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L.A. Confidential
An entertaining cross between Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables
and Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, L.A. Confidential evokes
the good old days when cops in Los Angeles didn’t need search warrants,
could accept payoffs, and didn’t have to worry about being videotaped
when they beat up a member of a minority community. Director Curtis
Hanson (The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and The River Wild)
uses post-war Los Angeles as a setting more effectively than most modern
movies, and actually develops some characters before letting all hell
break loose bullets- and blood-wise. His all-American cops include
non-Americans Guy Pearce (who looked great in a dress in The
Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert) as the anal-retentive
eagle scout and Russell Crowe (Romper Stomper) as the dumb sucker
trying to wise up. American-born Kevin Spacey (The Usual Suspects) and James
Cromwell (Babe) are,
respectively, the star-struck cop and the not-exactly-by-the-book chief.
(Seen 18 October 1997)
L.I.E.
Being 15 years old is tricky enough, but poor Howie has more to contend
with than most other boys. His mother was killed in a car crash (on the
titular Long Island Expressway). His father’s bereavement has dovetailed
with his kinky midlife crisis—when the feds aren’t after him for
criminal negligence. Howie’s new best friend is a parent’s worst
nightmare of bad influence. Oh yeah, and Howie has attracted the
attention of a pederast. This film by Michael Cuesta is a stark and
largely realistic view of adolescent alienation, in the tradition of
Jonathan Kaplan’s Over the Edge and Larry Clark’s Kids. The
good news is that this is ultimately a movie about survival. But you are
never quite sure exactly where it is heading along the way. It gives
every indication of being about sexual initiation, but isn’t—which makes
its NC-17 rating in America kind of strange. (It is, however, clearly
about sexual awakening.) The pedophile (played by veteran Scottish-born
actor Brian Cox) is the most provocative thing about the movie. On one
hand, the film may be performing a service by showing that such people
can’t be spotted easily by the horns on their head. On the other hand, it
risks giving the impression that chicken hawks are actually pretty nice
guys. [Related commentary] (Seen 1 November 2001)
Lady and the Tramp 
By the end of the 1960s it was fashionable to dismiss Disney’s output as family friendly to the point of blandness. So it is a little surprising to see how much innuendo was actually woven into this 1955 animated feature, the studio’s first in CinemaScope. Of course, it goes right over the heads of kids, but it’s there, in this tale of childbirth, courtship and then puppy birth. Even the very title is a jokey reworking of a popular song about a woman of questionable reputed virtue. The suggestiveness peaks in a dog pound scene wherein a worldly woman of a dog named Peg sings a sultry tribute to the titular Tramp. Peg is voiced by the immortal Peggy Lee, who also wrote the lyrics for the movie’s songs. She also voiced the roles of Lady’s female owner and the two Siamese cats who torment the cocker spaniel. In this more politically correct age, that twin portrayal of cats, with Hollywood Asian accents, feels a little uncomfortable, and it definitely made an impression on me as a youngster. (“We are Siamese, if you please…”) Indeed, the movie is replete with stereotyped ethnic portrayals, mostly as anthropomorphic canines. And did a Disney cartoon ever feature a cop who did not have a stage Irish accent? It’s not so much mean-spirited as a bit provincial. Still, this story of the travails of two mismatched pooches is charming, if a bit simple by today’s standards. But it’s all the more satisfying for it. In fact, it was such a good story that Disney has continued to tell the same story over and over (cf. The Aristocats, One Hundred and One Dalmatians plus remake plus sequels, etc.). (Seen 25 February 2006)
Laissez-passer (Safe Conduct)
The title of this film refers specifically to a document that allows the
bearer to be out on the streets during curfew under the German occupation
of Paris in 1942. This is a very handy thing for a Frenchman to have,
especially is he is doing his best to help the underground resistance.
But the song over the closing credits with the refrain laissez passer
le temps signals other senses of the phrase, which evoke a sense of
resignation. The director is the renowned Bertrand Tavernier, and as with
another war film he made, also based on actual events, Captain Conan, the movie refuses
to follow what Hollywood has trained us to expect from a World War II
movie. In a rambling three-hour story, we follow two Frenchmen involved
in filmmaking under the German occupation. Jean Devaivre decides
reluctantly to work for a German-owned film company and takes the
opportunity to engage in espionage whenever he can. Jean Aurenche refuses
to work for the Germans and instead does his best to get words
encouraging resistance past the censors and into his movies—while at the
same time, in the best French tradition, doing his best to stay faithful
to all three of his three mistresses. Although the movie displays
potential for being a thriller, it is mainly suspenseful in the way that
the film Julia was. There is an amusing/absurd episode where
Devaivre is drafted spontaneously into an overnight train and plane
journey to be interrogated by the British, but mostly we get a view of
Paris life under the occupation and the ingenuity filmmakers needed in
order to make movies under wartime conditions. And we also get a
thoughtful examination of the internal conflicts that the French dealt
with in terms of how much to cooperate with their occupiers. (Seen 13 October 2002)
The Lake House
Most of us have had that experience of a relationship that didn’t work out and, if we are being philosophical, we might shrug and say that the timing just wasn’t right. Sometimes we get a second chance, and a relationship that didn’t work out in one period of our lives does work out in a later period. Again, we explain it by saying that the timing just wasn’t right the first time. This fantasy/romance, directed by Argentine filmmaker Alejandro Agresti and based on a South Korean movie, makes a fair attempt at capturing that sense of disjointed time between two people by imagining the stars of Speed being literally out of sync time-wise. I suppose the studio backers were going for a teary chick flick in the vein of Somewhere in Time, but the pace here is disastrously
slow—not because there is something wrong with a languid pace in telling a romantic story but because it gives us way too much time to think about all the illogical aspects of the story. Maybe it’s just my analytical mind, but I’m personally less inclined to get caught up in the “timing was just wrong” thing and more interested in the “if I knew then what I know now” thing. The Lake House is pretty much designed people like me crazy.
(Seen 25 November 2006)
Lamerica
Back when I was involved in broadcasting the International News on KRAB
radio, we had a running joke about Enver Hoxha. He was the xenophobic
dictator of Albania who sealed his country off from the rest of the world
for decades. Hardly anybody got in or out. Well, now with the Fall of
Communism, Albania was opened up a couple of years ago, and as you can
imagine the victorious capitalists can’t wait to get in and develop a new
market. In Lamerica, the West is represented by a couple of
Italians who go in to set up a shoe factory scam. Since the law requires
that the enterprise’s titular head be Albanian, they dig up an old codger
who has been in a political prison for half a century and who has no
family. Through a strange chain of events, the yuppie younger Italian
winds up on a journey with the old man who turns out to have more in
common with him than he could have imagined. By the end of the film,
their odyssey becomes confused in the mind of the old man (an 80-year-old
former fisherman in his acting debut) with a long ago dream of sailing to
America. Meanwhile, the formerly confident younger man learns just how
close we all are to refugee status. (Seen 5 June
1996)
Land and Freedom
This film by Ken Loach sort of pretends to be the story of a war-time
romance set against the background of the idealistic struggle of left and
right in 1930s Spain. But it’s really Loach’s own take on the Spanish
Civil War and the real reason the good guys lost, using an English
character as the viewer’s surrogate observer. David (Ian Hart, for once
playing someone other than John Lennon; he was in both The Hours and
the Times and Backbeat) is a gung-ho Communist Party member
from Liverpool who decides to head to Barcelona to help the Loyalists
defend the Spanish republic against Franco’s rebels. Matching the
rightists as villains, however, is the Stalinist Communist Party which
controls the International Brigades and seemingly spends more time
liquidating leftist rivals than in fighting the common enemy. The film is
played largely in a pseudo-documentary style that peaks near the middle
with an extended discussion of the pros and cons of land collectivization
that almost seems improvised. (Seen 8 May 1996)
Land of Plenty
Wim Wenders made this flick quickly and cheaply in 2004 when his financing for Don’t Come Knocking fell apart. At the risk of sounding all New Age, it must have been For A Reason. What could be better than seeing the German director of Paris, Texas take on America in the aftermath of 9/11? And it gets better for me because the film’s metaphysical journey actually leads to a part of the country that I know—the California desert. Wenders views the post-9/11 U.S. through the eyes of two characters. Michelle Williams (Dawson’s Creek, Brokeback Mountain) plays the 20-year-old daughter of missionaries, who returns to the States after living most of her life abroad, most recently as a peace activist in Palestine. John Diehl (Zito on Miami Vice), looking strangely like Steven Seagal, is her uncle, who drives around L.A. in a beat-up van, on a one-man crusade to prevent the next terrorist attack, while listening to AM talk radio. Clearly, Diehl’s character was conceived more or less as a cartoon, but something interesting happened while Wenders worked on the story with collaborators Scott Derrickson and Michael Meredith. He came to have sympathy for Diehl’s right-wing character, so in the end this is a story about reconciliation rather than a blue-state-vs.-red-state diatribe. The plot has Diehl and Williams make a journey out to (of all places) the desert town of Trona, where Diehl expects to find some sort of stockpiling of dangerous substances by a terrorist cell. (Anybody see a metaphor here?) The result is a portrait of America that emphasizes its blighted urban landscapes and desolate stretches. But it ends with an idealized conversation across political divides that too rarely seems to happen in actual public discourse. This isn’t the classic that Wings of Desire or Paris, Texas is, but there are enough touches of both to make this a movie well worth experiencing.
(Seen 22 February 2007)
Lantana
The title is the name of a plant that is lovely on the surface but dense
and thorny underneath. Kind of like the marriages portrayed in this
Australian movie. In the opening, we peer through the thick vegetation to
see a woman’s body, and from that point on we wait to find out who she is
and what happened to her. It’s a bit like the Swedish film The Last Dance. The movie,
directed by Ray Lawrence and adapted by Andrew Bovell from his play
Speaking in Tongues, pretends to be a police mystery, but
don’t be fooled, guys. This is A Relationship Movie. Be warned: more
than one grown male character breaks into a huge sobbing fit.
Anthony LaPaglia has the biggest role, and he reminds us that he can
do way more than play a comically loutish Brit, as he has done a few
times on Frasier. Most of the film is depressing, as we watch
married couples fail to connect, numb themselves with affairs and
glasses of whiskey, and basically confirm one character’s
observation that “women want men to share everything and men have to
hold something back.” But by the end, something unforeseen happens.
A senseless tragedy brings people to their senses, kind of like The Ice Storm, and we think
that maybe there is hope after all. Single viewers may come away
relieved that they are not married. But married viewers will run
home and hug their spouses. In a strange way, this is like the
Harold Pinter version of It’s a
Wonderful Life. (Seen 4 February 2002)
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider
Somewhere near the middle of this movie, Lara Croft makes a quick dash
from England to Cambodia just in time to catch her nemesis in the process
of violating an ancient temple in search of an artifact that will help
give him the powers more or less of God. As she surveys the scene, Lady
Lara purrs, to no one in particular, “Mr. Powell. How predictable.”
Exactly. This cookie-cutter version of an action/adventure movie is as
devoid of surprises as, well, as a video game that has been played over
and over. Everything seems borrowed not just from better action/adventure
movies but from better action/adventure franchises. Lara’s work life is
reminiscent of Indiana Jones. Her home life smacks of Bruce Wayne. Her
lithe and aristocratic figure seems calculated to remind us of The
Avengers’s Emma Peel. Which leads me to the kindest thing I can say
about the film: it is still a definite cut above the disastrous 1998 Avengers film adaptation. But
so many of the conventions and plot devices the film lifts are by now so
old and musty, it gives the title Tomb Raider a whole new
resonance. On the positive side, Angelina Jolie looks better than any
other action hero I can think of in hot pants. And it is fun to see Chris
Barrie, who has played the obnoxious Rimmer for several seasons on BBC’s
Red Dwarf series, here more or less playing the Kryten role as
Lara’s loyal Alfred-like butler. (Seen 7 July
2001)
Larga Distancia 
Roy is the kind of guy who doesn’t talk much, believes it’s important to
return home from vacation on time and, when the girl tells him it’s a
good deal to “super size” his fast food meal, he says sure. In other
words, he’s boring. Unfortunately, he’s the main focus of this first-time
directing effort by Greg Smith who, as it happens, also plays Roy. A sort
of noirish road movie set in Baja California, Larga Distancia
tends to be as tedious as, say, the drive from Tijuana to La Paz. In the
course of his journey through Baja, Roy hooks up with Crystal, a sort of
Parker Posey clone, and the verbal sparring between them is supposed to
carry the movie. Unfortunately, the weak script and long dead patches
make the film way too unwieldy for any of the cast to carry. The biggest
surprise is a near-amusing cameo by Scott Glenn. (Seen 11
July 1998)
Last Chance Harvey
If any major American actor cannot appear in a wedding scene without bringing a lot of resonance with him, it’s Dustin Hoffman. The climactic scene of The Graduate has made sure of that. But four decades have gone by since then, and Hoffman is a whole different presence. But he still has that hangdog stare and look of bewilderment on his face, but now his gaze is looking back (instead of uncertainly looking forward) and wondering how his life got to where it is. There is not a lot of suspense, even in the very first scenes, as to where this movie is headed, so it depends crucially on the performances of its two stars—and they deliver. We believe that Hoffman perpetually feels awkward and out of place. The wonderful Emma Thompson has a harder time making us think that she is not immediately the center of attention in any room she enters. While it may not sound like much of a recommendation, the film really captures that feeling of being in a room where everybody seems to be enjoying each other’s company except you. The high point is a poignant and ultimately uplifting scene played at Hoffman’s daughter’s wedding reception. The bride’s stepfather is played by James Brolin, and that has to be some kind of in joke, since Hoffman played Barbra Streisand’s husband in Meet the Fockers. Nice work is turned in by all involved, including Kathy Baker (who seems to have aged into Olympia Dukakis) as Hoffman’s ex and Eileen Atkins as Thompson’s needy mum, who has a strange Rear Window thing going on—as well as writer/director Joel Hopkins. (Seen 10 June 2009)
The Last Days of Disco
This fills a longtime hole in my completionist goals when it comes to Whit Stillman movies. Admittedly, seeing all of this writer/director’s films was never a particularly daunting challenge; after all, there are only four. But somehow I missed this one when it came out in 1998. It says something about Stillman’s niche that this is the first of his films that I didn’t see at a film festival (Metropolitan and Barcelona at Seattle’s and Damsels in Distress at Dublin’s) and, hence, the first time I’ve seen a film of his without him in person to introduce it. In other words, Stillman isn’t pitching to the multiplex crowd. I always enjoy visiting this director’s world. It’s a place where everyone is young, thoughtful, articulate and genuinely searching for meaning in their lives. (Did I mention this wasn’t pitched to the multiplex crowd?) One also gets the feeling that his stories (not that his movies are particularly plot driven) have a healthy autobiographical element. It turns out that Stillman was big into disco in the Studio 54 days, and he performs a minor miracle in that he makes those of us who never warmed up to disco music or the whole disco scene actually understand the attraction of the phenomenon to young single adults of the 1980s. Maybe think of it as a white collar variation on Saturday Night Fever without the big production numbers. Stillman always goes for the brain more than the heart, so there is no big emotional gush. Still there is a nicely bittersweet elegiac tone as the passing of an era is observed. The cast is top-notch (and more than a little attractive), led by Chloë Sevigny (just before her breakthrough in Boys Don’t Cry) and Kate Beckinsale (three years before Pearl Harbor and five years before her first Underworld movie).
(Seen 25 June 2012)
The Last Detail
A blast from the early 1970s, this is a somewhat depressing movie featuring characters that we either pity or just plain don’t like. Part of a Galway Film Fleadh tribute to screenwriter Robert Towne, the movie earned Oscar nominations for him and actors Jack Nicholson and Randy Quaid. The director was Hal Ashby. It is a well-observed portrait of lifers in the Navy and how a particular job (escorting a prisoner to serve his sentence) touches their hearts and fuels their cynicism. The joys of viewing it today are in seeing Nicholson at his prime, displaying his genius for characters with short fuses, and for seeing familiar faces in early roles. It is hard to believe that Quaid was once so young on screen he could pass for an 18-year-old. Also looking impossibly fresh-faced are Carol Kane, in a stand-out role as a young whore, and Michael Moriarty. And the heart breaks to get a glimpse of a very young Gilda Radner in one brief scene. The film is very much of its time, and yet it still stands up today. In fact, given that we seem to be reliving the 1970s these days anyway, it just might be newly relevant. One fun mind game to play: imagine that Nicholson is a younger version of the same character he played in Rob Reiner’s A Few Good Men. (Seen 12 July 2006)
The Last King of Scotland
Frankly, there is something distasteful about a movie that takes the relatively recent real-life tragedy of Uganda under Idi Amin’s regime and turns it into a backdrop for a movie thriller about a fictional white Westerner. But, if you can get past that (and the critics generally seem to have), then this movie by Kevin Macdonald, who previously weaved true life and dramatic reenactment to marvelous effect in Touching the Void, does provide not only an effective entertainment but also an important history lesson of sorts. Very convincing in their respective roles are the deservedly lauded Forest Whitaker, in the title role, and James McAvoy (last seen as a faun in The Chronicles of Narnia) as the adventurous young Scotsman, practicing his medical skills in Africa as a bit of a politically correct lark. The unlikely relationship that develops between the two is not unlike that between Jack Nicholson and Leonard DiCaprio in The Departed. As a suspense thriller and, ultimately, horror piece, the movie delivers all too well. If, in addition, it serves a worthwhile purpose, beyond reminding or informing movie audiences of what went on in Uganda in the 1970s, it is also to spotlight Western arrogance in dealing with Africa. There is a suggestion that Amin was essentially a creation of British post-colonial policies (in the form of an English spook, who looks unsettlingly like Paul Wolfowitz), but what is really devastating is the portrayal of McAvoy’s glibly liberal character who, early on, is all too willing to overlook Amin’s ruthless and anti-democratic actions because he is charismatic and pushes all the right rhetorical buttons—including bashing the English.
(Seen 1 February 2007)
The Last Movie
This almost was the last movie for Dennis Hopper. It is a very
Sixties movie and looks like Hopper was probably doing a lot of
substances while making it. Hopper made it right after Easy Rider,
but Universal Studios killed it, so no one ever saw it. Now Hopper owns
the rights to it, so he made us watch it before his tribute. It is about a Hollywood crew
shooting a cowboy movie in Peru (sort of an empanada western) and
the effect it has on the locals. They begin imitating the Americans,
except when they do it, the cameras and mikes are fake and the violence
is real. Lots of cameos by Hopper’s friends, like Peter Fonda and Kris
Kristofferson. Director Hopper did his best to blur the line between
reality and film. I can see why it didn’t get a real release, but I’m
glad I saw it. (Seen 31 May 1987)
Last Night
An On the Beach for the 1990s, Last Night is a darkly funny
and strangely touching tale of planet earth’s final hours. It is written
and directed by the multi-talented Don McKellar, who has had supporting
roles in many Canadian films, including The Red Violin, which he also
co-wrote. McKellar gives himself the lead role here as a somewhat
cynical thirtysomething more or less determined to spend his last
hours alone. If you have ever thought about what that final day
would be like—assuming that the exact day and time of the world’s
demise was known well in advance—this vision of a relentlessly
sunny, partying Toronto may not be exactly what you had in mind. Not
only do people not seem particularly panicked, but the Big Day seems
to have become some sort of communal holiday, kind of like the Super
Bowl. Just about every Canadian you care about is here, from Sarah
Polley to David Cronenberg to Geneviève Bujold as the high
school French teacher you always had a crush on and, hey, since this
is the last day anyway, maybe just maybe… Of course, in the end,
what this movie is about is life as we know it right now since, for
all we know, any night could be The Last Night. (Seen 25
May 1999)
The Last Picture Show
Thanks to the writing of Larry McMurtry, we have gotten to know quite a few Texas characters on the big and small screens, as diverse as the ones in Hud, Terms of Endearment and Lonesome Dove. Some of the most indelible are the ones in The Last Picture Show, which he adapted from his own novel. It also happens to be the movie that put Peter Bogdanovich on the map back in 1971. In hindsight, Bogdanovich filmed this somewhat bleak story of young people in a windy, dusty Texas town dying on the vine with such artistic detachment that it nearly could have been made by one of any number of European directors, who ironically have a keener eye for true Americana than the natives do. This is probably because Bogdanovich hailed from New York state and not Texas. But despite the visual style, there is something authentic about its characters and story. At the time, people like me were impressed by the way Cybill Shepherd took off her clothes in the swimming pool scene. Now we are impressed by how good she was in an unsympathetic role. Also standing out were Ellen Burstyn, as Shepherd’s totally bored mother, and Eileen Brennan as the tough-talking waitress/cook with a soft spot for everyone. The film’s two Oscars for supporting actors were particularly well deserved. Cloris Leachman, as the coach’s wife who finds happiness with student Tim Bottoms, is great, essentially playing the dark flip side of her character on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. She made us jump out of our seats when she threw that coffee pot against the wall. And Ben Johnson is the heart and soul of this film. As Sam the Lion, he is the father to every kid in town needing a father figure. Seemingly, the only businessman in town, the place can’t long survive without him, and it’s easy to see why. (Seen 26 February 2004)
The Last September
Yet another movie about hyphenated English aristocracy getting kicked out
of a foreign land that doesn’t want them (this time Ireland) and one
featuring the wonderfully imperious Maggie Smith, The Last
September causes us to wonder whether this won’t turn out to be
something that could be called Tea with de Valera. The
subject of how the Anglo-Irish coped with the last days of direct
British rule in Ireland’s 26 southern counties could make a
fascinating film. Unfortunately, the operative word here is
could. Director Deborah Warner’s adaptation of Elizabeth
Bowen’s novel reduces the situation to an ambiguous love triangle
involving a young woman, a soldier and a terrorist/freedom fighter
in County Cork in 1920. We get a sketchy portrait of a people who
are at once comfortable and uncomfortable with the true Irish and
the true English, but we never get to feel like we truly know anyone
in this movie. Fine actors like Smith, Michael Gambon and Fiona Shaw
are easy enough to watch, but we never know what the point of
watching is. The direction attempts to be artful in places, but it
only serves to draw attention to itself rather than serve the story.
If the English and the Anglo-Irish were really this annoying, then
it’s no wonder they weren’t welcome on the Emerald Isle. (Seen 6 May 2000)
The Last Song
This is about the special love and bond between a father and daughter. And that’s how I got dragged to a Miley Cyrus movie. In fairness, however, this is a perfectly decent little movie, aimed as it is at the teen and young adult market. I suspect that Cyrus has the chops to be a fine actor, but here she is required to do little more than give the sort of sullen looks that come as second nature to many females her age. Greg Kinnear, as her father, gives a fine and understated performance in the role that has to make you go for your hanky. And Bobby Coleman, carrying a huge burden for a child his age, breaks your heart. In the end, however, Liam Hemsworth has the hardest job, making a hunky, volleyball-playing, mechanic, aquarium-working, turtle-egg-saving, Tolstoy-quoting-in-the-original-Russian potential love interest seem like he’s not too good to be true. While never seeming too busy or rushed, this movie has enough plot strands to keep one of those CW network teen soaps going for more than half a season. Cynics might feel a little manipulated or pandered to, but it’s not the worst way to spend a couple of hours with your daughter or your father or (probably more likely) your boyfriend or girlfriend.
(Seen 21 May 2010)
Late Bloomers
Late Bloomers has many funny moments and even some touching ones.
But it’s ultimately undone by all its inconsistencies, particularly the
pull-out-all-the-stops feel-good ending that requires too many characters
to have a sudden change in attitude. The story takes place in a suburban
high school where Dinah, a geometry teacher and basketball coach, and
Carly, the school secretary, fall in love. Unfortunately, we are asked to
see Carly’s husband as a jerk because he gets upset that his wife of many
years and the mother of his two children suddenly decides she wants to
leave him. (The fact that he’s boring seems to the justification for the
desertion.) Then we’re asked to believe that he suddenly comes around and
happily blesses the couple when they decide to have a wedding. If the
filmmakers (sisters Julia and Gretchen Dyer) are hoping to reach out to a
straight audience with this demonstration of true love, I’m afraid that
the lesbian wedding episode of Friends actually did a better job.
That aside, the observations on high school life are quite amusing. Nice
touches include the school’s reader board (which displays a series corny
homilies that seem to comment on the film’s action) and the fact that the
couple look as Mary Richards and Rhoda might in middle age. (Seen 30 May 1996)
Lautrec
The word that this lively and colorful French biography brings to mind
is: rollicking. From the beginning scenes of the birth of Henri de
Toulouse-Lautrec to his death and funeral at age 37, we are swept along
at a breakneck pace by colors, light, music, dancing, and laughter.
Writer/director Roger Planchon’s film is essentially a two-hour party,
celebrating the carefree, bohemian life of the post-Impressionists in
Paris’s notorious Montmarte during the Gay Nineties. Deformed and stunted
by two broken legs in adolescence combined with a congenital calcium
deficiency (his parents were first cousins; someone describes him as the
“last dribble” of a very old, aristocratic family), Toulouse-Lautrec
overcompensated with an outsize joy of life and prodigious artistic
creation. Looking at Henri and his wild artist friends on the eve of the
year 1900, one old coot remarks that things don’t look good for the
twentieth century. That should give us hope today for the twenty-first.
This movie will inevitably make a fascinating double bill with John
Huston’s 1952 Moulin Rouge. (Seen 19 May
1999)
Laws of Attraction
This is the kind of movie where I keep finding my attention wandering because I keep thinking about who should have been cast in the lead roles. Julianne Moore is simply too good at playing the tough-exterior/insecure-inside divorce lawyer who protests too much that she isn’t interested in dating and marriage. She is so convincing that we really don’t care how things turn out for her. This is more of a Meg Ryan role, but that wouldn’t work either because Tom Hanks would have been all wrong for the male lead. Pierce Brosnan is actually pretty good as her adversary/suitor, although even when he is supposed to be unkempt he still looks stylish. Frances Fisher is more than game as Moore’s mother, whose social and cosmetic surgery schedule are way too busy for her to get around to her long-overdue midlife crisis. In the end, this flick’s story is just plain silly. After a few reels of predictable rom com developments, things suddenly move to Ireland, where filming was being done anyway, to take advantage of tax breaks. It’s as though the filmmakers had used up all the romantic comedy clichés faster than expected and so decided to pad with major Ireland clichés as well. Director Peter Howitt did much better with Sliding Doors and at least had more fun with questionable material in AntiTrust. Laws of Attraction is clearly meant to evoke Hepburn and Tracy, but its job would be easier if similar material hadn’t been recently done a whole lot better by the Coen brothers in Intolerable Cruelty. (Seen 12 May 2004)
A Leap of Faith
Please do not confuse this documentary with the Steve Martin film of a
few years ago about evangelists. This Leap of Faith was a
five-year project by two Americans (with Irish roots) in which they
documented the formation and first year of an integrated primary school
in Belfast. The film, with narration by Liam Neeson, is extremely clear
and even-handed in providing background on the “troubles” in Northern
Ireland, noting the extent to which the Protestant and Catholic
communities have become segregated. A major factor/result of this is
near-total segregation of the educational system. In the hope of
furthering peace, some parents have taken the initiative to form primary
schools that strive for a mix of religious backgrounds. Once established,
these schools are subsidized by the government, but getting to that point
can be quite daunting. Consequently, to date only a very small percentage
of Northern Ireland children attend integrated schools. As we see in
Jenifer McShane and Tricia Regan’s film, however, the results are
inspiring. This is underscored by the fact that the film spans a period
including some of the worst violence of the conflict to the declaration
of a ceasefire by para-military groups. (Seen 4 June
1996)
Leap Year
I should have liked this movie better. (Everyone should have.) It is, after all, nearly my own personal story in reverse. For the record, the Missus actually did propose to me on Leap Day—for all the good it did her at the time. Anyway, the setup here is that Amy Adams is a Boston woman who, tired of waiting for her longtime boyfriend to propose and, upon hearing a quaint family story from her father (a don’t-blink-or-you’ll miss-him John Lithgow), decides spontaneously to follow her man to Dublin to propose to him on February 29. Tragically, her plans go awry when the airplane passes through a time-space portal into a parallel universe where St. Patrick’s Day greeting cards are reality. Never mind that she winds up trying to get to Dublin from Cardiff by boat going through Cork but is re-directed to Dingle (look at a map and try to figure it out yourself), but it adds insult to injury that there is no sign of any of the many fine roads the Irish government has built while it was in the process of going broke. Normally, I have a high tolerance for Irish caricatures. In fact, I enjoy them because they annoy so many Irish people so much. But leading man Matthew Goode fails at the critical task of being more appealing than the man we know Adams is going to dump. Goode is normally quite fine at playing English twits (cf. Match Point, Brideshead Revisited, Cemetery Junction), but here he is simply like someone posh trying to affect the rough, laid-back charm exhibited by so many young Irishmen. I kept rooting for that nice American cardiologist, even though I kept thinking he could probably do better.
(Seen 27 February 2011)
Leave It to Beaver
The main problem with the new Leave It to Beaver movie is this:
When I watched the original TV series Wally, Eddie and Lumpy were all
several years older than me. But in this flick they are mere
children! That aside, this latest recycled-from-an-old-TV-show
big-screen movie at least goes a bit easier on the ironic, camp,
self-referential humor of the tiresome Brady Bunch movies.
Beaver plays more like a John Hughes kiddie comedy and at
first seems to be more based on Dennis the Menace. The actors
playing Ward, Wally and the Beav turn in eerily accurate
impersonations. Janine Turner is no Barbara Billingsley, but we can
understand why Ward would be turned on by the sight of her vacuuming
in pearls. Ironically Eddie Haskell, the one character who in the
original series was way ahead of his time, here seems the most
anachronistic. His self-conscious bad-boy posturing actually makes
him endearing—especially when compared to the story’s real
villains, two older delinquents who seem to have come from a totally
different movie. Appropriately, the director of this mishmash of
classic old sitcom plots is Home Improvement director Andy
Cadiff. Is it any wonder that Tim Allen’s TV show seems to be Ward
and June’s favorite? (Seen 22 August 1997)
Leaving Las Vegas
Someday Hollywood might remake this movie as a light comedy with Bill
Pullman and call it While You Were Drinking. But in the meantime,
we have this depressing but strangely affecting film by Mike Figgis about
an alcoholic screenwriter (Nicolas Cage) who decides to drink himself to
death. It is based on a novel by John O’Brien who, as it happens, drank
himself to death. The film gives Cage the opportunity for a tour de
force acting turn, and he makes the most of it—winning himself a
Golden Globe in the process. Anyone who has been close to an alcoholic
will see the truth in his performance. More problematic is Elisabeth
Shue’s role (lightyears away from her work in Adventures in
Babysitting and Back to the Future) which progresses from a
too-good-to-be-true hooker with a heart of gold to playing Mary Magdalene
to Cage’s alcoholic Christ figure. Don’t know if I would choose this
flick for a first date, but it is fun to watch for familiar faces and
names in the smaller roles. (Seen 26 January 1996)
The Lemon Drop Kid
If you have maxed out on the usual Christmas movies like It’s a Wonderful Life and White Christmas, you could do worse than to drag out this 1951 Bob Hope comedy. Drawn from the stories of Damon Runyon, it features all of his standard touches, including big dumb lugs with colorful nicknames and hearts of gold. Mostly, this is a vehicle for Hope, with all of his trademark wisecracks and double-takes and his finger tugging on his collar. And, frankly, this story was done better twice or more by Frank Capra, who told more or less the same story in 1933’s Lady for a Day and then again in 1961’s A Pocketful of Miracles. This time it is Jane Darwell, as beloved street vendor Nellie Thursday, who needs to be saved. Will the Lemon Drop Kid sell her out to save his own skin? Or will he come through on Christmas Day? Do you even have to ask? The movie is mainly worth remembering for Hope and Marilyn Maxwell strolling through a snowy Big Apple singing the now-standard “Silver Bells,” joined by a cast of Ruyonesque street types, including William Frawley, as Gloomy Willie, who also had a part in the 1934 movie of the same name. (Seen 26 December 2005)
Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events
As fans of the books by Daniel Handler apparently already knew, this 2004 movie is another one of those “children’s” stories (or series of them) that grabs attention by pretending not to sugarcoat anything and to seek entertainment in personal misfortune (proving that you’re never too young to appreciate a good weepy or soap opera), but in its heart it is still as sentimental as a Lassie movie. The hard part about bringing this kind of children’s literature to the big screen is that you wind up with a lot of scenes with kids looking at and reacting to things—here more so than usual. Having said that, there are some truly stunning visuals in the film—notably a house precariously perched impossibly high on a sea cliff. The morbid storyline also gets a bit of a frisson from the fact that it is directed by Brad Silberling, who seems to have been obsessed with death and loss since his first kids movie, Casper and, especially, his quasi-autobiographical Moonlight Mile. Random thought: if you put enough makeup on either Jim Carrey or Robin Williams, it really doesn’t matter which one is underneath it. The young actors acquit themselves well, especially Liam Aiken, who has been coping with parental onscreen loss since he played the tyke of Susan Sarandon’s cancer-stricken character in Stepmom.
(Seen 10 November 2006)
Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man
With musical/concert documentaries, 90 percent of greatness is simply selecting the right subject. So this film by Lian Lunson (whose previous directing effort was a Willie Nelson TV documentary) is definitely 90 percent of the way there. I can actually remember the exact moment when I first heard Leonard Cohen’s work. It was on a Bakersfield rock station more years ago than I care to remember. The DJ made a big fuss about a song he was about to play. It was called Suzanne and was sung by Noel Harrison. I don’t know if it was the song’s mention of Jesus that excited the DJ or simply the sheer poetry of the lyrics, but I, and probably every other teenager listening, knew that we were hearing something in a completely different category from our usual rock fare. Over the years, many people in the music business have been affected and influenced by Cohen’s work. Lunson’s film preserves a series of 2005 tribute concerts, in which some of Cohen’s most ardent admirers sing his songs. Many are from his native Montreal, with the notable inclusion of Australian Nick Cave. While the performances range from good to very good (especially Rufus Wainwright), we can’t help but wish that the movie focused even more on the life and performances of Cohen. When he finally takes to the stage himself at film’s end, joining U2 in a performance of Tower of Song at New York’s Slipper Room, we wish even more that we had a film of purely Cohen performing. The non-musical segments are nearly undone by endless stretches of Bono and, to a lesser degree, The Edge going on and on in a way that, at best, annoys and, at worst, actually distracts us from the business at hand. But they more or less make up for it with their climactic Slipper Room performance.
(Seen 9 October 2006)
Leonard Cohen: Live at the Isle of Wight 1970
The title says it all. If there are still any repertory cinemas out there that do double features, this would be a great first half of a double bill with Lian Lunson’s Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man, which gives us a good look at the older Cohen. Murray Lerner’s more recent documentary puts us firmly back in the early days, when Cohen was a charismatic troubadour with an acoustic guitar and his now classic songs were still brand new. There is something Dylan-esque about the man we see on screen, as he chats simply and unpretentiously with a massive crowd of more than half a million as if he were performing in modest coffee bar. As the film tells us, things had been ugly at the five-day festival off England’s southern coast. Frustration over admission fees, fences and patrol dogs had caused anarchy to break out and moods to sour. Many of the acts were getting heckled and booed. Context is provided by recent interviews with Kris Kristofferson and Joan Baez, who performed there, as well as his manager and keyboarder Bob Johnston and Judy Collins, who helped Cohen get his start. When Cohen finally performed in the middle the night/early morning, he had the kind of effect on the crowd that births legends. It is an amazing experience to see captured on film. But it is no less impressive to see and hear the young Cohen perform so many of his songs, making us feel as though we are hearing them for the first time.
(Seen 7 July 2010)
The Leopard Son
Real life is often more compelling than art. And sometimes they’re even
the same thing. That’s the case with The Leopard Son, a
documentary for Discovery Channel Pictures by famed naturalist Hugo van
Lawick (who also happens to be married to Jane Goodall). Van Lawick
followed and filmed a leopard and her cub for three years in Africa’s
Serengeti. He got some amazing footage of the cub’s life nearly from the
beginning to its coming of age as an adult. In some ways, the leopard’s
story parallels the plot of Disney’s The Lion King, and the tale
does not suffer in the least from a lack of song and dance numbers or an
evil Uncle Scar. The ending is at once traumatic, touching, and beautiful
in a way a Hollywood script writer could only envy. The film is further
enhanced by the grandfatherly voice of John Gielgud reading van Lawick’s
words and a score by Stewart Copeland (formerly of The Police). This film
makes good family fare, although we do see several cute animals become
somebody’s lunch. (Seen 5 June 1996)
Lepa Sela Lepo Gore (Pretty Village, Pretty Flame)
This movie’s title is really more solemn than the film itself. As with
movies about the Spanish civil war (cf. Libertarias), you can
reasonably figure that films about recent events in the former Yugoslavia
will be somewhat depressing. The surprise here is that this war movie is
eminently watchable and even entertaining. It is infused with a dark
humor (not too mention eastern European absurdity) not unlike Catch-22 or M*A*S*H. And the narrative
jumps back and forth through time, not unlike Slaughterhouse-Five. The
story focuses on a group of Bosnian Serb soldiers trapped by Moslem
forces in an abandoned tunnel. The main protagonist is Milan whom we also
see later in a hospital and earlier in his childhood. Before the war,
Milan has no enmity toward his Moslem neighbors but fatalistically
accepts war as inevitable (as does his Moslem friend Halil). But when his
mother is killed by Moslems during the war, he develops a raging hatred.
What’s really intriguing about Srdjan Dragojevic’s film, however, is the
way that it brings the reality of the war to us in a way that news
reports can’t. On seeing this movie that it hits home that the recent
Balkan conflict was the first European war fought to rock music and where
soldiers drank Coca-Cola from plastic bottles. (Seen 24 May
1997)
Less Than Zero
In 1985, 21-year-old Bret Easton Ellis (whose future books would include American Psycho) burst on the literary scene with his debut novel, about aimless, amoral, decadent wealthy youth in Los Angeles. They all seemed to be involved in—or children of people involved in—the entertainment business. They were the kind of vacuous minds that would, well, take a searing novel like Ellis’s and make a movie like this. Actually, this is not at all a bad movie (directed by Britain’s Marek Kanievska three years after Another Country), but all that survives from the source book (which, in fairness, was probably un-filmable as written) are a few character names and a dead coyote. Essentially, a story (to the extent that there was a story) about not taking any responsibility becomes a Hollywood flick about learning to step up. Andrew McCarthy (a few months after he ran around with Kim Cattrall in Mannequin) and Jami Gertz (a few months after she fought vampires in The Lost Boys) are fine, and James Spader (three years before Sex, Lies, and Videotape) is surprisingly dark as the evil drug dealer. But it’s no surprise that the standout (a year after he left Saturday Night Live) is Robert Downey Jr. as the dissolute Julian on a downward spiral. A patchwork of charm and sarcasm, the role is tailor-made for the future Tony Stark and Sherlock Holmes. What we have since learned about Downey only adds, in hindsight, an additional layer of authenticity and poignancy. The film is made even more memorable by a great soundtrack that includes The Bangles’ cover of “A Hazy Shade of Winter,” Poison’s “Rock and Roll All Nite” and Roy Orbison’s “Life Fades Away” but, interestingly, not the Elvis Costello song that gave the source novel its title.
(Seen 22 October 2012)
Let Me In
This is where I trash a movie for being one more clueless Hollywood remake of a fine European film. Unfortunately, that plan has two big obstacles: 1) somehow I never managed to see the highly lauded Swedish original (Låt den Rätte Komma in, or Let the Right One In), and 2) writer/director Matt Reeves (best known for Cloverfield) has made a very good movie in his own right. Okay, so maybe I can trash it for being one more vampire movie in a popular culture already overpopulated with bloodsuckers. Well, that plan doesn’t work either because this movie completely eradicated the residual distress I was suffering from having recently sat through both a Twilight movie and an uninspired Twilight parody. This is a vampire flick as art film, and I mean that in the very best sense. The movie is so well made and written and acted that it could have been about anything and still succeeded. If the old system of movie marquees were still in business, the poor fellow with the ladder and the letters, would have had his hands full trying to fit the names Kodi Smit-McPhee and Chloë Grace Moretz up there, but the two young leads turn in powerful performances. Smit-McPhee (best known for The Road) is reminiscent of the young Nicholas Hoult, and Moretz (unforgettable in Kick-Ass) makes you believe that a monster can be irresistibly seductive, especially to a boy entering adolescence. In the end, this movie isn’t really about vampires at all. It’s about how, without realizing it, our paths are molded by our parents. Owen’s mother is barely there. She is always gone or asleep after a few glasses of wine. In other words, she has a liquid addiction. Connect your own dots as to why Owen might feel protective of a female vampire.
(Seen 10 November 2010)
Let’s Get Lost
Three aimless guys and a romantically frustrated woman in a movie more or
less about nothing? I guess that makes this the Danish Seinfeld.
Actually, that comparison is more apt than you might think. This low-key
black-and-white character study derives its humor largely from this
crew’s sometime wacky schemes and fetishes and general lack of ambition
in the career and romance departments. This is the feature debut of Jonas
Elmer and grew out of a short film, which was apparently inspired by the
(now ancient) French New Wave. In case you’re wondering, I don’t know if
the film’s title was inspired by the song of the same name. That tune
doesn’t come up, but an ultra-cool/hip Mark Murphy rendition of the old
Steve Allen Standard “This Could Be the Start of Something Big” is used
to surprising effect in a sequence involving the lads in a lackadaisical
soccer drill that seems choreographed by an understudy of the June Taylor
Dancers—a dramatic contrast to the rest of the movie. But it’s not
really the start of something big. It’s just the near beginning of
something mildly amusing. (Seen 22 May 1999)
Letetet s Rossinant (Fly By Roscinante)
This Bulgarian film by Georgi Stoev is an homage to an artist of another age. Unfortunately, I did not catch his name or enough details to say who he is and searches on the internet have not turned anything up for me. So what I can tell you is that this is a movie brimming with comedy, music and opera and circus all mixed together. The plot is ostensibly about a Bulgarian opera company journeying to Vienna by bus. The bus is called Rossinant, an apparent reference to Rocinante, whom literary types will immediately recognize as the steed of the quite mad don Quijote de la Mancha. And the movie glories in its own unique brand of madness. As I have since described it to more than one person, it is like some weird combination of Federico Fellini and Benny Hill. It is one burlesque sketch after another. Because the driver has become incapacitated upon learning that he has become a father, the old maestro takes over the driving. He is accompanied by his current, much younger mistress, as well as his somewhat older former mistress and his quite ancient former former mistress. By the time we get to Vienna, flashbacks have pretty much given every performer a chance to do their comedy shtick. Some of shenanigans are corny, and some are quite funny. But the film is never less than compelling. The word mirthful comes to mind.
(Seen 10 July 2009)
Liam
Director Stephen Frears, who most recently transplanted the novel High Fidelity to the States,
returns to his native England for this period piece. The opening
scenes depicting New Year’s Eve in Depression-era Liverpool drip
with nostalgia, and we think we are getting a dewy-eyed childhood
reminiscence à la How Green Was My Valley or Hope
and Glory. But then things turn grim as the Sullivan family
slips into poverty, and we think we are getting a tale of childhood
hardship and Catholic repression in the vein of Angela’s Ashes. (The
screenwriter Jimmy McGovern did even more of a job on the church in
1994’s Priest.) By the end, however, we realize that what we
have actually gotten is a none-too-subtle tract on the evils of
fascism and anti-Semitism with an ending that, intentionally or not,
emulates the kind of hell and brimfire moralizing that most of the
movie is all too eager to mock. Young Anthony Borrows is downright
heartbreaking in the title role, as a boy with a stammer so bad
you’re sure he’s going to suffocate every time he opens his mouth.
Ian Hart has the thankless part of the father, whose motives are
hard to follow. (Seen 21 May 2001)
Liberation
Many of us may have gotten our fill over the past year of commemorating
the end of World War II. But Liberation is a documentary of the
war in Europe that deserves to be seen by a large audience, and this is
not at all a bad time to look back and learn some lessons from history.
It is produced by the Simon Wiesenthal Center and it takes a more
even-handed approach to the war than we often see from other sources.
Other than to effectively re-tell history, its only agenda is to make
sure the facts of the Holocaust are known. And, while it does that quite
well, most of the film’s 100 minutes focus on the Allied invasion that
would liberate Europe from the Nazis. We cheer the Allies as they storm
the Normandy beaches, but we are also told of how the world (including
U.S. Jewish leaders) largely ignored what Hitler was doing to the Jews
during the war and that the Pope quietly cheered Hitler on because he was
fighting Communism. We are also reminded that US troops were racially
segregated and Japanese-Americans were interned. (The film is strangely
silent on Stalin’s atrocities, however.) A wealth of film clips, radio
recordings, and popular songs of the day give us a strong feeling of time
and place. The end of the film is particularly moving as we see the
Allies discover what was going on in the concentration camps.
Liberation demonstrates that the real thing is much more powerful
than even a well-done dramatization like Schindler’s List.
Incidentally, Ben Kingsley who was seen in that film is one of the
narrators of Liberation. Among the others are Patrick Stewart and
Whoopi Goldberg. (Seen 5 June 1995)
Libertarias
The problem with any movie about the Spanish civil war is that we know up
front that the good guys are going to lose. Indeed, the climax to
Libertarias is more than a bit harrowing. Director Vicente Aranda
(The Lover, Turkish
Passion) covers similar territory to that of Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom except that,
instead of dealing with the International Brigades, this film
focuses on the Free Women’s Red Brigade. As in Loach’s film, we see
that the leftists who defended the Spanish republic had their own
agenda for Spain’s future but wound up fighting among themselves
almost as much as against the fascist rebels. At least in this film,
we actually see that Franco’s forces are even more atrocious than
the republic’s. In the best war movie tradition, we have a
heterogeneous band of ragtag soldiers, with the point of view
provided by an innocent young nun (Ariadna Gil of Belle
Epoque, Celestial
Clockwork) who undergoes a definitely non-religious
conversion. (Seen 22 May 1997)
Liberty Heights
In Barry Levinson’s canon of life in Baltimore, his latest Liberty
Heights falls time-wise between Avalon and Diner, i.e. the early
1950s, and that’s also where it falls mood-wise. On one hand, there
is the ruefully nostalgic sense of times gone by, but our
point-of-view character (the British Ben Foster making a convincing
enough Jewish American high school senior) is old enough to provide
some welcome youthful antics and humor. This time out, Levinson’s
narrative reaches further beyond the Jewish world to include other
communities as well (not unlike John Sayles or Spike Lee). Indeed,
the writer/director seems determined to chronicle the entire era,
complete with school integration and the birth of rock and roll. To
drive his points home, the story features not one but two
inter-ethnic quasi-romances—and, given the similarities between
Adrien Brody’s character and Mickey Rourke’s in Diner, we
have to assume that our author has a fixation with blondes on
horses. In the end, this story is definitely (as always) about being
Jewish in 20th century America, and in that regard that film is
adept at making its points without hitting us over the head. Just as
Frasier’s dad appeared in Tin Men, another member of
the family (Bebe Neuwirth) is present here, but her part is not
nearly as good. (Typical of her mother role is to exclaim, “Please
kill me now!” when her son expresses an interest in an
African-American classmate.) As usual, the ending brings a tear to
the eye, but it is definitely and honestly earned. (Seen
3 December 1999)
Licence to Kill
James Bond goes rogue. Again. This time he has pretty good reason, although his grimness of purpose turns rather lighthearted pretty quickly. This is the last time we see CIA agent Felix Leiter before the Daniel Craig reboot 17 years later. Strangely, he is played by David Hedison, who played the character 16 years earlier in Live and Let Die opposite Roger Moore. Just two years earlier, the character was played by John Terry in The Living Daylights, opposite Timothy Dalton (as he does in this movie). Anyway, it’s the unfortunate aftermath to Leiter’s otherwise happy wedding that sends Bond on his quest for revenge against the drug lord Sanchez, who is played almost sympathetically by Robert Davi. The closest he comes to Ernst Blofeld is his penchant for stroking his pet iguana. The main Bond girl is Carey Lowell, whose short haircut is meant to convey (along with her bridling at having to pretend to be Bond’s assistant and being called Miss) that she is some sort of feminist. But although Dalton does his best to cement 007’s dinosaur credentials (for which Judi Dench would upbraid him in the subsequent movie), Lowell pouts and runs away (twice) when she sees him swapping spit with the comely Talisa Soto. We barely see M and Moneypenny this time, but good old Desmond Llewelyn’s Q gets so much screen time that he nearly qualifies as a sidekick. Also among the interesting supporting cast are Wayne Newton as some sort of New Age evangelist and a very young Benicio Del Toro as a grinning henchman.
(Seen 6 October 2012)
Lie huo zhan che (Full Throttle) 
The first midnight movie of the 1996 Seattle International Film Festival
was Full Throttle from Hong Kong. On the positive side, there are
maybe 15 or 20 minutes of exciting motorbike racing through the streets
of Hong Kong. (Conveniently, the streets of Hong Kong generally seem to
be deserted at night, except of course for the inevitable truck or bus
just around a really bad curve.) The bad news is that the rest of the
film’s 114-minute running time is filled with every imaginable
cliché you could think of. The girlfriend who doesn’t want the
hero to race? It’s there. The best friend who bites it tragically? You
got it. The estranged father and son? You bet. Fighting back from a
near-fatal crash? Well, you’ve got the idea. (Seen 18 May
1996)
The Life and Death of Peter Sellers
If Peter Sellers starred in a movie about his own life, would he have to play all the characters himself? This somewhat grim biopic seems to suggest that he would. At regular intervals, Geoffrey Rush, who plays Sellers, delivers a monologue as each of the film’s key characters. (Notably absent was the one soliloquy I was really looking forward to, Rush becoming Britt Ekland, otherwise luminously brought to life here by Charlize Theron.) It seems strange that the story of one of the funniest men who ever lived should turn out to be so depressing. According to this film, the comic genius Sellers was an empty vessel of a man, who could masterfully play any character in the world but who had no character of his own. Indeed, he comes off as having the moral compass of an infant, and the way he treats his wives and children suggests an alternate title, Daddy Dearest. The pop psychology portrait (weak father, overly attached to mother) is the weakness of this sort of film and, even more so in this case, the fact that poor Rush has to (very gamely, it must said) recreate Sellers’s most brilliant roles (The Pink Panther, Dr. Stangelove, Being There), inevitably reminding us how much better Sellers was (or, worse, making him seem less the genius he was). Somehow, I think Sellers’s life was actually a bit more fun than this film makes it out to be, but that’s not to deny the man’s clear flaws. The director is Stephen Hopkins, whose body of work also includes a Nightmare on Elm Street movie and a Predator movie, The Ghost and the Darkness and the film version of Lost in Space. Also in the cast are Stanley Tucci as Stanley Kubrick, who directed Sellers in Lolita and Strangelove, and John Lithgow (looking eerily like Roy Orbison) as Blake Edwards, who directed him in The Party and endless The Pink Panther movies. (Seen 21 November 2004)
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
After making a pair of clear winners, Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, director Wes Anderson comes perilously close in his fourth film (the low-budget Bottle Rocket was his first) to making one of those on-location, self-indulgent vanity productions that usually turn out to be more amusing for those making the film than those watching it. Still, despite a few slow stretches (that are actually part of the movie’s point), Anderson manages to give us a film with a sustainable, if quirky, artistic vision. The deal-closer is the finale that (and I hope no one thinks this is a spoiler) has Bill Murray walking along with a young boy on his shoulders. This echoes that young boy that shadowed Murray in a swimming pool in Rushmore and is the main link in the chain tying this movie to the rest of Anderson’s oeuvre. Is this lad meant to evoke Murray’s own (lost) childhood? Or is he meant to evoke the son that he (perhaps) never had? Or both? Like all of Anderson’s films, this one is ultimately about family, and this time Murray also takes on the Gene Hackman role from The Royal Tenenbaums. He even has Anjelica Huston playing his wife, and Gwyneth Paltrow is back too. Okay, it’s not actually Paltrow; it’s Cate Blanchett doing a strange Gwyneth Paltrow-doing-an-English-accent imitation. The story involves a team of naturalist/explorers who do documentaries about their own exploits, so the film is a wry observation of not only the state of the documentary genre but also of reality television. At the same time, it tells us something about filmmaking in general. The wonder of Bill Murray’s inner child in the face of the strikingly animated creatures he encounters speaks volumes about directors like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. A special treat is the presence of Seu Jorge (City of God), whose job on the crew seems to consist entirely of playing the guitar and singing. His Brazilian renditions of David Bowie songs alone are worth the price of admission. (Seen 9 March 2005)
Life During Wartime
If you have seen Todd Solondz’s Happiness, among the many thoughts (and there would have been many) that went through your brain, probably none of them was this one: I can’t wait for the sequel! But here it is: Happiness 2: Life During Wartime. Okay, that’s not the exact title, but I think it would have been cool if it were. It nearly would have been in keeping with Solondz’s off-kilter sensibility. What is surprising about this sequel—aside from the fact that it actually exists—is how unsurprising it is. None of the characters have moved too far off the mark where we might have expected. What is surprising—or maybe not—is the fact that Solondz has recast all the parts, giving another bunch of actors a chance to see how uncomfortable they can make us. That’s actually a very interesting thing to do, as well as including characters from Solondz’s 1998 breakthrough film Welcome to the Dollhouse, who had their own sort-of sequel in Palindromes and now appear here, also recast. Got all that? To say that Solondz seems to be in the process of creating an extended imagined world full of recurring characters à la Honoré de Balzac might be giving him too much credit, but what he is doing is not without precedent. Solondz’s trademark is definitely the ick factor and, as with Happiness, much of the proceedings deal with the uncomfortable theme of child molestation, although arguably slightly more sensitively than before. And what better way to evoke an ambiance of perversion than to cast Pee-wee Herman himself (Paul Reubens) in the role Jon Lovitz originally played? There’s something oddly detached about Solondz’s filmmaking, but there are a couple of scenes in this movie that electrify. They are between Ciarán Hinds (reprising Dylan Baker’s pedophile) and Charlotte Rampling. These few minutes convince us that Solondz has a much wider range than we have seen to date.
(Seen 20 February 2010)
Life of Brian
As someone who has never been a member of any church, I wasn’t offended by this movie when it came out in 1979, but I was blown away by its numerous “I can’t believe they did that or said that!” moments. I wondered how I would react to it three decades later in an age marked by crazy reactions to movies that deliberately disparage certain religions. Is this irreverent Monty Python project to Christianity what The Innocence of Muslims is to Islam? Hardly. For one thing, Life of Brian doesn’t actually deal with Jesus but with a hapless man (Graham Chapman) whose life more or less parallels Jesus’s historically. The tenets of Christianity are never directly challenged. Mostly, the movie is a chain of trademark Python sketches, displaying the troupe’s wonderfully absurdist, mocking humor—getting more mileage than is decent from people’s handicaps and, particularly, speech impediments. To the extent that the film has targets, they are mainly the mindless followers of religions in general. One of the classic bits has a huge crowd robotically repeating in unison Brian’s exhortations for them to all be individuals. But the religion that gets hit hardest (in my humble opinion anyway) is one that tends to be atheist, i.e. those leftist activists so consumed with their causes that they spend more time fighting rival factions than fighting the declared enemy. The bits where John Cleese, Michael Palin, Eric Idle and Sue Jones-Davies, as members of the People’s Front of Judea, bicker and debate and accomplish nothing are truly classic. A particularly memorable scene has Cleese ask rhetorically, what have the Romans ever done for us? And then he gets dragged more and more off track as an endless list of Roman accomplishments come to people’s minds. This movie isn’t anti-religion. It’s anti-nonsense—even while it gloriously celebrates nonsense.
(Seen 3 March 2013)
Life of Pi
I am always on the lookout for a filmmaker who looks like he or she might be able to adapt one of my favorite all-time (and perhaps un-filmable) novels: Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. I think my new frontrunner may be Ang Lee. Not only has he successfully tackled an allegedly un-filmable source in Yann Martel’s novel, but he has made it look easy as he infuses his movie with a Canadian-Indian brand of magic realism. If his extensive use of CGI doesn’t exactly escape leaving fingerprints, it’s okay because the feel of the tale is fantastical anyway. From transitions to special-effect set pieces, the images are delights. Lee’s work on the much-maligned Hulk has paid off (and my appreciation of that movie has been vindicated) as the Bengal tiger is extraordinarily convincing. Even more convincing than Gérard Depardieu, who puts in a brief appearance on his way to tax exile. The crucial part is played by Suraj Sharma in the title role for the bulk of the movie. It is his first and, to date, only feature film role, and it all succeeds or fails on his shoulders. He carries it off just fine. But does the story, as promised, make us believe in God? I don’t think it actually intends to do so. But it’s fair to say that it probably helps us understand God a bit better.
(Seen 27 December 2013)
Life Tastes Good
If Tampopo was a Japanese
noodle western, then Life Tastes Good is a Japanese-American
film noodle noir. Written and directed by San
Francisco-based stage director Philip Kan Gotanda, this film was shot on
the proverbial shoestring but doesn’t look it. The plot involves a badly
disfigured body found in an abandoned car, a small-time hood hiding out
from the boss he doublecrossed (played with malicious glee by the
director), a mysterious woman who haunts a warehouse apartment like some
strange, silent ghost, a reconciliation of sorts with an estranged son
and daughter, and several very interesting food dishes. Some parts seem
(deliberately) slow, and some are quite funny. But by the end, the whole
thing comes together in a touching and satisfying way. A particular
standout is Julia Nickson as the mysterious woman, a role originally
intended for Joan Chen, who was too pregnant to play it. Nickson gives
her inscrutable character a depth that was never so evident when she
played Commander Sinclair’s love interest during the first season of Babylon 5. (Seen 24 May
2000)
Lift
This flick starts off with a high-energy burglary and police chase. So,
is it a guy flick? But then it deals largely with a young woman and her
unresolved family issues. So, is it a chick flick? Actually, it’s a
people flick and one that exhilarates by letting us into a world
that, despite all the thieving we have seen in movies before, feels so
real that it becomes totally new. And it somehow manages to meet and defy
our expectations all at the same time. Niecy is an extremely well-coifed
and well-dressed woman who seems to have it all: friends, looks, talent,
a good job, and top label dresses. The problematical thing is that she
actually steals it all. And, in the world she lives, that is
perfectly normal. She thinks that, because she doesn’t use a gun, she is
somehow safer and more moral than thieves who do. But this wise film
eventually disabuses her of that notion. One of the most brilliant things
in this film by DeMane Davis and Khari Streeter is a totally pivotal and
shocking event that comes so suddenly and unexpectedly that, for once in
a movie, it feels like life itself. The attractive cast includes Lonette
McKee, who seems to be doing an African-American turn on the character
Mary Tyler Moore played in Ordinary People. (Seen 17
May 2001)
Like Crazy
This movie gives every indication of wanting to do for open borders what Brokeback Mountain did for gay liberation. But it’s a sign of the murkiness of the filmmaker’s intentions that we aren’t quite sure whether this is an “issues” movie or simply a human love story. I’ve read that director/co-writer Drake Doremus intended to make an update to Claude Lelouch’s 1966 arthouse hit Un Homme et une femme. But that movie had visuals that made a major impact on worldwide popular culture and a theme song that you couldn’t get out of your head. Like Crazy is just annoying. And maybe that’s the point. Maybe it’s really meant to be an anti-romance. Certainly we become as irritated with the two lovers (who can’t seem to spend a week apart without falling into bed with someone else) as they do with each other. Things start out promising with a realistic depiction of incipient student romance, and Felicity Jones (Brideshead Revisited, Cemetery Junction) and Anton Yelchin (Star Trek, Terminator Salvation) are likeable enough—at least at the start. But after that, it’s a long, tough, whiny slog. (While watching all the whinging, I couldn’t help but think about my own parents, who met and married around the same age as these two and were immediately separated for two years by World War II.) Doctor Who fans, take note: not only did Jones have a title role in the episode “The Unicorn and the Wasp” but her mother is played by none other than River Song herself, Alex Kingston.
(Seen 6 November 2011)
Lila dit ça (Lila Says)
This is the only film I can remember off-hand in which a sex act is consummated while two people are riding a bicycle. But more impressive, at least cinematically, was the phallic image of some kind of derrick or crane on the Marseille docks immediately before, signaling our hero Chimo’s arousal—a vision that Hitchcock himself might have been impressed with. The director is Ziad Doueiri, working from a novel purported to be a real-life Chimo’s autobiography. Doueiri paints a fairly bleak, if not hopeless, picture of France’s Arab sub-milieu. In the early scenes, there are hints that something Hitchcock-ian may indeed be going on. The very blonde titular Lila (played by Vahina Giocante, seeming like a pubescent Laura Dern) seems to be nothing but trouble, kind of like Kim Novak in Vertigo. Indeed, it is hard to know what to make of Lila, except that she is extremely provocative, not unlike her literary cousin, Lolita. But, in the end, as we are informed at the very beginning of the film, this is the old story by and about a young man, in a bad environment, who is destined to become A Writer. Like Lila herself, this movie talks dirty, but deep down it is almost naively sentimental. (Seen 9 October 2006)
Lilies
This is the kind of movie that you will likely either love or hate. At
the very least you can’t help finding it intriguing. The Catholic church
is put on trial in fairly literal fashion in the screenplay adapted by
Michel Marc Bouchard from his own play. A bishop comes to a Quebec prison
to hear a dying murderer’s confession. Instead, the bishop is held
prisoner by a group of convicts and their chaplain and is forced to watch
an elaborate play they have produced. The minimalist stage production
weaves magically in and out of flashbacks but always with the same
actors. This means that the female roles are taken by men (you know, like
in Shakespeare’s day) which is strange at first but then comes to feel
normal, thanks largely to the talent of the actors. The play within the
movie (and there’s also a play within the play) centers around a tragic
romance involving two young Adonises. The director is John Greyson, but
in some ways Lilies is reminiscent of the work of the late Derek
Jarman. (Seen 30 May 1997)
Lilja 4-ever
The title of this film by Swedish director Lukas Moodysson is a phrase
that is carved into a wooden bench by the movie’s title character, an
engaging and appealing 16-year-old Russian girl. As played by Oksana
Akinshina, Lilja looks like a fresh-faced teenage mixture of Renée
Zellweger and Shirley MacLaine. The brief scene where she carves “Lilja
4-ever” is especially poignant, not only for its aspiration to survival,
but because that scene also expresses Lilja’s stubborn insistence on
living life on her own terms and in her own time. But things are grim for
Lilja from the film’s beginning, when her mother abandons her to emigrate
to America with her boyfriend. The movie’s portrait of the former USSR is
not a pretty one. Tellingly, when things finally start looking up for
Lilja, she is taken to McDonald’s, but this is only a prelude for worse
things. This film would be an incredible downer if not for its wistful
spiritual twist in the final scenes. To its credit, it’s only when the
film is over that we realize that we have been watching a “message movie”
that is highlighting a serious social problem. In many ways, this movie
is Sweden’s El Norte. (Seen 9 July 2003)
Limbo
In the course of an on-stage interview prior to the U.S. premiere of this
film, writer/director/editor John Sayles said that his movies never quite
fit into a genre. For example, he said, Matewan was “not quite” a
western and Lone Star was
“not quite” a detective story. Well, Limbo actually is
quite an adventure story, and one that is in keeping with its rugged
Alaska setting. But the adventure isn’t just about surviving the
wilds of nature. It’s also about the challenge of personal and
family relationships. Sayles’s films are sometimes disconcerting
because we are so conditioned by formula movies that it is hard to
adjust to a story where, as in real life, we are never quite sure
just where things are headed. And the point, as the film’s sudden
ending underscores, is that where you’re headed isn’t nearly as
important as the journey itself. Limbo is one journey
definitely worth taking. Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio gets one of her
best roles ever and demonstrates that she is quite a singer. And
David Strathairn’s character has echoes of (but is light years
beyond) the one he played opposite Meryl Streep in The River
Wild. (Seen 18 October 1997)
Lincoln
This is, of course, the high-profile Steven Spielberg movie that cleaned up with the Oscar nominations but then largely got stiffed when the awards were actually handed out. The major award that it did get was for Daniel Day-Lewis’s extraordinary turn in the title role. And he deserved it. As we watch him, we do not see the actor. He is, to all intents and purposes, Lincoln. It’s the closest you can come to a ghostly visitation. The movie itself, on the other hand, is not like real life. Tony Kushner’s screenplay is like those old Masterpiece Theatre miniseries, like The First Churchills, I used to watch and love on PBS, i.e. every single conversation—between friends, colleagues, family members—is bald historical exposition. It may be a very illuminating history lesson, but it remains first and foremost a history lesson. Visually, the film is a series of one painterly frame after another. Its glowing lights illuminating shadows remind one of old Renaissance paintings of the lives of saints. If Day-Lewis inhabits the heart and soul of Lincoln, it only highlights the familiarity of most of the other faces. We are left to ponder how Gidget came to be the mother of Tommy from 3rd Rock from the Sun and young David from the Dark Shadows movie. This provides an interesting insight into the film medium in general. Flawlessly inhabiting a character is impressive, but it’s not determinative to our appreciation of the film. Despite Day-Lewis’s uncanny performance, the transcendent speech does not actually come from him, as we might expect, at the end of the movie. It comes from good ol’ Tommy Lee Jones (basically playing no one else but good ol’ Tommy Lee Jones) somewhere in the middle. Just as The King’s Speech paradoxically made us want to stand up and cheer over a speech urging people on to war, Jones gives us the movie’s greatest emotional impact with a speech which (due to the byzantine politics involved) declares that the races are not equal.
(Seen 10 March 2013)
Little Miss Sunshine
What is there about this 2006 Oscar-winning (Michael Arndt for Screenplay, Alan Arkin for Supporting Actor) movie that makes people like it so much? Everyone I know who has ever seen it has really liked it. This movie has become something of an archetype. For the past year or so, any discussion of an independent film that might break out to become a mainstream and critical hit is invariably referred to as “the next Little Miss Sunshine.” But that raises its own question. Did popular taste eventually catch up with independent film sensibilities? Or are independent films becoming more reflective of popular tastes? After all, the jaundiced view of American family dynamics in this flick is not very far away from your average episode of The Simpsons. And some of its dark humor wouldn’t be out of place on ironic post-modern primetime shows like Desperate Housewives. While not exactly remarkable as a cinematic event, this movie does earn the love of its audiences through its optimistic (but never sweet or sentimental) take of families. This is neatly summed up by its simple but elegant metaphor of the Hoover family, when it is time to hit the road again, dropping their various self-absorptions long enough to pull (or rather push) together to get their VW van going and then help one another climb on board.
(Seen 14 June 2008)
Little Voice
The most striking prop in this drama/comedy is the big red shiny American
car that Michael Caine proudly motors all over the North Yorkshire
coastal town of Scarborough. This is appropriate because this film is
first and foremost a vehicle, largely for Jane Horrocks (Bubbles in TV’s
Absolutely Fabulous) who recreates the (title) stage role from a
play built around her own considerable singing/mimicking abilities. It is
also something of a vehicle for Caine and Brenda Blethyn, whose
chew-the-scenery, over-the-top,
dare-to-dream-in-spite-of-miserable-boozy-life-circumstances roles seem
expressly written to gain them supporting Oscar nominations. (In
Blethyn’s case, it worked.) The film is directed by Mark Herman, and it
gives all the appearances of executing the same
triumph-over-one’s-dreary-lot-through-one-great-musical-performance plot
that his Brassed Off did.
(Not to mention The Full
Monty, The Commitments, etc.) But in reality, the
story is much closer to the old Warner Bros. cartoon about a guy
whose life is ruined because he finds a singing frog. Once again,
Herman casts Ewan McGregor as a sweet romantic lead, which in
untypical fashion doesn’t even require him to shave his head, get
buck-naked or do hard drugs. Oddly, in a normal role McGregor looks
like a young Sam Neill. The talented Horrocks, on the other hand,
looks like nothing so much as a young, anorexic Carol Channing. But
she sings like, well, like anybody she wants. (Seen 28
February 1999)
Live and Let Die
One way movie watchers with a severe masochistic streak can drive themselves seriously crazy is to watch the James Bond films with an eye to continuity. Consider that this 1973 entry in the series marked the third consecutive movie with a change in the actor playing Bond. (Sean Connery sat out On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, wanting more money, then came back for Diamonds Are Forever and then was replaced, definitively, in this one by Roger Moore.) CIA agent Felix Leiter is back for the fifth time, played by a fifth actor. This time it is David Hedison (Capt. Crane on TV’s Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea). Hedison would become the first actor to play the role twice when he returned in Licence to Kill 16 years later. So, did Moore deserve his rap for being an inferior replacement for Connery? On the basis of this movie, yes. By this point, Moore’s debonair elitist adventurer persona was well established by his TV roles in The Saint and The Persuaders! But part of Connery’s charm was the perceptible wink and chuckle at himself. In this movie, Moore gives no indication that he is in on the joke. And the cardboard effect is only accentuated by the fact that he finds himself in middle of what amounts to a blaxploitation movie. A few entertaining stunts aside, it is not a good combination. On the bright side, the reliable Yaphet Kotto makes a good, if ill-used, villain, and the movie gives us a couple of quite attractive Bond girls, notably Jane Seymour, in one of her earliest roles.
(Seen 21 April 2012)
Live Bait
The Graduate meets Harold and Maude? Well, sort of. This
low-budget Canadian film (shot in black and white to save money) deals
with 23-year-old Trevor who is having trouble figuring out where to go
with his life. As the story opens, he is living with his parents and
working part-time in a library. His father keeps pestering him to come
work in his company, his mother can’t stop mothering him, and his
brother’s sexual exploits are a sore reminder of his own late-blooming
sexuality. Then he meets 60-year-old Charlotte. Live Bait is quite
amiable and easy to take. (Seen 19 May 1996)
Live Free or Die Hard (Die Hard 4.0)
Like any good action movie series, this one keeps upping the ante. The original flick was merely about some high-rise building that was being held hostage. Now, with the fourth one, it’s the whole darn country. If you’ve seen any of the earlier ones, then you know the drill. Bruce Willis is unapologetically macho and blue collar, the villains are suave, urban, totally without a moral center and frequently foreign. And the stunts are not hindered by logic or physical laws. Indeed, Willis’s Detective McClane has the same instinctive gift for projecting the trajectory of hurtling cars that David Beckham has with a soccer ball. And it’s just as well that McClane keeps wandering into these elaborate criminal plots, since it seems to be the only way he resolves his own family relationship issues. Despite the numerous topical touches, it is safe to say that this action extravaganza doesn’t actually have a sincere political bone in its pretty little head. But it’s still fun to see where the politics seem to fall. Without doubt, McClane is the ultimate neocon hero. He takes on the bad guys while highly paid men in suits dither and is pretty much an unqualified patriot. He also seems to enjoy knocking about French-speaking henchmen. And, if the main villain of the piece has a real-life counterpart, it is some combination of former security adviser Richard Clarke and former ambassador Joseph Wilson. On the other hand, the movie provides plenty of fodder for people who worry about warrantless wiretapping and other intrusions in personal lives. Bottom line for this movie: as the critics here like to say, it does exactly what it says on the tin.
(Seen 10 July 2007)
Live Nude Girls
With a title like Live Nude Girls, you might expect this to be a
film aimed at men, but the opposite is true. If comments made to the
director after the screening are any indication, then this movie has
succeeded in faithfully recreating what a lot of women talk about (and
how they act) when there are no men around. The pretext is a bridal
shower/slumber party attended by five women who have been friends since
childhood. At some points it seems kind of like a 1990s female version of
The Boys in the Band. At other times it reminds me of that episode
of Taxi where they did flashbacks of everyone’s lives before they
became cab drivers. Fortunately, what could have been simply an extended
sitcom is strengthened by a fine cast which includes Dana Delany
(China Beach) as a woman who enjoys tormenting her sister, Kim
Cattrall (Police Academy, Mannequin, Star Trek VI: The
Undiscovered Country) essentially playing herself, and Cynthia
Stevenson (The Player, TV’s Bob and Hope and Gloria)
playing her usual goody-two-shoes character. Singer/teen idol Jeremy
Jordan makes a brief appearance as an incredibly lucky Greenpeace
volunteer. Overall, the movie is very entertaining, with the best bit
being when Stevenson describes how she imagined she would grow up to be
like her Barbie doll. Moreover, this movie is a perfect example of why
you should always stay in a movie theater until all the
credits have been shown. (There might be one last shot of a bunch of
naked women!) (Seen 9 June 1995)
The Lives of the Saints
The problem with being a very well-known actor like Jack Nicholson is that, when you are playing a borderline psychopath in a movie like The Departed, familiarity makes it hard for audiences to really feel the sense of menace. That’s less of a problem for Scottish actor James Cosmo who, early on in this flick, exudes the kind of unpredictable simmering rage that could explode at any minute, nearly as effectively as Ben Kingsley in Sexy Beast. But his magnificent malevolence peaks with an unspeakable act perpetrated on a kitten, after which the strange turns of this odd movie undo whatever spell Cosmo had woven. This movie was written by Tony Grisoni, who also penned such recent films as Brothers of the Head and Terry Gilliam’s Tideland. It gives every indication of being a gritty drama of life on the mean streets of north London. But it quickly takes a vaguely supernatural/spiritual turn that keeps us guessing as to where it is really heading. Is the urchin with the haunting eyes really an angel or perhaps the devil or maybe just a pint-sized genie, teaching people to be careful what they wish for? Is this yet another re-hashing of the Christ story? Or is it just a bleak fable? Heck if I know.
(Seen 12 October 2006)
The Living Daylights
Two years after A View to a Kill, James Bond was back, but something was different. The familiar faces of M, Q, the Minister of Defense and even Soviet General Gogol are all back, but Miss Moneypenny has been rejuventated into the form of pert, young Caroline Bliss (who had previously played Princess Diana in a TV movie). And 007 himself has wound the clock back 17 years and become dark, dashing Timothy Dalton. After Scotland’s Sean Connery, Australia’s George Lazenby and England’s Roger Moore, Wales got its Bond. An interesting and attractive actor whom I first noticed as Heathcliff in the 1970 version of Wuthering Heights and who achieved true historical significance a couple of years ago as the head Time Lord in a two-part Doctor Who special, Dalton made a pretty darn good Bond. He looked the part and, even if he didn’t exactly have Connery’s jovial charm, he had charisma. A propos of recasting, CIA agent Felix Leiter makes his first appearance (in an Eon Productions Bond film anyway) in 14 years and, as was customary, is played by a new actor (John Terry). This film marked one of the series’s periodic back-to-basics shifts. This was more like a standard espionage action film rather than a quasi-comedy/romcom of the Moore era. Bond’s trademark quips (when his car’s laser disables a police car, he jokes that it was “salt corrosion”) are somewhat fewer and nearly out of character with the rest of the flick. Maryam d’Abo makes an attractive Bond girl and gets more screen time than they usually do. The villains, Jeroen Krabbé and Joe Don Baker, are definitely sub-Blofeld level and we have nearly forgotten about them by the time 007 goes after them as an afterthought at the end. In the end, the flick is entertaining and satisfying though not particularly memorable.
(Seen 15 August 2012)
Local Hero
When I first saw this wonderful movie back in 1983, I marveled out how well it caught that longing young adults often have for magic in their lives. Little did I know that I was seeing my own future. Well, sort of. This was Scottish writer/director Bill Forsyth’s follow-up to his international hit Gregory’s Girl, which charmed art house audiences with its quirky take on teen travails. Many of the same touches are in evidence here, including a cameo from Gregory’s Girl star John Gordon Sinclair as a band member, and Forsyth’s trademark shots where characters suddenly emerge from behind things where we don’t expect them. But this movie seems clearly and directly aimed at the Americans who took the earlier film to their heart. The star here is Peter Riegert, a mainstay of American independent romantic comedies of the time, and the star power (in more ways than one) is provided by seventyish Hollywood veteran Burt Lancaster, as the astronomy-obsessed head of a Texas oil company. The setup seems standard enough: in the best Frank Capra tradition, Mac (Riegert) is sent to a small village to negotiate the purchase of breathtaking scenery on the northernmost tip of Scotland for a refinery. But things don’t pan out exactly as we expect. The villagers are dying to sell their property for quick cash. Mac’s in-country contact Ben (a wonderfully awkward and gangly Fulton Mackay) becomes distracted by an enigmatic marine biologist who seems to be at least part mermaid. Every crowd scene (the village is predominately male, with apparently only two female residents in the place) includes a baby in a pram, and the men all go quiet when asked whose child it is. For no apparent reason, Mac falls in love with Stella, the wife of the accountant/innkeeper/waiter with whom he is negotiating and who is strangely unperturbed by this infatuation. Really, though, it is the whole place he is falling in love with. It is one of those enchanted locales (cf. everything from the village in Waking Ned Devine to the town of Cicely in Northern Exposure) that populate movies and sometimes TV shows and make us feel like going on holiday.
(Seen 13 December 2008)
Lola Rennt (Run Lola Run)
Whew! I’m still catching my breath after seeing this one. The best advice
I can give you is what director Tom Tykwer said in his introduction.
Visit the lavatory before it starts. The film may be only 81 minutes
long, but you won’t want to miss a minute of it. And it will definitely
get your adrenaline pumping. As a heavily stylized, American-influenced
European tale of a small-time criminal and his stunning girlfriend, this
film can legitimately claim to be the millenium-end heir of Jean-Luc
Godard’s Breathless. And, not
to put too fine a point on it, breathless is what it will leave you.
But this is the MTV-age, hyper-kinetic, video-game,
oops-game-over-put-in-another-quarter version of the old story.
Watching Franka Potenta in the title role as she races through the
city streets like some sort of android on steroids, you can’t help
but be mesmerized by her and by the catalog of cinematic techniques
and camera shots that record her movements. As if all of this
weren’t enough, we also find that this is actually the German take
on chance, fate and coincidence—apparently Europe’s big movie motif
trend for 1998—making a nice triumvirate with the French (Chance or Coincidence) and
Spanish (The Lovers of the Arctic
Circle) variations on the same theme. (Seen 4
June 1999)
Lolita [1962]
Given all the sordid things we hear and read on a daily basis, Stanley
Kubrick’s 1962 film Lolita seems today almost strangely innocent.
(Whether the same will be true of Adrian Lyne’s new version starring Jeremy Irons is
doubtful.) We have to laugh at Vladimir Nabakov’s dark humor not
only because of the continuous sly double entendres but also
because his strange tale of Humbert Humbert tells us more than we really
want to know about the nature of our own sexuality and desire. In
defiance of common sense, we find ourselves feeling sympathetic toward
James Mason’s Humbert as he contemplates statutory rape and murder. This
all works as well as it does entirely because of the uniformly wonderful
cast (Mason, Shelley Winters, Sue Lyon) and in particular the amazing
genius of Peter Sellers as a paranoiac’s worst nightmare. (Seen 7 January 1997)
Lolita [1997]
There are exactly two reasons to do a new version of Lolita: 1) to
make the sexuality more frank than was possible in the 1962 version and 2) because you are a
complete idiot because why would anyone in his or her right mind want to
try to improve on the work of a master director like Stanley Kubrick who
was working with author Vladimir Nabakov’s own script! Having gotten
that off my chest, I have to say that the new version by Adrian Lyne
(Fatal Attraction, Nine 1/2 Weeks) isn’t really all
that bad. Humbert Humbert is just the sort of damaged,
sick-of-himself eurotrash character that Jeremy Irons has been working
toward for years. But, go figure, here Irons looks strangely boyish, tan
and fit. Unlike Shelley Winters who made her absurd character sympathetic
enough that we felt bad when she met her fate, Melanie Griffith is so
annoying that we feel nothing but relief at her demise. As for the title
role, young Dominique Swain seems to have been cast more for the tan and
muscle tone of her legs than for the allure of a youthful Sue Lyons.
Frank Langella has a thankless task reprising the role of Clare Quilty,
so superbly played by Peter Sellers. Wisely, Lyne keeps the Quilty
character mostly in the shadows as a lurking presence. On the positive
side, the film is nicely photographed, and it makes good use of its North
Carolina and Texas locations. And, as Lyne showed in Jacob’s
Ladder, he can definitely portray descent into paranoid madness. In
the end, the new film follows the old one fairly closely. Indeed, most of
its wit comes from inadvertent reminders of touches from the 1962
version. An interesting addition is a phosphorescent prolog about
Humbert’s own adolescence that attempts to explain his lifelong obsession
with pubescent nymphs. (Seen 19 June 1998)
Lón sa Spéir (Men at Lunch)
You have probably seen the photo. If you have ever visited the tourist locales in New York City, you have certainly seen it. It shows eleven workmen casually having their lunch while sitting in a row on a girder high above Manhattan. At some point I came to assume that the photo was posed, perhaps in a studio. That was probably around the time I started seeing different versions, with schoolchildren or yuppies sitting on the girder. But it turns out that the famous photo is exactly what it seems to be. If there was anything you ever wanted to know about it, this film will tell you all that is knowable about it. In this documentary by Séan Ó Cualáin and narrated in the Irish language by the actor Fionnula Flanagan, we learn the exact circumstances of the taking of the photo in 1932 high atop the under-construction Rockefeller Center. It turns out that a lot of photos were taken there around the same time, and many of them are equally breathtaking. Indeed, the film’s editing tricks with the photos at times will make viewers like me dizzy with vertigo. There is much background information on the times: the rash of skyscraper building during the Roaring 20s, the scarcity of jobs during the Great Depression, the state of immigrant communities. We don’t know who exactly took the photo, but we get the likely suspects. As for the men themselves, they surprisingly remain mostly anonymous—although we learn that lots of people frequently claim various ones as relatives. Two are pretty well identified by matching with other contemporaneous photos. And, by the end of the film, two others appear to be pretty much definitively identified, as two brothers-in-law from the County Galway village of Shanaglish.
(Seen 13 July 2012)
Lone Star
John Sayles’s movies don’t particularly excel in unusual plots, special
effects, or bravura starring performances. His movies are not Events. He
just crafts films very skillfully, and he writes intelligent scripts.
Lone Star is as good as anything he has ever done. It is a
sprawling story of a small Texas town on the Mexican border,
appropriately called Frontera. The large cast includes scores of speaking
parts. And refreshingly, the film gives equal time to numerous characters
who are Anglo, Hispanic, and African-American. The title may be the
ultimate product placement since there is much imbibing of Lone Star
beer. But the title also refers to the state of Texas as well as to an
old sheriff’s badge that is found with a skeleton on an old rifle range
as the story opens. The mystery of the victim’s identity as well as that
of the killer is the spine of the plot, but the movie is more interested
in exploring the various characters in the community as well as the
friction between sub-groups within the community. A recurring theme is
the conflict between parents and children, both living and dead. Chris
Cooper (also in Sayles’s Matewan) is fine as the sheriff
investigating the uncovered murder. Kris Kristofferson is chilling in
well-executed flashbacks as a corrupt former sheriff who held much of
Frontera in fear. (Seen 6 June 1996)
The Long Day Closes
Terence Davies’s 1992 follow-up to Distant Voices, Still Lives, this is in some ways the same movie. Again, we have a 1950s Liverpool family in what seems to be the same humble semi-detached home. And again we have the kind, hard=working mother and the young lad who is mad for the pictures. And instead of a conventional story, we have a languidly flowing set of vignettes that have the feel of old memories. Some people might go so far as to suggest that Davies always makes the same movie and it is always about himself. What is missing this time is the angry father, who dominated, emotionally if not in terms of screen time, Distant Voices. There is more focus on the lad: his loneliness, his being somehow different than other boys. Audiences more comfortable with mainstream movies may feel that this long day does not close soon enough. But lovers of film art will admire its careful attention to movement and composition and music. The film ends movingly with the title song, published in 1868. The lyrics by Henry Fothergill Chorley (music is by Arthur Sullivan of “Gilbert &” fame) meditate on death, but here they seem to be mourning a lost time.
(Seen 15 October 2008)
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
Either you have seen this movie or else you have talked to someone who
has seen it and/or you have read one or more reviews of it. So, you just
need me to confirm what you already know or have heard. All I can say
is… Thank you, Peter Jackson. Thank you for making a film that is
faithful to a great work of literature in every possible way except,
perhaps, in a literal way. Thank you for a movie that is epic in a way
that movies have only tried to be in recent years. Thank you for the kind
spectacle that computers were invented for but too often dehumanize.
Thank you for a fantasy movie that doesn’t nudge or wink or put its
tongue in its cheek—like so many movies in recent decades have had to do
because filmmakers had to show that they were, after all, way too hip to
take fantasy seriously. Thank you for a movie that genuinely frightens us
and touches us and makes us laugh and cry, even though most of the
characters are not even of the race of men. I’ve always had little
patience for people who condemn movies because they aren’t just like the
books that they happen to be based on. This movie puts my philosophy to
the test since The Lord of the Rings is one of my favorite works
of literature of all time. And you know what? I didn’t even miss Tom
Bombadil or the Ents. [Oops, see Reader
Feedback.] Now, I have just one request. Peter Jackson, once you’ve
wrapped up this trilogy, can you please start work on adapting Gabriel
García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude?
Please! (Seen 26 December 2001)
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
Wow. It’s finally over. After two years (December 2001 to December 2003), it seems so sudden to have this epic story finished. A couple of reviews I have read assertions that The Two Towers was the weakest of the three movies, but it may have been my favorite. My memories of the books are strongest with the beginning of the end of the story. The middle part was more vague, and that is where Peter Jackson’s movies had the least competition. Also, the third movie in any trilogy has a lot of obstacles to overcome. First, there is the fatigue factor. We have followed this story and these characters for literally years, and after a while we get too familiar with the male bonding between… fill in the blanks (Frodo and Sam, Legolas and Gimli, etc.), or the way the cavalry keeps showing up with a new army just in time to save the day whenever a battle is going badly. Some books get overshadowed by movie versions. Some movie versions are incidental to the great books they are based on. And some stories are big enough to support a classic book and a classic movie. (Gone with the Wind comes to mind.) This is one of those cases. Even at 9+ hours, the movies don’t allow the time for all the subtlety and subplots of the books, so people should definitely read the books. But for people who just don’t read books, these three movies (really one very long movie, originally distributed in three sections) by Peter Jackson provide a major epic that stands on its own. For those of us who both read the books and watch the movies, we have an experience so rich in ideas and themes and visuals and sensory experiences that we can’t imagine what is left for us to discover and enjoy. The beauty of life is that, somewhere out there, there will be something out there to match or exceed the enjoyment of the Tolkien/Jackson epic. At least that’s the hope. (Seen 27 December 2003)
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
What can I say? I’m in heaven. Thank God I lived to see this and the previous one, and please let me live long
enough to see the next one. The great thing is that this isn’t a sequel.
It’s just more of the same (great) movie. That’s a concept that is so
simple and obvious and yet almost never actually happens in real life.
Another great thing about these movies is that they are both book movies
and movie movies. They satisfy the wants and desires of fans of the books
but also those of film buffs. Without ripping anything off, The Two
Towers echoes so many epics, from swashbuckling classics like The Seven Samurai and their
western counterparts, i.e., The Magnificent Seven. Or war
epics, like Lawrence of Arabia. But there is so much more, like
when Gollum begins talking to himself and we find a character as weird
and complex as Psycho’s Norman
Bates. Or unexpected glints of recognition, like when we see King
Théoden is, quite appropriately, played by the same mournful actor
(Bernard Hill) who was the captain of the Titanic! (It’s also strange
seeing New Zealand actor Karl Urban as the dashing Éomér,
when I mainly think of him as the offbeat male lead in the quirky comedy
The Price of Milk.) Okay, I could
have done without Legolas doing the skateboard thing, but aside from that
everything was perfect. Sam’s speech at the end may have come off a bit
corny, but you know what, that’s not a problem with the speech. It’s a
problem with the world, that we’ve become too jaded to deal with innocent
movie characters. Thanks again, Peter Jackson! [Related commentary] (Seen
27 December 2002)
Losing Chase
Any movie that gives Helen Mirren a chance to strut her acting stuff is
always worth a look. As the title character in Losing Chase, she
gets to run the gamut from clinical depression to newfound serenity. The
directing debut of actor Kevin Bacon, this Showtime production also
serves as an acting vehicle for his wife Kyra Sedgwick (Singles),
the executive producer. Mirren’s character is recovering from a nervous
breakdown and, in stark contrast to Angel
Baby, mental illness here is defined as being extremely rude to
other people. So Mirren is constantly berating her husband (Beau Bridges)
and their children and especially the new “mother’s helper” (Sedgwick)
that her husband has hired. Thankfully, the course of the plot isn’t
always predictable, and Mirren does her usual fine work. She seems like
the only one of the main cast who actually belongs on Martha’s Vineyard,
where the story is set. (Seen 22 May 1996)
The Loss of Sexual Innocence
In a way, this newest and most personal film by Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas, One Night Stand) is a bit like
that great film Slaughterhouse-Five in that
it is about a man who seems to be unstuck in time. We keep bouncing
between Nic’s boyhood in Kenya, his traumatic adolescence and young
adulthood in north England, and marital tensions and a disastrous
filmmaking excursion in middle age. Oh yeah, and Adam and Eve in the
Garden of Eden. Figgis’s stated intention was to provide the viewer with
the same satisfaction that Figgis gets after reading a collection of
short stories. Long stretches with little or no dialog, however, don’t
really make this feel like a literary experience. It is one of those
movies that is best summed up with that most damning of words:
“interesting.” Anyway, we get to find out what it would have been like if
Adam and Eve had had to face the paparazzi upon being cast of out Eden.
Perhaps the most entertaining part of the evening was Figgis’ lavish
praise for Seattle’s newly restored Cinerama theater, a gift to the city
from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen which, like most of Allen’s “gifts,”
stands to make him a lot of money. (Seen 14 May
1999)
Lost and Delirious
This Canadian film by Léa Pool, who usually works in French but
here is working in English, is a powerful story of love, passion and
relationships. So it will appeal to a good many women. Will their
husbands and boyfriends want to come along? Well, it also features love
scenes between teenage schoolgirls in uniforms so, guys, you’ll have to
make the call. This tale about a girl totally driven over the edge by
obsessive love is the sort of stuff that is probably most appreciated by
teenagers with their own raging hormones fueling their passions. But it
has an appeal as well to those of us who can still sort of remember what
those raging hormones felt like. Our minds may tell us that lovesick
Paulie (played convincingly by Piper Perabo) is simply nuts, but after it
is all over, we are haunted by the force of her passion and the
indomitability of her spirit. The rest of the cast is uniformly good,
particularly Mischa Barton, as the narrator “Mouse,” and Jackie
Burroughs, as the most compassionate and empathetic headmistress any
girls school could want. (Seen 25 May 2001)
The Lost Boys
A couple decades before all this Twilight hoopla, this 1987 sort-of horror movie, sort-of comedy proved very popular without making vampires romantic heroes or, worse, sparkly. Executive-produced by Richard Donner and taking a child’s point of view, it can be thought of as The Goonies with vampires. It provided an early breakout role for Kiefer Sutherland as the main young vampire thug. It also marks the first pairing of the two Coreys (Haim and Feldman). Moreover, it gave most of us our first look at Jason Patric, son of playwright and Exorcist star Jason Miller and grandson of comedy legend Jackie Gleason. Director Joel Schumacher infused this film with the popular youth culture of the time, and the ghost of Jim Morrison (among others) is regularly invoked. As Haim’s older brother, who falls in with a bad crowd, i.e. the vampires, Patric is like Morrison’s reincarnation, as he exudes a raw animal energy. A scene where he first feels the lust for blood and proceeds to stalk Haim in a bathtub is truly creepy—for all kinds of reasons. From there, it goes on to a crowd-pleasing finish which, unfortunately, is more evocative of Home Alone than it is of all the darker possibilities that were raised by the provocative beginning.
(Seen 24 November 2012)
Lost Highway
If you know anything at all about David Lynch, then you probably already
have an idea as to whether or not you want to see Lost Highway.
Lynch has always created his own strange world where everything is a bit
(or a lot) off. You feel that it would all make sense if you could
just get a hold of the cheat sheet, but it never shows up. In Lost
Highway characters can change names, identities, or even bodies as
they go about their business to the oh-so-hip soundtrack. And time
doesn’t seem to flow quite as linearly as we would expect. Like Twin
Peaks, the story revolves around a murder mystery, but once again
Lynch seems more interested in tossing out more and more strange twists
than he is in actually solving it. This is like one of those weird
eastern European flicks that really just wants to play with your head.
The movie tries our patience early on with a lethargic pace, elliptic
dialog, and lots of dark rooms. Then suddenly it kicks into gear and
becomes more entertaining. Robert “Baretta” Blake is memorable as a
Mephistophelean Mystery Man. (Think of the dwarf in Twin Peaks
with Dennis Hopper’s bad attitude in Blue Velvet.) Poignantly,
there are brief appearances by Richard Pryor and the late Jack
“Eraserhead” Nance. (Seen 3 March 1997)
Lost in La Mancha
Now here is a case of life imitating art. Or rather, life turning out more than a bit like art which is trying to be made but doesn’t succeed at being made. Apparently planned as one of those “making of” documentaries, this movie turned into a fascinating cautionary tale. Filmmakers Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe were clearly given pretty much unfettered access as Terry Gilliam set out to make his long cherished dream project, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. As things fall apart before our eyes, it’s as though Gilliam realized that, even if his own movie couldn’t be made, a mirror documentary version of it might emerge by having Fulton and Pepe around with their cameras. The film is particularly interesting for showing us the day-to-day work that goes into pre-production and production when making a moderately budgeted movie on location (in Spain). Someone describes the project as trying to make “a Hollywood movie without Hollywood” and that the budget and time constraints leave no room for error. What’s amazing is how unglamorous and how much like actual work it all seems. Only when the on-screen talent begins showing up (veteran French actor Jean Rochefort, the perfect Quixote, and an incredibly young-looking Johnny Depp, with whom Gilliam had recently made Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) does it start to seem like show business—but only a bit. Then the calamities befall. A freak storm halts filming and changes the landscape and light. NATO planes keep roaring by overhead. Most crucially, Rochefort disappears back to Paris to consult doctors over pains that make it impossible for him to sit on a horse, triggering intervention by insurers. In the end, it makes Gilliam and crew look incredibly hapless and worthy of a dictionary entry for the word quixotic. Is this documentary to be the sole fruit of Gilliam’s sad quest? Hope springs eternal a decade later, as rumors continue to be heard about another go, with Robert Duvall in the title role.
(Seen 13 March 2012)
Lost in Space
In the 1960s the TV series Lost in Space and Star Trek came
to be the main standard bearers of the two main types of sci-fi TV and
movie franchises: those with cute kids and robots and those without. And
if you really liked one, you probably didn’t care much for the other. The
new movie version of Lost in Space is directly aimed at the same
audience as the TV series, i.e. pre-adolescents, and taken as such
it is a fair amount of fun. The cast is mostly fine. Matt LeBlanc is
apparently cursed forever by his Friends role, but Gary Oldman
comes up with one more inventive variation of an evil genius. Of course,
this is about a family, but then aren’t most sci-fi shows and flicks?
(Think about it.) The family dynamics here have been clearly updated for
the 1990s and, in fact, the family theme is harped on so much that movie
eventually turns into a strange combination of The Wizard of Oz
meets It’s a Wonderful
Life. By the end it feels as though we have seen one of those
Mormon public service announcements, but with much better special
effects. (Seen 6 April 1998)
Lost in Translation
This is the kind of movie that people will like or not, based entirely on the experience they bring to it. Personally, I was getting jetlag flashbacks throughout the film’s entire running time. I can’t think of another movie that has caught so deliberately the sense of disorientation that one feels making a major time zone shift as well as a major cultural shift. An added element is the strange experience, that may be quintessentially American, of seeing one’s own culture refracted and reflected back on oneself in a totally foreign setting. There is something so real about this simple story of two people adrift during a week in Tokyo that it feels as though it must have really happened. Writer/director Sofia Coppola, who was sneered at for daring to take over a role from Winona Ryder in her father’s final Godfather movie, is definitely getting the last laugh after her respectable enough adaptation of The Virgin Suicides and now this much acclaimed film. The big surprise is Bill Murray, whose well-known comic persona has always been the wry, sneering commentator on everything around him. Somehow, those jaded eyes have matured into showing something sad and vulnerable, as he demonstrated so well in Rushmore. As a man wondering how he got where is and connecting with a young woman wondering where she is going, he gives this film its world-weary soul. (Seen 28 January 2004)
The Lost World: Jurassic Park
A lot of critics have been saying that this sequel to Jurassic
Park is disappointing compared with the original. Well, to anybody
who thinks The Lost World is a letdown follow-up to a Steven
Spielberg mega-hit, I have only the following to say: Jaws II! The
fact is, this film does exactly what a sequel is supposed to do:
it basically recreates the original movie, only everything is
bigger—more dinosaurs, better dinosaurs, better vehicle-over-the-cliff
episode, more extras (listed in the credits with names like “Screamers”
and “Unlucky Bastard”) to get eaten, etc. As a bonus, we get a
King Kong remake tagged onto the end. The problem is that a remake
can never recreate the wonder of a true original, so you just have to sit
back and enjoy the ride and not worry about it. One of the best things
about this movie is Jeff Goldblum, who continually says out loud the
exact things that we are thinking. Early on he predicts humorously and
accurately what is going to happen. And, of course, it happens anyway. At
the film’s end, a cold-hearted, profits-obsessed executive gets eaten and
we’re supposed to cheer. There is a bit of hypocrisy here because you
know Spielberg has to have a whole bunch of guys like this working for
him. (Seen 16 June 1997)
Lou Reed: Rock and Roll Heart
Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’s documentary on the career of musician/poet
Lou Reed is basically the rock equivalent of one of those TV tributes to
someone like Bob Hope. The film is never less than 100 percent admiring
of Reed and his oeuvre. His personal life is barely mentioned at all, and
celebrities from David Bowie to Laurie Anderson to Sonic Youth’s Thurston
Moore (who seems to have a whole new career showing up in films like this
to praise his musical antecedents) are trotted out to shower
(justifiable) praise on Reed. For those who are not devoted fans, Lou
Reed: Rock and Roll Heart is an ideal way to put together all the
pieces of Reed’s long and diverse career. From the Andy Warhol days with
the Velvet Underground through the glam rock phase to the machine noise
stuff, it’s all covered here. For admirers this is a must-see. For
everyone else it’s a chance to say, “Oh yeah, that’s the guy who did that
‘Walk on the Wild Side’ song!” (Seen 9 July 1998)
Louis 19 le roi des ondes (Louis 19 King of the Airwaves)
This Canadian movie (in French) is the film festival winner so far in the
belly laugh competition. It is yet one more critique of the mass media,
but it is so clever and well executed that the whole idea of trashing
commercial television seems fresh and new. (And this film couldn’t appear
at a better time, as a whole nation sits spellbound watching court
proceedings on TV.) As a satire of TV’s effect on our lives, it is closer
to Being There than to
Network, but it is mostly the cinematic heir to such Frank Capra
classics as Meet John Doe. Louis is a young nebbish who is
fascinated with the idea of being on TV. His dream comes true when he
wins a contest to have his life televised round-the-clock for three
months by a cable channel. Improbably, he becomes a hit and he’s all
anybody in Montreal is talking about. (And, no, he isn’t televised
every single minute. There is a sign on his bathroom door that
says “Louis will return in five minutes” and, when he is in a private
meeting with the network brass, they run a retrospective The Best of
Louis.) As time goes on, Louis learns that being a media star has a
dark side. His life becomes cluttered with product placements from
advertisers. People want to hang out with him, so they can be on TV too.
And how would you like your mother or boss to be able to see what
you are doing all the time? Just when you think the filmmakers
have milked this idea dry, they come up with yet another twist that makes
you howl. I haven’t had this good a time at a movie in a long time. (Seen 27 May 1995)
Love Actually
I wish everybody could see this movie at a film festival. So much of the fun in the film is in the element of surprise. And, unfortunately, thanks to things like movie reviews and word of mouth, some of the best surprises won’t be surprises for many people who see this movie. But they’ll probably like it anyway. It is the directing debut of Richard Curtis, who previously penned Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill. So, already you have a good idea what sort of stuff to expect (especially with that title). As if to remind us who’s the creative force behind things, the movie even begins with a wedding and a funeral. And a whole lot of other stuff. Yes, this is one of those large-cast, sprawling narratives of multiple stories that weave and intersect and collide. But usually it’s not done so magically. There’s a bit of inspired casting, as well as a couple of really fun cameos, that just make this thing soar, even when it’s shamelessly manipulating us. Not all the threads wind up satisfactorily, but we needed something to make this celebration of all kinds of love seem something like real life. If all this is just confusing you, then just focus on the cast: Liam Neeson, Keira Knightley (Pirates of the Caribbean), Alan Rickman, Laura Linney, Colin Firth (Bridget Jones’s Diary), Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson (yes!), just enough of the hilarious Rowan Atkinson, and more! Especially entertaining (in addition to Atkinson) are Bill Nighy, as a burned-out rocker whose penchant for saying exactly what he’s thinking threatens his Christmas comeback, and Kris Marshall (The Most Fertile Man in Ireland) whose adventures in Wisconsin made me want to jump right on a plane back to America. (Seen 18 October 2003)
Love and Death on Long Island
If you’ve ever watched Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice, you
probably said something to yourself like, “Hey, they should update this
flick for the 90s. And make it a comedy!” Well, now somebody (first-time
director Richard Kwietniowski) has, and the result is actually more
entertaining and more intriguing than you might think. A better film
comparison would really be to Blake Edwards’ 10, with the
wonderful John Hurt (last seen aboard the space station Mir in Contact) in the Dudley Moore
role and Jason Priestly (gamely playing on his teen idol image) in the Bo
Derek part. Hurt plays a stodgy, reclusive English writer (a BBC radio
note sums him up as “erstwhile fogey, now cult”) who one day wanders into
a cinema and, instead of E.M. Forster’s Eternal Moment,
inadvertently finds himself viewing Hotpants College II. As he
rises to leave, he catches sight of Priestly and instantly and
obsessively falls in love. Hurt gives a delightfully improbable
performance as a curmudgeon getting in touch with his inner 12-year-old
female child. Chief among the joys of this film is watching him dragged
bemusedly into the 20th century by way of the teen idol sub-culture. The
wit here is truly inspired. [Related commentary] (Seen 18 October 1997)
Love at First Bite
In a strange way, this movie is really a precursor of the Twilight films. That is to say, it is all about romance with no horror, the vampire is sympathetic and the object of his affections is not really averse to joining his lifestyle. This flick was a surprise hit in 1979 and the only real unqualified box office triumph of actor George Hamilton’s career. (He was also executive producer.) The title wasn’t great, but not as bad as the original working title, Dracula Sucks. It primed us to expect a silly parody along the lines of the movie spoofs Mel Brooks had started turning out since Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein five years earlier. (Brooks finally got around to doing his vampire spoof in 1995 with Dracula: Dead and Loving It.) This movie, rather, was a New York romantic comedy that nearly didn’t need its vampire gimmick to work. Hamilton could just as well been playing a flesh-and-blood European with old-fashioned ideas about love—although the Dracula shtick does provide for plenty of gags and an entertaining turn by Arte Johnson as the insect-devouring manservant Renfield. Hamilton’s recent memoir Don’t Mind if I Do makes it clear that, aside from the accent, Hamilton was essentially playing himself. A thoroughly traditional—if perpetually romantically ardent—southerner by birth, Hamilton has always been the quintessential courtly seducer. His screen alter ego turned out to be a welcome tonic to the end of a decade of self-gratification and rejection of traditional mores. It was also the prototype for a kind of romcom we have seen ever since (e.g. Kate & Leopold, Enchanted) in which putative feminists end up deciding they really want a big strong man to treat them like princesses after all. As the love interest, Susan Saint James is funny and beautiful but looks way too healthy, by today’s standards anyway, to be a top model. Richard Benjamin is very funny as the over-analytical sort-of boyfriend with major commitment issues.
(Seen 20 August 2010)
Love God
Director Frank Grow made this film more or less as something to accompany
his favorite heavy metal music. He says his main inspirations were
underground comic books and Fox TV’s Cops. The target seems to be
(aside from well-meaning film festival devotees fighting jet lag to stay
awake for a midnight movie) 12-year-old males. There is some sort of
story about mental patients being released from a hospital and having to
contend with a phallic prehistoric worm cum [heh! heh! he said
“cum”!] destructive love deity. One of the monsters looks like Marlon
Brando in the role of Gumby. Also among the movie’s charms is a blob of a
head that appears on the screen periodically to yell “Love God!” for no
particular reason. We also get to learn what sort of people make a living
cleaning up crime scenes. (Seen 18 May 1997)
Love Happens
Innocuous enough, this romantic comedy is occasionally amusing. It is
mostly like watching an extended TV sitcom. Set in modern-day Los
Angeles, where everyone drives sparkling sports utility vehicles while
talking on their cell phones, this is the story of Lisa who is constantly
dating but is incapable of committing. She has one of those cubicle jobs
that always seems to provide plenty of time for flirting, plotting with
her best friend/roommate/co-worker and chatting on the phone with her
mother. Lisa looks like a bit of a cross between Jennifer Aniston and
Helen Hunt, but she really reminds me of Deborah Walley (anyone else
remember her?). Her main love interest looks like a young Christopher
Reeve. Her best friend looks like Julia Sweeney. The love interest’s
obnoxious best friend is a bit like Rob Schneider. And her insufferably
chipper secondary love interest is a lot like (I’m not making this up)
Tony Blair. If you don’t like shocks or surprises at the cinema, this is
the perfect film for you. Tony Cookson wrote and directed. Best line:
“Three and a half weeks with one man! What was I thinking?” (Seen 4 June 1999)
Love in the Time of Cholera
Everything seemed very promising. The director was Mike Newell, whose eclectic c.v. (Enchanted April, Into the West, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire) has dealt with such grand themes as love, romance, fantasy and far-flung cultures. The screenwriter was Ronald Harwood, who penned two of the best movies of the past couple of decades (Cry, The Beloved Country, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly). And the source material is from one of the best authors of all time (and one of my personal favorites), Gabriel García Márquez. They even did filming in the actual setting, in Cartagena, Colombia. So what could possibly go wrong? Is it the international cast? Maybe. Despite his clear talent and star appeal, Spain’s Javier Bardem doesn’t seem to be right for the central role of Florentino Ariza, although the most miscast is Colombian-born John Leguizamo as Fermina Urbino’s domineering father. Maybe the filmmakers were hoping that the mere fact of being in the country that produced the story would lend it some of the book’s magic. Instead, though, the screenplay just seems to be ticking off plot points instead of sweeping us up. Maybe it was an impossible task. But I still have hope that there is a filmmaker out there whose visual style can do what García Márquez’s prose can do, i.e. through some sort of magic make a story more than the sum of its mere parts.
(Seen 17 May 2013)
Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon
The problem with movie biographies of famous artists (especially gay
ones, for some reason) is that they so often give little sense of why the
person should be famous in the first place. This is definitely the case
with this study of the destructive relationship between Francis Bacon,
considered one of this century’s greatest painters, and his lover and
sometimes subject, George Dyer. It doesn’t help that for legal reasons
director John Maybury wasn’t actually able to use any of Bacon’s
paintings in the film. (So much for exploiting the most visual of
mediums.) The idea instead is that Maybury evokes Bacon’s paintings
through visual cinematic style, using strange angles, perspectives,
lighting, and distortion, e.g. shooting a scene in a bar entirely
through empty glasses. Sometimes this stuff is clever and sometimes it’s
just plain distracting. We learn that Bacon was a sharp-tongued,
upper-class twit and that Dyer was from the wrong side of the tracks, so
they basically had an (excuse the expression) upstairs/downstairs sort of
relationship. We hear several times how great an artist Bacon is, but we
don’t really get a sense of why he should be held in such high regard. He
comes off as petty, self-involved, and not particularly deep. The film
does include one of the most harrowing suicide scenes I have seen in a
movie; afterwards, you will feel like getting your own stomach pumped.
Maybury is a disciple of the late director Derek Jarman, and at this
point I’d have to say that Jarman was better. (Seen 28
September 1998)
Love Serenade
This dark Australian comedy threatens to do for Barry White what
Muriel’s Wedding (and The Adventures of Priscella, Queen of the
Desert) did for Abba. The movie, by first-time director Shirley
Barrett, demonstrates what David Lynch taught us years ago: people in
small towns can be mighty odd. The story revolves around two single
sisters, who live in a decaying backwater town, and the slimy lounge
lizard of a disc jockey who moves next door and comes between them.
Dimiti, the younger sister, is an innocent whose actions aren’t always
predictable. Vicki-Ann is the type who will show up on a man’s doorstep
in a wedding gown the morning after a first date. You’re never quite sure
exactly where this story is headed, and that’s just as well since it
relies a lot on strange touches and a few surprises. You’re better off
just sitting back and enjoying the ride. (Seen 2 June
1997)
Loved
After Breaking Up, the
last thing I needed was another bad-relationship movie. But next on
the schedule was the world premiere of writer/director Erin Dignam’s
Loved. This one is a bit better, and it certainly is
thought-provoking. But it is ultimately frustrating and disappointing.
Its non-judgmental near-analysis of a violent relationship is liable to
be controversial and probably isn’t very politically correct. Robin
Wright-Penn (The Princess Bride, Forrest Gump), in short
dark hair, gets to strut her acting stuff as a woman forced to testify
against an abusive ex-boyfriend. Although he battered her and is
responsible for the deaths of two other women, she feels she deserved
everything he did to her. William Hurt is the thoughtful prosecutor who
rambles into esoteric conversations with her on the stand during a
pre-trial hearing. Unfortunately, Dignam’s self-avowed approach to
filmmaking is not to give out too much information about characters,
motives, or back stories, thus much of the film is needlessly confusing.
Sean Penn has a bizarre cameo which seems to exist mainly because he is a
producer and the star’s husband. (Seen 6 June
1997)
Lovely & Amazing
My friend Jim says that, whenever he sees a movie in which Brenda Blethyn
plays the mother of a black girl, he wants to slap everyone in the movie.
There are only two such films, as far as I know (this movie and Secrets & Lies), but the pattern
is clear. The women of the Marks family sound great on paper. Mother Jane
has adopted an African-American child from a disadvantaged background.
Daughter Michelle is an artist. Other daughter Elizabeth is an actor
whose first movie is being released. But the film deliberately and
cynically (but not unsympathetically) shows how screwed up these women
are, despite their best efforts. If this sounds like a chick flick, well,
it is—with a capital C and a capital F. That means that the male
characters are mainly jerks and the female characters are mostly
neurotic. And I mean really neurotic. We haven’t seen so many women doing
so much obsessing over their physical appearance and how unfulfilled
their lives are and how the men in their lives aren’t meeting their needs
since, well, I guess the last episode of Sex and the City.
Director Nicole Holofcener seems to have a penchant for project titles
featuring the conjunction “and.” In addition to directing for the
aforementioned Sex and the City, she directed a Gilmore
Girls episode called “Secrets and Loans” and a feature film called Walking and Talking. This
movie is a bit more interesting than the average chick flick,
however, because of its subtly subversive view. It’s sort of a
kinder, gentler Todd Solondz (Welcome to the Dollhouse, Happiness) film. In a
supporting role Dermot Mulroney, who usually comes off as wooden and
self-absorbed, is perfect here playing an actor who is wooden and
self-absorbed. (Seen 22 July 2002)
Loverboy
A decade and a half before he became Grey’s Anatomy’s Dr. McDreamy, Patrick Dempsey had a nice little thing going as a nerdy clown in teen comedies. This one, in which Dempsey plays a college student trying to earn tuition so he can get back with his girlfriend and patch up their quarrel, has all the trappings of a French farce. It is directed by Joan Micklin Silver, who had previously given us more serious films like Hester Street, Head Over Heels (which began with a much more apropos title, Chilly Scenes of Winter, before the studio ruined it by changing the ending) and Crossing Delancey. The setup is that Dempsey’s summer stint as a pizza delivery boy evolves into a very successful gigolo sideline when he susses out that the women ordering the “extra anchovies” (code for tossing the sheets) really mostly need a sympathetic ear and a bit of romance. His clients are certainly first class. They include Barbara Carrera, Kirstie Alley, Princess Leia herself (Carrie Fisher) and even Kate Jackson as (paging Dr. Freud!) Dempsey’s own clueless mother. Their husbands include the likes of Vic Tayback and Robert Picardo. (In a Star Trek match-up, future Voyager cast member Picardo is paired with former Vulcan Alley.) What is surprising is seeing how utterly ballet-like young Dempsey handles the considerable physical comedy. His movements are poetry in motion.
(Seen 1 September 2012)
Lucía y el sexo (Sex and Lucia)
Shown at the Dublin International Film Festival as part of a tribute to Spanish filmmaker Julio Medem, this is the filmmaker’s second most recent movie. (His newest, also shown at the festival, is Basque Ball, a documentary about the Medem’s native Basque country.) Medem was there to introduce the film and amusingly confounded his translator as he tried to explain to the audience what it is about. Like Medem’s previous films (especially Earth), this one is maddeningly strange and full of less-than-obvious meanings. It is essentially one part art film, one part melodrama, and one part skin flick. So, in theory, it should have all movie audiences covered. The most satisfied viewers will probably be the ones wanting to see very attractive people making love. The overall plot is the weakest part. The most intriguing aspect is figuring out the meanings underneath the narrative, what we Spanish language literature students would call the código literario. Any time the hero of a story is a writer and there is book within a book (or, here, within a movie), you can figure that your brain is going to get twisted. In this flick, it gets more than just twisted. It gets knotted in kinks. (Seen 19 February 2004)
Lucky Break (Paperback Romance)
Each year a running trend emerges over the course of viewing scores of
movies at the Seattle International Film Festival. Two years ago it was a
surge of updates to the film noir genre. Last year there was a slew of
low-budget independent films about people making low-budget independent
films. So far this year it seems to be a resurgence of the screwball
romantic comedy. The Heartbreak
Kid, Pretty Baby, Alegre Ma Non Troppo, and A Business Affair all fit into
this category to some extent. (But definitely not L’Enfer!) Now we have Lucky
Break, an Australian comedy about a romance between an author of
trashy novels (the kind with Fabio sans shirt on the cover) and a shady
jewelry dealer. The lucky break of the title is a literal one. Sophie
(Gia Carides) breaks her leg in an elaborate slapstick scene, and this
means that Eddy (Anthony LaPPaglia), who has just met her, goes several
weeks before learning that she has had polio since childhood. How will he
react when he finds out? And what about the little matter of his
(predictably obnoxious) financée? In addition to the resulting
misunderstandings and close calls, we are treated to Sophie’s Walter
Mitty-like escapes into her writing (every passage seems to end with the
couple in the “Trojan horse position”) which she has the bad habit of
reading out loud while working at the public library. I’ve seen this
stuff done as well or better elsewhere, but the movie gets extra points
for recognizing that there are “differently abled” people among us and
that humor can be derived from their situations without making fun of
them. (Seen 26 May 1995)
Luke
In a lot of ways, this biography of legendary Irish musician Luke Kelly
is fairly standard stuff, but by the end it manages to pack quite an
emotional wallop—as well as bringing to life an era that seems a million
years away and yet as recent as yesterday. The film essentially makes the
case that Kelly was Ireland’s Pete Seeger, i.e. a politically
aware and progressive folk singer who somehow became the conscience of
his time. But as a subject, Kelly is even more interesting than that
because of his notorious bad boy ways and early death. Although Kelly
died in 1984, this documentary has an urgent and modern feel about it,
largely through the testimonies of people in the news today like Gerry
Adams and John Hume. Indeed, there seems to be no lack of personalities
to step forward and speak of Kelly’s talents and exploits. Footage of
Kelly is scarce in the early parts (causing the filmmakers to rely
heavily on a lot of standard archival shots), but there is more than
enough to make up for that later on during Kelly’s many years with The
Dubliners, the seminal folk group whose name he suggested after the James
Joyce book. Films like this always run the risk of beatifying their
subject, but this one manages to be candid enough even while it
appreciates quite warmly the man that it examines. (Seen 23
January 2000)
Lust Och Fagring Stor (All Things Fair)
Sweden’s All Things Fair was nominated for an Oscar for Best
Foreign Language Film this past year (losing to Antonia’s Line).
It is an epic coming-of-age story by Bo Widerberg (Elvira Madigan)
and stars his son Johan as a high school student who gets more education
than he bargained for. It is 1943 in Malmö and, while Sweden is not
involved in the war, it still feels its effects. Stig and his friends
talk a lot about sex and penis sizes, but talk turns to action for Stig
when his teacher (who looks a lot like Linda Hamilton) decides to take
advantage of the crush Stig has on her. Ironically, Stig winds up
becoming good friends with her husband and, in some ways, becomes closer
to him than to his own father. Overall, the film is nostalgic and
provocative in a manner reminiscent of the late Louis Malle. (Seen 18 May 1996)
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