Here’s
another instance of romanticized prostitution, but this time it’s
absurd enough to be believable. Melina Mercouri received an Academy Award
nomination (and was named Best Actress at Cannes) as Illia, the “beautiful
and corrupt” whore whom the local men treat with respect, and who
gets to choose with whom she plies her trade – she sleeps with the
men she likes, not just anyone willing to pay. As usual, the only way
women could be portrayed as sexual creatures in movies back then was to
make them either exotic foreigners or prostitutes; in this case, director
Jules Dassin cleverly does both. Dassin casts himself in the film (and
does a bumbling Tati-esque shtick) as a scholar travelling abroad in search
of “the purity that was Greece”; coming across Illia and her
sexy overbite, he declares her symbolic of all that’s gone wrong
with this once-great land. “A whore can’t be happy,” he
declares, and he resolves “I’ve got to educate her – she’s
an outlaw!” He deceives himself into thinking she’s just an
intellectual project for him, and bit by bit he replaces her free-spiritedness
with shame. It’s the triumph of pure reason over emotion, perhaps
what caused the cultural decline of classical Greece to begin with. Sunday
constantly toes the line between maturity and standard Hollywood formula,
always pulling back before it collapses into cornball. In the hands of
any other director the film would probably have aged badly, but Dassin
deftly poses the question of who’s assimilating whom by the end,
and we’re instead treated to an obscure classic.
It's unfathomable
that the same person could be directing The
Last Waltz at the same time - that film's so wondrous, and this
one's so harrowing. Martin Scorcese somehow succeeds in adding another
nail to the Hollywood musical's coffin with this big-budget headache that
only entertains when Liza Minelli sings, which is not often enough. Robert
DeNiro swaggers about as Jimmy, the most annoying bandleader to grace
the screen; he's an absolute wild card always on the edge of violence,
and how Liza's Francine could ever warm to such a self-obsessed man is
the film's biggest quandary. Liza's all lips, nose, chin, and eyelashes,
and her hair and dresses are largely a fright, but compared to the patently
false exteriors she almost looks normal. (The actors also do a poor job
pretending to play their instruments.) New York is actually two
different films - the sucky, implausible, and joyless first half which
follows Francine's rise to stardom, and the more explicitly musical second
part which shows her on the Broadway stage with that glorious voice of
hers. Pity Scorcese makes you wait so long for the good stuff - if possible,
time it so you don't make it to the theater until the intermission, because
until midway it's a far cry from anything you'd call entertainment.
Liliana
Cavani starts with an interesting premise – what if, years after
the war, a former Nazi concentration camp intern runs into the officer
who sexually subjugated her during her imprisonment? – and somehow
succeeds in making it less interesting than it sounds. The film adds a
curious twist – camp survivor Charlotte Rampling, it turns out, enjoys
being abused and dominated – but once she abandons her comfortably
domesticated postwar life and returns to Dirk Bogarde’s cruel embrace,
we lost sight of whatever’s motivating her, and any film that squanders
Rampling deserves endless maledictions. Instead we discover there’s
a secret network of ex-Nazis throughout Europe policing each other’s
behavior so as to avoid anyone naming names, and the M-ish setup
wildly digresses from the story elements that truly intrigued us. The
daring Rampling is, as always, a delight to behold; pity the secondary
components that eventually overshadow her are so painfully dull.
Yet
another dreary yarn set in lower-class England where we discover Brits
can be as vulgar as Americans (see Ladybird Ladybird or Naked
for more bleak examples). Everyone's drinking and smoking and bullshitting,
the breadwinners all seem to be involved in vaguely criminal dealings,
not a sentence passes without a shovelful of obscenities, the men are
all emotionally arrested, and their women all put up with it. Gary Oldman
wrote and directed this cheery romp which records the various dysfunctions
of a brutish father and his punching bag of a wife (who is allegedly thirty
but looks closer to sixty), their grown son who descends into drug addiction,
and various members of their extended family who make various attempts
at tough (and not so tough) love. There is nothing fun about this picture,
it's simply a matter of how bad will things get, but it all rings sadly
true to anyone not living in a bubble. As usual, the menfolk only want
to live it up all the time (you'll notice they never have just one drink
with them at the bar, but always at least two), and the womenfolk are
all willing to settle for less. Somehow the film manages a not entirely
dismal ending, but since it's clear the sins of father visit the son several
times over, you're not about to hold your breath waiting to see a group
hug. Featuring one of the more innovative sequences in recent memory,
where Oldman visually alternates two scenes but never separates the audio
tracks; though a great actor, Gary needn't fear quitting his day job if
so inclined.
A glorified
vanity project for Hollywood's A-list men's club, where we're just supposed
to revel in how cool and smooth everyone is while they simply phone it
in. This remake of the 1960 Rat Pack extravaganza is strangely lifeless
from start to finish, probably not least because these casino burglars'
success is preordained. A cast of VIPs from George Clooney to Matt Damon
to Don Cheadle to Brad Pitt exercise star wattage but minimal acting chops
in plotting, executing, and decamping from an elaborate Vegas heist that
gives the atrociously overacting Andy Garcia (the manager of the joint)
fits and the audience a smug sense of vicarious superiority. But here's
the problem - despite all the chinks that seem to pop up in their plan,
our slick masterminds had it all figured out from the start, and there
was no hint of a challenge. Without any element of risk there's also no
real accomplishment, just as director Steven Soderbergh's directing-by-numbers
fails to inspire, and the recycled hipness is all we've got. Ocean's'
material is ultimately beneath both cast and crew, and Julia Roberts'
Tess (formerly Clooney's gal, then Garcia's, then guess who she ends up
with) is quite possibly just a gold digger, which sabotages any real romance
as well. (It would be a nice twist for the sequel to see Tess double-cross
them all, à la Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.) Clearly we're supposed
to take everything as a triumphant given - including the film's own success
- but to be human is to make up your own mind, and you have every right
to see Ocean's for the flimflam it really is.
A boy who’s
a dead ringer for Hallie Eisenberg’s brother tossed about by fate
amidst squalor so dense it hardly seems appropriate for a musical. It’s
not exactly a fantastical or romanticized escapist setting in this, considered
the last great screen musical of its age (the genre would pretty much
run out of gas for the next thirty years), but despite all its Oscars®
it hardly qualifies as among the best. The dance numbers sure aren’t
dull, and the highly detailed sets are no small achievement, but the plot
doesn’t really get going until the second half, and by then you may
have ceased to care. If Oliver! was a sensation when it first hit
theaters, it’s failed to age well, and comes across as ephemeral
and hardly the acme of its species. Indeed, Carol Reed’s relic may’ve
somehow become the nail in the musical’s coffin for the duration,
which only something as daring as Moulin
Rouge! could later exhume.
A good friend insisted I grab this off the shelf at the video store when I said I was writing a review of 28 Days Later last summer, just in case I was going to praise the latter for any perceived originality; turns out once you've been around long enough the recycling of ideas gets easier to identify. Here we've got Charlton Heston (already long in the tooth, but not too long for many shirtless scenes) driving around a deserted Los Angeles (although if you look really carefully, you can see one pedestrian in the distance in one scene), and screening the Woodstock documentary for himself in a dusty cinemathèque ("held over for the third straight year," he grumbles). Turns out a Sino-Russian conflict in the early seventies escalated to germ warfare, and most of humanity got wiped out. Those who remain have turned, or are turning, into mentally-unstable photosensitive albinos, and LA's afflicted have gathered into a Luddite secret society (complete with witch robes) led by Anthony Zerbe's Matthias (you'll recognize him as one of Zion's elders in The Matrix: Reloaded) who decries modern machinery, weapons, medicine, science, and electricity as nothing but trouble, since they're what led to their current woes.
Heston's
Colonel Robert Neville, a scientist who's come up with a vaccine for those
who haven't yet turned, hunts for Matthias' nest during the day, and endures
their medieval assaults on his brownstone by night. Director Boris Sagal
(who cranked this out for Warner Brothers, "A Kinney Leisure Service")
clearly banked on the urban playground of a deserted metropolis, the zombies'
Marilyn Manson contact lenses, Heston's star appeal, and the occasional
corpse to carry the film, but the inappropriately cheery soundtrack, distracting
plot holes, and a lazily symbolic ending all make 28 Days Later
look like a vast improvement. Man's similarities with Days
are numerous, not least the pairing of a white guy with a badass black
girl (plus a kid or two), but this return-to-the-dark-ages conflict with
opponents who are but a pale (get it?) shadow of its virtual remake's
ferocious monsters fails to thrill or chill.
Once again Germany fails the Jews. Be warned when diving into this documentary - the most unpleasant facts are saved for last. Everyone's familiar enough with the Israeli athletes and coaches being taken hostage by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 summer Olympics in Munich - this is the year Mark Spitz won just about every race in the pool, and the Soviets were handed extra seconds to defeat the USA in men's basketball - and though 27 years after World War II the mere presence of the Israelis here was brave enough, it was perhaps ill-fated from the start, here in the city in which Nazism was born. Stemming from their enduring national guilt over their "recent history" with the Jews, the hosting West Germans insisted on no police or armed security at the Games - a "nonmilitaristic" image that in the end jeopardized their guests' lives. (By contrast, the Greeks have already invested just over one billion dollars in security for this summer's Olympiad.)
Day
cleverly profiles participants from both sides of the situation - a Palestinian
revolutionary and an Israeli fencer, both of whom would meet a violent
end. And whereas the Israeli government's official policy was to never
make deals with terrorists (otherwise "no Israeli life is safe"),
the sometimes black and white, sometimes color footage of the event shows
the Germans were hopelessly stymied and botched the rescue attempts in
innumerable ways. Those failures of competence come across as merely pathetic,
but what they arranged later is simply unforgivable - staging a fake airline
hijacking to send the surviving Palestinians back to their homeland, in
the hope the PLO would agree never to disturb German soil again. Justice
is cowardly thrown out the window, and the anger this film sparks is enough
to make you resolve never to give that country your tourist dollars. At
least that would finally communicate that actions have consequences.
What's
shocking about this movie isn't how Christina Ricci's trailer-trash teenager
tears her way through the lives of everyone around her without a shred
of conscience - it's how so many of her victims subsequently feel morally
obligated to save her from herself. Most of us would be glad to see her
gone and to pick up the pieces, relieved it isn't worse, but instead we
find Martin Donovan pursuing her all across North America to ensure her
unborn child has a good home, and his former gay lover sticking with her
for the sake of that child, even at risk of imprisonment, and even after
it's been proven not to be his offspring. Ricci's unredeemable delinquent
deserves none of this, and therein lies the draw of the film. The Opposite
of Sex is rightfully classified as a comedy, thanks to a richly witty
script, but in the end we are chastened by the response of those who,
once deceived and used by Ricci, do more than just act to preserve their
own interests. It's an act of faith, a course of action rarely considered
in a cinematic world typically ruled by revenge fantasies. And perhaps
that explains the movie's ambiguous title - at least with sex, you're
guaranteed to get something out of it.
The gothic
third of Nicole Kidman’s 1-2-3 knockout punch in 2001 (with Moulin
Rouge! and Birthday Girl that year, Oscar® attention
was inevitable), here we find her cast as a doting mother of two on Jersey
in the Channel Islands in 1945, waiting for her husband to return from
the battlefield and shielding her photosensitive son and daughter from
sunlight’s reach. There’s no telephone, radio, or electricity,
probably not so unusual for the time, but all of a sudden the servants
absent themselves as well, and Nicole’s forced to hold the fort herself.
(Like she isn’t micromanaging things enough already – she inexplicably
forces the children to always lock the door behind them every room they
enter or exit.) Eventually a trio of new servants arrive to assist, but
there’s something vaguely creepy about them, and the kids insist
there’s a ghost of a young boy running amok in the house; their traumatized
dad’s arrival only adds to the confusion, as he stays only for a
night, then trudges away for good. It’s difficult to fathom exactly
where The Others is aiming most of the time, but you’re no
less tense for it, and the final revelations reward your patience with
twists you’ll throttle yourself for not foreseeing. This is a solid
story with spooky atmospherics devoid of cheap shots or expensive CGI,
the plot scattering red herrings in all directions. The children may be
a little too forgiving of their mother’s actions in the end, but
this deceptively modest pic’s games are eminently forgivable.
Le Pacte Des Loups (The Brotherhood of the Wolf) (2001)
Some savage
quadruped of impressive size and indeterminate species is tearing people
apart across the countryside of 1760's France, and Pacte ends up
mirroring its feral subject both in its ambitious scale and in its inimitability.
You just never know sometimes what those crafty French are gonna come
up with - and here they tried cooking up a blend of Matrix-y martial
artistry and pre-revolutionary political intrigue with mixed results.
When the musketeerish Gregoire de Fronsac is called to the scene with
his Mohawk Iroquois companion Mani to get to the bottom of things, they
find plenty of opposition, both from the surprisingly savage indigenous
peoples littering the land and from the various nobles in the castle with
their own special agendas. It's easy to get lose in all the subplots,
but just as easy to be dazzled by the array of costumes, the intricate
sound design, expressively photographed landscapes, and thoughtful designs
of mundane objects from bullets to fans that make this barely civilized
culture look subtly glamorous. Directors Christophe Gans and Pascal Laugier
keep their own creative juices flowing by throwing in brief slo-mos in
the middle of all the derriere-kicking, presenting flashbacks in photonegative,
and making witty cuts in which a pair of breasts in one scene turns into
a range of snow-covered mountains in the next. There's no end to the visual
delights, and that's even without the curious creature with fangs of iron
and claws cooler than Wolverine's,
or Mani himself, who's one hell of a piece of work. Pacte's phantasmagory
just succeeds in counterbalancing its overwrought and somewhat nonsensical
storylines, but even if it is a mess, it remains an admirably ambitious
one.
Or, translated
literally, Redwood Pigeon - which makes as much sense to me as all the
political theories Nanni Moretti tosses about in this supposed comedy
that uses an extended water polo match as its ostensible setting. It seems
Moretti's character is disillusioned by the Italian Communist Party's
declining relevance in recent years, and while his sad-sack recreational
water polo club takes on a more polished rival team in a multi-day tournament
he works through his ambivalent feelings out loud, Moretti's films are
never less than entertaining, but Rossa probably cannot help but
alienate viewers who aren't up to speed on the fortunes of the Italian
left. There's very little concrete political speech one can latch onto,
and when his concerns shift to the importance of one's choice of words
in the course of linguistic exchange, it's clear the intended audience
is much more narrow than its video distributors probably hoped. The match
serves as a therapy session for him, but all seems forgotten when Dr.
Zhivago appears on the TV at the concession stand, which all the players
and spectators watch transfixed. (Moretti may've abandoned his quest for
a point at film's end - but there's always the consolation of the movies,
he seems to be saying.) Whimsical, but irritatingly vague.
I
picked this up to see how my favorite actress, Judy Davis, earned an Oscar®
nomination for Best Actress, and what proved surprising is how little
the film is about her. Ostensibly recounting how Davis' Adele Quested,
during a visit to the colonial subcontinent, brought a friendly native
doctor to trial for attempted rape, A Passage to India more accurately
covers the friendship between the accused Dr. Aziz (Victor Banerjee) and
a British schoolteacher, Richard Fielding (James Fox) who doesn't distance
himself from the locals like most of the colonial occupiers. David Lean,
who adapted E.M Forster's novel, directed, and edited, is even-handed
in honestly presenting both the chaos of India and the British who will
gladly rule any number of developing nations but wouldn't dream of associating
socially with their subjects. Thrown into the mix are Davis, set to marry
a magistrate assigned to India, and her soon-to-be mother-in-law Mrs.
Moore (Dame Peggy Ashcroft, who did pick up a Supporting Actress Oscar®
instead), both of whom are sympathetic to the indigenous culture but are
affected by it in different ways. For her part, Davis gives a surprisingly
subdued performance; you're more likely to be impressed by the chameleonic
Alec Guinness, a Lean staple, as an enigmatic and vaguely insincere brahmin.
There are also the grand scenic shots to take in, as well as the clever
plot devices that demonstrate, despite the artificial separation between
the two peoples, how both the British and the Indians take stock in arranged
marriages. The racism of the English and the obsequiousness of the Indians
will prove unsettling, and that is most likely the point; it's up to the
individual to decide whether to respond with anger or forgiveness.
They may
not have thought so fifty years ago, but nowadays black and white can
make most any old film interesting enough to watch. Too bad that’s
about all that’s of interest in Stanley Kubrick’s first big-budget
Hollywood feature, a war movie that’s very quickly no longer presenting
any warfare. In 1916 France, an abortive assault on a German fortification
so embarrasses the French commander he orders his own troops fired upon
– at least then they’ll be more scared to turn back than to
sacrifice themselves charging forward. Blaming the maneuver’s failure
on the men’s rank cowardice rather than his own miscalculations,
he orders three soldiers court-martialed and executed for “mutiny”
– which is somehow supposed to boost morale among the rest. You’d
think we’d end up with a military tribunal drama along the lines
of Breaker Morant, but this film’s far too talky, cold, and
analytical to hold your interest. (It doesn’t help that most everyone
from Kirk Douglas and Adolphe Menjou on down the line insist on conversing
in stage whispers – I think I missed significant chunks of dialogue,
but not for lack of trying.) the only actor who truly impresses is Ralph
Meeker, as one of the condemned, who’s frightfully sexy amidst all
the cynicism.
By now most everyone's heard the story of the Andrea Gail, the world's unluckiest swordboat, and its fatal run-in with the storm of the century out in the Atlantic. Six men died in one last-ditch effort to reverse their failing fishing fortunes on that well-worn ship in the fall of 1991, and their addition to the Gloucester, Massachusetts Wall of the Dead was first commemorated in a best-selling book inevitably screaming for translation to the screen. Yes, you know what's going to happen to Clooney, Wahlberg et al, but you'll be thoroughly terrified nonetheless. The Perfect Storm's streak of brilliance is paralleling the Gail's plight with that of a tiny yacht near Bermuda equally imperiled by the storm, and of the coast guard crews who attempt to rescue them all. (Note to self: the coast guard is NOT a job I want.) Director Wolfgang Petersen succeeds in weaving a coherent tale out of chaos, but the result is still hell on your nerves. It's all a fitting memorial to the men and their families, as well as their fishing community whose love of the sea regularly whittles their numbers down.
Ah, signature
Buñuel, where people behave utterly civilized in patently absurd
situations. Most infamously, in this film, the public and private spheres
are switched: instead of a dinner party it's a pooping party, with toilets
all around the table, and meals are consumer individually in a room down
the hall. (One child is reprimanded for brazenly declaring she's hungry:
"Don't say that at the table!") Phantom takes on more of a Monty
Python-esque structure of stringing together largely unrelated scenes,
all of them turning some societal convention on its head. One couple goes
through their photo collection, aroused by shots of banal highway overpasses
and disgusted by the Arch de Triomphe; later, their bedroom hosts a parade
of animals, and the next day they report their daughter missing to the
police, even though she's right in front of them the whole time. The sexual
innuendoes get tiresome, but Buñuel never could resist trying to
shock - there's plenty of gratuitous cheesecake shots and obligatory digs
against the church, neither of which scandalize like they used to. But
in other areas he proved eerily prescient, such as the autograph-seekers
in court mobbing the man just sentenced to death, and the smattering of
terrorists and snipers wreaking havoc in the cities. For the mid-seventies,
it's clear Phantom was a few steps ahead of the curve - let's just
hope the pooping party wasn't anywhere near it.
To their
immense credit, my own music instructors in my youth did me an enormous
favor by forcing me to consider whether I was having fun throughout my
piano and flute studies; they risked losing a steady source of income
were I to realize that just being proficient wasn't enough. That's what
makes all the more depressing Isabelle Huppert's turn as an utterly joyless
conservatory facultant who cultivates coldness and indifference in her
students. (Such an aesthetic must still be valued in some circles, since
teachers usually want to be well-represented by their legatees, and she
hasn't lost her job yet.) Dowdily attired, distant from her colleagues,
and apparently into genital self-mutilation (the gelogenic look on her
face when she later tries to urinate is pretty disturbing), it's therefore
baffling that Benoit Magimel's wholesome engineering student would be
so drawn to her. He's like a ray of sunshine, but she can't endure anything
resembling tenderness, and their explosive romance (if that's what you
want to call it) eventually falls prey to her need for humiliation. (Like
it isn't dodgy enough she still shares a bed with her elderly mother,
played with ugly ferocity by Annie Girardot.) Director Michael Hanecke's
definitely done better, but
his steady focus on long, quiet, mundane moments takes lots of courage.
Immersed within and indistinguishable from her character, Huppert's certainly
deserving of her Best Actress award at that year's Cannes Film Festival
- you can virtually see the gears turning in her head when she contemplates
her next soulless gesture - but the relentless portrait of sickness becomes
quite ridiculous when she insists on spelling out her masochistic fantasies
to her young lover (the audience I sat with broke out laughing). Unless
Hanecke was aiming for his own unique brand of ultra-dark comedy, he's
fallen way short of anything actually worthwhile.
If memory
serves, my household in the seventies shared a party line with some folks
up the street, a charmingly medieval telephone arrangement that sets events
in motion in Pillow Talk. Don’t let the tagline fool you (“it’s
what goes on when the lights go off!”), Doris Day and Rock Hudson
are decidedly not amorously chatting when the film opens. Hudson’s
a swinging songwriter with a bevy of females at his beck and call, and
interior designer Day fumes over always overhearing his come-ons every
time she tries to call a client. Ever true to his gender, Hudson marvels
that a single woman can be professionally successful and live alone and
be satisfied with her bachelorette existence, so he poses as a rich Texan
(they’ve never met in person, you see) and tries to seduce her off
her airs. Everyone has great comic timing (and Day even snagged herself
an Oscar® nomination for Best Actress), not least Tony Randall (as
Hudson’s selfish pal) and Thelma Ritter (as Day’s boozing housekeeper),
and though the innuendo-laden script ends with a formulaic inevitable
Hollywood reconciliation, it gets there via surprising avenues. Viva furs
and booze and Cinemascope™!
A boy with
bedroom eyes and a butt that could launch a thousand ships enters into
a fantasy world to deny the sordidness of his actual sex life. Echoes
of Kenneth Anger permeate this erotic reverie in which Bobby Kendall is
either lounging in his very pink and very gilded apartment in see-through
matador pants or degrading himself in a public restroom. He later casts
himself in a Roman setting, then among sheiks, but always preoccupied
with all things phallic and libidinous. The self-proclaimed "anonymous"
director (actually Jim Bidgood) isn't psychologizing our oft-naked cherub
but asks us to simply enjoy what we're looking at, from animated creatures
in an oneiric forest to a city street filled with horny men and vendors
selling stimulators ("get 'em while you're hot!"). Some scenarios
go hardcore, most drastically minimize their wardrobe budget, and none
bothers with dialogue, so this one will be filed under avant-garde for
sure, but thanks to fantastic lighting it's never not pretty. And despite
Narcissus' alienating narrative trajectories, its final message
is as true as anything: nature pays no heed to gay obsessions - the beautiful
A-listers will age just as fast as the rest.
Definitely
among the most overlooked films of 2000, thanks to a feeble advertising
campaign with commercials that did little to suggest it was anything other
than forgettable (note to marketing: look up "self-fulfilling prophecy").
In fact Pitch Black is intelligent, sexy, and terrifying, and hardly
deserves to be shunted with the neverending torrent of B-grade horror/sci-fi
flicks regularly wasting screen space (*cough*Event Horzon*cough*Supernova*cough*).
Here we find a credible cast of characters stranded on a former mining
colony planet (by means of the highly plausible vagaries of space travel,
which most films rarely touch upon) set to be totally eclipsed for the
first time in decades (rare because of its three suns), upon which the
nastiest sort of nocturnal creatures will ascend from below the surface
and enjoy a human smorgasbord. Add to that the variable of one escaped
serial killer off the ship - the only one who can see in the dark - some
fantastically executed special effects, and the occasional revelation
that few among the remaining examples of humanity are morally uncompromised,
and you're in for one hell of a scary ride, not without its plot twists
that show a script with some thought put into it for once. One hopes word
of mouth will raise Pitch Black's stock until it is lionized as
a perfect example of the greatness you can squeeze out of a modest budget,
and how NOT to market a good film.
A
gem of a film that might have been completely forgotten but instead achieved
hyper-belated notoriety for being inexplicably shelved, unreleased, for
twenty years after its creation, The Plot Against Harry manages
to construct a palpable world in eighty-one minutes when many movies fail
to do so in two or three hours. After nine months in prison for racketeering
in horse races, mafioso Harry Plotnick immediately starts re-establishing
his territory in New York City, rounding up all his old Jewish, Puerto
Rican, Asian, and Italian underlings and finding plenty of resistance
among those who used to fear him before he was busted. It's never fully
clear whether Harry is small-time, or big, or formerly big, but he's certainly
likeable, and it's easy to believe he could command loyalty. A freak car
accident reunites him with his ex-wife Kay, their two daughters, and their
respective families after what seems to be a good number of years, and
everyone's remarkably sociable with each other. Harry subsequently ingratiates
himself back into their Jewish subculture, one where it seems he has a
huge backstory. This becomes the film's unique genius: instantly convincing
you of Harry's numerous and lengthy relationships with the delightful
supporting cast, it feels like there could've been many, many movies in
their shared pasts, and we're only seeing one of the final installments.
Eventually Harry's extensive networking and wheeling and dealing so soon
after release start arousing suspicion in his parole officers, and their
scrutiny coupled with Harry's increasing health concerns move him to change
course and clean up his reputation. Donating generously to various charities
organized by Manhattan socialites, blabbing to a televised government
commission exploring the connection between organized crime and legitimate
business, joining a Mason-like temple and appearing on the radio, it all
helps soothe his conscience but opens up his past to even more police
investigation. (And all this in under an hour and a half!) Director Michael
Roemer astonishes by dropping us into a microcosm of New York City's multi-ethnic
criminal subculture with instantly believable relationships, suggesting
a world of depth with the briefest screen time. The authorities eventually
extend their inquiries to his loved ones, and Harry's guilt increases
under the pressure leading to a very public and ironic heart attack (on
the set of a telethon for heart disease), and a final act of selflessness
brings an amusing result no one ever expected. Despite how Harry's situation
seems to only get worse, his perpetually resigned smirk illustrates this
is a film filled with humor, and The Plot Against Harry becomes
a primer on filmic economy and a major find of any year.
Positive
works as an historical primer of the first decade of the AIDS epidemic
in the United States, and especially New York City, where approximately
one quarter of Americans with HIV were residing in the late eighties.
Acting in collaboration with local journalist Phil Zwickler, himself among
the infected, Rosa vonPraunheim documents the major figures, events, and
issues surrounding the crisis when complacent federal, state, and municipal
governments crossed paths with virulent (so to speak) activists and their
various organizations demanding to be heard and acknowledged. There's
Larry Kramer, ever eloquent, enraged, and critical even of the gay community,
Michael Callen's PWA Coalition, Diamanda Galas and fellow artists expressing
anxiety and fire through their work, and GMHC and ACTUP. It's sometimes
explicit in presenting an issue in which sex plays a major role, but it's
never unclear in its central message: the fight to get help to those with
HIV was inextricably linked to confronting society's homophobia, and though
AIDS has never been just a "gay disease," its perception as
such contributed to the authorities' complicity in ignoring the disease
for as long as possible. Tragically, it's that institutional sluggishness
that has helped spread the virus to the heterosexual population beyond
expectations, and twenty years later everyone's in the same boat.
I may have
missed the point to this film, but my dominant impression afterwards was:
boy, politicians sure eat a lot of crap. Certainly the central message
couldn't have been how divorced a moral character is from effective politicking,
because the nation's disgust at the interminable impeachment hearings
in 1999 proves that Americans don't have a problem with morally bankrupt
politicians as long as they're doing a good job at getting us what we
want. Perhaps Primary Colors, in failing to shock, becomes then
an essential document of American politics, where it's understood by all
that dirty deals are necessary to succeed in Washington. Kathy Bates,
in the film's most impressive performance as the moral center, then becomes
an anachronism, since "fighting the good fight," i.e. cleanly,
isn't enough to win. Perhaps it's always been this way. "We didn't
know how the world worked," argue Presidential candidate John Travolta
and First Lady wanna-be Emma Thompson, "this is the price you pay
to lead." If none of that moves you, though, the ending will: after
watching John & Emma play dirty all the way to the inauguration, we
find the Presidency stripped of all nobility. And this is the price we,
the electorate, pay for allowing it.
Of the millions
who've flocked to Mel Brooks' Broadway musical of the same name, many
are probably unaware that the film on which it's based won no less than
an Oscar® for Best Original Screenplay; if anything, it deserves praise
as a herald of the now-legendary art of creative accounting. Gene Wilder
and Zero Mostel mount a big-budget stage production of "Springtime
for Hitler" (funded by donations from Mostel's bevy of octogenarian
mistresses, all of whom have a fondness for role-playing) in the hopes
of declaring a substantial loss (which, from a tax perspective, can be
enormously profitable). Brooks laudably understates the black humor of
two probably-Jewish impresarios soliciting a script from a Nazi sympathizer
- and when the Busby Berkeley-fied final product makes its premiere, with
the intentionally-miscast Dick Shawn (named "L.S.D.") hanging
loose as der Führer, one wonders if German distributors ever dared
touch the thing. Christopher Hewitt's cross-dressing director will forever
taint your memories of "Mr. Belvedere," but it's Wilder's neurotic
delivery that steals the show ("Scared - can't - talk!") even
when the ending seriously whiffs. Three decades later, the resurgent Brooks
must be echoing Mostel's famous line when his plans bypass all expectations:
"Where did I go right?"
Henri-Georges
Clouzot won Best Director at Venice for all the details of this police
procedural which threatens to overflow with murder suspects and risks
losing us when it appears the detectives know more than the film's willing
to tell us until the very end. Aspiring singer Jenny Lamour (who carries
a mean tune even with a cigarette in one side of her mouth) pines for
fame and riches, and her lower-middle-class husband Maurice frets she
may step beyond the bounds of marriage to get to the top. She spends an
evening with a lascivious old producer, Maurice follows them to his place,
and by the time they both have left the scene the geezer's dead. (Oh,
and Jenny's gorgeous and protective lesbian photographer pal apparently
snuck in later to try and erase any sign of Jenny's presence.) So whodunit?
It falls to the haggard Louis Jouvet (who's adopted a kid "from the
colonies") to tighten the investigative vise around all three to
see who cracks first - and crack they do, but the revelations of what
really happened that night are not what you expect. (Nor is a scene where
the cops treat the local pederasts with respect.) But Quai's biggest
surprise is the subtle shift from a standard murder mystery to a humanistic
portrait of Jouvet's Inspector Antoine, who grows in stature from a nuisance
to a genuinely sympathetic codger. Don't expect to keep up with the plot
twists - but do expect to enjoy the ride nonetheless.
Although not all sailors fulfill their commissions with filmworthy experiences (cf. Potemkin), their romantic lives are often of interest to the homoerotically inclined, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Querelle does a world of good for those with a weakness for men in uniform. Lucky us that Brad Davis is cast in the title role, as a painfully handsome French seaman with burgeoning tastes for crime and sodomy; unlucky for us that the film fails to render more accessible Jean Genet's source material, whose antisocial philosophies constantly equate homosexual attraction with violence and murder. (Most tellingly, the eponymous title character's name translates into "quarrel.") Fassbinder sends Davis cruising through a fantastically impressionistic and oversexed French port city of Brest, inflaming desire in the locals just as much as his ass yearns for attention from the menfolk. Querelle's immeasurable desirability even affects his brother Robert, who crosses his path at a brothel whose owner demands all patrons play dice with him upon entering; if you win, you get whomever you choose, if you lose, the owner gets you. (In Genet's pansexual universe, however, many don't mind losing.) Querelle gives us plenty of pro-homosex moments, with macho types nonchalantly declaring their love for manflesh, but Fassbinder willfully obfuscates the proceedings with hyperliterary narration, improbably profound dialogue delivered with impassive contempt, and far from illuminating textual intertitles. Meanwhile, Genet's weltanschauung is telegraphed loud and clear, with Jeanne Moreau's housemadame repeatedly singing "Each man kills the thing he loves" as the men smolder around her. There's way too much talk, but at least those talking are easy on the eyes; though the semantics threaten to bog the film down, it'll turn your crank one way or another.
You may
feel the subject matter's been done many times before - a family's travails
getting by among the indigent in post-industrial urban England - but never
quite like this. Previous entries in the genre (Nil
By Mouth, Naked, Ladybird Ladybird) are explosions
waiting to happen, explorations of just how badly people can treat each
other; Ratcatcher takes it all in through the eyes of a child (12-year-old
James, played with an authentic blankness by William Eadie), and a child
will do everything to keep things as playful as possible. For once a film
doesn't pound its point into your head over and over - this film instead
maintains an unexpected peacefulness among the endless vulgarities and
disappointments and humiliations. Director Lynne Ramsay refuses to stage
events for their dramatic value (there isn't even a musical soundtrack);
developments happen under the surface, and even the occasional death is
recorded with ample detachment. It's a despair that refuses to organize
itself around some sort of climax and resolution, for which we can be
grateful, and the result is an almost Zen-like experience. Filmed in musty
blues and greens by cinematographer Alwin Kuchler.
Though co-produced
by England and Canada, The Reflecting Skin stands as a potential
successor in the tradition of independent American gothic cinema (per
the dictionary, "a style of fiction that emphasizes the grotesque,
mysterious, and desolate"), the next in line after original classics
like Night of the Hunter, River's Edge, and Near Dark.
This 1991 production takes place somewhere in rural hillbilly country
in the late forties, though its look is inscrutably timeless and plausibly
contemporary. Eight-year-old Seth Dove, never having seen any different,
can't seem to recognize that he's surrounded by a gallery of freaks: his
dad's more than a little jittery, his mom's a totally frazzled basket
case, his neighbors are a pair of twins who resemble Wednesday Addams,
and the local sheriff has only one each of eyes and hands. Such is Seth's
lack of perspective that when his dad is revealed to be a pedophile and
sets himself on fire, or when Seth finds his best friend dead in their
well, he's more entranced than distressed by the spectacles. But this
film is not that simple - Seth himself is far from perfect, willfully
terrorizing an English widow (named Dolphin Blue??) down the road for
no apparent reason, and I won't even discuss what he does with a dead
baby he stumbles across. The film is to be applauded for such a realistic
rendering of kids (who are never completely heroic and upright, regardless
of what Hollywood says), and The Reflecting Skin has won a cult
following for its unflinching portrayal of the nightmares of childhood
that mainstream films shy away from and sugarcoat. "Sometimes terrible
things happen quite naturally," says the wan Dolphin Blue, and slowly
Seth starts to believe it, as more and more of the locals turn up dead,
and the soundtrack becomes increasingly portentious. Visually the film
is astonishing, somehow remaining constantly spooky even in broad daylight,
but the ambiance is irreparably shattered with an ending that either missteps
disastrously in tone or tries to recast the previous events as a comedy.
Ultimately director Philip Ridley is admirably uncompromising and singular
in vision, and we will have to content ourselves with a flawed masterpiece.
The Replacement Killers (1998)
Contrary
to expectations, the title does not refer to our heroes Chow Yun-Fat and
Mira Sorvino, but rather to the assassins hired to finish the hit job
Yun-Fat could not - and to finish off our heroes. Contrary to their expectations,
however, Yun-Fat and Sorvino just happen to be a pair of badasses who
soon make short shrift of anyone who looks at them the wrong way. Yun-Fat
and Sorvino look fantastic from start to finish; it's a pity they had
to recite such asinine dialogue. Very little in this film is original,
but the director goes to a lot of trouble to give each scene some style
and it doesn't ultimately feel like a waste of time. With a hunky James
Rooker as a cop also on their trail, and one of the better soundtracks
to come along in recent years.
The Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980)
What with
having enjoyed my ten-year college class reunion last summer, and spent
my last Christmas vacation driving around the Midwest visiting pals I
hadn't seen in at least five years, the idea of a confab among old playmates
is always an attractive concept, and John Sayles' gathering of former
undergraduate political activists at a weekend getaway seems a sure winner
until it's clear how poor a bunch of actors he's hired for this production.
(Even David Strathairn proves less than chameleonic this time around.)
Most everyone delivers their lives like first-year theater students, which
makes even the occasional good bits of dialogue come across as painfully
artificial. Return's not altogether unwatchable: there's a cute
seduction scene, an adroit analysis of a barf, and one immortal addition
to the English language (killing a deer = "Bambicide"), but
it's possible my own reunions this past year would make for more convincing
entertainment.
It's fitting
that a Bicentennial film celebrate the triumph of the working class in
the land of opportunity, and in Philadelphia no less, a city suffused
with so much early American history. Sylvester Stallone's small-time pugilist
is far from perfect - he starts out as a mob enforcer, and later accepts
financial support from the mafia when he's training for his big chance
in the ring (like that's unusual in boxing films) - but he's iconically
American in his determination to at least take advantage of his opportunities.
Rocky Balboa's living far from Philly's upper crust, has barely enough
social skills to survive his first date with Talia Shire's Adrian, and
is essentially a crap-eating, Schlitz™-drinking slob - and he's just
foolish enough to take on the World Heavyweight Champion to show he can
"go the distance" and amount to something. (Carl Weathers' Apollo
Creed wants to look magnanimous in providing an unranked fighter a chance
at the title - as well as show the world a black man making mincemeat
of a white guy - but Stallone's script fails to realize the boxing commission
would hardly allow or broadcast such a stunt, a potential bloodbath of
the briefest sort when two boxers of vastly different levels go head-to-head.)
One would expect the most cheeseball of endings for this franchise-spawning
slice of Americana, especially since it's already implausible enough that
Adrian would fall for Rocky so quick, or that Rocky could get in shape
so fast - but Stallone and director Jon Avildsen save the film's most
redeeming feature for last. The southpaw makes good by fighting to a split
decision - and if and if that's good enough for him, then that's just
Cinderella-ish enough for me.
The French
seem to have a monopoly on romantically-obsessed women (see The Mystery
of Adèle H. or Savage Nights for contemporary examples),
and director Catherine Breillat’s young schoolteacher here adds yet
another variation to their rogues' gallery. It’s not remotely clear
why she remains with her photo-model boyfriend who has no sexual interest
in her, and even less understandable why she alternately seeks out sordid
and anonymous encounters in the meantime while she agonizes over unrequited
love. There’s as much vague soliloquizing as there explicit sex in
this film, and the ultimate effect is clearly meant to render ironic the
title. Her various philosophies fail to cohere, and anyone who sought
this film out for its “sexual situations” (per the MPAA) will
find all her speeches a glorious turn-off, but it’s possible that’s
the point: Breillat may mean to lure the average male viewer with generous
servings of nudity and sex, but she refuses to sensationalize any of it.
It’s the least erotic erotic film ever, and though the central gamine
is little more than a cipher, a mouthpiece for the director’s ideas,
the final shocking scene makes clear her opinion of modern heterosexual
relations: a wall lined with holes, out of each come the bottom halves
of women’s bodies, and hordes of men partaking of the goods. The
stark visual portrayal of how men may truly view women, and the equitable
showings of both male and female genitalia throughout the film, will force
you to examine your attitudes – if you aren’t bored to tears
first.
I'd always
assumed trailer parks were a uniquely American phenomenon, but it appears
Europe has its share of manufactured housing as well, and according to
Rosetta there's no shortage of unskilled and underemployed persons
populating them, immigrant or otherwise. The young Emilie Dequenne's Rosetta
aspires to classier digs, but she has an alcoholic mother to keep in check
and acts essentially as the head of this two-person household while barely
out of high school. It's her ceaseless drive for self-sufficiency that
betrays a childhood that lacked any semblance of order, and she's virtually
in perpetual motion trying to make ends meet and maintain a sense of keeping
things under control. You wonder why the local factory seems unwilling
to take her on, but it's possible she has difficulties getting along with
others - when a boy she meets finds her mobile home to offer she cover
his shifts now and then at his waffle stand, she physically assaults him
out of shame over discovering her modest residence. Hers is one of the
most palpably delineated personalities in world cinema of recent years,
even when her apparent financial desperation drives her to do some unexpectedly
treacherous deeds; it's a decidedly bleak portrait of Europe's labor situation,
not to mention the most unsentimental film to ever come out of Belgium.
Writer-director brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne provide plenty of
handheld camera action (though not as creatively as in their subsequent
feature, The Son, thank goodness)
in a tale that may be frustratingly open-ended but emphasizes above all
Rosetta's quest for autonomy, a personal crusade that demands a sense
of responsibility, even if it means calling into work before you try to
kill yourself.
Another
case of greatness out of the gate that later runs off the rails, if you
don't mind me mixing my metaphors, and it doesn't help that you can see
the boom mike descend from above in three different scenes! Tenenbaums
has so much going for it: production designers and costumers going on
all cylinders with vaguely retro designs, and an ample cast that dedicates
itself to its dysfunctional personae with comedic finesse. Each member
of the Tenenbaum clan is disappointed in everyone else, everyone's on
the verge of a breakdown, and everybody's destiny is all too bound to
that of their distinguished family. Gene Hackman, Ben Stiller, Gwyneth
Paltrow, Bill Murray, Owen & Luke Wilson, Anjelica Huston et al are
all uniformly a hoot, but it's director Wes Anderson who drops the ball
when he (once again) doesn't know when to end a story. His poor sense
of economy dooms the picture way before its vaguely misanthropic bent
does, and by the time everyone realizes they desperately need therapy,
you've realized Tenenbaums needed a bolder editor.
After enduring
the nonsense of Notting Hill early in the summer of 1999, where
Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant keep coming together and falling apart over
and over for no apparent reason, I was certain I wasn't up for Runaway
Bride a few short months later. I was doubly repelled when the ads
announced the film heralded the reunion of the team that brought us Pretty
Woman ten years earlier, a film where, everyone seems to have forgotten,
Richard Gere pays Julia Roberts to give him a blowjob and then they fall
in love and live happily ever after. Imagine my surprise when, once I
grab a copy at the video store a year later, Runaway Bride is found
to not require I suspend disbelief to the breaking point, and instead
has me dying to know, as did the rest of the world much earlier, will
she or won't she once again bolt from the altar? Julia is simply the most
charming thing in the world, everyone else involved keeps up their end,
and I returned the video feeling completely warm and fuzzy. Runaway
Bride is that rare thing: a star vehicle that justifies our fascination
with its stars.
This darling
of the art-theater circuit in 1999 deserves every rave you may have heard:
Run Lola Run is a breath of fresh air in a foreign film scene that
all too often takes itself very, very seriously. Playful from start to
finish, we're given three alternate narratives each offering divergent
possible outcomes for everyone involved when Lola (the Claire Danes-ish
Franka Potente) has twenty minutes to scare up 100,000 Deutsch Marks and
save her slightly inept smuggler boyfriend from his criminal debtors.
Each sequence presents a series of coincidences and near-misses that send
character's lives careening in fortuitous or unenviable directions, even
flash-forwarding to follow random passersby whose destinies can be irrevocably
altered by Lola simply speeding by. Director Tom Tykwer's greatest stroke
of genius among many is Lola's shock of neon cherry Kool-Aid hair, which
grounds our eyes while she bolts throughout the gray city. It's a marvellous
feat, threading together numerous mini-dramas, and it's good to see the
Germans still possess such remarkable cinematic energy.
Alexander Sokurov's paean to St. Petersberg's renowned Hermitage museum probably holds worlds more meaning for Russian audiences, with what seems to be an unending stream of cultural historical references specific to that always-evolving nation. Less worldly viewers can content themselves with spectacle over comprehension, as the camera explores the recently-restored Winter Palace (which housed the Tsars in the 18th and 19th centuries) and adjacent galleries in one unbroken ninety-five-minute take. It's the circumstances behind Ark's creation that impress more than actual plot - the premises were closed to the public for years during preparations, filming could only take place during a couple-hour window with the requisite amount of sunlight, and the crew made a few false starts before this final production came together. It's therefore the achievement you're busy admiring during those moments when the unseen central character (who appears to be some sort of ghost, seen by some but not all, and who marvels that he is suddenly able to speak Russian, so he must be from elsewhere - like us?) follows a black-garbed "Marquis" from room to room, listening to his various disquisitions on art and history; each corridor takes them to a different point in time as well, with one hall occupied by Catherine the Great and another filled with contemporary Japanese tourists.
Clearly
there's more to this than a simple stroll - the gent whose perspective
we share constantly advises caution, and later a clearly-discomfited docent
asks them to leave. But how the camera blithely floats through the crowds,
over orchestras, and down tiny hallways beggars belief - if anything,
this is a triumph of spatial peregrination, and at the end of it all Sokurov's
touched upon sculpture, painting ("Russians are talented at copying
- why? Because they don't have ideas of their own - the authorities don't
want them to"), dance, music, costume, pageantry, food, architecture,
and, not least, drama: "Russia is like a theater," the Marquis
opines, and an ambitious one at that. "The subtitles don't always
match the audio, but a soundtrack is barely necessary when our eyes are
taken on such a journey.)
Would you
believe that one of the most fascinating Japanese movies was written,
directed, and produced by a German? None other than Josef Von Sternberg
concocted this surreal "postscript to the Pacific conflict"
in which a group of men - and one woman - are stranded on a three-square-mile
island in 1944 halfway between Guinea and Japan, and for half a decade
think World War II is still going strong. They sit around preparing for
an Allied incursion, but no such combatants materialize - and they discover
the true enemy was "in our own bodies." The presence of an attractive
woman, Keiko, all but dismantles any semblance of law and order, especially
when a pair of guns are found: "two old pistols - two new masters,"
the deadpan narrator explains. When all they can think about is getting
laid (at least Keiko doesn't mind being the center of attention) it never
occurs to them that having the guns only makes you a target, as everyone
else seeks to usurp your authority. It's a dreamlike chronicle of a wholly
distinct world, and Von Sternberg even forgoes the use of subtitles in
place of a highly articulate and oftimes literary narrator who renders
the anarchy all too clear.
A
passable, if tasteless, parody of various (mostly slasher) films of the
late 90's, where for starters, all the main characters are named after
the Brady Bunch children. The film's creators, Shawn & Marlon Wayans
(and directed by Keenen Ivory), tread dangerous ground by satirizing films
like Scream which themselves
already deconstruct the slasher genre, but they strike gold when they
introduce elements we've always wanted to see, like a killer who is, in
truth, perfectly incompetent, and by finally addressing where everyone's
parents are the whole time (hiding from Colombian drug lords, of course).
His teenage victims, perfectly in tune with our desensitized media-drenched
culture, stay sarcastic to the end (even after they're decapitated), refusing
to believe any of this is really happening to them. Also a bit too much
like Scream, the ending makes
no sense whatsoever, but that's easily forgiven when we're treated to
scenes where theater patrons at a screening of Shakespeare in Love
beat the masked killer to the punch and together stab to death another
viewer who refuses to stop talking throughout the movie. Never has wish
fulfillment for a film critic appeared so blatantly on the screen. (Incidentally,
if you can't get enough of films like these, it's worth your while to
seek out Shriek if You Know What I Did Last Halloween, produced
almost simultaneously as Scary Movie, and ultimately released on
the USA Network instead. This film, though virtually identical in purpose,
is actually more clever than the one that beat it to theaters - you can't
top watching a cheerleader, on the verge of a messy demise, whip out a
stick of Mentos and, Doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo, come up with a brilliant
escape.)
Inevitably
not as groundbreaking as the first installment,
but hitting its marks just as brilliantly (part 2 was passable if perfunctory),
this celebration of all that's good and bad about the slasher genre wraps
up in a way most franchises can't: having not played all its cards
in the previous films. Scream3 bleeds original ideas, not the least
of which is upping the self-referential quotient to dizzying levels: between
the developments of Scream2 and now, the world within the film
has seen its own horror trilogy hit the silver screen about the same events,
and now murderous hijinks are taking place on the set of the forthcoming
"Stab 3." This gives the killer, to our delight, twice the bodies
to perforate - the original survivors from Scream2, and their "Stab"
counterparts cast with varying degrees of resemblance. What ensues is
a dead-on parody of tinseltown, most effectively in the bickering between
Courtney Cox-Arquette's still-persistent reporter and her Hollywood shadow
as played by Parker Posey. Once again anyone could be the killer, once
again anyone is liable to be offed, and once again, we can only pray that
this franchise won't go on forever.
Don't dismiss my forthcoming assertion that Maggie Gyllenhaal is the next Mary Steenbergen - she's got an Oscar® after all, so there's talent implied in that association. And her first lead role's a whopper - to watch such an innocent-looking pixie come under the sexual thrall of her boss is hard to take at first, but the road to female self-actualization is never a smooth one. Recently released from a psychiatric institution for a long history of self-abuse (she's a cutter) and determined to make a stable career for herself, she gains employ under E. Edward Gray (James Spader, never better), whose psychotically baroque offices (the interior decorating is both the best and worst element in the film) and perfectionist supervisory style (he keeps a menagerie of red sharpies yo correct any and all clerical typos) suggest neuroses of his own. (So does the permanent "Secretary Wanted" sign out front that lights up like a hotel vacancy sign when necessary.) When he starts ordering her what color clothes to wear and what to eat for dinner that night, or to dumpster dive for a lost document, the twist is she finds she enjoys the structure and simplicity of all the rules he's imposing on her.
Simultaneously
confused and ecstatic, she starts exploring this S&M/B&D dynamic
by relentlessly accommodating his demands until he discovers he's no match
for her desire to serve. The media circus that ensues when she makes a
last-ditch attempt to earn his trust is unlikely, as a lawyer risks serious
public opprobrium for crossing the line with his subordinates, and S&M
is a little tired as a topic these days, but if you can put the morality
aside it's like a twenty-first-century Now, Voyager, about a girl's
admirable quest to figure out what turns her crank and individualize herself.
As well as a cautionary tale of how not to blend Asian and Western styles,
shag carpeting, and wallpaper-size photographs of Greek ruins when designing
your workplace - oh, the horror….
When certain
personalities become so integrated into our cultural consciousness (everyone
knows what Charlie Chaplin is all about, but how many people have actually
sat through one of his films?), it's easy to take their enormous talent
for granted. Perhaps this is a good thing, for when we do finally encounter
their work we are amazed afresh. Over the years our collective cultural
memory has reduced Marilyn Monroe to little more than an object of desire,
and discounts her tremendous skill as a comedienne. I guarantee therefore
that The Seven Year Itch will astound you. There is Monroe's unfathomable
beauty, yes, flawless in scene after scene, but who expected her to deliver
her lines with such calculated innocence, to use that body with such impeccable
comic timing, to personify dizziness so accurately? This is something
precious and rare, and paradoxically underappreciated when elevated to
iconic status. Monroe is a sensation, but only when witnessed firsthand,
otherwise she is diminished to cliché. Everyone thinks they know
Marilyn; few run over to the classics section of their video store to
discover how much greater she is than they imagined.
Although
there's nothing wrong with Jackie Chan's solo films, it's becoming clear
he finds a greater audience in the U.S.A. when paired with a comedic partner.
This time around he gets Owen Wilson, a highly articulate and painstakingly
professional train robber who, had he been born in this era, would've
found a home doing the New Age guru/interpersonal relations counselor/motivational
speaker circuit. His character's largely an anachronism, and it's revisionist
twists such as these that provide the most pleasure in Shanghai Noon.
For one thing, this is the most multicultural portrayal of the Old West
you'll ever see, with Chan travelling to Carson City in 1881 as a member
of the Chinese Imperial Guard to retrieve the kidnapped Princess Pei Pei
(Lucy Liu). First he is assimilated into a Native American tribe and even
married off to the chief's daughter (says another tribal councilman, "It
could be worse - at least he's not a white guy"), all the locals
assume he's Japanese (though one dim settler sees him and corrects his
wife: "They're not Injuns, woman, they're Jewish"), and he eventually
finds himself in a showdown with the bad guys at a Spanish mission. Most
humor is thanks to cultural misunderstandings, as hardly anyone speaks
the same language, which provides more authentic diversity than we've
ever seen in a Western, but the primary locus of cross-cultural bonding
takes place between Chan (who co-produced) and Wilson, who alternately
assists and betrays him. Chan faces various threats en route to rescuing
the Princess (bandits, the mountains, Indians, U.S. marshalls, slave traders,
and finally the Imperial Guard itself) while atop his horse, Fido (the
first horse trained to sit upon command?) and soon builds up a reputation
as the "Shanghai Kid." The choreography's relatively crude when
compared to, say, The
Legend of Drunken Master, and the violence and language are somewhat
obviously sanitized (possibly to keep the film its PG-13 rating), but
Chan, who never uses a gun once in the film, does some great things with
a horseshoe and rope, and at least he has a very clever script to back
him up - just wait until you hear what his character's name turns out
to be.
There are
two kinds of teen films - those made for adults, and those made for teens.
The first, exemplified by Clueless, for example, features dangerous
levels of irony and playfully skewers the insecurities and traumas of
adolescence from a safe (i.e. adult) distance. The latter school, in which
this film belongs, may occasionally parody aspects of high school life,
but ultimately the story is as old as dirt (the in-crowd versus those
deemed unpopular) and the stakes are as dramatically urgent as in an after-school
special. She's All That is particularly insidious in that the charming
Freddie Prinze, Jr. makes us forget that he's being so sweet to Rachel
Leigh Cook under false pretenses, that he's using her to win a bet, and
in the end you still cheer for him. Somehow we are to believe that even
after a guy is cruel to you, you just might discover he's actually meant
to be your soul-mate. Don't be fooled: this is a teen film for teens where
the star is the less evil of several bad guys, and we are made to love
him for it. The filmmakers are trying to hedge their bets, and subsequently
are peddling very questionable notions of heroism. That's as arrogant
as the assumption that all the high school dramas set among rich &
bright California kids, i.e. the vast majority, are somehow representative
of the rest of America. They're probably not even representative of most
California teen-agers. (This is also, notably, a PG-13 teen flick - is
it because the MPAA has now deemed the F-word appropriate for 13-year-olds,
but not when they're twelve? And you wonder why Congress is after Hollywood
these days.)
It's
perhaps the oldest Hollywood cliché - a young ingenue sets out
to make it big in show business - except this is the 1990's, and she ain't
no ingenue, and the compromises she faces to crawl her way to the top
would give those girls in 42nd Street a heart attack. In contemporary
renditions of this theme, gone are the illusions that success in the entertainment
industry can be achieved without whoring yourself to some degree, and
in the hands of Paul Verhoeven, Showgirls similarly leaves just
about nothing to the imagination. It may be unfashionable to suggest that
this film, often cited in movie jokes as among the worst ever, really
is quite passable. (In light of what we now know goes on, in Vegas and
beyond, it certainly can't be faulted for its honesty.) The T & A
factor is second only to Caligula,
to be sure, and the script only slightly less predictable, but it does
raise one pertinent question: who in their right mind would ever think
Elizabeth Berkley is attractive? It may sound uncharitable, and she does
try very hard, but if Verhoeven and scripter Joe Eszterhas (both hot off
the success of Basic Instinct)
thought they'd discovered the next Sharon Stone, they're grossly mistaken
(as Berkley's subsequent career has illustrated). In truth, you need look
no further for the wow! factor than her co-star, Gina Gershon, whose jaw
- and talent - are a thing of wonder. As Berkley's dancer wanna-be "works"
her way up the ladder as a Vegas showgirl, we hear the film's thesis loud
and clear: it's all just different degrees of prostitution. News to no
one, to be sure, except to Berkley's character, but it's a trashily fun
ride watching her get the point.
Deeply
brilliant, and profoundly flawed. Director Jonathan Nossiter delivers
a marvel of elliptical storytelling, presented with surprisingly stunning
colors for digital video. Also marvelous is Charlotte Rampling, who communicates
endless frustration over her husband’s sudden need to subject every
random physical object to interpretation, and concluding it’s all
telling him to leave her for another woman. Sadly, the last quarter ruins
what could’ve been the most fascinating film of the year; as Signs
nears its end it all makes less and less sense, until it’s finally
completely inscrutable. Nossiter falls flat on his face with this one,
but he is to be applauded for taking great risks – he’s either
going to turn into a great filmmaker or an irrelevant one, but certainly
not average.
A fascinating
representation of a certain amoral postwar mentality, cloaked in the guise
of a melodrama. Willi Forst pulls no punches in presenting the moral bankruptcy
of the generation that came of age during WWII, as its hardened youths
grow into absolute libertines in a psychological maneuver to avoid their
collective traumas. Hildegard Knef, looking like a young Catherine O'Hara,
takes "a few steps in the gutter" starting with her stepbrother
(who pays her for regular shags) and sleeping her way through wartime
(to bypass "the fear of death") until she falls hard for a "has-been
painter" (who enjoys portraying her on the canvas as Phyryne, the
classical Greek figure who stood naked before her judges and was exonerated).
He's got a malignant brain tumor, though, which teaches her that true
love isn't about equitable transactions but "means giving and giving
and giving." Forst's hyperactive camera comes up with some great
angles in which to frame his tightly-plotted series of flashbacks and
flash-forwards, and the almost incidental critique of Germany's moral
failings is surprising for coming so soon after the war; his only failing
may be in staging a double suicide as a painfully romantic gesture.
Brian De Palma's signature style of cinematic obviousness either works brilliantly or implodes ungracefully, and Sisters sadly belongs to the latter camp. His first mistake is in explaining things too quickly, and therefore robbing any mystique from the set-up where Margot Kidder plays two once-conjoined twins - one sane, the other less so. Then when a reporter tracks them to an "experimental madhouse" (do those only exist in the movies?) the shift in the story's focus from Kidder's duo to the journalist's plight at the hands of their evil doctor is the second equally fatal misstep - it's all sufficiently creepy, but hardly suspenseful. The weird dream newsreel/hallucination sequence fails to elicit interest as well, and though it's neat to see both Kidder and New York City so long ago, the rest dates exceedingly poorly. De Palma's since done much better (Carrie, The Untouchables, Femme Fatale) and much worse (Hi, Mom!, Mission: Impossible, Obsession), which is still probably a better track record than most - fans exploring his hit-and-miss career will certainly come to respect his persistence in the most uncertain of industries.
Welcome
to the Hummingbird Hill suburbs, where everybody knows a little too much
about everyone else, and what the neighbors know about Marueen O'Hara
and Robert Young's kids is that they're fantastically out of control.
The film offers no reasons behind their intractability - certainly a modern
production would place blame squarely on the parents for lax discipline
- but all are in agreeance a nanny is needed. Enter Mr. Belvedere (Clifton
Webb), the very source of the 80's TV series, and the star of numerous
sequels - a Britisher of impeccable comportment who, though confessing
to hating kids and refusing to cook, proves more than capable in an incongruous
position that sends the gossipy community all atwitter. O'Hara's delivery
is a little too practiced, but no one's prepared for all the clever rejoinders
Belvedere dishes up at the right moments - the best among them: "only
an idiot is completely happy anywhere." The plot makes a hard turn
at the end when all sorts of secrets come out in the open, and it's hard
to believe the central dissembler isn't punished more, but director Walter
Lang adeptly keeps us in our seats without complaint.
Sobibor, 10/14, 1943, 16h (2001)
Claude Lanzmann's
follow-up to his epic Holocaust documentary Shoah
was originally supposed to be a part of that earlier production, but the
story it recounts contrasted so sharply with all of Shoah's woe
it ultimately merited its own distinct release. The title pinpoints the
moment when the inhabitants of a Belarussian concentration camp rose up
against their German captors and fled to freedom, an instance of self-determination
so rarely mentioned in Holocaust lore it almost defies belief. Lanzmann
interviewed the remaining participants back in 1979, including Yehuda
Lerner, who escaped no less than eight different camps in six months when
he was a teenager, and helped plan the intricately-detailed rebellion
that in the end killed thirteen Nazis. It's a tale that deserves to be
heard ho matter how belatedly, and though Sobibor is hardly cinematic
in the retelling (most scenes offer little more than a static camera and
a solitary speaker), it's the least we can do to listen. Just prepare
yourself for the interminable list of the numbers killed at each camp
that appends the film (and recited in voice-over by the director) - despite
the achievement of the escapees, not for a second does Lanzmann want you
to forget how many others died before and during the Final Solution's
execution - in Sobibor's camp alone, another quarter-million didn't make
it out alive. It's more an act of conscience than a desire to be entertained
that will bring you to this film - but it's also the least we can do,
to devote an hour and a half to remembering the courage of those subject
to one of the lowest points in human history.
I drove
all the way to Toledo to see this Palme d'Or winner, and Nanni Moretti's
Cannes triumph is both a lot less funny and a lot less concerned with
Italian politics than his earlier works like Caro Diario and Palombella
Rossa. Moretti tackles a weighty subject that American audiences saw
at the same time in In The Bedroom - the death of a teenage child
- but these parents have no one to revenge themselves upon. Their high-school-age
son drowns in a cave while scuba diving, and Room explores the
emotional landscape the family must traverse in trying to make sense of
it all. Dad Moretti, a psychiatrist, blames himself for choosing to attend
to a suicidal patient instead of accompanying his son on that dive, and
the accruing guilt eventually dismantles any sympathy he previously had
for his damaged clients and their self-absorbed issues. (His colleague
encourages him for his own sake to vent at the guy who took him away that
fateful day, but now the hapless man's got cancer.) Amidst all their grief,
they later learn their son had a long-distance girlfriend they knew nothing
about, and they seek her out as a sort of still-vibrant connection to
their now-ghostly son. It's a bittersweet encounter, meeting this girl
who could've been part of their family, and it's Moretti's most impressively
mature work to date, quietly devastating - and worth driving to another
state for.
Salzburg,
at the end of the thirties, and Julie Andrews is famously spinning around
in the hills, but not as much as I remembered. I use the word "remembered"
loosely, as I'd never actually seen Music before, and refer instead
to the endless cultural references one runs across in one's lifetime before
you actually go rent the film. Especially in the church that shaped my
undergraduate years - the cinema was assumed to be an improper influence
and prohibited by the Christian Reformed Church until this Robert Wise
creation came along and won everyone over - it's hard not to be inundated
with Music lore, but nothing replaces the real thing, which turns
out to be better - and much less saccharine - than anyone could've foretold.
Both Andrews and Charmian Carr (as Liesl) seem a bit old for their parts,
but Christopher Plummer's awfully dashing for his age, and even when the
kids put on their puppet show you'll be too mesmerized to roll your eyes.
Wise maintains a compelling narrative pace, and even explores some interesting
psychological territory with Rolf the proto-Nazi, but thankfully the final
result is far from insufferably cheery, and its historical charming of
the cinematically-wary is hardly inconceivable. (Especially with Richard
Haydn cast as Max!)
That cape,
that cape, that cape: some cinematic creations are so visually pleasurable
that they justify an entire film. And in Spawn we finally find
a caped crimefighter that can pull off wearing one without looking ridiculous
(what is Superman's for, anyway? To check the direction of the wind? At
least Batman's helps him look creepy). This sort of fantastic fashion
statement is exactly what CGI is for, and Spawn's digital effects
as a whole are pretty impressive, with the exception of a Satan who looks
straight out of a video game. We also get cheeseball dialogue and narration,
delivered in those cliched breathy overtones of menace, that should remain
exclusive to the comic book domain, but they are easily ignored when confronted
with the main character's kick-ass nectoplasmic armor and fourth-degree-burned
face. And that cape! How many more days until Halloween? (There's a plot,
too: double-crossed first-caliber government assassin is groomed post-mortem
to lead the devil's armies against the gates of heaven in return for seeing
his wife again, but he eventually decides his new boss doesn't have his
best interests in mind and switches camps. I'd seriously consider replacing
him if I could have his cape!)
David Cronenberg put an awful lot of work into such a slight film; the attention to detail as he recreates a relentlessly gloomy postwar London working-class neighborhood feels like such a waste when the end result is so irrelevant. Ralph Fiennes' Mr. Cleg checks out of an insane asylum and into a decaying boarding house and confronts some unpleasant childhood memories that, we assume, made him the mightily impaired sort he is today. Muttering to himself, dressing in multiple overlayed shirts, subject to the occasional panic attack, and more than a little paranoid, Cleg pores daily over his tin of treasured possessions, including a homemade journal that he's written in his own idiolect. His diary instigates flashbacks where Cleg watches his father (Gabriel Byrne) neglect his mother (Miranda Richardson) and philander with the crassest of floozies at the pub (Richardson again) and ultimately plot to replace the former saint with the latter tart. (The adult Cleg places himself within these long-past events as a grown-up, observing events he couldn't possibly have witnessed first-hand, so the veracity of these memories is highly questionable.)
It seems
that Cleg was perfectly well-adjusted as a child, so the dominant question
becomes exactly how he ended up so debilitated; it's also possible that
the silo that overshadows his building - sometimes full as he walks by,
sometimes half-full, sometimes empty - is to serve as some sort of metaphorical
commentary, but perhaps only Cronenberg knows exactly what. Lynn Redgrave
looks perpetually put-upon as the overseer of Cleg and his various elderly
fellow lodgers in this tenement with its brown water, startlingly-angled
ceilings, and dusty wallpaper; and though Fiennes' inscrutability is commendable
as a performance, the script's comparable impenetrability must be regarded
as a shortcoming. Like with his M. Butterfly, Spider's substantial
visual textures only mask the most meager of storylines - it makes you
yearn for Cronenberg's schlockier days.
Welcome to an anachronistic Manhattan where crime is around every corner - because if there wasn't, what would all those superheroes do with themselves - volunteer in soup kitchens, or in Iraq? Scripter David Koepp had a tough job in condensing everyone's favorite web-slinger's origin, and that of his arch-enemy, into a feature-film-size package, but he's masterfully organized the flow of ideas so that director Sam Raimi can dive right into the genetically-engineered blue & red spider biting high school senior and wussball Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) and repeatedly rescuing neighbor and unrequiting object of affection Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst) from unhinged industrialist Norman Osborn (Willem Dafoe) a.k.a. the Green Goblin - who also happens to be his best friend's dad. The arachnid's toxin garbles Parker's own DNA in all the good ways, buffing up his body and erasing his myopia (plus the wall-crawling, web-spinning, and spider-sense extras), but he's still a kid who can't get up the nerve to ask Mary Jane out and whose best idea for his new abilities is to make a buck in the semi-professional wrestling circuit.
Uncle Ben
dies, Aunt May perseveres, Daily Bugle editor J. Jonah Jameson seethes,
and the super-nimble Parker transforms the skyscrapers into his own personal
jungle gym - we've got all the requisite components of his legend firmly
in place - but other elements don't transfer onto celluloid quite so seamlessly:
it's never explained from whence came Peter's fashionista powers to whip
up with the ornate costume without eyeslits, or how he explains to Jameson
how he can get all those photos of Spider-Man in action, and he certainly
wouldn't've swung off that building the first time without testing his
web's tensile strength first. There's always sequels to address the loose
ends, of course, and Spider-Man's strength is in never losing focus
on what is essentially a tale of young love, and of a working-class Queens
kid taking down the rich corporate mogul, as well as further proof that
Maguire and Dunst are watchable in just about anything.
Or,
Extradordinary Tales of Edgar Allen Poe, per its original French
title. Three characteristic short stories of mortality, misanthropy, and
the supernatural, translated to the screen by Vadim, Malle, and Fellini,
presented in declining order of excellence. First you'll marvel at a young,
breathtaking, and utterly soulless Jane Fonda (actually speaking French!)
playing a sadistic countess who falls for a neighboring baron (played,
in a twisted moment of casting, by her brother Peter), is rejected by
him, and has him killed, only to believe he's returned to bedevil her
in the form of a black stallion. Next Alain Delon plays William Wilson,
a heartless idler who keeps running into his doppelganger during his cruellest
moments (with Brigitte Bardot always caught in the middle), and resolves
to do away with him for good, at great cost to himself. Lastly the completely
incoherent "Toby Dammit" sequence, with Terence Stamp as a flavor-of-the-moment
English actor among the Roman glitterati, drinking himself stupid, and
driving recklessly in a new Alfa Romeo. One imagines Poe was a little
less stupefying on the printed page than he is presented here; you're
better off first enjoying all the outfits Vadim squeezes his comely wife
Jane into and then taking the video back quickly. Malle's centerpiece
is more an intellectual exercise, and the finale an evocation of a certain
paranoid and occult atmosphere, but neither narrative is worthy of its
source. Case in point: which has survived the passage of time, Poe or
this film?
Revisiting
the sardonic view of the future he initiated in Total Recall, director
Paul Verhoeven reaffirms his status as King of the modern 'B' picture
with Starship Troopers. The script telegraphs itself from a thousand
miles away, as we follow three earnest teenagers pursuing their dreams
in Earth's military forces while engaged in war against a nasty arachnid
race from the planet "Klendathu," but Verhoeven's attention
to detail, his keeping his tongue firmly in cheek, and his trademark over-the-top
gore factor engages from start to finish. The film would have fallen apart
if it had taken itself too seriously, and Verhoeven never lets us forget
that the whole point is to have fun. Mimicking the earnest sci-fi flicks
of the 50's with an equally cheeseball script, but this time with astonishing
visual effects, the film does manage to keep you guessing where it will
all lead, with only two things certain: the body count will be high, and
those that survive will be a mess. This is a solidly entertaining second-tier
picture, nothing to be ashamed of, with all the right elements firmly
in place, a quality guilty pleasure if there ever was one. Featuring Denise
Richards' eyebrows, almost as scary a sight as the bugs themselves.
Star Trek: First Contact (1996)
Used to
be the Star Trek films succeeded in appealing to larger audiences
because their dilemmae and tight spots felt palpably threatening - now
their storylines seem overly-concerned with their own continuity, engendering
a solipsistic universe of little interest to anyone not already immersed
in the Trek mythos. In this installment the Enterprise crew have to go
back in time to ensure their own existence – an adventure that hardly
seems relevant in the bigger Hollywood picture. At least First Contact
has the Borg, who are endlessly creepy (they’re a uni-minded cyborganic
species incessantly determined to integrate everyone who crosses their
path into their ranks, robbing them of their individuality), and their
queen (Alice Krige), who is no less appealing for being half-robot (and,
considering her sexy line readings, apparently perpetually aroused). But
the true indication of the film’s narrow target audience is its idea
of humor: the jokes thud abysmally, but maybe not if you’re well-versed
in (or care much about) “Next Generation” lore and its cast
of characters. Myself, I’m rooting for the Borg.
Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999)
Some menace, indeed - so formidable that an 8-year-old boy can single-handedly destroy the bad guys' early Deathstar model from the inside and treat it all like a video game. The premise of this trilogy is intriguing enough - witnessing how a Christ-like child in whom "the Force is very strong" can grow to instead become Darth Vader, the archenemy of Episodes 4-6. But writer/director George Lucas' obvious weakness for computer generated imagery betrays Part I, by blinding him to the continued necessity of a compelling plot and cast of characters. (The pen is ever mightier than the blue screen. Remember how Titanic wasn't nominated for the Best Original Screenplay Oscar®?) The result is more ephemeral than anything the poor actors had to pretend to interact with. You come compelled by the Event-ness of the film, and then are cast adrift by the absence of narrative economy: instead of scenes justified by pushing the narrative forward, they are clearly little more than opportunities to showcase Industrial Light & Magic's digital wizardry. Though comparisons to the original trilogy may be unfair, they are less so when the film tries to feed off their reputation, and this film entirely lacks the kinds of characters that made the first series so enjoyable: there's no Han Solo, there's no Princess Leia, and even though technically there is, there's no Obi-Wan. Any critic could pounce on this film to argue for a deteriorated and decadent contemporary moviemaking scene; instead, this abortive attempt at making more film history simply helps illustrate how elusive greatness can be.
We'll ignore
the sound mikes invading the frame from above, the few script implausibilities,
and the cheap synthesizer soundtrack so easily associated with 80's horror/slasher
flicks: The Stepfather illustrates brilliantly that a modest production
can transcend its 'B' status with intelligent direction, bold acting,
and avoiding cheap shots like things jumping out at you every five minutes.
Joseph Ruben's 1987 creation follows a psychopath (played with chameleonic
genius by Terry O'Quinn) who integrates himself into fatherless homes
in the search for the American Dream but somehow always ends up disappointed,
and feels the need to start over afresh, leaving a bloody trail in his
wake. This time he becomes "Jerry" the realtor, weds former
Charlie's Angel Shelly Hack, and finds his new resentful stepdaughter
difficult to win over. (She's a handful to begin with: expelled from school
for fighting, she remarks how her new father figure is "gonna kill
me," the first of a steady stream of inadvertent one-liners.) O'Quinn
switches from caring head of household to (privately) raving maniac on
a dime, and just as he and Steph "bury the hatchet" his façade
starts to crumble. The film is clearly a product of its era, with foggy
interiors, portentious music, and reporters stumbling upon clues far too
easily, but the strengths far outweigh the weak spots: Ruben understands
it's all about build-up, and to his credit he doesn't overdo the final
chase scene. The Stepfather coaxes some great stunts and performances
out of everyone, and is aging remarkably well to stand out among a most
degraded genre.
This film’s
guilty of the same shortcoming that turned me off of the Ocean’s
Eleven remake two years ago – our heroes are always one step
ahead of the law, and are never once truly challenged. The only kinks
in the con men’s plans are themselves entirely staged, and the result
is a smug tale that merely illustrates the virtues of thorough planning.
Typical dramatizations of admirable cinematic heroism usually require
the stars beat the odds and rise above their circumstances and discover
their true fortitude of character as they encounter various obstacles,
but here Redford and Newman have accounted for every possibility well
in advance and only feign any moments of weakness. The Depression-era
sets and designs are charming (though I’m unsure they had fluorescent
lighting just yet), director George Roy Hill unfolds the tale at a perfect
clip, and Newman and Redford generate enough combined Hollywood wattage
to power several former Soviet republics, but their characters are never
really tested, and are therefore never truly impressive.
The Straight Story is a slow yarn, and that is its genius. This paper-thin tale of a septuagenarian travelling cross-country on a riding lawn mower to see his ailing estranged brother crawls as quickly as the film's central piece of machinery. Prepare yourself for one of the most languid films not made by the French, Japanese, or Russians; it takes some time before you realize how little is spoken, how little happens, and how enrapt you've become. Director David Lynch, thankfully back in form, probably did very little to direct Richard Farnsworth's portrayal of the stubborn protagonist who touches the lives of all he meets along the way, and the script filled probably no more than a few pages, and the gamble pays off. (Couldn't the Oscar® for Best Actor have been shared by Spacey and Farnsworth?) Most significantly, though, the film bravely dares to mine a compelling subject that Hollywood is typically loath to exploit: you exit saying, more films about old people, please.
Werner Herzog's
movies are famously taken with the unique character of geographical settings,
but Stroszek finally proves preoccupied with its rural American
environment at the expense of factuality. After a trio of German oddballs
(one a mentally-challenged ex-con, one a prostitute, one an elderly conspiracy
theorist) place their faith in the USA's reputation of instant prosperity
("everyone makes money there, we can too"), they find themselves
in a backwards world of cinder blocks, propane tanks, and deer hunters
- and buying mobile homes on credit. It's unlikely banks lend to non-permanent
aliens on a tourist visa with virtually no income or savings (unless Herzog's
trying to indict predatory lenders), nor is it plausible (after another
German movie made clear, Siodmak's My Schoolmate) that immigration
would allow in someone with both a history of mental illness and a criminal
record. Herzog additionally sidesteps how Germans and Americans can hold
conversations with no knowledge of each other's vocabulary, but once again
this isn't about the story - Stroszek shows just how foreign even
America's heartland can appear to some people. (You wonder what the locals
thought of a European film crew invading their town - and it that already-fading
municipality even exists anymore.) To his credit, Herzog's never condescending
to this populace who simply pull out a bad tooth themselves with pliers,
or plows their land with shotguns in hand at all times, but the overall
impression still ain't pretty. "Here they [kick you] spiritually,"
Bruno complains (with his usual inimitable delivery), "they do it
politely - with a smile - it's worse." There's some comedy amidst
the winter gloom, but you can bet these guys are wishing they'd just taken
the train to France instead.
Enough time
has finally passed that the seventies, no longer regarded as simply degraded
and stylistically gauche, can now be enjoyed for all their rakish film
expressions, not least the Blaxploitation genre. The clothes and hair
are no longer painfully embarrassing and are instead pleasurable to behold,
if sometimes for their comedic value. Behold, in Superfly, the
world of the ghetto before rap, if you can imagine that; and while Ron
O’Neal’s Priest isn’t exactly pushed to his limits as he
fights for African-Americans’ place in the free (and job, and black)
market, he certainly possesses a certain presence. And director Gordon
Parks, Jr. carries it all off with enough confidence to keep the story
on the better side of credibility. Priest’s girlfriend’s mustache
could use a waxing, and I’ve never seen a hero snort so much cocaine,
but the leather, suede, fur, ankhs, and fedoras are just plain smooth.
For anyone contemplating a move to Los Angeles, do I have a movie for you. In Swingers, Jon Favreau delivers a clever script guiding us through the bars, clubs, and hillside parties of late-night LA and reaffirming the eternal awkwardness of the heterosexual singles scene. Favreau himself plays a reluctant bachelor, owner of the single most depressing apartment in all of southern California, trying to find his footing after the end of a six-year relationship and repeatedly assotting himself in the process. He and his friends, all twentysomething wanna-be actors failing to find their big break, have their individual strategies for getting into the ladies' hearts (or pants), and Favreau wilts under their conflicting streams of advice. Most painful, and brilliant, is when our protagonist hits rock bottom, passing through all the stages of a relationship, from first conversation to breakup, in the course of seven consecutive answering machine messages. It's quite possible, in the end, that Favreau intends for LA-slash-Hollywood and the singles scene to be metaphors for each other - both environments have seemingly unknowable rules for success, and both can ultimately crush you despite all your efforts. Which means, before heading out west, you have a litmus test available to you: if you've got the stomach for one, you're sufficiently prepared for the other.
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