Movies : June 2001

29 June 2001

A. I. Artificial Intelligence

In some corner of New Jersey that remains once the ice caps melted and buried the coastal cities of America (and much of the rest of the world), a cyberneticist (William Hurt) proposes to improve the output of his factory by creating a robot child that can love. No one dares contradict the man, or even ask why? (The only question from his staff is, can you make his human owner love the robot boy back?) The lack of consideration only gets compounded when husband Henry Swinton (Sam Robards), whose child has been incurable and frozen for 5 years, brings home the prototype robot boy for testing without the slightest warning to his wife Monica (Frances O’Connor). With such bad market research and poor marital communication and a miracle recovery by the real son, things will not go well for the mecha David (Haley Joel Osment). But we’re only a third of the way through! Monica, having activated David’s emotional neediness on Mommy but scared of the sibling rivalry (poor robot, never went even 1 day to school and doesn’t know not to carry scissors through the house) will abandon David rather than have him destroyed as demanded by the manufacturer. David will wander the hinterlands with a robotic teddy bear (easily the most appealing character) and experience the terrors and thrills of a human populace that really hates robots on the one hand and really loves them on the other (nudge-nudge, wink-wink). But that’s not all, either! There will be a specific number of millenia! There will be aliens! There’s the Chrysler Building! And absolutely no one will mention David’s little murderous rage. Did I like it? Certainly some sequences had the same leaden feeling I got watching Eyes Wide Shut but without the symmetry of Nicole Kidman to carry me through. There’s a lot of production design and special effects to study. But that wench in the rubber suit in the promotional photographs? She’s on-screen for maybe 2 seconds. Boo, Spielberg. Update: Did I say aliens? I might be wrong about that. What if…? What if this is a film about archaeology, about the search for roots, about the efforts of offspring to honor the ancestors, about the love of a child for its parent? That would be embarrassing. I might have to see this again.

144 minutes.

28 June 2001

The Fast and the Furious

Uh-oh. Is the hedonism made possible by a movie theater close by warping my judgement? I remembered Jordana Brewster from The Faculty (and should have remembered Michelle Rodriguez from Girlfight) so off I went to the number one movie of the previous weekend. In Los Angeles, truckers are complaining that fast drivers in pocket rockets are assaulting them and hijacking their valuable shipments of DVD players. The FBI assigns the whitest guy on the LAPD (Paul Walker) to infiltrate the world of illegal street racing with a fake background and a lime Mitsubishi Eclipse. Gasp! Will his lust for the sister (Brewster) of the prime suspect (Vin Diesel) cloud his judgement? Did I like it? The movie dispenses with subtlety fairly quickly with an impromptu race against a Ferrari (whose driver gives up). It was fun. It was fast (except that part where we were expected to sympathize with the main suspect). It was pretty.

106 minutes.

24 June 2001

Amores Perros

The subtitle for the name of the movie includes a rude word—although I am suspicious because the same Spanish word appears in the crew credits. Life certainly is a pain for the adulterers in the plot. Grevious bodily harm comes to two of them in an automobile collision, and there’s plenty of misery to go around for the others. The contract killer, on the other hand, with his lowered expectations (although he’s been set up with a place to sleep, he otherwise behaves as a street person) seems to get along quite well. An export from Mexico that does not flinch from blood (from the dog fighting especially), it’s still hanging on in its 10th week of release in this market. Did I like it? It is a strange world where Chrysler products dominate the streets. I did not find the high rise apartment with the hollow floor (the better to introduce rats) especially convincing. To sum up: don’t commit adultery (especially with the wife of your brother when you all share one small apartment), and don’t try to kill your brother by proxy, either. No, I don’t think this one has anything to teach me.

156 minutes.

22 June 2001

The Anniversary Party

You think you have problems? Sally (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and Joe (Alan Cumming) are trying to keep their marriage together after a trial separation. They have invited a few of their closest friends and business associates to a celebration of their sixth anniversary. Maybe some of them are too close. There’s the ex-girlfriend (Jennifer Beals) whose photographs are adored by Joe and stored away by Sally. There’s Joe’s sister (Jane Adams) who’s in a panic over leaving her child with a sitter. There’s the director of Sally’s new romantic comedy, whose anxiety over the disaster he’s helming is more quiet. There’s the neighbors (Mina Badie and Denis O’Hare) who are threatening to sue over the barking of their dog. When the young actress Skye (Gwyneth Paltrow), whom Joe hopes to cast in the role based on his wife in the screen adapation of his recent novel he’s set to direct, offers a bag of Ecstasy pills as an anniversary present, fireworks will ensue. Did someone say Glorification of drug use? Did I like it? Half-and-half. This film, shot quickly on digital video as a screenwriting and directing collaboration between Cumming and Leigh, is almost perfectly targeted to my age. Leigh is joined by her co-star from Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Phoebe Cates, in the role of the wife who gave up her show-business career for the children (played by, eep, the children of Phoebe Cates and Kevin Kline, who’s also in the film). Although the spontaneity of the performances is belied by the complicated camera set-ups, nevertheless, the feel of mingling with the Hollywood set is there. But surely there is such a thing as hanging out at a party just too long, and the cascade of revelations (and couplings) as the evening turns to dawn starts to stretch credulity. The true horror for those afraid of getting old: the wrinkled ex-hippie with the guitar and the bitter song—that’s Blair Tefkin, the girl who gave birth to the twins on the television series V. Ouch.

114 minutes.

21 June 2001

Evolution

A meteorite lands in Arizona. Two faculty members of the local community college make a routine visit to the crater, but soon discover that alien life forms are proliferating. As it becomes clear that the aliens have the potential to wipe out life on Earth, government agencies muscle their way into the crisis. Did I like it? A science lesson, this is not. A firm proponent of the chain-of-being model of biological devleopment, the screenplay has an intellectual value in teaching the current theory explaining evolution of roughly zero. The pacing is choppy, too, as if there have been quite a few cuts. (What happened to the plan with the truck and the hoist?) The cast (David Duchovny, Orlando Jones, Seann William Scott, Julianne Moore) tries hard, but they’re a little at sea, too, in an over-engineered special effects extravaganza that’s scored like a military comedy.

101 minutes.

20 June 2001

Atlantis The Lost Continent

Atlantis sinks! Some time later, in the Washington, D.C. of 1914, a boiler operator (voice of Michael J. Fox) dreams of continuing his grandfather’s efforts in locating the site of the lost civilization. A very rich man makes those dreams possible. But what is the expedition’s true agenda? Did I like it? There’s plenty of adventure. But something about the animation was bugging me, and it took a while to begin to figure it out: each female character is drawn in a different style. The tough second-in-command with the blonde hair (voice of Claudia Christian) has an Aeon Flux look to her face, while the teenaged engineer has the big eyes and thick lips of some cartoon (maybe an underground comic?) I just can’t place yet. There is a pleasant surprise in the voice of the Atlantean king.

96 minutes.

16 June 2001

Bride of the Wind

What a curiousity that there should be a biographical movie of the life (and depicting especially the loves) of the woman best known as Alma Mahler (and most famous for bedding a series of men sufficiently famous to have entries in my American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language). I first encountered the sensual photograph of Alma Maria Schindler on a bearskin taken in 1899 (she was 19) several years ago and immediately understood her appeal. Strangely, the film begins with a subtitle of 1902 and several characters comment on Alma’s youth at a time when the real Alma was already 22 and had already had an affair with Gustav Klimt (famous name number one) and was pregnant with the child of Gustav Mahler (famous name number two). No matter. The screenplay barely has time to dramatize Mahler’s stern view of a proper marriage, the birth (and death of one) of their children, and their move to New York before Alma meets Walter Gropius (famous name number three) at a thermal health spa back in Austria. Some more simplification and Mahler is barely dead before the widow is introduced to Oskar Kokoschka (famous name number four), a painter who becomes obsessed with Alma and includes her face in many of his subsequent works. Kokoschka’s life is sufficiently dramatic (he was shot in the head and bayoneted in the lung one day while in service with the Austro-Hungarian Imperial army on the Eastern front with Russia) that the screenplay follows his own turmoil for a while. Alma meets Franz Werfel (not famous enough to be in the dictionary) while married to Gropius. Filmed entirely on location in Austria, the screenplay reduces Alma’s life after she leaves the country to a series of title cards describing the fate and import of the characters. Did I like it? Sarah Wynter is a trifle gaunt in the modern manner to quite convey the physical appeal I discerned in the photograph of Alma, but she and the rest of the cast (Jonathan Pryce, Vincent Perez, Simon Verhoeven, Gregor Seberg) have been chosen with a keen eye for their physical resemblance. The screenplay, as sketchy as it is in compressing the times and the work of these men, still contains a satisfying number of true details (Alma’s first impulse upon thinking Kokoschka is dead is to rush to his studio and retrieve her letters, although I suspect an anachronism in at least one of the sketches seen in this scene). But their empire was on the wrong side of the Great War (Serbia is not mentioned by name) and a sense of Alma’s character beyond the frustrations is weak.

99 minutes.

15 June 2001

Lara Croft Tomb Raider

Lara Croft (Angelina Jolie) is a British heiress who, to keep boredom at bay, practices her running, jumping, and swinging skills with a deadly robot as adversary. (Her ability to speak Cambodian and Russian and read ancient stonecarvings needs no refresher course, apparently.) Fortunately, she is old enough to have seen RoboCop and is able to face another day with just a few tendrils dangling from her tightly braided ponytail. When her acute hearing leads her one night to discover an ancient clock her late father left hidden in the castle, she begins an adventure that will lead her to Cambodia and Siberia where she will shoot many things. Did I like it? All I know of the video game is the cartoon on the box cover. To the fictionality of the characters this movie adds fictional religion, history, family dynamics, physics, archaeology, orbital mechanics, cultures, technology, temporal dimensions, and who knows what else. So why was I adamant to skip The Mummy Returns which, no doubt, offered many of the same fictional pleasures? It wasn’t for the British machinery (most of it a subsidiary of an American or German company by now) on display. I’m led to understand that there are some prosthetics involved in Croft having that Starfleet standard issue chest size. Jolie is plenty sturdy otherwise, so she is credible in the role even if the screenplay doesn’t let her touch even one camera in pursuit of her day job as a photojournalist. (The preceding sentences qualify as a so-so.)

100 minutes.

10 June 2001

Best in Show

From the minds who brought us Waiting for Guffman comes another faux documentary, this one about the attendees at a major dog show, following their preparations and travel to the show in Philadelphia and the competition that follows. (This was one of the recent high grossing movies playing for free at the new AMC Hoffman Center 22.) Did I like it? No. As a documentary, the camera work is even less plausible than in Waiting for Guffman which included a blatant cut from the other side of a locked door (and the screenplay of this one rather patly ends where it began). The characters are a little too wacky and un-self-aware, and the actors playing them a little too familiar. I’m not saying I didn’t laugh. Larry Miller as the hostage negotiator talking down his son from the roof of the garage! Fred Willard as the announcer whose mouth can’t stay away from the cliché and the trite! Catherine O’Hara as the woman with an ex-lover around every corner! Parker Posey as the high-strung catalog shopper on the edge of insanity! But for me it was not enough.

90 minutes.

08 June 2001

The Road Home

A Jeep Cherokee makes it way into the mountains of China. The road gets narrower and narrower until it is just two ruts in the snow. A businessman from the city is heading home. His father has died, and his mother insists that his body be carried home in the traditional way. This is causing the mayor some trouble, as there are no young men left in the village to carry the coffin. As he tries to sleep that first night, the son listens to his mother making a funeral cloth on the loom. He begins to remember the stories he has heard about how his mother and father met… A handsome young man Luo Changyu (Zheng Hao) arrives in a remote village to run the school which is currently under construction. The publicly acknowledged prettiest maiden Zhao Di (Zhang Ziyi) sets her sights on the teacher and begins her calculations. Stalking him from the forest’s edge by day, preparing special meals in her finest bowl for lunch, leaving her basket on the road where he walks, using the old well overlooking the school. I’m sure this is all considered adorable and romantic. The guy has no chance! But with her father dead and her mother blind, the young woman (the princess with a secret in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) cannot rely on the arranged marriage which is the norm. When the teacher is recalled to the city for political questions, they have not yet had sex. This is not a time travel movie, and our narrator (the son) is not in danger. Did I like it? The performers and the landscape are pretty (the titular road becomes a character, but the movie avoids comparing Zhang Ziyi to any other female performer). The inevitability of the son detracts slightly from the suspense of the two lovebird’s union. The flashback construction allows a simpler story focusing on the good parts of life (while avoiding the young girl’s birth in a world at war in 1940 and the Communist takeover), but the story of the son goes on a touch too long to be just a framing story. What is his secret?

91 minutes.

02 June 2001

Pearl Harbor

From some parallel universe where no one in America smoked comes this Armageddon-like approach to a historical event. Did I like it? No. When will Ben Affleck notice he’s always cast as the self-absorbed boor? Or is it just my imagination? Mallrats, Chasing Amy, Shakespeare in Love, Bounce… [How could I forget Forces of Nature?] If the romance between Army pilot Rafe (Affleck) and Navy nurse Evelyn (Kate Beckinsale, playing yet another Yank) was necessary as an imitation of Titanic, then that is an insult to Titanic. If this movie was like Titanic, we would leave the theater knowing a little something about the geography of Oahu or the number and disposition of the American forces. Indeed, we might have heard the phrase Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere even just once. (As it stands, I’m not at all sure the audience is supposed to realize that the aircraft carriers were not in port at the time of the attack, or why.) So they can manipulate a tear out of me when the coffin is carried out of the plane at the end.

182 minutes.

01 June 2001

Moulin Rouge

What on earth?! This movie comes from some future where they cannot be bothered to sort out the sequence of events in the twentieth century. Told in flashback from the vantage point of 1900 as Christian (Ewan McGregor) types (I suppose typewriters had been invented by then) the story of his arrival in Paris the previous year and how he came to the Moulin Rouge and fell in love with Satine (Nicole Kidman), the famous courtesan making a bid for respectability by seeking the lead role in a new production—which Christian will write—at the popular club and bordello. A delirious mishmash of the costume and production design of its nominal era with the lyrical stylings of the past 40 years of pop music. Did I like it? Yes. I suppose I should be suspicious that I recognize at least 75% of the lyrics, or that most of them are from my own lifetime. Enough of the young lady from Australia peeks through in Kidman’s performance to get past those parts where she plays her own icon. (I can’t remember when I’ve seen a camera go so far up the gum line on a performer, either.) You’ll never guess who gets to declaim the lyrics to Like a Virgin!

128 minutes.

Entries subject to editing at any time. Last edited on: 12-Sep-2004