Bob’s Weekend

Someday I really have to visit Blackpool, England. I feel as though I already know the place after having seen it represent nostalgic dreams and faded elegance in so many movies (cf. Funny Bones, The Last Dance, Shall We Dance?, etc.). Bob’s Weekend uses Blackpool as a location so relentlessly that it almost qualifies as a travelogue. As for the movie itself, well, my friend Michael came up with the best high-concept shorthand for it: After Hours meets It’s a Wonderful Life. Actually, the less you know about this movie beforehand, the more you will probably enjoy it. Suffice it to say that it is quite odd and frequently funny. (Seen 20 May 1997)

Boca a Boca (Mouth to Mouth)

The title of Spain’s Mouth to Mouth has a double meaning. The film begins and ends with a woman receiving artificial respiration. But it also refers to the fact that our hero, an aspiring actor named Victor (Javier Bardem of Jamón, Jamón), is making ends meet as a telephone sex operator. If this had been a suspense thriller instead of a wacky screwball comedy, it almost could have been a Brian De Palma film (from his Dressed to Kill days). The plot involves double crossing, triple crossing, strange coincidences, titillation, gender bending, and a murder conspiracy. Not the least of the joys of this romp is a subplot about Victor playing up the stereotyped image of Spanish men as he auditions for a Tarantino-esque Hollywood director. (Seen 23 May 1996)

Boiler Room

As something of a dot.com entrepreneur myself (There’s still time to get in on the IPO! Just make those checks out to “cash” and mail them in TODAY!), I’m sometimes curious about what my broker actually does between those monthly phone calls when he tries to get me to churn my account. So when I had a couple of hours to spare, I went to see Boiler Room to find out. Imagine my shock when I learned that, when he’s not on the phone, he’s running around the office acting macho, casting ethnic slurs at his co-workers, and getting into barroom brawls after work. Okay, so it’s not my broker or yours doing this. It’s a bunch of young kids working in an illegally run “chop shop,” although I’m not sure that a lot of viewers will know the difference since their stated goal is the same as everyone else’s at that age: to get rich young like the secretaries and gardeners at Microsoft. Rookie writer/director Ben Younger does provide several nice touches, including the way Giovanni Ribisi evolves (fairly quickly) from a not overly self-assured youth to a shark of a telephone seller. And Whit Stillman regular Taylor Nichols is very believable as a hapless client who seems bright enough but is easily manipulated over the phone. Running this operation is Tom Everett Scott, who is looking strangely like Rob Lowe, which is perfect for the amoral empty suit he represents. Also on board is Ben Affleck, whose job is mainly to update Michael Douglas’s speeches from Wall Street. And just to be sure that we don’t miss the point, the characters actually lip synch dialog from that film as well as using Glengarry Glen Ross as a training aid. All in all, lots of fun for anyone who has ever hung up on an unsolicited phone call. (Seen 24 February 2000)

Boogie Nights

Boogie Nights demands comparison to numerous other movies, but not for particularly obvious reasons. Like TV’s Tales of the City, it richly evokes the sexual freedom/innocence/naïveté of the 1970s. Like Ed Wood, we have a group of characters who are infectiously gung-ho about making really bad movies. Like most Robert Altman films, it follows a sprawling cast of characters all over the cinematic map. Like many movies released these days, it features a constant and comprehensive soundtrack of old pop songs. And it even has the obligatory post-Tarantino “weird characters caught up in a strange and tense situation involving guns” scene. While I did my best to miss the late 1970s and early 1980s the first time around, I have to admit that this revisit is oddly endearing—to the extent that a film about the porn movie industry can be endearing. “Marky” Mark Wahlberg is appealing as the film’s well-endowed ingenue, and the former New Kid on the Block proves that he can sing really badly when the role calls for it. The father figure for this post-Manson Southern California extended family is Burt Reynolds, which is appropriate because he is looking strangely like Lorne Greene. (Seen 7 November 1997)

The Book That Wrote Itself

Hardcore “film buffs” (as opposed to “hardcore film” buffs) will probably enjoy The Book That Wrote Itself just fine, but other folks out for an evening’s entertainment may find it, well, film-school-ish since it is yet another low-budget film about making a film. It is thereby somewhat similar to another Irish low-budget effort, How to Cheat in the Leaving Certificate. But it must be said that this one (in addition to being in color) has more than a few manic touches along the way of its caper/road movie plot. And, if nothing else, it is a nice mini-travelogue of Ireland as it wends its way from Dublin to Wexford, Cork, Ennis and winds up at, of all places, the Galway Film Fleadh. It is there that the film within a film (also called The Book That Wrote Itself) has its premiere, just as the real film actually did. (Got that?) There is also a side trip to the Venice Film Festival where, in a strange life-imitates-art-to-make-art riff on the moviemaking satire Bowfinger, the likes of George Clooney, Melanie Griffith, Catherine Deneuve and Bruce Willis become (if only briefly) unwitting costars. The concept and script are clever enough, but by the time we reach the somewhat anti-climatic ending, we can’t help but wish that the ostensibly romantic plot had a bit more feeling to it. The film’s writer/director/producer/star is the very promising Liam Ó Móchain. (Seen 30 January 2000)

Boon sang yuen (Eighteen Springs)

This Hong Kong/Chinese tearjerker is about a romance between the world’s shyest man and the universe’s most hesitant woman. It’s sort of like Comrades: Almost a Love Story on Valium. Leon Lai and Wu Chien-Lien are young co-workers who have the most glacial courtship ever recorded on film. When he finally gets around to popping the question, she puts him off because of family obligations. Everyone in their lives is against the match, but it takes years before anyone actually gets around to hatching a dastardly plot to separate them. The sweetness and discretion of the couple (this is Shanghai in the 1930s) may seem mighty odd to us modern westerners, but by the end of the story everyone will be able to identify with the bittersweet longing for the one true love of one’s youth. Ann Hui directed. (Seen 26 January 1998)

Booty Call

I am extremely unqualified to critique this movie. I mean, I watched the whole thing and I still don’t know what the term “booty call” means! Anyway, this flick is partly a comedy of manners, partly a sex farce, and partly a primer on how to have safe sex! In fact, were the movie not so offensive on so many different levels (there are some ethnic stereotypes that make The Pest look like a treatise on cultural tolerance), it could almost be an afternoon school special on sexual responsibility! Except that in the end it makes safe sex seem like more hassle than it’s worth. (Tip: if using Glad Wrap for protection, do not wrap it tightly around your whole head.) By far the best part of the movie is the final stretch which takes place in a hospital and involves an accidental near-castration. Booty Call is a showcase for Jamie Foxx (of In Living Color and his own TV show on the WB) and features the lovely Viveca A. Fox (the stripper in Independence Day) as a kinky lady named Lysterine. (Seen 27 February 1997)

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan

Oh dear. Where to begin. For a start, this flick will not be everyone’s cup of tea. But if your sense of humor runs from appreciation of the outrageous to loving a shock every minute, then this is your movie. It is the first movie I have seen that actually includes a joke about the 9/11 attacks, but it barely registers because there is so much other provocation going on. If you are familiar with Sacha Baron Cohen’s Da Ali G Show from Channel 4 and HBO, then you know his modus operandi. Go among unsuspecting real people in character and say and do the most inappropriate/outrageous things and then watch the results, which are frequently hilarious, or at least jaw-dropping. The reason it is so funny is Cohen himself, who is a masterful comedian, who thrives on improvisation. Having said that, as a character, Borat has all the depth of, say, Steve Martin’s “wild and crazy guy” eastern European from the early days of Saturday Night Live. We occasionally feel sorry for Cohen’s dupes, but we laugh, partly because it really is funny and partly out of self-consciousness because we know that it could have been us, or at least someone we know. To the extent that this mockumentary (emphasis on the “mock”) has a story arc, it concerns Kazakhstani TV presenter Borat’s obsession with Pamela Anderson, as he crosses America (under the guise of making a documentary) from New York to California in order to meet her. Is there some point to all of this besides mindless, nasty fun? Well, I suppose it has something to say about First World perceptions of Third World countries. Or is it actually mocking Third World ignorance? Heck, I don’t know. In this case, the movie also provides an alien point of view for a fresh look at America, although it doesn’t really feel all that fresh. (Europeans’ most negative images of the U.S. will not be altered by anything here.) And his over-the-top anti-Semitism may conceivably (and worryingly) have some laughing at him as well as with him. But in situations like the one in a private home in the South, where Borat is being tutored in American etiquette, when Borat hands his hostess his bag of excrement after using the toilet, he and we are really just indulging the naughty child inside us. (Seen 13 October 2006)

Bordello of Blood

At one point in Bordello of Blood, Dennis Miller compares his and Chris Sarandon’s characters to those of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby in their numerous Road pictures. Actually, a series of comedies with Miller and somebody else (probably not Sarandon, though) doesn’t seem like such a bad idea. It definitely sounds better than those movies that Chris Farley and David Spade do. Anyway, Bordello of Blood (based on a cable TV series based on the old EC Tales from the Crypt comic book) is mindless adolescent fun that has far more giggles than, say, From Dusk Till Dawn. To get the idea, imagine the graphic images that go with such one-liners from madame/vampire queen Lilith as “I like a man who gives me head—and lets me keep it” and “I find the way to a man’s heart is through his rib cage.” But as good as these are, the best lines go to Miller who quips his way through the movie with the same insouciant cynicism that he did on those “Weekend Update” segments on Saturday Night Live. (Seen 3 September 1996)

Born Romantic

Seeing this soon after the Mexican film Sex, Shame & Tears gave me a bit of déjà vu since it is also about three men and three women working out romantic issues. But in this case the three men are pursuing the three women—and not always for transparently clear reasons. Since Born Romantic is something of a case study of laddish behavior on the English singles scene, it is reminiscent of segments of The Missus’s and my favorite British dramedy Cold Feet (currently shown in the US on Bravo)—an impression reinforced by the participation of two actors (John Thomson and Hermione Norris) from that series. Writer/director David Kane has plod this field before in This Year’s Love, which also dealt with six people in search of love, but this time out he is definitely going the feel-good route. He has assembled a great cast. Craig Ferguson (The Big Tease) is the square chasing after Olivia Williams (The Sixth Sense), who is such an ice queen that she dismisses his first come-on by saying she doesn’t have time to waste on men whose faces aren’t perfectly symmetrical. Also on hand are Jane Horrocks (Little Voice) and Catherine McCormack (Shadow of the Vampire) and, best of all, Adrian Lester (Primary Colors) as the dreadlocked cabby who seems to always pick up the same six people and who gets emotionally involved in their lives. (Seen 6 June 2001)

Borstal Boy

I have occasionally gotten email from strangers thanking me for recommending a certain movie on my web site, but it was a first when someone sitting behind me at the cinema in County Mayo thanked me for choosing to see Borstal Boy. The fellow had apparently arrived at the multiplex without a clue as to what film he wanted to see and on an impulse followed me to see what I was seeing. He could have done worse since his other choices consisted of such American imports as Charlie’s Angels. Borstal Boy is based on the quasi-autobiographical novel of the colorful Brendan Behan, who entertained a generation of Irish readers and TV viewers before drinking himself to death at the age of 41 in 1964. The film depicts young Behan in 1939 as a zealous IRA gofer with a scowl and a stammer. By the time he leaves England’s Borstal reform school, his attitudes towards the British, life in general and a few other matters have been shaken considerably. The film is the first feature by Jim Sheridan’s brother Peter, who has mainly worked in theater and who also turned out the short film (also about young boys in an institution) The Breakfast. Intentionally or not, Borstal Boy echoes practically every prison, reform school or other young-men-living-under-pressure-in-close-proximity film from Boys Town to Midnight Express to Streamers. As film conventions dictate, the inmates are diverse, including a German Jew, a Canadian, a Scot, a psycho, and a gay sailor who—along with the warden’s artistic daughter and a librarian who introduces our hero to Oscar Wilde—raises Brendan’s consciousness. The warden, by the way, as played by Michael York, is the most gentile and fatherly jailer you will ever meet. Despite some predictability, as the fellow sitting behind me discovered, the film is well worth watching. (Seen 23 December 2001)

Botched

This movie opens with a professional, well-rehearsed jewel heist on the French Riviera, and we think we are in for one of those suave and sophisticated caper flicks. Nope. Not even close. First-time director Kit Ryan is determined to mix his genres and to not even worry about making them jibe. His target audience is that which, like the one I was part of, sits down in a cinema to watch a movie at or around midnight. (People who go to the cinema earlier in the evening likely won’t be interested.) And, since the main thing this flick has going for it is the element of surprise, that is all that I will say about that. Introducing the film, producer Terence Ryan (the director’s father), emphasized that it was a comedy, thereby giving us permission to laugh. He needn’t have bothered. There is no way that anyone will get through the first reel thinking it is a straight drama. There is plenty to laugh at and, for those with delicate sensibilities, to avert their eyes from. Stephen Dorff gamely essays the hero role, while Doctor Who offspring Sean Pertwee is on hand briefly as his criminal patron. Apart from that red herring of an opening sequence, the movie is set in Moscow, but it was actually filmed in Ireland, with mostly Irish and English actors hamming it up as cartoon-ish Russians. (Seen 19 October 2007)

Bottle Rocket

Bottle Rocket is an appropriate enough title for this film that makes a flash, amuses for a moment, and then fades away. We’ve seen this before. A no-budget film by a young first-time director gets picked up by a studio and we have another of the film world’s Horatio Alger stories. Inevitably, these films feature a series of vignettes rather than a conventionally coherent plot, and the characters are all quirky and eccentric. Screenwriters Wes Anderson (who directed) and Owen C. Wilson have acting roles, but with studio support they also attracted James Caan and Lumi Cavazos (Like Water for Chocolate) to the cast. This comedy is best enjoyed if you don’t worry too much about verisimilitude or consistency, and if it is remembered by posterity it will be for what maybe be the most hilariously inept robbery caper to be recorded on celluloid. Now the question is: when Anderson and Wilson get their inevitable huge budget for their next film, will they make another Desperado or another Mallrats? (Seen 4 March 1996)

Bound

Bound is a good title for this kinky film noirish thriller. The two principal characters (Jennifer Tilly and Gina Gershon) are emotionally bound to each other. At various points in the story they each become literally bound. And the plot bounds along at a pretty good pace. The camera work is the most striking thing about the film. Not a shot is wasted, although there are times when the camera becomes a little too playful for its own good. Also standing out is Joe Pantoliano as a not-always-predictable gangster who specializes in money laundering—in more than one sense of the word. He seems to have watched Jack Nicholson’s work in The Shining a few times. Tilly, who seems doomed to play mobsters’ women, is suitably inscrutable, while Gershon swaggers convincingly and flaunts lips the size that Goldie Hawn was shooting for in The First Wives Club. The film overall is lots of fun (in a suspenseful, bloody sort of way) and close to flawless, although its dark comedy unfortunately spills over into camp at at times. (Seen 1 October 1996)

The Bourne Identity

If you’re wondering why the intelligence services of the US government still haven’t captured Osama bin Laden, this movie explains the problem. As The Bourne Identity illustrates, the CIA is a crack outfit that can locate anybody anywhere in the world and track them down relentlessly and dispatch them with assassins who are bred to be unstoppable killing machines. Unfortunately, these fabulous resources seem to be used exclusively for tracking down the agency’s own wayward employees. This kind of international spy suspense/thriller seems strangely quaint, given today’s politics and today’s movies. It is adequately entertaining and delivers the requisite occasional adrenaline rush as well as some nice photography of European locales. Matt Damon is really too boyish to pass as one of the aforementioned killing machines (he still strikes us more as a fraternity partying machine), but he and Franka Potente (Run Lola Run, Blow) do have some nice scenes together. As the villain, Chris Cooper has notched up the hostility he displayed as the father in October Sky quite a few degrees. Seeing this standard-issue movie throwback is especially strange since the director is Doug Liman, who previously made the deliberately cool flicks, Swingers and Go. (Seen 17 June 2002)

The Bourne Supremacy

It’s true, sequels are getting better. Or maybe I’m just getting easier. This one not only matched the first film, but it even achieved the feat of making me reevaluate my own impression of the earlier movie. I know now that I was definitely too hard on it. What seemed old-fashioned in terms of plot and action, it is now clear in hindsight, was actually the movie’s strength. Despite a few clichés and predictable moments, both films’ insistence on taking themselves completely seriously is refreshing. There is no winking or “in” jokes to let us know that the filmmakers don’t believe any of it either. We can care about the characters because they clearly care about themselves. And Matt Damon has somehow grown (or matured) into the Jason Bourne role. There is something cold and more hardened about him. I’m still not convinced he was the best choice for the role, but it doesn’t matter anymore. Paul Greengrass, who has made films about real-life tragedies in Northern Ireland (Bloody Sunday, Omagh), is definitely an interesting choice to direct in this series. Still, we have to reconcile the fairly efficient CIA we see in these movies with the one we have come to know in real life, which so easily got bamboozled about WMD stockpiles. And the climactic Moscow car chase, while pulse-pounding, does kind of put the film into more standard Hollywood action territory. But hey, it’s just a movie anyway, and this one delivers the goods for summer entertainment. Note to self: next time I come upon an important clue that could break a big case, make sure there are plenty of other people around when I tell the boss. (Seen 22 August 2004)

The Bourne Ultimatum

One more useful tip we learn in this series of movies is that, when the secret agent tells you to stay put, do not (absolutely do not) bolt and run in panic. I agonized a bit (but just a bit) over giving this one three stars. It absolutely earns them in terms of entertainment and execution, but on plot points it comes perilously close to jumping the shark. The strength of these movies has been, despite all of their improbabilities, the pulse-pounding sense of reality that this is all really happening. This is exemplified by this flick’s central action sequence, an extended chase-upon-chase-upon-chase-upon-chase through the lanes, rooftops, balconies and apartments of Tangiers. But toward the end of the movie, there is an over-the-top car crash/chase that would not be completely out of place in the latest Die Hard movie. This, plus the fact that we have had three movies now where the CIA has absolutely nothing to do except spend all its resources and time 24/7 on trying to rub out a single rogue agent. In fact, in terms of basic plot, Die Hard 4.0 (as it’s called outside the U.S.) and The Bourne Ultimatum are virtually the same movie, i.e. a lone hero taking on a threat ultimately spawned by the U.S. government. It’s just that each flick is spun politically for a different target audience. If the Die Hard movie was a neo-con dream fantasy about taking on the bad guys, the Bourne movie is a MoveOn.org paranoid nightmare about what the U.S. government is up to. While the latest Die Hard villain could be seen as based on, at least partly, Ambassador Joe Wilson, then the good guy CIA operative in this movie, played by Joan Allen, seems to be a thinly disguised version of his wife, Valerie Plame. (Seen 10 September 2007)

Bowfinger

I swear that Hollywood types long to make movies about people making movies more than any other subject—except perhaps about people in therapy. (This film sort of does both.) Bowfinger may have been some sort of self-therapy for Steve Martin, who wrote it and who stars in it, since he gets to release some venom about everything from ego-maniac action stars (Eddie Murphy, who really gets to cut loose here) to cold-blooded studio executive types (Robert Downey Jr., looking like he’s, uh, in withdrawal from drugs) to ingenues who learn quickly which bed to hop into to advance their careers (Heather Graham, in a sly performance). But because Martin is in the end really a sentimentalist (and his director is Muppet guy Frank Oz), the satire is not nearly as dark as, say, The Player. In fact, the film’s spirit is closer to something like Ed Wood or Boogie Nights and, by the final reel, it is positively wallowing in the glory of Hollywood and of making movies, as if to say that the rewards fully justify all the b.s. one has to endure. Miscellaneous observations: By my count Murphy has a mere two roles here. After two Scream movies and this, Jamie Kennedy is quickly becoming typecast as an overly intense movie buff. (Seen 17 September 1999)

Box of Moonlight

Tom DiCillo’s first movie, Johnny Suede, starred Brad Pitt. DiCillo probably can’t afford Pitt’s acting services anymore, but he’s found a close enough look-alike in Sam Rockwell, who’s had minor roles in Last Exit to Brooklyn and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. Rockwell and John Turturro make a team in this oddball comedy reminiscent of many duos through the years. (Steve Martin and John Candy in Planes, Trains & Automobiles come to mind.) Turturro is the uptight, anal-retentive control freak who is feeling helpless in the face of middle age. He has a chance encounter with Rockwell, who turns out to be Huck Finn, Peter Pan, and Jim Carrey all rolled in one. The ensuing bickering friendship and transformation are somewhat formulaic and predictable, but the execution is well done, and the result is quite entertaining. It was filmed on location in Tennessee. (Seen 25 May 1997)

The Boxer

Things have changed in Northern Ireland. In director Jim Sheridan and star Daniel Day-Lewis’s 1993 collaboration In the Name of the Father (which was set in the 1970s and 1980s), the clear villains were the despicable Brits. In The Boxer (set during today’s environment of IRA/Loyalist cease-fires) the Brits are still despicable, but mainly because they dress up in fancy clothes and drink champagne at boxing matches. The real villains are now the IRA “hard men” (as distinct from their more pragmatic leaders) who can’t seem to get out of the habit of blowing up things and shooting people. And, as we see, their targets are as likely to be fellow republicans as the hated Orangemen. In cowboy parlance, Day-Lewis is the gunfighter who is tired of killing and wants to hang up his gun and Emily Watson (Breaking the Waves) is the gal who hankers after him. Although a bit melodramatic, the film does a good job of showing the very real difficulties of building peace in a community where tit-for-tat revenge has long been a way of life. (Seen 15 January 1998)

Boy A

What a complete change from Corkman John Crowley’s previous feature, the irreverent, amusing and sprawling Intermission. This movie comes pre-loaded with a load of baggage since it is clearly based on one of the most notorious and horrific events of recent British history. (It’s adapted from a novel by John Trigell, which was inspired by the murder of a toddler by two older boys.) It cheats just a bit by changing the circumstances of the crime to provide some mitigation. Beyond that, the film wears its socially liberal heart on its sleeve by making it clear that the young criminals are victims too, products of bad circumstances. But the British juvenile justice system has worked wonders, with the surviving boy having become nearly saintly under the guidance of his case worker (played by Peter Mullan), who provides the fatherly guidance the boy never got from his own father and which, ironically, Mullan’s character was apparently unable to give to his own son. These manipulations aside, the film is a beautiful piece of work. Andrew Garfield is great in the title role, as a young offender who can no longer be legally held but must hide behind a new identity because of the strong public passions still swirling around his case. The filmmakers do a good job of imagining what this must be like, bringing in the sort of press hysteria and incidents that have actually accompanied the real-life case (except for the part about a movie being made about it). There is something hopeful about the movie, but ultimately despairing at the same time. If anything, it is an impassioned plea to let redemption happen. Like much of latter-day British film and television, it does nothing to dispel the notion that British society is in crisis and that the English drink way too much for their own good. (Seen 20 October 2007)

The Boy from Mercury

The Boy from Mercury is a lovely film by Ireland’s Martin Duffy that is more than a little reminiscent of My Life as a Dog. While the young protagonist of that film escaped by thinking he was a dog, eight-year-old Harry’s escape is the belief that he must be from the planet Mercury. The point of this fantasy is that it allows Harry to believe that the Mercurians are watching over him and protecting him. This need for security stems from the fact that his family has largely disintegrated. His father died when he was tot, and most of his brothers have left Dublin for England to find work. (He also has an extremely scary priest for a teacher.) By the end of the story, the film reaps amazing emotional dividends from something as simple as thwarting a school bully. James Hickey is perfectly cast as Harry, while Hugh O’Conor gets to show more range than he does in The Young Poisoner’s Handbook as the brother still at home. Tom Courtenay has fun in the role of loopy Uncle Tony. (Seen 4 June 1996)

Boys Don’t Cry

In a way, Kimberly Peirce’s Boys Don’t Cry is the dark, American, adult flip side to Alain Berliner’s French-language film of gender-confused childhood, Ma Vie en Rose. Interestingly, despite its subject matter, the film actually tells us less about what it is like to be a man living in a woman’s body than it does about what it is like to live a hopelessly boring and aimless life in the small towns of America’s heartland (in this case, Nebraska). We spend little time wondering why Teena Brandon would want to be a man and much time wondering why Brandon Teena feels so attracted to the small town and group of friends among which he finds himself. And that is the strength of the movie. The filmmakers resist the temptation to make Brandon a saint or a martyr for transgender politics. He is a loser, like so many of the other denizens of this movie, and ultimately he’s an unlucky person in the wrong place at the wrong time. The injustice he suffers at the hands of the local authorities is clearly shown but not overstated. Only in the Romeo-and-Juliette quality of his love affair with a local girl does the film tend to romanticize. Hilary Swank (who previously had the title role in The Next Karate Kid) is convincing and haunting as Brandon. As usual, dramatic license has been taken with some details, so for more information on these events check the web or seek out the documentary The Brandon Teena Story. (Seen 10 November 1999)

Brassed Off

Probably the best way to describe this sentimental comedy about an amateur brass band in a Yorkshire mining town is Capra-esque. When the film isn’t tickling us with its gentle humor, it is shamelessly assaulting our tear ducts. But it does this all quite well, so it’s okay. Coursing throughout the entire film is a righteously angry tone that makes a surprising contrast with writer/director Mark Herman’s previous effort, the Bronson Pinchot farce Blame It on the Bellboy. Pete Postlethwaite (In the Name of the Father) is the single-minded band conductor, and Ewan McGregor (Trainspotting) and Tara Fitzgerald (Sirens) provide the romantic interest. By the film’s end, you will be made to feel very happy that Britain’s Tories recently got defeated so resoundingly at the polls. (Seen 20 May 1997)

Braveheart

Nine months after it premiered at the Seattle International Film Festival and five months after it opened in Ireland (where parts of it were filmed) and a couple of weeks after it received a slew of Academy Award nominations, I finally got around to seeing Braveheart! This is a passionately made film full of visual beauty, the kind of historical epic we don’t see very often anymore. It is also quite violent, with unfliching battle and torture scenes. (Quart for quart, more blood gets spilled in this flick than in the whole Nightmare on Elm Street series!) As played and directed by Mel Gibson, Scottish rebel William Wallace seems a shoo-in candidate for sainthood. This despite a nasty penchant for revenge and an eye for a comely lass or two, including the French-born Princess of Wales who tires of playing Lisa Marie to her bridegroom’s Michael Jackson. Patrick McGoohan is quite good as the wretchedly evil King Edward Longshanks. If nothing else, Braveheart is a useful illustration for us Americans (with our notoriously short historical memory) as to why there are people angry enough to this day to explode bombs in London. (Seen 26 February 1996)

Breakfast on Pluto

One of the pleasures of following a filmmaker’s work for years is seeing signature themes, actors and visuals recur and turn on themselves over the years. Like seeing Stephen Rea back in London, becoming obsessed with a man who makes a pretty good-looking woman (cf. The Crying Game). Or the way director Neil Jordan gives us a slightly(?) warped take on rural Ireland, as he did in his previous adaptation of a Pat McCabe novel, The Butcher Boy. And it’s always good to see Jordan regulars Rea, Liam Neeson (very effective in the tricky role of a not-completely-celibate priest) and Brendan Gleeson, no matter how busy they get with their international movie careers. There are two stars here. The main one, of course, is Cillian Murphy, who I always knew would make a really fine woman, but I wasn’t prepared for how he’d turn out to look so eerily like Minnie Driver on a really bad hair day. The other star is the soundtrack that brings us back to the late 1960s/early 1970s, as most of us didn’t get to experience them. Morris Albert’s grating “Feelings” is used to sinisterly ironic effect in a mesmerizing scene with Roxy Music’s Bryan Ferry. Also creepy is Murphy’s character’s adoption of Bobby Goldboro’s maudlin “Honey” as his personal anthem. But these necessary, if annoying choices, are more than compensated by songs by the Rubettes, Joe Dolan, Harry Nilsson and Dusty Springfield. What is perhaps most pleasurable is the way Jordan’s take on the politics of the era is informed by the hindsight of history, and our strangely innocent Candide finds a world that is not quite so black and white as Irish movies have often painted them in the past. Oh yeah, and young Conor McEvoy does fine in the brief role of the hero/heroine as a child and is already working on his second film, thereby embarking on the movie career my nephew Josh should have had. (Seen 24 January 2006)

Breakfast of Champions

Well, here’s yet another sentence I never expected to write: y’know, Nick Nolte doesn’t look half-bad in a dress. Actually, in this movie Nolte looks like he is still shell-shocked from his battlefield experiences in The Thin Red Line, which maybe is why he keeps telling Bruce Willis they are “war buddies” even though they never served in the military together. Strangely, Willis is actually pretty good in this movie, and once and for all he proves that he has more range than just fighting terrorists in a sweaty undershirt. But I’m afraid that this adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel has arrived a few decades too late. As a serious wallow in American mass merchandising and shallowness, it definitely feels dated. Which is too bad because it has a great cast, particularly Albert Finney (looking strangely like the late Kenneth McMillan) as the perpetually muttering crank novelist Kilgore Trout. This romp by Alan Rudolph (Afterglow, Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle) has its moments, but it’s really one of those movies you need to watch at midnight while ingesting hallucinogens. (Seen 17 May 1999)

Breaking the Rules

This is another one of those German documentaries that makes you wonder why it wasn’t made by Americans. It takes a fairly systematic look at a number of American artistic/social/political movements, during the past half-century, that can generally be lumped together as “counter-culture.” The journey takes us from the jazz clubs of Harlem to the Beats’ coffee houses and bookstores of Greenwich Village and San Francisco’s North Beach to the Hippie movement in Haight Ashbury and northern California to hip-hop and graffiti artists in New York City. There is enough here to wish that each sub-topic had gotten its own entire documentary. For old farts, it is a strange trip indeed to once again see the footage and hear the music and to see the talking heads (especially the survivors of the 1960s) looking back at their time. Some of these include poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, peace activist Wavy Gravy, Ray Manzarek of The Doors, Peter Fonda (discussing Easy Rider), DJ Afrika Bambaataa and rapper Kurtis Blow. Maddeningly, the film at no point identifies any of its talking heads (maybe there is a German version with subtitles that does so?), so if you’re not old enough or well-studied enough to recognize them (and even if you are old enough to remember them, that still doesn’t mean you’ll be able to recognize them), you are out of luck. This is the second year that this film has played at the Cork Film Festival, and it has handily sold out both times. And the audience was, for the most part, quite young. It must be very strange, for a lot of them, to see the parallels between the present and the 1960s. It must be stranger still to see how much more of a broader revolution was associated with the anti-war movement back then than there is now. (Seen 12 October 2006)

Breaking Up

In the question-and-answer session following the world premiere of this movie, the stars—Australia’s Russell Crowe (Rough Magic) and Mexico’s Salma Hayek (Fools Rush In)—demonstrated that they can be charming, amusing, and entertaining. Unfortunately, they don’t get much chance to be any of those things in Breaking Up. An extremely claustrophobic film by Robert Greenwald, there are just the two characters and their bad relationship to occupy us for 90 long minutes. They seem to have no friends, no family, no acquaintances. She is a school teacher. He has some sort of job that requires him to photograph fruit. We watch them fight, break up, get back together, and then do it all again—all with the regularity of CNN Headline News. On the bright side, there is a cool fantasy sequence, in which Crowe imagines Hayek’s new boyfriend, and an epilogue, where the couple meet again years later, that actually feels real and three-dimensional. (Seen 6 June 1997)

Brian Friel

This made-for-television documentary would not be out of place on A&E’s Biography series. While not particularly daring or imaginative, it is very competent and polished in telling us what we need (and want) to know about the man who is arguably Ireland’s greatest living playwright. As a subject, Friel is especially compelling since, as the film points out, he is a very shy man who doesn’t give interviews frequently and so has, deliberately or not, encouraged a “Greta Garbo-like” fascination about himself. We don’t actually get a lot of detail on his personal life, but his prolific body of plays (the best known of which is probably Dancing at Lughnasa), which have kept his name on theater marquees in Dublin, London and New York for years, is enough to hold our interest. Mostly, we get repeated, gauzy shots of him walking the beach, thinking profound thoughts, looking strangely like a wispy-haired John Gielgud. We learn that he was very much influenced by his upbringing in Derry (he was one of those marching on the streets when the Bloody Sunday massacre occurred) as well as half-remembered visits to his mother’s home place in Donegal, the county where he has made his home for years. And, as his work shows, he has been very preoccupied with the fact that the Irish had their original language forcibly removed and how English in Ireland differs from English in other places. At one point, Friel jokes that at his age (the film centers around his 70th birthday) interviews start to seem like memorials, and we definitely get that feeling from this film. (Seen 15 February 2002)

Brick

One of the strangest (but successful) ideas anybody ever had was to take Superman and do a WB teen soap opera series about his early years. This movie is like doing the same thing for the character Jack Nicholson played in Chinatown. Those of us forced to watch the Disney Channel at length already know this conceit. It’s called Fillmore, and it’s basically a police series in the style of those old Quinn Martin productions, but set in a high school, with hall monitors for cops and a principal as the responsible politician. If you can get past the gimmick (and the fact that our hero’s high school has precious few students and apparently no classes), the classically film noir plot and execution aren’t half bad. My favorite touch was the fact that the twentysomething drug lord, played by Lukas Haas, sported a cape and cane just like Barnabas Collins did in Babylon 5! Can this really be a nod to the fact that this movie’s star, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, several years before he played an extraterrestrial in a human teenager’s body on 3rd Rock from the Sun, had a regular role in the short-lived Babylon 5 primetime revival? Anyway, this flick really drives home something that, I think, we knew all along. At the end of the day, in films noirs, there was always something pretty adolescent about all the impossible macho posturing and self-conscious cool. (Seen 20 June 2006)

Bridge to Terabithia

The Munchkin had this one sussed. “It’s like Narnia,” she said, “It’s made by the same people.” The TV ads had done their job. It is indeed by the same people, i.e. Walden Media, the production company whose unabashed purpose is to make family entertainment that is actually good for kids, and Disney, the original family-friendly movie-maker. But, as the Munchkin discovered, Bridge to Terabithia is a very different movie than The Chronicles of Narnia—despite a similar kids-entering-a-fantasy-world angle. Although set in contemporary time, it has a very old-fashioned feel, as it earnestly deals with heavy issues like childhood fears and pressures, financial stress on a family and (the big one) death. In its exploration of youthful trauma and guilt it is not completely unlike the movies of Carlos Saura (Cría Cuervos), and the child/fantasy/reality angle would be somewhat reminiscent of Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth. But admirers of those films may find this one, directed by Gabor Csupo after Katherine Paterson’s book, overly wholesome and sentimental. That may be. But this film does have one advantage over those Spanish ones. You can actually reasonably bring a child to this one, and the child will quite possibly enjoy it. And it will give parents and children plenty to talk about afterwards. The young leads are engaging, especially AnnaSophia Robb, who was previously seen in Walden’s Because of Winn-Dixie and as spoiled Violet Beauregard in Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Also on hand is Robert Patrick, who seems to have settled into playing tough rural fathers (cf. Walk the Line). (Seen 5 May 2007)

Bridget Jones’s Diary

A few years ago I went to an authors’ reading at Eason’s bookstore in Dublin. I mainly wanted to see novelist/filmmaker Neil Jordan, but he didn’t show because he was busy filming Michael Collins. To everyone’s surprise, his replacement was Salman Rushdie. I was so excited that I ran up to him after his reading and asked him to autograph his latest book. I wanted to say something profound, but I just mumbled some inanity, and he gave me a heavy-lidded look that bespoke total perplexity. I tell this story, so that you will understand how it did my heart good to see something very similar happen to Bridget Jones in this movie. And, in fact, there is a bit of a running gag about people walking up to Rushdie and asking him where the loo is. This is just one of many very funny bits in this very funny movie. Bridget is a desperate single woman in her 30s, so she is akin to Rhoda of sitcom fame and Cathy of the comic strips. But unlike those media, movies need to have endings, so this winds up as a fairly conventional romantic comedy. Renée Zellweger (who does a Gwyneth Paltrow-like conversion to a very convincing English accent) gained weight for the role, which only makes her look healthy, but she and everyone else seems to see her as fat. The main message in the end, although it’s rather underplayed, is that the person who seems like a jerk to you may actually be more like you than you think. Which probably means that the other (pencil thin) women in the movie probably think they are fat too. (Seen 18 April 2001)

Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason

This is really the worst kind of sequel. Like more than a few sequels, it is not really very good. But it goes a step farther and actually makes us question whether the original movie was as good as we thought it was. It is as though the filmmakers (Beeban Kidron, who directed To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar, took over from Bridget Jones’s Diary director Sharon Maguire) took the weakest bits from the first movie and decided to redo them over and over in the new movie. But then a sequel was kind of a superfluous idea anyway and illustrates the pitfalls of making a follow-up to a story that ends “happily ever after.” Watching the all-too-human Bridget go through the trials and tribulations of modern adult single life the first time and arriving at some enlightenment about life and relationships was endearing. Watching her slide back to square one and do it all over again is just annoying. And, where Maguire’s movie was affectionate in highlighting Bridget’s foibles and imperfections, Kidron’s movie merely delights in them, in a mean adolescent sort of way. It says everything that the best part of the movie (really) is when the main character gets thrown into a prison in Thailand. (Seen 3 December 2005)

A Bright Shining Lie

Irish director Terry George crafted a respectable treatment of the Troubles in Northern Ireland a couple of years ago in Some Mother’s Son. Now he’s moved on to a different intractable conflict, one which is now thankfully in the past. Based on Neil Sheehan’s novel which, in turn, was based on the real-life experiences of John Paul Vann, A Bright Shining Lie does just fine as a quickie history lesson on U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Vann (well played by Bill Paxton) is a larger-than-life figure, whose involvement in the war over a decade personified how “Vietnam” became synonymous with “quagmire.” A gung-ho military man, Vann was undone by his own personal (shall we say Clinton-esque?) compulsions and the fact that he had a clarity about the situation that was a quarter-century ahead of his time. George said that John Milius used Vann as the model for the Marlon Brando character in his script for Apocalypse Now, but this film suggests that Vann was an extremely complex man who deserves better. The movie has gone directly to HBO in the States, but it is being released theatrically in Europe, where the big screen suits the subject matter and the powerful war scenes quite well. (Seen 11 July 1998)

Bright Young Things

What could more delicious? A scathing social satire from the poison pen of English author Evelyn Waugh, adapted and directed by one of England’s funniest present-day wits, Stephen Fry. Given the film’s trajectory from devil-may-care excesses by the privileged class to the grim world-changing gloom of war, it is tempting to think of this 2003 adaptation of the 1930 novel Vile Bodies as basically an alternate version of Waugh’s best known work, Brideshead Revisited, but shorter and without all the Catholic stuff. Given the director and the new title, we suspect that perhaps this is meant to say something about our own age, but any intended parallels aren’t blazingly obvious—beyond the timeless theme of the vacuous-ness of people who become famous for being famous and the cynicism of the popular press. Mostly, we seem to be expected to sit back enjoy watching people partying mindlessly and utter things like, “I’m so frantically bored,” followed by an ending that suggests that maybe commitment and seriousness might not be such bad things after all. The real pleasures in the movie are seeing a new young crop of British acting talent, including the next Doctor Who, David Tennant, as well as supporting roles by some great veterans, including Dan Aykroyd as a Canadian press lord; Stockard Channing, as an American evangelist; Peter O’Toole and Jim Broadbent, as batty old military men; and, most touchingly, the late John Mills, in one of his last screen appearances. (Seen 19 November 2005)

Brokeback Mountain

At the risk of sounding glib, I will give you the honest, unvarnished reaction I had upon watching this movie: Sure is pretty, but it ain’t Evelyn Waugh. As for the pretty part, the film is so well made that it will deserve the multiple Academy Award nominations that it will receive. The photography is stunning, the acting is first-rate all around, and there is some very good music on the soundtrack. Before I saw the movie, I thought I would be comparing/contrasting it with Ang Lee’s wonderful 1993 film (the first time most of us saw his work) The Wedding Banquet, which also dealt with complications arising from two men loving each other. But Brokeback Mountain really makes more sense as the flip side to another great Lee film, 1997’s The Ice Storm. That one dealt with the consequences of perhaps too much sexual liberation. This one deals with the consequences of too much sexual repression. And Lee’s view of 20th century Wyoming is not only repressive but downright bleak, which should be no surprise considering that Larry McMurtry, who wrote The Last Picture Show, was a co-screenwriter. But McMurtry, over the years, has given us many memorable, sympathetic and life-affirming characters, and this is where Brokeback falls short for me. The two forlorn cowpokes are, frankly, a bit dim. (That’s what brought Waugh, longingly, to my mind.) We certainly pity them, but no more or less than their wives or their children. Obviously, the story will speak to others’ experiences better than to mine and they will connect better. But I longed for at least some small hint of grace and/or enlightenment, as we saw at the end of The Ice Storm. [Related commentaries here and here and here] (Seen 18 January 2006)

Broken Arrow

When John Travolta spends the first ten minutes of Broken Arrow telling Christian Slater why he’ll always be a loser, you know pretty much that the conversation will continue throughout the mounting violence right through the final reel. Along with a few well-executed special effects and action sequences, Travolta (who makes a much better villain than he does a gangster, disco dancer, or high school student) is actually the best thing about this rollercoaster of a movie. Hong Kong actionmeister John Woo has clearly upped the stakes in his second American feature (after the Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle Hard Target). Slater and Samantha Mathis are okay, respectively, in the earnest and resourceful Keanu Reeves role and the pert and plucky Sandra Bullock role. (Seen 17 April 1996)

Broken Flowers

In his latter-days movie career, Bill Murray is specializing in playing over-the-hill everymen, more or less bemused, and bit melancholy, about where the shifting sands of time have deposited them. Director Jim Jarmusch’s quirky movies tend to be laid-back, wry and dawdling. The combination of these two talents produces a central character who is nearly catatonic. It stretches our credulity to believe that the passive Murray not only made a fortune in the computer business but has also led a life of serial romantic conquests. In theory, Murray’s character is a close match to the one Hugh Grant played in About a Boy: a man with too much time and money on his hands and an emotional detachment that doesn’t allow him to really share any of it with anyone. A movie device sends Murray on a cross-country trip to look up some of his old flames and, as we know, when a film sends its hero across the U.S. in search of birth parents, memories of a dead parent or, in this case, a putative love child, we are really getting the filmmaker’s portrait of America. Jarmusch’s America (which looks pretty much the same, no matter where the plane lands) includes exploding Nascar dads, antiseptic suburbs, New Age professionals and backwoods ruffians. Jarmusch seems to be suggesting that each of us is living in our book or movie. For example, if Murray’s Don Johnston is really Don Juan, then Sharon Stone has the Shelley Winters role in Lolita. At the end, we are left with a vision of a man numb and haunted by more than half a lifetime of what-ifs. (Seen 8 November 2005)

The Brothers Grimm

Why is everyone so down on this movie? I suspect maybe the critics were really using it for target practice, taking their final shots at the Weinstein regime at Miramax. But I was particularly concerned about the opinion of English movie critic Mark Kermode, who engages in lively film discussion on BBC’s Five Live radio channel (available to the entire universe via podcast). He professes to be as big a Terry Gilliam fan as, well, as me. But he went so far as to claim that The Brothers Grimm did not qualify as a true Terry Gilliam film, despite meeting the only criterion that I personally consider essential for earning that designation: it was directed by Terry Gilliam. (Gilliam got him back but good, though, by suggesting that he was taking his lead from American critics.) I think I understand the problem, however. When Time Bandits came out in 1981, those of us who were Monty Python fans expected and wanted it to be a Monty Python movie, mainly because it was directed by Gilliam and included John Cleese and Michael Palin in the sprawling cast. It wasn’t a Monty Python movie, though, and it took a little getting used to that Gilliam had an artistic life that was influenced by but independent of his work with the Pythons. By the time Gilliam had made films like Brazil, The Fisher King and Twelve Monkeys, we had come to expect something more from Gilliam than mind-blowing imagery, antic action and subversive, anarchic humor. We had come to see his films as profound and meaningful as well. The Brothers Grimm (set in a world where fantasy is reality, meaning that curses and monsters are real and France is a dominant military power) is a bit of a throwback to Time Bandits, which in the end was just a twisted take on old fairy tales. Matt Damon and Heath Ledger are more or less Hope and Crosby bumbling through an improbable adventure, while competing for the attention of Lena Headey, in the Dorothy Lamour role. Profound? Not particularly. Entertaining? Very. Indeed, this is the most Pythonesque film Gilliam has made since, well, since he co-directed (with Terry Jones) Monty Python and the Holy Grail. (Seen 15 November 2005)

Bruce Almighty

Morgan Freeman acquits himself very well playing God. It’s a tricky role, but Freeman can hold his head high next to the likes of actors ranging from George Burns (Oh, God! plus sequels) to Alanis Morissette (Dogma). The only problem is, he’s not really playing God. He’s playing Clarence the angel. This is really yet another remake of It’s a Wonderful Life. We know this for sure because director Tom Shadyac has Jim Carrey lasso the moon, just like Jimmy Stewart pretended to do in IaWL (here with more tidal consequences). Just to make sure we “get” this, Shadyac actually shows us the relevant clip from IaWL, leaving us to wonder if he will also show us Charlton Heston parting the Red Sea so that we will “get” the scene where Carrey parts his bowl of tomato soup. That’s the kind of movie this is. It’s also the kind of movie that, instead of actually writing a character for Jennifer Aniston, it makes her a pre-school teacher who donates blood so that we will “get” that she is A Really Good Person. If you enjoy this movie, it will be because you enjoy Carrey’s considerable comedic antics. But as a movie, it’s a pale shadow of the one it attempts to imitate. Where Capra’s original showed us a man’s entire life so that we really understood how a decent man became overwhelmed and lost hope and then found his way back, this movie tracks a man’s journey from being a vengeful jerk to being a do-gooding jerk. But what else would you expect from the man who gave us (in addition to previous Carrey vehicles, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and Liar Liar) the shameless Patch Adams? (Seen 2 July 2003)

The Brylcreem Boys

“It’s a strange story, but it’s all true.” With that assurance, co-scriptwriter Susan Morrall introduced this quirky tale (co-scripted and directed by Terence Ryan) about prisoners of war in neutral Ireland in 1941. The result is yet another high concept that we weren’t expecting to see: The Bridge Over the River Kwai meets Local Hero. The “Brylcreem boys” are the RAF pilots shot down over Ireland and forced to sit out the war to satisfy the republic’s tricky stance between the Allies and Germany. In the same loosely run internment camp (more than a little reminiscent of the old Hogan’s Heroes TV show), however, are also German prisoners. The enmity between the two groups becomes personal when a Canadian and a German vie over a local beauty played by Riverdance star Jean Butler. When Butler and some of the lads at the local pub spontaneously break into a Riverdance routine, we know for sure that this is yet another cinematic Irish shaggy dog story in the vein of The Quiet Man. Commanding the camp is the inevitable Gabriel Byrne enjoying himself immensely playing a right Paddy. (Seen 8 July 1998)

The Buddha of Suburbia

This isn’t really a movie but rather a four-part mini-series made for British television. I suppose you could compare it to PBS’s Tales of the City in that it is an indulgent look back on the 1970s and a time that has gone forever. Beyond that, however, there isn’t much similarity. And, in the Age of Newt, I don’t think we are likely to see anything like the sexual escapades of our young hero Karim on U.S. public television. The Buddha of Suburbia is based on the novel (and co-scripted) by Hanif Kureishi who also penned My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammie and Rosie Get Laid. As you would expect, this is about being from a southwest Asian background in modern Britain. Early on in the story, Karim’s future stepmother gives him some books to read. They are Stendhal’s The Red and the Black and Voltaire’s Candide. This alerts us that Karim is at once the passionate Julien Sorel and the innocent Candide finding his way through a strange world. Even though the program notes say that Karim’s father (who cashes in on his Indian-ness to be a teacher to spiritually starved white people) is the Buddha of the title, I submit that it actually refers to Karim who is a modern Siddhartha seeking enlightenment. Over a leisurely four hours (which actually pass very quickly) we follow Karim as he experiences family life, sex, politics, and art in 1970s England. He finds that he is admired on one hand for his being exotic (even though he was born in England and his mother is not Indian) and resents him on the other hand for being racially different. At the end of the story, Margaret Thatcher appears on a television screen to let us know that things are going to hell in a handbasket, much the same way footage of Richard Nixon’s 1968 election was used at the end of Shampoo. (Seen 29 May 1995)

Buffalo Soldiers

This is a kind of movie we haven’t seen for a while, certainly not in the post-9/11 neo-patriotic era. It’s a good old-fashioned “war is insanity” flick in the tradition of Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H and Mike Nichols’s Catch-22. Except technically this isn’t a “war” movie, since it is set in the final days of the Cold War, but its message is that, when you’re in the military, peacetime can be hell too. If we go with the M*A*S*H comparison, then star Joaquin Phoenix has a combination role of the manipulatively efficient Radar O’Reilly and the wheeling-dealing Hawkeye Pierce. Meanwhile, Ed Harris, who has played a host of military men in his career, this time has the fumbling Colonel Blake role. I guess that would make the by-the-book Scott Glenn (who co-starred with Harris in the more gung-ho The Right Stuff) the Major Burns character. Or a better comparison might be with the Willem Dafoe and Tom Berenger light and dark figures from Oliver Stone’s Platoon. Indeed, this movie (by Australian Gregor Jordan) is very much like an Oliver Stone film, exploring a topic not really highlighted much before: the effects of peacetime stationing American military long-term in other countries, in this case West Germany. Anyway, we know something is pretty screwy in the world when Dean Stockwell outranks Ed Harris. Things are just outrageous enough that we believe it could really have happened. Elizabeth McGovern is surprisingly effective as Harris’s Lady Macbeth of a wife. (Seen 3 September 2003)

A Bug’s Life

If you care at all who makes the best computer-animated ant movie—the legendary Disney studios or the offshoot upstart DreamWorks—then you surely know by now that the answer is definitely Disney. And not just because of coincident over-marketing. While DreamWorks’s Antz is impressive enough technically, it just doesn’t have the masterful wizardry or joy of comedy that Disney’s A Bug’s Life has. At heart, Antz is basically a typically angst-ridden Woody Allen movie with Allen’s voice but little else of his creativity. Sort of a cartoon version of Love and Death. A Bug’s Life, on the other hand, while having an extremely similar plot, is a brighter and cheerier tale that manages to be reminiscent of both To Be or Not to Be and The Magnificent Seven. And in lieu of Allen’s trademarked neurotic readings, we have a joyful cast consisting largely of NBC sitcom stars like Dave Foley, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, David Hyde Pierce, etc. etc. (Particularly welcome is the voice of Dr. Smith from TV’s Lost in Space, Jonathan Harris, as a self-important thespian.) A Bug’s Life really excels at the “acting,” that is, the animated character renditions, which are much more natural and entertaining than those of Antz, as well as the writing. There are many wonderful turns and lines in A Bug’s Life, such as the one involving the word “slapstick.” (Seen 17 December 1998)

El Bulto (Excess Baggage)

Imagine that you are 20 years old and you go to sleep and then you wake up and find you are now 40 years old. (This actually happened to me except that I was apparently awake most of the time.) You find that your wife has been living with another man for years. Your baby daughter is now a young woman. And you have a son who wasn’t even born the last time you were awake. You also have a lot of world history and a lot of computer games to catch up on. This is the premise of El Bulto, a 1991 Mexican film. Lauro is a radical who is injured by police during a demonstration in 1971 and goes into a 20-year coma. His family, which loyally cares for him, has taken to calling him el bulto (the lump). The film handles this all realistically, and the resurrected Lauro (“or should we call you Lazarus” jokes an old friend) is a gaunt figure with long scraggly hair and beard who haunts his old home like a ghost. At first, it appears that this is going to be a pretext for political commentary as Lauro looks disdainfully on his former radical friends who have since joined the establishment. But this is at heart a family drama, as Lauro has a tough time adjusting to all the changes he encounters and alienates everyone around him. The film ends all too tidily as Lauro and his family (and his new twentysomething girl friend!) all reconcile and sing rap music together. (Seen 6 June 1995)

Bure Baruta (Powder Keg) (Cabaret Balkan)

This very dark film opens with a heavily made-up emcee welcoming us to the Cabaret Balkan. This deliberately makes us think of the movie Cabaret, but if we think we’re in for a pleasant evening of singing and dancing, we’d better think again. The film weaves several interconnected stories during the course of one long night in Belgrade, coming off like some violently nightmarish mishmash of After Hours and Taxi Driver with a bit of Pulp Fiction thrown in for good measure. Director Goran Paskaljevic paints the Yugoslav capital as a city seething with tension and violent tempers, waiting for the slightest provocation to erupt. A fender-bender becomes an obsessive manhunt. Lifelong friends bloody each other while each spews his own catalog of past grievances. A bus driver’s over-long coffee break leads to disaster. And on and on. While this may reflect life in one city since the Yugoslav breakup (can’t even begin to wonder what a sequel featuring NATO bombing would look like), it is clear that this black portrait is also clearly meant to represent the Balkan region in general. As the searing final scenes demonstrate in very literal fashion, the cliché about the Balkans being a tinderbox or a powder keg is all too true. This, plus a few passing references to refugee situations in Kosovo and Bosnia, helps explain why, despite the film’s popularity at home, the Milosevic government was not exactly thrilled about it. (Seen 29 May 1999)

A Business Affair

In a nutshell, A Business Affair is a comedy-drama about a talented woman who goes through two bad marriages before she realizes that it is okay to just be on her own. There’s not much fresh or new in this Anglo-French production, but a couple of fine performances are turned in by the actors who play the jerk husbands. Husband No. 1 is Jonathan Pryce (looking much tweedier than in his urbane Infiniti car commercials), an English intellectual novelist on the verge of breaking through to a mass market audience. Ironically, he is going through extended writer’s block, and it annoys him that his French wife Kate (Carole Bouquet) is gushing out words at a fantastic clip in her first writing effort. (Maybe it’s because she’s using an IBM ThinkPad and he’s writing in longhand?) He was happier before she quit her job as a department store fashion model. Husband No. 2 is Christopher Walken, an obnoxious New Yorker who is running a London publishing house. He is obsessed with Kate until they finally get married. Then he is threatened by her talent as well. I suppose there are worse ways to kill 101 minutes than with this film, but it’s definitely not something that’s going to stick in the memory for long. (Seen 25 May 1995)

The Butcher Boy

Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins was an fine introduction to modern Irish history. His latest, The Butcher Boy, is an incisive but twisted tour of the Irish Catholic psyche. Indeed, this may be the quintessential Irish movie. We have a drunkard father (Stephen Rea), a sainted mother, a peculiar priest with bizarre predilections (the wonderful Milo O’Shea), and the Virgin Mary herself (Sinéad O’Connor!). This last bit of casting is especially amusing since O’Connor looks and sounds strangely like Roma Downey in that Touched by an Angel TV show. Ostensibly a look in the mind of a budding young psychopath, the film can be seen as an allegory of Catholic Ireland. Look no farther than the beatings rendered on our hero by the thug brothers of the anglified neighbor who consistently looks down her nose at our lad. Eventually and inevitably, he reacts with sickening violence. Jordan and Patrick McCabe, who adapted the screenplay from McCabe’s novel, have served up something to offend everyone—in a deliciously entertaining fashion. (Seen 12 May 1998)