Movies : October 2002

27 October 2002

Spirited Away

A Japanese family speeds along in its finely engineered German car (courtesy of Audi Japan) on their way to their new home. A wrong turn leads them to a rutted, rock-filled road (no problem for all wheel drive) and a curious series of structures (father amusingly decides it’s a failed amusement park from the go-go era of the nineties). While the father and mother are eager to explore the desolate surroundings, the lone daughter Chihiro (10 years old and despondent over leaving her friends and familiar settings behind) is wary. When the hungry parents overindulge at a well stocked buffet, they turn into pigs!!! Seems they’ve stumbled onto a bath house for the ample number of spirits populating the region. What to do?! Where to turn?! She is found by Haku, a young boy who seems to know his way around and has some advice for Chihiro. That the spirits can smell humans and don’t like it is the least of her problems. Still, she takes his advice and her life is never the same. For one thing, upon taking Haku’s advice, starting at the bottom with the boiler room and agreeing to a contract for employment with Yubaba, the head witch who foolishly agreed to the proviso that she give a job to anyone who asked, she loses her name and is supplied with Sen instead. Quite an adventure she has. Ups: small things with big eyes are classic, and you can’t get much smaller than soot. Enchanted soot. Downs: I still wonder what No-Face’s deal was (the greed engendered when he creates gold is straightforward, but what was he hoping to achieve by supplying Sen with the tokens for special bath waters?)

125 minutes.

21 October 2002

8 Women [8 femmes]

A singing comedy about murder and failed family relations from France. Christmas time has come to the patriarch’s mansion, snow is falling, a deer nibbles at the window, and Suzon (Virginie Ledoyen) has just returned home from school. Mother Gaby (Catherine Deneuve) has to put up with her own mother, Mamy (Danielle Darrieux), her own sister, Augustine (Isabelle Huppert), the other daughter, Catherine (Ludivine Sagnier), the devoted housekeeper, Chanel (Firmine Richard), the maid hired under dubious circumstances, Louise (Emmanuelle Béart), and not least of all, her husband, Marcel. But when the time comes to wake Marcel, Catherine reports that he has been murdered! A knife in his back and blood everywhere! With the snow all of two inches deep on the Renault Dauphin (so all those critics placing the setting of this movie in the fifties are just as wrong as those reviewing Chocolat) there is nothing to do but speculate as to which of these… wait a minute, there’s only seven women in the house. Just in time arrives Marcel’s sister, Pierrette (Fanny Ardant), quite familiar with the house’s layout despite Gaby’s strict orders that she is banned. Each character has some motive, some opportunity, some means to have done Marcel in. They get one song each to explain themselves and the rest of the time wallow in speculation, interrogation, and anxiety. While the snow keeps falling. Ups: Yow! Was Ledoyen’s pink top vacuum-packed onto her? Mmm, that’s tight. Huppert, a dubious romantic attraction in Heaven’s Gate, offers a high-energy performance as the hypochondriacal spinster aunt. Béart may be of my generation (b. 1965) but her combination of thick-soled boots, upper body voluptuousness, and full lips (last seen in La Bûche) has its attractions. Although there is not enough variety in the song styles, Ardant’s turn evokes the sensuousness of Gilda. Downs: as goofy and over-the-top as the rest of the film is, there is ultimately a plot twist out of American Beauty that doesn’t sit well.

110 minutes.

20 October 2002

Bowling for Columbine

Thirteen years after Roger & Me, and a few television series and books in the meantime, Michael Moore is unable to avoid returning to Flint, Michigan in this funny, graphic, horrible look at gun culture in America. This time, however, his eventual target is Charlton Heston, president of the National Rifle Association at the time of the massacre by two students of the Columbine High School, secure in his home behind a tall fence and with loaded guns alleged to be around. Even though he has never, never been the object of an assault or other crime. Why should this be so? ponders Moore as he visits the organic-farming brother of Oklahoma City bombing suspect Terry Nichols, tramps through the mud with members of the Michigan militia, walks in the front doors of homes in trusting Toronto, Ontario, chats with the co-creator of South Park, takes a tour of a missle plant in Littleton, visits an ex-producer of Cops who agrees that corporate crime is just as important but sees no way to make it television, and on and on…. Ups: the South Park-style cartoon explaining the fear which continues to grip white men of means in this country is pretty funny. Downs: the trademark tactic of ambushing famous people who really don’t want to talk to Moore is a little stale (Dick Clark is a victim this time) and there’s a little too much ellipsis we don’t get to see in Moore’s reaching Heston or getting the management of Kmart to change its mind about selling ammunition intended for handguns.

approximately 115 minutes.

18 October 2002

Abandon

Katie Burke (Katie Holmes) is just about to wrap up her fourth year at a nicely prestigious college (filmed entirely in Quebec). She’s finishing up her thesis and thinking about what to do after college when detective Wade Handler (Benjamin Bratt) arrives on campus with a few questions about her boyfriend who disappeared suddenly 2 years’ earlier. Seems Embry Langan (Charlie Hunnam) never reappeared. This renewed attention on her old flame is just stressing Katie out (how convenient for the director that he named the character for the actress he hoped would play her) and she’s getting jumpy. Even the mousy student assistant at the library (Melanie Lynskey, the good stepsister from Ever After) seems threatening. Why isn’t anyone more concerned that Katie is seeing Embry on campus again—driving his red Citroen? Will her therapist (Tony Goldwyn) stop trying to get in Katie’s pants long enough to realize how seriously disturbed she is? What really (yawn) happened to Embry? Ups: Katie Holmes (The Ice Storm, Disturbing Behavior, The Wonder Boys, Teaching Mrs. Tingle), Gabrielle Union (10 Things I Hate About You, Bring It On), Zooey Deschanel (even if I didn’t recognize her from her recent turn in The Good Girl). Downs: not even the target audience believed that Holmes’ character would have any romantic interest in Bratt’s detective and there was giggling in the theater.

98 minutes.

14 October 2002

White Oleander

A young woman works on a craft project involving the decoration of four suitcases reflecting phases of her life. Who reads these novels, anyway, that they should be optioned into films? Astrid (first-billed Alison Lohman) is the sole offspring of the artist Ingrid (Michelle Pfeiffer), font of a philosophy of critical thinking and free expression and naturally dismissive of the vast number of people who don’t measure up. When self-professed Viking Ingrid is hauled off for the murder of a two-timing boyfriend (Billy Connolly, looking too much like Joe Eszterhas in the long shots to be totally sympathetic), Ingrid starts her odyssey through life as a foster child. Stop #1 is the reformed stripper Starr (Robin Wright Penn), with troubled but game children and a live-in boyfriend, who’s juggling an affair with the local minister, but the auto mechanic boyfriend takes too close an interest in the upbringing of this new daughter and Astrid must leave. Stop #2 is a group home for troubled youth where she establishes, with a well-placed knife at the neck, that she’s got just a little of mother’s steel in her, plus she meets a boy who likes to draw cartoons and who dreams of moving to New York with her. Stop #3 is the expensive but chilly home of pathetic actress Claire (Renée Zellweger) who wants to do good but doesn’t realize the danger of accompanying Astrid on a visit to Ingrid in prison. Stop #4 is the employ of the Russian Rena (Svetlana Efremova) who is pursuing the American Dream by hustling at flea markets and such. All the while, Ingrid sits in prison with only a thin veneer of smooth skin and straight, blond hair to sustain her and plots how she’ll interfere with any attempt by Astrid to bond with anybody else. Ups: a cascade of star power (although only Penn doesn’t remind me of any previous role); Astrid’s desire to continue drawing even in her worst circumstances. Downs: with four or five phases (depending on how you count) to Astrid’s life, each must have its turns fairly well telegraphed; it’s a small detail, but Ingrid slips up—the DOS command to delete all files on a disk is del *.*, not erase all files.

109 minutes.

12 October 2002

The Rules of Attraction

Students at some college somewhere, equipped with the latest cars and the latest Apple computers (that would make it an unspecified time frame only for the imperturbable) and no real worries about finances or education, occupy their spare time by calculating with whom to hook up next. Aided by ostentatious film gimmickry such as reverse motion and audio, skip printing, and split screen sequences, Lauren (Shannyn Sossamon, still in the cute with short hair mode she was in for 40 Days and 40 Nights), Sean (James Van Der Beek, the ersatz Jay in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back), and Paul (Ian Somerhalder), and later Victor (Kip Pardue) wander around a party under the impression that one of the others likes them, and then in flashback over a semester’s time we see why they are completely wrong on this point. There will be much consumption of alcoholic beverages, much injection, ingestion, and inhaling of controlled substances, and much asking and giving of sexual favors. Ups: in a cast that also includes such pneumatic thespians as Jessica Biel and Kate Bosworth, even the neglected classmate that commits suicide over her unrequited attraction to Sean is impossibly pretty. Downs: the lack of consequences for that suicide suggests that the timeline has been jumbled up to obscure rather than to elucidate.

110 minutes.

11 October 2002

Secretary

A trim and self-assured young woman makes her rounds of an office, doing the stapling, fetching the coffee, retrieving the typing while her hands are manacled to a long bar saddled to her neck. Six months earlier, Lee Holloway (Maggie Gyllenhaal) was a troubled girl, just out of an institution for a history of cutting herself. It was the wedding day of her sister (Amy Locane, once the glamour girl of Melrose Place, now almost invisible) and while her mother (Lesley Anne Warren) eventually had the presence of mind to lock up the kitchen knives, no one remembered to search Lee’s room. Before Lee got too tempted to return to her ways, she spied the classified section of the newspaper and started working herself up to look for a job. The first stop was the office of attorney E. Edward Grey (James Spader) which was in a shambles as the previous secretary left (the Secretary Wanted sign out front is permanent). Grey had a number of odd questions but hired her anyway. Naturally, Grey has his own problems, and as time went by, he complained more and more about Lee’s performance of her duties until one day he spanks Lee for typing errors. Marriage minded high school chum Peter (Jeremy Davies) cannot compete for Lee’s sexual satisfaction anymore. The movie is quick to make the leap from this beginning to the scene at the start and proceed more or less in montage until the day Grey fires Holloway. Well, don’t you know, it’s about love now. Ups: Gyllenhaal goes from plain to glamourous and back with ease; nudity sufficient to satisfy those keeping track of such things. Downs: So how did the missing scene go, anyhow? Here’s this bar I’ve got, do you mind trying it on? Maybe I’ve seen too many movies about damaged characters finding each other.

110 minutes.

08 October 2002

Satin Rouge

Lilia (Hiam Abbass) dusts the furniture around her apartment in Tunis, watches the soap operas, dances a little to the radio, and keeps her hand in on the knitting and sewing. (She’s a widow.) She’s getting suspicious of her teenaged only daughter’s daily requests to study over at Hela’s. So one day she follows Salma (Hend El Fahem) to the belly dancing class and with a mother’s eye for these things identifies the drummer Chokri (Maher Kamoun) as the potential source of interference with raising Salma in the proper manner. When the opportunity to follow the drummer arises one day while Lilia is out shopping, she drops everything to do so, and follows Chokri right into the cabaret where he works nights and she promptly faints. But the belly dancers are an understanding group and she recovers, and meeting the lead dancer Folla (Monia Hichri) in a fabric shop later, she agrees to visit again. Once there, the construction of the flashy costumes overcomes her natural reserve, and Lilia is persuaded to dance for the noisy, smoking customers out front. As the weeks go by, the concern for Salma’s future gets subordinated to the urge to sneak out at night and get in a few hours of dancing. Meanwhile, Chokri is definitely taking notice of this new performer. Ups: the usual gratitude for a look at another place, another culture; the priceless look when Chokri realizes exactly what [could be a world of hurt] he’s gotten himself into. Downs: the easy way in which Lilia lies to daughter and neighbors when the occasion arises.

110 minutes.

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