31 December 2001

Intimacy (2000)

Not content with polluting movie screens with explicit depictions of carnality for audiences limited by language comprehension, French money and a director have metaphorically driven through the Channel tunnel and set up shop in London. There, a man and a woman meet on a Wednesday afternoon for intense sex in a dilapidated and cluttered row house (the thin and bare mattress and stacks of LPs cannot make for much comfort). They do not speak to each other. Well, it’s good for the man, clearly, but the film is much less interested in why the woman is there. (Not to mention that he doesn’t always remember to put on a condom, but no one notices.) Nevertheless, Jay (Mark Rylance), who is divorced (that explains the shabby house) and a bartender frustrated by new employees at the bar and friends with barely comprehensible accents, finds it’s not enough and one day tries to follow the woman. He ends up at a pub with a theater downstairs where the woman is playing a lead role in a threadbare production and discovers, from her husband Dave (Timothy Spall), that she is named Claire (Kerry Fox). Oops, he meets her adorable little son, too. Claire has her own problems. The acting classes she gives Tuesdays and Fridays aren’t delivering any improvement to the performance by student Betty (Marianne Faithful) or improving her own disposition. Oh, there’s a lot of bitter posturing and shouting before it’s all done. Did I like it? Let’s say no. For this, a novel and a short story were necessary in developing the screenplay? Maybe it’s just me that can’t comprehend the accents.

119 minutes.

A Beautiful Mind

Director Ron Howard and Imagine Entertainment reach into the past once again to depict a world where everyone (who mattered) was white. Coincidence, or something more? The biography upon which this film is based is already at The Book Market, a remainder store that moves from one empty storefront location to another as the months go by. John Nash (Russell Crowe) is the odd student of mathematics from West Virginia at Princeton in 1947. The other students are competitive (and already publishing) so Nash decides to abandon classes and seek an original idea that will distinguish him. Having done so, he lands a position with the Wheeler Labs at MIT, where student Alicia (Jennifer Connelly) who knows what she wants sets her eyes on him. They marry and have a child. Nash has a mysterious assignment with William Partcher (Ed Harris) to decode Soviet messages in our own media (Life magazine in particular) to their agents. But… Christopher Plummer intrudes to inform the contented wife (and the audience which may be unfamiliar with the details of Soviet capabilities at the time or the sequence of technological development of the last century) that Nash is a paranoid schizophrenic with persistent hallucinations. Skipping over anything that might upset the majority consensus, the film winds up at the Nobel ceremony of 1994 where Nash is awarded the prize for economics. Did I like it? If not as triumphant in the face of adversity as Apollo 13 was, for Nash’s hallucinations remain to the end, and not quite as over the top as was The Caveman’s Valentine, nevertheless the struggle with mental illness is poignant.

135 minutes.

30 December 2001

The Shipping News

A boy considered a loser by his father grows up to be a man (Kevin Spacey) who is used to being unnoticed and invisible, until the day a woman actually, independently sees him—and the rest is consequences. Petal (Cate Blanchett) is all hair and eyeliner and pink lipcolor and she has Quoyle in bed by that night. Although they have a daughter Bunny, Petal’s bar- and bed-hopping days are far from over, but Quoyle lacks the resolve to improve their lot. When Bunny is 6 (and played by triplets), and rather quickly in cinematic terms, a few people die, and Quoyle and Bunny are off to Newfoundland with Aunt Agnis Hamm (Judi Dench) to restore the family home abandoned for 44 years on an otherwise inhospitable spit of rock in the face of the ocean. Through family connections and obligations he doesn’t quite understand, Quoyle becomes a reporter of sorts for the daily fishwrap of a local paper. He meets Wavey (Julianne Moore), the local vendor of day-care services with a 6-year-old of her own who’s a little slow, and soon the whole town knows they’re an item (even if he doesn’t realize it). There’s a little conflict at the office of the paper, too, what with editor Jack (Scott Glenn) preferring to fish, another character (Pete Postlethwaite) championing the oil industry no matter how many spills they have, a third (Rhys Ifans) dreaming of restoring his junk and sailing to Brazil. Bunny turns out to be sensitive in the local fashion. From time to time, someone explains a scandal or other secret. Did I like it? At least it’s far less didactic than Chocolat was (other than: don’t let floozies into your car). But it’s not a passionate place, this area of snow and rock and storm. Incest, murder, a scatlogical approach to honoring ancestors, drunken rampaging, rampant lying are all just another promontory or cove in the plot which don’t arouse any of the inhabitants. The leads are sympathetic, however. Say, how old was the novel anyway? The late eighties? It’s the only way to explain the anachronism of Jack insisting on an IBM personal computer over a clone when IBM doesn’t even sell at retail anymore and the clones (Dell, Gateway) are the largest vendors of personal computers.

111 minutes.

24 December 2001

Ocean’s Eleven

By now, director Steven Soderbergh and star George Clooney are quite familar with prisons. Daniel Ocean (Clooney) is just leaving a North Jersey facility of the NJDOC and assuring his parole officer that he has no intention of leaving the state when he’s off to Atlantic City to make contact with an old buddy Frank (Bernie Mac) now calling himself Ramon and then it’s west to plan that big heist that’s close to his heart. Um, on whose money is he traveling? Anyway, Ocean needs the talents of ten more criminals to plunder the vault containing the cash to cover a boxing weekend’s bets for three casinos in Las Vegas. Ah, but there’s more than money to Ocean’s plans when his card shark buddy (Brad Pitt) discovers that the proprietor of the casino housing the vault, Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia), has as his current mistress Tess (Julia Roberts), the ex-wife of Danny. Did I like it? There was the slightest hint of plausibility in the romance at the center of Out of Sight, Soderbergh and Clooney’s previous collaboration, and that is missing here. There is nothing about Tess that drives Danny to seek her return to matrimony, only the drive to best Terry. And I’m guessing that Tess was satisfied with her jump from wife of a conman, who eventually got caught, to mingling with the high-rollers at the side of an immensely wealthy man. Oh, yeah, there must be quite a gap between what patrons pay for the experience in Las Vegas and the cost of delivering it. Indeed, the cost of Ocean’s plan stretches credulity, with its multiple vehicles, military armament, huge warehouse spaces… just the meals over their 2-week preparation period comes to 462 in all! A sad, empty bit of business. Or maybe it’s the presence of Casey Affleck in the cast.

116 minutes.

23 December 2001

The Endurance

Liam Neeson narrates the tale of Sir Ernest Shackleton who, frustrated that someone else had reached the South Pole first, advertised for a crew to join him on an expedition to cross the continent (of Antarctica) on foot. In 1914, just as the war in the Balkans was entangling the world’s alliances, twenty-seven men joined up and set sail with Shackleton on the HMS Endurance. When they reached the Weddell Sea, pack ice enclosed the ship and they could proceed no farther. When the ship was destroyed, they saved what they could and set out on foot. When eventually they reached water, they took to the lifeboats they had been dragging and rowed to Elephant Island. But Elephant Island was off the shipping and whaling routes, so Shackleton and three of the crew took a lifeboat and rowed to South Georgia Island. Only they were on the coast opposite the one with the whaling station, and an unmapped mountain range was in the way. Pretty much nothing went right on this expedition, except that Frank Hurley, one of the crew, had motion and still-picture cameras with him, and we can now see much of how they lived and suffered. With interviews of descendants, actors reading journal entries, and sketches made when they were down to three rolls of film, the story of the failed mission (which nevertheless entailed no loss of human life) unfolds. Did I like it? With so much emphasis on the human drama and the qualities of leadership that Shackleton embodied, in which the goal of the expedition was subordinate to the safety of the crew, the equipment gets slighted. I suppose the smokestack on the ship is a good enough clue to the alert viewer, but couldn’t a word have been spared to say whether it was coal or oil being burned? Plenty of shots of penguins and seals cavorting in the desolate areas in which the expedition found themselves (both were a source of food and fuel) but not one frame on what equipment Hurley brought with him.

98 minutes.

22 December 2001

No Man’s Land

Lucky me. I don’t need the subtitles for this multilingual movie, which includes dialogue in Serbian, French, German, and a smidgeon of English (plus, for the truly sensitive, Bosnian ). Clueless international audiences also require a subtitle to identify the players, since their flags are bound to be obscure. It’s 1993, and a Bosnian relief squad is proceeding to the front through fog (har-dee-har-har, fog, get it?), but when the sun rises and the fog lifts, they are caught in the open and slaughtered by rifle fire from the Serbian line. Ciki (Branko Djuric) makes it into a trench between the lines and hopes to wait until evening for a dash back to his front. A pair of Serbian soldiers on an investigatory patrol interferes with his plan, but not before they’ve placed a Bouncing Betty mine under the body of one of the Bosnian fallen. Soon enough, Ciki is in a standoff with inexperienced Nino (Rene Bitorajac) and Cera (Filip Sovagovic) turns out to be not so dead. A French patrol from UNPROFOR is on the scene before the British commander (Simon Callow), who’d just as soon see everyone kill each other when he’s not inspecting the short skirt of his helmet carrier, can recall them. But he’s thwarted when the on-air talent for a British Global News Channel (Katrin Cartlidge) has heard what’s going on over her scanner and arrived at the scene as well. Did I like it? Ah, the rich cursing of soldiers in the field! As black comedies go, this one’s pretty funny. When Ciki and Nino compare notes on the women they knew in Banja Luka, the number one criterion is breast size. It’s spoiled only by its unqualified support of the Western line on the bread line massacre.

97 minutes.

18 December 2001

Lisa Picard Is Famous

Andrew (even without the credits at the end, it’s pretty obvious it’s Griffin Dunne) is looking for a way into the big time, and figures a documentary about a performer on the very cusp of stardom is his ticket. He chooses Lisa Picard (Laura Kirk), who’s just made a little splash in an erotic television commercial for, of all things, Wheat Chex cereal. As Andrew follows Lisa around with his camcorder and a sound man, she works to parlay her notoriety over the commercial and her upcoming appearance in a television movie with Melissa Gilbert into more work. Her best friend Tate Kelly (Nat DeWolf) is having a little difficulty with the attention Lisa is getting from her documentarian. Did I like it? Argh, it seems my personal touchstone for the mockumentary, Dadetown, is never to be topped. Nevertheless, this contribution to the genre has its share of laughs at the expense of actors, struggling and experienced. What on Earth Sandra Bullock is doing in a private mail box shop taping up her own carton for shipment is left unexplained.

90 minutes.

16 December 2001

Vanilla Sky

A Bob Dylan album cover? This is supposed to be a clue for me? Cameron Crowe is showing his age on this one—the album in question (I found out later) is from 1963. The sequence of scenes in this drama with the big secret is deliberately disjointed so that it’s harder to tell that the central story is not so much from The Twilight Zone as from, urp, Total Recall! David Aames (Tom Cruise) is so used to what money brings him that it doesn’t faze him when, in his dream, he is driving a Ferrari (I’m guessing) instead of a 1969 Mustang fastback. Although he’s got a ready and willing sex partner in Julie (Cameron Diaz), David is ready to pounce when his best friend Brian (Jason Lee) brings to his birthday party some cute little dancer with the thick accent he met at the library: Sofia (Penélope Cruz). Even though there’s more than 2 hours left in the movie, the stirrings of true love make themselves known quickly and David and Sofia spend the night drawing sketches of each other. The next morning, David unwisely takes up Julie’s offer of a ride (seems she really has been stalking him). Leave your classic Mustang on a Brooklyn street? Bad choice, that, David. He would barely have had time to notice that Julie’s Oldsmobile Cutlass (also from about 1969, it looks like) is airbag-free when she drives over the side of an overpass. Julie is dead, David’s face is horribly scarred, and he’s now discussing it all with a court-appointed psychiatrist (Kurt Russell) because he’s got a murder charge against him. Did I like it? It is such a shame that Cameron Diaz cannot find roles worthy of her, she was so good in Being John Malkovich, and she is largely wasted here as the psycho. The years since Belle Epoque have been kind to Penélope Cruz (not to mention the years since she played Sofia in the Spanish version, which I haven’t seen) and she’s cute enough to justify the jostling of male egos. Tilda Swinton (seen earlier this year in The Deep End) and Alicia Witt do what they can with small roles, with Swinton especially effective as an imperturbable sales counselor. I’m no fan of Tom Cruise (I might have a title of his on capacitance videodisc—oops, showing my own age with that mention) but Jason Lee is a delight as ever even outside the world of the Jersey Trilogy. The technology is a little too advanced to be contemporary (even though a tombstone of sorts is labeled 2001 ). Most of the flesh on display is Cruise’s, by the way, for those with an interest in that sort of thing. Cruz’ toplessness is actually another clue necessary for the plot and everything.

135 minutes.

15 December 2001

The Business of Strangers

Traveling executive Julie (Stockard Channing) is worried because the company’s CEO has requested a lunch with her, really soon. Her mood is not improved when Paula (Julia Stiles), the A-V person for today’s important presentation, is 45 minutes late without even a heads-up. She fires Paula, then finds out that the CEO wants to pass the title on to her. Oops. She doesn’t need that headhunter Nick (Frederick Weller), after all. Finding Paula in the hotel’s bar, she takes back the firing and tries to start a conversation. To the extent that the screenplay is written by a man, the two will spend the rest of the evening talking about sex, power, age, drugs, liquor, and the like. When Paula has a revelation about Nick, their Scotch- and Zoloft-powered night will involve much humiliation. Did I like it? Clearly, I’m a sucker for most anything with Julia Stiles. As a slice of life, the screenplay is hopeless. But as a dynamic struggle between characters, it allows the two leads to let loose. Yow!

83 minutes.

Baise-Moi (2000)

Somewhere in France far, far away from the sunny Montmarte of Amélie Poulain where there were no citizens of African heritage, a bored call girl (Raffaela Anderson) and a drifting porn actress (Karen Bach) don’t know each other yet. When they find themselves in a train station after the last train out of the city has left, after having respectively murdered a roommate that day, the actress who can’t drive can nevertheless dig up a gleaming red Peugeot 104 and the call girl with no car can nevertheless drive. It will be the misfortune of the women and men that they come across in their ATM-robbing, casino-hopping, Jack Daniels-fueled road trip that they will have sex, and that they will kill. Repeatedly. Did I like it? If these are actresses from the French world of porn, they’re a lot more natural than what passes for talent in America. The cramped close-ups and lack of establishing shots (there’s only one showing the exterior of the Peugeot!) is typical but tiring. And the call girl’s roommate may have been annoying, but she didn’t deserve to die.

76 minutes.

Not Another Teen Movie

The week before prom night at the John Hughes High School brings with it a great many plot points lifted without much modification or originality from other movies, some as old as 15 and more years ago. Did I like it? Such is the state of American comedy that barely one laugh per movie can be extracted. This film’s one laugh comes courtesy the use of an Aerosmith song.

88 minutes.

01 December 2001

Audition (2000) [ Odishon (1999) ]

Seven years after his wife died at peace in a hospital bed, Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi) is getting a little old. Even his son says that he looks plain and should marry again. At the office, where his status is conveyed quietly by the Herman Miller Aeron chair, his secretary informs him she is getting married yet she looks a little forlorn as he enters the elevator. Talking over the situation with a pal in the video production business at a bar, and decrying the ill-mannered, stuck-up girls laughing it up at one of the tables, an idea is born: hold an audition for a video project (that may or may not ever get off the ground) that calls for a woman (definitely under the age of 30) in several roles. Aoyama is much taken with the essay submitted by Asami (Eihi Shiina) and despite the funny and sexy auditions by the other applicants has already decided she is the one. Her obedience appeals to him. They meet for lunch and then for dinner and then for a weekend where Asami insists on showing him everything—she is scarred on the inside of her thighs. Whoa! Did you think Mulholland Drive was too tame? Hang on! The cross-cutting between potential realities—is Aoyama dreaming after sex that weekend that Asami is forcing acupuncture needles into him (and not in the helpful places, either) or, overcome by the torture with the needles and the cutting wire, is he dreaming of a quiet post-coital night? What is Asami’s story? Who is that guy without the tongue or the ear or three of his fingers? Ew! Did I like it? Ishibashi has a strong resemblance to Garrett Wang who played Harry Kim on Star Trek Voyager and Aoyama shares Harry’s knack for going places where his capabilities are inadequate. (I called it the Harry screws up school of episode plotting.) The cross-cutting reminded me of those Voyager episodes that invoked the big reset button to explain away unpalatable plot lines. Unfortunately for Aoyama, this film from Japan is far, far bloodier than Tokyo Decadence. Demure, obedient Asami is (or she may not be) anything but. Ouch! Even the dog has to suffer. Which doesn’t mean there isn’t enough sleek hair and smooth faces and short skirts to make up for it.

115 minutes.

Thomas in Love [ Thomas est amoureux ] (2000)

Thomas (voice of Benoit Verhaert) is agoraphobic. He has not left his apartment, nor let anyone else enter, in 8 years. His contract with his insurance company, for example, allows him to demand of the appliance repair company that they send someone over to pick up the robot vacuum cleaner which he will leave in his entryway, built like an airlock. We see Thomas’ world entirely from the perspective of his visiophone (for the entire length of the film, no less). Thomas is just about to the high point of his cybersex session when call waiting is activated—mother is calling. What were you doing? Are you all right? You look a little pale. As the next step in his therapy, however, his psychologist has given his telephone number to a dating service and also suggested he might partake of the medical prostitution service offered to patients at his B8 classification level. As Thomas speaks with these women on the two-way video telephone, his life will get a little more complicated. Mélodie (Magali Pinglaut) from the dating service is a video poet (so old fashioned) who’s a little wacky but willing to buy a cybersuit for their mutual pleasure. Eva (Aylin Yay) was having a bad day in her government whorehouse cubicle when Thomas first called and has some secrets of her own. Both demand he leave his apartment. Did I like it? This film from Belgium is funny and romantic with an agreeable amount of science fiction (much, much funnier than Happy Accidents).

97 minutes.