|
|
P.S. I Love You
Chick flick par excellence, maybe this movie moves some to tears. But mostly I just found its characters annoying. Anyway, the whole dead-lover-who-won’t-go-away thing was sealed for me when Jeffrey Dean Morgan showed up, since that was his trademark turn on Grey’s Anatomy a couple of seasons ago. Still, for my money, the Seattle-born Morgan makes a more amiable Irishman than Scotsman Gerard Butler. The narrative structure is kind of interesting, as the device of the dead husband arranging a year’s worth of letters to be delivered to his widow (kind of creepy, no?) has the effect of telling the story of their romance in reverse. Unfortunately, the beginning, when we finally get to it, wasn’t much more endearing than the ending. Anyway, the book on which this is based had quite a high profile in Ireland since it was authored by Cecelia Aherne, whose dad was the country’s Taoiseach (prime minister) when it came out. Sure sign that the filmmakers knew they were dealing with a weak hand: inclusion of lots of clips of much better tear-jerkers (Bette Davis, Judy Garland).
(Seen 26 December 2010)
Le Pacte des loups (Brotherhood of the Wolf)
I’ll say one thing about Christophe Gans’s movies: they are fun to watch.
The action is frequently slowed down or sometimes sped up, so that the
sensation you get alternates between a dark, eerie dream to a sudden dip
in a roller coaster. It’s probably no coincidence that the opening scene
(just the first of many with whip-lashing, bone-crunching violence) looks
very much like the first scene in Jaws—except that there are
rocks instead of water. If you have seen Gans’s Crying Freeman, then you have
a pretty good idea what to expect. American actor Mark Dascascos
(who had the title role in Crying Freeman as well as the
Brandon Lee role in a TV series based on The Crow) is on
hand, but this time he is the sidekick. He is a Native American in
18th century France, but he really has more in common with the David
Carradine character in Kung Fu. He and Samuel Le Bihan as the
hero, Vincent Cassel as a petulant aristocrat, Monica Bellucci as a
prostitute with a mysterious day job, Jérémie
Rénier (who made an impression in the grittily realistic La Promesse) and others make
up one of the most physically attractive casts we have seen in some
time. There are basically two types of characters in this movie:
those that are “drop dead” and those that do drop
dead. (Several fall into both categories.) This being a French film,
I kept expecting some kind of Big Statement about the historical
period. Like, the beast represents the savagery of the aristocracy.
Or, the beast represents the savagery of the coming revolution. But,
in the end, this film has as much to say about the French Revolution
as the James Bond movies have to say about 20th century geopolitics.
Still, it is a lot of fun and definitely one heck of a wild ride.
(Seen 25 January 2002)
Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros (The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros)
It is hard to know what to make of this little melodrama from the Philippines, directed by Auraeus Solito. If the titular 12-year-old protagonist were an orphan, it could nearly be seen as a gender-crossing version of Oliver Twist, and it nearly works that way anyway. Maxi, played engagingly by Nathan Lopez, sashays and sways his way through his Manila neighborhood with the utmost of self-confidence and without the slightest bit of self-consciousness. “You look pretty today, Maxi” sneers a street tough, just before he and his friend are about to attack him. “I’m always pretty,” shoots back Maxi, without the slightest hesitation. The film’s dramatic conflict arises when Maxi’s loyalties are torn between his petty criminal father and brothers and the new handsome cop, who idealistically wants to enforce the law—and upon whom Maxi has a mad crush. We never know what to expect next (although we frequently expect the worst), and that is all to the good. In the final reel, we have all the makings of tragedy, but instead we get an ending that shifts gears in a slightly confusing manner. In any event, it is hard not to be mostly enthralled with the portrait of Manila street life and quite taken by its shining young lead performer.
(Seen 10 July 2007)
The Painted Veil
In the old days of Hollywood, they brought over lots of English actors, but when they made a movie set in a far-off, exotic locale, it was often shot on a Los Angeles back lot. Nowadays, however, in a movie like this, the exotic locales are real, but the English people are fake. The highlight of this film by John Curran is the striking scenery of rural China. Of course, there were films shot on location in the old days, and this movie is like nothing so much as one of those great classic location movies by filmmakers like David Lean—although not quite on the same scale as his better known epics. This is really quite a nice movie, with a serious message and a very grown-up love story. Naomi Watts makes a convincing headstrong young Englishwoman, but Edward Norton seems to be trying to look like Ralph Fiennes—which only serves to make us think about how much better this movie would be if Ralph Fiennes had been the star. And just imagine if Jude Law had played the “other man” instead of Liev Schrieber. Normally, I am a defender of any actor being able to play any role. But, in this case, this very English story by a very English author (W. Somerset Magham) probably would have been better served by more actual Brits in the cast. Not much chance of that, though, since it was clearly the star power of Norton and Watts (credited among the producers) that got the movie made in the first place. Still, it is a fine movie and well worth the investment of two hours. And there are still the pleasures of supporting roles played by Toby Jones (who will now forever always remind us of Truman Capote) and Diana Rigg(!), as a French mother superior.
(Seen 21 February 2007)
The Pallbearer
This gloomy comedy is called by some The Graduate for the 90s. At
least this time the Anne Bancroft character (a very blonde, except for
the roots, Barbara Hershey) and the Katherine Ross character (Gwyneth
Paltrow) are not mother and daughter. And, since it’s the 90s, the Dustin
Hoffman character (David Schwimmer) doesn’t have to have his parents’
friends tell him about “plastic.” He’s got his ambitious, aspiring yuppie
friends for that kind of advice. Schwimmer mopes his way through the film
with his heart-tugging patented little-boy-lost look, but it’s hard to
worry about him too much since we know he’s making a ton of money on
Friends. (Somehow I suspect that this is a much more true-to-life
look at twentysomething life in New York than Schwimmer’s TV gig.) A
comic highlight of the film is one of the briefest and most pointless
eulogies in history. Paltrow gets to spend some screen time with her Emma co-star Toni Colette. (Seen 19 June 1996)
Palookaville
For pure ineptness, the criminal “gang” in Palookaville gives the
guys in Bottle Rocket a serious
run for their money. Sid, Russ and Jerry are three losers who live in
Jersey City. They are way too smart to have jobs, so Jerry (Adam Trese)
lets his wife support him and their infant; Russ (Vincent Gallo) lives
with his mother, sister and brother-in-law; and I don’t know what Sid
(William Forsythe) and his two smelly dogs live on. Part of the problem
seems to be that, underneath all the tough talk and macho banter, these
guys are just too nice to be criminals. And it probably isn’t a good sign
that they are always discussing their next big haul more or less publicly
in a coffee shop or at Russ’s place. (His brother-in-law is a cop.) There
is just enough sadness about these dead-end lives to give a touch of
substance to the humor of this story. This is the directorial debut of
Alan Taylor. (Seen 4 June 1996)
Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills
Forget O.J.! The most intriguing real-life trial you’re likely to see on
film is Paradise Lost by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, who
previously made Brother’s Keeper. It is no coincidence that it
takes its title from John Milton’s epic about God and Satan. There are
few things, if any, more evil than the crime committed a few years ago in
West Memphis, Arkansas. Three eight-year-old boys were savagely murdered,
the crime involving sexual assault and mutilation. One of the resulting
trials took on the trappings of a witchcraft trial since the
prosecution’s argument for motive was that the murderers were Satanists.
(In an eerie twist of fate, the crime’s case number even ends in
“-0666"!) Unlike Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line, this
documentary—which has extraordinary access behind the scenes to the
defense, prosecution, and the families involved—does not attempt to
“solve” the case for us. We are left to wonder if the three teenage
suspects are guilty or if they were persecuted because they were
eccentric, liked to wear black and listened to Metallica. We see that the
community was ripe for a witchcraft trial as we hear the victims’
families and others speak vehemently in the best southern evangelical
tradition. In addition to being a tragedy and an impenetrable mystery,
this film is a slice of American life that people in other regions aren’t
always comfortable with. (Seen 1 June 1996)
Paradise Now
Imagine that, one evening, you suddenly learn that you have less than 24 hours to live. And you can’t say a word about it to any of your friends and family. What would you do (and not do) during the time you had left? This is just one of the themes raised by this quite amazing film by Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad, and one we don’t think about too much when reading about suicide bombers in the newspaper. The film also adds the interesting but totally cinematic touch of further asking: and what if you met a girl during those last few hours? The movie is so full of provocative questions and issues that it came as quite a surprise when, after the screening, the filmmaker said that he had only wanted to make a good suspense thriller and that all the political stuff got included as an inevitable afterthought. Interestingly, the movie, which is nothing less than gripping, is at its weakest in the later stretches, where it most follows standard thriller conventions. It is at its best when the two young West Bank men, who have volunteered for a dual suicide bomb mission in Tel Aviv, debate the morality and efficacy of the campaign between themselves and also with the young Europeanized daughter of a celebrated martyr. Its story is told squarely from the Palestinian view, giving us a glimpse into what generations of refugee life is like, as well as how it contrasts starkly with the standard of living in urban Israel. The danger with this subject matter is that it could easily turn to rank propaganda, but this movie doesn’t. Based on the reported reaction from Palestinian and Israeli viewers, Abu-Assad got it just right. Most reaction on both sides was positive, he said, and a minority on either side criticized it for making the suicide bombers either too human or not heroic enough. Indeed, the human touches are the most amazing. In a grimly hilarious scene, one of the men has to repeat his speech for his martyr’s video more than once because the camera malfunctions. On the second go, he inserts an aside to his mother, mentioning that he has found a better place to buy water filters. (Seen 7 July 2005)
The Parent Trap
When I first saw this movie as a child, I thought: how cool would it be
to find out I had a twin somewhere! When I watch it now (with my own
child), I think: how cool would it be to have a fabulous ranch house in
Carmel, California! Otherwise, this Disney original mainly makes us aware
of how tame movies about impish, trouble-causing scamps used to be. In
the pre-Macauley Culkin world, merely tipping over a boat or cutting away
the back of a girl’s dress was the height of juvenile hilarity. What’s
also notable, with the perspective of time, is how much Disney’s square,
squeaky-clean image was not entirely deserved. The details of this little
tale of divorce, twins separated without their knowledge and spousal
abuse would later become fodder for trash TV shows like Jerry
Springer. And yet there is still something wholesome about this
flick. Maybe it’s the way that nobody seems to notice or care that the
twins both have English accents for no logical reason. Or the fact that
Maureen O’Hara’s fiery Irish redhead is the daughter of Boston
bluebloods. Her character is an inevitable carryover from her immortal
role in The Quiet Man, just as the
lanky Brian Keith’s is a foreshadowing of his definitive television role
as the single dad in Family Affair. Most interesting is the
subtext of bitchy cat fighting among the female characters, particularly
the gold digger played by Joanna Barnes, who would play her character’s
mother in the remake 37 years later.
(Seen 28 August 2002)
The Parent Trap
Probably the major question on most film critics’ minds these days is,
why would hip director Gus Van Sant undertake a virtual shot-by-shot
remake of that classic cinematic masterpiece, The Parent Trap? Oops, wrong
movie. Okay, so actual director Nancy Meyers (writer/producer of
Private Benjamin, Baby Boom and the Steve Martin Father of the Bride movies)
didn’t use David Swift’s script from the 1961 original—which would two
and a half decades later spawn three made-for-cable sequels. (And before
all that it was actually a 1953 British film called Twice Upon a
Time.) But this Disney remake follows the Disney original pretty
closely. But that’s okay because this is after all a movie for kids and
everyone knows that kids want new stuff instead of hand-me-downs. I don’t
know if young Lindsay Lohan has the same exotic appeal that England’s
Hayley Mills had for us young boys in the early 1960s, but it is for
someone far younger than I to deal with that question. I can say,
however, that Natasha Richardson is just swell in the old Maureen O’Hara
role. Always ravishing, she seems to have now matured into Emma Thompson.
(And that’s a very good thing.) The film’s unlikely story is still good
fun because it plays on so many childhood fantasies: having a twin,
finding out your real father has a cool ranch in northern
California, finding out your real mother is a glamorous woman in a
big city, and (most poignantly) having your divorced parents get back
together. In a nice touch, Polly Holliday’s camp counselor is called
Marva Kulp, after the late wonderful Nancy Kulp in the original. (Seen 21 December 1998)
Paris Brûle-t-il? (Is Paris Burning?)
When Americans think of the 1944 liberation of Paris, the images that come to mind are of Yanks rolling into the city to the cheers of residents and copious kisses from French women. This sprawling extravaganza by René Clément (Les Maudits, Jeux Interdits, Plein Soleil) has that all right, but it also recounts that the Americans and the Resistance had some real fighting to do in taking the city and that France’s timeless capital very nearly was razed as an act of spite by Hitler. Released two decades after the events, the nearly-three-hour black-and-white movie has the feel of a docudrama. Filmed on the actual locations, all of Paris seems to be one giant soundstage. Seemingly every big French star of the day has a role. Alain Delon and Jean-Paul Belmondo are busy organizing the Resistance. Jean-Louis Trintignant crosses the German lines to convince the Yanks not to bypass Paris on their way to the Rhine. Simone Signoret shows up running a café and letting everyone use her phone. And I haven’t even mentioned Yves Montand, Leslie Caron, Claude Dauphin and Jean-Pierre Cassel. It gets more surreal. Orson Welles is the Swedish consul Nordling. Kirk Douglas is General Patton. Robert Stack is General Sibert. Glenn Ford is Omar Bradley. Hey look, there’re Anthony Perkins and George Chakiris as soldiers. Oh yeah, and the head German in the city is Gert Fröbe, who two years earlier was the titular villain in Goldfinger. Yes, in the end, it is one long string of star turns and a bit of mythmaking. But it is also quite a powerful and moving lesson about traumatic events that happened not that long ago. The emotional impact is heightened by Maurice Jarre’s deceptively simple and hauntingly Parisian musical theme. The impact for me personally was all the greater upon realizing that I actually met the real-life character played by Alain Delon. After Jacques Chaban-Delmas was a young general for the Resistance, he served as prime minister and, while I was a student in France, was a candidate for president. He was also mayor of Bordeaux for 48 years, in which capacity he hosted a vin d’honneur for foreign students which I attended. And, no, there was no indication at the time that he was ever as young or as pretty as Alain Delon. This would definitely make a very good day-long double bill with Les Misérables.
(Seen 1 June 2013)
Paris Was a Woman
If you’re interested at all in early 20th century arts and literature
and, in particular, the Lost Generation, you should find this documentary
fascinating. Using extensive archival film and audio clips, as well as
interviews with historians, it traces the path of a community of women
who came together in Paris between the two world wars. The group included
the Americans Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas as well as the
publishers and booksellers Adriene Monnier and Sylvia Beach, the
journalist Janet Flanner (who wrote for The New Yorker for decades
under the name of Genet), and the novelist Djuna Barnes. Less time is
devoted to the writer Colette and the singer Josephine Baker. The film is
alternately enlightening, inspiring, gossipy, and entertaining. (Seen 17 May 1996)
The Parting (The Farewell)
A Soviet film about a 300-year-old island village that has to be
abandoned because it is going to be flooded for a hydroelectric project.
Some of the older people take it kind of hard. Just imagine My Sweet
Little Village with screenplay by William Shakespeare and directed by
Ingmar Bergman. (Seen 16 May 1987)
The Party
Something I don’t like to talk about much is the fact that, for too many years of my young life, I was madly in love with Claudine Longet. I know she always had a really annoying singing voice, but what can I say? I was even willing to wait out her marriage to the singer Andy Williams. I think it was when she shot her lover dead that I finally was able to move on emotionally. Anyway, this movie gave her the absolute best role of her non-stellar film career, but that’s a mere footnote. This is the movie that Blake Edwards and Peter Sellers made instead of the third Pink Panther movie—which was directed the same year (1968) unsuccessfully by Bud Yorkin, with Alan Arkin as Inspector Clouseau. On the surface, The Party appears to be more of the same, with Sellers playing an Indian bumbler instead of a French one. But it is much more than that. Sellers’s Hrundi V. Bakshi is an everyman/clown in the grand tradition that goes all the way back to Charlie Chaplin. The situations he gets himself into are just close enough to embarrassing incidents in our own lives that we identify and sympathize with him entirely—even though events tend to escalate to impossibly dramatic levels. But, as a non-American, he is a detached observer of 1960s Los Angeles, and in this way The Party is a direct precursor to Edwards’s 1981 poison pen letter to the entertainment industry, S.O.B.. There is much skewering here of movie business foibles, notably in the person of a sleazy jerk producer played by Gavin MacLeod. While Sellers clearly dominates the comedy (a friend who grew up in India tells me that his portrayal is flawless), it is worth noting that he is not the primary, or even secondary, agent of chaos that makes the titular party the disaster of the social season. There is, after all, the little matter of the hosts’ college student daughter and her friends with the elephant. And, most delightfully, there is the disaster-spawning waiter, who surreptitiously imbibes most of the drinks he is supposed to be serving the guests. He is played by Steve Franken, who will be best remembered as the snobby Chatsworth Osborne Jr. on the classic TV series The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. Movies like this can be frustrating for people with short attention spans. But everyone else should more than content to watch a wonderful ensemble of masters of satire and slapstick at work. (Seen 12 May 2006)
Party Girl
The program notes describe Mary (played by Parker Posey) as a Holly
Golightly for the ‘90s. That well may be, although this film is not
exactly Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Mary doesn’t need George Peppard
to come along and straighten her out. She decides on her own that what
she really wants to be is a librarian. Along the way on this journey of
self-discovery we get to go to a lot of parties and meet a lot of strange
and/or interesting people—some of whom are concerned by Mary’s frivolous ways.
But not to worry. The whole cast comes together at the end (at a party,
where else?) and everything works out. Like a lot of parties, this movie
is a pleasurable enough place to be for a couple of hours, but it may not
stand out in your memory from a lot of others you’ve been to. (Seen 3 June 1995)
La Pasión Turca (Turkish Passion)
When we first meet Desi, she seems like a nice, sensible, virginal young
woman who is about to get married. By the end of the film, she has, uh,
changed. She and her nice but boring husband make the mistake of going
off on a holiday to Istanbul. Desi has no sooner stepped on Turkish soil
when she swoons and is overtaken by strange new feelings. Minutes later
she is going at it with the guide in the tour bus while everyone else is
in a café having coffee. Things go down hill from there.
Turkish Passion, directed by Vincente Aranda (The Lovers),
resembles nothing so much as one of those old Emmannuelle movies. It also
begs the question: What kind of married person finds out they are sterile
and decides to keep it a secret just so they can use it in an argument
someday? (Seen 1 June 1996)
Pas în doi (Paso Doble)
This is sort of a Romanian Heartbreak Kid. The film is framed by
shots through a long corridor of a back lit young man in fencing gear. By
the last shot, be has gone through hell (albeit a hell of his own
making). Mihai is a young factory worker who is pretty darn cute. His
hobbies include fencing, playing the flute, and making love to his
girlfriend while listening to Haydn. He shares a room with Ghita in the
workers hostel. Ghita, who looks like a slimmed down version of Avery
Schreiber, is anything but smooth. When he tries to speak in public, he
gets totally tongue-tied and then winds up giving the speech he meant to
give later, standing in the shower with all his clothes on. Ghita is
hopelessly smitten with an unwed mother/co-worker named Maria. But when
she meets Mihai, she falls for him and he for her. Not that he lets this
interfere with his stumbling into a vague betrothal with his other
girlfriend. This film is unmistakably Eastern European. Workers
committees and organizations provide the context for the action. But
there are some surprisingly Western-looking aspects. In the park, a
jogger wearing earphones passes. The workers all go to a disco, where
Mihai and Ghita do a pretty wild rap while manning the turntables. The
camera angles, editing, and use of music reminded me of nothing so much
as Miami Vice (at least during its first couple of seasons). The
cumulative effect of this film was strangely potent, and somehow it
managed to do the best job I have seen of capturing what it is like to be
male and single. (Seen 20 May 1987)
Pasolini: un Delitto Italiano (Who Killed Pasolini?)
One of my festival-going buddies described this film as “Italian Oliver
Stone” and that pretty much sums it up. Director Marco Tullio Giordana
doesn’t quite have Stone’s stylish flair, but it’s the same general idea
as JFK and Nixon. Recreate history and throw out lots of
major hints of a mysterious conspiracy. When Pier Paolo Pasolini was
bludgeoned to death 20 years ago, the conventional wisdom was that his
penchant for picking up teenage boys finally did him in. This film
suggests the controversial fim director was set up, probably at the
behest of neo-fascists. One has to ask, however: if there is indeed
convincing proof of this, why not do a documentary instead of a dramatic
recreation? On the other hand, given recent revelations of what was going
on in Italy at the time, anything is possible. Fittingly, the film ends
with all the evidence being locked away in a basement in a scene that
could have been lifted directly from The X-Files! (Seen 18 May 1996)
The Passion of Ayn Rand
As with any good title, The Passion of Ayn Rand can be taken more
than one way. There is, of course, Rand’s intellectual passion, which
made her a cult figure for her objectivist philosophy, which basically
said that selfishness is a good thing. And there is also her romantic
passion, as this made-for-Showtime-cable-channel biopic recounts her
longtime affair with a devoted disciple. The best thing about the film is
Helen Mirren’s chameleon-like performance in the title role and Peter
Fonda’s understated turn as Rand’s constant and supportive husband. Fonda
has the best line, in the movie’s final reel, when he stirs from a
drunken stupor to utter, “I don’t understand any of it. I never have,”
thereby producing laughter and a bit of relief from the audience, which
largely feels the same way. Director Christopher Menaul, who worked with
Mirren on the Prime Suspect TV series, creates a wonderfully moody
atmosphere for this intriguing tale of fanaticism and snobism among
intellectuals. There is something fascinating about watching people speak
so passionately about “honesty” and “corruption” when all they’re really
doing is manipulating others. (Seen 18 May 1999)
The Passion of the Christ
I have always thought it would be interesting if someone would make a docudrama about the last hours of Jesus’s life, i.e. a Missiles of October-style rigorously realistic re-creation, based on all that is known historically about the events and time and place. When I read months ago that Mel Gibson was making The Passion of the Christ in Aramaic and Latin, I thought perhaps this is what he was doing. It turns out that he wasn’t, but Gibson has made a stunning film in any event. Gibson does conscientiously follow the texts of the New Testament, but visually he has chosen to evoke the look of the 17th-century Italian painter Caravaggio, who was a very gifted painter but not exactly a contemporary eye-witness to Jesus’s execution. Jesus is played by an American, Jim Caviezel, who is made to look like most paintings we have seen of Jesus for hundreds of years. All the other roles are played by Europeans. There is, of course, no way for us to know what Jesus actually looked like, but as a native of Palestine, he probably didn’t look exactly like the European versions that have been handed down for centuries. So, what we have here is one more feature film interpretation, with Gibson following in the footsteps of such filmmakers as Cecil B. DeMille, George Stevens, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Martin Scorsese, who previously tackled the story on film. What is interesting is how much a Hollywood film this is. The greatest impact on the viewer comes from the sheer violence of Jesus’s flogging, carrying of the cross and the crucifixion. But it’s not a “realistic” violence that creates the sensation of witnessing the punishment. Rather, it uses all the standard Hollywood techniques (gory make-up, close-ups, slow motion, exaggerated sound effects, etc.) to make the viewer feel the punishment. It’s safe to say that for Christians who take communion, after seeing this film, the phrase “blood of Christ” will never be quite the same. But, while the violence has gotten most of the attention, it’s not the whole movie. Jesus’s message of forgiveness comes through. And, if the film makes us feel the violence, it also makes us feel the love, particularly of Jesus’s mother Mary, through the powerfully effective use of brief flashbacks. In the end, Gibson has succeeded at what all good filmmakers, indeed all good storytellers, do. He has taken a very old and familiar tale and made it seem brand new. [Related commentary] (Seen 7 March 2004)
Patch Adams
This is a strangely old-fashioned movie and not just because its rare and
stark moments of sex and violence occur completely off-screen. Patch
Adams belongs to a film genre we don’t see much anymore except in
some made-for-television fare: an admiring, uncritical biography of a
living person, in this case a virtual hagiography of a practitioner of
unorthodox medical theories. Adams’s antics would seem to be ideal fodder
for Robin Williams’s manic improvisational style of humor, but there is
something distasteful about a movie that goes for emotional impact by
focusing on sick and dying children and adults as a grateful audience for
Williams’s essentially self-indulgent gags. Still, the film is a chance
to get welcome but brief glimpses of such seasoned actors as Harold Gould
and the late Richard Kiley. But mostly, watching Patch Adams is
like seeing familiar film classics in a parallel universe. It’s One
Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest with the McMurphy character coming out
triumphant. It’s Animal House with God on the side of the frat
boys. It’s Miracle on 34th Street with Kris Kringle
self-righteously campaigning for the right to do shtick. (Seen 13 March 1999)
4 luni, 3 saptamani si 2 zile (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days)
It took a night’s sleep for me to appreciate how good this film really is. It is a disturbing movie that will push a lot of hot buttons because of its straight-ahead treatment of the subject of abortion. Moreover, after a deceptively slow start, it is harrowing and anxiety-inducing. It was a critics’ favorite at Cannes this year and ended up taking the Palme d’Or. The lead actor, Anamaria Marinca, gives one of those understated performances, typical of European cinema, as we watch her go from plucky to exploited and violated to emotionally overwhelmed. Written and directed by Cristian Mungiu, the movie is set in 1987 Romania, a place and time when abortion was outlawed. A Hollywood movie could never address this subject matter so directly and, even if it could, it’s hard to imagine that it would take such an emotionally involved yet politically detached view. It is to Mungiu’s credit that he does not sanitize or whitewash the story. Nor does he make any overt political case that I can see. It is easy to see partisans on both sides of the abortion debate using this film to make their case. And maybe that is the point. Both sides have their merits, and the answer isn’t necessarily clear-cut as either side would like to believe. I notice that this film has also received the Cinema Prize of the French National Education System, which makes a fair amount of sense. It is hard to imagine anyone seeing this movie and not being henceforth extremely careful about their birth control options.
(Seen 17 October 2007)
Paul Monette: The Brink of Summer’s End
This is easily the most touching documentary I have seen about a gay
activist since 1984’s The Times of Harvey Milk. The film is a
labor of love by Monte Bramer who worked on it over a period of two and a
half years in addition to his regular film editing job. It is an
amazingly intimate portrait of National Book Award winner Paul Monette
and a unsparing chronicle of his last years. Monette’s dream was always
to be a writer, but ironically he didn’t find his artistic voice until he
was confronted personally with the AIDS crisis. Then he became a poet and
spokesman for an entire community. But it’s the human story in this film
that is compelling. By the end, you feel as though you have known this
man and his intimates and you thereby feel a loss. (Seen 17
May 1997)
Pavee Lackeen
This is the sort of movie that film festival programmers live for. It is socially important, is somewhat provocative politically and pushes all the right emotional buttons. Director Perry Ogden planned to make a fictional film about a homeless boy who is befriended by Travellers, Ireland’s gypsy community. Odgen cast real Travellers, and as things progressed, he wound up chucking the main character and plotline and found it more compelling to make a barely fictionalized film about the Travellers themselves. The star is 10-year-old Winnie Maughan, along with her mother Rose and various other family and community members. The movie is interesting but, strangely, it is not nearly as interesting as I thought it would be. Ogden seems to be striving for the modern Irish equivalent of The Grapes of Wrath, as we watch Winnie’s family slip a bit in the course of the film further to the margins of society. I think Irish and Europeans are meant to watch Winnie and Rose’s various interactions with social workers, activists and council functionaries and pity them for their plight. As an American, I watched and was impressed with how much help and support was actually available to this community—particularly compared to comparable people in the U.S. In an early scene, Rose is offered public housing in one of several locations, but she rejects all of them because they aren’t in the location she prefers. Meanwhile, Winnie visits a number of shops operated by non-Irish immigrants. One wonders why someone recently arrived from eastern Europe or Africa seems to be getting a foothold on the Irish economic ladder and the Travellers, who have been in Ireland for ages, do not. The film not only offers no possible answer but doesn’t even seem to be interested in the question. (Seen 8 July 2005)
Peaches
It’s strange to see an Irish film that isn’t about Ireland or the Irish.
(It’s is set in England.) But then we’ve seen enough movies about Ireland
that were made by Brits or Yanks, so I suppose turnabout is fair play.
Nick Grasso’s film is adapted from a play, so it’s no surprise that it
consists essentially of a series of conversations. Frank, Johnny and Pete
are out of school but aren’t quite ready for things like jobs or
long-term commitments. They are more comfortable with going to pubs and
discos and discussing “peaches,” a slang term for chicks. This theme
makes Peaches something of a cousin to the low-budget American
film Freak Talks About Sex.
As with that film, you either enjoy the running conversations of
these not-quite-mature young men or you don’t. You certainly don’t
watch a film like this to see major character growth. The star is
Welsh actor Matthew Rhys, who ended up as a meal in Titus. (Seen 14
June 2001)
Pearl Harbor
So, what happens when the action/violence/testosterone team of Jerry
Bruckheimer and Michael Bay meets the Disney company? Well, basically you
get Titanic with massive
explosions. After The Perfect
Storm, this movie now makes it official. The formula for
blockbusters is now to take a well-known historical catastrophe,
spending a couple of hours building suspense for this well-known
disaster by telling a love story, let all hell break loose and sink
a ship (or two or twenty), and have an emotional ending about all
the people that were lost. Make no mistake. The recreated attack on
Pearl Harbor is as powerful and exciting as anything you will ever
see in a movie. But the creators of The Rock and Armageddon giving us a
tender love story? Puh-leeze. It seems to take forever to get to the
attack. And, according to this movie, the entire U.S. military spent
100% of their time during the months leading up to it agonizing over
what the Japanese were “up to” and still couldn’t figure it out. The
reason Titanic worked in spite of its sappy love story is
that James Cameron obviously had a deep emotional involvement in the
ship’s story and that came through loud and clear. Bruckheimer and
Bay may have similar feelings about Pearl Harbor, but aside from
impressive special effects what we mainly get are random facts
thrown in for the sake of authenticity. Oh yeah, and that sappy love
story. Geez, guys. We were primed to expect a macho war film, and
you went all weepy and limp-wristed on us. (Seen 25 May
2001)
Pédale Douce (What a Drag!)
Pédale Douce, directed by Gabriel Aghion, is more or less
an update to La Cage aux Folles. Actually, it wouldn’t even
qualify as update except that there is a brief scene, included as if an
afterthought, involving an HIV test. Otherwise, we have every
limp-wristed gay cliché trotted out (along with the occasional
unfortunate line like, “Straights are just guys we haven’t met yet”) for
another comedy about gays pretending to be straight, straights being
taken for gay, etc. In the end, this is just another one of those silly
French sex comedies that lurches from one situation to another, sometimes
with a comic payoff and sometimes without. The best thing about the movie
is Fanny Ardant, who usually seems consigned to overwrought and/or
costume drama roles. Here she radiates and hams it up as Eva, the
flamboyant proprietress of one of those impossibly outrageous, hip and
happening gay-oriented restaurant/discos that seem fairly commonplace in
the movies. (Seen 18 May 1997)
Penelope
What could be a better icky family? We have the weird little girl from The Addams Family, Christina Ricci. As her mother we have the very funny Catherine O’Hara, who was creepy Macauley Culkin’s mother in Home Alone. And for a dad we have the insane Richard E. Grant from Withnail & I. But the writing was on the wall when O’Hara was a guest on Jay Leno’s show before the movie opened in the US. It’s a great movie for teenage girls, Leno kept saying, in his kindest, and therefore most damning, way. In fairness, Penelope is in no way as bad as a lot of critics have made out. But it feels strangely less than heartfelt, even though this is for once a case where the ultimately trite message (it is important to love yourself) is one that Hollywood can actually sincerely embrace. Maybe it’s because the real, unstated message is that it’s so hard to be an object of public scrutiny and constantly be measured against physical perfection. Reese Witherspoon is one of the producers and has a secondary role. The acting standout is James McAvoy who, like most of the Brits in the cast, inexplicably speaks with a (in his case, very good) North American accent, even though the film was clearly shot in London.
(Seen 3 March 2008)
Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief
Unfortunately, this movie fell into a difficult spot marketing-wise. It had a ready-made fan base of the series of books by Rick Riordan—but not one large enough to motivate the studios to fund the slavish fidelity in the adaption as in the cases of the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter movies. So the most rabid fans were put off by the changes and omissions, while newbies may well have had trouble following the many details and plot strands that did survive. Anyway the movie, while good fun, clearly lacks the careful attention that the first Harry Potter movies got—even though this has the same director, Chris Columbus. The classy supporting cast (the likes of Sean Bean, Pierce Brosnan, Kevin McKidd, Catherine Keener) generally seem bored but presumably happy with their paychecks. The young leads (Logan Lerman, Alexandra Daddario and the well cast Brandon T. Jackson), on the other hand, make up for it with their enthusiasm. But if anything highlights the problem with the movie, it is the casting of Steve Coogan as Hades. Coogan is extremely entertaining, but his participation guarantees that the movie can’t be taken seriously. My kid lamented the absence of the war god Ares (truly a major omission and change to the thrust of the story), but it’s probably just as well. Columbus might have cast Robin Williams in the role.
(Seen 5 February 2011)
The Perfect Match
What the heck is this? A contemporary comedy about single people in the
1980s trying to have a relationship… with no sex in it? Yes,
it’s true! Tim and Nancy are two single people in L.A. who are at that
scary age of 29. Tim (Mark McClure, Jimmy Olsen in the Superman
movies) works in a large corporation and isn’t sure what he’s supposed to
be doing there. His active life mainly includes watching basketball games
on TV. Nancy (Jennifer Edwards, Blake’s daughter) is a bookworm and
perpetual student (she has 503 units out of the 180 required for
graduation) with a nothing job in a video store. The plot is familiar.
They each have the requisite best friend giving them lots of bad advice.
Through an improbable series of events, Tim places a personal ad that
describes the perfect single male, and Nancy answers it. They both
pretend to be what they are not: rich, interesting, cultured, athletic.
They go on a hilarious weekend trip into the mountains to do things
neither has ever done before, hoping the other doesn’t notice: skiing,
horseback riding, tennis, backpacking. It’s all predictable but very well
done and there are a lot of very funny moments. This is another one of
those low-budget, independent Hollywood films which are often such
pleasant surprises. Unfortunately, I fear they may have to dub a few
dirty words into the soundtrack so they can at least get a PG rating if
they hope to get a distributor. (Seen 3 June 1987)
The Perfect Storm
German director Wolfgang Petersen enthralled us with his classic undersea
thriller Das Boot in 1981 (and also provided a few choice moments
in the more standard 1997 flick Air
Force One). Now he gives us another thriller, this time on
the surface of the ocean, and it is a real doozy. I suppose that it
is inevitable, after the mega-success of Titanic, that we would get
an effects-laden, true-life sea disaster epic full of romance and
poignancy. The early scenes in Gloucester, Massachusetts, are so
full of emotional pathos and foreboding that we keep looking for
Leonard DiCaprio to win a place on the Andrea Gail in a poker
game. While the scenes with the loved ones waiting anxiously for
news are the weakest, the film sinks or swims based on the
excitement of its storm scenes, and in this regard it delivers,
comparing well with the memorable tempest in Ridley Scott’s White Squall. The Perfect
Storm is at its best and its most exciting when it is (closely)
following such actual events as the rescue of the passengers of the
sailing boat Mistral and the ditching of a rescue helicopter.
There is something morbid, on the other hand, about the final scenes
of the Andrea Gail‘s crew, since it is pure speculation about
real people. But George Clooney and crew give it all they’ve got as
a group of men who refuse to give up hope no matter how desperate
things get. (Seen 30 June 2000)
Personal Foul
Like so many films at the film festival, this is a nice, low-budget U.S.
movie looking for a distributor. It stars David Morse (St.
Elsewhere) as a guy living out of his pick-up truck and Alan Arkin’s
son Adam as a grade school teacher who befriends him when they meet on a
basketball court in a park. Jeremy (Arkin) can’t Show His Feelings, which
is driving his quasi-girlfriend up the wall, so she makes a play for Ben
(Morse) to make him jealous. The comedy is low-key, and the people are
all nice and decent. And the kids in Jeremy’s class act like real kids
(gulp). The director was there to discuss it afterwards, and he said that
so far no distributor has wanted to pick up the film because it didn’t
have a “hook,” meaning it’s not like some other movie that’s made a lot
of money. Too bad. (Seen 25 May 1987)
Personal Services
This is a very British comedy by Terry Jones, of Monty Python fame. But
this is definitely not a Monty Python movie. There are Python-esque bits
of humor in it all right. Julie Waters (Educating Rita) is a
feisty waitress, who winds up becoming the madame of very successful
brothel (despite some amazing sexual naïveté). This is not a
slapstick farce. There are serious moments. But the last part is devoted
to a lot of kinkily funny moments. Sex in this movie is mostly portrayed
by having elderly men dress up like little girls or schoolboys. The point
seems to be: these people aren’t hurting anybody, so why hassle them? The
tag line is one old geezer’s proclamation: “The future is kinky people.”
(Seen 30 May 1987)
The Pest
This flick has a title that sounds like a Jerry Lewis movie and a star
(John Leguizamo) who makes himself look strangely like Jim Carrey. But
this is yet another live-action cartoon, this time with Leguizamo in the
Bugs Bunny/Daffy Duck role and Jeffrey “Does anyone even remember he was
once in a classy movie like Amadeus?” Jones in the Elmer
Fudd/Yosemite Sam role. In addition to lots of silly action aimed at an
adolescent mentality, there is something here to offend everyone. In
fact, the ethnic lampooning is so rampant that it almost becomes a
positive statement on society’s increasing sensitivity to stereotypes. A
nice touch along these lines is the kilted Scottish mobsters that pursue
Leguizamo. Also, on the positive side, is the fact that one scene
features the little-known lyrics to the Bonanza theme song. Of
course, in keeping with the spirit of the movie, they are sung with a
really bad Japanese accent using a karaoke machine. (Seen 19
February 1997)
Peter Pan [1953]
It’s hard to believe that it’s been a half-century since Disney released
this animated classic. The question now is whether it will be eclipsed by
the new live-action version by P.J. Hogan, promised at year’s end. The
trailer for that one definitely looks promising. Meanwhile, the Disney
adaptation of the ageless play still holds up, apart from some
embarrassing racial stereotyping of injuns, I mean, Native Americans. I
suppose we could cut the film some slack since Neverland was always meant
to be an Enlishman’s idea of a young (white) boy’s fantasy, complete with
pirates and mermaids. In hindsight, it is interesting to see how some of
the movie’s themes were echoed in later Disney films, such as the whole
pirate adventure thing in the current Pirates of the Caribbean or the
magical-visitor-visiting-a-London-family-whose-stodgy-father-is-out-of-to
uch-with-his-children thing in Mary
Poppins. Peter Pan has been especially poignant to watch
for the past 35 years because the title character’s voice and mannerisms
belong to Bobby Driscoll, the gifted child actor who also starred
(onscreen) in Disney’s Song of the South and Treasure
Island. What a bitter twist that the quintessential boy who didn’t
want to grow up was played by a boy whose life was a misery once he
outgrew child roles and who died alone and anonymous 27 days after his
31st birthday. (Seen 16 August 2003)
Peter Pan [2003]
I have decided that, whenever a filmmaker declares that his remake is going to be truer to the roots of the book or play he is adapting than previous versions, it really means that he is going to drag the material by force into whatever century or decade the filmmaker is currently residing. P.J. Hogan’s version of the classic Peter Pan story has all the trappings of how we like to remember Victorian England (in movies anyway), but the film’s fantastic illusions are jarred from time to time with science-fiction-like special effects. Still, there are wondrous images to behold, and we really do believe (most of the time) that Peter can truly fly. For children (old enough not be terrified of the pirates and a very large crocodile), the story is simply a fantasy adventure. We adults bring more baggage, since the story is essentially a psychodrama about the difficulty of leaving childhood behind—not to mention the fact that nasty Capt. Hook and repressed papa are, er, the same person. Indeed, the years have piled even more baggage on poor Pan. Our attitudes and sensitivities toward children and other cultures (i.e. Native Americans) have changed, and Pan’s very name has been appropriated for the syndrome of men not wanting to take on adult responsibilities. (And let’s not even get started on what has happened to the name Neverland.) Hogan actually attempts to subtly incorporate these new resonances, and in the end, makes a movie that may be more fulfilling and challenging for adults than for their kids. Jason Isaacs (who is already known to kids as a fantastical villain in the Harry Potter movies, as the elder Malfoy) makes a fine Capt. Hook and Mr. Darling. In the end, Hogan’s version of Peter Pan really owes more to the Disney version that he (or his lawyers) would probably care to admit. Not the least of these touches is the decision to make the boy who lures three Victorian English children out their bedroom window decidedly American. (Seen 14 January 2004)
La Petite Lola (Clubbed to Death)
It would be an easy shot to say that the title of this film describes
what it does to the viewer. As it happens, the title Clubbed to
Death is a play on words where the verb “to club” can mean either “to
beat viciously” or “to hang out in dance clubs in slum areas of urban
France and get involved with drug addicted Arabs who lead futile lives,
have lousy relationships and fight the odd brutal boxing match for cash.”
Clubbed to Death is also the name of one of the numerous
techno-pop songs that throb on the soundtrack. Director Yolande Zauberman
has created a dark, depressing vision of a particular French milieu. In
its opening scenes, the film looks as though it might be a French
After Hours, but in the end it is as aimless and pointless as its
characters’ lives. (Seen 24 January 1998)
Phenomenon
For my money, the villain in Broken
Arrow is still John Travolta’s best role.
Phenomenon is a thankfully gentle movie that is somewhat
similar to last year’s Powder except that the hero is
older and has hair and the film wasn’t directed by a child molester.
It is also reminiscent of the old Cliff Robertson starrer
Charly. It is not particularly similar to Forrest
Gump to which its ad campaign wants to compare it. On the
positive side, the movie benefits from the capable presences of
Robert Duvall and Forest Whitaker. It is also admirably restrained
in terms of not resorting to a violent climax, which it easily could
have. The syrup content of this tear-jerker, however, is high
(particularly toward the end) with the sweetness level enhanced by a
couple of adorable moppets playing Kyra Sedgwick’s kids. (Seen 7 July 1996)
Photos to Send: People to Go Back To
There is a voyeuristic appeal in having a gawk at people at two or more
distant points in their lives and being able to do a side-by-side
comparison. Michael Apted has exploited this sort of fascination with his
every-seven-years documentary visits to a group of people in England in
his 7 Up series (most recently in 42 Up). American filmmaker Dierdre
Lynch pulls off a similar feat in her 1997 visit to Ireland’s County
Clare. Her film’s title is taken from a scribbled note on a folder
of black-and-white photos taken by the renowned photographer
Dorothea Lange around Ennis in 1954. She tracks down the people in
Lange’s photographs, and it is a testament to the attachment people
in the west of Ireland feel for their land that a good many of them
are still in the same place 43 years later. It would be nice to know
a bit more about Lynch and how she decided to follow in Lange’s
footsteps, but instead we can content ourselves with sharing her
visits with these friendly Clare people of a certain age. In the
interviews, she manages to elicit virtually all the major themes
that characterize Ireland’s west: the trauma of a history marked by
extreme poverty and mass emigration, the strange sensation of
recently found affluence, reliance on and bitterness toward the
Catholic Church, and above all that tenacious love and attachment to
the land. We can easily see why Lange loved these people so much and
desired to (but never did) go back to them. And why Lynch was so
happy to complete the journey for her. (Seen 20 January
2002)
p
With its mathematics mumbo-jumbo and several scenes in the New York
subway, this movie put me in mind of the wonderful Argentine student film
Moebius. But the tone
here is quite different and less satisfying. Its stark high-contrast
black-and-white look and retro technology props suggest a vintage
mad scientist movie. (Despite its frontier-of-science theme, math
genius Max uses mid-century style keyboards and CRTs and even
5.25-inch floppy disks. Remember them?). p plays with some interesting ideas, like
the possible relation between numeric patterns and God, and when
does artificial intelligence become sentient? (There’s also some
stuff about predicting the stock market; Max doesn’t seem to have
heard about technical analysts.) But in the end it’s really another
descent-into-paranoia story that suggests sometimes it’s best not to
understand too much. (Apparently, a power drill in the temple can
solve this nicely.) What really has Max alarmed, though, is the
corporate executive who keeps chasing him, probably because she
looks so much like the woman on the packages of Mavis Beacon typing
software. Or maybe it’s the wide-eyed cult-leading orthodox rabbi
who seems to be Burt Lancaster risen from the grave. Anyway, this is
a more than respectable directing debut by Darren Aronofsky. (Seen 26 January 1999)
The Pianist
Every serious filmmaker with roots in Holocaust-era Europe seems to have
an innate compulsion to make a film about history’s worst crime. Just as
Steven Spielberg had to make Schindler’s
List, French-born Polish director Roman Polanski (Rosemary’s
Baby, Chinatown) had to make this powerful film about
German-occupied Warsaw. But where the American Spielberg recounts the
Holocaust story by telling of a hero who saved many people, the European
Polanski’s story is that of one man’s mere survival against overwhelming
odds. Indeed, The Pianist (which garnered Oscars for Polanski’s
direction, Ronald Harwood’s adaptation of Wladyslaw Szpilman’s memoir and
Adrien Brody’s portrayal of Szpilman) is a harrowing chronicle of one
man’s journey through an unimaginable hell. That he survived at all seems
a miracle, if not a result of totally capricious chance—which got a
boost from the fact that Szpilman was a gifted artist whose talent
touched a variety of people at critical moments. The ultimate message of
any Holocaust movie is: don’t let it happen ever again. The problem is
that not everyone can agree on what “it” is. Is “it” the invasion of one
country by another? Or is “it” the world standing by while a government
machine terrorizes and kills civilians? Frankly, Holocaust movies are
real downers, but we need to revisit these events from time to time to
learn the lessons and to see the roots of the world we live in today.
(Seen 30 April 2003)
The Picture of Dorian Gray
How time flies. It seems like just yesterday we were watching blond-haired moppet David Gallagher play child roles in movies like Look Who’s Talking Now and Phenomenon and on television series like 7th Heaven. Now he is old enough to convincingly play the privileged and beautiful man of this movie’s title, who leaves no hedonistic or bloodlusting stone unturned. Critically for the film, Gallagher is symmetrically pretty enough, in a not-yet-completely-wasted boyband sort of way, to pull off the role. The idea of the movie, directed by Duncan Roy, seems obvious in hindsight. Take Oscar Wilde’s classic tale and update it for the media-saturated and beauty-and-celebrity-obsessed 21st century. (Dorian’s picture is now a video installation.) And, while we’re at it, definitively remove the “sub” from the story’s gay subtext. The frantic edits, music soundtrack and visual-art approach make us think that this is how Baz Luhrmann might have approached the material. Which is unfortunate, because it makes us wish desperately that Luhrmann, instead of Roy, had approached the material. Because of the style, the narrative is a mess, offering incoherence under the guise of artiness. (On top of that, I’m pretty sure that, at the screening I saw, the projectionist was using the wrong lens.) That could be forgiven if it were at least interesting to watch most of the time. In the end, the film seems to be yet another indictment of what might henceforth be referred to as Larry Craig Syndrome. Dorian’s vanity and all his problems seem to ultimately stem from his refusal to come to terms with his own sexuality.
(Seen 20 October 2007)
La Piel que habito (The Skin I Live In)
This is pure Almodóvar. Ostensibly, it is a thriller, but it is not that thrilling, at least in terms of the standard genre. Like all of Almodóvar’s movies, it is really a melodrama. Long-time Almodóvar collaborator-turned-international-star Antonio Banderas plays a brilliant surgeon, who has been applying an artificial skin he has invented to a mysterious woman. We learn that she is a dead ringer for his dead wife, which raises the question: could she actually be his wife, somehow reanimated? Or perhaps their daughter who, we are told, took her own life? Or is her identity even stranger? While not keeping us exactly on the edge of our seat, the filmmaker does pique our curiosity and comes up with a scenario that actually gets at some interesting questions about gender, identity and sexual orientation. It is also calculated to creep us out. By rights, it is the enigmatic Vera (the beautiful Elena Anaya) who should be the focus of the story, but the filmmaker can’t help but shift the point of view to the housekeeper Marilia (yet another Almodóvar veteran, Marisa Paredes). Even when he has a compelling and unusual idea for a movie that could be quite the thrill ride as well as a major thought-provoker, ol’ Pedro still can’t help but turn it into a chick flick.
(Seen 19 January 2012)
Piglet’s Big Movie
One thing that confuses me about Disney’s cartoon version of
Winnie-the-Pooh is Christopher Robin. In some cartoons, he has an English
accent. In other cartoons, he has an American accent. I think I prefer
the English accent (as he has here), since the stories do come from
England. But then how to explain Pooh and his various animal friends, who
always have American accents? Okay, I’m taking this way too seriously. It
is for kids after all, and my three-year-old loved this. It is perfectly
harmless, and no one can argue with this movie’s message, which is
basically that just because you are small doesn’t mean you aren’t
important. This is certainly a good message to give to people when they
are very small (and very important). And it is more useful in life than
the Pooh cartoons’ general overriding theme, which seems basically to be
that it’s great to have friends, no matter how dim they may be. A special
treat for parents (or grandparents) who tag along to the flick is seeing
Carly Simon (who wrote the film’s songs) rocking out as the end credits
roll, singing a song about a house at Pooh Corner. Hmmm. I wonder if they
thought about asking Kenny Loggins to do that sometime? (Seen 23 July 2003)
Pilgrim Hill
For nearly half this film’s running time, I was convinced that it was a documentary. Joe Mullins, who is on screen for pretty much the whole hour and a half, gives every indication that he is merely being himself. Kerry filmmaker Gerard Barrett has clearly crafted the film based on people he knows well. Mullins plays Jimmy Walsh, a fortyish bachelor farmer. An only child, Jimmy’s mother took her own life when he was a child. He has been minding his depressed father ever since while single-handedly keeping the farm going. Filmed in the most naturalistic of styles, not much happens until the final stretch. We mostly watch Jimmy do his chores, drink his solitary cups of tea and chat glumly with the occasional visitor. It is not only a bit tedious but it is ultimately depressing. But it does result in a culmination of emotion when two unfortunate events occur, one after the other. The film ends at a point where we don’t know whether to be hopeful for Jimmy or despair for him. One thing we can say, though, is that, if Mullins wasn’t playing himself, then he is one hell of an actor.
(Seen 13 July 2012)
The Pillow Book
If you enjoyed Ewan McGregor’s performances in Trainspotting, Emma, and Brassed Off and you’ve been
wanting to see, ah, a lot more of him (and quite a few other
actors), then this is the film for you! (In a grotesquely strange
way, McGregor actually has the title role.) No director seems quite
as adept at combining exquisite form and structure with shocking
material as Peter Greenaway. Basically, his heavy use of split
screens, insets, and other visual flourishes makes this flick look
like a graphic designer’s multimedia project rather than a movie. As
for the subject matter, well, let’s just say that The Pillow
Book does for calligraphy what Greenaway’s The Cook, the
Thief, His Wife & Her Lover did for fine dining. Set in the
inscrutable Far East, this bizarre tale covers it all: love, lust,
obsession, art, death, and getting back at your publisher. (Seen 28 July 1997)
The Pink Panther
The numerous sequels (not to mention the Steve Martin remakes) have devalued the very name Pink Panther. The fact is that the original movie was quite a good film. Peter Sellers’s Inspector Clouseau was only one of an ensemble of a large and sparkling cast, collaborating in a sophisticated update to a Feydeau-style romantic farce. Clouseau was clearly meant to be a secondary character, but Sellers’s genius as a physical clown made him the most memorable thing in the film. So it happened that the sequels did not focus on David Niven’s aristocratic jewel thief but on Clouseau. This creates a bit of a problem at the end in that Niven was meant to come out more sympathetically than the self-important inspector, but Sellers made his buffoon just too darned likeable. While Cary Grant could have pulled off the romantic lead in his early 50s, Niven was simply too old, and his wooing of the gorgeous Claudia Cardinale (less than half his age) just seems creepy. Made only a couple of years after Breakfast at Tiffany’s, director Blake Edwards was clearly going for some of the same tone of life among beautiful sophisticates. Indeed, a scene in which Cardinale’s teetotaler princess gets dizzily drunk seems tailor written for Audrey Hepburn. But she, along with Capucine and Robert Wagner, adds plenty of eye candy along with the beautiful locations in the Italian Alps. You don’t have to be a jewel thief to enjoy this marvelous escape.
(Seen 7 August 2011)
The Pink Panther 2
Rarely is a target audience for a movie as clearly defined as for this one. And that target audience is obviously people under the age of 12 and amnesiacs. The amnesiac demographic is key because anyone who can remember seeing the genius who was Peter Sellers play the impossibly daffy Inspector Clouseau will be put off this flick from the get-go. This is unfortunate because the pleasures the movie does offer also rely on a good memory. Specifically, it helps immensely to be able to remember that John Cleese was once very funny. It also helps to be able to remember the 1984 movie All of Me to delight in seeing Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin working together again. Perhaps the best laugh of the proceedings comes during the closing credits when we learn that Jean Reno, the only actual Frenchman among the main cast in this Paris-set spoof, had his own dialogue coach. Another notable French actor also appears. Singing icon Johnny Hallyday stiffly plays a brief scene opposite Jeremy Irons, who appears visibly annoyed about being in the movie. I would be lying if I said I didn’t laugh and several times. But then I’m easy. The very notion of Clouseau going to the grand re-opening of a posh restaurant he destroyed in flashback is enough to put me in stitches. In the end, it’s hard to see Martin approximating (but at least not copying) Sellers’s shtick. And the fact that his moustache and white hair sometimes evoke memories of latter-day Charlie Chaplin doesn’t help things a bit.
(Seen 25 February 2009)
Pirates of Silicon Valley
A made-for-cable movie about outlandish corporate intrigue, the very
title Pirates of Silicon Valley is clearly meant to remind us of
the extremely entertaining Barbarians at the Gate. But the subject
matter here should be even more compelling—the rise and rivalries of
Apple Computer and Microsoft. Writer/director Martyn Burke has his facts
mostly in order, but for a history lesson you are still better off
watching the documentary Revenge of the Nerds. (Strangely, this
film could easily give the casual viewer the impression that Windows was
a full-blown success in its first release and immediately superior to the
Macintosh.) This is really Steve Jobs’s story. He more or less has the
brilliant-but-twisted-and-flawed Anakin Starwalker role in this
mini-epic. Which I guess makes Bill Gates the comic-relief Jar Jar Binks.
You couldn’t ask for anyone geekier than Anthony Michael Hall to play
Bill, but for some reason he seems to be playing Andy Warhol instead.
Still, the film has some inspired moments, like the initial juxtaposition
of Apple’s famous 1984 commercial with Jobs’s later announcement
that Microsoft was investing in Apple—with Gates’s gigantic televised
head standing in for Big Brother. Or when an eerily affable Steve Ballmer
steps out of frame to describe in detail how IBM made a monumental
business miscalculation. The good news is that you won’t even have to get
up off the couch to see this one. It premieres on TNT on June 20. (Seen 15 May 1999)
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
Long before people started throwing around the word “synergy,” the Disney
company had mastered the art. One thing they did was fill their theme
parks with rides based on some of their most popular screen
entertainments, e.g. Peter Pan, The Wind in the Willows (Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride), Dumbo (flying elephants), etc. One of the Disney parks’ most popular attractions for years now has been the Pirates
of the Caribbean. But it was only recently, after several decades, that
someone in one of Disney offices noticed that they had forgotten to make
the movie. So, now we have it, and it even has a subtitle (The Curse
of the Black Pearl), which means, yes that’s right, Disney has made
up for lost time and gone straight to the sequel. If most big-budget
summer movies seem like thrill rides, at least this one comes by it
honestly. Part of the fun (aside from eyeing an extremely attractive
cast) is watching for set pieces lifted directly from the theme park
ride. The film has particular fun with the scene in which jailed pirates
try to get the cell keys from a dog holding them in its mouth. Disney’s
partnership with Jerry Bruckheimer, which has also given us Pearl Harbor and Veronica Guerin, had already shown
that it knows how to portray heroism, not to mention boats and
explosions. Director Gore Verbinski (Mouse Hunt, The
Mexican, The Ring), for his part, brings a light-hearted touch
that makes this expensive spectacle a bit reminiscent of Rob Reiner’s
The Princess Bride. Indeed, romantic lead Orlando Bloom (who is
nearly as gorgeous as his name) is rather reminiscent of Cary Elwes in
that pic. In the Inigo Montoya role is Johnny Depp, who shows an
unexpectedly expansive flair for comedy, in a role that seems written for
someone older (or who at least looks older). His bizarre jumble of
mannerisms comes off as some sort of cross between Foster Brooks and
RuPaul, but somehow it works. Tip: I know the closing credits go on for
ten minutes and your bladder is probably full of fizzy drinks, but it is
still worth staying in your seat until the very end. (Seen
13 August 2003)
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest
As I sat watching this rollicking sequel, I could perceive one supernatural special effect that was not, strictly speaking, up on the movie screen. It was the smiling ghost of Georges Méliès. Cinema’s father, who delighted in amusing, entertaining and mystifying audiences with the illusions made possible by film, would surely appreciate this elaborate and energetic successor to his own body of work. One of my personal weekly pleasures is listening to Dr. Mark Kermode’s discussions of current movies with BBC Five Life host Simon Mayo (available worldwide via podcast), and all summer long I listened to Dr. Kermode eviscerate this movie as rubbish. And the reason that I, and everyone else, got to hear him trash this movie for endless weeks is because the good doctor was obliged to discuss it week after week because the movie was constantly in the UK’s top ten. Is the movie Citizen Kane? No, and thank goodness. It is simply pure entertainment. Dr. Kermode complained that there was no coherent story. Well, I could see one easily enough, but just as Hitchcock’s movies usually involved a MacGuffin that existed only to provide Hitch with opportunities for set pieces and screen banter, so do a certain key and Davy Jones’s chest here. And what set pieces! Particularly a pair of sequences involving large, round, run-away, rolling structures with men inside them and/or on top of them. And, while the dialog may not be up to Hitchcockian standards, it is agreeably amusing throughout and there are more than a few double entendres that even Hitch might admire. And director Gore Verbinski continues to get mileage out of the theme park ride that inspired the whole thing, particularly with the infamous dog with the keys in its mouth, right up to the film’s final frame. (Oh? You didn’t stay and sit through all the closing credits? Too bad.) Of course, we have seen this movie before. And I don’t just mean the first one in this series. This is the Pirates’s equivalent of The Empire Strikes Back. It follows a movie that stood perfectly well on its own and itself ends incomplete, anticipating a second sequel. And leaving us wondering which of our male heroes will wind up with Princess Leia, I mean, Elizabeth Swann. Lots of us deride the theme park sensibility of a lot of movies these days, but it is worth remembering that, from the time of Méliès, cinema was perceived as a kind of thrill ride in its own right. (Seen 8 September 2006)
Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
Anyone who listens at all regularly to Mark Kermode’s reviews on BBC radio cannot approach this movie without a fair bit of baggage. Kermode’s rants on this franchise are by now legendary and impossible to get out of the head. But one needs to bear in mind that, to invoke the title of Kermode’s own book, it’s only a movie. In this particular case, it is the kind of movie that is made for people who did not get enough of the first movie—even after two sequels. The purpose is to give viewers the approximate experience they had seeing the original movie but differently enough so that it does not seem as repetitive as merely watching the original over again. Much of the charm of the original was the convoluted plot and array of characters, but most of that has been jettisoned in favor of what may have been the biggest appeal for summer audiences: the over-the-top set pieces and the buccaneer banter, notably Johnny Depp’s dodgy double entendres. The weakness this time is that Depp must do double duty as both the colorful featured character and as the romantic lead. Sure, there is the obligatory attractive young romantic couple (with Sam Claflin and Astrid Berges-Frisbey taking over from Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley) but their story seems more like an afterthought or filler. We are meant to be focused squarely on Depp and his Blow co-star Penélope Cruz. But their characters are so cartoonish that the romantic tension doesn’t even rise to the level of Popeye and Olive Oyl. Still, as a distraction the movie is perfectly okay. It just doesn’t leave you panting for another one—even if Jerry Bruckheimer is threatening one anyway.
(Seen 11 June 2011)
Le Placard (The Closet)
Here we go again with the one about the straight guy who, because of a
strange chain of events, has to pretend that he is gay. But something is
different this time. Usually, this story gets its laughs by watching the
straight guy try to camp things up. This time around, however, the
straight guy (dramatic stalwart Daniel Auteuil), upon the advice of
someone who should know, executes his impersonation by not changing his
behavior one iota. Instead, the focus is on how everyone else reacts to
the new “information” about him. And the reactions are interesting
indeed. His female co-workers, after years of studied indifference, now
find him fascinating. His male colleagues are uncomfortable to downright
hostile. His estranged teenage son takes a sudden new interest in him.
And, most importantly, his company reverses its decision to fire
him—apparently not because of any rigid French discrimination laws but
because one of its chief products is condoms. This film is the work of
Francis Veber, who had a writing hand in such classically hilarious fare
as The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe and La Cage aux
folles and who directed the funny and sentimental The Toy,
La Chèvre and Les Compères, most of which
have been remade by Hollywood. There is something of a message here, but
mostly this film is just for laughs, particularly one memorable scene
involving a condom assembly line and a touring group of Japanese
businessmen. Also very entertaining is Gérard Depardieu as the
office homophobe, who undergoes a strange and unlikely growth of
character. (Seen 6 June 2001)
A Place in the Sun
Fans of Woody Allen’s 2005 film Match Point might want to check out this mid-20th-century classic if they haven’t already seen it. Directed by George Stevens and adapted from a play based on a Theodore Dreiser novel, it is in many ways the same movie. Instead of hunky Jonathon Rhys Meyers, we have hunky Montgomery Clift at the full dawn of his Hollywood stardom. In the Emily Mortimer role we have Elizabeth Taylor in her glamorous beautiful phase. And in the Scarlett Johansson part, we have a commanding turn by Shelley Winters, who goes from a likeable but dull young woman to every ambitious young man’s worst nightmare. A Place in the Sun seems a bit quaint now with its fastidious discretion about pregnancy and abortion but, in a strange way, this actually makes it all the more powerful. The main difference between Stevens’s film and Allen’s is in the endings. Allen’s presents a world where justice and morality are subject to the randomness of life. In Stevens’s, justice seems inexorable and inevitable.
(Seen 10 October 2008)
Planet of the Apes
It’s a tricky thing to remake a very well-known movie, especially when
much of that film’s impact came from its surprise ending. Gus Van Sant
dealt with this challenge in his remake of Psycho by not changing
anything at all. Thus, the new surprise was the fact that there was
no surprise. In remaking Planet of the Apes, Tim Burton and
his writers came up with a new ending that differs from the first
film and is also different—but more in spirit with—Pierre Boulle’s
novel. And it is probably as good an ending as was possible, since
it has something for everyone: a perverse Rod Serlingesque twist
that will please most filmgoers, a secret for Matt Drudge to spill
so he can feel like he still matters and, most importantly, a
perplexing quality that will keep sci-fi geeks debating for months
the best way to explain the logic of it. I remember when the
original flick came out how we all oohed and aahed at the state of
the art of the ape make-up. Thanks to Rick Baker, we can do that
again. Surprisingly, much of the movie seems like standard movie
sci-fi, but when we get to the apes’ home city, we see the
well-known stylistic touches of the director of Batman and The Nightmare Before
Christmas—not to mention some great, um, aping of mankind’s
tics and foibles. After this film and Town & Country, I just have
to say that Charlton Heston (star of the original Planet of the
Apes and the nation’s No. 1 self-avowed gun nut) is one heck of
a good sport. (Seen 17 August 2001)
Plata quemada (Burnt Money)
Some of the best novels come out of Latin America. But adapting them to
the silver screen can be a bit of a challenge because their strength is
generally in their narrative prose, and how do you transfer that to a
mainly visual medium? This film’s solution, in the first couple of the
reels anyway, is to use extensive voice-over narration. So much that we
start wondering if the film is going to read the whole darn book to us.
But by the latter half, this turns out to be a movie movie and one as
exciting as any heist yarn we have seen in a long time. The story is
actually a true one, and this fact gives it a feel that is reminiscent of
both Bonnie and Clyde and Dog Day Afternoon. When we
finally get to the heart-pounding final siege scenes, however, we might
be more likely to think of The Alamo. Except that I don’t think
that we could imagine John Wayne and Richard Widmark having the heatedly
passionate and tempestuous romance that the two central gangsters in this
film have! (Seen 13 June 2001)
Play
Should I be kinder to this film because it so effectively echoes its own theme, i.e. not quite connecting? I suppose you can admire a film for deliberately not quite connecting, the same way its characters do not quite connect. But admiring is not the same as liking. Still, it is a well-made film, written and directed by Chilean Alicia Scherson and set firmly in her home city of Santiago. It tells the story of two people who gain an unlikely link when Cristina, a home health care worker, happens to find a shoulder bag that contains various artifacts and personal data of the life of Tristan, a young professional man seriously in need of antidepressants. Cristina becomes somewhat obsessed with this unexpected glimpse into a life completely different from her own and turns into something of a voyeur of Tristan’s life and also of that of the woman who has recently dumped him for someone else. The title is an apparent reference to Cristina’s penchant for arcade video games, something that may be a symptom, if not the actual cause, of her odd combination of curiosity and detachment. For a movie that feels at several points like it is about to end, when the ending finally does come, the story feels strangely unfinished.
(Seen 13 October 2006)
Play Misty for Me
During the decade and a half before Adrian Lyne’s Fatal Attraction, the best way for monogamy-challenged men to get a good fright was to view Clint Eastwood’s 1971 feature film directorial debut. Audiences at the time could have been forgiven for seeing this flick mainly as a successful actor’s vanity project, since there was no particular hint that Clint would go on to make such solid (and frequently award-winning) films as Bird, Unforgiven, Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, Changeling and Gran Torino. And the vanity aspect was enhanced by the fact that it was set and filmed in Eastwood’s personal stomping ground around Monterey, California, and that Eastwood starred as a radio DJ for a jazz station, allowing him to indulge his passion for that musical genre. Indeed, about two-thirds of the way through, the whole movie grinds to a halt to include several minutes of footage from the Monterey Jazz Festival for no particular reason. Having said that, the movie does provide a reasonable amount of creepiness and suspense (though tame by today’s standards) and had a bit of freshness in the fact that the whacko killer was a woman (and not even a man dressed as a woman). Further turning the set-up on its head was Eastwood, the quintessential manly movie hero, casting himself in the traditionally female role of potential stalker victim. However novel, though, the casting wasn’t quite ideal. Eastwood is unnaturally unflappable throughout—even when he wakes to see an effectively unnerving Jessica Walter plunging a knife into his bed. While Eastwood clearly always had directorial talent, his maiden effort lifted too many references from Hitchcock’s Psycho to not feel, in the end, derivative.
(Seen 5 June 2010)
Playing by Heart
If the couple passionately making out next to me in the cinema while I
insisted on my usual ritual of reading the closing credits all the way to
the end was any indication, this is a great date movie. It is definitely
very romantic, and it may indeed be the ultimate chick flick, since it is
mostly about desperate women getting involved with guys who seem too good
to be true but aren’t. Writer/director Willard Carroll is aiming for
something more profound, however, as the script strains to explore the
themes of love and death. (Three of the characters face serious mortality
issues.) An interesting and talented cast of familiar faces holds our
attention, but the movie mostly sets up situations and, as is often the
case with movies of this type, none of the interweaving stories would
really be interesting enough to carry a film on its own. Dennis Quaid’s
character is by far the most intriguing—at least until we learn what he
is about. X-Files star
Gillian Anderson seems doomed to play cold fish characters, Jon
Stewart is entertaining but in a smarmy TV host sort of way, Ryan
Phillippe’s character is annoying but nice to look at, and veterans
Sean Connery, Gena Rowlands and Ellen Burstyn lend a lot of class.
The best part of the movie is the ending, which pays off way better
than we might have expected. (Seen 18 August
1999)
Pleasantville
People like to sneer at 1950s family sitcoms, but those shows were
generally better than most TV and movie parodies (including this one)
give them credit for. Actually, this movie does a much better job of
lampooning cable TV nostalgia channels than it does the old sitcoms, but
then that isn’t what Pleasantville is really about. It is, rather,
an allegory about the continual struggle between conservatism/traditional
values and liberty/artistic freedom. The directing debut of Gary Ross
(who wrote the screenplays for Big and Dave), this movie is
clever in how it portrays rebellious youth and oppressed minorities
clashing with the forces of tradition. But since the rebels here are part
of a total fantasy world, their struggle doesn’t have a real resonance.
The closest it comes is the use of the term “coloreds” to describe
characters who are no longer black and white. It’s ironic (maybe
intentionally) that the rebels’ provocative literature (Catcher in the
Rye) and music (Dave Brubeck) are now considered classics by just
about everyone. In the end, this film is propagating a set of values for
the 1990s just as those old sitcoms did for the 1950s. The main
difference is that the sitcoms resolved everyone’s problems in the span
of 30 minutes and this movie takes 124 minutes to do it. (Seen 24 October 1998)
Please Give
Writer/director Nicole Holofcener (Walking and Talking, Lovely & Amazing, Friends with Money) may get higher-profile actors than she used to, but she goes on making pretty much the same kind of movies. I suppose you could label them the thinking person’s chick flicks, but it’s probably fairer to say that her movies are gentle comedy/dramas about people and relationships, from a definite female point of view. Because of its New York setting, her latest has something of a feel of a Woody Allen flick, perhaps abetted by the presence of Rebecca Hall, who previously essayed her entirely convincing American accent in Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Also on hand is the inevitable Catherine Keener (a Holofcener stalwart long before she was famous enough to play Percy Jackson’s mother), as well as Amanda Peet and Oliver Platt, reunited after their big-budget turns in 2012. To the extent that there is a story (plot points exist but are not necessarily the main attract in a Holofcener film), it involves the relationship between Keener and Platt, as a couple who essentially make their living buying stuff off the recently deceased, and Hall and Peet as granddaughters of a neighbor on her last legs. The granny is played by 81-year-old Ann Guilbert, familiar to TV audiences from sitcoms like The Fanelli Boys and The Nanny, but who will forever be remembered as the neighbor Millie on The Dick Van Dyke Show. At the risk of unintentionally damning this movie, I can say that it is an entirely pleasant way of passing an hour and a half. It has warm moments and a few genuine laughs.
(Seen 21 February 2010)
Plein Soleil (Purple Noon)
This is a 1960 classic by French director René Clement (Jeux
Interdits) who died not too long ago. It is a suspense drama
reminiscent of Hitchcock, with much of the action taking place in
picturesque locales on the coast of Italy. Several scenes on board a
sailing boat seem to presage Dead Calm. A very young Alain Delon
(who back then was like Rob Lowe but with a screen presence) plays Tom
Ripley, a crafty sort who has always envied the life and fortune of his
well-bred acquaintance Philippe. What’s Tom got in mind and will his plan
succeed? You can’t stop watching until the very final scene. (Seen 19 May 1996)
Pocketful of Miracles
Why is this movie not on my list of Five Christmas Classics? I guess because five wasn’t enough for a list like that. Still, this is a classic that should bring a smile to the face (and the requisite tear to the eye) of anyone trying to get (or is already) in the Christmas spirit—even though the Christmas angle is hardly played up in the story. Frank Capra’s final directing effort, it is a remake of a movie he made nearly three decades earlier (Lady for a Day). Pocketful of Miracles is slicker and more star-studded than the original, but one can reasonably argue that the 1933 version was actually better in a number of ways. Still, the 1961 edition is an excellent example of why most people used to go to the movies. They didn’t go for the special effects but for the faces and personalities on parade. And Capra assembled a fine large cast for his swan song. In her early 50s, Bette Davis chews the scenery as the dipsomaniac Apple Annie, who is not so secretly financing a proper upbringing abroad for her daughter. Glenn Ford and Hope Lange mug it up as the prototypical Damon Runyon guy and doll, bantering as if for their lives. Capra regular Thomas Mitchell, in his final role, is the erudite pool shark judge who takes to a new con job like a fish to water. A young Peter Falk is the apoplectic henchman driven crazy by all the distractions from turf negotiations with a mob boss played by Sheldon Leonard. The young lovers are played by Ann-Margret and Peter Mann, both in their first roles. Ann-Margret had a long film career ahead of her, Mann a brief one. The icing on the cake is the marvelous Edward Everett Horton, as the anxious butler who loves happy endings. If the emblematic literary figure of the season is Ebenezer Scrooge, then what better holiday entertainment than one that brings us to a world where every criminal and politician and bum on the street turns out to have a heart of gold?
(Seen 19 December 2009)
Poitín
The first feature film of its length to have been filmed in the Irish language, this 1979 movie by Bob Quinn provided a picture of life in windswept Connemara that was closer to reality than some of the more fanciful previous treatments of Ireland’s west. The simple story has the ring of truth, like some incident that got told and retold in the pub on rainy evenings. (There is actually no sign of rain in this film, but that can be overlooked. There are occasionally dry days in the region.) The title refers to an illegal Irish beverage, what we Yanks would call moonshine, and that is the life’s blood that flows through the film’s narrative. There is barely a scene where somebody is not drinking poitín or at least talking about it. The fun of looking back at this film is seeing the renowned actor Cyril Cusack in the lead, playing a more naturalistic role than his better-known film and stage roles, as well as other well-known Irish actors in early roles. The odd couple of louts who sell Cusack’s hooch are Donal McCann and Niall Toibín. And the less-than-effective garda sergeant is Mick Lally, familiar to TV viewers from the soap opera Glenroe. Mildly interesting coincidence: two years later Toibín would play a priest in the miniseries Brideshead Revisited giving the last rites to Laurence Olivier, who played the prospective father-in-law of Jeremy Irons, who was the real-life son-in-law of Cyril Cusack. (Seen 6 July 2005)
The Polar Express
When this computer-animation extravaganza by Robert Zemeckis (of Back to the Future and Forrest Gump fame) came out two Christmases ago, a number of critics remarked with no little astonishment that its North Pole sequences seemed to have been lifted directly from Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. And it’s true! Rather than the quaint, sugary and pastoral visions we usually get of Santa’s abode, this film shows St. Nick lording over a fairly grim urbanized complex that seems part slave factory and part sinister shopping mall. The fact that our children protagonists arrive on a train, upon which they have been hurried with little explanation or welcome, only adds to the sense of a Nazi scheme. And the fact that our hero is a boy, starting to question what he has been told all his life, makes the whole exercise feel like a forced march to a reeducation camp. There is something to be said for children’s literature that doesn’t sugarcoat or pander to what adults think children want or should consume. And I suppose the film’s tone does capture something of the confusion and uncertainty that goes on in the adolescent mind. But I can only go by how my own heart and mind reacted to the movie. It just made Christmas feel creepy. (Seen 22 December 2006)
Pooh’s Heffalump Movie
I’m not at all comfortable with how much context I find myself bringing to this new Disney movie. In our home, we have seen quite a bit of the Disney-fied version of Winnie-the-Pooh the past few years, so I am more knowledgeable on the topic than I ever meant to be. I was curious, for one thing, to test the assertion by the Irish Times critic that the strangely (in this film) bellicose Rabbit character was seemingly based on Donald Rumsfeld, making the movie a virtual allegory on the war in Iraq. Undeniable similarities aside, I choose not to go there. Better to stick with the obvious theme that just because others are different from you doesn’t mean they’re not the same as you. This is definitely more profound than the usual Pooh theme (cf. Piglet’s Big Movie) that it’s good to have friends, no matter how dim they may be. In fact, there is a whole new tone and emotional range displayed in this film. One of the limiting things about Pooh has been the fact that there are only so many stories written by A.A. Milne, so most of the movies have tended to recycle the same plots. This one breaks new territory by fleshing out characters previously only referred to and presumed by some (me, anyway) to be mythical figments. We are actually witnessing new Pooh canon. I suppose this is good, but I still worry about Rabbit going off the deep end. For such a gentle cast of characters, he nearly turns this into an animated version of The Ox-Bow Incident. (Seen 14 May 2005)
Popiól i diament (Ashes and Diamonds)
From the very first frame, it is clear why this 1958 movie by Polish director Andrzej Wajda (who went on to make such other well-regarded films as Man of Marble and Man of Iron) is considered a classic. We see two men, sitting on a hill, waiting. The younger one, Maciek is lounging on the grass, looking for all the world as if he doesn’t have a care or any responsibilities. Then, very quickly, we see that the pair are assassins, in place for an ambush. It is the final day of the Second World War, and everything is about to change. Maciek is played by Zbigniew Cybulski, who is often called the Polish James Dean. Not only does he look more than a bit like the American actor, but he has the same cool/hip juvenile delinquent swagger. And, like Dean, he died too young (at 39) in a traffic accident (struck by a train). He is probably most recognizable to Americans as the star of the wonderfully baroque Saragossa Manuscript. In this movie, he is what today we would call an insurgent. He is part of the underground that has been fighting the German occupation and is now fighting the Soviets. He has one more job to do and then he has to decide if he is going to continue fighting or try to transition to peace. You see, he has met a girl… Most of the action takes place in a hotel, where multiple characters come and go with their various political and personal agendas. This atmosphere plus its theme of duty versus security makes the movie more than a bit reminiscent of the classic Casablanca. It also presages Lina Wertmuller’s Love and Anarchy. Suspenseful and thought-provoking and eminently watch-able, the film does not offer any easy answers to the questions it raises. With such important matters at stake as life, death, war, peace and love, how could it?
(Seen 13 July 2007)
The Portrait of a Lady
An otherwise tasteful and thoughtful film about sentimental relationships
in the Victorian age is marred by a totally superfluous and over-the-top
car chase at the end. (Fortunately, this doesn’t happen with The
Portrait of a Lady, but maybe I’ve tricked some guy who only skims
movie summaries into seeing this flick!) If the sunny Jane Austen movies
are all about getting married, then this moody and somber Henry James
film is about being totally trapped after the wedding. As she did in
The Piano, director Jane Campion creates a visually impressive
world that moves with the off-kilterness and languorous pacing of dark
dream, replete with barely repressed eroticism. But this time, instead of
lush and damp New Zealand, we have settings in England and Italy that
feel like prisons. (And we don’t have Michael Nyman’s wonderful music.)
Nicole Kidman is quite okay in the lead, although her pale skin, piercing
eyes, and Mary Queen of Scots hairdo did at times remind me of Gary
Oldman in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. As for John Malkovich, whatever
you thought of him in Dangerous Liaisons, you’ll probably think
the same here. (Seen 2 February 1997)
Possession
A.S. Byatt’s novel Possession has a lot of fans, and they probably
have not been disappointed by Neil LaBute’s film adaptation. As a movie,
Possession is bound to remind a lot of people of The French
Lieutenant’s Woman, which also contrasted a period romance with a
modern one. I, on the other hand, was reminded of John Sayles’s Lone Star (because of its clever
transitions between present and past) and the TV series The X-Files. Aaron Eckhart
(converted from British to American for the movie) is essentially
Mulder, on a search for the truth that is Out There, and Gwyneth
Paltrow is the doubting Scully, who comes along for the ride anyway.
And, just as M&S always seemed to find aliens and other weirdness
under every rock, England and France turn out to be completely
littered with previously unknown letters and papers documenting a
torrid, years-long romance between two famous Victorian poets, who
were not previously known to have been acquainted. The fact is, that
it is hard to dramatize a literary research quest such as this, so
we get a lot of shots of turning pages and the actors reading the
letters. In the end, it mostly pays off emotionally, but the
greatest satisfaction will be with those who have read the book.
(Seen 8 October 2002)
Postcards from America
Postcards from America was filmed in the U.S. but directed by a
Brit (Steve McLean) who was inspired by the poems and essays of David
Wojnarowicz who died of AIDS in 1993. This is essentially a
non-chronological life story of a very unhappy gay man. Apparently, it is
based much more on McLean’s own life than on Wojnarowicz’s. The story
keeps jumping between a child abused by his father, a teenage hustler on
the streets of New York, and a grown man wandering the Southwest desert.
Obviously filmed with a negligible budget, the movie is inventive but
comes off largely as a filmed play with characters often talking directly
to the camera. It doesn’t exactly leave you whistling a tune as you leave
the theater, but you do feel like you’ve gotten some insight into another
person’s life—even if it is largely fictionalized. (Seen 19
May 1995)
Il Postino (The Postman)
Pablo Nerudo was one of the greatest poets of the 20th century and one of
two Chileans who have won the Nobel Prize for Literature. In a darkly
cosmic coincidence, he died (of natural causes) in 1973 just days after
the Chilean military extinguished democracy in his beloved homeland. At
some point a novel was written that told about a friendship that grew
between Neruda and the postman who brought him mail every day. I have no
idea how much truth there is to this story, but two films have been based
on it. The first was an obscure production made several years ago, and it
played like a romantic comedy (with Neruda acting as cupid for the
lovestruck, inarticulate postman) but turned dark at the end with an
angry comment on the political situation in Chile. This new version is
even more bittersweet and ends with an angry comment on Italian politics.
Neruda (played this time around by the great French actor Phillippe
Noiret dubbed, sadly, by another actor who speaks Italian and Spanish) is
in exile on a remote Italian island in the early 1950s. He teaches the
young postman not only about love but also about poetry and politics. The
ending is deeply felt and moving. It was made even more so after the
house lights came up. The director of this Italian production (England’s
Michael Radford who made the 1984 version of 1984 and White
Mischief) had introduced it by telling how Italian comic Massimo
Troisi (who plays the postman) lured him to Italy to work on the film and
how hard it was for Radford to work in a foreign language. Only after the
film, and in answer to an off-hand question, did Radford explain that
Troisi had been suffering from heart disease while making the film and
died a few days after it was completed. I understand that this film will
be getting a commercial run, and I would definitely recommend seeing it,
although not as a literal history lesson. (Seen 25 May
1995)
Pousse Café
This film attempts to do for cocktails what Like Water for
Chocolate did for Mexican food. Feeling very much like a filmed stage
play, the various acts are introduced by recipes for mixed drinks. (One
of the two main characters is authoring a mixology tome.) The film
consists almost entirely of conversations during cocktail hour between a
British-American game show magnate (think mixture of Richard Dawson and
Merv Griffin) and his avant-garde son. The constant chat (My Highball
with André?) is easy enough to take, although one occasionally
wishes that Noel Coward were still around to have collaborated. The
script was written by the two principal actors, Anthony F. Hamilton and
Dominic Hamilton-Little, and the director, Susan Winter. The story
revolves around the father’s attempts to deal with the fact that his wife
has left him. One of the highlights is the making of an elaborate drink
called the Pousse Café which is impressive to watch indeed.
(Seen 5 June 1997)
Poussières de vie (Dust of Life)
A title like Dust of Life is a pretty good clue that this probably
isn’t going to be a comedy. Indeed, Schindler’s List had more yuks
than this flick. An Algerian production filmed in Malaysia, this film is
based on actual events involving Vietnamese children with American
fathers after the fall of Saigon. The story follows Son who is picked up
with other children in a roundup and sent to a re-education camp to be
purged of his bourgeois beliefs and Christian religion. In the camp he
makes friends with some other boys and they begin plotting an escape,
knowing full well that capture will mean a stint in the dreaded “tiger
cage.” This isn’t a particularly easy movie to watch, but in the end it
does reaffirm the power of the human spirit. (Seen 22 May
1995)
Powder
This is another one of those movies about a being who is so superior and
so much nicer than us that he really can’t bear to be here on earth. In
this case, it’s a teenager whose mother was struck by lightning when she
was pregnant. Powder is albino white and, when he puts on sunglasses and
a fedora, well, he looks like Michael Jackson. In fact the movie is so
infused with bitterness about the misunderstanding and treatment received
by its title character that it could have been written by (and starred)
Jacko himself. (He probaby would have discreetly omitted, however, the
scene where the hero gets assaulted by a group of teenage boys for
gawking at one of them in the locker room.) This film has received some
notoriety because its writer/director went to prison for molesting a
young actor in a previous movie. Aside from the familiar Christ-like
story and quasi-religious mumbo-jumbo, it does contain a very moving
scene where Powder allows the sheriff to communicate with his dying wife.
(Seen 31 October 1995)
Practical Magic
Practical Magic wanders all over the place, and for much of its
running time it is hard to tell where it is going. By the time we find
out, the participation of Sandra Bullock suggests that it could have been
called While You Were Hexing. This is about witches, but they
aren’t witches like on Bewitched or Sabrina where they have
the power to solve a problem in a split second. These witches are fairly
limited in what they can do, compared to what we’re used to in other
films and on TV. And that’s just as well. Indeed, this could almost just
be the story of the lives and loves of an eccentric but non-supernatural
family. Think Hannah and Her Sisters with a dash of The Addams
Family. There is some creepy stuff along the way, as might be
expected from director Griffin Dunne, who has starred in such fare as
An American Werewolf in London and After Hours and who
tackled romance in Addicted to
Love, which also had its perverse side. In the end, this may
be mainly a chick movie, but with stars like Bullock and Nicole Kidman,
the men who get dragged along shouldn’t mind too much. (Seen
28 October 1998)
Praise
The Australian feature film debut of John Curran, Praise has
something uncomfortably real about it. It is not a fun movie to watch,
but its unrelenting gaze at the human condition makes it noteworthy as
some kind of work of art if not entertainment. (Several people in the
audience got up and left before it was over.) Gordon looks like a tall,
young, lanky Harry Dean Stanton and his prospects aren’t great. He lives
in a depressing rooming house, drinks lots of beer and chain smokes in
between sucking on his inhaler to relieve his asthma. He takes up with
Cynthia, a nymphomaniac with a (literal) rash of skin problems, and they
proceed to have a lot of sex. By the end of this affair, there is
just the faintest hint of optimism lurking underneath it all. The film
festival notes have it about right when it describes the film as “Charles
Bukowski meets Franz Kafka” and the source novel as “Last Tango in
Brisbane.” (Seen 19 May 1999)
The Preacher’s Wife
About midway through The Preacher’s Wife, a character lies
sniffling on the couch in front of the TV and explains that she always
cries every year at “these movies.” The Preacher’s Wife aspires to
be one of “these movies” which are the ones that we watch year after year
at Christmas time on TV or on video. They include It’s a Wonderful Life, White Christmas, and
maybe even The Bishop’s Wife, the Cary Grant/Loretta Young film of
which this is a remake. There are enough lovable characters and winsome
kids to pull your heartstrings slack for a month, not to mention a church
on the verge of loss and a good man who has lost his faith. But what cuts
the sugar is the chemistry between Denzel Washington and Whitney Houston
who make such a good couple that you kind of wish she would leave her
overwhelmed screen husband (or even her real-life one). Because of that
(and against its own intentions), Penny Marshall’s film is really more of
an heir to Just a Guy Named Joe than it is to It’s a Wonderful
Life. (Seen 29 December 1996)
Prête-moi ta main (I Do: How to Get Married and Stay Single)
This is another one of those French comedies that draws its humor from a universal experience that all of us have lived through at one time or another. After all, who among us has not paid someone to pose as our fiancée to get our overbearing mother and sisters off our back? Wait, I’m sorry. Did I say “universal experience”? I meant “like a failed sitcom pilot.” But this bit of farcical nonsense is easy enough to take, as it signals early on that it has not the slightest intention of being taken seriously when, in a flashback, its leading man, a mature Alain Chabat, who is in his late 40s, dons a wig and plays the least convincing 21-year-old ever to grace a movie screen. Will our hero’s scheme work? Will he and the feisty but gorgeous Emma complete their arrangement and then go their separate ways, as agreed? Will our guy finally learn to stand up to the women who mother and smother him? Oh, s’il vous plaît! Things are helped by a fast pace, some good comic timing and the casting of extremely watchable Charlotte Gainsbourg in what, in another age and country, would have been called the Kate Hepburn role. She is more than a match and dandy foil for Chabat’s Doris Day-era-style confirmed bachelor.
(Seen 18 October 2007)
The Price of Milk
Lucinda and Rob seem to have an idyllic life in the gorgeous New Zealand
countryside. After a day of looking after his 117 beloved dairy cows,
they settle into an outdoor bathtub where they can eat dinner, bathe and
wash the dishes all at once. But if this is the Garden of Eden, then
Lucinda is its Eve, with a touch of Pandora. An encounter with a
mysterious old woman crossing a road (not to mention some self-interested
advice from her best friend Drosophila) seems to lead to all kinds of
problems. This is the kind of magic realism-type fable where a group of
mysterious men can steal silently into a tiny bedroom in the middle of
the night and make off with a couple’s quilt while they are sleeping
under it. Or where a woman can nearly drown from a kitchen full of milk
that has leaked from the fridge. You never know what wondrous image or
plot twist will happen next, and that is the charm of this film by Harry
Sinclair. The stars are Danielle Cormack and Karl Urban, who have had
recurring roles on the Hercules/Xena series. (Seen 11
July 2001)
Prick Up Your Ears
The title of this movie is never really explained in the movie, but I
have been given to understand that, if you think about it in such a way
as to come up with something nasty, you will get the idea. That’s the
sort of guy Joe Orton was. He also was constantly making things up that
weren’t true just to mess up people’s minds. The facts here are well
known. Orton wrote a few plays, dark comedies, and was very successful.
In 1967 his lover and roommate Kenneth Halliwell killed him with a hammer
and then committed suicide. This sounds like it could be a real downer of
a movie, but it is actually quite funny and entertaining. Even the
occasion of the murder provides a blackly funny line as does the
cremation afterwards. The movie portrays the two main characters’
relationship as a marriage and suggests the jealousies that doomed the
couple afflict all marriages to some extent. Halliwell’s envy at his
former protégé surpassing him is echoed by the wife of the
biographer, who is gathering Joe’s life story, as she shares in the work
with no credit or glory. This film makes three winners in a row for
director Stephen Frears, who also did The Hit with John Hurt and
last year’s My Beautiful Launderette. (Seen 6 June
1987)
Pride and Joy
“Never get sentimental about property.” If that (I think quite sensible) advice could suddenly be enforced magically and retroactively, then a full half or more of all Irish literature would vanish in that instant. But it is telling that not only does this movie itself not follow that advice but that the character who utters it is ultimately shown to be a cold-hearted bitch. This is a generally well-done “kitchen sink” story about a modern Dublin family that face a crisis when the granny dies. It turns out that granny owned the house they are living in and she has left it to both her children—the married daughter who has lived with and minded her for years and the errant son who has piled up debts pursuing a “career” as a professional gambler. The film is produced by its two acting leads, Michèle Forbes (not to be confused with American actor Michelle Forbes) and Owen Roe. Probably best known to international audiences as the publican during the last two seasons of Ballykissangel, Roe bears a fair resemblance to the late Carroll O’Connor and, indeed, he seems to have prepped for the role by studying old episodes of All in the Family. A subtle critique of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger economy with a surprisingly sugary ending, the film is in the end a well-observed portrait of a couple, neither of whom is perfect, who manage to muddle through life one way or another. (Seen 14 July 2006)
Primal Fear
The title Primal Fear is unfortunate because it sets us up to
expect a suspense/slasher kind of movie. (The title cleverly plays on the
fact that the movie deals with a heinous crime involving an archbishop.)
The movie is actually a somewhat thoughtful courtroom drama in which
Richard Gere and Laura Linney play younger, sexier versions of F. Lee
Bailey and Marsha Clark. To that extent, it is fairly well done. The film
clearly trades on the general American cynicism vis-à-vis
the legal system which crystalized with the O.J. circus. By the time we
get to the twist ending, however, we learn that—despite celebrity,
riches, media-grabbing, and general consorting with well-heeled scum—the
Johnnie Cochrans and F. Lee Baileys of the world ultimately do what they
do largely for altruistic reasons and, in fact, they may just be a little
too innocent. Chicago politicans and the Catholic clergy in this film do
not come off nearly so well. (Seen 6 August 1996)
Primary Colors
How appropriate that the director of the seminal film 30 years ago about
baby-boomers coming of age (The Graduate) should now undertake a
film fable about that generation’s rise to ultimate political power. But
Primary Colors won’t be the classic that Mike Nichols’s earlier
movie is because it centers too much on John Travolta’s cartoonish
buffoon of a “Clinton-like” presidential candidate, an image that will
become increasingly irrelevant as time marches on. The movie also just
misses catching the current moment (in stark contrast to Barry Levinson’s
Wag the Dog) because its most
provocative episodes have already been eclipsed by mainstream media
coverage of supposed and/or real Clinton scandals. The main reasons
to see Primary Colors are two ostensibly supporting
performances. Adrian Lester, as our point-of-view character, was
born to play the wide-eyed innocent losing his political virginity.
And Kathy Bates’s larger-than-life conscience-of-a-generation role
is classic scene-chewing Oscar material. (Seen 1 April
1998)
Prime
I was spellbound by this movie. It was sharper and brighter than any film I have ever seen before in a cinema. In fact, I was so taken up with its clarity, I nearly forgot to pay attention to the story. You see, Ben Younger’s Prime is the first movie to be distributed and displayed digitally in Ireland, and I saw it in one of the 11 cinemas showing it in that format. I know, as an aspiring film buff, that I am supposed to be sentimentally attached to celluloid. But this is better. In a way, the antiseptically clean quality of the images matches the rather perfect world of New York portrayed in the narrative. It’s a world where people enjoy a very high quality of life (great food, great wine, great art, great sex) and the men look a bit like the late John Kennedy Jr. and the women look like Uma Thurman. And where everyone pretty much has the wisdom to put things into perspective in the long run. This is basically a romantic chick flick, but with a considerable and welcome distraction into hilarious farce—set up by the usual sort of movie coincidence regarding identities. The burden of providing the comedy falls mainly on the shoulders of, of all people, Meryl Streep, who plays a Jewish mother more or less as a somewhat toned-down version of Mike Myers’s old Linda Richman character. (Remember “Cawffee Tawk”?) As with Younger’s earlier writing/directing effort, Boiler Room, he aims just a bit higher than the usual movie entertainment. And, like the earlier film, it has the heartfelt quality of quasi-autobiography. But its dead serious final stretch feels like a dead weight after the hilarity of the earlier scenes. But it sure looks great at the Eye Cinema! (Seen 16 May 2006)
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
More than three decades before she first taught at Hogwarts, Maggie Smith was the flamboyant prima donna on the faculty of an otherwise conservative girls’ school in Edinburgh. The role that really put Smith on the international map (it won her the first of her two Oscars), Jean Brodie is one of those larger-than-life movie teachers who serve, dramatically, to turn their school into a microcosm of the larger world. (Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society makes a nice counterpart.) An overly romantic spinster, her life, as she says, is her girls who, once they come into her sphere of influence, are forever known as “Brody girls.” If this seems like a cult of personality, it is not a coincidence that Brody is an open admirer of Mussolini and Franco. (This is the 1930s.) The dramatic tension comes when one of her young circle (the magnetic Pamela Franklin, who started out as one of the kids in Jack Clayton’s The Innocents) refuses to play the role that the manipulative Miss Brodie has chosen for her. The director was Ronald Neame, who would go on to make The Poseidon Adventure and The Odessa File. The screenplay was by Jay Presson Allen, after her own stage adaptation of Muriel Spark’s novel. As always, Smith is riveting to watch—so much so that it is easy to forget that this is really more of a coming-of-age story than a portrait of a charismatic teacher. Coincidentally, Herbert Ross’s remake of Goodbye Mr. Chips came out the same year.
(Seen 22 January 2010)
Primer
By now this 2004 low-budget indie flick has achieved clear cult status. It is a prime example of a do-your-head-in movie. At 77 minutes in length and made for around $7,000, this movie makes Inception look like a Dogme 95 one-act two-hander. Written and directed by and starring Shane Carruth, it’s film that starts out deceptively realistic and straightforward. We begin with four guys who work for some sort of technical company. They are spending their spare time on a project in somebody’s garage. It is hard to follow what they are talking about all the time, but as things progress it emerges that one or two of them realize that they have stumbled onto a breakthrough of literally cosmic proportions. It’s an intriguing premise: what would really happen if someone figured out a way to peek into the future or tweak the recent past. And would the people involved be able to trust each other? The film’s latter stretch, through an elliptical narrative style and a minimum of exposition, quickly becomes very confusing. This is a film that nearly cannot exist without the possibility of multiple viewings, the use of pause and rewind buttons and, perhaps most importantly, consulting the internet. It is a mind-bending puzzle par excellence. The main mystery here is why Carruth, eight years later, is not well on his way to a Christopher Nolan-like filmmaking career. According to the IMDb, his prospective sophomore project is something called Upstream Color, but there’s not even a tentative release date.
(Seen 16 November 2012)
Prince of Egypt
It is a very brave thing to take one of the most revered figures in
three, count ‘em three, major religions and turn his story into a major
animated entertainment, complete with songs, comic relief and an
action-packed chariot race. I’ll leave it to others to decide whether
DreamWorks’s latest full-length cartoon makes the Book of Exodus more
“accessible” or is merely blasphemy. I will say, however, that it is a
horrible waste to take one of the greatest voices of our time (Patrick
Stewart’s) and squander it in the relatively minor role of “Pharaoh”
(father of Rameses and adoptive father of Moses) when it would have been
so much better suited to the even more minor role (in terms of number of
lines here anyway) of “God.” (On the other hand, The Irish
Independent observed wonderfully that it was too bad that George
Burns wasn’t still around to voice the role.) Purely as an entertainment,
Prince of Egypt holds the attention and dazzles with images. The
animation is well done and quite life-like, particularly the crowd
scenes. And Steve Martin and Martin Short are very amusing as a pair of
sycophantic priests. The young’uns (ages 6 to 11) who accompanied the
Missus and myself seemed to enjoy the spectacle just fine, although
conceivably the antics of the Old Testament God—which include plagues,
infanticide and drowning armies—could be a tad upsetting to some. (Seen 27 December 1998)
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
There are moments when this fantasy action/adventure flick raises hopes that it twill transcend its video game origins and flesh out some fully fledged characters who can make this a Hollywood swashbuckling yarn in the mode of Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn. The nicely buffed-up and hirsute Jake Gyllenhaal and heavily-made-up Gemma Arterton may not spark major chemistry, but each is appealing in his and her own right. But little time goes by before we get another CGI set piece and, while these are not without entertainment value, their artificiality totally drains the life out of the story. And the fact that the secret weapon everyone is scrambling over (I think the words “deus ex machina” are embossed on the handle) looks like a remote control and serves to rewind only further reminds us just where the story came from. What saves the movie is the arrival of the reliable Alfred Molina, the rogue who turns out (surprise!) to have a heart of gold. Molina essentially has the Eli Wallach role, which in Bruckheimer/Disney terms amounts to the Johnny Depp role. But he is better than Depp because his performance is natural and unforced and completely entertaining for every second he is on screen. Also not to be underestimated is Steve Toussaint as his sidekick. Mainly known to UK TV audiences, Toussaint creates the most sympathetic and heroic character of the movie while getting precious few words of dialog. Director Mike Newell, on the other hand, seems in it for the paycheck, using some of the tricks he picked up on his Harry Potter movie, as does Sir Ben Kingsley, who has pretty much phoned in his turn as the king’s supposedly devoted brother.
(Seen 9 June 2010)
The Princess and the Frog
The trouble, for those of us who are old and cynical, in seeing a new traditionally animated Disney princess film is that, not only do we see echoes of so many such earlier movies (not necessarily a bad thing), but we also see the potential product knock-offs and theme park rides. In the very first scene, we see a spoiled rich girl with endless numbers of princess dresses, and it just reminds us of all the high-priced costumes we will inevitably encounter at all the strategically placed gift shops during the next visit to Disneyland. The filmmakers seem to be having a bit of fun with the inevitable commercialization of their work. It is hard not to like a movie that features new Randy Newman songs celebrating his native New Orleans or, for that matter, a movie that itself celebrates New Orleans at the height of the jazz age. And it is hard not to like Tiana, the hard-working, spunky heroine, firmly in the vein of Disney princesses since 1989’s The Little Mermaid. As with other Disney feature-length cartoons since then, this production is part Broadway musical, part romantic comedy and a bit spooky and scary. Even more than most of its predecessors, however, this one is very respectful of the formula. Do we get amusing and/or endearing woodland creatures? Do we get lump-in-your-throat moments signaled by big dewy female eyes? Do we get a happy ending? Well, actually there’s a bit of surprising, if momentary, sadness in the finale. Best roles go to Keith David as the villain, Jennifer Cody and John Goodman as a funhouse mirror version of a Tennessee Williams daughter and father, and Bruno Campos as a refreshingly fun-loving, strangely Latin sounding prince.
(Seen 14 February 2010)
The Princess Bride
As far as I can remember (which isn’t always very far) this is where it all began. I think this was the beginning of the ironic, post-modern re-telling or re-invention of fairy tales that has become ubiquitous with movies like Shrek and Enchanted and whole lot of others. Part fantasy, part Christmas pantomime, part Borsht Belt dinner show, this rehashing of fairy tales and Errol Flynn movies was an unexpected mixture of romance and belly laughs in 1987. Still thinking of Rob Reiner as “Meathead” from All in the Family, we started to cop on that he was actually a pretty darn good filmmaker. (He had previously helmed the mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap, the romcom The Sure Thing and the Steven King adaptation Stand By Me.) The wit in this film derives from the writing by William Goldman, after his own book. In her film debut in the title role, the future Mrs. Sean Penn (Robin Wright) was nearly as beautiful as Cary Elwes, her love interest and near twin. As the vain scheming prince, Chris Sarandon not only gets away with but provokes guffaws with lines like “I’ve got my country’s 500th anniversary to plan, my wedding to arrange, my wife to murder and Guilder to frame for it. I’m swamped.” Christopher Guest makes a dandy Basil Rathbone-like villain, and you cannot help but be amused by characters like André the Giant, Wallace Shawn and Billy Crystal as the wisecracking Miracle Max. A standout is Mandy Patinkin, whose revenge-seeking Spaniard caused legions of young male filmgoers to continually recite the lines “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” Let us not overlook the nice turns by Peter Falk and Fred Savage in the framing story of a old man reading to his grandson.
(Seen 2 January 2012)
The Princess Diaries
Disney has made something of an industry the past several years out of movies and TV shows about teenage girls being bitchy to one another. Between musical numbers or special effects, the banter largely consists of our heroine getting dissed by some Malibu or Beverly Hills princess and then giving it back better. The gold standard for this clique/class conscious entertainment may be this 2001 movie, adapted from Meg Cabot’s novel and directed by Garry Marshall. In a way, it is a junior version of Marshall’s Cinderella opus Pretty Woman. But, in another way, it is the girly version of the Harry Potter movies, i.e. a seemingly ordinary adolescent discovers that she is actually the chosen one but finds that her problems get worse instead of magically disappearing. The movie succeeds because of its reasonably realistic approach to the unlikely situation but mainly because of the talent involved. After Brokeback Mountain and The Devil Wears Prada, it is hard to believe that Anne Hathaway so recently could convincingly play a 15-year-old. As her socially conscious best friend, Heather Matarazzo still has that air of emotional desperation from Welcome to the Dollhouse. The amiable Hector Elizondo is the most unlikely of chauffeurs. And no one radiates class and royalty more than the world’s favorite former music hall chorine turned movie nanny and nun, Julie Andrews herself. Needless to say, the sequel was a given.
(Seen 9 August 2009)
The Producers
There are so many ironies attached to this Broadway musical within a movie based on a Broadway musical based on a movie that I don’t even know where to begin, and others have probably commented on them at length already anyway. Still, one can’t help but bask in the chief irony of Mel Brooks living out the reality lampooned by his 1968 comedy classic, i.e. satirizing the sort of people who produce Broadway shows. I never saw the stage version of The Producers, but I can say that the new movie version lacks something that the original film had and no new version can ever get again, and that is the element of surprise. When Bialystock and Bloom settled on a musical called Springtime in Hitler in the 1960s, it had shock value. For today’s moviegoers (or their parents anway), Springtime for Hitler is a fond celluloid memory. Still, Brooks’s manic and irreverent brand of humor still shines through, and there is something reassuring about his something-to-offend-everyone approach to comedy. Neo-Nazis are, if anything, more scary today than they were in 1968, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t fun to see ridiculed. And I’m not even sure who was meant to be most offended (the gay community or the religious right or both) by the trotting out of every gay stereotype known to mankind. As a Swedish-American, even I got to feel somewhat included in the offend-everyone spirit of things with Uma Thurman’s simplistic Scandinavian bombshell. And the audience around me was fun to watch when the most clichéd pair of Irish cops ever appeared. Perhaps the biggest surprise was seeing how Brooks has aged into looking like Jimmy Durante. What? You saw the movie and don’t remember seeing Mel Brooks? Well, you must have left the cinema without watching all of the credits. (Seen 10 January 2006)
Profundo Carmesí (Deep Crimson)
When shown as a “surprise film” at the 42nd Cork Film Festival, this
little gem from Mexico had many in the audience fleeing for the exits by
the time it reached its bullet-riddled conclusion. What starts as a tale
of mismatched losers who become lovers turns into a serial murder spree
and finally a distasteful on-screen of bloodletting. I suppose the idea
was to endear us to this pair early on and then make their first victim
or two somewhat ridiculous so that we would become somewhat complicit in
their acts. Well, it didn’t work. I didn’t like either of them from the
beginning. (Seen 19 October 1997)
La Promesse
I’ve been chided by more than one person for not including La
Promesse on my top ten list for 1997,
but I couldn’t for the simple reason that I didn’t see it in 1997.
Oh, I had the chance all right. It played at the 1997 Seattle Film Festival, but I didn’t see it
there. (I don’t remember what I saw instead, but I’m sure it had
lots of nudity in it.) Anyway, I finally got another chance
to see this film, and it is indeed a fine one. But it’s hard to
watch. Just like adolescence is hard to get through, which is what
this film is about. The directors, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne,
made documentaries before this and it shows in the movie’s jerky,
it-could-really-be-happening verité style. A gritty
tale set in urban Belgium, once again we see that nobody deals with
childhood and youth more unblinkingly or truthfully than francophone
filmmakers. The movie’s success is due largely to the casting of
young Jérémie Renier, who is in practically every
scene. More to the point is the timing of Renier’s casting, as the
film catches him poised exactly at that agonizing crossroads between
childhood and adulthood, which for a guy means old enough to want to
posture and swagger but young enough to still sort of look like a
girl. (Seen 22 February 1998)
Un prophète (A Prophet)
Not only did this movie sweep the Césars (the “French Oscars”), it picked up the Grand Prix at Cannes and was a runner-up for Best Foreign Film at the Academy Awards (the “American Oscars”). So, it must be good, right? Well, actually, it is. It’s very good. Part prison drama, part rising crime boss saga, part spiritual and social meditation, the flick is just plain compelling and a darn good story. That shouldn’t be a surprise, given director Jacques Audiard’s track record (See How They Fall, A Self Made Hero, The Beat That My Heart Skipped). When we first meet Malik (Tahar Rahim, in a star-making performance), we have little hope for his future. We don’t know exactly why he is going into prison, but we know he is only now old enough to be there. His answers to routine questions, as he is processed, reveal that he is completely adrift—from family, from religion, from society. But this victim-in-waiting surprises us and shows an unusual ability to adapt and keep in with all sides—when not playing one off against the other. Through luck, chance and a bit of kindly guidance (some of which seems to come from beyond the grave), he actually flourishes. Indeed, his instincts and luck are so extraordinary that, at one point, someone asks him if he is “a prophet or something,” thereby giving us the title. The impressive Rahim makes Malik’s maturation and growth from callow loser to wily entrepreneur seem entirely believable. And, with explicit intention or not, the movie also tells us something about the importance of demographics in a changing society.
(Seen 8 July 2010)
The Proposal
One of the running gags/indicators of those amusing guys on UK BBC radio Five Live, Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo, is that romcoms that have a movie poster with the male star leaning against something (usually Matthew McConaughey, usually against a woman) is a bad sign. This is such a movie because its poster featured Ryan Reynolds, if not exactly leaning, then being pushed up hard against a wall or something. He is pushed by Sandra Bullock, who is his evil queen of a boss who needs a quick fix for her immigration situation. The Virginia-born Bullock plays a Canadian, and her quick fix is a sham marriage to the British Columbia-born Reynolds, playing an American. But this is not just a green card romcom, but it is also a fish-out-of-water rom as events conspire to have Bullock’s prissy character accompany her newly betrothed to his rugged family home in Sitka, Alaska. What makes this a kind of strange romcom is that, despite the fact that convention dictates that the bickering couple really belong together, it is never completely clear if they do. Fairly late in the proceedings, we are still wondering if Reynolds actually belongs with Malin Åkerman, the hometown girl he left behind. Despite some nice supporting performances from Mary Steenburgen, Craig T. Nelson and Betty White as Reynolds’s parents and grandmother, there is really nothing about Reynolds’s ambitious corporate flunky and Bullock’s imperious manager to make us root for them to get together.
(Seen 29 October 2012)
The Proposition
You only need to know that Nick Cave penned this Australian western, as well as providing music for it, with his collaborator Warren Ellis, to know that it is going to be dark. Well, forget dark. Shakespeare’s Macbeth was dark. This movie is the emotional equivalent of a black hole. Directed by John Hillcoat, this movie gives us an 1880s Queensland blighted by one act of gut-churning violence followed by another. There is a hero of sorts. He is Irishman Charlie Burns, played by Guy Pearce, whose brothers are prone to go off on the occasional rampage. An English captain, played with exhausted determination by Ray Winstone, offers him a bargain: bring in his outlaw brother Arthur who, along with another brother, has just committed an atrocity at a farmhouse and the youngest brother, who is in custody, will avoid hanging. Meanwhile, as the captain’s prim and proper wife (Emily Watson) goes about readying her best china for Christmas dinner, we know somehow that the holidays will probably not come off without mishap. Danny Huston, son of legendary director John, is very reminiscent of the late Oliver Reed as the leader of the Burns gang. When the wildest brother learns the existence of the word “misanthrope,” he asks him, “Is that we are? Misanthropes?” “No,” replies Arthur firmly, “we are a family.” Choking on the dusty scenery he has been asked to chew, John Hurt goes crazy with the heat as an English bounty hunter, who further complicates things. The movie’s message seems to be that violence merely begets more violence. Until someone finally decides to break the cycle of violence. Which, in movies like this, usually means at least one more act of violence. (Seen 16 October 2005)
Psy-Warriors
Just when bomb blasts in Omagh and missile attacks in Sudan and
Afghanistan make you think that the world has become a very different and
dangerous place, you get a chance to look back at a film like
Psy-Warriors and realize that nothing much has changed at all.
Part of a retrospective of the oeuvre of late British filmmaker
Alan Clark shown at the Edinburgh International Film Festival,
Psy-Warriors is a filmed play that was originally shown on BBC
television in 1981 (in a macabre coincidence on the same night that Bobby
Sands died). To see it now is to evoke a time when idealistic and violent
terrorist gangs were active in Germany, Italy and the UK and state
terrorism was on the rise in both East and West. The film is as maddening
and disorientating as a session of military torture, which is basically
the sum of the plot. It turns out that the subjects of this abuse are
military volunteers, who get much more than they bargained for. Although
hard to watch, the film powerfully shows the dehumanizing process that
makes a terrorist, either for or against the state. This is light years
away from Clark’s best known film, the comedy Rita, Sue and Bob
Too. (Seen 25 August 1998)
Psycho
You can wonder why Gus Van Sant would make a shot-by-shot remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s seminal slasher
flick, but the point is, he has. And, hey, what’s the big deal? I
mean, Brian De Palma has done it lots of times, mainly in 1980’s
Dressed to Kill. And this remake really is shot-by-shot. I
thought maybe it was a trick and they would pull a surprise at the end,
like maybe Norman jumps the guard in the final scene and escapes and
kills a lot more people. But no. The only truly Van Sant moment I spotted
was briefly where William H. Macy (in the Martin Balsam role) bites it--
which is probably some kind of karmic payback for all those awful things
he did in Fargo. If you
haven’t seen the original, I don’t know what your reaction will be
to this version, except maybe that the pace seems kind of slow and
the actors kind of old compared to the Scream and Last Summer
movies. (By the way, Vince Vaughan is plenty creepy as Norman, but
he’s no Tony Perkins.) As for the rest of us, seeing this film is
akin to reading the script of a classic movie. It brings back lots
of memories of how good the actual movie was. (Note: sit patiently
through all of the closing credits if you want to know whose kitchen
knife was used.) (Seen 8 December 1998)
Public Enemies
When you make a movie about the gangster era of 1930s Chicago, there are two ways to go. You can make the law enforcement guys the heroes, as Brian De Palma did in his 1987 adaptation of the TV series The Untouchables. Or you can focus on the criminal, making him some sort of flawed Shakespearean figure or even a modern-day Robin Hood. Clearly, Michael Mann (whose seminal TV series Miami Vice actually did a very good job of focusing on the good guys) has gone the latter route. You cannot cast Johnny Depp and not have him be sympathetic or, for that matter, be Johnny Depp. And it doesn’t help that, in this movie, his pals have to emphasize his Johnny Depp-ness by constantly calling him “Johnny.” And, this being a Hollywood film in 2009, there also have to be echoes of recent current events. John Dillinger and J. Edgar Hoover are both consciously conducting a media war as well as a shooting war. And when Hoover keeps talking about a “war on crime,” we cannot help but think “war on terror.” The humorless, robotic good guys (led by, who else, Christian Bale) sell out their values by wiretapping and what might be called enhanced interrogation. (Interestingly, the one instance of what could be called outright torture is shown to be pretty darn effective.) In the end, Dillinger is like one of those old cowboys in an elegiac western, having outlived his time. All he wants to do is pull one last bank job (he never accepts the money bank employees offer him out of their own pockets) and then have a nice peaceful retirement. Poor guy. Instead, he finds out the hard way that there is a down side to being a movie buff.
(Seen 7 July 2009)
Puffball
What wonderful symmetry! Last year at the Film Fleadh I got a welcome chance to see Nicolas Roeg’s masterpiece Don’t Look Now on the big screen. Now, this year, I got the pleasure of seeing his latest film, which seems, in many ways, like a bookend to the 1973 one—and introduced by the man himself. In Don’t Look Now, Roeg took Venice and made it damp and decaying and full of menace for outsiders who don’t belong. If he could do that to Venice, just imagine what he could do with water-logged and remote rural Ireland—which is what he does in this movie. Once again, we have outsiders working on an architectural project, a weird pair of sisters who may or may not have some supernatural powers, and a pervading sense that the place itself does not want these interlopers. And, in case there is any doubt, even Donald Sutherland is back, although this time in role that doesn’t serve any obvious purpose other than to have Donald Sutherland in the movie—which, in this case, is reason enough. The couple this time are played by Kelly Reilly (in her way, nearly as charismatic as Julie Christie) and Oscar Pearce. In a situation familiar to anyone who watches Irish home improvement programs on the telly, she is doing up an old cottage—and on the soggiest, muddiest site on the entire island. (The result, by the way, is one of the best jokes in the film, especially given her de rigueur insistence that she is “respecting” its traditional character.) The obligatory strange neighbors are played by Miranda Richardson, desperate to conceive a male child before the change of life kicks in, and Rita Tushingham, as her mother, in one of the all-time great weird old lady roles. Now, I realize that I’ve made this sound like it’s a horror movie, and it certainly has all the trappings of one. But Roeg made clear that he didn’t intend the movie to belong to any genre, and it’s fair to say that that is more true of Puffball than of Don’t Look Now. Part suspense thriller, part fairy tale, part fable—this movie, in the end, is the kinder, gentler (but still disturbing) Don’t Look Now.
(Seen 14 July 2007)
The Pursuit of Happyness
The first few frames of this movie threaten that it may be just a bit too inspirational. And the cutesy title and poster featuring Will Smith and his moppet of a kid do not particularly discourage this impression. But, in the end, the film (directed by the Italian auteur of such romantic fare as The Last Kiss and Remember Me, Gabriele Muccino) succeeds brilliantly by virtue of what it does not do. It does not make Gardner a saint—an all-too-common problem with biopics of living people. It does not go sugary
sweet—although young Jaden Smith is dangerously adorable. And it does not give in to the temptation to make an overt political statement in this true tale of a family slipping off the economic ladder into homelessness, set against the dawn of the Reagan administration. This is not the first movie to deal with the victims at the bottom of society’s economic framework, and certainly not the first to treat its downtrodden hero as noble. But it is one of the few that I can think of where the noble hero refuses to give up and works within the system to succeed in spite of everything. Will Smith is a revelation as Chris Gardner, and this is clearly a story that he identifies with. No one, who has ever wondered where their next paycheck was coming from or who has spent much time minding their own child, will remain unaffected. Nor, I am guessing, will anyone else.
(Seen 17 January 2007)
Pusher
This movie can be thought of as the Danish Spider-Man. After all, it subsequently spawned two sequels and a reboot. Okay, that’s a rubbish comparison. Made several years before Doug Liman made The Bourne Identity, this cult favorite had the gritty feel and breathless action associated with post-Bourne thrillers. It actually feels like an edgy TV show, starting with shots and name labels for the main characters and ending with what seems like a cliffhanger but is really just somewhat open-ended. As a portrait of a mid-level drug dealer during a particularly bad week, it feels fairly realistic—despite sudden bursts of action set to pulsating music. In the beginning, Frank and Tonny are living the good life in Copenhagen, and we see indications that Frank is even trying to become more refined in his lifestyle. But as the days go by, we realize that not only does he not make great decisions but he’s also a bit soft about accepting excuses from his clients. Predictably, it all goes wrong and we become totally wrapped up in Frank’s stress over his potentially fatal situation. Tonny (who would be the focus of a sequel eight years later) is played by future Bond villain Mads Mikkelsen in his film debut. The director is Nicolas Winding Refn, who scored last year with Drive. The aforementioned reboot is actually a London-set British remake directed by Luis Prieto.
(Seen 12 July 2012)
Pushing Tin
If you were charmed by the comedic take on modern social mores in Four
Weddings and a Funeral and have enjoyed such U.S. sitcoms as
Taxi and Cheers, then you may find yourself liking this wry
tale of air traffic controllers in the very busy air hub of New York
City. That’s because it’s directed by Mike Newell (4W&aF, Into
the West, Donnie Brasco) and written by Glen and Les Charles,
who have provided the laughs for some of America’s finest sitcoms. Many
of the best wisecracks may remind you of Frasier. The movie
presents a flawless portrait of ego-driven male competition in the
workplace spilling over into every aspect of one’s personal life. John
Cusack is the hotshot in his prime who is extremely good and knows it,
but we know there’s trouble ahead when he drives to his home and has to
think several minutes about which driveway is his. Billy Bob Thornton is
his stoic, mystical nemesis, who seems to do everything better, including
having the youngest and sexiest wife (Angelina Jolie, who made quite an
impression as “Legs” in the grrrl power flick, Foxfire). Also on hand is
Australian Cate Blanchett (Oscar and
Lucinda, Elizabeth) doing a fine New
York accent as Cusack’s better half. Note: Seeing this film may not be
particularly reassuring to people who fly a lot. (Seen 29
April 1999)
Pusinky (Dolls)
It used to be that films from Eastern Europe were arty and hard to follow and slow and weird. But this 2007 Czech flick by Karin Babinská is like nothing so much as an extended episode of an edgy UK teen TV series like Skins. Another way to look at it is as an Eastern European version of Where the Boys Are. Iska, Vendula and Karolina are three teens who have apparently been friends forever. They keep mentioning that this will be their last summer together, apparently because with school behind them they know they will go their separate ways, but it’s more as if they sense that the things that bound them as children will not be enough to sustain friendship because of the different kinds of adults they will become. Iska and her younger brother Vojta are dragged off, against their better judgment, on a summer lark, a hitchhiking journey to the Netherlands. But, as with most road movies that double as coming-of-age stories, the destination is virtually irrelevant in comparison to the journey. There is much bad behavior. Mistakes are made. Regrets pile up. Hormones rage. And three young women get a clearer picture of who each of them is. It’s the kind of movie that is liable to keep the father of a young girl awake at night.
(Seen 8 July 2009)
Puteshestviye molodogo kompozitora (The
Young Composer’s Journey)
Another Soviet film. It’s 1908 and a shy, earnest, gangly young composer
sets out for Georgia (theirs, not ours) to record folk songs. A rebellion
against the Czar has just been crushed and people are restive and
paranoid at the same time. Everybody seems convinced that the young
composer has come to lead the people in battle. And it doesn’t help that
his self-appointed guide, a hard drinking, hearty laughing lout by the
name of Leko keeps spreading this story around. I can’t help but think
that, if these Russians would spend less time casting meaningful glances
about and more time talking things out, these kind of misunderstandings
could be avoided. Even though this movie was made only three years ago,
the acting is the exaggerated kind we tend to associate more with silent
movies. I guess one of the points here is that you really can’t separate
politics from art—unless you’re in Hollywood, but that’s another story.
(Seen 19 May 1987)
|
|
|
