Scott's Movie Comments

To Die For

Okay, what if we took the basic facts of the Pamela Smart case (you know, the teacher who convinced her teenage lover and his friends to kill her husband?) and turned it into a black comedy? And we make Pamela an aspiring TV star so we can turn the whole thing into A Comment on the Media? (Lord knows we need more movies that satirize the media. Personally, I only saw two others all weekend!) To Die For looks like it will be Gus Van Sant’s first film to reach a “mainstream” audience. In commercial terms, this is a great comeback from the fiasco of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues and somewhat less challenging for Middle America than My Own Private Idaho. This movie is a wonderful collaboration of talents. The entertaining script is by Buck Henry who also does an acting turn as an apopletic school teacher. The whole cast, led by Nicole Kidman who is great as the murderously ambitious bride, is uniformly wonderful. Kidman looks so kittenish she seems to have turned into the young Ann-Margret. Matt Dillon doesn’t have a lot to do as the hapless victim. The kids who play the duped teenagers are much more convincing than Dillon ever was when he played those roles. The real standout, however, is Illeanna Douglas as Dillon’s sister. She appeared a while back in a film called Grief where she was equally great. It turns out that Van Sant is perfect to direct this film. Even though it is played for laughs, his understanding of adolescents and street life (well established in his early films) has led him to create a film that explains to me for the very first time how a woman could convince teenagers to commit a murder. Danny Elfman’s typically spooky carnival sounding score is perfect for the subject matter. (Seen 28 May 1995)

To Russia with Love

Definitely not to be confused with a James Bond movie with a similar title, this documentary by Louise Wadley chronicles the story of Dublin housewife Debbie Deegan, who founded a charity to help one wretched orphanage in western Russia. While the film is essentially non-critical, it gives Deegan enough screen time to let viewers decide for themselves if she is a saint, a shameless self-promoter or something in between. Whatever the verdict, Deegan is certainly an interesting subject. An unstoppable blonde earth mother who can talk without a trace of self-consciousness about squalid toilets while having her nails manicured or sipping wine in her affluent suburban kitchen. Strangely, the strongest angle in terms of cinema, her quest to bring her adopted Russian daughter’s best friend back to Ireland, is somewhat underplayed in the final reel. But the impact of a woman who has gone to great effort to do a least a little bit of good for children in a strange country remains. (Seen 8 March 2001)

Todo sobre mi madre (All About My Mother)

This movie ends with a dedication to a string of powerful female actors as well as writer/director Pedro Almodóvar’s own mother. But you don’t have to wait that long to figure out where he is coming from. The opening title of this potboiler appears over a dubbed version of the not coincidentally similarly titled Bette Davis classic All About Eve, which our heroine Manuela is watching on TV with her adored Adonis of a teenage son. Actually, you know where Almodóvar is coming from even before the movie starts if you have seen even one or two of his previous films (everything from Labyrinth of Passion to last year’s Live Flesh). In other words, fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy movie. If you’re hungry for melodrama, you’ve definitely come to the right place. Like most of Almodóvar’s other work, this flick is drama queen heaven. The cast of characters also includes the exquisitely named stage actor Huma Rojo, who plays (who else?) Blanche DuBois in a production of A Streetcar Named Desire, as well as sundry denizens of Barcelona’s sexual demimonde and the breathtaking Penélope Cruz (Open Your Eyes, The Hi-Lo Country) as the unlikeliest and unluckiest nun ever. For those in need of a cinematic emotional release, All About My Mother has something for every woman as well as something for every woman trapped in someone else’s body. (Seen 6 January 2000)

Tokyo Cowboy

Here’s another of those screwball romantic comedies. Tokyo Cowboy is an assured first feature by Canadian Kathy Garneau. Filmed in British Columbia, this movie is very hard not to like. Its star Hiromoto Ida is totally charming as No, a young Japanese man who dreams of going to North America and becoming a cowboy. (After the screening Garneau said it’s a good thing that Hiromoto has finally gotten an agent. He turned down a role on The X-Files because he thought it would involve pornography!) After being fired from his job as a fry cook, No heads to BC to look up his old grade school penpal Kate who once sent him a photo of herself on a horse. In one of the more improbable aspects of the story, after graduating from college Kate has moved back to her small hometown with her female lover and is so uptight about anybody knowing she is a lesbian that she virtually hides out in her house. (The odd thing is that Kate is an artist, while her lover Shelly who seems not the least bit concerned about public opinion is a school teacher.) Throw into the mix Kate’s mother who encourages No to woo her daughter and a postal carrier (who deeply wishes he were Native American) who coaches No on how to be a cowboy and to romance women. This film does the gentlest job I have ever seen of dealing honestly but positively with racial and sexual conflicts. While a couple of minor characters exist purely to be unlikable, the main characters are all treated with sympathy and understanding. Like its star, this film can’t help but charm. (Seen 29 May 1995)

Tokyo Nagaremono (Tokyo Drifter)

The main mystery about this 1966 Japanese classic is: why did the film festival show it at 3:30 in the afternoon instead of at midnight? It starts off in black and white, like it’s going to be some gritty film noir type of thing. But the style keeps changing throughout the movie. At some moments it seems like one of those swinging 1960s James Bond movies. At other times it seems like a musical or a Three Stooges comedy. The plot deals with Tetsu and his boss who are gangsters trying to go straight, using their ill-gotten gains to go into legitimate business. But of course, they can’t escape their past so easily. Another gang (which hasn’t gone straight) tries to muscle in on their action. After a little bloodshed, Tetsu has to go away to avoid the heat, hence becoming the “Tokyo drifter” of the title. He even has his own theme song which he sings (with full orchestral accompaniment) as he sadly walks along. (At one point, the sound of his singing alerts some assassins that he is drawing near.) He has a girlfriend who also spends a lot of time singing sadly in what appears to be a sound stage, although it’s never quite clear to me what she’s doing there. Tokyo Drifter is one perplexing hoot. (Seen 26 May 1996)

Tom and Huck

Do we really need yet another adaptation of Mark Twain’s classic novel? Not really. But apparently Disney needed a vehicle for its hot property, teeny-bopper cover boy Jonathan Taylor Thomas. Tom Sawyer provides Jon an opportunity to play a 19th-century version of his Home Improvement character, but he is upstaged regularly by his fellow adolescent pin-up Brad Renfo (the child-in-jeopardy in The Client) who plays a sensitive, brooding Huckleberry Finn. The action/suspense elements of the tale have been emphasized for the benefit of 1990s audiences, but this movie is harmless fun. Unless, of course, you are one of those wimpy parents who shelter their kids from anything that might give them an adrenaline rush. If so, then it may be too intense for your kids. (Seen 23 January 1996)

Tomorrow Never Dies

If you can’t get in to see Titanic or you just don’t want to hassle the queues, you can see a ship sink in Tomorrow Never Dies. And a bunch of explosions. And some breathtaking chase scenes. And a lot of produce stands chopped up by helicopter blades. (Don’t ask.) In his second outing as 007, Pierce Brosnan firmly establishes himself as the second best James Bond. Which is to say, he’s no Sean Connery but he definitely out-Roger Moores Roger Moore. Judi Dench (Queen Victoria in Mrs. Brown) has settled quite nicely into the role of M. Joe Don Baker gets increasingly loutish in the frequently superfluous role of Bond’s CIA contact. And still in the role of Q after 34 years, ancient and stooped Desmond Llewelyn brings home just how long the Bond movies have been turned out. The villain this time is Jonathan Pryce, a Rupert Murdoch/Ted Turner type who invokes William Randolph Hearst in manipulating world events in order to have something interesting to cover. But is that really his game, or is he just ticked because he’s an Infiniti spokesman and Tomorrow Never Dies is the world’s most expensive BMW commercial? (Seen 20 December 1997)

Tonight Is Cancelled

Here is Exhibit B in my indictment of what I am calling The Curse Of The Framing Love Story (cf. A Thousand Kisses). Once again, we have a compelling story about a subject that has, to date, received little attention in international cinema, but it is undone because the story has been relegated to secondary status in favor of a love story that, by nearly any calculation, should be compelling, but isn’t. The ultimate story here is about the war in Kosovo at the dawn of the 21st century. During the war, a young man named Edi was taken captive for three years. When he was finally released, he found that his girlfriend Aida had waited for him. A few years later an Irish director arrives and wants to make a movie about their story. And that’s where the trouble begins, since the device of a movie within a movie doesn’t usually work out unless there is a really good reason for it. Here there isn’t. To be fair, the director character (played by Mark O’Halloran, who played Bobby Sands in H3 and also wrote the screenplays for Adam & Paul and Garage) has some good moments as the business of independent filmmaking gets some ribbing. But the movie just feels schizophrenic. The story of the war and the separated lovers feels nearly like an afterthought, while we get endless scenes of Aida wandering around doing interior monologs about her frustrations with her relationship with Edi. These scenes feel like an entirely different movie—specifically a European art house film, or perhaps a parody of one. More confusion is added by another plot strand—involving a man at a bus station mistaken for a pen pal fiancé—that has no discernable relation to the rest of the movie. In the end, however, the movie is at least partly redeemed by the light it shines on Kosovo and the war and, in particular, Bubulina Lajçi as Aida, who makes the best of thankless role and brings something of the spark of the young Jean Seberg. Director Brendan Grant seemed to acknowledge the film has some problems when he introduced at the Film Fleadh. He concluded by saying, “At least it’s short.” (Seen 14 July 2007)

Total Eclipse

Obviously typecast for life, Leonardo DiCaprio plays yet another wild, screwed-up but brilliant young poet. (Okay, so The Basketball Diaries is the only other case, but hey, I’m quick to spot a trend.) This is the true story of two of the greatest French poets of the late 19th century, Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine. It is directed by Agnieszka Holland whose previous work includes such reptitive titles as Europa, Europa and Oliver, Olivier as well as the 1993 version of The Secret Garden. Total Eclipse captures the tempestuous relationship between Rimbaud and Verlaine, although they generally come off as whiny, self-indulgent, and self-destructive. And they were certainly all of these things. (No wonder the Republicans want to cut off funding for the arts!) But, even though the screenplay is drawn from their own letters, we don’t get a sense of how talented these men were—especially Rimbaud who is considered one of the great poets of all time, even though he stopped writing by the time he was 20. The reason for this may be that the movie doesn’t really try to present their poetry, probably because French Symbolist poetry is notoriously difficult to translate. (Seen 6 November 1995)

Touching the Void

This docudrama is so intense that I could barely walk on my own two legs leaving the theater. Everyone else seemed to be affected similarly. I had to find a place to warm up and get some water to drink. Never have I seen a more riveting marriage of movie adventure and talking-heads documentary. Directed by Kevin MacDonald, it is based on Joe Simpson’s book about his and Simon Yates’s ascent of Siula Grande, one of the world’s highest peaks, in a remote part of Peru. (Things did not go routinely.) Simpson’s and Yates’s heads are on camera (as well as Richard, an acquaintance who waited for them at their base camp), telling us in detail and with understated English matter-of-factness about the ordeal. At the same time, MacDonald has recreated the events with breathtaking photography in the actual place that it happened. The recreated scenes on their own would make one heck of a movie thriller, though we might find bits of it hard to believe. But with the real guys’ running commentary, we know it is all true and are never allowed to forget that it all really happened. Nor do we ever forget that these are real people, dealing with something most people never come close to, but who are still very human. (At one point Richard confesses thinking that, if only one climber returned, he hoped it would be Simon.) This flick is the most excitement a person can have while watching a movie. When it comes out on DVD, I might carry around a copy, just in case anyone ever asks why I never got into mountain climbing. (Seen 17 October 2003)

Town & Country

If you’re still steaming about that big tax cut the super-wealthy are getting from President Bush, you might feel better to know that people who can actually afford a fabulous Park Avenue apartment as well as a lovely house in The Hamptons may be far less happy than you. That’s the apparent point anyway of this comedy by English director Peter Chelsom, who has previously given us such quirky flicks as Hear My Song and Funny Bones. The Manhattan setting, the ensemble cast of familiar faces, and the soundtrack of jazz pieces and standards make us think of a Woody Allen comedy. At times, Garry Shandling even seems to be doing a Woody Allen imitation, the way Kenneth Branagh did in Celebrity. But we get déjà vu as we follow a dumb-faced Warren Beatty and a buddy through numerous unfunny scenes. Where have we seen this before? That’s right, this is the Ishtar of sophisticated, romantic comedies. Which is to say that it isn’t very sophisticated, it isn’t very romantic, and it frequently isn’t comedic. Like Ishtar, this film had problems in production, which dragged on far longer than scheduled. In fact, it seems to have been begun so long ago that marital infidelity, ditzy but good-looking women, and husbands hemming and hawing about their sexual orientation were all still considered titillating and droll. In spite of it all, the movie does have its moments, chief of which is a minor role by Charlton Heston, who good-naturedly and (rare for this film) hilariously plays on his NRA association. (Seen 4 May 2001)

Toy Story

Who would have thought that one of the most moving moments in the movies this past year would involve a toy spaceman coming to the realization that he is not a real person? I am one of the last people on the planet to see this movie, so you probably already know that it is not only an incredible technical achievement but also a considerable artistic one. It is sly and clever and manages to avoid the sappiness that would have seemed inevitable. Some parents apparently think this movie is too scary for young children. (Maybe because it features a neighbor child who is a walking argument for infanticide and a hound from, well, if not hell then from one of George Booth’s New Yorker cartoons.) I think those parents are scarier than this movie. (Seen 24 January 1996)

Traffic

Okay, you’ve already seen this movie. Or you’ve heard so much about it before and since the Oscars, that it’s old news. So, I’ll just tell you my favorite bits. I like the scene where the White House chief of staff lectures Michael Douglas on the size of egos “inside the Beltway,” followed by a party scene in which the movie illustrates this very fact by featuring cameos by a bunch of real live politicians. I like the scene on the airplane where Douglas asks a bunch of government people traveling with him to “think outside the box” on America’s drug problem (as if people who have honed their job skills by watching their backs and mastering political ploys could suddenly start operating like a hip, young Internet startup), and they all just give him blank stares. I like the scene where Topher Grace lectures Douglas about how the drug problem is really about white people exploiting black people. The only question is why Grace looks so self-righteous and Douglas so chastened, when Grace is the one going to the inner city to buy illicit drugs while Douglas undoubtedly buys his scotch from white people right in his own suburb? I like the irony of seeing Dennis Quaid putting the moves on someone else’s wife (like happened with his real-life wife), playing against a co-star who herself was fraternizing with a co-star. And I like Douglas’s final big scene where he gives an important speech, just like he did in The American President, except that in that movie his speech was a fantasy of what everyone thinks they would like their president to say and in this movie he can’t even finish the speech because he knows it is pure bull. [Related commentary] (Seen 13 April 2001)

Traição (Betrayal)

Like Getting to Know You, this Brazilian film dramatizes several short stories by a single author, in this case Nelson Rodrigues. But here the three stories, while sharing some of the same actors (notably Fernanda Montenegro of Central Station), are all self-contained and helmed by separate directors. And, as the movie’s title might suggest, the common theme among them is not exactly undying loyalty. The first episode is a bit of fluff about a young man’s first affair with a married woman. It’s a bit like something from the old Love American Style TV show. The second one is by far the most interesting. It finally answers the age-old riddle: what if Humbert Humbert had been engaged to marry Lolita’s older sister and Lolita had been possessed by Satan? The final segment is a Tarantino-esque stand-off involving a love triangle in a seedy hotel. By the end, this omnibus has turned out to be less like Love American Style and more like a Brazilian Night Gallery. (Seen 3 June 1999)

Train de Vie (Train of Life)

Since Life Is Beautiful became a big hit and won some Oscars, the inevitable question is: Are we now due for an onslaught of poignant yet funny serio-comic movies dealing with amusing characters being swept up in the Holocaust? The fact that this French language film has shown up suggests a definite maybe. In fairness, writer/director Radu Milhaileanu’s script had been around for years and reportedly was even pitched to Roberto Benigni at one point. It’s not hard to see Benigni in the central role of the town idiot who continually comes up with inspirations that get his Central European shtetl past one more disaster. The most audacious of his visions is for all the villagers to escape the approaching Nazi troops by constructing their own deportation train and delivering themselves to Russia and then to Palestine. The merry singing and dancing atmosphere of the town combined with the frequent close calls with buffoonish Nazis make this strange fable something like Fiddler on the Roof meets To Be or Not To Be. The movie is consistently funny and suspenseful, but the question lingers as to whether, given the subject matter, this isn’t all in bad taste. A twist ending endeavors to put things back into perspective, but the whole message seems fairly trivialized when viewed next to Benigni’s masterpiece. (Seen 30 May 1999)

Trainspotting

This is a charming little Scottish comedy in the tradition of Local Hero and Gregory’s Girl. NOT! Actually, it is somewhat reminiscent of Bill Forsyth’s quirky films but in a Sid and Nancy sort of way. Created by the crew that gave us the neo-Hitchcockian Shallow Grave, Trainspotting follows the adventures of one Mark Renton and his assorted mates (who have names like Spud and Sick Boy) as they cope with their dead-end, nihilistic, Generation X world. Although the details are rather sordid, the film itself is amazingly entertaining and laced with a blackly comic touch. We can see early on where things are headed when a subtitle alerts us that we are entering the “worst toilet in Scotland” (a gross understatement, by the way) and a hallucinating Mark winds up deep sea diving in said plumbing fixture. As a comedy of social mores, this is 180 degrees from Sense and Sensibility. As a comment on Scottish society, this is the anti-Braveheart. Definitely worth seeing if you’re not put off by heavy heroin usage, criminal activity, excrement, and the odd dead baby. (Seen 2 April 1996)

Trancers

This low-budget science fiction thriller is probably mainly of historical interest. To see it now, one would dismiss it as a cheap rip-off of Blade Runner and The Terminator, so it’s important to know that it was made before either of those movies. Jack Deth is a hard-boiled cop (trooper, as they will say in the future) in a time when old Los Angeles is somewhere under water. An evil villain has gone back in time to kill the ancestors of world leaders. So Jack is sent back to stop him. I couldn’t help thinking what they could have done with a bigger budget, but it still is a pretty clever film. Helen Hunt (Project A) plays the girl who falls in love with him and learns how to singe trancers and that “dry hair is for squids.” (Seen 31 May 1987)

Transamerica

I missed this Oscar-nominated film the first time it was in cinemas, so I was glad to get a chance to see it at the Galway Film Fleadh, as part of a tribute to Irish actor Fionnula Flanagan, who all too convincingly plays Felicity Huffman’s smothering mother. Written and directed by Duncan Tucker, it is a standard enough road movie—where the journey is not just across the country but also a passage through life, as well as yet one more look at the state of America as family. The twist, of course, is that our protagonist is on the verge of sex-change surgery and her traveling companion is the son she fathered during her one brief sexual relationship. That setup provides plenty of opportunity for mix-ups, confusion, awkward situations and plenty of emotional baggage—and the film makes the most of all of it. Huffman deserved her Oscar nomination, although she is hampered by the need to use a gratingly husky voice. And she isn’t helped by the coincidence that her character has the same name as one of her fellow Desperate Housewives. Depending on where you’re coming from, this movie will make you depressed about the state of the American family or oddly hopeful. (Seen 11 July 2007)

Tranvía a la Malvarosa (Tramway to Malvarosa)

The tramway of the title refers to a Valencia streetcar that occasionally glides past the hero Manuel, sometimes in the night like a ghost, with a beautiful young girl as its passenger. He has never spoken to this girl, but he has had a crush on her ever since she has spent her summers in his provincial small town. This coming-of-age story set in Franco’s Spain in the 1950s divides its time between Manuel’s first year of university in Valencia and his hometown. Nothing particularly extraordinary happens—with the possible exception that Manuel gets to go to bed with a spacey prostitute played by the lovely Ariadna Gil (Celestial Clockwork, Libertarias). In the course of the movie, Manuel is exposed to new political ideas, questions religion, witnesses military overbearing-ness, deals with the death of a friend, and gets a girlfriend. Generally pleasant and nostalgic, the movie is directed by José Luis García. (Seen 5 June 1997)

Un 32 Août sur Terre (August 32nd on Earth)

Its title and capsule description made me think at first that this might actually be a reissue of Un Samedi Sur la Terre (A Saturday on Earth), which also involved an automobile mishap. But, no. If anything, August 32nd is a bit more coherent, possibly because it is Canadian rather than French. One might describe it as a screwball romantic comedy for hard-core film school denizens. One of the two principals has a Jean Seberg poster prominently displayed in his apartment, so it is easy to see why he carries a torch for Sylvie, who is deliberately reminiscent of the legendary star of Breathless. The story doesn’t always make sense, but then what can you expect from a film that is literally off the map, not to mention the calendar? A centerpiece of this meditation on nothing less than Life, Death and Love is an improbable excursion south to the U.S. that does for Utah what Cold Fever did for Iceland. This is the directing/writing debut of Denis Villenueve. (Seen 29 August 1998)

The Trigger Effect

David Koepp has had a screenwriting career that has ranged from the low-budget paranoid thriller Apartment Zero to the big-budget paranoid thriller Mission: Impossible. Now he has directed (and written) his first feature, The Trigger Effect, and it turns out to be a... c’mon guess. The opening scene shows wolves tearing apart a carcass just a short distance from a nice, civilized suburb, and we are about to be reminded that our proximity to these creatures is not just geographical. From there we have a nicely done chain of events seemingly inspired by the classic short film La mort du rat, culminating in a blackout in a movie theater. (This eerily mirrored a real-life projector problem at the first screening of this film, its world premiere.) Kyle MacLachlan (Twin Peaks) and Elisabeth Shue (Leaving Las Vegas) are a yuppie couple who learn how thin the veneer of civilization is when a power failure knocks out electricty and telephone service over a massive area. In an instant, news, communication, ATM machines, sources of gasoline, and other trappings of modern life are cut off. This is a fascinating premise which deserves more exploration than it gets here. But the film has several nicely tense moments and the good grace to end on a hopeful note. (Seen 9 June 1996)

Triple agent

As the title suggests, this is a spy thriller. Well, actually, since it was written and directed by veteran French director Eric Rohmer, this flick is a “spy thriller” in roughly the same way that an episode of Dr. Phil is a “medical drama.” If you have ever seen any of Rohmer’s films (My Night at Maud’s, Claire’s Knee, Autumn Tale and scores of others), you know that they include a lot of talking. I mean, a whole lot of talking. Chat, chat, chat. So how does Rohmer (who is now 84) go about telling a spy story? Well, with a lot of conversation. Usually, with his films I find I have to work hard to keep interested, but there is a payoff at the end. This one was actually pretty interesting all the way through, but the ending was kind of a letdown. The setting is Paris, and the time frame runs from 1936 to 1943. Arsinoé is a Greek woman married to Fiodor, a former general of the Russian White Army, who is now in exile. Like any good Rohmer character, Fiodor is quite a talker, but for all his banter he gives away precious little to anyone as to who he might really be working for or what his true aims are. We get a lot of information about pre-war European politics and intrigues, punctuated by newsreel footage from the time. There is no indication that Rohmer means for us to draw lessons for application to the current world situation, but it won’t be lost on any American neo-cons in the audience that the fruits of the endless chatter among French politicians about peace is the sight of German troops goose-stepping down the Champs Elysées. (Seen 12 October 2004)

Trojan Eddie

“When I look at you, I want to yell, ‘Man overboard!'” With that line, Richard Harris aptly sums up the title character of this Irish sort-of film noir. I don’t want to say that Eddie—a small-time huckster and occasional, ineffectual criminal—as played by Stephen Rea, has “victim” written all over him but, if you were to look up the word hapless in the dictionary, I’m pretty sure you would find his picture right there. One can’t really blame Eddie if he looks a bit shell-shocked and gun-shy all at once. On the one hand, he has the local godfather (Harris, who now holds the patent on weird, aging Irish characters) getting pissed in the local pub and going ballistic as he recounts the various bodily injuries he has dealt people over the years. On the other hand, Eddie has a cocky young partner who is bonking Harris’s new bride (young enough, by the way, to be his great-granddaughter) twenty minutes after the wedding ceremony. This whole set-up reeks of bad news, so the twist ending comes as rather a pleasant surprise. The director is Gillies MacKinnon (Small Faces), a Scot who previously explored problematic Irish relationships in 1992’s The Playboys. (Seen 14 April 1997)

Tron

When a movie’s appeal is built entirely on the state-of-the-art technology that created it, it’s inevitable that it will eventually feel as dated as, well, as your old Commodore 64 that you’ve left in your closet out of pure nostalgia. And that’s the main reason to see this film again, 20 years after its initial release. Its use of computer-generated animation was such a cool concept back then and, of course, pointed to the future of action/adventure movies. Its virtual reality plot premise, on the other hand, was merely an update of such other fantasies as The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland and Fantastic Voyage. But in hindsight, it’s hard to believe that Tron came five whole years after Star Wars, which it more or less aped with its vicarious video game approach to action, the triangle among its heroes, and its storm trooper-like villains. Tron looks like the older movie, thanks largely to the fact that Star Wars told a great story that evoked timeless myths while Tron threw around a lot of computing buzz words that only add to the dated feel of the flick. (Soon after I saw Tron for the first time I suddenly became not only a Unix user but also a Unix administrator and was amused to learn that there actually existed a tron program, for “trace on,” that wasn’t nearly as exciting as the movie would have had us believe.) This movie represents perfectly how the center of moviedom’s sense of wonder and imagination shifted from Disney to George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. If there is any other reason to see Tron today, other than nostalgia, it is to see the title character (and his user counterpart) played by Bruce Boxleitner and Peter Jurasik as the accounting program Crom. These two, of course, would go on to star together in a much better science fiction saga, Babylon 5. (Seen 28 February 2002)

Trouble Every Day

There is something truly amazing in this movie that caused to my heart to leap out of my chest. At one point early on, an American couple on their honeymoon arrive at a hotel in Paris and, without any problem whatsoever, they get a king-size bed! I obviously stay at the wrong hotels. Anyway, after seeing director Claire Denis’s Vendredi soir, I wasn’t exactly clambering to see another one of her films, but how could I resist one that is about cannibals? In the end, Trouble Every Day is like Denis’s other films, except that there is a bit more dialog and bit more blood. The trouble with this movie is that any summary you can make of its plot makes it sound way more interesting than it really is. Basically, some scientific experiments gone awry have turned two of the movie’s characters into ravenous cannibals. One of them is Béatrice Dalle, whose huge mouth has always looked ready to devour any man who comes along. The other is Vincent Gallo, who looks a bit like a young Frank Zappa. In the end, the film cannily uses the vampire/cannibal gambit as an allegory for the carnal nature of human lust, exploring how people compartmentalize their animal urges into an otherwise civilized life. Interestingly, I had a different reaction to Dalle’s feedings than to Gallo’s. I don’t know if this has something to do with myself or years of enlightenment from the women’s movement or just Denis’s handiwork, but I found myself feeling that Dalle’s (male) victims nearly deserved what they got, having willingly and recklessly accepted her advances, whereas when Gallo goes after the comely hotel maid, who seems to welcome his advance, at least at first, I felt decidedly uncomfortable. (Seen 8 July 2003)

The Trouble with Dick

The kind of delightful surprise you usually only find at film festivals. A quirky independent U.S. comedy with a style all its own. Features Susan Dey (Partridge Family, L.A. Law). Dick is a freelance (read unemployed) science fiction writer who is bombarded with rejection from publishers and from Susan Dey but constantly attacked by his California airhead landlady and her sexpot teenage daughter. I can’t remember a movie where every line and every scene seem so carefully planned to work independently and yet build on everything that has gone before. The scenes portraying the action in Dick’s novel about an escapee from a prison planet chain gang are hilarious. (Seen 22 May 1987)

Troublesome Creek: A Midwestern

The real mystery is why anybody farms. Think about it. At the beginning of each season you have to borrow tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars from the bank. If you’re lucky, you can pay it back at the end of the season from revenues that are wholly dependent on the weather, the markets, and pure chance. If you’re really lucky, there will even be money left to live on. Troublesome Creek is a heartfelt documentary by Jeanne Jordan and Steven Ascher about Jordan’s family in southwest Iowa and captures the period during which the elder Jordans throw in the towel, retire, and pass the family farm (what they don’t auction off to pay the bank) to one of the sons. The film purports to de-romanticize people’s ideas about family farms but then serves up scenes straight out of Norman Rockwell paintings. There are really two stories in Troublesome Creek. One is about the end of the family farm as an economically viable entity. The other is about the difficulty of seeing one’s parents reach the end of their “useful” lives. The movie wants to find a bad guy in all this, and the finger keeps pointing at the bankers. But, of course, the situation is much more complex than that. In any event, the film is a real tear-jerker, especially if you have any roots in farming and/or the Midwest. (Seen 3 June 1996)

Troy

Have you ever thought about how many clichés we have in our language because of the ancient story of the Trojan War (e.g., face that launched a thousand ships, beware Greeks bearing gifts, Achilles’s heel, etc. etc.)? The number of cinematic clichés has now increased a bit as well, thanks to this movie by Wolfgang Petersen. Obviously, this film got green-lighted because epics are “in,” after the success of The Lord of the Rings. In typical studio think, however, the suits figure that the lesson of TLotR’s success is that people want epics, but what it really means is that audiences respond to films that are well crafted and inspired by passion. If Petersen has any passion at all for the Trojan War, it doesn’t come across. He made a truly classic war movie in 1981 with Das Boot, but that was set in the intimate confines of a German U-Boat. There are a thousand boats in this flick, but there is little life in any of them. Trusting the source material instead of trying to make it “cinematic” (9.9 years of the Trojan War seem to have vanished in the rewrites) is another lesson from TLofR which has been ignored. The biggest problem is Brad Pitt. This is an actor who can be effective enough in certain kinds of roles, but as a classical Greek Rambo, he just doesn’t work. His Achilles swaggers like a rock star and emotes by pouting and knitting his brow. It doesn’t help that old hams like Peter O’Toole provide an unfavorable contrast by making so much more out of the thin material. Main lesson to be gleaned from the story: the guy who claims to be interpreting what the gods are saying always gets it wrong. (Seen 26 May 2004)

True Blue

This is basically Chariots of Fire with oars. A British production, True Blue is said to be based on a true story about the Oxford rowing team and its dream of beating its rivals at Cambridge in The Big Race. I suppose it’s a sign of the state of things in Britain these days that four-fifths of the film is taken up with petty politics and power struggles among the team and its coach which nearly wreck the team’s chances. The villains are a group of arrogant American rowers who join the team as ringers and then insist of running everything their way. (Perhaps these exchange students are picking up degrees at Oxford before going on to get MBAs and becoming Microsoft product managers?) If you can survive ‘til the end of the movie, the final race is quite stirring in the best English tradition. (Seen 13 March 1997)

The Truman Show

This is another film that fell between the cracks. But I made a point to track it down—even if it was a whole year later—because this is the only movie that, in advance of its release, I was actually lobbied via email by complete strangers to see it. And, of course, I was never in the right country at the right time. I did have a chance to see half of it on an airplane once, but I quickly changed the channel to give it a fairer chance at a later date. So was it finally worth the wait? Yes and no. When I first heard about The Truman Show, I figured it was an American remake of my beloved Louis 19 le roi des ondes, but that would turn out to be the more inside-joking EDtv. Instead, Truman turns out not be so much about the media at all but really about Life itself (and about unloading baggage). And it’s definitely qualified to explore The Big Issues, given a writer like New Zealander Andrew Niccol (Gattaca) and a director like Aussie Peter Weir (Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Last Wave). It is definitely clever and sometimes touching. And the climactic confrontation between Jim Carrey and Ed Harris does evoke a classic Father/Son, God/Man contest of wills. But with this much talent involved, I guess I expected more. And Carrey’s “serious” role required so little stretching on his part, can he really have been surprised when he didn’t get an Oscar nomination? (Seen 4 May 1999)

The Truth About Cats & Dogs

Somewhere between making the seminal black teen comedy Heathers in 1989, the Bruce Willis commercial disaster Hudson Hawk in 1991 and the Josh Hartnett abstention comedy 40 Days and 40 Nights last year, director Michael Lehmann made this quasi-feminist Cyrano de Bergerac variation in 1996. Since this time out Cyrano is a woman, she doesn’t even need a huge nose to feel unworthy of the object of her affection. It’s enough simply not to be a beauty of supermodel proportions. The whole romantic triangle involving a photographer (Ben Chaplin) and a tall, slender model (Uma Thurman) comes off as nearly absurd because, as played by Thurman, the model isn’t nearly as appealing as Janeane Garofalo, who is supposedly the “smart but ugly one.” And that’s really the point of the movie. For a silly comedy, the film does raise some serious questions about whether love between two people depends more on the mind or the body. The examination climaxes, so to speak, with a rather uncomfortable phone sex scene. (Seen 18 January 2003)

Tuntematon sotilas (The Unknown Soldier)

This movie is billed as the Finnish Platoon. However, this is World War II and not Vietnam. Yet the comparison is apt in many ways. As the movie shows, this war was not Finland’s finest hour. The Finns changed sides more than once, depending on which way things seemed to be going. The movie follows a platoon of young recruits (a few have serious acne problems) as they invade Russia and then get driven back in a bloody retreat. This is probably as gory a war movie as I have ever seen. Although it runs nearly three hours and there is not a single note of music in the entire soundtrack, the time passes quickly. The screening got off to an inauspicious start when they showed a print with French instead of English subtitles. The linguistic wimps in the audience who couldn’t read French remonstrated. From the lengthy credits, I would say virtually everyone in Finland worked on this movie. And judging from the last hour, half of Finland was blown up to make it. (Seen 25 May 1987)

Twelve and Holding

Michael Cuesta’s previous film, L.I.E., was uncomfortably frank in its non-judgmental way of looking at the darker side of people in general and of adolescents in particular. This one isn’t any less so. It follows the fortunes of three young friends, all dealing with somewhat more than the usual pubescent pressures. Jacob is trying to cope with his feelings of guilt and inadequacy after the tragic death of his more outgoing twin brother. That event has also led the obese Leonard to try to break his family’s well-entrenched cycle of behavior. And Malee, in a big hurry to grow up, is desperate to find the adult male love that her father has denied her. In the film’s firm refusal to heed conventional morality, it is reminiscent of Todd Field’s In the Bedroom in more than a few ways. But despite its provocative characters and situations, it never feels as prurient as a Larry Clark movie. The film features such strong talent as Linus Roache and Annabella Sciorra as parents, but it is the three main young actors who shine. Zoe Weizenbaum is frighteningly convincing as the sexually precocious Malee. And Conor Donovan (currently seen as the Boston lad who grows up to be Matt Damon in The Departed) is deceptively good as Jacob and his twin brother. Because of his well-directed performance, I was certain that the two characters must have been played by two different actors. (Seen 15 October 2006)

Twelve Monkeys

Okay, here’s a question. What if those deranged-looking homeless people wandering around the streets shouting about a coming apocalypse are really from the future and they actually know what they’re talking about? Another question: If someone sent you back in time to 1996 to gather information on a catastrophe that wiped out most of humanity, once you got here how could you be sure you weren’t just crazy? This wonderful film by Terry Gilliam explores these questions via a Terminator-like plot, but as a Gilliam film this is definitely closer to The Fisher King (with touches of Brazil thrown in) than it is to Time Bandits. (You may also be reminded of Adrian Lyne’s Jacob’s Ladder.) No one spins magical but disturbing cinematic imagery like this former Python. Bruce Willis has his best role ever as the increasingly confused protagonist. And Brad Pitt makes a refreshing break from his recent beautiful, angst-ridden young men roles to tear into this one as if it had been written for Jim Carrey. (Seen 15 January 1996)

28 Days Later

I’ve been trying to figure out who Cillian Murphy is like, and I think I have it now. He’s very much like the young Michael Sarrazin, who played the (male) ingenue in a number of movies in the late 1960s and early 1970s, notably the depressing They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? Murphy, who has starred in an impressive few Irish films (Sunburn, Disco Pigs, On the Edge, How Harry Became a Tree), gets his first international starring role in this ostensible thriller by Trainspotting director Danny Boyle. Like M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs, this film begs to be called “the thinking man’s Night of the Living Dead.” It similarly pretends to be a monster movie but is really about more serious issues: in this case, the very nature of civilization, community and family. The monster aspect is moderately scary, although those thrills are somewhat blunted by its low-budget-proclaiming, jittery-handheld-digital-camera, Blair Witch Project-style, indecipherable action shots. What is really creepy about this movie is the disturbingly plausible images of a deserted London city center, a wall of 9/11-style posters for missing loved ones, mounds of corpses, etc. Like Signs, this flick plays on some of our deepest terrors—such as finding ourselves completely alone and losing the all-too-shallow feeling of safety that we work at creating for ourselves. And, like Signs, the film suggests that, no matter how bleak things look, we should never give up hope. (Seen 6 November 2002)

Twilight

In a way, this film is to The Maltese Falcon as The Golden Girls was to Three’s Company. It’s a fine Los Angeles-based film noir in which, along with everything else, our hero is grappling with old age. (Most 1940s cinematic PI’s drank and smoked too much to live this long.) In the lead role, it’s hard to totally accept Paul Newman as someone who looks back on his life and feels he squandered it. But since he’s Paul Newman we don’t really care. The writing and direction here are exemplary, which is to be expected since Twilight is helmed by Robert (Places in the Heart) Benton, who also directed Newman in Nobody’s Fool. Newman is ably supported by a strong cast that includes Gene Hackman, Susan Sarandon, Stockard Channing and the always affable James Garner. In fact, the film is so cast-rich that it can afford to use an actor like Giancarlo Esposito in a throwaway Cheech Marin-like not-quite-sidekick role. (Seen 5 February 1998)

Twin Town

The film Trainspotting has been so co-opted by the mainstream culture it means to tweak that the Bank of Ireland is now running radio spots consisting almost entirely of a rendition of the thick, Scottish, sarcastic opening monologue (“Get a car. Get a cardigan. Get married. Get a house in the suburbs. Get a baby.”) from the film. I mention this because every article and review I have read thus far about Twin Town deals mainly with whether it is the “Welsh Trainspotting.” It is executive-produced by Trainspotting’s creative team, and it features lots of crudity and drug use, but there’s where the similarities end. Directed by Absolutely Fabulous actor Kevin Allen, this poison pen letter to his erstwhile home of Swansea doesn’t know if it wants to be merely a tasteless comedy or a vicious revenge melodrama. It stars Rhys Ifans and Llyr Evans, who are really brothers, as two no-account, car-stealing, joyriding brothers who are called “the twins,” although they aren’t actually twins. Got that? (Seen 29 April 1997)

Twisted

Here is a first-time writing/directing effort that, while far from perfect, is at least more interesting than most. This is a re-telling of Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist set in a New York City street-hustling, drag-queen-populated demimonde. Director Seth Michael Donsky managed to get William Hickey to play (and overact) the Fagin character, who here is pimp for street kids. The tragically doomed Nancy character becomes a sensitive young man named Angel, who strikes up a friendship with the homeless Lee—much to the displeasure of Angel’s brutal lover Eddie. The tender and wholesome story of Angel and Lee’s friendship makes a strange juxtaposition with the dark scenes of sex and violence that also populate the movie. In the end, the movie probably needed to be either more dramatic or more campy. According to Donsky, who is from New York, the film was intended to be much more tongue-in-cheek than the Seattle audience took it. (Seen 27 May 1997)

Twister

I really worry that the hordes of people lining up to see this movie may think they are actually going to see a reissue of Michael Almereyda’s 1988 low-budget film about a dysfunctional family with Harry Dean Stanton and Crispin Glover. Well, it’s not that movie, okay? You have seen this one before. Oh sure, instead of tornadoes it was a burning skyscraper or a shark or dinosaurs. (And before that it was a book about a whale, but let’s not put too fine a point on it.) Be honest. You’re not forking over seven dollars to gain a whole new insight into the human condition. (Or even to find out if Bill Paxton’s and Helen Hunt’s characters get back together.) You’re paying to see cars, houses, cows, and tanker trucks fly through the air. You won’t be disappointed. (Seen 14 May 1996)

2 by 4

2 by 4 is a good name for this movie because that is what you feel you have been whacked with by the time it is over. Like Elizabeth Gill’s Gold in the Streets, this film deals with the trials and tribulations of young working-class Irish men trying to make a living in New York City. At least that’s what it seems to be about at first. But, as we soon see, that’s like saying Midnight Cowboy was about a bus trip to Florida. Jimmy Smallhorne (who directed, co-wrote and stars in the movie) said that he wanted to make a film for (blue collar) Ballyfermot rather than for (posh) Dublin 4, but I’m not sure what the lads in Ballyfermot will think of this portrayal of the kinky New York demimonde or the hero’s confused sexuality. The film is extremely raw and frequently confused. But I give it three stars mainly for its final wallop of an emotional climax that is powerful without being over-the-top. (Seen 10 July 1998)

2 days in the Valley

When people talk about this movie (well, guys anyway), they will probably refer to the great fight scene between Teri Hatcher and Charlize Theron. Let me just say that it is a wonderful fight that is not about scratching or pulling hair or the usual babe cat fight clichés but a real punch-‘em-up of the kind that usually gets assigned to Bruce Willis or Sly Stallone. And it’s over all too quickly. 2 days in the Valley (would it have killed them to capitalize the d?) looks like it could one more new young director’s attempt to emulate the increasingly tiresome Quentin Tarantino, so it’s no small relief to find that it aspires more to be like some southern California variation on the Coen Brothers. There is an ensemble of familiar faces (many cast against type), and the plot is woven deliberately and intelligently in unexpected ways. There is no small amount of blood, but the film isn’t so much interested in lingering over violent or cruel acts as intense situations. In the end it is actually rather sentimental. Most importantly, writer/director John Herzfeld’s movie successfully does what a film of this type needs to do: it regularly confounds our expectations. (Seen 30 September 1996)

Tying the Knot

Now this is an example of the right way to make a film in the genre that I personally have dubbed advocacy cinema. This documentary by Jim de Sève has a definite point of view, and it puts forth its case the old-fashioned way: with facts and case histories. It uses clips of President Bush to cast him as stubborn and mean-spirited, but it doesn’t resort to taking him out of context to do it. This film serves as a useful overview of past and recent events and debates in the ongoing debate over same-sex marriage. And it puts forward its view that laws forbidding it are unjust and unfair, by presenting a number of personal stories, notably a police officer and a rancher, both of whom have lost their partners. In doing so, it establishes two things that no reasonable person can really doubt. One is that there are many same-sex couples who are in committed relationships, which are more long-lasting than a lot of different-sex ones. Another is that the lack of marriage rights for same-sex couples gives rise to unfair situations. Beyond this, people will agree or disagree with the film, depending on their own personal beliefs. It asserts that marriage is basically whatever society says it is. It dismisses religion as not particularly relevant in the matter. (A historian explains that marriage didn’t become a sacrament until many years after the founding of Christianity and that marriage was largely a legal arrangement for managing assets until the Victorian age.) So, the two main obstacles that advocates of same-sex marriage face are 1) quite a few people won’t dismiss the religious component as readily as the filmmakers, and 2) even if we accept that marriage is what society says it is, then there is still the problem that American society (in most states anyway) at the moment, through its elected representatives, wants to keep marriage between a man and a woman. This may not be fair, but then there is no explicit provision in the U.S. Constitution that life has to be fair. The film’s implicit answer to this is that same-sex marriage is a basic human right. Its main argument for this is to compare the ban on same-sex marriage to laws that banned interracial marriage during the era of segregation. We have yet to see how that question will ultimately get resolved. In the meantime, this film has made a serious and worthwhile contribution to the debate. (Seen 17 October 2004)