25 November 2000

Venus Beauty Institute [on screen as:] Vénus Beauté (Institut) | Venus Beauty (Salon)

Angèle is one of three workers at a salon in Paris and she is having trouble with life. She is old enough (the film identifies her as in her forties but the reviewer in the Washington City Paper, cruelly or otherwise, identifies the actress Nathalie Baye as 52) for the proprietor to suggest she open her own shop. The man of her last 3-day fling has dumped her in a railroad station because she makes plans. An eavesdropper to the dumping is stalking her even though he is already engaged to someone half her age. She picks up a man in a cafeteria so quickly he can barely sputter that he is married before they’re off to his car. But really, everyone who works in (or even visits) this salon has problems. Winner of four Cesars in France, this is a rather goofy and inconsequential film that not even the presence of a gun can derail. There are plenty of cars to look at in the streets (the salon’s front is entirely glass, a boon to pedestrians).

106 minutes.

24 November 2000

Goya in Bordeaux

I have got to stop listening to my colleagues. I knew less about this movie than the young woman in line ahead of me overheard explaining it to her parents (It’s Goya... in Bordeaux... he was like a painter, right?). The film opens on a close-up of the severed head of a bull, and the camera proceeds to examine the other body parts and the eviscerated carcass. A rumination on art and artistry follows, with the elderly Goya explaining his life in dialogue, narration, and flashback to his young daughter. Those viewers looking for a little flesh mixed in with the art are rewarded about a hour in, when the younger Goya is shown sketching the Duchess with whom he is having an affair (not her only one).

101 minutes.

Requiem for a Dream

Director Darren Aronofsky’s previous film [pi] was a black-and-white, headache-inducing look at Judaism cloaked in a veneer of mathematics. His follow-up is in color with professional cinematography, and uses the stories of four characters (a widow, her son, his girlfriend, and his pal) to say that addiction is bad. Didn’t Trainspotting settle that question? (And have the funnier memorable line: Because it’s illegal, like!) Let’s face it, I am here for Jennifer Connelly (the girlfriend who shares the use of multiple drugs with the son and his buddy, if the fetishistically repeated close-ups of paraphenalia and biological signals of arousal are understood) and the promise of graphic sexual content. Connelly is as adorable as ever, lacking the enlargement I thought I saw in Mulholland Falls, but Aronofsky makes us wait, and the cinematography and lighting is all too professional (and the editing too frantic) for anything to be visible. For all the reviewers who complain about the techno and electronic score, not one mentions that the soundtrack makes the Kronos String Quartet sound irritating! Curiously, the placement of Jennifer Connelly at the end of a pier on a very sunny day, previously seen in Dark City, is done here, too. At least the dress is different.

100 minutes.

18 November 2000

Bounce

The trailers ahead of this film load up on the romantic comedies, but this Miramax film tries something a little different, a romantic tragedy. I am not exactly the target audience for either, but is it too much to ask that the male role be played by someone inspiring? Freddie Prinze, Jr. and Ben Affleck do not qualify for me. At least Affleck is convincing as a self-absorbed womanizer who, one snowy evening in Chicago, gives someone his airline ticket for a flight that crashes. He is less interesting as the man in recovery from alcoholism looking up the person he has wronged (the widow of the man who took the ticket) and falling in love with her. She is Gwyneth Paltrow and even though I cringe every time I hear her described as Academy Award winner she is adequate. I am suspicious of her dialogue that her husband was tight with money, her house has the same expensive thermostat on the wall that mine has.

106 minutes.

17 November 2000

You Can Count on Me

Laura Linney has long played second fiddle (The Truman Show, Primal Fear, Congo) and I always thought of her as having the blandest face. Nevertheless, she’s been asked to hold the center of this film as the orphaned mother raising an 8-year-old (Rory Culkin). Her new boss (Matthew Broderick) is ridiculously insensitive and demanding (I like paperwork, he says when requesting that timesheets be submitted every day). Her brother has just returned after months of drifting to ask for money because a girl is in trouble. She is struggling to decide what to do about a long-time romantic interest. Already in the VideoHound’s Golden Movie Retriever 2001, this award winner at the Sundance Film Festival is getting a theatrical run now. The two leads (Mark Ruffalo plays the brother) are very effective, but Broderick makes less of an impression than he did in Election. The film lacks the vicious attitude towards a small town (played in the film by two in New York state) that marred Fargo and its ilk, and also avoids the killing and artificiality that came as a surprise in Simon Birch.

112 minutes.

14 November 2000

Men of Honor

The trailer made this movie seem like a standard-issue inspirational tale of perseverance in the military ranks. However, I had listened to the subject of the movie, Carl Brashear, on the Public Interest program aired locally on WAMU-FM so I gave it a try. I hope I am not breaking any rules with this direct link to the RealAudio file. The film is pretty close to being standard-issue, and I am disappointed that America and the Navy seem no different after the 10-year dissolve centered on Robert De Niro’s eyes, but Cuba Gooding, Jr. delivers a star performance. What is Charlize Theron doing in this movie?

130 minutes.

09 November 2000

Lucky Numbers

This movie starts with an anachronism: the on-screen title, Harrisburg, Pa. 1988 and a highway scene that includes a Big Kmart sign. Normally, I would avoid anything from Nora Ephron, but the Washington City Paper semi-liked this, and Ephron is only the director and not the writer, too. Plus, I grant Lisa Kudrow a little leeway because of her performance in The Opposite Sex, although here she has been cast more for her performance in Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion. Paramount Pictures has already distributed an ordinary-people-overcome-by-greed-to-the-point-of-murder-because-of-easy-money movie (A Simple Plan) and this one pales a bit in comparison. Michael Moore, in a few scenes as an asthmatic in conflict over religion and sexuality, cannot achieve the impression Billy Bob Thornton did as the conspirator who wants out. Is there any lesson in the screenwriting that makes the blonde haired woman the most murderous? There’s a decent selection of laughs, especially if you’re a bit older and remember the Ford Maverick.

106 minutes.

03 November 2000

Spike and Mike’s Classic Festival of Animation 2000

This compilation features mostly new work, and it is apparent that violence is still funny.

99 minutes.

Charlie’s Angels

This cacaphonous movie bears little resemblance to the ABC television series that nominally inspires it. The full body disguises and elaborate, exquisitely timed operations against threats to national and global security are from the CBS series Mission: Impossible. The humorous musical reference is to the NBC series Miami Vice. About all that remains is the voice of Charles Townsend (John Forsythe), a few notes of music (I did not catch any credit to the original composer), and the name of the character John Bosley (Bill Murray). Although the opening credits do try to evoke a few of the original episodes, the characters are played much more immaturely. Maybe it’s because I was flipping through Biography magazine at my local Tower Records/Video #195 and discovered that Lucy Liu was born in Queens, but she is the only one of the three leads to retain any dignity. Whose idea was it to have Matrix-style fighting without any science-fictional premise to justify it? The flaw in the plot is the same one that plagued Remington Steele in its slide to mediocrity-SPOILER-private detectives in television and cinema should always investigate their clients first!

99 minutes.