29 September 2000

Cameron Crowe’s love poem to his own adolescence is slick and amusing in spots but lacks any personal resonance. Either the production could not afford the rights to the really popular tracks of the era, or I may not have had a good radio in 1973. Somehow, money does not seem to have been a problem with two studios involved and a lot of old cars visible on screen (although there is one turquoise Volkswagen Transporter which shows up once too often). There is even some location shooting in Manhattan, which shows the difference between a little division of Disney (Miramax) and the combination of DreamWorks and Columbia. I note that they could not tilt up to the top of what I shall always know as the Pan Am building but which now says Met Life or something. On the other hand, most of the characters are young-ish and may have been available cheap. Anna Paquin has grown up to be extremely pretty with zero screen charisma (and, yes, I am aware she was the fulcrum of X-Men this summer).

122 minutes.

Hallie Kate Eisenberg gets an and credit and all the best lines which is not too difficult since the screenplay makes all the other characters flat. Joey Lauren Adams particularly must struggle with a character who must do anything the plot requires but have no interior life of her own. Director Sally Field may think she is making a movie about how love can conquer cross-generational misery or something but I watch it with a different perspective and see Vanessa Has Two Mommies with not one mention of the l-word. I find it interesting that both our protagonist Mona (Minnie Driver) and her repressed sidekick Ruby (Adams, who may never find another role like she had in Chasing Amy) are duplicitous—the first lies to deny maternity, the second lies to assert it. Now it is one thing to lie to strangers in public, quite another to lie to the young girl Vanessa (Eisenberg) for 7 whole years, and I am left with the question: what did they tell the state? When police detectives come to arrest Ruby for the death of an elderly woman at the nursing home where she works, why isn’t the child removed, too? (Handcuff Ruby in the apartment for your safety, officers, I wanted to advise, don’t wait until you get outside! Where was the police consultant?) Don’t get me started on the length of film in the SLR camera that the pageant sends to each entrant so she may document her selfless life! Vanessa presses the shutter so vigorously it must be a 144-shot roll, and unless she grew momentarily and temporarily while we weren’t looking to the height of a movie camera on tracks or a truck, the photograph the local newspaper prints did not come from that SLR. The only semi-genuine moment I could detect in the whole sorry mess is when Vanessa denies she wants to be a beauty queen and insists she wants to play professional soccer.

113 minutes.

28 September 2000

I had never seen this alleged classic, and I had even misremembered its location in the TripleR list. My brain needs a full-time fact checker! The list puts it in the category of Movies to Avoid Like the Plague. There were two gigglers in the audience which did not help. I was not ready for the sense of place—there’s Georgetown University! But the editing is startlingly choppy. For a movie that has had 11 minutes added, there are too many loose ends left untied for my taste. Why isn’t Regan in school, anyway? The Hallowe’en costumes the children wear as Ellen Burstyn walks back from her acting performance in the movie she’s a part of makes the action take place in October and November. Maybe Sharon is a tutor? And that movie! I kept thinking, Mrs. McNeil is going to have to loop all her lines, because the A.D.’s have not told the extras playing protesting students to stay quiet while they perform. What happened to Regan’s birthday? What happened to going to the movies tomorrow night? Why does the film jump from Regan sleeping in Mom’s bed to a full-bore physical examination with an attempted gynecological probe? I was seriously thinking that a reel had been misplaced because it seemed like an overreaction, even on the movie’s own terms. (I have experienced a theatrical projection where the reels have been out of order.) I really empathized with Ellen Burstyn’s frustration with the condescending but completely ignorant medical professionals. Hey, look, there’s a mechanical planar tomography machine! At the end of the movie, there is a special treat. A 1973 Plymouth Fury with ring bumpers in Metropolitan Police Department livery! How long did they use the blue band down the side of the car with the gold shield on the door? (They only changed to the flag scheme about 3 years ago. There have been a few tweaks since then.)

142 minutes.

27 September 2000

Yes, there is a graphic scalping, but I was ready for it and averted my eyes and the worst was over. The film is a fantasy. The states of Colorado and New Mexico seem to have disappeared, as Renée Zellweger drives from Kansas more or less directly through Monument Valley. Although I have a low threshold of anxiety when a character is to be humiliated, the film never follows through—it’s a fantasy!—and everything goes perfectly for her. By the time the sheriff and journalist from her home town show up and pile into the tiny living room of her roommate and have a shootout with the hit men, the audience is ready to laugh. There is something about the casting of Chris Rock next to Morgan Freeman that bugs me, but it would be a spoiler to say why.

110 minutes.

15 September 2000

This curiousity from British television of 2 years ago was apparently classified by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts as a foreign language film. There’s Welsh, Yiddish, and a spot of English. It’s an extremely improbable romance between a Jewish refugee from Russia selling fabrics door to door and the daughter in a Protestant family of coal workers. I kept waiting for the scene where Gaenor says You had sex with me twice and lied about even your name?! but the writer-director must not have been interested in that emotional payoff. Plus, the male character is thick as a brick, isn’t he? This is the second movie I have seen that features a birth simultaneous with a death (the first was Romance).

105 minutes.

08 September 2000

What a pathetic selection this weekend! It came down to this in the last few minutes before show time—I didn’t think anyone was KILLED in this movie. This movie is so inept. All the characters keep saying Washington but—Keanu Reeves’ boat is in a marina that is clearly in an industrial harbor— the love interest (Brooke Langton) is the proprietor of a working class bar on a corner, even the door is 45° to the rest of the bar— the stadium itself— it all screams Baltimore! The trailer packed in all the funny bits, but the movie really wants to be taken seriously. Yet it is not a period piece (someone correct me on this sports history, but the NFL players strike was in 1987) and wants to be set in the present. So it ends with an unseen narrator sentimentally looking back on those days when the replacements played. Then there are the jarring close-ups without any discernable point. And, no, I am not going to provide a link to that strip club near the airport. (That guy Rhys Ifans from Notting Hill is definitely identified as a Welsh character in this movie.)

120 minutes.

01 September 2000

I don’t remember having heard of this 1954 French film of a jewelry store heist before, but I was intrigued by the alleged 30 minute sequence without dialogue or music. Neither could I pass up the opportunity to see the cars and trucks of Paris of the time. I was surprised to see so many American vehicles, actually. The actual break-in and heist are not the exact prototype for every subsequent caper film, but the meticulousness and suspense of the execution certainly do inform such scenes. (I had in mind specifically Wallace and Gromit in The Wrong Trousers.)

117 minutes.

Someone must have asked me to see this. Sony Pictures Classics must have thought that if Miramax and Dimension could release inconsequential romantic comedies, they could too. This tale of a randy man with a philosophy of seduction is for adults—well, it begins at a 10 year reunion, anyway—and is able to sustain its frothy tone until exactly the middle when an inconvenient fact is remembered. However, it does have an amusing interlude in salute of two television series—Hawaii Five-O and The Six Million Dollar Man—that combines music and dialogue and action to evoke precisely the credit sequences. Set in Santa Fe, New Mexico, I am suspicious of the credit for North Carolina casting.

88 minutes.