Movies : March 2001
24 March 2001
When Brendan Met Trudy
Brendan (Peter McDonald) is a 28-year old teacher at an elementary school in Dublin. His life is a little dull right now. The boys at school give him grief. For Christmas, his mother gave him a Tamagotchi to keep him company, and asks nervously a girl?
every time he says he has met someone. Still, he enjoys singing with the church choir and going to the movies, the more classic or obscure the better. (He gave his mother a book about Godard.) So he is a little bewildered to find himself one evening in the pub the target of attention from Trudy (Flora Montgomery). Her first contention that she is a schoolteacher, too, is not persuasive, but he is drawn to her, anyway. She stands him up at the Polish movie he wanted to see, but they meet again and have sex. So much for realism. Did I like it? The screenplay by Roddy Doyle takes every opportunity to find the humor in their relationship, in Ireland, and in the world at large. (Trudy makes Brendan stand in a square and wave because it’s in the field of view of a webcam and her sister in Berlin might be watching. Turns out, so are Brendan’s students.) The film as a whole very, very seriously pays specific reference to those classic movies, although by the time Brendan is repeating the scene we just saw from
The Producers, the gimmick is a little tired. Nevertheless, when it starts riffing on the structure and look of those classic films Brendan is devoted to, the laughs just keep coming.
96 minutes.
21 March 2001
The Caveman’s Valentine
Quite possibly a labor of love for somebody, what with the author adapting the novel for the screen. The first few scenes threw me, as I felt the star, Samuel L. Jackson, acting
in his performance as a Julliard-trained pianist who choked at a Lincoln Center performance and now lives in a cave in a park within New York City. But the brazen attempt to make something malevolent out of The Chrysler Building (a trademark of 405 Lexington, LLC claims the end credits with nary a hint of that transnational merger of equals
) caught me off balance. By the time Romulus (Jackson) finds a body frozen in the tree in front of his cave’s entrance and decides to investigate it as a homicide, I was prepared to go along. Did I like it? Yes, there may be some star vanity in a scene that elaborately gets Romulus naked (he is inspecting himself before an overdue bath before travelling to the home of his suspect). Yes, there is the ludicrously quick way the sister (Ann Magnuson) of the suspect pulls him into her house and into her bed. Yes, there is the completely improbable geography that the suspect (Colm Feore) should live on a farm
that is otherwise within walking distance of the boroughs. But something of the world of the mentally ill, struggling to understand and make themselves understood, reached me through the direction of Kasi Lemmons and the rest of Jackson’s performance.
104 minutes.
18 March 2001
Series 7 The Contenders
I have never watched more than a few seconds of
Survivor
or
Temptation Island
in passing while surfing by. But this satire of television reality shows hits plenty of other targets:
The Real World
and
World’s Greatest Police Chases
among them. (I am appalled to discover that the very finest example of the mockumentary genre,
Dadetown, released in 1996, is not found in my standard references.) Maybe it tries too hard. Although it seemed to satisfy my audience, the rules of the television series
The Contenders
(of which this film is purportedly the marathon wrap-up of the seventh season, a nice jab at MTV’s endless re-running of the episodes from New Orleans) elude me. A municipality is selected, and contestants are chosen by lottery
from local residents, not from anyone wishing to participate in the series, which bespeaks a regulatory abdication otherwise unhinted at. For Dawn (Brooke Smith) to be participating in her third series on the program, is she really unlucky for her number to pop up again and again? The six contestants are each supplied with at least a 9 mm semiautomatic pistol and the identities of the other contestants. The only way to win
is to be the last alive at the end of the season, which seems to last about a month. We meet Dawn in her eighth month of pregnancy, and she’s got this game figured out,
she’s homeless, which gives her a big advantage over the other contestants, who are still a little bewildered at having been chosen for the contest. Did I like it? There’s a terrific laugh at the end! I liked how the overbearing parents of the 18-year-old female contestant were subtly supported by the producer’s choice for them of a Volvo station wagon.
87 minutes.
17 March 2001
Chunhyang
Desperate for anything different not playing at a Loew’s Cineplex theater, I took a chance on something described in the advertising as Korea’s Official Academy Award® Entry.
Chunhyang is the name of the Pansori performance which we see performed in contemporary times, and the name of the character whose story it tells. (I always find placing the time of period films from various countries in Asia difficult since the sequence of technological introductions is different from Europe or America.) In eighteenth-century Korea, the son of the governor in Namwon naughtily leaves his studies for a half-day and notices a young woman (Lee Hyo Jung) on a swing. Chunhyang is too arrogant,
his servant implores him, and she is the daughter of a courtesan, too low class for him, but they meet anyway and are soon secretly wed. But the governor is promoted and the scholar Mongryong (Cho Seung Woo) must follow the family to Seoul to continue his studies and take the exam for government service. The new governor is very upset that Chunhyang is not included in a line-up of courtesans arranged for him, and when she refuses his demand that he service her, she is publicly beaten and sentenced to death. When Mongryong returns to Namwon after 3 years away, and everyone treats him as a beggar (although to my Westerner’s eyes he looked to be dressed like all the other bureaucrats around the governor), something is up. Did I like it? Pansori is apparently an operatic narrative art, with one singer and one drummer conveying the story, but it involves a little too much shouting for my ears. And as far as I could tell, the bridge
had nothing to do with the story at all, so I felt set up with no payoff. Still, there is something to the way the character of Chunhyang is able to work the cardinal number of each stroke of the beating into her rebuke of the governor.
120 minutes.
16 March 2001
Enemy at the Gates
I wasn’t the only one to notice all the financing for Hollywood productions coming from companies with GmbH
in their names. Something like one quarter of all the money comes from German sources, if I understand correctly, and it started to bother some Germans that none of the subjects of storytelling involved German ones. I remember seeing the trailer for this ambitious multinational production about the siege of Stalingrad and thinking along the lines of: Please tell me they haven’t taken this pivotal battle of World War II and reduced it to a
mano-a-mano
cat-and-mouse between a Soviet rifleman (Jude Law) with a farm boy’s knack for hitting his target and the Wehrmacht’s most successful sharpshooter (Ed Harris). Well, they have. As if tossing the youth of the motherland without equipment or training in the face of the mechanized assault of the Third Reich was insufficiently compelling, the screenplay adds a love triangle between the rifleman, the political commissar (Joseph Fiennes) who builds a mythology out of his marksmanship, and the college-educated Tania (she reads a book on the train evacuating her village to the front for battle) who is just looking for a way to avenge her parents’ death. (The film makes no distinction between the sexes in unit composition or barracks arrangements.) Then there’s the adorable young shoeshine boy who’s running himself as a double agent between the two snipers. Forget the accents, these young British actors don’t nearly have the facial contours to represent Russians (compared to how the producers of
Das Boot
cast their mini-series with the sons of farmers from all around Germany). And the film touches on so much that might be interesting: the aforementioned gender indifference, the inner operations of the Communist Party, the fact that months go by and Russian operations crossing the Volga continue; yet, its main energies are directed to some swell battle scenes (very similar, however, to those in
Full Metal Jacket) and an anatomically improbable tryst between Tania (Rachel Weisz) and the rifleman whom she chooses over the commissar. Did I like it? I did not find it heartening that those in the audience who I suspect were there because they were too late to buy a ticket for the sold-out
Exit Wounds
cheered at the resolution of the conflict. And, durn it, where are those German soldiers with their Regular 8 cameras loaded with color Kodachrome film?
Update:
How could I forget the lame music of James Horner? It’s been over 18 years since he used those fluttering trumpets in the score for
Star Trek The Wrath of Khan—enough already!
130 minutes.
10 March 2001
Get Over It
The Toronto
Star
may have had an agenda in giving this production a favorable review; there is a credit for exclusive location shooting in Toronto, Ontario at the end. Miramax continues its bizarre foray into the genre of teen romantic comedy. The film
begins
with the rating of PG-13 on a black field. (There is the regular rating on a blue field at the end.) Berke (Ben Foster) has just been dumped by his sweetheart Allison (Melissa Sagemiller) from since when he was seven. Intent on winning her back, he auditions for his high school’s production of a musical version of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Helping him in the development of singing and acting abilities is the little
sister Kelly (Kirsten Dunst) of his best friend. Will he stop pining enough to see who really cares for him? The
Star
was right about one thing, the incorporation of Shakespeare’s play, albeit in a demented version courtesy of the pen of the desperate instructor (Martin Short), helps out. For one thing, it is far more comprehensible than that ponderous effort with Rupert Everett and Calista Flockhart and the bicycles was. But what is up with the stunts designed to amuse by flinging pretty women in trajectories that would, in a realistic film, kill them? Did I like it? It was less cringe-inducing than
She’s All That.
Distributors: don’t book the interesting films only at Loew’s Cineplex.
There was a nice scene at the piano with Foster and Dunst where the lighting and the hair let one imagine she was thirty. At last I got to see this Vitamin C
and wonder what possessed Mattel to miniaturize
her
into a fashion doll (it is the best likeness of the several alleged pop sensations so immortalized).
86 minutes
08 March 2001
MonkeyboneNow, here’s a curiousity. The trailer for this movie did not include the actual scene where the protaginist Stu Miley (Brendan Fraser) is knocked into a coma. Instead, it showed him as the victim of some falling infrastructure (a large pipe) as his girlfriend looked on. Miley, long the victim of nightmares so bad he has barely slept all his life, has had some measure of improvement in his life thanks to his sleep researcher/therapist and girlfriend Julie (Bridget Fonda) and has just sold a rather vulgar animated series to the cable television channel Comedy Central. One car crash later, Stu is in a coma. Finding himself in an underworld populated by other victims of coma and assorted hangers-on desperate for fresh nightmares from the dreams of the living, S. Miley acclimates rather quickly. When his animated creation has corporeal form in this underworld and tricks him in a plot to occupy his comatose body, Stu must summon his resources to outwit Death (Whoopi Goldberg) and warn Julie whom he had intended to marry that the current occupant of his body is that darn monkey. All in all, a lot of production design and a parade of effects studios in the credits at the end for not much (tell the ones you love). The casting of Goldberg put me in mind of some terrible Soviet co-production I was exposed to while in high school, but she manages to enliven the proceedings even if it is a bit early for another movie with Fraser offering his soul for a chance with a woman. A few months ago, I was complaining about the casting of much younger women with older men, here Bridget Fonda has the rare opportunity to play against someone younger, if only by a few years. Chris Kattan brings down the house as the freshly dead gymnast who embodies the soul of Stu as he rushes to warn Julie. What psychological role did Kitty (Rose McGowan), the waitress at the bar in the underworld, play? She is on screen far too little. Did I like it? Well, I paid nothing to see it, and I did laugh at some of the slapstick.
93 minutes
Entries subject to editing at any time. Last edited on: 12-Sep-2004