18 April 2001

As part of a ransom demand, the kidnapper asks Metropolitan Police Department Detective Alex Cross (Morgan Freeman) to run from the Watergate apartments to Union Station. This is a comedy, right? No, the score is by Jerry Goldsmith, it must be a thriller. When critics say that Freeman has a been there, done that look to him, maybe it’s because he has—he played Cross before in Kiss the Girls. The movie is already dated because of the Bell Atlantic pay telephones, maybe soon pay telephones will date it. After a prologue that uses one of the seven dirty words and is otherwise completely unaffecting because the animation has no weight to it but which kills his partner, Cross mopes at home building ship models under the disappointed eye of just another character whom we shall not see a second time. A young girl is kidnapped from her school for the children of Important People, and the kidnapper sends her shoe to Cross. Jezzie Flanigan (Monica Potter) is the Secret Service Agent whose performance in protecting the senator’s daughter was inadequate. Did I like it? No! I don’t think it’s coincidence that the only entity the producers wish to thank is the MTA. All of the police cars look just so slightly off. The geography is ridiculous. May I point out that no authentic Metro train can run from Union Station to I-66? (It must have been filmed along I-795 in Owings Mills, Maryland.) There is still no there there in Potter’s performances. Half of the scenes in the trailer didn’t make it! It’s like there’s a half hour left out somewhere!

102 minutes.

14 April 2001

Texan Renée Zellweger essays the role of Bridget Jones, publicist at a book publishing firm in London. Jones worries about her age and her weight and resolves one New Year’s Day to improve her health and snag a man. Anything to get her mother off the project! She proceeds to implement her resolutions by continuing to drink and continuing to smoke and flirting (using what looked to me like instant messaging on the firm’s network of Macintosh equipment) with the boss. Zellweger looks a little lost under her puffy cheeks but is surrounded by British talent: Jim Broadbent as her father, Hugh Grant as the boss, and Colin Firth as the uptight barrister who turns out to have harbored a long-lived attraction for Jones. (Maybe that’s why it takes three distributors to bring this project to theaters: Miramax, Universal, and Studio Canal.) Indeed, the casting of Grant and Firth apparently causes a little cognitive dissonance for readers of the book. Did I like it? Zellweger is nowhere near as convincing as Gwyneth Paltrow in playing a British subject (I suppose Kate Beckinsale and Tara Fitzgerald were way too skinny). It is true that Jones is completely hopeless as a human being, yet too dull to be called clueless. Since she is shown walking home from her job across a bridge, that is, she does not even ride a bus, how does she know how to drive her parents’ car (a suspiciously new Ford Focus) through snow? The film isn’t even particularly English aside from a few words of slang. Even so, it is rather quite a bit of fun. The end credits, however, seek to make concrete the plot point that Jones had played naked in an inflatable pool at a party held at the home of the future barrister. At age four. Although the footage, intended to look like Super 8 home movies, only shows the young actress topless, it’s still an unnecessary bit of creepiness.

97 minutes.

13 April 2001

Blimey. Forty minutes to show time and Bridget Jones’s Diary is sold out. I dug out my A Free Night at the Movies pass and went to Plan B. Jane (Ashley Judd) is a booker on a talk show that has just gone national (even though it’s based in New York—what UHF channel did they start on?). She falls for the executive producer Ray (Greg Kinnear) and is ready to move in when he gets cold feet. Desperate, she takes a room in the expansive loft of coworker Eddie (Hugh Jackman). Although Jane never books anyone, Ray never produces anything (not even the name of his possessive girlfriend), and Eddie is interested only in casual sex (was the bar set from Coyote Ugly left standing?), romantic entanglements ensue. She starts writing a column pseudonymously for the magazine where her friend Liz (Marisa Tomei) works, even though Jane uses a Dell notebook computer and Liz is equipped with the latest Macintosh equipment (file transfers are not a problem anymore). Did I like it? There’s less New York flavor than in The Brothers McMullen or even Gloria (that loft looks left over from Head Over Heels). Jane has clearly never seen a Greg Kinnear movie (I’m thinking of Loser) so the audience is way ahead of her on Ray’s betrayal. It’s pleasant enough. Here’s an idea for Ashley Judd and her agent—for the eleventh Star Trek movie, it’s time for a Captain Lefler adventure!

97 minutes.

08 April 2001

Hong Kong, 1962. An apartment building’s narrow corridor is full of movers one day as Mrs. Chan (Maggie Cheung) moves into a room, and Mister Chow (Tony Leung) moves into a room in the adjoining apartment. Each is married, but their spouses are rarely around, as Mister Chan travels on business to Japan, and Mrs. Chow is always finding excuses to avoid her husband. As the days go by, and the lonely neighbors add two and two, they realize that their spouses are having an affair. To sink to that level would be too mortifying, but they go out to dinner a few times and discover that they both like martial-arts serial fiction, and they collaborate on a work for publication and practice confronting their spouses about infidelity. Did I like it? This film really lifted my spirits. The cinematography is very assured (even if the lack of daylight exteriors until the very end is more likely the result of a shrewd production design rather than any aesthetic choice) with the camera sliding to peer at our protagonists in mirrors, behind curtains, through screens, and around corners. There must be more symbolism in Cheung wearing nothing other than an unending series of tight sheath dresses with high necks.

98 minutes.

Iranian cinema shows up in Washington from time to time. This particular release is part of the Shooting Gallery series sponsored by Loews Cineplex Entertainment. The setting is seaside, it may be an island my atlas identifies as Qeshm. Three segments are each introduced by a card bearing the name the woman whose story is told. In the first, Havva is told by her grandmother she must stop talking with boys for she is 9 years old today and must start wearing the chador her mother has gone to buy fabric for. But Havva manages to argue for one last hour based on her time of birth. In the second, Ahoo is participating in a semi-competitive bicycle ride with other women but she is chased on horseback. First her husband who demands she give up the devil’s mount, then the mullah who would like to see her reconciled with her loving husband but gives up and grants the divorce as she continues pedaling, then the tribe’s elders who urge her to return, and finally her brothers who do not talk but instead grab the bicycle and carry it off as the camera truck leaves them all behind. In the third, an old woman arrives by airplane and goes on a shopping spree using a mysterious inheritance to obtain all the things she’s ever wanted in life. There is a surplus of young boys willing to cart her purchases around as she shops in the glossy malls, then to the beach to array them for her contemplation. Did I like it? The screenplay is a little too spare and symbolic to allow immersion in another culture in the way that Ermo did, for example. The deliberate way in which technology makes its appearance in each segment (i.e., wooden boats and oil barrel rafts in the first, bicycles with shocks fore and aft in the second, airplanes and automobiles in the third) is no accident.

77 minutes.

06 April 2001

Apparently I couldn’t resist. Even with the same director, same stars, and at least one original screenplay author, surely the Americanized version of Les Visiteurs had to be worse. (Look what happened to The Vanishing, after all.) It’s even being distributed by Hollywood Pictures! The most popular movie in France of its time (1993) followed the story of a French knight (Jean Reno) who, in order to correct a grievous wrong, arranges with a wizard to go back in time to several minutes before the error to set things right. A rather standard science-fictional premise, but our hero and his vassal (Christian Clavier) end up in modern-day Paris instead and must cope with all the changed circumstances that implies. The American version has our protagonists end up in modern-day Chicago instead, for no better reason than that one of the authors added to the list of screenplay credits likes Chicago. The confusion begins earlier when the knight, still identified as French, is celebrating his impending marriage to the daughter (Christina Applegate) of the king of England. Did I like it? One of the most telling sources of humor in the original was the notion that it was the descendants of the vassal who had prospered and inherited the castle of the knight. The outrageousness of the peasant usurpation of the social position of the knight (and their crass exploitation of the decaying castle as a hotel, with Christian Clavier playing the role of the hotel proprietor as well) must have contributed greatly to the favorable audience response in France. It’s bizarre, but I really missed this class consciousness in the remake. As a substitute, we are offered a gardener (Tara Reid, whose character clearly has oodles of free time) who teaches the vassal that this is America and a democracy which would be so much gibberish to inhabitants of the twelfth century no matter what their education. It’s still funny, but at about 20 minutes shorter, much of it seems like an excuse to show off Chicago landmarks. Subtitles or not, try to find the original.

88 minutes.

03 April 2001

A little film that plays with our conception of time, causality, motive. We fade in on a hand holding a photograph in a square Polaroid format which is fully developed. As the credits continue, the development of the image reverses, and it becomes less and less clear. Leonard (Guy Pearce) has just murdered a man and taken a picture of the body. He lacks the ability to form short-term memories, so he relies on photographs to remind himself of where he’s been and who he knows. The film takes us backward, scene by scene, from the murder to the events which led him there. Each scene ends with the beginning of the previous scene. Did I like it? Clearly, the design is an intellectual puzzle. What role did Dodd play? Was Teddy (Joe Pantoliano) really a police officer? What affection might Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss) the bartender have had for Leonard? But there is the suspicion that playing the chapters of an eventual DVD release reversely would make me feel like that Polaroid photograph at the beginning.

113 minutes.