Archive for April 2005
Todd Solondz insists that all of his films are love stories—and that his latest, Palindromes, is no exception.
“This young girl, she wants to be a mom,” says Solondz, in
Washington to appear at the movie’s Filmfest DC screening. “That’s a
way of accessing unconditional love. So this odyssey is nothing but a
quest for that unconditional love. For all the political and moral
charge to it, at heart the narrative is very simple.”
Coming from the man himself, who, with his nasally voice, giant
green glasses, and raspberry V-neck sweater, resembles a sedated,
Technicolored Woody Allen, the proposition seems reasonable. But anyone
who’s seen such sordid Solondz fare as Welcome to the Dollhouse or
Happiness knows that with this writer-director, nothing is simple—or
sacred. Palindromes, in fact, may be the 45-year-old filmmaker’s most
complicated and controversial film to date. For starters, this “young
girl” eager for motherhood? She’s 13. And though she doesn’t age during
the movie, Aviva (note that spelling) is played by several actors of
different ages, races, and genders.
“There are eight, but it could have been 80,” Solondz says. “In the
sense that any one of us in the audience could have played an episode
in this young, innocent life. Of course, I knew it was a somewhat
radical conceit, and that the audience would at first be disoriented.
But I thought that at a certain point it’ll kick in, that they’re going
to get one character and multiple performers.”
Palindromes starts with the funeral of a favorite Solondz character,
Welcome to the Dollhouse’s Dawn “Wiener Dog” Wiener. Aviva is her
cousin, and when we first meet her, she’s telling her mother (played by
Ellen Barkin) that she wants to have lots of babies ASAP so she’ll
always be loved and not end up a miserable suicide like Dawn. But her
precociously ticking biological clock isn’t the only thing about Aviva
that makes her different from the typical white suburban teen.
“I had to use a black child at first to alert the audience that, if
Ellen Barkin’s the mom, something’s off here,” Solondz says. “Then
[Aviva’s] Latino, then she’s a redhead—it gets established that
something’s going on. Then I push it further. I have a boy. I have a
big black woman….
Finally you get to Jennifer Jason Leigh, and when you see her face,
it’s of a woman of a certain age. “You see a kind of sorrow etched in
it,” the filmmaker adds, “as if this character had lived a whole life,
though of course she’s still only 13 years old.”
The gambit, he says, is partly an attempt to create a “wholly
sympathetic character,” but the many faces of Aviva also relate to the
film’s title. “As Mark Wiener [Dawn’s older brother in Dollhouse, who
appears briefly in Palindromes] points out, despite all these
metamorphoses—whether you gain 50 pounds or lose 50 pounds, or if you
have a sex change, for that matter—that in some sense there’s a part of
ourselves that’s immutable,” Solondz explains. “Part of ourselves
resists change, which I characterize as palindromic.
“‘Mom,’ of course, is a palindrome,” he continues. “But more
significantly, [Aviva’s] need to be a mom is so identifying. It marks
her as a palindrome in that way.”
Finding willing child actors for the unrated film—a task the
filmmaker gladly left in the hands of casting director Ann Goulder—was
only one daunting aspect of a process Solondz doesn’t exactly love. In
fact, 1995’s Dollhouse was the director’s return from filmmaking
retirement, following the cold reception of his feature debut, 1989’s
Fear Anxiety and Depression. (One online reviewer faintly praises it
with “Not the best film, but it’ll surely not be checked out from your
video store and you’ll definitely enjoy a few laughs.”) Solondz spent
the next few years as an ESL teacher, and four features into his
renewed cinematic career, he still characterizes his art as “just so
stressful.”
“It’s just a nightmare, the actual production. It doesn’t get
better,” he insists. And writing? “It’s just a different kind of
nightmare. It’s a great question, What compels one to put pen to paper?
It’s a process of discovery, I think. You write something, and you
think you know what it’s about, but then you’re in production and it
takes on a different meaning. I feel less like a director than a
pursuer.”
“I’m amazed that I’m allowed to make any of these movies at all,” he
concludes. “It’s very gratifying. And, hopefully, [the parents will]
also take pride in their children’s participation”
That will probably depend on their reaction to the “moral and
political charge” of this love story, which not only addresses the old
Solondz topic of pedophilia, but adds abortion and an encounter with a
conservative Christian named Mama Sunshine (Debra Monk) and her foster
family of severely disabled kids. Though Palindromes’ indictment of
fundamentalism seems particularly harsh, Solondz insists he’s not out
to change anybody’s mind.
“It’s not a dogmatic work,” he says. “It’s not out to advocate a
particular pro-choice or pro-life position…. It’s easy enough to hold
a placard. But to look at these words—‘pro-choice,’ ‘pro-life’—they’re
Orwellian. It’s all double-speak. It’s all a demonization of one side
against the other, as if there is anti-choice and anti-life at work
here.”
Solondz, in fact, finds the Mama Sunshine segment the film’s most
moving, though he expects that his mostly liberal audience—“You don’t
get a lot of conservative Christians at film festivals”—may be
unsettled by the happy home he presents.
“Look, what Mama Sunshine does—what could be more virtuous than to
take in the abandoned, the scarred and unwanted children, and create a
kind of sanctuary?” Solondz asks. “So for all one’s politics as a
liberal—you know, we can laugh at the ‘freedom toast’ and all the rest
that goes on there, but at the same time, it’s a beautiful place. And
that may be a hard thing for any healthy liberal to swallow. But, of
course, if you’re a conservative Christian, you’ll say, ‘Ellen Barkin’s
family, that’s the place that’s really troubling.’”
Though Solondz maintains that his presentation of Palindromes’
various worldviews is balanced, he regrets that his audience likely
won’t be. “[Conservatives and liberals] live in such parallel
universes,” he laments. “I wish I could have easier access to the red
world, so to speak. I’ve gotten some evangelical response, and I’m also
told that Christian Web sites have it in for me. But that’s to be
expected to some extent.”
The filmmaker does admit, however, that despite his humble intention
of telling a story that both red-and blue-staters can relate to, his
approach to universal understanding can be a bit inflammatory to both
camps. “When Mark Wiener’s falsely accused of this terrible crime,
[Aviva] has the wisdom to see that he didn’t do it, rationalizing,
‘Pedophiles love children.’ And it’s like, My God, is this an
advertisement for NAMBLA or something?”
“It’s very shocking, but you have to recognize that from her
consciousness, there’s truth here,” Solondz continues. “[A pedophilic
relationship] is how she found her love. And that’s what’s so
troubling. That, for her, there was nothing sordid. And in the
hysterical times in which we live, it’s very difficult to digest this.
[Abuse scandals] are important things to be exposed, and yet there is a
kind of damage to society’s psyche, affecting the way adults do engage
with children. How do you sign up to be a Boy Scout leader today
without people looking at you a little off?”
Solondz also suggests that outside the United States, Aviva’s early
expression of her sexuality might not be so gasp-inducing. “It’s a
taboo that shifts in meaning from culture to culture. In Japan,
13-year-old middle-class girls commonly take on jobs as paid escorts.
It’s not that I’m advocating any of this, but [other civilizations]
don’t shudder in revulsion. It’s built into the culture. In Africa and
Asia, there are people who are married at 13.”
Still, given the director’s penchant for putting kids in what many
Westerners regard as decidedly adult situations, it’s likely that the
parents of his prospective actors might regard him as suspiciously as,
well, an aspiring Boy Scout leader. “I worked with children in all my
movies,” he says, “and they all involved delicate material. The parents
receive the material, and then they decide after hearing what I have to
say whether they want to make this leap of faith.”
“I don’t have kids,” Solondz says, “but if I did have a child
clamoring to act, I certainly would feel good about my child acting in
one of my movies, where I do think a certain dignity is accorded.
Whereas I wouldn’t give permission to my child to act in a commercial
for the Gap or AT&T or some detergent, where they’re essentially
functioning as a shill. To me, that’s the obscenity.”
David Duchovny has weird ideas of what audiences might find moving.
In his directorial debut, House of D, the former nerd-nation sex symbol
treats us to several shots of a son peeing over his mother’s
toilet-discarded cigarette butts. And later, of the kid wistfully
plucking one out of the bowl for posterity. (Mom, apparently, is so
melancholy she forgets to flush.) But four words summarize Duchovny’s biggest misjudgment: Robin Williams as “retard.” Touched yet?
From the opening scene in which Duchovny, rockin’ a Fu Manchu and
speaking en français, begins telling the story of “a Frenchman who was
not French” to an estranged wife who’s poetically hanging out a window,
House of D threatens to be a sentimental disaster. The X Files vet (who
also wrote the pun-laden script) plays Tom Warshaw, a New York native
who, for some unimaginable reason, has kept the story of his emigration
to Europe a secret from his French wife, Coralie (Magali Amadei), and
son, Odell (Harold Cartier).
Is it because his background is filled with scandal or disgrace? You
wish. Actually, Tom’s is a typical coming-of-age tale, tinged with
sadness, confusion, and many, many jokes about balls and boners. As the
adult Tom sugarcoats—er, narrates—House of D jumps back to ’70s
Greenwich Village, where the “almost 13”-year-old Tommy (Anton Yelchin)
attends parochial school; delivers meat with his 41-year-old best
friend, developmentally disabled school janitor Pappass (Williams); and
tries to entertain his mom (Téa Leoni), a nurse who’s been fighting
depression ever since Tommy’s father died. Because Mom’s a basket case
and Pappass, well, makes conversation by saying things like “I have a
huge penis” and “I shaved my ass once,” Tommy gets his best advice from
Lady Bernadette (Erykah Badu), an inmate at the Women’s House of
Detention who likes to yell out to people on the sidewalk.
Each of these relationships is meant to be complex and troubling.
But they’re about as resonant and believable as that whole thing with
Mulder and his sister and the clones and those bees. Tommy’s mother
goes to the bathroom while he showers (behind a clear curtain) and
offers to wash his hair; he attempts to make her laugh by imitating
Nixon with a giant erection. Lady Bernadette, House of D’s version of
the magical Negro, responds to Tommy’s lament that some girls think he
has small balls by shouting, “Even if you do have small balls, good for
you!” And Williams wears false teeth and says things like “How many
sleeps will you be away?”—which may make you long for his deathly dull
but full-brained dramatic turns. Or, better, for him to go away for a
whole bunch of sleeps.
The cherub-faced and shaggy-haired Yelchin grates rather than
elicits sympathy with his babyish delivery (“It’s shokay. I’ll
protectsh you”), and Duchovny apparently couldn’t decide whether the
kid should be a confident class clown or the kind of guy who’s afraid
of speaking up to prevent a simple misunderstanding. And besides the
Freudian implications of choosing Leoni, Duchovny’s wife, to play his
alter ego’s mother, her character is a mess of contradictions as
well—one minute laughing hysterically at her son’s fake boner, the next
freaking out when she finds a mildly racy flip book in his pants
pocket.
Perhaps the only part of House of D that rings true is that this
bizarre adolescence—combined with a predictable, tear-jerking
tragedy—makes Tommy run, run, run! to France and never look back until
adulthood. Of course, by the time grown-up Tom decides he must revisit
his old ’hood and old friends, he’s profoundly changed. Too bad the
film hasn’t: The journey results in his crying in the rain, blubbering,
“I don’t have to run anymore!”
Emotionalism certainly isn’t a factor in Enron: The Smartest Guys in
the Room—at least not on the part of the players involved. For the
audience, however, Alex Gibney’s documentary will likely stir up
disgust, outrage, and, perhaps for the very naive, downright shock at
the blatant extortion and fraud regularly practiced by the once-exalted
energy corporation before its epic downfall.
With interview subjects groping for metaphors (“Enron was a house of
cards—built over a pool of gasoline!”) and sometimes-flowery narration
by Peter Coyote (“Was Enron the dark shadow of an American dream?”),
The Smartest Guys in the Room initially comes across as a special
all-corporate episode of Behind the Music. What seems to be hyperbole
starts to feel apt, however, once the 110-minute documentary starts
unleashing its flood of information.
Several of the former employees, lawyers, analysts, and journalists
commenting here compare Enron to the Titanic, and indeed, The Smartest
Guys in the Room soon takes on the feel of a disaster flick, with a
feeling of dread building during even early celebrations. The
information presented is based on a book by Fortune reporters Bethany
McLean and Peter Elkind. It was McLean’s mildly critical 2001 article
“Is Enron Overpriced?” that first called attention to the company’s
not-quite-right financial reports; until then, no one had questioned
Enron’s heavy reliance on mark-to-market accounting, which allows
projected income to be counted as current earnings and kept the
company’s profits high and stocks higher. Essentially, that meant
everyone involved was getting rich, with no clue of the collapse that
lay ahead.
The Smartest Guys in the Room focuses on the brainy duo of the
movie’s title, former Enron Chair Ken Lay and onetime Enron CEO Jeff
Skilling. The story of their ingenious money-magicking is divided into
chapters with facetious titles such as “Kenny Boy” (President Bush’s
nickname for Lay), “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” (referring to Skilling’s
assistant, Andrew Fastow), and “Ask Why, Asshole” (a rather funny
combination of the firm’s motto—“Ask Why”—and Skilling’s caught-on-tape
cursing of a questioning analyst). The film presents footage of Lay and
Skilling at meetings, strutting and boasting while their company was
still the darling of Wall Street, as well as maintaining their
ignorance and innocence of illegal practices at congressional trials
when their paper palace began to tumble.
The most stomach-churning of the company’s activities is its alleged
involvement in the California energy crisis. The documentary includes
phone conversations of Enron traders celebrating the state’s rampant
fires (“Burn, baby, burn! That’s a beautiful thing”) and joking about
the rolling blackouts that, far from being unavoidable, were ordered to
drive the price of power up (“Let ’em use fucking candles,” one trader
gloats).
While Lay and Skilling keep up their cheery, back-patting attitude
throughout, Gibney relates the mutable health of the company with a
ticker that occasionally scrolls Enron’s stock price across the bottom
of the screen. The filmmaker also tries to keep things light with the
use of pop songs and even a Simpsons clip that shows the family
considering the Enron Ride of Broken Dreams at an amusement park. Both
are successful strategies. Unlike last year’s sprawling anti-big-biz
screed The Corporation, the tightly focused The Smartest Guy in the
Room is edifying to the eye as well as the conscience.
Of course, when the numbers of Enron’s bankruptcy are listed at the
end of the movie—20,000 jobs lost, along with an equal number of
pensions; average severance: $4,500—the “corporate crime of the
century” elicits anything but amusement. The scandal even took the life
of Enron Vice Chairman J. Clifford Baxter, whose suicide note says that
he wished he’d taken the company’s slogan more seriously: “I didn’t ask
why enough.”
Copyright 2005 movie-babe.com
In Kung Fu Hustle, adversaries splatter on billboards, jump to
bird-skirting heights, and run after each other with such speed that
their legs turn into wheels. Some have their feet flattened to the
approximate size and shape of deflated basketballs. One lands facedown
after being thrown out a window, only to have his forehead pushed a
little farther into the ground by a precisely flung potted plant.
In other words, imagine Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote as
humans—with special talent for the martial arts, of course—and you’ll
have a good idea of what Kung Fu Hustle is all about.
Writer-director-star Stephen Chow’s follow-up to his 2001 Hong Kong
hit, Shaolin Soccer (shelved here by Miramax until 2004), the movie is
another example of mo lei tau, a genre of comedy Chow is credited with
creating. The term translates as “nonsense”—a quality that becomes
increasingly evident as Kung Fu Hustle’s relatively straightforward
story, about a group of baddies trying to take over a ’40s Chinese
shantytown, escalates into a series of battles manic enough to leave
Bugs Bunny wishing he’d taken that left turn at Albuquerque.
Chow plays Sing, an incompetent crook who attempts to con the
residents of the blighted Pig Sty Alley into believing that he and his
tubby sidekick (Kam Tze Chung) are members of the notorious Axe Gang.
When they fail miserably, discovering too late that the sorry-looking
denizens of the Sty are actually kung-fu masters, the ruckus gets the
attention of the actual Axe Gang. Sing, naturally, then tries to
convince the mob that he’s worthy of joining it. His sidekick goes his
own way, claiming, “It’s tiring being tough!”
It’s tiring to watch, too: Depending on your tolerance for
slapstick, the film’s 95 minutes can be either nonstop fun or downright
demoralizing. Co-written by Chow, Lola Huo, Chan Man Keung, and Shaolin
collaborator Tsang Kan Cheong, Kung Fu is the HK equivalent of The
Naked Gun, packed with homages to and parodies of movies ranging from
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to Kill Bill to, weirdly, The Shining.
Even superhero flicks get a nod, with a quote lifted directly from
Spider-Man 2 and the Axe Gang’s version of the Bat Signal.
But the real point, of course, is the gag-packed action,
hypervividly rendered by cinematographer Poon Hang Sang, visual-effects
supervisor Frankie Chung, and fight choreographer Yuen Wo Ping. The
fights are epic and high-speed, often with one or two underdogs wiping
out an army of adversaries, whose bodies fly like missiles or pound
deep into the dirt. In one of the more impressive scenes, a
harp-playing duo use their instrument to strum ghostly fists and
bayonets that strike their opponents. Then there’s the deathly yowl of
the film’s most fully developed character, the Landlady (Yuen Qiu).
Wearing a housecoat and curlers, and with a smoke dangling from her
pursed lips, Pig Sty’s de facto warden need only unleash her “lion’s
roar” to send villains airborne and pulverize property into
balletically scattering pieces. (“The fat lady can really sing,” Sing
remarks. “And she deserves to die.”)
Thing is, the fanciful fighting breaks out every few minutes, so by
the time Kung Fu Hustle’s big—and seemingly never-ending—finale takes
place, Chow’s furious antics have started to get boring. Though bits of
the dialogue are funny (asked whether he’s ever killed anyone, Sing
replies, “I’ve thought about it!”) and some of the sight gags are
surprisingly subtle (far in the background, a kitty jumps off the roof
and ends up a splatter of blood), the filmmakers generally overestimate
the value of such humor—not to mention pure cinematic spectacle. You
want to see assassins who take on the characteristics of frogs? Check.
How about a guy whose wayward shorts reveal a giant portion of ass
crack? Done. Sing getting peed on? You got it.
That last one, which immediately follows our young hero’s first
attempt at administering an asskicking, is about as close as Kung Fu
Hustle gets to real emotion—which is still a requirement of successful
filmmaking, even if reality isn’t. Undoubtedly, Chow is the new master
of nonsense. But perhaps Looney Tunes sensibilities are better kept to
Looney Tunes lengths.
Trapped by the Mormons also depends on a joke that isn’t funny
enough to sustain a feature—even one that’s only, ahem, 69 minutes. A
remake of a 1922 British propaganda film, this is the first cinematic
foray for Cherry Red Productions, the local theater company that—just
in case you’re not familiar—describes itself as being “dedicated to
smut.” A story about an evil Mormon who brainwashes a young woman and
her friends isn’t a surprising choice for the irreverent troupe—after
all, company founder and Trapped adapter/director Ian Allen was, nudge
nudge, raised in Utah.
Trapped is a largely faithful redo of its predecessor, from its
black-and-white cinematography to its scene-by-scene re-creations. Like
the original, Allen’s version is silent—and, with quaintly
old-fashioned dialogue, played relatively straight. Though the
original, which is actually considered a horror movie, has allegedly
gathered a cult following because of its campy alarmism, the new
Trapped raises the usual question for this sort of thing: Why take a
piece of wonderfully unintentional cheesiness and replicate it with
tongue now kinda sorta in cheek?
Even Trapped’s retro appearance doesn’t quite work. Obviously shot
on digital video, most of the scenes are too crisp to seem old-timey,
regardless of the occasional shadows and scratches that were added in
postproduction. And though it’s fun to see familiar Cherry Red players
such as Monique LaForce on film, no one but big-eyed, ringleted
newcomer Emily Riehl-Bedford (as the main damsel in distress, Nora) can
pass for a character stuck in the ’20s. Allen’s casting of New York
drag king Johnny Kat as Trapped’s she-bitch villain, Isoldi Keane, also
fails. Sorry, but dude looks like a dude.
Of course, there are a few unmistakably Cherry Red touches to be
enjoyed: a disclaimer that reassures, “No Mormons were harmed in the
making of this production”; the random nakedness that’s a staple of the
company’s plays; and bits of suddenly lascivious banter that are even
funnier when presented on a placard. By the time the film crawls toward
its zombie-vampire conclusion, however, the idea of the Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-day Saints as a fear-instilling cult has lost its
entertainment value. Cherry Red followers may appreciate a peek at the
crew in whatever form it takes, but here’s hoping Allen & Co. put
down the camera and return to what they do best: smutting up the stage.
The title A Lot Like Love is way too easy to twist around into a critique, so let’s get some possibilities out of the way now. The latest Ashton Kutcher movie is: a lot like crap, a lot like a sleeping pill, a lot like the kind of stupid romantic comedies you immediately kick yourself for paying $10 for. Surprisingly, it’s not entirely Kutcher’s fault. Just like in his most recent attempt at big-screen acting, Guess Who, Kutcher doesn’t embarrass himself as A Lot Like Love’s timid wooer, Oliver. (He even believably uses sign language!) The problem is that if he’s not playing the part of a dumb stoner — which, admittedly, Kutcher does very well — dude just doesn’t register. And though he may finally have met his actorly match in the usually blah Amanda Peet, here her impulsive Emily is so radiantly photographed that, despite her lack of personality, Oliver’s attraction to her at least seems reasonable.
What you won’t buy is, well, the rest of the movie, which rivals Debra Messing’s The Wedding Date in lifelessness. This friendship of theirs that is supposedly what true love is built on is essentially a series of brief encounters spread out every few years: Seven years ago, Emily inducted Oliver into the mile-high club after she dumped her boyfriend before a flight to New York; three years later, Emily gives him a call to go out on New Year’s Eve after her new boyfriend dumps her; two years later, he looks her up after his girlfriend leaves him, etc. Never do they spend more than a day together, and never do sparks fly — in actor-turned-writer Colin Patrick Lynch’s debut script, these two are witless (if genial) bores. Besides Taryn Manning’s small but entertaining role as Oliver’s sister — who does nothing but call him “dick” every once in a while — director Nigel Cole (Calendar Girls, Saving Grace) wrings a few laughs/personality out of exactly one scene, in which Emily and Oliver try to break each other’s silence by goofing around in a serene Japanese restaurant. The dinner is preceded by this tedious exchange: “I’m not talking about it.” “Fine, then I’m not talking to you.” “You’re not talking? Fine, then I’m not talking either.” If only they’d kept their words.
Copyright 2005 movie-babe.com
Get out! That’s not the house talking, but what people’s reactions may be when they hear that the redone Amityville Horror is miles better than the 1979 classic. From its upgraded ghosts (no more laser-pointer eyes for Jodie!) to its nonpussy ending, 2005’s Amityville actually earns the horror in its title. The story pretty much remains the same: In 1973, a dude heard voices and killed his entire family. A year later, George and Kathy Lutz (Ryan Reynolds and Melissa George) move into the murder house with Kathy’s kids from a previous marriage. And it’s not long before Kathy’s daughter is taking evil orders from an imaginary friend and George just plumb loses his mind.
Sure, first-time feature director Andrew Douglas relies on big booms and whooshes for cheap scares, and even steals a now-tired trick from The Sixth Sense. And though Scott Kosar more fully fleshes out Sandor Stern’s original script, sometimes you don’t need to know a centuries-old explanation of why a house goes bad when the much more recent one will do. But Reynolds’ breakdown is way less Planet of the Apes than James Brolin’s — not to mention the bits of much appreciated humor the former sitcom star brings — and Douglas keeps the frights a little arrhythmic and off-kilter, even squeezing additional uneasiness from nonghostly dangers such as when wee Chelsea (Chloe Grace Moretz) decides to play on the roof. Admittedly, 2005 has already seen its share of haunted-kid flicks, and it’s a shame that Hollywood now seems to prefer remaking old faithfuls to coming up with something new. But if you consider that recent alternatives include Boogeyman and Cursed, Amityville’s redo seems like the best idea ever.
Copyright 2005 movie-babe.com
Who’s buried in Napoleon’s tomb? That’s the central riddle of Monsieur
N., Antoine de Caunes’ elaborately told speculation about the little
Corsican’s final days. Narrator Basil Heathcote (Jay Rodan), Napoleon’s
aide-de-camp during his imprisonment on the small British island of St.
Helena from 1815 to 1821, says at the beginning of the film that he
doesn’t intend to “rewrite history, but…to shed some light on the
puzzling events that I witnessed.” René Manzor’s script then takes its
sweet time getting to these events—most prominently, when, after
Napoleon’s death in 1821, the body of his recently deceased butler and
rumored half-brother, Cipriani (Bruno Putzulu), was discovered to be
missing. For much of its 127 minutes, though, Monsieur N. plays more
like a breezy Merchant Ivory drama than a mystery.
Though technically a
prisoner in St. Helena’s bucolic Longwood House, Napoleon (Philippe
Torreton) lives luxuriously, dining on imported food and surrounded by
his staff and mistresses. The whole arrangement costs the British
government 8 million pounds a month, and it doesn’t seem to have
dampened M Bonaparte’s spirit in the least: When his uptight new
jailer, Gov. Hudson Lowe (Richard E. Grant), requests a meeting with
his captive, he’s made to wait three days. Napoleon’s portrayal here
isn’t all tyrannical, however. Torreton plays him with distracted,
stuck-in-the-glory-days gravitas, and Manzor gives the character plenty
of bon mots to prove that he’s usually the smartest person in the room
(“The man who escapes admits he’s a prisoner”), as well as a burgeoning
romance with an Englishwoman named Betsy (Siobhan Hewlett) to show his
(slightly) softer side.
Though Monsieur N.’s engaging first half, with
strong performances by both Torreton and Grant, is anchored in the
past, the movie flashes forward with increasing frequency to
Heathcote’s puzzle piecing after the exhumation of Napoleon’s body in
1840, showing his questioning of the now-gray-haired staffers who
served at Longwood. The back-and-forth is, at best, distracting, and
its culmination—a reunion with Lowe that builds to Heathcote’s frenzied
declarations of And this happened! And that! And this, too!—is just
plain silly. Engrossing up to this point, Monsieur N. ultimately
deserves to be dismissed as Lowe does Heathcote: with slow, sarcastic
applause.
Copyright 2005 movie-babe.com
The most heart-swelling, eye-misting moments in Fever Pitch have
everything to do with love—but nothing to do with the movie’s main
couple. As the kissy-faces in the Farrelly brothers’ latest, Jimmy
Fallon and Drew Barrymore are genial but generic, mere archetypes in
yet another boy-meets-girl story that starts sweet, goes sour, then
turns sweet again. You know exactly where their relationship is going,
and you don’t much care.
But as far as the kind of passion that leads a grown man to wrap his
legs around a delivery driver in a full-on body hug? That could only
come from a lifelong devotion to a sports team, and you’d have to be a
heartless bastard—or perhaps a Yankees fan—not to feel Fever Pitch’s
love.
Loosely based on a Nick Hornby book, Fever Pitch translates the
British author’s obsession with soccer into a Bostonian’s experiences
as “one of God’s most pathetic creatures”—a Red Sox fan. It also,
thanks to some hasty reshooting, turns that bittersweet tale into
something more appropriate to the team’s celebratory 2004 season. Ben
(Fallon) is a lowly schoolteacher—but the cool, fun kind, of course—who
meets nonspecific businesswoman Lindsey (Barrymore) when he brings his
students into her workplace to prove to them that, yes, math can have
some usefulness in real life.
He initially assumes that the high-powered looker won’t give him the
time of day because of his profession. And even after they spend the
next few winter months in puppy-love bliss, Ben still doesn’t feel
home-free: As spring training nears, he cautiously informs Lindsey of
his BoSox mania, a fixation so extreme that no other woman has ever put
up with it. Lindsey, naturally, tells him not to worry—she’s not like
those other chicks. In fact, she thinks fanboys are romantic—until,
that is, she sees Ben on ESPN, jumping around and generally acting as
fanboys do. Cue wide-eyed horror.
Unsurprisingly, scriptwriters Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, the
duo behind Robots, City Slickers, and A League of Their Own, bring a
bit of the last’s “There’s no crying in baseball!” attitude to Fever
Pitch’s portrayal of women and sports. Besides her initial
misunderstanding of what it means to be a hard-core fan, Lindsey, smart
in every other way, assumes that Ben’s annual spring-training trip
means that he gets to play with the Sox. Could a successful woman who’s
about to turn “20-10”—even one who would use that retchingly cutesy
term—actually believe that? At least the story gains some heft by
asking whether an all-consuming devotion to a sport is any different
from a fast-tracker’s 80-hour workweek and by making some valid points
about concessions in relationships.
That last part’s not exactly new territory for the recently mature
Farrellys, who explored similar themes in both Stuck on You and Shallow
Hal. And few should be surprised that the only gross-out touch is some
tastefully off-camera vomiting. Indeed, the only real vestige from the
Dumb & Dumber days is the relentless—and relentlessly
feel-good—guycentricity. Even a casual follower of any team that has
“raised losing to an art form” will relate to Fever Pitch’s portrayal
of the roller-coaster of elation and heartbreak that comes with
loyalty: the anticipation of a new season, the treasure chest of
tickets that the UPS man so nicely delivers, the gut-wrench when the
boys seem to be breathing their last in the playoffs.
Whether such outsized love of the game (and girl) should have been
placed on Fallon’s narrow shoulders is another matter. Together, he and
rom-com queen Barrymore are…well, nice enough, and sometimes funny.
But in a genre that depends so much on chemistry, charm, and our
willingness to believe that some people have a Very Special Destiny,
being unexceptional doesn’t make you an Everycouple—it makes you
forgettable.
Fever Pitch closes with footage of the postgame pandemonium
following the Sox’s World Series win, accompanied by a raucous Dropkick
Murphys cover of “Tessie,” the team anthem. It’s a scene so jubilant
you stop paying attention to the fictional couple celebrating along
with the real fans—and that’s truly something to cheer for.
There’s also a romance of sorts in Dust to Glory, a documentary
about the arduous annual race known as the Baja 1000. After a couple of
interview subjects open the film by unleashing a litany of
adjectives—“beautiful,” “scary,” “mystical”—to describe the Mexican
desert where the competition takes place, one finally says that the
love/hate dynamic the treacherous area inspires is most akin to a “girl
that breaks your heart.”
Dust to Glory then spends its remaining 90-plus minutes proving that
the metaphor is apt: Every year, some 1,200 pumped-up participants
return to race, despite knowing that there’s a good chance that more
than just their hearts will end up broken. Offering a whole lot of
danger and very little payoff, the daylong Baja is open to any
competitor with any vehicle—dune buggies, motorcycles, Volkswagen bugs,
and indescribable Frankencars are all welcome in the 1,000-mile race.
Both no-names and big names, including NASCAR vets Mario Andretti and
Robby Gordon, regularly compete. And though most vehicles make their
way through the course driven in shifts by a team of operators, in the
2003 race documented in the movie, one particularly loony
biker—frequent Baja champion Mike “Mouse” McCoy—decided to go the
18-hour trek alone.
No matter their experience or transport, however, all competitors
face the same task: high-tailing it through silt-blinding paths that
remain open to traffic, cows, and thousands of spectators, most of whom
think nothing of standing right in the middle of the unrailed raceways
until just before a vehicle blows through.
The director of surfing documentary Step Into Liquid and son of
Endless Summer filmmaker Bruce Brown, Dana Brown is clearly in his
element with Dust to Glory. Though a day in this desert is no day at
the beach, the Baja enthusiasts captured by Brown’s camera have the
same laid-back vibe—and professed inability to devote themselves to,
say, golf—as the big-wave surfers who know full well that every chance
they get to do what they love may be their last. (As one racer puts it,
“In Baja, if you’re dumb, you better be tough.”) Add the
vehicle-fastened cameras that offer the driver’s (frequently
compromised) view of every dizzying spinout and stomach-churning
negotiation, and that adrenaline-fueled addiction is no longer so
difficult to understand.
As in Step Into Liquid, Brown tries mightily to theorize about What
It All Really Means, both with his sometimes cheesy narration—“It’s not
about a race, it’s about the race—the human race!”—and well-edited
comments from his subjects. There are remarks about the perspective the
race gives you on life’s more mundane problems (“What’s the worst that
can happen—somebody says no to a job? Well, I almost just got killed 40
times”) and the musings of a wife who suggests that even if she were to
tell her husband to stop racing, he’d probably get killed driving along
the freeway.
Unlike the great big ruminations of surfers in Step Into Liquid,
which ultimately sounded inspired by too much sun, many of the
statements in Dust to Glory make good sense. The block-party spirit
that dominates the Baja 1000 despite its frequent crises helps, too.
The film convincingly relates a story of delirious racers, destroyed
vehicles, and the incredible feeling of accomplishment that comes when
most participants cross the finish line after all. And it really does
sound an awful lot like life: “In one day, great things happen and
terrible things happen, but at the end, you just deal with them.”
Copyright 2005 movie-babe.com
In Sin City, there are bad guys and there are…slightly less bad
guys. It’s a world where every madonna happens to also be a whore,
where the death of one of these dames prompts a guy to go on a killing
spree to avenge the loss of his “angel”—the same woman a priest refers to as “that corpse of a slut.” Blood gushes in
geysers as limbs are severed and heads—quite a few of them—are removed.
But just because the body parts are separated from their people doesn’t
mean they’re finished with. A villain might have to chew a gun out of
his old hand, for instance. And one serial killer prefers to mount his
prey on the wall like a proud hunter’s: “He keeps the heads,” a
victim-in-waiting explains. “He eats the rest.”
One cop’s narration notes, “There’s wrong and there’s wrong, and
then there’s this.” But immorality doesn’t get any more gleeful than in
the hands of Robert Rodriguez. The legendarily low-budget filmmaker
brings From Dusk Till Dawn–Êlevel vivacity to this $40 million project,
though Sin City’s blood-and-guts heart and soul come courtesy of Frank
Miller, upon whose graphic novels the movie was based. And not the way
Catwoman was based on the DC Comics character: Fans will be pleased to
see that Rodriguez essentially used Miller’s pages as storyboards,
carefully adapting the text and using all-CGI sets and high-definition
digital video to bring the author’s black-and-white drawings to
exquisitely noirish life. Rodriguez was so committed to his source, in
fact, that he named Miller Sin City’s co-director—and he had to quit
the Directors Guild of America to do it.
The result is perhaps the freshest homegrown film since Pulp
Fiction. (Fittingly, Quentin Tarantino “guest-directed” one of the
sequences, which is one of the movie’s funniest.) Like Tarantino’s
breakthrough masterpiece, Sin City doesn’t follow a traditional
three-act arc, instead jumping among episodes taken from three of
Miller’s novels and one short story. There’s “The Hard Goodbye,” in
which a pill-poppin’ brute named Marv (Mickey Rourke) falls in love
with Goldie (Jaime King), a gorgeous hooker who, for reasons he can’t
comprehend, voluntarily gives him the night of his life—and is
stealthily murdered as he’s sleeping next to her. “The Big Fat Kill” is
a mass slaughter that’s prompted by a dirty cop (Benicio Del Toro)
showing up at the door of his cocktail-waitress ex-girlfriend, Shellie
(Brittany Murphy), while her new squeeze, Dwight (Clive Owen), is
there. And bookending these stories is “That Yellow Bastard,” a tale of
rape, revenge, and unlikely romance that spans eight years and, in one
of the movie’s rare instances of bizarre casting, stars Bruce Willis as
Hartigan, a remarkably youthful 60-something cop. (Also ill-fitting is
Josh Hartnett as an assassin in “The Customer Is Always Right,” the
footage that Rodriguez filmed to win Miller’s approval for the job and
here uses as an introduction.)
In other words, this movie is all attitude. (And guns. Lots of
guns.) The dialogue is ’40s-crime-drama over-the-top, with flowery
tough talk—“This is blood for blood and by the gallons. This is the old
days, the bad days, the all-or-nothing days!”—punctuated by growly
“goddamns” when it’s not interrupted by punches or the clank of a pipe
over someone’s head. The look is unlike that of any comic-to-screen
piece you’ve ever seen, from Batman to X2 to American Splendor. Color
is used only as an accent, with red momentarily flashing above
hill-hopping police cruisers, yellow lighting up Goldie’s mane, or
swimming-pool blue shining out of the eyes of a brothel’s
girl-next-door hooker (Alexis Bledel), making her look more kittenish
than human. Blood isn’t only red, but also silver or black; Marv’s many
bandages glow whiter than white against his skin.
Besides its beauty and bluster, Sin City offers up the kind of hoods
that you don’t mind getting cozy with. From Marv’s creative quenching
of his thirst for blood (a highlight: his face-down dragging of a
dirtbag out a car window with his left hand as he steers with his
right) to Del Toro’s occasional channeling of his Usual Suspects
character (“Some of my best friends…” he mutters under his breath
after Shellie suggests she’s been getting multiculturally busy), Sin
City’s characters are as funny as they are criminal. And the cast
clearly reveled in it: Excluding Hartnett, both bit players such as
Murphy and Michael Madsen and more substantial presences such as Owen
and Rourke seem invigorated by their contributions to well-written
stories too fiercely black to be taken seriously. This is American
mythologizing, pure and simple—big as can be and not as dumb as it
looks. But if you do start to feel guilty about getting caught up in
all the nasty fun, just take Hartigan’s advice to himself as he travels
further down his own dark path: “Hate yourself later.”
The underworld portrayed by Schizo, on the other hand, is sleepy
enough for a bedtime story. Set in the former Soviet republic of
Kazakhstan, this debut by Kazakh writer-director Guka Omarova recalls
recent Armenian release Vodka Lemon in its visual and narrative
spareness.
The movie’s title is the nickname of Mustafa (Olzhas Nusuppaev), a
15-year-old boy who just got kicked out of school for the erratic
behavior that makes others think he’s unbalanced. His mother (Gulnara
Jeralieva) takes him to a doctor she can’t afford, who gives him pills
but no real diagnosis. Mom only offers that Mustafa does what anyone
tells him and “wouldn’t hurt anyone”—which, in any language, means that
the boy will be hurtin’ someone in the near future.
But not directly. Mom’s boyfriend, Sakura (Eduard Tabyschev), busies
Mustafa by having him recruit fighters for the bare-knuckle-boxing
operation he’s involved with. Mustafa is slightly horrified by the
scene when one of the fighters dies and no one seems to care. But when
Mustapha carries out the dying man’s request to deliver his winnings to
his gimpy girlfriend, Zina (Olga Landina), and finds that she not only
lives in poverty but is also now left to care for the fighter’s young
son (Kanagat Nurtay), he becomes more deeply entrenched in the
moneymaking scheme. The boy even talks his drunk old uncle (Bakhytbek
Baymukhanbetov) into signing up to get pummeled.
Omarova and co-writer Sergey Bodrov keep the unspooling of their
story practically silent and almost oversimple. This reduction, though
effective tonally, tends to be problematic narratively: Mustafa’s
mother pretty much drops out of the picture after her two early scenes,
and it’s unclear whether her son is even still living with her after a
while. His visit to the uncle, who was until then a stranger, comes out
of nowhere, and the relative’s discovery is left unexplained.
The narrative holes might have been forgivable—even tantalizingly
ambiguous—if first-time actor Nusuppaev had created a stronger, more
sympathetic character. His Mustafa is infuriatingly blank, however,
reacting to nearly every situation with the same spaced-out stare.
Granted, that may not be unusual for some 15-year-olds, but besides
Mustafa’s sporting sunglasses and smoking cigarettes after he begins
pursuing his new lifestyle, there’s nothing to reflect the
coming-of-age shift in his personality that Omarova seems to be
shooting for. Worse, his attempts to “protect” the 28-year-old Zina are
duplicitous, condescending, and mean-spirited: He initially tells her
that her boyfriend has left instead of died, then breaks the news days
later while the two are dancing and giggling. At another point, he
leaves her a bag of cash but doesn’t let her know, instead hiding it
and instructing her little boy to tell Zina of the stash after the
first snowfall. (Even the kid is smarter than Mustafa, pointing out
that it might not snow for a long time.)
Visually, however, Omarova gets a lot of things right. Given
Kazakhstan’s barren landscape—most of the scenes take place outside,
against browned fields and deserted roads—it’d be difficult to not lend
Schizo a sense of desolation. But the director is careful also to focus
on details that accentuate the residents’ poverty, such as a broken
porch chair that’s held up by a tire on one end. And there’s true grit
to the film’s boxing scenes, which have the unprotected fighters
drawing blood from each other easily and often. (Press notes indicate
that these were real boxers, not actors, who therefore “didn’t know how
to pretend.”) If only the passion inside the ring were matched outside
of it. Unfortunately, by the time the boss of the boxing operation
exclaims, “This Schizo is an idiot!” you may well agree.
Copyright 2005 movie-babe.com
In the closing voice-over for In My Country, Anna, a
white, idealistic South African poet/journalist, expresses her desire to
seek absolution for apartheid on behalf of her people: "I want to say,
‘Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me.’" But those may as well be the
sentiments of actress Juliette Binoche, apologizing for her contribution to
John Boorman’s high-minded but sometimes laughable movie about South
Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. For instance, you may snicker
at a gathering of the world’s most easily shocked reporters, who gasp, say
"Whoa!" and break down in tears when told of one black South African who
was stabbed multiple times. And you’ll likely scoff at Samuel L. Jackson’s
Langston Whitfield, an African-American Washington Post reporter who
immediately butts heads with Anna and is so bitter that he ends an
interview with "Fuck you very much!" But despite Anna’s hypernaivete about
the unification of her country and Langston’s outsized bitterness about how
he never feels welcome in his, it’s when the two–could you see this
coming?–become romantically involved that things get intolerably
ridiculous: "My skin will never forget you!" Anna whispers to her new,
no-longer-angry friend.
Based on Antjie Krog’s memoir Country of My
Skull, In My Country includes the real stories of some of the
2,000 people who publicly testified during the commission’s hearings in the
late ’90s, an undertaking that Nelson Mandela ordered so black South
Africans could face their oppressors and, upon their confessions, grant
forgiveness. Boorman, who also tackled political upheaval in 1995’s Beyond Rangoon, and scripter Ann Peacock unwisely push aside these
wrenching tales, however, to focus on the blather of journalists who, far
from having a sophisticated understanding of global events, act as if
they’ve never considered the world beyond Mom’s back yard. At a press
conference announcing the commission, one of these newshounds ridiculously
queries, "Do black people have a special capacity for forgiveness?" As far
as this superficial treatment of a nation still very much divided, let’s
hope so.
Copyright 2005 movie-babe.com
