Copyright
©
1995-2008 Scott Larson
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F*@k the Disabled (Keeping It Real: The Adventures of Greg Walloch)
This film isn’t quite as provocative as its title, but it does its best.
While the phrase is heard at one point in a comedy sketch about a waiter
with cerebral palsy who provides New York diners with a lower standard of
service than they expect, its main usage in this quasi-documentary is in
another sketch inspired by the notion that a disabled man who is gay
might have become that way because he can’t attract women. The film, by
Eli Kabillio, is a portrait of performer Greg Walloch, who opens his
comedy monologue by announcing, “I’m gay, I’m disabled, and I live in
Harlem.” The film basically takes us through Walloch’s club routine,
punctuating it with interviews with Walloch, his parents and others, as
well as sketches dramatizing some of his comedy gags. A few well-known
actors participate in the sketches, notably Stephen Baldwin as an
illiterate gym queen. While Walloch can be described as a comedian, he is
really more of a monologist, not unlike an urban Garrison Keillor. His
stories are funny and touching and refreshingly puncture politically
correct notions about being gay and/or disabled—like when he tells about
being in a hurry to make a date and getting angry because the bus has to
wait for a woman in wheelchair. This film goes to show that the easiest
way to make an entertaining film is to find a great subject and then just
turn on the cameras. This is the case here, since with his toothy, boyish
grin and big soft brown eyes, you can’t help but like Walloch and not
want to give him a big hug.
(Seen 11 July 2001)
Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain
(Amélie de Montmartre) (Amélie)
On one hand, this visually impressive fable seems to be another European
meditation on chance, coincidence and fate, in the vein of such films as
Julio Medem’s Earth and The Lovers of the Arctic
Circle, Tom Tykwer’sRun Lola
Run and The Warrior and the Princess and Claude
Lelouche’s Chance or
Coincidence. (An American cousin to this genre might be Paul
Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia.) On the other
hand, the film has a sugariness about it and its do-gooding meddling
heroine (not to mention a stylized/romanticized vision of France)
that is reminiscent of Chocolat. In fact, the title
role almost seems tailor-made for Juliette Binoche, even though the
role has actually gone to Audrey Tautou. Her apparently foreordained
soul mate is played by actor (A
Self Made Hero)/director (The Crimson Rivers) Mathieu
Kassovitz. The movie is frequently mesmerizing to watch, but that is
no surprise since the director is Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who previously
collaborated on such visual treats as Delicatessen, The
City of Lost Children and (less memorably) Alien Resurrection.
Still, given Jeunet’s track record, this movie should be even
better. For what is essentially a romantic love story, the emotional
payoff at the end feels rather small. Maybe it’s because we’re asked
to root for two people who don’t actually know each other. (Seen 27 September 2001)
Face/Off
There have plenty of movies where the line between the cop and the
criminal get blurred or where two people’s identities get confused and
seem to merge. But no movie (or at least no ultra-violent action movie)
takes the premise so far or as literally as Face/Off. The title is
a sly play on words indicative of the film’s ironic sense of humor.
Directed by John Woo, this is the best marriage yet of Hong Kong-style
over-the-top melodrama and impossibly choreographed violence with slick,
technically rich Hollywood production values. As in Broken Arrow, Woo again works
with John Travolta, who this time plays the good guy, that is, when
he isn’t playing the bad guy. For a bonus, we also get Nicolas Cage.
What’s really fun is watching the two of them impersonate each other
and then impersonate each other impersonating each other. The result
is something like Brian De Palma might have done in his
Scarface days—if he was on some really weird drug. For all
the mayhem, the movie is surprisingly satisfying. But be advised
that, as is the case with many Hong Kong directors, the body count
is ludicrously high. If the FBI really did all this stuff, Janet
Reno would be in congressional hearings for the next 40 years! (Seen 10 July 1997)
Factotum
Film is “a medium that relentlessly and consistently failed, time after time after time, to produce anything at all. People became so used to seeing sh** on film that they no longer realized is WAS sh**.” Given that opinion about movies by the late writer Charles Bukowski (describing his experience writing the 1987 Barbet Schroeder film Barfly), one cannot help but wonder what he would think about another big screen adaptation of his work. He may have had a point, at least when it comes to his own stories on film. Bukowski was always admired much more in Europe than in his home country, and it is again a European who has brought his work to the screen. In a way, the Norwegian Bent Hamer, who previously gave us the oddly touching Kitchen Stories, may actually be too gentle for Bukowski, whose work tends to be on the rough side. Then there is the casting of Matt Dillon, who is way better looking than Bukowski, whose face had been disfigured by acne vulgaris, ever was. But still, the middle-aged Dillon may actually be physically closer to the young Bukowski than was Mickey Rourke in Barfly, who infected Bukowski’s alter ego Henry Henry Chinaski with his own trademark slyness. In the end, the problem with movies taken from Bukowski’s writings may be this. His boozing, aimless exploits may come off as somewhat romantic on the printed page. Seeing them portrayed visually inevitably shows them to be depressing and pointless. Perhaps the best advice for filmmakers pondering future adaptations is the single line that appears on Bukowski’s headstone in Green Hills in Los Angeles: “Don’t Try.” (Seen 11 October 2005)
Fade to Black
We’ve seen this basic idea before. Take a well-known real-life figure from the past (Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, Jane Austen) and put them in the sort of story that they themselves might have created (Agatha, Hammett, Becoming Jane). In this case, it is Orson Welles, and writer/director Oliver Parker has adapted Davide Ferrario’s novel which puts the legendary actor/director smack dab in the middle of film noir-like mystery when, fresh from his divorce from Rita Hayworth and ready for self-exile, he goes to Italy in 1948 to star in the movie Black Magic. The funny thing is that, of any classic movie, this one seems to evoke not one that Welles himself directed but rather The Third Man (released a year after Black Magic), which featured Welles’s famous turn as Harry Lime, but which was written by Graham Greene and directed by Carroll Reed. Needless to say, there are multiple murders and something rotten reaching up into the highest levels of power. Most of the fun (for film aficionados anyway) is in watching for references to what we know about Welles’s film work as well as his personal progression. For example, our hero (played by a quite trim Danny Huston) makes regular references to concerns about gaining weight. But the best bit comes late in the movie, when a possible murderer is unmasked by Welles, through close examination of the day’s rushes, causing the culprit to rue Welles’s penchant for low camera angles. Huston is amazingly effective playing such a well-known figure. The voice is darn near perfect, and he has great eyes and a screen presence that is like a cross between Darren McGavin and Billy Zane. There is also that relaxed air of confidence and authority that bespeaks Welles, but also Huston’s own father, legendary director John. Also on hand are the always attractive Paz Vega and Diego Luna, as well as Christopher Walken, who is darn near unrecognizable because, well, because he is wearing a nice suit and has his hair neat and tidy.
(Seen 19 October 2007)
Fahrenheit 9/11
It’s official. It’s 1972 again. Michael Moore’s latest film presents us with an America ruled by a buffoon, who begins his term on perpetual vacation but then jumps into action after 9/11 to plot invading the (seemingly) only country in the world that had absolutely nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, out of pure, unadulterated greed. Or maybe it’s 1984, since Moore closes by drawing a comparison between the government in the George Orwell book and the current administration. The title, of course, evokes the Ray Bradbury novel about yet another future repressive society. It has to be said that Moore does a couple of things really well in this movie. He reminds us of the horror and consequences of war. We already get a lot of this on TV’s evening news, but Moore shows us rawer pictures that primetime TV won’t. He also makes a very good point about the fact that the all-volunteer military inevitably draws most of its recruits from the lower economic classes. In a typical ruse, he badgers congressmen about sending their own children to Iraq, and he might well be asking, what happened to the days when war was important enough that a country’s best and brightest (including children of political leaders) signed up for the cause? But most of the rest of the movie is typical Moore. He sets up vignettes aimed at the emotional heart of his core audience but which confound people with analytical minds. Like the way he won’t just let the eerie footage of Bush reading to schoolchildren after the twin tower attacks speak for itself; he has to put his own words into Bush’s mouth/mind. Or the way he intones ominously about the chilling effects of the Patriot Act and then gives us two cases over overzealous law enforcement that have nothing to do with the actual provisions of the Patriot Act. Or, most damningly for Moore’s credibility, the way he portrays pre-invasion Iraq as an idyllic paradise and says (off-camera, presumably with a straight face) that Iraq had never harmed or tried to harm any American. As this stuff went on and on, it occurred to me that much of what Moore does is what Jay Leno does in his filmed parodies on The Tonight Show: take the most embarrassing clips you can find and edit them together skillfully and add evocative music—like the way Leno recently did a montage of Kerry and Edwards to make them look like gay lovers. (Moore specializes in using clips of his targets while they are getting ready to go on air or have just gone off air.) The difference is that Leno’s bits are better in at least three ways: 1) they are shorter, 2) they are funnier, and 3) Leno is fair enough to lampoon everyone equally. [I have also discussed this film in not one, not two, but three commentaries, with at least one more to follow.] (Seen 14 July 2004)
FairyTale: A True Story
At last! A Harvey Keitel film you could actually take your grandmother
to! And a film set in Yorkshire that isn’t about depressed miners or male
strippers. A couple of years ago Charles Sturridge directed the TV
mini-series Gulliver’s Travels starring Ted Danson, in which the
story was told from the point of view of Gulliver’s young son. The whole
story turned on the boy’s faith in his father’s fantastic tales and
everyone else’s refusal to believe them. Sturridge explores this theme
more deeply in this beautifully photographed film, which is “inspired by
actual events.” In the grim world of working class Britain during World
War I, two girls produce apparently genuine photographs of fairies, and a
public sensation is created. People as famous as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
(Peter O’Toole) and Harry Houdini (Keitel) are drawn into the debate over
their authenticity. Few films capture as sweetly (but not too the point
of sugar coating) the magic of childhood and the importance of being
willing to believe in the unseen. (Seen 2 December
1997)
Fall
Ninety-five percent of this movie is like that obnoxious couple that is
always smooching and cooing and talking cutesy to each other to the point
where you want to throw up. The other five percent is like your morose
friend who can’t be consoled but insists on hanging around with you and
unloading all his anguish on you ad nauseum. Three years ago
director Eric Schaeffer made his first movie, My Life’s in
Turnaround, which was a goofily amusing film about making a film. He
followed that up last year with the poorly received If Lucy Fell
in which he wrote himself a make-out scene with Elle MacPherson. In
Fall he has himself romantically involved with a fictional
supermodel (didn’t they used to be called just models?) played by Amanda
DeCadenet. Schaeffer is a cab driver who apparently charms DeCadenet with
his Woody Allen-like wit. But the tender soundtrack music and adolescent
poetry he reads constantly in voice-over makes it clear that this is all
to be taken very seriously. When they go back to her fabulous penthouse
to make love, I found myself rousing from my tedium just long enough to
pray that her husband would waiting there with a gun. Sadly, he wasn’t.
(Seen 2 June 1997)
Family
If Emile Zola were alive today and making films, he would probably turn
out something like Family. (Except, of course, it would probably
be about a French family instead of an Irish one.) This is a gritty,
naturalistic study of a working class Dublin family that is relentless in
its observance of human behavior and which refuses to lighten the
proceedings with even a single moment’s mirth. It was originally a
four-part BBC television series, but we saw a version that had been
edited down to two hours specifically for festival viewing. The
introductory screen text notes drily that the series spurred some
“discussion” when it aired in Ireland. I bet! The Irish tourist bureau
definitely won’t be picking this one up anytime soon to show off Dublin’s
scenery or the charm of Irish life. The screenplay is by Roddy Doyle who
knows this territory well, but the tone here has about as much in common
with his The Commitments and The Snapper as The Grapes
of Wrath has with Oklahoma! Dad is a thieving, womanizing lout
who gets abusive when he drinks which is all the time. Mom is an
alcoholic and, given how much everyone else around her is drinking,
that’s really saying something. John Paul, the 13-year-old son, is
traumatized by the fighting going on his home. He is always in trouble at
school and nearly kills himself in a drinking binge with his mates.
Nicola, the 16-year-old daughter, seems the least afflicted but she shows
signs of (at the very least) mental abuse by her father. If you haven’t
gotten the idea yet, this film is incredibly depressing. But it does end
on a slight note of hope and you feel that things might just be getting a
little better. (Seen 30 May 1995)
The Family Stone
More than two decades before he lent his voice to the dad in The Incredibles, Craig T. Nelson played the father of a family beset by all kinds of spooky, supernatural, otherworldly forces. Well, they’re ba-a-ack... in a manner of speaking. Here he is the patriarch of a classically Northeast liberal family, in which the mother jokingly declares (but one suspects also with a bit of sincerity) that she wishes that all her sons had been gay. Many commentators have been touting Brokeback Mountain as the social watershed movie of this Christmas season, but I think it may actually be this holiday comedy/drama by writer/director Thomas Bezucha. In the final reel, Sarah Jessica Parker’s wound-up conservative gets to deliver the kind of take-me-seriously speech that, in earlier ages, used to be given to minority characters. Frankly, watching yet another movie about a disastrous family holiday gathering can feel a bit redundant (especially at a time when everyone is going through their own sometimes disastrous family holiday gatherings), and plot developments toward the end tend to feel a little too pat. Yet, this film does capture something about not only the current state of families in America but also about the current state of America itself, in the way certain characters simply cannot get past mental barriers to connect with other characters. It also cheats by blatantly borrowing some emotion from a grand old movie like Vincente Minnelli’s Meet Me in St. Louis. But in doing so, it does us a service by reminding us that the standard “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” was not originally the cheery carol we so often hear in the background these days but rather a desperately sad song about triumphing over life’s all-too-frequent adversities. (Seen 26 December 2005)
The Fan
It’s sad to see one of the great actors of our age (Robert DeNiro)
squandering his talents on an average (but at least restrained) slasher
movie like The Fan. His sporting knife salesman is really just a
pale shadow of his title role in Taxi Driver. To be sure, the
film’s premise has promise. The increasing glorification and
merchandising of sports stars and the obsession of their most die-hard
fans have ample potential for exploration. But what we get is Death of
a Salesman meets Fatal Attraction meets Damn Yankees.
In the end this Tony Scott film merely wants to do for baseball fans what
Psycho did for motel
operators. Unfortunately, it is nowhere near as entertaining. (Seen 2 September 1996)
O Fantasma (Phantom)
When asked what this movie was about, one of the festival staff helpfully
replied, “It’s about a guy who puts on a rubber suit and does stuff.”
That’s probably the kindest description possible, although it may cause
you to confuse it with Batman. The phantom of the title is a night
shift sanitation worker named Sergio, who is a ghost not only because he
winds up putting on a rubber suit and stealing through the night but
because he is an emotional phantom as well. He seems to connect with no
one and prefers to get off on things like voyeurism, stalking,
auto-eroticism and the odd anonymous sexual encounter. The plot is as
inconsistent and incoherent as a half-remembered dream. As it happens,
Sergio is quite attractive, so we find ourselves watching and
objectifying him, just as he does the same to a man he meets in the
course of his work. (Guys note: the sanitation night shift seems to be
where all the hot action is in Portugal.) But this makes the movie sound
better than it is. Basically, what director João Pedro Rodrigues
has done is to make a date movie for people who are exclusively dating
themselves. (Seen 31 May 2001)
Fantastic Four
One disconcerting effect of seeing long-awaited and long-delayed film adaptations of classic comic books, for those of us who actually followed the characters from the very first issue, is seeing them updated to the modern world. When the first issue of The Fantastic Four appeared in late 1961, only recently had the first American left the earth’s atmosphere, and Reed Richards and Ben Grimm’s backstory included service in World War II. It is even more disconcerting to realize that neither the film’s director, Tim Story, nor any of the actors playing the superhero quartet were even born when Fantastic Four #1 hit the newsstands. So, things have been updated a bit. For one thing, the origin of the FF’s main nemesis, Dr. Doom, has been closely intertwined with the superheroes à la the Green Goblin in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man and the Joker in Tim Burton’s Batman. Julian McMahon makes a good slimy villain in the Billy Zane mold, but once he adopts the Dr. Doom persona, he’s all wrong. The transformation makes no sense. They should have had Dr. Doom come straight from Latveria, complete with heavy accent. Otherwise, the casting and execution are amazingly faithful to the comic books. The FF themselves are perfect, except that I would have gone younger with the Johnny Storm character. A major part of his appeal was the logical extension of his adolescent, i.e. teenage, raging hormones to the Human Torch persona. Anyway, just being faithful to the source really isn’t enough. There is something perfunctory about the action in this movie. Compare it to Raimi’s Spider-Man and, frankly, there’s no comparison. These heroes don’t become real like Peter Parker was real. And we never get the sense of exhilaration of having superpowers, as in that film. Even Ang Lee’s Hulk (and I know I am a minority voice in liking that movie) brought a certain amount of believability to completely preposterous incidents and situations. So, as a movie, Fantastic Four isn’t great, but for us die-hard fans, well, it’s good enough. (Seen 21 July 2005)
Fargo
This time the Coen brothers have returned to a story that is not
completely unlike their first film, Blood Simple. Except this time
instead of every character merely being tragically unaware of what every
other character is doing (and consequently making disasterous
miscalculations), most of the key players are just plain dumb. Despite
the title (which is perhaps a jokey word play on how far some
people will go), most of the action takes place in Minnesota where
a desperate car salesman ineptly hatches a scheme to bilk his rich
father-in-law out of a ton of money. But in this film, Minnesota is a
snowbound version of Twin Peaks where everyone is blandly pleasant and
speaks with an exaggerated Scandinavian-American accent. (Seen 14 May 1996)
Ein Fast Perfekter Seitensprung (An Almost Perfect Affair)
Apparently, this goofy comedy has been very popular in its native
Austria. Unfortunately, that tells me more about the Austrian psyche than
I cared to know. The plot of An Almost Perfect Affair deals with
Henny, an uninhibited woman in her 30s who leaves her fiancé at the
altar in her small German town and flees to Vienna where she expects to
live by her wits. Sadly, they are in short supply. She meets up with
Sigi, and the two take to each other, but we then have to go through the
usual misunderstandings and mistaken identities, including the one where
Sigi borrows a friend’s apartment to pass off as his own even though he’s
never been there before. The movie makes light of some sad situations,
including the break-up of a marriage with a young child involved. In the
end, the message seems to be that low-brow people are nice and rich,
snobby people are awful. (Seen 23 May 1996)
Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
Say what you want about Russ Meyer, he has his own unique cinematic
vision. Of course, to the casual observer that vision consists mainly of
women with extremely (and I do mean extremely) large breasts. But there
seems to be something more going on—at least judging by the smattering
of self-proclaimed feminists in the audience for the first midnight
screening of the 1995 Seattle film festival. They applauded Meyer for his
films because they tend to depict women as strong, independent and
superior to men in just about every way. Faster, Pussycat! Kill!
Kill! was originally released in the 1960s and differs from most of
Meyer’s films in that the sex is mostly via innuendo rather than
on-screen nudity. I have to say, this campy picture is a hoot. Meyer was
on hand to answer lots of questions. For example, just how did he manage
to find all those big-chested female actors? (Answer: If you can find one
woman like that, they can usually get you more.) We also learned about
some interesting proclivities of Roger Ebert who used to work for Meyer.
We all owe Russ Meyer a debt for his pioneering work. After all,
Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! broke ground that made it possible
for younger filmmakers to make movies like Chopper Chicks in
Zombietown. (Seen 20 May 1995)
Father of the Bride Part 2
This movie is not only a sequel to a remake but also a remake of a sequel
(Father’s Little Dividend). It features the quota of slapstick
that you would expect from a film featuring Steve Martin and Martin
Short, but don’t be misled. This flick, which deals with mother and
daughter pregnancies, is a virtual multimedia Hallmark card dripping with
sentimentality that wrings every tear and lump in the throat that it can.
Even the obligatory madcap drive to the hospital is eclipsed by Martin’s
heart-tugging scenes in the maternity ward. Well before that point, when
Martin tries to cheer up his family who are bemoaning the sale of their
Leave It to Beaver house,
he asks rhetorically, “What are we? The Schmaltz family?” The answer is
emphatically yes. (Seen 26 December 1995)
Fei Xia Ah Da (The Red Lotus Society)
Every so often a movie comes along that makes you sit up, take notice,
and say out loud... “Huh?” The Red Lotus Society from Taiwan is just
one of those movies. Maybe it’s a cultural thing, but I don’t think so. I
mean, just because I’m not French doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy a movies
about women tied to radiators, does it? (Actually, it does, but that’s
besides the point.) Anyway, you know how in those Hong Kong sword and
sorcery movies the heroes are always flying through the air? Well,
apparently there is some basis in fact or at least in legend for this.
This film is about a group of people who still practice this art, called
vaulting. The catch is: once you learn how to do it, you can’t do it in
front of anybody. This explains why you hardly ever see human beings fly
under their own power. There’s lots of other stuff going on in the movie
as well, including plots involving healing jade, gangsters, big business,
major financial transactions, and flashbacks to the 1950s. But darned if
I know what any of it means! (Seen 4 June 1995)
Feiseung Datyin (Expect the Unexpected)
Expect the Unexpected is a good (English) title for this police
action thriller because a lot of unexpected things happen. For instance,
this Hong Kong flick has an incredible number of violent shoot-outs with
blood and bullets everywhere and wrenching death scenes. Okay, that
wasn’t unexpected. But the ending is unexpected, but of course it
would be wrong to tell you why. The title also works as a motto that our
police heroes should always keep in mind, but unfortunately they don’t.
For a Hong Kong movie of this genre, we actually get to know a lot more
about and to care about the characters than is usually the case. The
movie also has a fair number of humorous touches, including a hospital
sequence where one young woman after another shows up when a cute cop is
wounded—each clearly under the impression that she is the special person
in his life. Another scene where Sam (the chronically rule-breaking cop
who openly trades in contraband cigarettes in the police station)
attempts to break down the door of the woman with whom he is smitten. All
of these sequences contribute increasing poignancy when the story reaches
its (did I happen to mention, unexpected?) finale. (Seen 24
May 1999)
Fever Pitch
When we last saw Colin Firth, he had gone a bit loony and was trying to
crash his airplane into his wife and her lover in The English Patient. In
Fever Pitch, he is still fairly loony, and once again he is
caught up in a monumental love triangle. Scripted by Nick Hornby
after his best-selling novel, this is basically the story of a man’s
18-year love affair with the sport of European football
(specifically, a club called Arsenal) and the woman who tries to
come between them. The film goes a long ways toward explaining the
fascination that soccer has for its most rabid fans and how, in
certain circumstances, even non-fans can get caught up in the
excitement. Its quirky love story set against a sports background
makes it more than just a tad reminiscent of Jerry Maguire. Watch for
Stephen Rea in a humorous cameo. (Seen 23 April
1997)
Fierce Creatures
I suppose with farcical comedies, it’s all a matter of taste.
Fortunately, there is a reliable litmus test for Fierce Creatures
since, as we all know, it reprises the cast and spirit of 1988’s A
Fish Called Wanda. If you somehow missed that one and can’t decide
whether to see Fierce Creatures, then just go. You will likely
laugh a lot. Or you might possibly be offended, in which case you deserve
to have your twit nose bent out of shape anyway. This flick has got
everything you want in a comedy: John Cleese sputtering, sheep-in-a-bed
gags, Michael Palin driving everyone else crazy, lemur-in-a-bed gags,
Jamie Lee Curtis in mini-skirts, and tarantula-in-a-closet gags. Part of
the genius of this film is that, in satirizing the rampant
commercialization of our culture, it gets to have it both ways and rack
up what has to be a record number of product placements! (Seen 10 February 1997)
The Fifth Element
Luc Besson has finally cut out the middleman. He has essentially skipped
the original French version of this movie and gone straight to the
Hollywood remake himself. I guess this will avoid inferior US versions
like Point of No Return (starring Bridget Fonda), based on his
La Femme Nikita. This imaginative science-fiction
special-effects-laden action comedy adventure has a look somewhere
between Tim Burton and Terry Gilliam. With plot elements that seem
borrowed from Stargate, Species, and Blade Runner,
the film consistently entertains and amuses, although its numerous
cartoonish stretches make it hard to get emotionally invested in the
story, which actually has a pretense of profundity. Bruce Willis is on
hand playing the same character he has played repeatedly since the first
Die Hard movie, but the niftiest fight moves belong to Milla
Jovovich, who is basically a futuristic alien version of Besson’s earlier
heroine Nikita. Gary Oldman makes quite a comical villain who isn’t
particularly threatening. (Seen 11 June 1997)
The Fifth Province
At one point in this film directed by Frank Stapleton, a woman giving a
seminar on screenwriting admonishes her Irish pupils to avoid “Irish
mothers, priests, sexual repression and the misery of the rural life.”
Except for the bit about the priest, this goofy film cheerfully refuses
to follow its own advice. Other self-referential film bits include an
extended homage to Hitchcock’s Psycho, which suggests
(cf. mother and sexual repression, above) that Norman Bates
was really an Irishman at heart. The somewhat innocent hero of this
tale is Timmy (Brian O’Byrne), who is reminiscent of some of the
childlike protagonists we have seen in various quirky, oddball
Australian comedies. And the whole movie has an absurd quality with
heavy religious and Freudian overtones, not unlike some Eastern
European comedies. The real story seems to be about the tensions
between traditional Ireland and the very foreign European continent
with which it has cast its fate. In a brief but telling scene, Timmy
navigates through a road works area where one of the old highways
from Tara is being paved over with money from Brussels. If you’re a
film buff, it is hard not to like this film, particularly the
performances by Ian Richardson (forever known as the man in the ad
asking for Grey Poupon) and Anthony Higgins, both strangely
reminiscent of the late Peter Sellers and both of which Sellers
easily could have played in one of his frequent multi-character
turns. (Seen 28 January 2001)
50 First Dates
As frequently happens to me in rural Ireland, my personal life seemed to be a mere extension of this movie. For one thing, I came within inches of colliding with a cow on a dark country road on the way home from the cinema (true story). For another, I saw this with my usual movie date, my brother-in-law Joseph who was struck by a car as a child and still suffers from short-term memory loss. (Five years ago I made the mistake of bringing Joseph to two movies on the same night—the quirky Australian comedy The Castle and the macho space adventure Armageddon—and he was convinced that it was all one single movie.) The film itself turned out to be a pleasant surprise. At the outset, we are primed to expect one more rom com about a serial one-night stand artist coping with the idea of commitment. Then, when we start getting gags about head injuries, we feel ourselves entering the tasteless humor realm of the Farrelly brothers. In the end, however, we get something fairly unexpected: the romantic comedy version of Christopher Nolan’s Memento with the comic sweetness of Groundhog Day. Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore reprise their unlikely chemistry from The Wedding Singer, but without that movie’s artificial 1980s conceit. In the end, despite the movie’s frequent low-brow gags (a scene with a vomiting walrus comes to mind), the movie is a cockeyed testament to real love in the face of overwhelming obstacles and something of an allegory of living with a partner suffering from Alzheimer’s. The film’s lovely ending, as well as a very good soundtrack, is actually worth putting up with Rob Scheider’s inevitable trademark obnoxious turn. (Seen 12 April 2004)
54
One of my top priorities upon returning to the States was to catch up as
best I could with the recent cinematic mini-revival of the Disco Era. By
autumn, however, all that was left for viewing was 54, a
borderline guilty pleasure about New York City’s all-too-hip and
glamorous nightspot. Actors obviously got into the cast of this movie the
same way patrons used to get into Studio 54—by looking really
good. As an exercise in nostalgia, it is entertaining enough with a
certain amount (but not enough) namedropping. As a history lesson, well,
the most major of facts are here—plus a lot of fictionalized stuff. I
suspect that this would have been even more entertaining if
writer/director Mark Christopher hadn’t been making this for a subsidiary
of Disney. Christopher, whose previous work was in the genre of “gay
cinema,” here seems limited to playing it mostly straight (so to speak).
This exuberant tale constantly promises to turn dark. There is a
blossoming romantic triangle, rampant drug use, and constant sex on the
eve of the age of AIDS. But nothing much really happens and the film is
ultimately as star-struck as its young hero. Mike Myers (he can act; who
knew?) plays club owner Steve Rubell as something of a cross between Jon
Lovitz and Woody Allen. (Seen 25 October 1998)
Fight Club
I made the mistake of ignoring a spoiler warning in a Sunday New York
Times article and learned the “surprise” twist to David Fincher’s
Fight Club before I saw it (I hate when I do that!), so I’ll never
know if I would have figured it out on my own or not. But it doesn’t
really matter because having that knowledge going in didn’t really help
me to follow what point this movie was trying to make. It starts off
extremely promising, threatening to do for white-collar American male
yuppies what Trainspotting
did for nihilistic Scottish drug users. But then it seems to aspire
to being a study of a twisted mind and blurring identities along the
lines of such classics as Bergman’s Persona or Altman’s
Three Women. Finally, it seems to want to be a hallucinogenic
tour de farce about society going to hell à la Terry
Gilliam (cf. Twelve
Monkeys, which also starred Brad Pitt, and Brazil), but with only about
a tenth of his wit. Anyway, the movie does provide some very strange
sensations, notably 1) Edward Norton playing an exaggerated
variation on the same role he played in Primal Fear, 2) a reprise of
Kevin Spacey’s blackmailing-the-boss scene from American Beauty, and 3)
hearing Pitt, the epitome of the young and glamorous superstar,
making speeches about how such dreams don’t come true. (Seen 2 November 1999)
Film d’Amore e d’Anarchia (Love and Anarchy)
This film was a major cause of my longtime love affair with European
films. When I saw it soon after its original release in 1973, I instantly
became a die-hard Lina Wertmuller fan and religiously sought out each of
her subsequent movies. At least until I realized that she was pretty much
making the same movie over and over, usually with the same stars who were
in this one: Giancarlo Giannini and Mariangela Melato. It took me 25
years to see Love and Anarchy a second time, but I’m happy to
report that it holds up. Sure there’s a fair amount of overacting, but
this is an Italian film after all. As often as Wertmuller has tackled the
theme of sex and politics in other films, she has never handled them
before or since with such energy, passion, or respect for their
complexity. Giannini’s performance (his innocent’s stare stays with you
indefinitely) was such that I have never seen him since without thinking
of this movie. Well, at least until I saw him in A Walk in the
Clouds and Mimic anyway.
(Seen 26 January 1998)
Fin Août, Début Septembre
(Late August, Early September)
Olivier Assayas’s last film was Irma
Vep, which was all about movie-making and was a lot of fun.
This one is completely different. It is like an Eric Rohmer film.
Actually, it is like six Eric Rohmer films. Which is good because,
where each Eric Rohmer film deals with one season, this one deals
with six episodes covering a whole year in one movie, so it is much
more efficient. Like a lot of French films, it is largely about
people talking—and inevitably, having some nice meals with some
good wines—although there is one quite dramatic development that
dominates the last part of the movie and gives it some much needed
intensity. For the American remake, I vote for Paul Reiser to play
Gabriel, the editor fears committing to a serious job or a serious
woman; Spalding Gray to play Adrien, the self-involved writer
confronting his own mortality; Amanda Plummer as Jenny, Gabriel’s
somewhat neurotic ex; and Catherine Zeta-Jones as Gabriel’s new love
interest, who has a hidden kinky streak. (Seen 23 May
1999)
Finding Nemo
What is so darned funny about short-term memory loss? Maybe it’s just me. What’s just me? I don’t remember. (Okay, it’s not particularly funny when I do it.) Years ago, Saturday Night Live had me in stitches with a recurring skit called “Mr. Short-Term Memory.” To this day, my friend Jim and I can still crack each other up by repeatedly quoting a single line from one of the skits, which was simply the name “Tony Randall!” Even the movie Memento, which definitely had its grim side, had a perversely comic appeal because the hero (and the audience, through the narrative device of telling the story backwards) was in a constant state of not knowing what had already happened. The best running gag in the very successful Finding Nemo is the character Dory, voiced brilliantly by Ellen DeGeneres, who has a short-term memory problem. She, along with the titular Nemo, display handicaps that make this tale all the more endearing and, I submit, very emotional for parents of small children. Disney has a long history of portraying traumatic parent-child events in their animation (cf. Bambi, The Lion King), and strangely these scenes seem harder to take as an adult (an adult with a child anyway) than as a kid. Like a lot of classy kid video lit, this instant classic by the Pixar guys aims straight over (or at least through) the heads of its ostensible juvenile audience and straight at the parents, with its Gary Larson sensibility of animal world irony. The movie speaks volumes about child-parent relationships and fears, but at heart it is also about an epic quest, reluctantly undertaken, that causes growth and enlightenment for its heroes. In that sense, this film is yet another legend in a long line of literature exemplified by the likes of The Lord of the Rings. (Seen 8 November 2003)
Finding Neverland
This is German-born director Marc Foster’s follow-up to the much-hailed Monster’s Ball and is based on a play by Allan Knee. It’s unfortunate that I saw it immediately after the wonderful Millions, another England-set film that did so much better at evoking childhood and fantasy. To be sure, there are some nice bits in this recounting of how the Scottish playwright J.M. Barrie came to write the play Peter Pan. Such as when Johnny Depp, who plays Barrie, gets transformed into a pirate, instantly reminding us of his turn in Pirates of the Caribbean. Mostly, though, as these movies generally go, it is largely an exercise in spotting people and events that will turn up in the Peter Pan story. One that I wasn’t expecting was Julie Christie (who seems to have aged into looking eerily like Eve Arden) as the prototype for Captain Hook. The film is already being touted as the one that will finally get Depp an Oscar. I won’t begrudge him at all if he gets one, but personally I wasn’t electrified by this particular performance. In most of his scenes, he is glum and reserved (obviously meant to be Victorian), but then, when he breaks out with jokes or playfulness with Kate Winslet’s kids, it comes out a bit weird. I found myself siding with the fuddy duddy adults who kept telling him to stop. But it could have been worse. They could have cast Robin Williams. (Seen 16 October 2004)
Fire
This movie seems kinkier than it really is, probably because it takes
place in India and everything seems kinkier there. Also, its brief and
tasteful (read barely soft core) love scenes between two beautiful women
seem specifically calculated to provoke scandal and outrage on the Asian
subcontinent. Canadian writer/director Deepa Mehta (who made a point of
mentioning that she is straight) tells the story of two women (Shabana
Azmi and Nandita Das) who are married to two loser brothers who amazingly
aren’t interested in having sex with them. So the wives turn to each
other. Comic relief is provided by their decrepit, speechless
mother-in-law who disapproves of everything she sees by frantically
ringing a bell. After the screening, Mehta explained that the men in this
movie are just as much victims as the women. (Yeah, right.) (Seen 16 May 1997)
The First Wives Club
It’s easy to watch The First Wives Club because it is all so
comfortable and familiar. (The sense of familiarity is only enhanced by
the fact that many key moments have been shown continually in TV ads and
movie house trailers.) Of the main stars, Bette Midler and Diane Keaton
essentially play variations on their own public personas (wisecracking
and neurotic, respectively) and Goldie Hawn is more or less the same
character she played in Death Becomes Her. (There’s even a sly
reference to erstwhile co-star Meryl Streep.) In smaller roles, we have
actors like Bronson Pinchot and Dan Hedaya also reprising characters they
have often played before. Not only that, but the film is also littered
with so many celebrity cameos and walk-ons that it threatens to turn into
The Player. Ostensibly, this is a middle-aged white woman’s answer
to Waiting to Exhale with an Important Message about how we view
and treat older women. But the movie really exists to give Hawn, Keaton,
and Midler a chance to chew the scenery, exercise their comic muscles,
and have fun lampooning their own public images. The director is Hugh
Wilson who, among other things, wrote and directed the original Police
Academy movie. (Seen 14 September 1996)
Flick
As played by David Murray, Jack Flinter (whose schoolboy nickname gives
the film its title) is not what you expect a hash dealer to be. He seems
more like the lead singer of an ultra-hip rock band. Or maybe a presenter
on one of those late evening chat shows on Network 2. But that’s the
idea. For his non-documentary film debut, writer/director Fintan Connolly
wanted to portray Dublin’s underbelly as he understood it to be and, not
incidentally, in a way that didn’t require much of a budget. In the end,
most of the drug dealer film clichés are still here: the score,
the double-cross, the set-up, the police shakedown. What’s new and
interesting is the vision of Temple Bar club culture nightlife that is
only now making its way into Irish films. Also making this trip
worthwhile is an evocative film score by Niall Byrne that, at times,
single-handedly makes the movie border on operatic. (Seen 9
March 2001)
Flirting with Disaster
In his debut film Spanking the Monkey, David O. Russell explored
some twisted family relationships. In Flirting with Disaster, he’s
still exploring the weird family thing, but now he’s got a lot more money
to work with and a much better-known cast. And the film, in my humble
opinion anyway, is very funny. If Woody Allen had made this, it
almost could have been called Mighty
Aphrodite: The Next Generation. Ben Stiller is a neurotic New
York entomologist obsessed with his finding his birth parents, Patricia
Arquette is his increasingly impatient wife, and Tea Leoni is
all-too-tempting counselor who ill-advisedly accompanies the couple on
their quest. But it’s the string of minor characters encountered along
the way that makes the trip worth taking. By the time we have bounced
from east coast to west coast to midwest to the desert, we begin to feel
that the dysfunctional family that Russell is chronicling is America
itself. (Seen 20 June 1996)
Flodder
One of my very favorite movies at the 1984 Seattle film festival was a
nifty little thriller from Holland called The Lift, about a
malevolent elevator that didn’t like human beings. (“Take the stairs! For
God’s sake! Take the stairs!”) Well, the director of that movie (Dick
Maas) has written, directed, co-produced, and even composed the music for
another movie which has now become the biggest money-making film in The
Netherlands. The premise is somewhat reminiscent of The Beverly
Hillbillies. The Flodder family is a real estate agent’s nightmare.
They’re the lewdest, crudest, rudest bunch of white trash on either side
of the Atlantic. Mother is a bedraggled hulk of a woman, always dressed
in a housecoat, and perpetually dangling a cigar from her mouth. Her
brood of several kids (each one apparently by a different father) include
Johnny, a James Dean for the eighties; Tracy, a pervert of a son; and
Tracy (I guess it’s hard for a mother to think up names all the time), a
comely daughter who wears hot pants that almost aren’t there. When it’s
discovered that the Flodders’ tenement of a hovel is located on top of an
old chemical dump, the city is obliged to find them a new home. It turns
out the only neighborhood where the family isn’t already infamous is a
posh development called Sunnydale, which is populated by lawyers,
doctors, their snooty wives, and their cute little pets. The stage is set
for a clash of class and trash. This movie is reminiscent of Blake
Edwards’ better films, with one slapstick set-up after another, car
chases down quiet suburban streets and cul-de-sacs, and a climactic party
where anything can and does happen. It’s easy to see why this was a big
moneymaker. If it catches on in the States, it could be Holland’s
Crocodile Dundee. (Seen 26 May 1987)
Flushed Away
I worry that, since no one else liked A Good Year, people may not like this either. After all, we have another Australian (this time, Hugh Jackman) playing (well, voicing) another uptight English twit, who gets his horizons expanded by finding himself unexpectedly in a foreign place. There’s even more of that lampooning of the genetic enmity between the English and the French. And it is strange that I seemed to be laughing much oftener and louder than both the Missus and the Munchkin. Still, I have to think that the geniuses at Aardman (David Bowers and Sam Fell directed) cannot fail—even if Ridley Scott occasionally does. The best thing this madcap entertainment has going for it is a non-stop pace that gives you no chance to catch your breath and makes you long for the DVD release so that you can go back and hear all the gags. There are numerous meta-cinema moments in the grand tradition of Airplane! and subsequent parodies. My personal favorite was the echo-y voice that is usually meant to be heard in the hero’s memory but here turns out to be someone talking into an empty bottle. Another joy is the deliberately hammy banter between the wonderful Ian McKellen as the villainous Toad and a good-natured Jean Reno, indulging in every French stereotype as his cousin Le Frog.
(Seen 28 November 2006)
The Fog of War
This fascinating film by legendary documentarian Errol Morris is subtitled “Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara,” and if we can’t learn something from McNamara’s life, then we can’t learn anything. This man was present at some of the pivotal moments of 20th century history. He was a key adviser to the military man who bombed the hell out of Japan before the A-bombs were even dropped. He revived Ford Motor Company in the 1950s. He was at President Kennedy’s side during the Cuban missile crisis. He picked the site of Kennedy’s grave. And he was the civilian head of the U.S. military during the first several years of the Vietnam war. After decades of public silence, McNamara opens up amazingly for Morris, apparently wanting to record his observations and judgments for posterity while his mind is still sharp as a tack. Morris obviously approached his subject with an agenda, but to his credit he doesn’t ambush McNamara the way, say, Michael Moore would have. In the end, the portrait of McNamara that emerges is that of a brainy whiz kid who approaches every job as a problem-solving opportunity. He is pressed about feelings of guilt for the deaths caused by his roles in World War II and Vietnam, but he seems reconciled to the fact the sometimes one has to commit a lesser evil in order to head off a greater evil. The portrait of Lyndon Johnson that emerges, on the other hand, is devastating. As described by McNamara, LBJ was a man who knew full well that his Vietnam strategy couldn’t work but was too stubborn and prideful to change course. (McNamara resigned as secretary of defense when LBJ declined to respond to his memo recommending a pullout.) Years later, we learn, McNamara met with his opposite number in Vietnam and was surprised to learn that the Vietnamese did not regard the war as a senseless tragedy that should have been avoided (the prevailing view in America) but as a worthwhile war of liberation. That is why one of McNamara’s key rules is that you need to be able to “empathize” with your enemy. (Seen 18 February 2004)
Fools Rush In
Yet another flick that takes its title from an old pop song (thereby
leveraging unearned name recognition), this one turns out to be a mostly
sweet heart-warmer reminiscent of the 1939 Jimmy Stewart/Carole Lombard
comedy-drama Made For Each Other. It is also another
Friends movie, with Matthew Perry more or less playing his TV
character except that here he’s on an actual career path. And, instead of
Joey, he has one of those movie/TV best friends who can’t seem to have an
evening out or close a business deal unless his pal has casual sex with a
stranger. Mexican soap star Salma Hayek is charming in the female lead.
Much of the film is silly, but it makes some nice observations on
differences between genders and cultural backgrounds. Mexican-Americans
get a bit stereotyped, but then so do Anglo-Americans. Trivia note: in
this film Jill Clayburgh plays Matthew Perry’s mother; in the 1979 film
Luna Jill Clayburgh played Matthew Barry’s mother. (Seen 3 November 1997)
For Your Consideration
The idea that Christopher Guest & company would turn their satirical eye toward the movie business (after rock bands, dog shows, hometown productions and folk music) sounded irresistible. In fact, it is a case of art imitating life imitating art, since this story of an earnest low-profile Hollywood production unexpectedly generating some sort of “Oscar buzz” follows by three years A Mighty Wind, which got an Oscar nomination for a song that was essentially a parody. But it is more directly inspired by just the sort of situation portrayed here that the creative team had witnessed in real life. After some of the many numerous scathing takes on Hollywood we have seen in the past (cf. The Player, Swimming with Sharks, Star Maps), this is gentle stuff indeed. The attraction (or problem, depending on your point of view) of Guest’s satires is that the writers/performers really like the people they are sending up. If there are any villains here, they are Ricky Gervais’s studio suit and Fred Willard’s smarmy, sadistic TV tabloid entertainment show host. If anyone gets treated too easily, it is the pair of sensitive writers, played by Bob Balaban and Michael McKean. Standing out, however, is Catherine O’Hara, who is given the chance to let her character, who could easily have been left nothing but an object of ridicule, become someone who seems real and about whom we can actually care. This time around, Guest has dropped the conceit that this is a documentary. Is he, like Woody Allen before him, edging in the direction of more “serious” films?
(Seen 21 February 2007)
Forgotten Silver
At each year’s Seattle film festival, a particular genre seems to stand
out for one reason or another. One year it was screwball romantic
comedies. Another year it was films noirs starring Linda
Fiorentino. This year it seems to be the “mockumentary.” Thirteen years
after This Is Spinal Tap, everyone seems to be out making
documentaries about people or things that never existed. Forgotten
Silver by New Zealander Peter Jackson (Heavenly Creatures,
The Frighteners) is not only very funny but also a welcome
antidote to the many reverent documentaries we’ve seen recently upon the
cinema’s centennial. (The film is particularly reminiscent of last year’s
The Lost Garden.) Doing an
on-camera narrator’s turn à la Rob Reiner (and even looking
a bit like him), Jackson takes us through the amazing life of his late
countryman Colin McKenzie who, it turns out, was actually first but
uncredited with virtually every cinematic breakthrough. It’s great fun
and, happily, the joke wears thin only occasionally. (Seen
17 May 1997)
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
If this movie had been made 70 years ago, it might have been directed by someone like Leo McCary and starred people like Cary Grant and Irene Dunne. And it would have been brimming with bright, sparking, witty dialog. If it had been made 30 years ago, it might have been directed by someone like Blake Edwards and starred people like Dudley Moore and Julie Andrews. The dialog might not have been as crackling as the Cary Grant version, but Dudley Moore would have been a more entertaining drunk than Jason Segel. Segel isn’t as charming as Grant or as amusing as Moore, but he is what passes for a comedic romantic lead in the age of the man who currently holds the license on man-child romcoms, producer Judd Apatow. The director is first-timer Nicholas Stoller, and the screenplay is by Segel, reportedly drawing on his own relationship experiences. His Peter Bretter is a familiar cinematic descendent of every insecure male persona, from Woody Allen to, well, every main character in a Judd Apatow movie. It doesn’t have the emotional payoff of Knocked Up or even Superbad, but it’s not the worst way to kill 112 minutes either. The bright spots are Russell Brand’s turn as a vacuous, self-involved rock star and dead-on outtakes of the TV police procedural that the title character stars in. (Don’t be too quick to get up and leave when you think the movie’s over or you will miss the best one.) And Mila Kunis (of That ’70s Show) is also quite pleasant as the best hotel receptionist ever. Beyond that, one might feel one is watching a very padded version of the trailer, which covered all the major plot points quite concisely.
(Seen 1 May 2008)
40 Days and 40 Nights
There is something kinky and perverse about many of Michael Lehmann’s movies. His Heathers in 1989 was a delightfully black comedy that gladdened the heart of any teenager (or former teenager) who wasn’t part of the “in” crowd. His Truth About Cats & Dogs in 1996 was a less venomous reworking of the same idea (criticizing the valuing of looks over substance) in an adult setting. His 40 Days and 40 Nights, released in 2002, seems to have given up the battle of substance over style in judging other people. But the same perversity is certainly still there. Being a sex comedy, the movie faces the same challenge that every modern sex comedy faces, which is how to do the comedy in an era where there are few, if any, restrictions on sexual behavior, since the comedy in a sex comedy, by convention, almost always follows from the lead(s)’s inability to have sex. Here, the obstruction to sex is straightforward enough: the hero (Josh Hartnett) simply gives it up for Lent. As required by the rules of sex comedies, Hartnett has the requisite best friend/roommate who, for reasons I’ve never been able to nail down, has a vested interest in the hero being sexual active. A point of side interest in the movie, is the apparent explanation it gives for the failure of so many dot-coms. Apparently, no work was being done while employees focused all their time and energy on following the sex life of a single co-worker. (Seen 17 January 2004)
The 40 Year Old Virgin
One thing we know for sure from watching movies is that bachelors would have a much easier time initiating meaningful romantic relationships if they didn’t listen to their male friends. The “best friend” is a cinematic staple in romantic comedies. He (and sometimes she, for the female lead) is always on hand to push exactly the wrong, shallow values on the hapless hero, whose own instincts would invariably serve him better. Poor Andy Stitzer is triple-cursed because he has three brand new best friends, his younger co-workers who have taken a passionate personal interest in his situation, which is succinctly summed up the film’s title. No, actually the title doesn’t quite sum it up. Andy is not merely a virgin. He is that most unlikely of specimens, a four-decades-old male who is completely celibate in every possible connotation of the word (and is not even a priest). Like the other surprise hit comedy of the summer, Wedding Crashers, this is a movie about ostensibly adult men doing some long-delayed growing up, disguised as a raunchy sex comedy. Humor, of course, is in the eye of the beholder, and milking laughs at the expense of someone’s sexual awkwardness may seem all too easy, but I have to say that the characters and gags in this flick, by Freaks and Geeks man Judd Apatow, had me in convulsions. And that doesn’t happen too often. In the end, we have quite an oddity of a movie. If one can get past all the gross, offensive, kinky and provocative bits, it actually has a message that the Christian right could be perfectly comfortable with! (Seen 14 September 2005)
42 Up
The closest we have come so far to a real-life Truman Show, at least in
terms of longevity, has to be the series of documentaries that
Michael Apted (the English director of everything from the 1980
Loretta Lynn biopic Coal Miner’s Daughter to the latest James Bond flick) has made
about a group of British people whose main link is that they were
all seven years old in the year 1964. What began as a somewhat
pretentious sociological look at British society for UK television
has evolved into something extraordinary: a long-term look at the
lives of several random individuals, all captured on film at
seven-year intervals. For filmgoers like myself who have compulsive
personalities, this is the ultimate addiction. (And I’m so glad to
see that Neil is doing so much better than he was in the 1985 and
1991 movies.) This update is particularly momentous in that the
original documentary (Seven Up) promised a glimpse through
its child subjects into British society in the year 2000 and, guess
what, it’s here! It would have been cool if one kid had actually
turned out to be a manager and another a shop steward, as originally
posed, but a cabby and a lawyer (not to mention a couple of
emigrants, a ward of the welfare state, etc.) provide more than
enough variety. Beyond the standard concerns of 42-year-olds
(children, aging or dying parents, failed marriages, career
disillusionment), what is particularly fascinating is how this
lifelong study has affected its subjects and the bond that has
formed over the years with the filmmaker. And the fact that, rather
than emphasizing class differences as originally intended, Apted’s
work has underlined how similar most people really are. (Seen 16 January 2000)
Four Days in September
When I lived in Chile in the 1970s, I would hear wildly varying accounts
of what life had been like during the tumultuous government of the late
Socialist president Salvador Allende. Depending on one’s political
orientation, life was either heaven or hell during the Allende years. The
stories were not just inconsistent but downright contradictory. Finally,
I met a fellow North American who had lived there through the whole
thing. I asked him which versions were true and which weren’t. To my
frustration, all he would ever say was: “Everything you’ve heard is
true.” It took me a while to realize that South American reality doesn’t
always conform conveniently to Anglo-Saxon logic. The Brazilian film
Four Days in September (an Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Film)
deals with this paradox rather nicely. Everyone is treated more or less
sympathetically in this re-enactment of the 1969 kidnapping of a U.S.
ambassador (Alan Arkin) by a group of idealistic middle-class young
people resisting a repressive military government. Even a secret service
cop who routinely tortures suspects is made somewhat human. Thankfully,
Bruno Barreto’s film is devoid of the action movie jolts and
clichés that a Hollywood version would have had. The excitement
here comes from the realistic portrayal of actual events and the suspense
that is inspired honestly by ambiguous reality. (Seen 17
February 1998)
4 for Texas
In the made-for-HBO movie The Rat Pack, there is a great scene where Joe Mategna, playing Dean Martin, observes to someone at a party that public adulation of the Rat Packers had reached absurd proportions. To make his point, he suavely utters some complete gibberish at a passing pair of young women, who then proceed to laugh as if they have just been entertained with the combined wit of Oscar Wilde and Noel Coward. Dino shakes his head and mutters, someday they will wonder what it was all about. For some of us, that day has long since arrived. This 1963 western, directed by Robert Aldrich, is a case in point. It starts promisingly with a rip-roaring stagecoach chase. It even has Charles Bronson shooting Jack Elam in the first few minutes, thereby presaging Sergio Leone’s seminal Once Upon a Time in the West. But if Leone’s oaters were “spaghetti westerns,” then this vanity project for Martin and Frank Sinatra could be best described as a gin martini western. Like so many Rat Pack projects, it is full of mugging, in jokes and winking at the camera. And precious little plot or action during the long middle section. Toward the end, Martin completely breaks through the “fourth wall” to make sure we don’t miss a cameo by Arthur Godfrey, the most popular radio personality of the day. No such signals are needed, however, when the Three Stooges appear. This flick is mainly interesting for what it tells us about Sinatra and Martin, who seem to be determinedly playing themselves, or at least who they think they are. While Martin deals with every situation with a quip, ol’ Blue Eyes is nothing but the tough guy ordering people around, surrounding himself with beautiful women, and looking for an audacious way to make few bucks. (Seen 30 April 2004)
Foxfire
If you took one of Clint Eastwood’s old spaghetti westerns and tried to
turn it into an episode of My So-Called Life (with a little bit of
Risky Business thrown in for good measure), it might not turn out
too differently from this first feature by Annette Haywood-Carter. Based
on the novel by Joyce Carol Oates, Foxfire follows the exploits of
five very different teenagers as they become aware of themselves as women
and also have a lot of crazy adventures. The principal actors are unknown
to me, but they are all engaging in their various roles as adolescents in
rebellion. It is also nice to see the wonderful Cathy Moriarty, although
she is essentially wasted in a brief role as someone’s mom. Twin
Peaks veterans Richard Beymer and Chris Mulkey also turn up in
supporting roles. Foxfire was featured at the Seattle
International Film Festival’s Women in Cinema series, but it is slick
enough to have a commercial future. (There’s even a car chase!) It also
makes very good use of its Portland, Oregon location. (Seen
30 January 1996)
Franchesca Page
It must be midnight at the Seattle International Film Festival because
here is another campy, drag queen musical parody. The musical numbers in
this one are actually quite entertaining. It’s just unfortunate that the
time between them, well, drags. The plot is that of a backstage musical
as old as Busby Berkeley—something about an evil producer sabotaging her
own show through murder and the hiring of talentless Franchesa as the
star’s understudy. The twist here is that the show is saved not by the
understudy but by Rita, her tank-sized, big-haired,
don’t-stop-me-I-gotta-dance diva of a mother who looks as though she
stuffs her bra with footballs. About the only suspense is wondering if
they will actually address why Franchesca and her mother have different
skin colors (à la Secrets & Lies). Sure enough, we
eventually learn that Franchesca is the love child that Rita had with
Sammy Davis Jr.! (Seen 1 June 1997)
Frank and Ollie
By examining the careers and lives of Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston,
this documentary not only tracks the history of animation at Walt
Disney’s studios but it also acquaints us with a remarkable friendship.
Someone notes that a lot of people don’t even realize that “Frank and
Ollie” aren’t one person, and it’s easy to see why. They finish each
other’s sentences. As one tells a story, the other acts it out. They
begin phone calls with “This is Frank and Ollie calling.” Frank and Ollie
went to Stanford together in the 1930s, both went to work for Disney,
both married at about the same time, both built houses on adjoining lots
in Flintridge, California (where they still live), and both had children
within a week of each other. This film is lovingly made, which should be
no surprise since it was produced by Disney and directed by Frank’s son
Ted. It gives us some interesting insights into what it was like to work
at Disney over the years, and we learn that the animators really are like
actors, since in a movie each animator is totally responsible for a
character and how that character behaves. Some of the documentary’s most
charming bits are when Frank and Ollie act out for the camera well-known
scenes they animated. This is a totally delightful film, although I do
have to offer a warning. I defy anyone to sit through clips of some of
the most moving scenes from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves,
Bambi, Lady and the Tramp, The Jungle Book, etc. and
not get a little weepy. (Seen 31 May 1995)
Frankie Starlight
This is an Irish film about the life of little man and his French mother
who comes to Dublin after World War II. In some ways it is sort of a
Gaelic Forrest Gump. It is a bit of tear jerker but in the end
upbeat. The cast features Gabriel Byrne, Anne Parillaud, and Matt Dillon.
(Seen 15 September 1995)
Freak Talks About Sex
This is another one of those movies that focus in on that awkward little
phase of your life that falls in between high school graduation and
death. More specifically, that phase you find yourself in when you’ve had
all the schooling you can stand but you don’t know what to do next. If
you’re like David (Josh Hamilton) you can move back to Syracuse—after
failing to write your novel out in the desert and still nursing a broken
heart because the great romance of your life went nowhere. You can
regress to a more comfortable time by hanging out with your best buddy
from high school (Steve Zahn who, as he showed in Out of Sight, is the master of
creating completely spacey, zoned-out characters), smoking a lot of
dope and going to bars. But mostly you talk. Shoot the breeze. Converse.
Philosophize. BS. Not much happens in this movie (directing debut of Paul
Todisco), so its appeal lies largely in how entertaining you find the
discourse between David and Freak. Much of the action is in the shopping
mall where David has a nowhere job, and the patent symbolism of emptiness
that it represents will put you in mind of directors like Kevin Smith
(Clerks) and Richard Linklater (Slacker). Best line: “I
can’t think of a single movie that couldn’t be improved with a lesbian
sex scene.” (Seen 4 June 1999)
Freedom Highway: Songs of Resistance and Liberation
This Irish documentary by Philip King is based on a really great idea for
a film: songs that have played an important role in political struggles
and liberation movements. In the end, however, there is so much potential
material to explore that a 90-minute film on the topic can’t help but
leave us feeling short-changed. The film uses some archive footage
(e.g. part of a moving performance by Chile’s Victor Jarra and an
all-too-brief snippet of America’s Woody Guthrie), but it consists in
large part of filmed interviews and performances by contemporary artists,
including some not known particularly for protest music, like Willie
Nelson. Interestingly, there’s relatively little focus on Ireland, the
first song related to that country being “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,”
the inclusion of which is useful for Americans my age and younger who are
doomed to always associate it with the final episode of The Mary Tyler
Moore Show. The film later discusses how the American civil rights
anthem “We Shall Overcome” was transferred successfully to Northern
Ireland. There is a wealth of talent captured here, including Tom Waits,
South Africa’s Hugh Masekela, Elvis Costello, Tibet’s Yungchen Lhamo,
Pete Seeger, Ruben Blades, U2 and a very engaging Ani diFranco. (Seen 15 July 2001)
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
What most people generally remember about romantic historical dramas are things like the passion of the story or the attractiveness of the leads or, if all else fails, the costumes and the scenery. What we tend to remember about this 1981 film is the way it dealt with a tricky literary gambit in the source novel. Author John Fowles wrote his book as some sort of elaborate history lesson about 19th century English society and then gave the reader not one but two different endings. Playwright Harold Pinter, who wrote the screenplay found an ingenious way to deal with this. He made the novel’s story a movie within a movie, about making a movie adaptation of the novel. Thus he could have leads Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons also play contemporary actors, whose extramarital on-location romance paralleled the one in the book. The historical plot got one ending, and the contemporary one got another. This also allowed Pinter to work in extra historical exposition from the book, as the actors researched and discussed their parts. And it also, improbably, allowed Pinter to do what he does best: write about modern infidelity. Now, all of this was and is very interesting, but it also explains why this movie, directed by Karel Reisz, does not touch the heart or soul the way that an adaptation of, say, Emily Brontë or Jane Austen might. Where screenwriters of those movies would tend to go along with the conventions and values of the time setting (letting the viewers make their own value judgments), Knowles’s book and this movie analyze and judge the 19th century with 20th century values on behalf of the viewer, thus sticking the film with that most damning of words: interesting. What’s really interesting, however, is this question: If we were really so much more enlightened in the 20th century than in the Victorian age, then how come the 19th century story got the happy ending?
(Seen 15 July 2007)
French Postcards
It’s hard to believe that I had been waiting to see this movie for practically a quarter-century! I heard about it, even before its release in 1980 and was anxious to see it because of its plot about American students in France during the 1978-79 school year, a mere five years after my own experience. Somehow I never got the chance to see it (until now), probably because it simply wasn’t a very good movie. It was written by Willard Huyck (who also directed) and Gloria Katz, who had already established their ability to handle a multi-thread teenage movie by writing American Graffiti for George Lucas, who coincidentally comes from California’s San Joaquin Valley, another place I am very familiar with.
(Is this guy following me or what?) The writing duo are less successful here, and it is worth noting that Huyck directed only two subsequent movies, the final one being the legendarily disastrous Howard the Duck. Anyway, this movie is interesting to see now, as a contrast to Bertolucci’s The Dreamers, set in 1968. The two films accurately reflect the fact that in the decade between their settings, being an American university student in France went from being a solitary experience to a group one. French Postcards gets several details right, in a superficial sort of way, i.e. the homesickness, the bonding with people you probably wouldn’t even hang out with at home, the desire and opportunity to try new experiences, the boyfriend back home, and the inevitable surreptitious visit to McDonald’s. But it misses a key point that Bertolucci’s film caught: the tendency of American boys to pee in French sinks. In the end, the film feels like it’s based on notes from people who actually were students in Paris, but which were then handed to the people who produced the old Love, American Style TV show. This makes it a potential c.v. embarrassment for the (now) better known members of its cast. This came out the same year that Debra Winger starred with John Travolta in Urban Cowboy, and fortunately for her she’s practically unnoticeable here. Jean Rochefort’s wonderful face is put to occasional good use but mostly wasted. Marie-France Pisier is a good sport or, depending on your view, showed very bad judgment. Mandy Patinkin is downright embarrassing as an Iranian with big romantic plans but who can’t hold his champagne. And, poignantly, a young Valérie Quennessen is present as someone’s French girlfriend and is very appealing indeed. Sadly, she died in a road accident nine years later. (Seen 21 February 2004)
Fried Green Tomatoes (Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe)
This movie is actually better than I remembered. That is probably because it is a stark reminder of what a treasure we lost when Jessica Tandy died. She is perfect as the old lady in the rest home who eagerly chats up a stranger on visiting day and plies her with tales of the old days. It is also a reminder of what a great screen presence Mary Stuart Masterson was in teenage and young adult roles. And, while somewhat overshadowed by Masterson, Mary-Louise Parker is also quite good in her role as a more repressed character. The film, directed by Jon Avnet and adapted from Fannie Flagg’s novel, is overly ambitious. It wants to cram at least two completely different movies into one, as well as tell us a few very personal stories as well as tell us something profound about the American South and America itself. But somehow it works. Probably because so much of it sounds like things that actually could have happened. As a movie, it is probably a tad too long, and some of the stretches with Kathy Bates, blossoming as a new woman, are a bit weak. (When she takes a sledgehammer to a wall of her house, is it actually a nod to her role the previous year’s Misery?) Ultimately, this is technically a chick flick. The male characters are all passive, evil or they die young. But the storytelling is so good that most men watching may not even notice. (Seen 16 July 2006)
Friends with Money
People, who turn up their noses at teen comedies like Superbad because of the graphic way the characters talk and objectify the opposite sex, can do a reality check by seeing if they have the same reaction to woman/friend movies like this one, which feature lots of brutally frank chick chat. But writer/director Nicole Holofcener is no trendy latecomer to this field, which was popularized by TV’s Sex and the City (of which she directed some episodes). She has been making films about female friendships (usually with “and” in the title) for a decade. And she was casting Catherine Keener before most of us even knew who she was (i.e. before Being John Malkovich, Capote). Here, as she did in 1996’s Walking and Talking, she explores what happens to close friends when, with the passage of time, their personal circumstances diverge. Specifically, she zeroes in on the way affluence, or the lack of it, has a huge effect on our self-image, self-worth and how we see others. In her low-key way, Holofcener casts a compassionately caustic gaze at white liberal guilt, white liberal non-guilt and what affluence does to our value system. But despite the keen insights, the film isn’t really quite as profound as it sounds, and feels a lot like one of those hour-long comedy/drama TV series that abound these days. That sense is not the least bit dispelled by the title or by the presence of Jennifer Aniston, whose role as aimless Olivia, who can’t quite get her life together, seems to be a deliberate in-joke. Still, time spent watching this flick is agreeable enough and (here’s seriousx praise) when it ends, it seems a bit too soon.
(Seen 6 October 2007)
From Dusk Till Dawn
From Dusk Till [sic] Dawn is more or less the cinematic
equivalent of those EC Comics of the 1950s that almost got comic books
banned entirely. It’s gross and adolescent but not particularly scary.
And it is infused with a snide, mocking humor. (One of the funniest bits
seems to be a brief nod to Gus Van Sant’s To Die For.) Directed by Robert
Rodriguez (El Mariachi, Desperado) and penned by (and
co-starring) the oh-so-hip Quentin Tarantino, it’s about what you would
expect such a collaboration to produce. The movie does seem to make an
interesting point about how the media change our perception of violence.
The bulk of the film is framed by similar scenes wherein two characters
walk away from a public establishment in flames where mayhem has just
occurred. The first one could come from today’s headlines, while the
second is typical movie over-the-top exaggeration. And, despite their
similarities, we see them both very differently. The problem, of course,
is that a movie can’t really make a comment like this without becoming
part of what it is commenting on. (Seen 5 February
1996)
From the Journals of Jean Seberg
Mark Rappaport’s From the Journals of Jean Seberg is not exactly a
biography. It is more of a free-flowing meditation on one woman’s film
career as well as anything else that happens to relate to it in any way.
It makes constant detours to tell us about people who crossed Serberg’s
path (from Otto Preminger to Clint Eastwood) and about people whose lives
had any kind of parallel to hers (Audrey Hepburn, Jane Fonda, Vanessa
Redgrave). It loves to come up with patterns and coincidences, kind of
like those lists you sometimes read about Abraham Lincoln and John
Kennedy. Narration is provided by Mary Beth Hurt who portrays Seberg
speaking to us from beyond the grave. (But just because she’s been dead
for 18 years doesn’t mean that she can’t make references to George Bush
and Entertainment Tonight.) While this approach is not unheard of,
it is a bit of a cheat because it basically puts Rappaport’s ideas in
Serberg’s mouth. Nevertheless, the film makes some interesting points
about the way women are portrayed in movies (particularly when their
husbands are the directors) and about political activism in
Hollywood—not to mention providing interesting details of Serberg’s
life. Her career careened from European adulation in films like Breathless to such standard
Hollywood fare as Paint Your Wagon and Airport. Oddly, the
potentially hottest topic of Serberg’s life—her harrassment by the FBI
over her involvement with the Black Panthers, which may have led to her
suicide at age 40—is dealt with by just a few lines read by Hurt. (Seen 3 August 1996)
Full Frontal
Director Steven Soderbergh, a person in the movie business, has come up
with the most fascinating, most interesting, most compelling, most
important theme for a movie ever conceived. It is, of course, the lives
of people involved in the movie business. He is not the first, nor will
he be the last, person in the movie business to mine this topic. People
who know Soderbergh only for his commercially successful films (Erin Brockovich, Traffic, Ocean’s Eleven) may be taken
aback. Those of us who remember the kinkily humorous Sex, Lies, and
Videotape and/or the perplexing Schizopolis, on the other
hand, will recognize the “real” Soderbergh. Actors love doing movies like
Full Frontal because it allows them to do the most stretching
their acting muscles anywhere outside of an acting workshop. Filmmakers
love making this kind of movie because it’s a way to get paid for
performing therapy on themselves. It’s no accident that these sorts of
movies are generously laced with confessional, introspective and deeply
personal soliloquies. Since there is no actual nudity in the film
(although David Duchovny does a, uh, standup job in a brief role that can
only be described as, um, pivotal), we are free to assume that the title
refers to a spiritual/psychological baring of the characters. In one set
of wickedly funny scenes (featuring Catherine Keener as a human resources
executive from hell) the film actually seems be mocking itself for the
way it emotionally tortures its characters. For those of us who are
merely watching the film, as opposed to participating in it, the main
pleasure is in the dark humor typical of these L.A. “insider” films and
watching a cast (Brad Pitt is now officially the standard cinematic
short-hand for the Hollywood A-list) that makes the move far more
interesting than it would have been with a cast of unknowns. (Seen 2 August 2002)
The Full Monty
Okay, how’s this for a cinematic marriage? Brassed Off meets Striptease with a dash of
The Commitments thrown in for good measure. As in Brassed
Off, we have unemployed Yorkshire laborers banding together for,
uh, the sake of art. But where Mark Herman’s movie was sentimental
and poignant, Peter Cattaneo’s The Fully Monty goes mainly
for sniggers, snickers, and belly laughs. Redundant steelworker Gaz
(Trainspotting’s Robert
Carlyle) is desperate because, if he doesn’t come up with some money
quick, he’ll lose joint custody of his young son (who, by the way,
is ten times more mature than Gaz is). So he decides to form a group
of male strippers. His recruits could be (but aren’t) played by the
likes of John Cleese and Robbie Coltrane, so you can see where
things are headed. There’s a lot of silly fun along the way, and the
ending in particular is quite the crowd pleaser. (Seen
23 May 1997)
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