Movies : August 2004

29 August 2004

We Don’t Live Here Anymore

Two families get together for a friendly Friday night of drinking. The men are both professors at the same college, running buddies even, and the wives like each other. But Jack (Mark Ruffalo), having tired a bit of his wife Terry (Laura Dern) as she scrapes by raising two children on an income that has Jack driving a Ford Bronco II, is already deeply involved with Edith (Naomi Watts), wife of Hank (Peter Krause) and mother of one daughter, and much prefers her Mercedes-Benz station wagon. Hank has his eye on the fetching students in his class yet is attentive enough to notice that Terry is not happy and is willing to listen. How marvelous for them all that they have a lot of time, easy access to baby-sitting, and never have the impulse to call each other during those four-hour absences. Still, the men are handsome (even if the idea of shaving eludes them) and the women pretty and the children absolutely gorgeous. The sex is non-explicit, though.

105 minutes.

27 August 2004

Intimate Strangers [Confidences trops intimes]

Set to music suitable for a mystery, the feet of an otherwise unseen woman head down Parisian streets to reach an apartment building where the concierge gives her appallingly inadequate directions to the office of the resident psychiatrist. Speaking quickly of an appointment when the door opens to reveal William (Fabrice Luchini), and comforted by the presence of a couch in his office, she begins to tell of her sexual frustration since her husband stopped working 6 months earlier, and William can barely get a word in edge-wise before she is gone again with a promise of returning the next week. William’s predicament is that he is a tax attorney, Dr. Monnier (Michel Duchaussoy) is down at the other end of the hall, but with his own novelist-turned-librarian girlfriend Jeanne (Anne Brochet) leaving him for an SUV-driving gym owner, he is intrigued by this stranger’s troubles and wants very much to continue their conversation. Their conversations do continue (to the consternation of his secretary, a relic of his father’s practice in the same apartment) and secrets are revealed, passions are unearthed, crises experienced and forgiven… not flashy, of course, as a character study, and the real doctor’s mercenary assumptions are most amusing, with a satisfactory ending.

106 minutes.

15 August 2004

Garden State

Andrew Largeman (Zach Braff, writing and directing) is living a spare existence as a television actor and zoned-out waiter at a Vietnamese restaurant when a message from his father is recorded on his answering machine that his mother has died. Returning home to New Jersey, he finds his friends—gravedigger Mark (Peter Sarsgaard), a Medieval Times jouster, a police officer, and an idly rich inventor—still devoted to drink, pot, and coke, just with ever-younger (by comparison) girls. Medicated by his psychiatrist father (Ian Holm) since he was ten, Andrew complains of momentarily intense headaches, and when his father sends him to another practitioner, he’s encouraged to change psychiatrists. But Andrew’s just met Samantha (Natalie Portman) whose utterances are less than reliable and whose problems are multi-faceted. As the week goes on, Andrew and Samantha spend a lot of time together. Andrew’s character starts off unsympathetic but as his lithium wears off he becomes more personable. The glorification of drug use goes on a bit long. Portman is believeable as the non-stop talker. Almost too low-key to register.

102 minutes.

13 August 2004

Open Water

Oh, that is cold. Not since The House of Mirth have I seen a movie so chilling. A busy couple have finally managed to get a weekend free so that they can vacation on sandy shores and do some blue-water diving. Susan (Blanchard Ryan, looking natural when fully nude the night before the dive, plus her real first name is Susan) and Daniel (Daniel Travis) get caught up with exploring the aquatic life and when they return to the surface, the boat they came out on with eighteen other guests is nowhere close. With some inquisitive sharks ready to make investigative bites swimming nearby… The usual poor quality of digital video in long shots is apparent, and the film suffers in any comparison with Touching the Void, but I’m not sorry I saw it.

80 minutes.

10 August 2004

The Village

To postulate a settlement completely cut off from the rest of the world is bad enough, for trade has been a characteristic of the human condition for the longest time, from prior to the invention of writing, at least. To further propose non-human upright bipeds flies in the face of the remarkable monopoly humans have on that phenotype. It’s… it’s… it’s… a bad episode of Star Trek Deep Space Nine? Oh, dear, I’ve said too much. (The exact episode is left as an exercise for the reader.) I might as well have repeated my comments on Unbreakable but Bryce Dallas Howard manages to retain some appeal. Yes, I waited for the asterisk to disappear from the board displaying show times (the asterisk indicates a special engagement for which a pass of the type I held is no good).

108 minutes.

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