.)
The Japanese can certainly be forgiven for a heightened fear of atomic
destruction, but when the lead character is eventually exposed as having
numerous mistresses and illegitimate offspring it's difficult to sympathize
when he demands a dozen people uproot their lives simply to indulge his
anxieties. (And yes, Kurosawa even asks the clichéd "Or are
we the mad ones?" - after watching this film, it's certainly possible.)
A modest
little chamber piece from Manual de Oliveira, depicting the slow onset
of grief. Michel Piccoli's a renowned thespian who suddenly finds himself
widowed, and distracts himself with his grandson Serge and as a last-minute
replacement on a film set of Joyce's Ulysses (with John Malkovich
as the patient director) before the reality of his loss finally takes
hold. The biggest surprise here is the film's brevity; I've always expected
foreign films to take their sweet time getting to their epiphanies, but
de Oliveira closes his tale just as I was settling in. (He's also apparently
a theater fan - and if you don't know your Ionesco, you may end up as
lost as I.) The film's focus on ordinary events is probably the point,
as even those facing tragedy have to get through their daily routines,
and Piccoli's abrupt resignation once the denial period's over is as accurate
as it gets. Home does exhibit some creative camerawork, if by "creative"
I mean "stationary" - more than once the camera stays behind
long after characters leave the area, and in one instance an entire conversation
transpires with nothing on the screen but the actors' feet. For subtitle
neophytes this may be just the thing, but for others Home's pat
ending will seem little more than a warm-up to something grander.
I may be on the verge of a trend, started last January when I fell in love with 8 Women: once again the first film I see in the new year is destined to make the list of the year's best. When just reviewing your notes gives you lumps in your throat, it's clear something tremendous has come along; Jim Sheridan's semi-autobiographical chronicle of an immigrant Irish family's early struggles in Manhattan (it's supposed to be the eighties, but the Jessica Alba billboard in Times Square betrays them) shows even this fiercely-independent reviewer just how gratifying raising a family can be. Of course, if your two daughters happen to be as adorable as Ariel and Christine, then your parenting heart will ever run out of gas: the former's incurably infatuated with E.T., and convinced in the prophylactic powers of her "magic" lemon drops, and the latter's recording everything with her treasured video camera and believes she's got three wishes to spend in this life - and the demands of relocating in a new country require her to spend them carefully. They've found a flat in "the junkies' building" with no elevator and no protection from New York's famed humidity, dad's auditioning daily on Broadway, and a few floors down lives "the man who screamed" - a Haitian artist who's not coping well with his AIDS diagnosis.
Sheridan
weaves together scenes of daily joys and disappointments over Christie's
already-nostalgic narration, and we learn that their parents are still
nursing the heartache of their son Frankie's death (who both had a brain
tumor and fell down a flight of stairs), for which everyone seems to blame
themselves. As Mateo, Djimon Hounsou hardly resembles someone approaching
death's door with those sculpted pecs, but he plays a crucial role in
the family's healing and establishing new roots in an expensive city,
and Samantha Morton and Paddy Considine as the parents effectively demonstrate
the indefatigable make-believe that is constantly necessary to keep a
family together. Don't dare pass this film by before 2004's out, especially
to catch Christie's destined-for-immortality line, "I've been carrying
this family on my back for over a year." (That ranks right up there
with "I'm seriously beginning to question your commitment to Sparkle
Motion!")
Highly nervous
and impressionable nanny Deborah Kerr is hired to look after Michael Redgrave's
two kids, both of which have the shared tendency to giggle at inappropriate
moments. Maybe Kerr's rather hastily-concocted explanation that ghosts
are possessing her wards has some merit - 'cause they sure aren't acting
like human beings. In fact, there's very little at work here that could
be called naturalistic - violins clue you in to suggestive lines of dialogue,
director Jack Clayton works overtime to infuse mundane moments with dramatic
significance, and Kerr's mannered and stiff delivery belongs to an era
of gothic productions long past. (It must've been the paradigmatic scene
of her walking through the old mansion's creaky halls in her nightgown,
candelabra in hand, that gave her the idea we'd buy into her melodramatics.)
Everyone starts behaving too knowingly too soon, bypassing any effort
to help us suspend disbelief, and instead we have to endure The Innocents'
purely cinematic logic playing itself out without a single legitimate
fright. How Kerr came up with her "solution" to all this paranormal
interference is beyond me, but any sort of explanation would fall way
short of justifying this forced and futile fandango.
Is this
film about marriage, revenge, the legal system, manipulation? Director
Todd Field's craftiest move was withholding any obvious message from this
dour New England chronicle in which just about everyone's made their share
of mistakes. You're never quite sure what's going to happen next, but
you know it's not going to be pleasant - the classical Greek music Sissy
Spacek has her music students sing invites sufficiently ominous comparisons
to Hellenic tragedies. And when her son dies by the hand of the jealous
almost-ex-husband of the girl he was dating (an astonishingly effective
Marisa Tomei), a girl she always felt was beneath them, the path mourning
takes them down is fraught with its own moral dangers. Bedroom's
a surprisingly quiet film, and open to divergent interpretations, and
it may not wow you as much as all its Oscar® nominations would have
you expect, but the matter-of-fact pace testifies to a confidence in its
material.
In the Realm of Passion (1978)
Though
their titles share the same first four words, don't confuse this film
with Nagisa Oshima's previous production, In the Realm of the Senses,
which achieved notoriety for being initially banned in the U.S. for its
hardcore sexual content. The later film, In the Realm of Passion,
may be more worthy of censorship, if only for being so boring. (Additionally,
once you've created a worldwide scandal with a film that blends art and
pornography, to follow that with a straightforward un-erotic tale of feudal
adultery and murder will disappoint your new fan base.) Passion
presents an attractive village wife and mother who falls for a younger
man, kills her husband to remove him from the picture, and is subsequently
haunted by her deceased spouse's ghost. As the authorities start to snoop
around, the guilt and deception and paranormal pestering eat away at the
lovers' nerves, and things end badly, surprising none of us. This venture's
purely forgettable, and not even when compared only to Oshima's early
sensation. It's possible he wanted to prove he could still do "regular"
movies, but he needn't waste our time trying to be average.
We probably
have the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
movie to thank for reminding us just what a threat someone could be if
imperceptible to the naked eye - as in, how do you know he's not in the
room with you, ready to pounce? - but in his debut film, Jack Griffin
was no pushover then either. Claude Rains synthesizes his breakthrough
formula (from a flower in India, apparently) back in the era when scientists
were romantic figures (and back when you could smoke in laboratories,
I guess), and predictably tests it on himself; now permanently bending
light waves around his body, he holes up in the British countryside in
the Lion's Head Inn (back in the era when the ladies drank their beer
separately in a back room) and puts his test tubes to work to find an
antidote. What he didn't count on was the locals (like the inimitable
Una O'Connor) making a fuss, and his same potion slowly driving him mad.
Rains (in his first American film) plays the megalomaniac to the hilt,
first dreaming of scientific acclaim and a financial windfall to win over
Titanic's Gloria Stuart, then
plotting to create "invisible armies" to take over the world.
And he just might do it, too, considering how incompetent the local constabulary
is - also since they think it's just a hoax to drum up more business for
the Lion's Head. Director James Whale keeps the whole thriller at a manageable
scale, and the special effects remain convincing to this day. And it's
for good reason this wasn't set in the USA - the skittish Second-Amendment-empowered
populace would've had bullets flying all over the place.
Finally,
an animated feature you'll be dragging the kids to see, instead of vice-versa,
and not just because no one bursts into song. The Iron Giant's
coy look back at fifties sci-fi films, while advertising a now-hip retro
aesthetic, provides endless laughs for grown-ups, and that inexhaustible
thematic chestnut where boy-meets-special-friend will hook everyone else
in. The animation is first-rate while remaining unique in style, the characters
are all sufficiently quirky, and the amnesiac title character's ongoing
discovery of its myriad of abilities is what propels the story to its
dramatic apex. As in E.T. and a host of other children's science-fiction
tales, once the authorities catch wind of the benign alien visitor's presence,
they can do nothing but cause harm; but unlike E.T., once this guy gets
pushed around too far, he starts kicking ass. Don't say I didn't warn
you if you rush to ToysR'Us without the kids to look for the action figure.
Buffoonish
acting, juvenile plotting, and completely obvious developments –
and it doesn’t matter one bit. We’ve got Shaolin monks (the
creators of kung fu) duking it out in 1850’s China, some in the service
of a corrupt warlord and others seeking to liberate his exploited laborers.
Hidden among them is the Robin Hood-ish Iron Monkey, and though the storytelling
is pretty elementary, and out hero’s victory over corrupt officials
hardly in doubt, the martial arts prove so exhilarating you can forgive
them film of most everything. Director Yuen Wo Ping (he of later Kill
Bill and Matrix fame) constantly
ups the ante in this comic book-esque universe – just when you think
the combat can’t get any more outlandish, you’re proved wrong
over and over – and the final showdown with the archvillain atop
a scattering of vertical poles is nothing short of insane. A co-worker
with a taste for Hong Kong’s output once explained that martial arts
films are close cousins to porn – take away the action, and what
have you got? – but it’s still a kinaesthetic art form unto
itself.
Four lonely
guys with no social skills - a recipe for disaster, missing one ingredient:
a defenseless female. When a beautiful young New Yorker takes a sabbatical
in rural Connecticut to write her first novel, a trio of shirtless hicks
rubs their heads together and sees an opportunity to help the village
idiot finally lose his virginity. The gang rape that follows is utterly
repugnant, no less so for being so drawn out: stealing their victim away
to the woods, they assault her, let her wander for a mile or two, assault
her again, let her go, and so forth until she escapes to her house, only
to find them waiting for her there as well. Such visceral cruelty doesn't
make this sort of evil any less unknowable - even rape victims themselves
have difficulty figuring out the reasons behind such a crime - but we
hear of this often enough in the news, and for once we can't just shrug
it off. This is a surprisingly languid movie, not remotely sensationalized
despite the subject matter, with such assured performances from everyone
(though the mentally challenged character floats millimeters short of
parody). Most assured, of course, is Camille Keaton, who upon recovering
from her injuries takes justice into her own hands and executes her assailants
as methodically as they violated her. The men can't fathom the idea that
a woman might fight back, and the role reversal proves fantastically satisfying.
"You exposed your legs to me….he saw half of your tits!"
explains one of her final targets from a strangely Islamic perspective
as he pleads for mercy, and we can only wonder how different the heterosexual
dating scene might be if the "weaker sex" always had an ax handy.
Ever trying
to knock films off my "To Be Seen" list, I finally mustered
the courage to rent this little chestnut just before the millennium ran
out. When a film achieves the status of a seasonal must-see, I am usually
inclined to run the other direction in an effort to preserve my freedom
of choice. But finally my compulsion to leave no film unwatched trumped
my pride, and what I found was a film much darker than I expected. James
Stewart, as George Bailey, is a man who must repeatedly defer his dreams
to look after the needs of others (primarily his father's modest Building
and Loan), the virtue of such a decision never really paying off like
you'd hope in a good Christian universe. Despite all his last-minute saves
his frustrations only increase, and Bailey's surliness grows throughout
the film as he feels more and more trapped in the town of his birth. Most
everyone else is as petty as you'd expect, and more than once George is
tempted to take an easier route, until a bank colleague's simple mistake
finally renders worthless all his sacrifices. (It's a morally chastening
film, to be sure: these days we're far from inclined to forsake our own
ambitions for anybody.) It's not for quite a while that we're finally
introduced to George's guardian angel, who famously treats him to a hypothetical
view of the world had he never existed, but even after this Candidean
insight ("we live in the best of all possible worlds," remember?)
strengthens George's resolve, there still seems no way out of his troubles
until the film's final minute. It's a much more mature work than I ever
anticipated, and not as smarmy to quite the degree I'd feared. One viewing
of It's a Wonderful Life in my lifetime may be enough, but certainly
some of the hype is justified. (Next up on my list of horrors: The
Sound of Music. I may need another year or two before I get the nerve.)
James and the Giant Peach (1996)
James
Henry Trotter is an orphan who lives with two horrible aunts perpetually
forcing housework upon him in their dreary cottage upon a rocky peak on
the British coast. All he has for comfort are his dreams to one day see
the Empire State Building, until an old itinerant stranger entrusts him
with a bag of magical crocodile tongues, whose touch accidentally enlarges
an ordinary peach to gigantic proportions. His greedy aunts charge admission
for tourists to behold the monstrosity, until James explores its insides,
finds an assortment of equally enlarged insect and invertebrate occupants,
and the peach rolls off into the ocean. It's on this adventure across
the Atlantic (first by sea, then by air) that the film switches from live-action
to animation, and James and the Giant Peach is to be commended
for never shying away from the sort of terrors children often face but
most children's films refuse to address for fear of compounding their
anxieties. James and his inhuman crew (including the voice of Susan Sarandon
as a French spider, David Thewlis as an earthworm, Richard Dreyfuss as
a centipede, Jane Leeves as a ladybug, and Simon Callow as a grasshopper)
face the challenges of navigation, starvation, and assorted maritime threats
en route to America, until the ending attempts to stretch our suspension
of disbelief to the breaking point by merging the fantastic and live worlds
with a hackneyed resolution that hopefully the film's target demographic
will overlook. Until then, however, we're charmed by the songs, the characters,
and the creative rendering of foes from metallic mechanized sharks and
ghostly parrot skeletons, and lines for which we probably have Roald Dahl
to thank - did you know what it's called when an insect kills himself?
"He's committed pesticide!"
This Spanish
film's subtitle is "A Tale of Ham and Passion," and for good
reason, as there's more meat and sex from start to finish than at an Atkins
Diet Singles convention. There's also plenty of both on Javier Bardem's
Raul, who boinks both Penélope Cruz and her mother while extolling
the aphrodisiac qualities of pork. Cruz has an oblivious fiancé,
José Luis, whose entrepreneurial ambitions hope to take them both
out of the parched countryside whose major employer is an underwear factory.
While Raul deals with his lust triangle, Penélope's mom is also
fooling around with José Luis' dad, and the couplings get increasingly
complicated from there. Director J.J Bigas Luna (who also co-wrote the
screenplay with Cuca Canals) clearly intends for José Luis to represent
the new moneyed (though emascualted) Spain, while Raul stands for the
old Iberian male who lacks resources but remains all man; aside from such
metaphorical strategies, Jamón distinguishes itself as perhaps
the most sexually-charged film you're likely to come across. Bardem's
studly beyond human understanding, raising the bar of maschismo to stratospheric
heights as he bullfights nude or auditions at the factory's underwear-model
cattle call; the plot may defy reason at times, and Cruz is as odd-looking
as ever, but as far as non-X-rated "marital aids" go Jamón
is possibly without peer.
The less-sermonizing
flipside to Traffic,
simply showing lives involved in recreational drug use rather than using
them as a springboard to a message - although few will think heroin is
a good thing afterwards. Alison Maclean (whose 1992 debut, Crush,
showed immense promise) transposes Dennis Johnson's novel to the big screen
and follows antihero Billy Crudup through his early adulthood in a series
of circumstances whose only common thread is his love for mood-altering
substances. The meandering tale, set in the seventies, takes him with
Samantha Morton to an abortion clinic, into a brilliant split-screen with
an overdosing Denis Leary, helping optically-impaled humans and orphaned
baby rabbits with Jack Black, and into the arms of a crippled Holly Hunter
when he tries to get clean. Son admirably resists moralizing, but
it's clear enough these folks simply can't soberly handle responsibility,
emotions, or the consequences of their actions. Plenty of funny scenes,
and a few enormously unfunny ones - one moment where Crudup disposes of
his girlfriend's farewell letter is crushing - and though at one point
Crudup complains "all this work is messing with my high," it's
amazing he had enough resources to stay so perpetually buzzed as long
as he did.
Writer/director
John Dahl taps into a previously-unexplored subculture for his latest
creepy and unhygienic and sociopathic antagonist – truckers. This
one’s named Rusty Nail, and he apparently has lots of free time to
exact vengeance on the little drivers in his way. Rusty’s a little
too implausibly omniscient and indomitable, but he’s an effective
source of terror nonetheless, especially since Dahl never really shows
him as he makes life along the interstates a living hell for some college
kid after they play a CB prank on him. The plot’s pretty forced,
the dialogue stilted, the escapes predictably last-minute, the red herrings
and jokes a little too obvious, but the formula’s still just barely
adequate. If theaters still did double-features, Joyride would’ve
been the perfect ‘B’ program – pity it has to con you of
your eight bucks posing as the main event nowadays.
Never
has a title character appeared so little in her own movie - but without
her, Jane Fonda's Lillian Hellman would have ended up a vastly different
person. Based on Hellman's memoirs of her alleged experiences in the 1930's
& 40's, Fonda spends a good deal of the film in the relatively superficial
pursuit of literary (and financial) greatness, but when her childhood
friend Julia (Vanessa Redgrave, in an Oscar®-winning performance)
recruits her to smuggle fifty thousand dollars into Nazi-ruled Berlin
to aid the antifascist movement, the author finds her nerves somewhat
ill-equipped. Told largely with flashbacks and a montage of disjointed
episodes, Julia is a quietly understated picture - exactly the
opposite of Hellman's personality - and requires force of nature Fonda
to seethe just under the surface as she desperately hopes enduring all
this international intrigue will renew a friendship irreparably altered
by war. It's a distinctly unglamorous role, and Fonda is perfect, smoking
and stewing and largely helpless. All shot in that fabulous foggy film
stock of the 70's.
A plain
Jane wavers between two spiritual extremes as she tries to face the way
of the (Italian) world - that all married folks retain a mistress/lover
on the side. Giulieta Masina, real-life spouse to director Federico Fellini,
puts on a brave face as her more glamorous pals and relatives walk all
over her, and her husband philanders almost openly, and Fellini's usual
weakness for parades and pageantry and gorgeous ladies fills the screen
with all sorts of optical delights. Juliet explores all sorts of mystical
paths in an attempt to simply accept the decadence around her, and in
the end it's unclear whether she learns to let go of her hang-ups, or
begins a descent into madness. In the meantime, though, a restored print
making the art-theater rounds dazzles with some marvelous color schemes
and unnerves with some genuinely creepy moments where Juliet's psychic
glimpses take a dark turn. It's possible this film can only be truly understood
from an autobiographical perspective - Fellini was hardly a devotee of
monogamy, and note how his central character's name mirrors his wife's
- but as ever in Fellini's output, the joy is in the tale's telling.
A terrifying
primer on life in Afghanistan under Taliban rule, and all the more credible
for being made before September eleventh, and by Iranians; if filmmakers
from one Islamic Republic find another Sharian society extreme, then you
know it's on the nerotic side. A Canadian lady of Afghan descent dons
a burka (all the more regrettable for her striking beauty) and crosses
from the free world into this land of "famine, suffering, and massacre"
to reach her despairing sister who's promised to kill herself soon over
the constraints imposed by the religious zealots who insist women are
barely better than animals. As she journeys across the parched Afghan
plains, deserts, and mountains perpetually risking her own liberty were
the menfolk to discover her escorts were not truly her relatives, Nafas
(Niloufar Pazira) encounters girls who adorn themselves extravagantly
with bangles and makeup even though no one will ever see them, a devout
nation with more than its share of thieves, petrifying boys' schools whose
students do nothing but pore over the Qu'ran, and childrens' dolls used
as landmines. It's those buried explosives that prompt one of the movie's
most pathetic sequences - a Red Cross outpost (staffed only by two European
women who speak Afghan but perilously refuse to wear burkas) trying to
match prosthetics to limbless mine victims who chase on crutches after
the latest shipments of false legs that are individually parachuted to
the site. (Equally sad is when a man comes looking for a pair of legs
for his disfigured wife, and he throws a burka over them to see how they'll
look on her.) This is, in Nafas' words, a nation where "everything
is at war" and "weapons are the only modern thing," and
writer/director Mohsen Mahkmalbaf loses us in the seamless documentary-like
feel exploring a land as medieval as can imagine. (It was actually filmed
in the border area between Afghanistan and Iran.) An already-surreal adventure
has curveballs to spare, however - like when she meets an African-American
doctor (Hassan Tantai, whose presence provided the film with unexpected
American publicity) who lives among them but can't grow facial hair,
and thus must don a fake beard to avoid charges of impiety - it's like
a burka for a guy.
I
guess we can be thankful for television for one thing - providing satirists
with endless fodder for mockery. Kentucky Fried Movie skewers TV
shows, commercials, news broadcasts, pornography, and even educational
films in ways now perhaps overly-familiar to twenty-first century audiences,
but it still has enough juice to distract for ninety minutes. It's surprising
that a segment featuring a talk show where the overhead sound mike fails
to stay unobtrusive can still provoke so many giggles, but clearly some
elements of comedy are eternal, as when the prisoner of a ruthless kung
fu chieftain receives the cruelest possible punishment: "Take him
to Detroit!" We get presidential assassination board games, the United
Appeal for the Dead (soliciting donations to help those with "this
debilitating disability"called death), and "Science Series #5:
Zinc Oxide and You," which illustrates a bit too literally what life
would be like without that valuable chemical compound. There are enough
flashes of zany brilliance that would strike gold in the creators' next
project (ever hear of Airplane!?) to suggest that this film is
the precursor to that particular school of comedy; our first clue is the
cameo by Stephen Stucker, whom Zucker/Abrams/Zucker would put to fuller
use in their subsequent film, achieving immortality with lines like "Well,
it's a hat, a brooch, a pterodactyl……."
Dogme95
adherent Kristian Levring throws together the likes of Jennifer Jason
Leigh, Bruce Davison, Janet McTeer, the late Brion James, and Romane Bohringer
(among others) as a group of travellers stranded in the African desert
and none too pleased with each other's company. Already fragile marriages
tear at the seams, dads and sons air long-simmering grievances, old men
lust after young women, and amidst this "striptease of basic human
needs" they attempt to stage King Lear to provide some structure
to their bleak days and keep one foot in civilized humanity. It's an odd
and hastily-contrived conceit whose relevance you'll question as much
as its participants do, but it's soon clear that King's content
matters less than the riveting performances by its cast. The use of digital
video makes for some gorgeous desert shots, both the oranges during high
noon and the blues at dawn - and cliché though the plot may become
when life starts imitating the play, it's all not half as melodramatic
as it could've been in lesser hands. We know next to nothing about these
folks from start to finish, but that's only because they're starting to
realize in extremis how little they've come to know themselves.
The biggest surprise here is Ms. Leigh; it's well-established I've yet
to be convinced of her greatness as an actress, but here it appears she
has an aptitude for playing a bad actress - which is a start.
It's fifteen
years after the Nazis were sent packing, but according to Wolfgang Staudte's
picture they still find the remains of soldiers every day in German soil
long after they went missing - but this time the skeleton unearthed at
the town festival isn't "just another unknown soldier." These
are the bones of one of their own, a boy named Robert who deserted his
post as the Allies closed in and risked his family's honor (and livelihood)
by returning home to hide. Staudte flashes back and forth from the present-day
village (with its convivial and upstanding citizenry) to the same place
during wartime, where we find that an unprepossessing street corner was
where deserters were regularly executed, the power-drunk mayor denounced
his neighbors at any opportunity, and even the priest lacked the courage
to shelter the desperate Robert. No wonder no one wants to discuss the
past - they'd rather focus on the New Germany, which has "a sense
of honor again" - and they excuse their past failings with "I
was only doing my duty." Robert may declare he's "betrayed the
Führer," but it's his former friends and family that proved
the greater traitors to their fellow man - not only did their village
have French servants brought in from the labor camps, they allow the sins
of an entire country to fall upon their sons. It's a searing indictment
that doesn't shy from the psychological realities of a defeated nation
- everyone wants to behave like an entire war never happened, and near
the end of the conflict the wearied populace simply yearned for defeat.
A Cliff's Notes™ presentation of The Taming of the Shrew with a parallel storyline thrown in where the two estranged leads, performing Shrew on Broadway, work out their own differences over the course of the production. Their speedy marital reconciliation is pretty implausible after what we take to have been some protracted divorce proceedings, but it's possible that back then the only way to make the topic of divorce palatable was to portray it was a stepping stone to even tighter renewed matrimonial bonds. One thing's for sure - the 3-D effects (if you're as lucky as I, and got to see a theatrical screening with the special glasses) definitely should've been adequate competition for the emerging threat of television. Director George Sidney makes sure plenty of items are regularly thrown at the fourth wall (a trumpet, a glove, confetti) and situates his feuding characters in long hallways and rooms where the spatial potential can be maximized. Without the 3-D, though, Kate would be nowhere - as a straight musical it's unexceptional and a little messy, as songs are shoehorned in with any excuse. (And one inadvertent effect of the gimmick is that any surface imperfections on the celluloid come zipping before our faces like flies.) You still shouldn't miss James Whitmore, or Ann Miller performing "Too Darn Hot" like a cyclone, or a young Bob Fosse showing us that he really could dance with the best of 'em back then.
Can you
name me an Oscar®-nominated film that takes place almost entirely
on a sailboat? Think 1962's Knife in the Water, where a bored Polish
couple pick up a hitchhiker and subsequently invite him on their Sunday
sailing getaway, but later discover there's room psychologically only
for two aboard. Director Roman Polanski's first (and only) feature-length
Polish production is not a thriller in the conventional sense, for the
threat is ill-defined, and we are quickly distracted by the film's languid
pace and comprehensive tour through the sailing lexicon. But mutual contempt
and male territorialism are rife on deck, and even without a clear sense
of narrative trajectory, it's still only a question of how badly relations
will sour. Polanski understood well the geometric possibilities of a sailboat
within a frame, and spares no effort in visually communicating the appeal
(and potential dangers) of such a demanding nautical passion. If black
and white films with subtitles aren't your thing, let me guarantee that
you can't predict the ending, that everyone ends up guilty of something,
and that you will ultimately understand why the director's attention to
detail earned him instant international fame. Featuring a groovy jazz
soundtrack paired alternately with silence to keep you on your toes.
Is Kevin
Spacey an alien or isn’t he? Mysteries like this have been done before,
and better (cf. Man Facing Southeast), as has the patient-teaches-the-doctor
shtick, and the whole don’t-let-work-overshadow-your-loved-ones moral
that at least helps distract us from the film’s central failure to
adequately answer its own questions. It’s possible Spacey both is
and isn’t an extra-terrestrial, but the puzzle takes a back seat
to feel-good schmaltz, and is aided not one bit by stereotypical mental-ward
inmates, lame dialogue, and Spacey’s apparent need to turn his back
on playing darker (i.e., more interesting) characters. It all looks and
sounds pretty, but it’s utterly tired, and Mulholland Drive
made more sense.
She's
wrong for leaving her child; he's wrong for having taken his wife for
granted. The victim of their mistakes: their child, ultimately. Dustin
Hoffman and Meryl Streep, as your average nuclear family, have spent their
married lives making individual sacrifices (her professional dreams, his
quality time with spouse & son), and when mom finally walks out, the
father has to learn how to juggle family and career, an entertaining gender
role-reversal. Thus a father finally learns how to parent, and a son learns
to adjust to having one adult in the house. What we are witnessing is
two guys learning to coexist, and helping each other out as befits a true
family, but then mom comes back to claim their son as her exclusive parenting
responsibility. Streep believes her son needs her more than he does his
dad, but Hoffman argues in court, "What law is there that says a
woman is a better parent by virtue of her sex?" Both parties are
revealed to have been less than perfect, but both have learned their lessons,
and the ending is wholly unexpected. Though the film's title wrongly suggests
this is largely another courtroom drama, its excellence comes from its
focus on who all the fuss is supposedly about: Justin Henry, the son,
in a deservedly Oscar®-nominated performance at the age of eight.
Why not make this film required viewing before getting married and breeding?
Just ignore the fact that it doesn't look remotely cold outside when the
action is supposed to be taking place in New York City in December, which
I know for a fact is usually damn chilly.
La Chasse aux Papillons (1992)
An utterly
charming document of a dying age, in which the inheritors of all the enormous
chateaux all over France no longer know what to do with them. What we're
witnessing in Otar Iosseliani's 1992 pan-European production is the passing
of an entire social class, no less sympathetic for all their assets and
creature comforts, and subject to all manner of predators hoping to come
into possession of as many of their antiquities as decorum will allow.
Iosseliani does not stage this as some sort of tragedy, though; La
Chasse has instead a documentary feel, largely just following the
countrified daily routine of a hearty septuagenarian who rides her bike
everywhere, plays trombone in the village band, and fishes in her pond
with a bow and arrow. The film does little more than eavesdrop on conversations
and record the villagers' various eccentricities, and withholds judgement
as we witness the generation gap grow even wider, with the youngsters
displaying little appreciation for their ancestors' residence apart from
its monetary value. Similarly, the encroachment of a multicultural France
makes itself known even en provence, as the matriarch generously hosts
a retreat of hare krishnas and their maharajah, entertains Japanese tourists
exploring the insides of her home, and, thankfully, fails to see what
happens when their poor eastern European relations inherit the entire
place. La Chasse's leisurely pace does not proclude a good deal
of fancy, though, with everyone either constantly hiding the silverware
in the toilet or trying to steal it, and the mansion's league of ghosts
playing pool when no one else is around; Iosseliani's magical light touch
redeems what could've been a most depressing ending, instead always emphasizing
the joy to be had while you can have it.
It was odd
watching this supremely languid Argentinian production (in collaboration
with Spain) back in early 2002, knowing that Argentina's concurrent economic
collapse meant that in the real world, this film's rich idlers' money
was no longer any good, and they were in the same boat as the Indian servants
they were all too often belittling. Lucretia Martel assumes the money's
there, but the problem is a clear defect of character among the central
personae. When the family's eldest son is called back from the big city
to care for his fragile mother (she fell down in a drunken stupor onto
her glass, slicing her chest) he becomes once again subject to the stupefying
inertia that dominates the household. The decrepit mansion, with its filthy
swimming pool, embodies the literal definition of decadent - "decaying"
- and its residents just lay around in the heat with their drinks, and
the TV constantly on - it's the accoutrements of ghetto with none of the
actual material deprivation. Martel's portrait of spiritual atrophy is
a surprisingly mature first feature, unique in its rendering of doom without
anyone putting up a fight - a state all too recognizable among those in
our own communities.
This isn't
one of Orson Welles' best pictures, but it may be his most misanthropic.
You can feel the venom as Welles broadly ridicules the rich by parading
their most annoying and/or grotesque examples before the camera, and his
own distinctly proletarian seaman can hardly be blamed for feeling above
them all. And when he's brought to trial for the murder of one of those
aristocratic wastes of space, he sets the whole legal system in his critical
sights: the DA interrogates him so tauntingly, the gallery howls with
impunity, the whole setup is so uncivilized - and that's the point. (We
do get Rita Hayworth as a blonde, and speaking Chinese, but she's not
much of a role model either.) Welles' final sequence in a carnival funhouse
makes for a crystal-clear homage to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
and serves as an effective summation of his view that people are just
plain bent, but the intrigue isn't there, and Lady ends up being
uncharitable to its audience the most.
There
are arguably different degrees of criminal aptitude among those who conduct
themselves outside of the law: some will kill to get what they want, others
cannot cross that line. The thieves in this film are masters of their
trade, but after pulling off perhaps their most skillful caper yet, find
themselves obligated to commit murder in order to cover their tracks.
These are, for the most part, thoroughly likeable men, clearly still communicating
with their consciences, and their gradual discovery that they can be no
more than thieves sets in motion the comedic mess that follows. Their
typically British sense of propriety also interferes with their homicidal
efficiency and complicates relations among them until we find their targets
have changed - to each other. Ultimately, each character, including their
elderly original intended victim, is rewarded according to the degree
of their moral compunction. Starring, it should be noted, Alec Guinness
and Peter Sellers, way before we came to know them as Obi-Wan or the Pink
Panther.
Lagaan: Once Upon A Time In India (2001)
It seems
every country or geographical region has to have its own grandiose Once
Upon A Time In…movie, and this subcontinental variant does no
shame to that ambitious tradition. Aamir Khan produces and stars, and
Ashostosh Gowariker directs and writes this Oscar®-nominated smash
domestic hit in which the late-nineteenth-century peasants of Kutch take
on their British colonizers in a match of cricket to try and lessen the
taxes the Empire arbitrarily imposes on their drought-ravaged region.
Khan gathers together various character types in a progressive mosaic
of a united India - the Untouchable, the Muslim, the nationalist, the
village idiot - and they quickly try to master the favorite sport of their
occupiers in between stellar song and dance numbers. It's an interesting
industrial reversal, seeing Brits recite lines and embody unflattering
roles handed them by their Indian casters (versus your
average David Lean production), and also watching the arrogant British
administrator's porcelain-white sister fall hopelessly in love with Khan's
Hindi hero (and who wouldn't?). This movie's possible because the Indians
have since consistently beaten the English at their own game - it's since
become the Hindustani national sport - and though the cagey Brits try
to break their opponents' spirits by physically punishing them in the
course of the match (whose long format allows us American neophytes plenty
of time to learn the rules), you can expect Indian pluck to triumph in
unexpected ways. The English actors are decidedly weaker than their Bollywood
counterparts, and a few more musical numbers couldn't've hurt, but the
well-paced story structure sucks you right in, and Lagaan (which
means "tax") becomes Bollywood's first classic of the new cinematic
century.
Although
Americans probably do it best in real life, only the French could come
up with a movie where four bored middle-aged men decide to eat themselves
to death. Cloistered on the grounds of an ornate mansion in a Paris suburb
with shipments of various meats (from goose to deer to boar and everything
in between) and produce coming in regularly, the quartet of gourmands
(Marcello Mastroianni as a nymphomaniac pilot, Michel Piccoli as a flatulent
TV personality, Philippe Noiret as a judge, and Ugo Tognazzi as the chef
who concocts their instruments of self-destruction) dine constantly to
a mind-boggling succession of lavish multi-course feasts (how many takes
did everyone have to do, stuffing their faces?) in the hopes that the
regimented but unfettered indulgence will quickly take its toll on their
systems. And then a neighboring zaftig schoolteacher decides to join them
essentially as their concubine, completing a portrait of suicide by the
French specialties of haute cuisine and sex. What baffles is how good-natured
the proceedings are - never is it explained exactly why these men entered
into such a compact to end it all - what matters more is the how of their
deaths, not the why. And as they drop one by one, those who remain mourn,
but continue eating. This 1973 Gallic box-office smash succeeds in being
both solemn and celebratory, pathetic and extravagant, and one can only
pray Hollywood doesn't pick it up for a remake, set inevitably in various
fast-food joints.
Give this
year's Best Actress Oscar® nominees their due, but if they'd had to
share the screen for a second with Anna Magnani, it'd be worse than when
Sigourney Weaver acted circles around Winona Ryder in Alien
Resurrection. Topping the list of chameleonlike thespians, Magnani
inspired reverence in her peers such that in 1948 Roberto Rossellini concocted
a film simply to showcase her talents. L'Amore does not astonish
by any particular tour de force scene per se, but in Magnani's seamless
transition from a grieving contemporary urban wife abandoned by her cheating
husband in the first tale, to a rather dim but intensely religious peasant
in the second story - could you see Julia Roberts attempt such a feat?
Not for a second do we doubt this changing of masks, and immediately we
recognize the conceptual distance between between an actress and a movie
star - sometimes the same thing, sometimes not. [Thankfully, the Oscars®
once saw the distinction as well, handing Magnani an Oscar® for Best
Actress in 1955 for The Rose Tattoo, her first appearance in an
American film.] The second act is weaker than the first, largely due to
the writing; but when the first act is an abridged version of Cocteau's
"La Voix Humaine," any writer might suffer by comparison. In
any case, Magnani is wasted in neither story. The day we instead see a
film subtitled "An homage to the art of Meg Ryan" is the day
Magnani's name fades into obscurity forever, and we lose all standards
of greatness. Until that day, acting's patron saint, thy name is Anna.
A distinguished
cast (Barbara Hershey, Anthony LaPaglia, Geoffrey Rush) that had the misfortune
of signing onto a script that tries to hide its weaknesses behind an everyone's-lives-are-intertwined
contrivance that's a little too pat. It's also a murder mystery that indulges
its red herrings a bit much, and what started out as a sophisticated exploration
of infidelity, suburban malaise, and distinctly Australian sociology degenerates
into confusion and pretention. We've got three shaky marriages, all sorts
of characters in therapy, and parents bereaved over their dead children,
all of which would provide opportunities for some quality acting if the
lazy dialogue didn't undermine it all. It still somehow won Australia's
Oscar®-equivalent for best picture, but it's only really laudatory
element is LaPaglia, who should win Studliest Actor in an Art Flick if
there were such an award. Good thing we can just get photos off the Web
to get our fill of him, instead of revisiting this poor shadow of American
Beauty.
The Last House on the Left (1972)
John Carpenter
knew this all along, and Wes Craven clearly agreed as early as 1972: key
to an effective horror film is its soundtrack. Playing a cheerful folk
song while two young girls are humiliated, raped, and murdered proves
a disturbing aural counterpoint, somehow amplifying the sense of despair
and cruelty by presenting the alternative to your ears. Craven's The
Last House on the Left begins in an equally wholesome manner, with
idyllic forest scenes and a benign audio track that will both figure prominently
in the brutality that follows. The four lowlifes that so casually defile
their young victims are portrayed effectively by Craven's cast of unknowns,
breathing menace by not doing much of anything, and eventually somewhat
sickened by their own actions. The vast majority of the violence happens
off-camera, and is doubly repellent for being so unremarkable, which true-life
violence often is. The reality of the situation is very sad, and the murderers'
comeuppance at the hands of one of the girls' parents is clumsy and far
from sensationalized. The total effect approaches what a snuff film would
probably feel like, and is all but an independent classic by virtue of
what was clearly a miniscule budget.
A series
of tableaux across several continents featuring a people who are all,
it seems, uniformly musical prodigies. Director Tony Gatlif followed itinerant
gypsies in Egypt, Turkey, Romania, Spain, and parts beyond, and documented
the mesmerizing music that arises out of them, whether spontaneously or
in more staged circumstances. Strictly speaking, all these people are
homeless, and they wander through cities and rural lands singing of how
they are “condemned to wandering throughout life,” living in
horse-drawn trailers, in trees, or out in the open. (The film’s title
translates into “Safe Passage.”) The music is top-notch, and
it would be easy to treat Drom as just an extended music video
and relegate the film to the background while you catch up on your reading,
but then you’ll miss Gatlif’s stunning super-35mm vistas. It’s
virtually plotless, but still somewhat theatrical, and the divergent lifestyles
and histories of these people (one gypsy reveals a concentration camp
tattoo on her arm) and musical styles (don’t miss the fiddler who
plays without a bow, making notes merely by pulling strings off the fiddle)
make Drom more than a simple concert experience.
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003)
It's not
half as bad as everyone says it is, thankfully; the novelty of bringing
old literary heroes to life is beguiling enough to guarantee no abject
failure. When Nazis appear in tanks to plunder the Bank of England decades
before they're supposed to exist, the British Empire gathers together
a remarkably incompatible cross-section of legendary adventurers to identify
and neutralize this time-hopping threat; their ranks include Allan Quatermain,
Tom Sawyer, Dorian Gray, Wilhemina Harker, Rodney Skinner, Captain Nemo,
and Dr. Henry Jekyll, each with their own formidable talents and resources.
LXG's fun lies both in seeing these Victorian-era superheroes showcase
their qualifications (Skinner's the Invisible
Man, Gray's immortal, Harker's received some hematic dividends from
her encounter with a certain Transylvanian count) and in their obvious
reluctance to enjoy each other's company. These "singular individuals"
are also, as Gray aptly puts it, more than a little "complicated,"
and their motivations range from disinterested civic service to outright
treachery - and their flaws make for a droll soap opera as their secret-agenting
leads them all over the globe and into the lair of literature's most reviled
villains. Stephen Norrington's direction is at times wildly chaotic, and
he sometimes compromises his actors' performances with his hyperactive
camera and editing, but the effects are solid and the historical references
more than sufficient to revive interest in an age of fictional derring-do
long past. With Sean Connery, Stuart Townsend, Peta Wilson, and Naseeruddin
Shah.
Jean-Pierre
Melville's most commercially successful film inexplicably never found
an initial release in the US, but the director's critical rediscovery
in recent years may elevate his cachet in perpetuity. Cercle's
stateside theatrical retrospective in 2002 can only aggrandize Melville's
reputation, especially when you see the opening shot where the inhabitants
of a moving train are seen from up close, and then the camera pulls away
- and flies into the air. It also doesn't hurt that his penultimate film
is bathed in the most luxurious hues, from the lush wallpaper on Yves
Montand's door to the pale exterior greens among which many bullets fly
at the end. Ballistics whiz Montand and the inscrutable Alain Delon team
up to filch some jewels in an age when the best boutiques are criss-crossed
with electric eye beams, and the caper goes off perhaps too well - now
they've got a stash so high-profile no one on the black market will touch
them. And the relentless police inspector Mattei (Bourvil), armed with
wise time-tested aphorisms like "there are no police without informers,"
"nothing will change a man's nature," and "all men are
guilty," slowly catches up to these criminals that he let slip from
custody in that aforementioned train scene. Montand impresses in the most
unglamorous of roles, and silences any accusations he's just another singer
parlaying his celebrity into cinematic roles - here it's clear he cared
about submerging himself into the role, narcotic-induced hallucinations
and all. If French cinema is to be believed, that nation is rife with
thieves - and if thieves have anything to learn from Cercle, it's
that the hardest part of the job isn't the actual robbery.
The Legend of Drunken Master (1994)
Martial-arts
films should perhaps be classified as a generic relative of musicals,
except here everyone suddenly breaks into kung fu at every opportunity
instead of song. Surely The Legend of Drunken Master's choreographer
was twice as busy as that of, say, Oklahoma. Here characters don't
walk around potted plants like you or I might, but instead have to leap
over them like a high-jumper, and it somehow doesn't ring false; similarly,
when Jackie Chan finds his foot is on fire, he doesn't simply stick it
in a bucket of water, but must once again leap into the air, this time
to meet his foot with water another person tosses from the bucket. In
what seems like his umpteenth film of the past few years, Chan plays a
colonial Chinese student of "drunken boxing" (where just the
right dose of alcohol "loosens the body and raises your pain threshold")
who drinks to excess, amplifying his martial arts skills to formidable
levels but earning him the scorn of his family. When he stumbles upon
a plot by the British occupiers to smuggle antiquities out of the country,
we are treated to every imaginable way of taking out your opponent, including
attempts at gouging their eyes with his chin as they're giving him a bear
hug. Chan looks far too old to pass for his father's son, he constantly
bounces back from an unimaginable amount of punishment, and his heroism
seems implausible in the face of what should have been an overwhelming
enemy, but this genre is a cousin of the musical, remember, and the rules
of reality are made to be broken. Even the dubbed dialogue, which is damn
funny, can't detract from what is ultimately a great ride. Like me, you
may not seek out films such as these, but when you stumble across them,
there's plenty to keep you watching.
Les Amants du Pont-Neuf/The Lovers on the Bridge (1991)
It took
virtually a decade for this film to find American video distribution,
and I can't for the life of me understand why. Few films are as magical
as this story of two of Paris' homeless who fall in love and make their
residence on the Pont-Neuf, a bridge over the Seine River in the dead
center of the city. Denis Lavant isn't the most handsome French guy around,
but as Alex he's enormously sympathetic in his doglike devotion, and especially
in his desperation to keep Juliette Binoche around after he spots her
face on "Missing" posters all over Paris. (A scene where he
lights afire the walls of an entire subway corridor to destroy the posters
is breathtaking.) Binoche plays Michelle, definitely a more aesthetically
pleasing object than Alex, but cursed with a degenerative eye disease,
all the more hard to bear because of her skills as a painter. Somehow
she seems of a decidedly different caste from Alex, but they still stick
together on the bridge through all sorts of weather. Director Leos Carax
has them breathe fire, waterski down the Seine, and drug cafégoers
for cash, and films it all amidst the Republique's bicentennial celebrations.
It's sometimes hard to separate fantasy from the physical truth of their
existence as they partake any amount of opiates to get through the day
(Did Juliette really pursue and shoot to death a former lover? Are they
suddenly smaller than their wine bottles?), but the endless series of
surprises constitutes the magic of this unpredictable and utterly unique
film. Said magic ends, happily for film buffs, in an explicit homage to
the 1934 French classic L'Atalante atop a barge, finally revealing
whether our lovers, despite their differences, have a future. (Cool trivia
moment: the film features, as it turns out, the actual artwork of Ms.
Binoche herself.)
The "mysterious
saga" from France in the nineteen-teens, when movie houses offered
serialized dramas long before the boob tube. Louis Feuillade authored
and directed these episodes exploring the criminal underworld of Paris
in the form of the black-clad Vampires syndicate whose agents and network
extended to every corner of society. Feared above all were their ringleaders,
the Grand Vampire with his many disguises among the professional class,
and his right-hand woman, the formidable and deceptive Irma Vep. Crawling
atop the roofs and through the secret passageways of the city, the group
pilfers and poisons and kidnaps and defrauds the wealthy so much that
they sometimes accidentally (and humorously) victimize fellow agents!
The chief thorn in the secret society's side, and our hero throughout
the series, is bold reporter Philippe Guerande, determined to uncover
the extent of their influence at great personal risk. Almost a century
later it's still a well-executed and engaging journey, with abusive tangos,
Philippe's resourceful mother, the usual palette of tints to indicate
interior/exterior, day/night, and no shortage of comedy, especially the
sob stories of Mazamette, Philippe's double-agent within the Vampires.
If
you think quarters are close in the sailboats you've been aboard, try
hanging out on the lifeboat for a few weeks. Better yet, try it with Tallulah
Bankhead among your crew. Her freighter sunk by a U-boat in the thick
of WWII, she and eight other survivors try withstanding the elements somewhere
in the Atlantic in the face of uncertain rescue. That may sound like a
snoozer until you hear this is an Alfred Hitchcock creation (from a John
Steinbeck story, no less), and when they suddenly take a Nazi aboard,
things start to get interesting - especially when he's the only capable
seaman. Social strata are leveled, alliances are made and broken, masts
are erected and smashed, coping mechanisms are strained, questionable
pasts are revealed, and moral states fluctuate as many times are there
are people on deck. Everyone's performances are first-rate, but it's Tallulah
who gets all the best lines, looking fantastic amidst all the bobbing
and the indifferent climate, and even while their little boat is being
shelled by their own side. Lifeboat guarantees not to end when
you think it will, deftly balances the theatrical with the ugliness of
war, and boasts a cameo by the director (on the boat!) you'll be hard
pressed to find. Also watch out for the plea to buy war bonds "in
this theater" in the closing credits; this was Hitch's contribution
to the war effort, and certainly the most individual.
The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)
A clear
case of conferencing scriptwriters thinking up exciting scenes first,
and a unifying story second. Director Steven Spielberg phoned it in for
this sequel to 1993’s megahit, jettisoning psychological plausibility
and any respect for subtlety in a desperate attempt to get humans back
on that dinosaur-infested island and letting them run for their lives.
Spielberg clearly couldn’t wait to push his characters to the cliff’s
edge, but when everyone behaves less like real people and more like plot
devices, and when so many elements from the first film are so blatantly
recycled, the resulting yawnfest is darn near hazardous to your health.
Sloppily dispensing scientific ideas for filler’s sake as egregiously
as its predecessor (hunter vs. hunted? The ecological balance? Wait –
here’s a fun chase scene instead!), and telegraphing violently which
characters are marked for death, World is eventually so bored with
itself it decides to move some of the prehistoric beasties to the mainland,
and our heroic bipeds decide to take the high road and refuse to stop
them with lethal force. It’s an unbelievably forced waste of effort,
and a rare instance when a film’s soundtrack is vastly more entertaining
than the events it’s embellishing.
Love! Valour! Compassion! (1997)
I admit to an uneasy relationship with the genre of "gay" films; they automatically assume one particular demographic will feel obligated, or starved enough, to make a return on their investment. Fact is, many African-Americans avoid Spike Lee's films, and gay viewers, as well, often find themselves identifying more with movies that don't claim to speak for their species. This is not to say there aren't plenty of good, even great, entries in the pantheon of gay cinema, but sadly, Love! Valour! Compassion! isn't one of them. A cast of ciphers with largely cliché concerns gathering on summer weekends at a Long Island home is probably meant to equal a slice-of-life film, but a point to all the proceedings would have helped immensely. The director must have assumed it's enough to just get gays on the screen, to claim a cinematic corner for queerdom, but it's not. And nor is waiting for the HIV-infected characters to start deteriorating - do people really think this is all gay folk do?
Andre Bazin
wrote in 1945 that the fundamental motivation behind the visual arts,
including motion pictures, was best described as a "mummy complex,"
namely preserving artificially one's bodily appearance from the flow of
time, to take a stab at immortality by creating "a representation
of life." Would that the cinema's earliest subjects at the turn of
the century knew that their attempts to cheat death and obscurity would
be undermined by highly perishable film stock. Before celluloid, movie
cameras recorded their images on nitrate-based film which, when exposed
to oxygen, gradually oxidizes, its images ultimately lost forever. Hence
the inestimable achievement of Lyrical Nitrate, which culled together
and restored numerous scraps of film created from 1905 to 1915 and discovered
almost a century later in an Amsterdam attic, in various states of deterioration.
Director Peter Delpeut provides a fascinating look at pre-war Europe and
its proto-cinematic enthusiasts, from brief travelogue clips to even briefer
melodramatic tableaux, all of whose actors have by now most certainly
been made aware of their mortality. This series of fragments provides
a rare window into the past, however short; and at the end, as the quality
of the fragments starts to weaken, we're given an equally hypnotic interplay
of images of decay, proving unexpectedly that even chemical processes
can become art.
Two
things are certain about the creative team behind Maborosi: they
like to place the camera far from the action, and they like their scenes
dark. This translates into a miniature shadow play for us, which some
may regard as a transcendental style and others as plain annoying. It's
also one of those tales where not much happens, at least not on the surface,
and none of it is sculpted into an obviously dramatic form. Young mother
Yukimo suddenly learns her husband was hit by a train, and evidence suggests,
contrary to his perpetually cheery demeanor, it may have been suicide.
A matchmaking neighbor finds her a new husband and family in a seaside
village far away, and though her new situation is copacetic, the puzzle
of her first love's death continues to trouble her. Director Hirokazu
Kore-eda refuses to provide an easy resolution - it's one of those slice-of-life
pieces, and to many that's art. What remains debatable is if, in this
instance, it's sufficiently satisfying.
The most offensively self-indulgent film since, say, VonStroheim's Greed originally clocked in at seven hours, Magnolia maintains a steady 120 minutes of pure genius, but sadly writer/director P.T. Anderson doesn't know when to quit. After a wildly aleatory and inventive opening sequence prepares us for just about anything, we are served up multiple tales involving characters all slowly moving toward a breaking point. Lonely cops, dying TV producers and game show hosts, quiz show whiz kids, these and their families are all failing to deal with their various circumstances, each falling apart due to unpleasant pasts they can no longer ignore. Their lives, as powerfully portrayed largely by Anderson's stable of talent from Boogie Nights, turn out to be more than a little interrelated, and as their coping mechanisms accelerate toward collective failure, you will be saying one of two things: either God, what intense performances, or God, what a mopey picture. And just as everyone hits rock bottom, and we also start to crack under the onslaught of everyone going to pieces, it all suddenly turns into a music video. Inexplicably, Anderson breaks the spell by having everyone sing along to an Aimee Mann song, and it's downhill from there. Hours later, Magnolia drowns in its own pretentiousness, canceling out all the brilliance that preceded it. (The length, though probably appealing to the French, might have worked better in this country as a TV miniseries.) I will concede that the final act does include perhaps the creepiest and most technically unfathomable sequence ever put to film, as well as a performance by Tom Cruise that is both Oscar®-worthy and sadly absent in Eyes Wide Shut, but you may turn against Magnolia by the end. After Mann sings "Save Me," you will find yourself begging for the same.
Gus Van
Sant shows an assured hand in only his first feature film, and one that
already spotlights what has become his perennial subject - young adults
on the fringes. Tim Streeter's Walt is admirably casual about his sexual
obsession with an immigrant Latino who speaks no English - he'll pay him
for sex, let him trash his car, literally give the coat off his back to
his best friend, and put up with a lot of abuse ("Am I that desperate?
Of course I am."), but his romantic pursuits are about as dead-end
as his day job at a convenience store in Portland's ghetto. Van Sant puts
his camera all over the place, with tilted angles galore, and the pacing
is confidently languid - it's impossible to tell if the sequence of events
was simply randomly improvised by talented actors or scripted to the minutest
detail. (The only glaring flaw is the audio, which is often muffled and
at other time obviously dubbed in later.) It's a little distasteful that
Walt is both contented doing nothing with his life and oblivious to the
notion he may deserve better treatment, but when he says to perfect (and
straight) strangers "I want to sleep with him" his lack of shame
makes him an unlikely hero in the ongoing fight for sexual freedom.
Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983)
No emotional
engagement, bad acting, an inexact narrative focus, and plenty of dead
spaces - Nagisa Oshima's disastrous re-creation of a Japanese POW internment
camp on Java in 1942 has everything to offer for the cinematic masochist.
David Bowie's Celliers disobeys his captors left and right in some misguided
attempt to assert his dignity, which inspires his fellow Brits to no end
but incurs the increasingly cruel wrath of camp director Takeshi Kitano.
Celliers seems mighty heroic at first, but a series of momentum-killing
flashbacks to his youth reveals his defiance to be nothing more than a
longstanding desire to atone for mistreating his little brother - which
pathologizes the tale beyond our capacity to care. If Oshima had a point
to make beyond one man's psychological quirks - there are occasional signs
some sort of cultural contrast is being attempted - it's hopelessly lost
in this listless quagmire - it's a very, very poor man's Bridge on
the River Kwai.
We've got
to classify this as a period-piece-slash-costume-drama, with a virtually
unintelligible Monica Vitti as a tattooed and earthbound Barbarella with
her own theme music. The fasions and itnerior decorations are nothing
short of insane - there can't be a color left unused off the spectrum.
There's secret agent intrigue afoot, but it's all quite incidental to
watching the Sphinxlike Vitti and Terence Stamp's Willy Garvin squealing
and luxuriating and being jerked forward in time via egregious temporal
ellipses. They're either infinitely resourceful or always in need of being
rescued - and with the unconvincing combat choreography and how they jerk
their hands forward each time they shoot their pistols, it's a wonder
they're alive at all. (In the most outrageous instance, Vitti the archer
launches an arrow so obviously nowhere her target, and in the next frame
it lands squarely in his belly - it has to be seen to be believed.) The
glamour quotient skyrockets with their fabulous planes, cars, boats, apartments,
and hotels, and director Joseph Losey seems to be trying ot make some
sort of point with the frequent use of mirrors and reflections, but these
jet-setting libertines never face any real danger, just as the dialogue
never sounds quite human. Only Dirk Bogarde has the sense to camp it up
as the effete and hypersensitive archvillain with a weakness for psychedelic
checkerboard - it's all quite absurd, but sadly not enough to appear ironic
- they apparently meant every visually appalling gesture contained herein.
When you've got a mime who won't even speak when kidnapped and brutalized,
and only silently begs for his life, you know a film's gone off the deep
end.
The Mother and the Whore (1973)
If I hear
Bernadette Lafont use the word "maximum" one more time, I'll
be forced to refer to anything French not as "Freedom" but "Infernal."
Equally annoying is Jean-Pierre Leaud as a bohemian (read: poor) idler
named Alexandre who refuses to work, is supported by his girlfriend Marie
(Lafont) on whom he cheats openly, and who is highly opinionated on matters
of artistic taste. This humorless and underexuberant ego-fest features
our self-absorbed trio (Leaud, Lafont, and Francoise Lebrun's Veronika,
whom Leaud picks up at a café and who makes herself at home) smoking,
drinking, going to cafés, sitting on the floor, listening to music,
and having plenty of sex - it's the worst stereotypical qualities of French
cinema all rolled into one - and although Leaud especially can philosophize
on a dime, all these mopers like to hear themselves talk. It's inconceivable
what Veronika and Marie might see in Alexandre, just as it's impossible
to imagine what anyone saw in this overlong collection of pointless verbiage.
The lack of a music score provides even less to keep you occupied (all
we hear is silence, arguments, or traffic), and don't let the black and
white cinematography mislead you into thinking this is some arthouse chestnut
ripe for rediscovery. Some films may be regarded as documents of their
age - Mother is often interpreted to represent the bankruptcy of
the sexual revolution - but that doesn't mean that age is worth reliving.
John Huston
is somehow to blame for directing this abomination that somehow garnered
several Oscar® nominations (including Best Picture), but has decisively
failed to stand the test of time. I can't think of a more helter-skelter
film than this, which mounts a garishly Technicolor bio of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
("a painter of the streets, and the gutter"); maybe the Academy
hoped to flatter itself by assigning some of its votes to anything concerning
"high art." José Ferrer as Toulouse-Lautrec, whom the
film takes great pains to convince us is of stunted height (thanks to
parents who were first cousins and a mighty fall down some stairs), spends
the whole first half of the film arguing incessantly with his mustachioed
girlfriend (Colette Marchand, overacting like crazy - and also receiving
an Oscar® nomination, but mysteriously disappearing from films afterwards)
and then tries to drink himself to death during the second half when she
finally has the sense to bail. It's at this point Huston serves us the
old great-pain-produces-great-art line, as T-L channels his angst into
what would become his signature lithographs of Can-Can dancers. (It's
when we see these girls in action that we realize how lifeless the rest
of the movie is - by all means, pick up Renoir's French
Can-Can instead for a film that better reflects the vigor of its
subject.) This torturous muddle resulted in Oscar® wins for its sets
(no wonder - there's hardly ever an exterior shot, which adds to an overarching
claustrophobia) and its costumes (Zsa Zsa Gabor, though woefully untalented
as an actress, is still decent eye candy as singer Jane Avril), but the
story's an unrelentingly bleak mess, certainly no one's idea of entertainment
outside of a martyr's convention.
If anything,
Jack Arnold's sit-commy production has a very original opening, where
the erstwhile torch-bearing Columbia girl flees her post upon sight of
an encroaching rodent. After that, though, it's all downhill. Peter Sellers
once again takes up multiple roles, this time among the aristocrats of
the Duchy of Grand Fenwick, an imaginary English-speaking country covering
a mere fifteen square miles in the French Alps. Their economy's faltering
- the queen even has to drive herself around - and when the government
has to start dipping into the petty cash box, they brainstorm a drastic
measure - declare war on the United States. Once they're handily defeated,
you see, the war reparations they receive will be sufficient to restore
Fenwick to glory. (Clearly they haven't seen Afghanistan lately.) An utterly
implausible sequence of evens accidentally results in the USA crying uncle
instead, and whereas Mouse ultimately poses an intriguing question
- what would the dynamics at the UN be like if smaller countries had the
bomb instead? - the whole affair degenerates into gratuitous excuses to
get Jean Seberg into a shower scene, and later we even find her in a French
sailor shirt - where'd they ever come up with that?
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
Were people
so cynical about their lawmakers already in 1939? The cliché of
the crooked politicos finds its fullest expression in this scathing critique
of Washington by a filmmaker unjustly accused of schmaltzy Americana,
Frank Capra. Here he shows what happens when a decent common citizen is
thrown into national office without the benefit of the years it usually
takes to be disillusioned enough by the system to shelve your ideals and
most of your moral qualms. Jimmy Stewart, as Jefferson Smith, is appointed
by his (never specified) state's governor to replace a senator who dies
during his term, and is expected to be overwhelmed and passive enough
to let the other senator, Joseph Paine (Claude Rains) conduct his crooked
business. Overwhelmed he is, but not passive for very long, and soon his
colleagues see fit to impugn his integrity and try to get him ousted.
It's a test of wills one always assumed our legislative branch was too
busy upholding their noble commission to engage in, but sadly the proceedings
are all too plausible, and one is left wondering, how many of our current
congresspersons are Smiths and how many more along the lines of Paine?
Death to
anyone who opens the tomb of Im-Ho-Tep, reads the scroll of Thoth: "well,
let's see what's inside!" If British archaeologists weren't so foolhardy
("in the interests of science") we wouldn't've been treated
to Boris Karloff's astounding performance as the newly-resuscitated title
character, who learns English over the next few years and takes the name
Ardeth Bey. He's on a quest to recover his lover from 3700 years ago,
and when he runs across the Drew-Barrymore-esque Zita Johann in Cairo
(her dad's the colonial governor of Sudan) he puts all his ancient mystical
powers to bear to awaken his lady's spirit within her. (He's got the ability
to mesmerize you, a scrying pool to watch you, and some other bags of
tricks to make it look as though you've died of natural causes.) It's
not just because everyone else acts so poorly that Karloff is so remarkable
- his under-moisturized makeup job and his hella-scary stare make for
legitimately horrific close-ups, and it must've sent millions to bed with
the lights on three-quarters of a century ago. It's a serviceable production,
if a little heavy on exposition and long-winded explanations - and director
Karl Freund's choice of no musical score for long stretches only adds
to the tension. (And leave it to the British to inject wit into situations
such as these: "Do you have to open graves to find girls to fall
in love with?")
The filmmakers had guts to try updating a horror classic about a very old guy whom most viewers assume did little more than walk around………really……….slowly. (Scary stuff!) Bravo to the scriptwriters of 1999's version of The Mummy for adding additional threats to the swashbuckling Brendan Fraser and his bumbling-but-brave team of British Egyptologists, placing the events in the stylish 1920's, giving the Desiccated One more talents than just languid ambulation, and injecting a whole lot of comedy in the first hour. But just as the revivified title character knocks off victim after victim, so do the jokes peter out, and we're left with an unexceptional and quickly-forgettable action picture with unconvincing special effects and an even less convincing buried-Egyptian-tomb set. The film is like a more cartoony version of Raiders of the Lost Ark, cleverly structuring the storyline (at first) as action-punchline-creepy scene-punchline, and happily this mummy moves faster, but not fast enough to avoid the deus ex machina ending. A word to those working on the sequel even as I write this: keep it funny.
My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2001)
Nia Vardalos raked in the dough instructing us on Greek ladies' three raisons d'être: one, marry Greek boys, two, make Greek babies, and three, "feed everyone until the day they die." (And somewhere in there you'd better remain a virgin until marriage.) Vardalos' Tula, nearing thirty and far from the most nubile prospect in Chicagoland, reinvents herself (makeover, college, travel agency) and forsakes her destiny as a "loud breeding Greek eater" when she meets Ian (John Corbett), straight out of a Harlequin™ romance cover illustration and absolutely unswerving in his devotion to her - except he's not Greek. MBFGW's surprisingly not about Tula's duckling-to-swan transformation (you'd think she needed therapy thanks to her overbearing parents), nor is Ian's love ever in question, but when her mom and pop meet the whitebread prospective in-laws, the culture clash is painted in broad strokes (though not clumsy ones). It's hard to begrudge this film its phenomenal success (until The Passion of the Christ, it was the most profitable independent film of all time) due to its good-natured attitude, though there are signs Vardalos possesses an even sharper wit than MBFGW displays (her "I am a snow beast" line deserves canonization). It's a lightweight delight - and we can only hope Vardalos applies her gazillions toward an even more playfully acerbic project one day.
 |