Review by James Teitelbaum
©2007 All Rights Reserved
v.1.2
Here is a film based on Frank Miller’s (Sin City, The Dark Knight) graphic novel 300. The story is loosely based on factual events from the year 480 B.C. Seems that a group of 300 Spartan soldiers were successful in holding off a gigantic army of tens of thousands (some historians say hundreds of thousands) of Persian invaders. Aided by 700 other Greeks who were not as combat hardened as the 300 Spartans, the 1000 men eventually gave their lives after slaughtering many thousands of Persians. The movie of 300 takes, shall we say, broad liberties with history, turning the event into an over the top bloodbath. Spartan King Leonidas is full of testosterone and swagger, challenging the endless hoards of Xerxes again and again. Leonidas and his 300 men fight Arabs, ninjas, a giant rhino, three giant elephants, and a giant (person). It’s almost as if the whole (real) event were being told through the lens of (not real) Greek mythology. Those nutty Greeks had a lot of crazy stories and myths to tell, but the events told here really did happen (more or less), and embellishing the event with a hunchbacked traitor (not a hunchback in real life), some wise men who are really ugly lepers (they weren’t lepers in real life), and a bunch of Spartans claiming that Athenians were buggerers (it was the Spartans who indulged in young boy bottom in real life) is not necessary.
The fanciful filmmakers have used oversaturated color to their give the film either a dream-like quality, a music video quality, or to hide poor CGI effects. Maybe all of these things. Amidst a soundtrack that ranges from thundering tribal drums, to ambient soundscapes, to heavy metal guitar, the Spartans succeed in kicking a whole lot of Persian ass, and pissing off the eight-foot-tall Xerxes. Old Xerxes has a thing for piercings and has had his voice enhanced by some sort of pitch shifter to give him an effect that is either menacing or silly, depending on your point of view. Leonidas eventually buys the farm in a hail of Persian arrows.
Pop quiz: what do we call Persia now? Answer: Iraq!
About the only interesting or thought provoking thing in this music video blood bath is the concept that Leonidas defies the law and the will of the people to go to war with Xerxes. Leonidas also claims to be fighting tyranny, while bullishly commanding a rather tyrannical society. There’s a bit of Geroge W. Bush in there, except that Bush hasn’t perished in a hail of pointy sticks. Yet.
Review by James Teitelbaum
©2007 All Rights Reserved
v.1.1
Great film. This is one of the very first French New Wave movies I ever saw (about 1989 - a year after experiencing Goddard’s Alphaville and Cocteau's Orphee for the first time), and as I revisit it every few years, it holds up for me brilliantly. Former film critic Francois Truffaut put his money where his mouth is, and decided that rather than telling other people what was wrong with their movies, he’d just go out and show them what a great movie is made of. This was his first film, and perhaps the best film of a career that had many more highlights.
An old axiom states that if you are strapped for ideas as a writer, then write what you already know best. For many people, Truffaut included, this means: autobiography. The 400 Blows introduces Truffaut’s alter-ego, Antoine Doinel. Truffaut used the character of Doinel in five of his films, and to watch all of these films back to back paints an interesting and epic cinematic picture of one man’s life... fictionalized. Doinel is played here by Jean-Pierre Léaud, who played Doinel in all five films. Leaud would also appear in films by Cocteau and a lot of films by Goddard, making him a sort of French New Wave poster boy. Certainly his performance in The 400 Blows is terrific. It was only his second role ever; he is still working at the age of 63 and has eighty films under his belt!
The story concerns young Antoine who lives with his stressed out mother and his kind but firm stepfather. Mom is cheating (one wonders what happened to the first husband, and whether her behavior is chronic), while dad seems more interested in his auto racing than his family. Antoine shares moments of happiness with his parents in their shabby little apartment, but he is still ultimately neglected and treated like a nuisance more often than not. He is a bit of a troublemaker in school, and as the story progresses, we see innocent childish tomfoolery escalate into petty crimes, and then into some more serious mischief and criminal behavior. Antoine seems to be a good kid at heart, but his environment and lack of real guidance send him drifting along a regrettable path. Seems as though every time he tries to do the right thing, it backfires on him and things get worse and worse. It is a hard world we live in, and poor Antoine just can’t get a break.
The film has one of the best endings ever, with Antoine escaping from a correctional school, running, running, running through the city and the country, all the way to the sea, where he is alone, and is free.
Every link in this film is strong. The sprightly score is by Jean Constantin, one of only a half-dozen films he worked on. Flutes and vibraphones repeat a memorable motif of descending arpeggios that perfectly capture the free-spirited Doinel’s adventures running around the brilliantly photographed Paris. Henri Decaë’s expert cinematography is lovely, and really gives the viewer a sense of being in Paris. Few films, in fact, could work as well as a portrait of that city at that time. And Truffaut’s direction: you’d be hard pressed to find a better debut. He had some writing help (mainly in the dialogue department) from Marcel Moussy. Part of the reason Leaud was cast as Doinel was because of his ability to improvise. Together, Truffaut, Moussy, and Leaud bring Doinel to life in one of the best films ever made, a film that is alternately charming, grim, funny, sad, beautiful, and chock full of pathos.
Review by James Teitelbaum
©2007 All Rights Reserved
v.1.2
Director/writer Kar Wai Wong is being hailed as a genius all over Asia and Europe. Indeed there are moments of genius in 2046, but it isn’t quite the masterpiece that it’s prestige would imply. It can drag a bit (ok, a lot), and although the ambiguity in the story is fine, the plot and characters are not quite gripping enough to hold interest as the slow and atmospheric film unfolds. Kar Wai Wong also seems terrified of long shots - every shot in the film is wonderfully composed and lit, but the camera seldom pulls back to let the viewer breathe; it all feels claustrophobic.
Some of the subtitles on the copy I saw were clearly - sometime hilariously - mistranslated. Inexcusable for a film as high-profile as this one (it was nominated for 25 major film awards, world-wide).
Review by James Teitelbaum
©2007 All Rights Reserved
v.1.0
Nicholas Cage is probably a good actor, but he keeps making really miserable career choices. We can make a strong case for the man in films like Wild at Heart, possibly Leaving Las Vegas or Raising Arizona, and definitely Adaptation. But look at all of the lame action films this guy has done, and it really makes you wonder.
Anyway, Adaptation is another of the clever scripts from the mind of almost-mainstream sorta-madman Charlie Kaufman. Given the task of adapting the book The Orchid Thief, Kaufman had a really tough time of it, and decided to base his screenplay not on the book, but on how much it sucked for him to attempt to adapt the book. So the movie is about himself, basically. Cage plays both Kaufman and his (fictional) twin brother Donald, a dimwit hack who keeps making unlikely leaps and bounds in his own screenwriting career, just as Charlie wrestles with his art and his life. Between fits of writer’s block and other struggles in his neurotic and miserable existence, we do get to see scenes from Kaufman’s take on The Orchid Thief, as portrayed by a convincingly scummy Chris Cooper and an unusually subtle Meryl Streep. As Charlie and Donald attempt to wrap up the script, their imaginations take over, and the worlds of their minds, the world of their script, and the world of book all twist around each other and become completely surreal. The resolution to all of this is a bit unsatisfactory, leaving the viewer hanging a bit, and perhaps feeling a tad unsatisfied; perhaps Kaufman really did run out of ideas towards the end. This is all that spoils an otherwise excellently written and nicely acted film. Adaptation was directed by music video director Spike Jonze, who had previously worked with Kaufman on Being John Malkovich, and who is currently finishing up the movie adaptation of the children’s book Where the Wild Things Are.
Review by James Teitelbaum
©2007 All Rights Reserved
v.1.0
Back at the tail end of the 1980s, an art college near my home started having what they called Japanimation festivals once a month or so. My buddies and I used to go, and we'd sit through what at the time was considered edgy and state of the art animation. It's hard to believe now, but at that time, this stuff was hard to get on home video in the US, and even the art-house theaters weren't showing it. So we'd go see it at the art school auditorium. The best of these anime films was Akira, and looking at the movie again so many years later - for the fifth or sixth time overall, but for the first time since perhaps the middle 1990s - it isn't hard to see why it is considered an all-time classic of the genre.
The story is a bit confusing, but in a nutshell, the government has created a group of psychic kids, but can't adequately control their powers. Most of the kids are docile enough, and willing to live in a hospital under sedation, but a few of the most powerful kids need to be put into deep-freeze. Just as the Army begins to lose control of the situation, a juvenile delinquent biker kid named Tetsuo runs afoul of the experimenters, ends up with his own psychic powers, and becomes more powerful than all but one of the kids - the popsicle-ized Akira. Tetsuo gets delusions of grandeur, goes on a destructive rampage, and begins to horribly mutate. Tetsuo's pal Keneda, his revolutionary girlfriend Kay, and Akira himself need to step in and take care of Tetsuo before Neo-Tokyo is destroyed... again.
There are some other tangential plot issues and a fair bit of backstory. Much of this stuff played a bigger role in Katsuhiro Otomo's original graphic novel of Akira, which took U.S.-based Epic Comics 38 issues to reprint in English in the 1980s (at 64 pages per issue). Ultimately, this film is a distillation of the key elements of that work.
The strength of this cartoon is in the quality of the animation. For it's era, it is amazing, and even 20 years later, it still looks great. Traditional cell animation hasn't been done with so much care or detail since the heyday of Disney - perhaps some time in the 1940s - although the style here is of course so much different. The story is dense and interesting, the characters are fairly well fleshed out, the dubbed English voice talent isn't too awful, and there's a fairly nice score.
After seeing Akira for the first time at age 18 or so, I was a prime candidate to become an Anime geek, but I have never seen anything else of comparable quality to Akira, and therefore never got the bug to follow the genre. Even after a friend who worked for Manga Entertainment (the company who licenses and releases most of the Anime titles for the US home video market) hooked me up with a handful of DVDs that she deemed the best stuff out (circa late 1990s), I still never saw anything else that was sufficient to get me hooked. Akira stands alone as the sole true masterpiece of the genre - in my experience - and is well worth a view.
Review by James Teitelbaum
©2007 All Rights Reserved
v.1.0
Looking back at Ridley Scott’s original Alien (1979), two things strike me. First, after almost thirty years, Alien still looks great. There is nothing about it that looks dated, cheesy, or low-budget. Second: while the film is well-made and thoroughly entertaining, the plot, in its entirety is: “In the future, spacemen find a monster. It kills most of them”. That is really it. There is no message here, no subtext, no deeper meaning. We can try desperately to read an environmentalist message into the movie (nature and it’s myriad creatures are ultimately stronger than man), or an anti-industrialist message (the outer space strip-miners dig too deep and uncover something bigger than they can handle), or a corporate greed message (let’s leave that one to the sequel’s revelations), but all of these arguments are flimsy and hollow at best. Alien is just a really great monster movie, maybe the best one ever made.
James Cameron’s sequel Aliens (1986) is more complex, has better developed characters, even more action, and holds up almost as well. It does occasionally dip into some clearly middle-1980s styles and textures, but never too deeply to sink it. Most notably, Aliens is probably a better attempt to film Robert A. Heinlein’s 1959 novel Starship Troopers than the awful 1997 Paul Verhoeven film Starship Troopers was.
Two more attempts to milk the franchise met with less success, even if directors of Scott and Cameron’s caliber were involved: David Fincher’s Alien3 (1992) was a disaster, but one that was miraculously elevated to almost-good status in a radically revamped 2003 DVD version. The amazing Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Delicatessen, Amelie) made a valiant attempt at Alien: Resurrection in 1997, but it just doesn’t quite measure up to what Scott and Cameron did.
Meanwhile, in 1986, Predator was released as that year’s Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle. The plot was just as thin as the plot of the first Alien: In the present day, crustacean-faced monsters (who are just as smart as humans and possessed of advanced technology), come to Earth now and then for big-game hunts. The predators crave and respect a human opponent who has combat skills worthy of what the predators themselves posses. They meet Arnold.
This film spawned an Arnold-free sequel in 1990.
Here’s where things get interesting. Kind of. In Predator 2, we see the inside of the predator spaceship. One room on the ship is full of trophies, mostly the skulls of all of the various alien beings from around the galaxy that this particular predator has hunted and killed. One of the skulls in the background -- immediately noticed by Alien fans -- is the skull of the titular alien. This of course got fanboy blood running, and it wasn’t long before there was an Aliens vs. Predator comic book, a video game, and then finally, a movie (2004). These all take place in the present or the very near future (like the Predator films) not the distant future (like the Alien films).
The film was directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, who has made a career out of making movies out of violent video games: Resident Evil, Mortal Kombat, and the upcoming Spyhunter, none of which I have seen (nor have I played any of the games). Seems like Anderson was just the guy to make a senseless, mindless, mid-budget action movie out of the material at hand. And this is exactly what we have. The movie seemed so clearly skippable to me, even as a fan of the earlier Alien films, that I didn’t bother with it until late 2007, when a little factoid floated my way: Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett, the writers of the original Ridley Scott film, had co-written the story outline of Aliens vs. Predator with Anderson.
One free download later, and I am here to tell you not to bother, although to be honest, the movie isn’t as completely miserably bad as I expected.
That doesn’t mean the film is good. But the parts I liked were all bits of writing - no doubt the work of O’Bannon and Shusett - that were certainly included for the old-time fan-boys. For example, the casting decision to use Lance Henriksen as one Mr. Weyland, who we find out is both the founder of “The Company” that stirs up so much trouble in the future during the Alien films, and the template for the robot named Bishop who plays an important role in Aliens and Alien3. O’Bannon and Shusett also resurrect their ‘ancient alien pyramid’ subplot, which was chopped by Ridley Scott out of the original Alien. So, the film does get some points for throwing all of the aging old sci-fi geeks a few bones.
That doesn’t mean the film is good, either.
A team of specialists is assembled to explore a structure (the pyramid) buried under Antarctica. This ancient structure was built by the predators as a sort of hunting lodge. They go there once a century, wake up their sleeping hive of pet aliens, kill them for fun, and then go home. This time, the aliens get the better of the small band of predators (kinda like a Deliverance thing, I guess!). One of the humans (a feisty female of course, in keeping with Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley character template) decides that if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. She helps the predator survive the aliens, is found to be a worthy warrior, and is allowed to live.
The film is completely forgettable, and only worth seeing if a smack-down between your two favorite 1980s movie monsters is something that you think you must witness before you die. There are a couple of slimy alien fisticuffs (as the film’s title promises us), but they aren’t geek-cool enough to sit through the rest of the movie for.
Turns out that AVP2: Requiem will be out in early 2008, with none of the same directors, writers, or cast.
But there will be a character named ‘Dallas’ (which was the name of Tom Skerrit’s character in the first Alien). Hmmm....
Review by James Teitelbaum
©2007 All Rights Reserved
v.1.0
It’s cool when films work on multiple levels, and even cooler when further layers of meaning reveal themselves as a viewer matures. I must have seen Altered States half a dozen times in the early 1980s, when it was in regular rotation on various cable movie channels. Early in my teens, I liked the sci-fi elements, such as seeing William Hurt turning into both a monkeyman and then into some weird mutant monster. The dream sequences scared the crap out of me worse than anything seen in any of the countless slasher films that were also constantly being shown those days (these days too, I guess).
Seeing it again after probably close to two decades, the things that amazed me were some of the metaphysical philosophy and some of the questions that the film raises about human origins. The ideas about collective consciousness and unlocking memories of a shared pan-human past are pretty interesting. Regressing into some sort of primitive state and having experiences close to what a common human ancestor might have experienced is an intriguing concept. Finding myself all wrapped up in the philosophy and the ideas in the film, the monkeyman and twisted-DNA-guy sequences seemed much less like the point of the film and more like what they are - set-pieces to entertain those who don’t get the deeper layers in the film (like teenagers seeing it on cable, for example). The dream sequences are still creepy and hold up well. Having tried both mushrooms (a few times) and sensory deprivation tanks (once) in the past, I can testify that you’re not going to turn into a monkey if you experiment - but taking us on a trip beyond reality is what movies are for. If they inspire some ideas too, that’s a bonus. Altered States gets bonus points.
Director Ken Russel is best known for making Tommy, based on the record by The Who, in 1975. Interestingly, he also did films about classical composers Liszt (the same year as Tommy, and also starring The Who’s Roger Daltrey), Mahler, Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, and did television documentaries on Debussy and Bartok. Who knew that he had William Hurt taking peyote with a tribe of indians in his future (and his wife Theresa playing a whore shortly after that)?
Review by James Teitelbaum
©2007 All Rights Reserved
v.1.0
Upon returning from a trip to Paris at the end of November 2007, it seemed clear that I would have to revisit Amelie, which was filmed in the Montmartre area of Paris, right near the hotel I stayed in. Watching this film again (for about the fifth time since its 2001 release) was not a task that I dreaded in any way.
Amelie was the fourth feature film from one of the most talented directors working today, Jean-Pierre Jeunet. In many ways, Amelie refines and firmly establishes many of Jeunet’s trademarks, making it perhaps what will later be considered the first of his mature works (although his very first film, Delicatessen, remains my favorite).
The story of one Amelie Poulain (Audrey Tatou) is the story of a young girl overcoming a crippling shyness while using her essentially good nature to help other people find the happiness that eludes her. At least, that is what the movie is supposedly about. One can also wonder about a darker subtext, in which Amelie can be seen as mentally disturbed and quite selfish. This is a notion I have been toying with the past few times I saw the film.
We do know that Amelie has some severe issues: she saw her mother crushed by the falling body of a suicide leaping from a building, she has an emotionally unavailable father, she wrongly believes that she has life-threatening health problems, and she cannot interact properly with the people around her. As cute and stylish and (let’s use this hated word because it really does fit here) quirky as Amelie is, she is also in dire need of therapy.
In her efforts to help other people, I wonder if she is actually hurting them: does describing everything going on in the world around a blind man make him feel more miserable for missing out on it all? How helpful is it really, in the long run, for Amelie to have forged ‘long lost’ love letters from her landlord’s estranged husband? What sort of false hope has Amelie given this woman, and what happens when the landlord finds out the truth? And what of the grocer Collignon (Urbain Cancelier) who constantly berates his helper Lucien (Jamel Debbouze)? When Amelie takes revenge, secretly, on behalf of Lucien, he doesn’t know anything about it. He is not vindicated because he can’t see or enjoy Collignon's misery. Even when Lucien sees Collignon looking tired and frazzled, he has no idea why. What has been achieved? And isn't revenge considered an evil act in most cultures? All of the other good deeds that Amelie performs can be seen from a certain perspective as selfish acts designed to distract herself from her own problems. Do her good deeds come from a genuine desire to help people, or a selfish desire to defer dealing with her own unhappiness? I want to see a sequel, in which all of Amelie’s actions come back to bite her in the ass.
There are many other examples of Amelie the self-absorbed introvert, Amelie the disturbed, and Amelie the villain if one looks for them in the film. But ultimately, the only time I ever truly dislike the character is when the director has her look right at the camera and mawkishly grin at the audience. Please pass the insulin, this is all dangerously sweet, and it is making me ill.
Aside from Tatou’s serial mugging (once would have been more than plenty), and my theories (which I will confess to being only half-baked) about Amelie as a less than positive role model, Amelie is quite a well made and entertaining film.
Jeunet has always had a sentimental streak mixed with a vivid imagination, a bit of goofiness, and a dark, macabre sense of humor running through it all. He has also had a strong visual style (helped along by partner Marc Caro in the earlier films), plus detailed and insightful writing. He does tend to recycle ideas a lot: for example, the ‘pointing out people’s funny traits’ bits of Amelie had their roots in Jeunet’s 1989 short film Foutaises, and were then used a third time in 2004's A Very Long Engagement. New ideas are never far away in a Jeunet film however, and as long as he can keep juggling his visual style, his writing chops, and his unique stories, I’ll keep seeing his films.
Next up for Jeunet is his sixth feature, Micmacs à tire-larigot, scheduled for 2009.
The Amelie DVD is loaded with bonus features.
Disc 1 has a commentary with director Jean-Pierre Jeunet. In fact it has two commentaries, one in English, and one in French. I can’t tell you how the French commentary is, but the English one is densely loaded with information. Jeunet loves to talk about his movies, and he pretty much talks non-stop, and scene specifically. Pay attention, or you’ll miss something interesting.
On Disc 2 is The Look of Amelie, which has interviews with Jeunet and cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel concerning the extremely memorable visuals (12:46). Next is Fantasies of Audrey Tatou, an all-Audrey blooper reel (2:07). After that we get to screen tests with three of the actors (6:24 total). In January of 2002, a Q and A with Jeunet was held at the American Cinematheque in Los Angeles. A video of this appearance lasts for 24:35. Jeunet is friendly and enthusiastic, doing his best to speak in English, occasionally cracking jokes, and memorably lambasting someone who asks about the French New Wave, fifty years after the fact. Jeunet is joined by Tatou and Debbouze for similar live Q and A before a live audience in France (5:55). A storyboard comparison takes us through the making of the scene in which Amelie encounters her future-boyfriend in a haunted house (:56). Following that is An Intimate Chat with Jean-Pierre Jeunet. The director sits in a chair in his office and talks right to the camera, apparently without anyone interviewing him. He explains from the beginning that he is a DVD collector himself and likes the commentaries and bonus features on the discs he collects. After having said this, it sets the tone for this segment, as well as the commentary on Disc 1. He clearly has great enthusiasm for his work, but is also perhaps still a bit of a fanboy himself, and is maybe indulging himself in telling us everything he can about his movie. For the most part, he is an engaging speaker and his love for film is infectious. This feature is in French with subtitles (20:47). A second page of menus begins with Home Movies, filmed and edited by Liza Sullivan (12:45). Liza is not listed aywhere in the credits for Amelie, but she apparently spent some time filming footage behind the scenes, and presents a montage of very nice moments from the making of the film, all set to Yann Tiersen’s instrumental score. The shots of people preparing for the photo booth scenes in Amelie are particularly interesting, in that they reveal how much work had to go into what appears to be small details in the finished movie. There are also two trailers and thirteen television spots on the disc. In spite of the supremely annoying lack of a ‘play all’ button, it is interesting to compare how the movie was marketed in the United States versus in France. Getting down to the nitty-gritty, The Amelie's Scrapbook contains still images: behind the scenes photos, French poster concepts, storyboards, and of course The Garden Gnome’s Travels. Cast and Crew Filmographies wrap things up. All in all this disc is fairly loaded with a broad variety of material, even though a single, comprehensive ‘making of’ documentary is missing.
Review by James Teitelbaum
©2007 All Rights Reserved
v.1.0
It’s funny how pop culture keeps revising how it views that most magical of American decades, the 1950s. These days, it’s all rockabilly pompadours, Bettie Page bangs, yes, Tiki bars. In the 1980s and into the 1990s, it was all about the atomic 1950s, with everything painted salmon and teal, covered with boomerang and starburst shapes. Back in the 1970s - not all that long after the ‘real’ the 1950s at all - it was poodle skirts and saddle shoes. The odd greaser was the exception, not the rule (as it is now), and the term ‘mid-century modern’ wasn’t even around yet. George Lucas’s second film, American Grafitti defined the 1970s version of the 1950s, spawning the Happy Days television series as well as Grease, before the B-52s came along, redefining the 1950s for a new wave generation.
American Grafitti came out in 1973, and detailed the events of some teenagers in 1962 - but let’s face it, that date was just picked so they could use the tagline "where were you in ‘62?”. Really, this film feels like it takesplace five years earlier than that, all the way. The point is that in 1973, Lucas was already invoking an prototypical brand of 1950s nostalgia, and barely a decade after the fact. Think of how odd it would be to make a film about how wonderful 1997 (or even 1992) was, right now (in 2007). Somehow, director George Lucas made 1957 (or 1962) feel nostalgic in 1973... and he probably has the Viet Nam war to thank for it. Certainly, that war, along with the assassinations of Kennedy and King, dragged the United States kicking and screaming out of the golden 1950s and dropped us squarely into what (until recently) was our crappiest war ever, as well as the energy crisis and Watergate in the early 1970s. From that point of view, I can see how Lucas thought that his teen years, just a decade or so earlier, were so innocent and wonderful. It all changed so fast, didn’t it?
The story is an end of innocence tale, and that in itself is nothing unique. This particular one was perhaps especially timely in 1973, maybe meant to be taken as a story about America’s loss of innocence as a whole, as much as it was about the kids in the movie. Movies about teenagers having one, long, wild, memorable night before having to grow up have been done over and over, as well - and maybe a bit more energetically than in American Grafitti. Ron Howard is about to leave for college, and decides that he and his sweetie (Cindy Williams), who is staying behind, are better off ‘seeing other people’. Both of them would show up just a few years later, playing virtually identical roles on the wretched Happy Days on television. Charles Martin Smith is the nerdy younger pal who inherits Howard’s cool car, and uses it as a crutch to boost his confidence (with some success). Richard Dreyfuss is set to go away to school with Howard, but he decides to follow a more bohemian path instead. Paul Le Mat is the bad boy who graduated a few years back, but who still hangs out with the younger kids, reminiscing about the old days. He refuses to grow up and accept adulthood. He ends up, ironically, with a much younger girl; maybe this helps him to change his perspective. These archetypical characters (and all of the peripheral ones) have been drifting through cinema for decades. Lucas has used these templates effectively however, crafting an entertaining film full of performances by an ensemble of players who would all go on to much greater things (not least among them, Harrison Ford in a bit part!).
I like the last moment of the film; after a bittersweet ‘goodbye’ sequence, there’s one of those tags that tell you what happened to the characters after the film. Their fates are suprisingly rather grim, and they drag the viewer right out of the teenage fantasy world of the past and right into the scary adult present. The scene also confirms all suspicions that the movie was made as an homage to America’s last good years before it all went to shit.
Review by James Teitelbaum
©2007 All Rights Reserved
v.1.0
Otto Preminger directed it, Howard Hughes produced it, and it stars Robert Mitchum and Jean Simmons. Can this movie possibly not suck? Nope, it can’t and it doesn’t. Five minutes into it, Mitchum (who plays and ambulance driver), and Simmons (who plays hard to get), are slapping each other. They go dancing, and she changes her tune pretty quickly. He’s got a perfectly desirable girlfriend, but he could have Simmons. Problem is that he hasn’t read the script - she’s the femme fatale.
I don’t know if this one, Cape Fear, Night of the Hunter, Macao, or Out of the Past is the better role in Mitchum’s golden age, but he made them all in a fairly short period of time, so you may as well see them in the same way - soon and quickly.
Mitchum and Preminger would get together again two years later for River Of No Return (with one Miss Monroe co-starring), but this is by far the better film.
Review by James Teitelbaum
©2007 All Rights Reserved
v.1.0
I used to really hate the idea of Al Gore attaining any higher political office, mainly because it was his wife Tipper who made all that stink about putting warning labels on music recordings back in the 1980s. Her actions with the PMRC (Parent’s Music Resource Center) have lead to disastrous consequences for artistic freedom in music over the past two decades. After seeing to it that recordings with potentially objectionable material on them (according to whom?) now carries a warning label, we have a situation where many retailers will not stock records with the label. In order to keep the retailers happy and to keep products moving, the record companies have begun to make demands on their artists, censoring the content of recordings, so as not to earn the warning label. When an artist has their work dictated to them by the money people, that is an inexcusable breach of artistic freedom. Almost two decades have passed since the PMRC successfully won their battle to control what we can or can’t listen to. Although the younger generations are growing up in an environment where they simply accept it, there are still people out here who remember when artistic choices were not quite as blatantly dictated by conservative politics, the church, and the pesky wives of dipshit politicos.
Now, just as I remember the days before the PMRC and their warning labels on our music, I also remember other aspects of the 1980s, like the big nuclear apocalyptic scares. As a matter of fact, at the same time that Tipper Gore was deciding what you can or can’t listen to, there was mass hysteria going on among the millions of people who were certain that the Russkies would nuke us at any moment. Fortunately, that didn’t happen, and eventually the whole imminent nuclear war thing from the 1980s was sort of forgotten about. It has been replaced with all manner of things to keep us scared - killer bees, vanishing bees, ebola, terrorists, and now, coming around again, nukes - but this time it’s the evil Iranians who have them. Point is, it seems as though there’s a new horrible, species-threatening crisis every decade or so, and a lot of people feel like global warming is this decade’s latest big scare.
Whether this is true or not remains to be seen, but in watching An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore makes a strong case for our species needing to get our act together and stop polluting our environment. Given all of the talk about human-induced climate change these days, it is pretty hard to ignore what we are being told are the facts. Personally, I have always been of the opinion that clean air, clean water, and things like unspoiled nature are things that we need, are worth working for, and are even worth making rather large sacrifices to preserve. It seems to be a no-brainier to assume that everyone on Earth wants our environment to be as clean and beautiful as possible, for reasons of our health - and the continued long term survival of our species - as much as the emotional well being that we get from living in a world that is alive and green. If we are now risking things like the destruction of our cities and a radical shift in our ability to produce food, then clearly things are reaching a crisis level. The idea that we all need to make some sacrifices in order to preserve our planet’s ability to support our lives as we know them, is, to me, self-evident.
I don’t need Al Gore to tell me to recycle, to use my car less, to save energy, to explore alternate sources of fuel, and to do my part. Apparently, I am the minority here, because our government and most of the people living in our society seem to think that it is perfectly all right to do everything from bombing Iraq for their oil, to driving Escalades and Hummers with impunity, to wantonly wasting water, food, and energy, to things like buying all manner of wasteful products that are used once and discarded. Gore makes a convincing argument for our need to make changes, both on the governmental level, and on a personal level. In my case, he is preaching to the choir, but hopefully his message will reach a few of the sorts of people that need waking up, and make them realize that change on a societal level is something that we all have to participate in; our leaders can only do so much, it is up to each individual to do our part as well.
Everyone should see this film.
Everyone should listen to what Gore has to say.
But someone needs to gag his wife.
Review by James Teitelbaum
©2007 All Rights Reserved
v.1.1
"Terminate... with extreme prejudice".
Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now is a modern-day reworking of Joseph Conrad's genius 1902 novel, Heart of Darkness, and is also the film against which all other Viet Nam war movies must be measured.
The 2006 'complete dossier' DVD contains both the original 1979 version of the movie, and the newer 'redux' version (2001) on two discs. The discs use seamless branching technology, so the first disc is the first half of the film; the user chooses which version of the film to watch, and the appropriate scenes are shown. The second disc works the same way with the second half of the movie.
Additionally, each disc has a few extra features. Disc one has a 17-minute featurette called Hollow Men, which is made up of a montage of behind the scenes footage and out-takes, paired up with creepy atmospheric music and some rather long unused sections of Marlon Brando's soliloquy from the end of the movie. The three-minute Monkey Sampan feature is basically more of the same. Additional Scenes include a dozen short clips that look as though they came from a work print; the quality is mediocre. The A/V Club consists of two short documentaries on the sound, plus two text files. There is also a very interesting and engaging scene-specific commentary from Coppola that is well worth listening to. He talks in depth about the stress of making this film, how it almost killed him, and about how much of it was unscripted. Dennis Hopper's character, for example, was completely improvised, and doesn't even appear in the script. Brando's scenes were made up as they went along too.
Disc two continues the commentary and adds some more bonus features: four featurettes on the post-production process that total about 50 minutes, a four minute piece on the four main supporting actors, a three-minute clip detailing what was added back into the Redux, and another four minutes on the color palette of the film. There is also a hidden one-minute clip of writer John Milius explaining the film's title.
What is painfully missing here is the documentary Hearts of Darkness, which was mostly shot on-set during the making of the movie, and which was released as a theatrical feature years later. The fact that the DVD set is called the 'complete dossier' but is missing this absolutely definitive and crucial documentary is a real disappointment. I read something on the internet (so it MUST be true) that there were problems with the rights issues, yadda yadda yadda. Never mind that. They needed to have made it happen. No doubt that they will include it in a future release, and they'll try to sell us this movie again in the 'really truly, definitely complete dossier' version.
Apocalypse Now is the definitive Viet Nam film, and yet it isn't really about the war, per se. The war is a backdrop, a setting, for a much more personal story. The plot involves one Captain Willard (Martin Sheen, in easily his best role) who is killing time between assignments, half insane in a hotel room in Saigon. His superiors send him on a secret mission. He is to travel by boat up river, to illegally travel beyond the borders of Viet Nam, and to enter Cambodia. Once there, Willard is to seek out and eliminate one Colonel Kurtz, who has gone rogue and set himself up as a sort of dictator, playing god over a small village deep in the jungle, using his troops to enforce his insane, violent will. Most of the film is Willard's journey up the river. On his boat are four other soldiers, and the men undergo a series of adventures as they make their trip into the heart of darkness.
Although there are a lot of action scenes, this movie is also fairly atmospheric, and rather surreal at times. The war, the fighting, the mission, they're all just a big hook to hang Willard's inner journey on. The characters seem to move backward into ancient history as they go down the river, and to regress personally into some primitive state as they go. The last few reels slow to a crawl with Willard locked in a cage and Kurtz (Brando) talking at him, slowly, hypnotically, spilling his consciousness into Willard. Rather than a big battle, or a huge ending, the movie winds down into Kurtz and Willard together, quietly, for a long time, almost in a dream-like state. Willard ends up in a position where he can - and seems ready to - take over Kurtz's position, but he opts instead to make a decision that he thinks will put an end to the madness.
Given that Coppola was making a lot of it up as he went along (by his own admission on the commentary track) it is astounding that he produced the nuanced classic that he did. This film could have been and should have been a disaster. And yet, Apocalypse Now is a film with a lot of themes and a lot of layers. Perhaps most of them are hard to focus on and hard to pin down, but it might be the strong point of the film that it reveals different aspects of itself on repeat viewings.
Review by James Teitelbaum
©2007 All Rights Reserved
v.1.0
This Mel Gibson feature from 2006 has a deceptive veneer of arty integrity on the surface, having been shot completely in a dead language spoken by non-actors. Ultimately, it reveals itself to be nothing but a mindless action film. There is nothing intrinsic about having to read subtitles that makes a film important or smart.
The story concerns a small jungle village in South America that is sacked and raided by cultist thugs from the nearby Mayan metropolis. Most of the villagers are brutally slaughtered. A few are herded to the center of the empire to be used as sacrifices to the sun god. Some of them escape and are persued through the jungle by the high priest’s enforcers. Persuers and persuees die, violently. A lone survivor finally makes it back to where his wife and children are hidden, just as the last of his persuers give up, having caught a glimpse of something so completely bewildering and amazing to them (not hard to guess what, but I won’t spoil it) that they forget their prey.
The film never really makes any sort of point at all. If there was a message here, it is obscured by the non-stop action set-pieces; if the film was meant as simply an entertainment, then why bother with the subtitles and archaic tongue? As an action thriller, it is merely adequate, and as anything else, it is a failure. The twist at the end also takes great liberties with history; the event that ends the film is about three hundred years too early.
There is some beautiful production design in the Mayan city, and a lot of the costumes are pretty cool too. I took issue with the fact that the characters are all copiously tattooed, scarred, and pierced; it is kind of lame how every movie made in the past decade that depicts a primitive culture seems to need to up the ante on the density of body mods that their characters have to have gone through, in order to seem sufficiently “tribal”. It is also sort of distressing how violent this film is - characters meet their fates in some exceedingly brutal ways, and Gibson’s camera never flinches, never pulls away. Perhaps old Mel needs to learn a bit about restraint. Both in his film making and in his personal life, he needs to learn how to keep certain things to himself.
Review by James Teitelbaum
©2007 All Rights Reserved
v.1.0
Cary Grant gets to show off his goofy side in this classic black comedy, made in 1944 by Frank Capra. Grant plays Mortimer Brewster, the man who literally wrote the book on bachelor life. Brewster lives next door to a Brooklyn graveyard with his two insane aunts and an even more insane brother who is believes that he is Teddy Roosevelt. Teddy (John Alexander) thinks he is digging the Panama Canal whenever he goes to dig graves. Aunts Abby and Martha (Josphine Hull and Jean Adair, respectively) are kind, considerate, and warm; they like to pass the time with things like charity work and the occasional murder.
Grant falls for Elaine Harper (Priscilla Lane, also seen in Hitchcock’s Saboteur) who is a cute and charming girl next door type... literally. She lives across the graveyard in the church, with her father the reverend. Brewster now has a host of problems: convincing the reverend that he’d be a good husband to the reverend’s daughter, covering up the murders committed by his sweet little old aunts, and keeping his readers from knowing that the ultimate bachelor is tying the knot. It isn’t long before another brother shows up (Raymond Massey) and this sibling is truly the most evil and spooky of them all. Of course his sidekick is none other than Peter Lorre. This pair of cruel creeps play their murder straight, throwing the quaint killings of the aunts into sharp contrast. Things stay funny, but get tense too.
Capra did a nice job on this one, keeping the tone of the film active and lively, and balancing the humor with the scary Halloween aspect of the story. The pace here is much more frantic than most of the other films of the era, and moves along at a good clip even by today’s standards. That said, the film is nearly two hours long, so keeping up the energy must have been tough, and there are a few dips in tempo during the second hour. There is a lot of detail and some nice gags in the script by Joseph Kesserling, who adapted it from his play with Julius and Phillip Epstein. Grant gets to be genuinely funny in this one, as opposed to just sort of lame (as in some of his other comedies). Capra clearly invested his budget on cast here rather than on sets. The entire film basically takes place in one room, but all of the actors are in good form.
I feel as if this film was an influence on everything from The Ladykillers to Delicatessen, and is a very nice bit of grimly fiendish screwball entertainment.
Review by James Teitelbaum
©2007 All Rights Reserved
v.1.0
Daniel Clowes is probably the greatest writer working in the medium of comics today. His absolutely spot-on observations about people, society, and modern life are filtered through his genius sense of satire, his twisted world-view, and a healthy dose of surrealism. All without a superhero in sight. His ongoing solo series, Eightball, has unfortunately been published with decreasing frequency in recent years, since Clowes has rather successfully been adapting his work to the medium of indie films. So far, his relationship with director Terry Zwigoff has been fruitful, yielding two adaptations of works that once appeared as serials in Eightball. These stories are Ghost World, filmed in 2001, and Art School Confidential, which came out in 2006. Zwigoff is also responsible for the good 1994 documentary about 1960s/1970s underground cartoonist Robert Crumb.
Art School Confidential stars Max Minghella as Jerome, a teenage guy who wants to be a great artist. He is a talented illustrator, and while not a bad looking kid, he is awkward, shy, and terrible with girls. Upon arriving at Strathmore College, he meets a wide variety of interesting characters on the staff, in his peer group, and in the nearby town. He’s completely smitten with Audrey (Sophia Myles). Audrey is older and could not be much less interested in Jerome, acknowledging him as a friend, seeming to like his company, but completely unaware that he’s the slightest bit interested in her romantically - she treats him like a kid brother.
The story itself doesn’t go anywhere particularly interesting, it’s the typical boy meets girl, girl is out of boy’s league, boy gets girl anyway (within the context of the most dark, cynical, and hilarious ending ever). Pretty ho-hum stuff. The magic here is in Clowes’ writing, and to an only slightly lesser degree, in Zwigoff’s direction, and the universally solid performances. Speaking of performances, John Malkovich is a bit less annoying than usual here, and clearly understands the character he is playing to a great degree. Myles finds just the right balance between being friendly and aloof, Joel Moore is fun as Jerome’s pal Bardo, Jim Broadbent does an admirable job as a stinky but wise old curmudgeon, and Adam Scott is delicious in a small role as the artist who made it, and who has turned in to a complete prick.
Clowes crams in so much genius observation, subtle yet hilarious parody, and truth about people in general (and art in particular) that the mind reels. Under the guise of a boy meets girl story, there are layers and layers of social commentary, and scathingly witty indictments of art, art school, and the art business. I think that the more you know about the art world, the funnier you’ll find this film, but there’s enough here for the rest of you to find entertaining too.
Review by James Teitelbaum
©2007 All Rights Reserved
v.1.0
This lightweight comedy clocks in at only 65 minutes, but is most notable for being an early entry in the Marilyn Monroe cannon. Monroe is billed sixth, after Constance Bennett (fifth) and four other people who didn't go on to make much of a dent in movie history. The film starts off with the common premise (of the era) of a young couple who want to get married, but the man doesn't have a good enough job to do right by her (she doesn't mind - he does). The man has a spirited and wacky yet dignified grandfather who is forced into retirement. He hates being retired, and finds out that his erstwhile employer is owned by another company that is owned by yet another company (etc.), who have a policy against allowing people over 65 to remain employed. Grand-dad poses as the man at the very top, and goes to see the head of one of the subsidiary companies, all in order to get company policy changed so that the 'real' he can get his job back. Monroe is a secretary at one of the subsidiaries. Comedy ensues as grand-dad gets in over his head, romances an elegant middle-aged Bennett, and turns the man he's impersonating into a hero. Of course, grandson ends up with enough cash to get hitched, while grand-dad gets his old gig back. Monroe is barely in the film, she seems a little stiff during her few scenes, and she does little of importance for the story, but of course someone must have noticed her...
The script is breezy, the lighting, photography, and editing are all economical, and the performances are fine. This is a quickie bit of competently made goofiness, notable only for the early Monroe sighting, but isn't an entirely miserable way to spend an hour.
The home video version begins with a newsreel made shortly after Monroe's death, succinctly recaping her life and career.
Review by James Teitelbaum
©2007 All Rights Reserved
v.1.0
So now we have Audition, one of those ultra-violent films coming from southeast Asia. This one is about a lonely middle aged widower who is just trying to find some love and happiness for himself, and maybe a mother figure for his teenage son. Now, the guy isn’t perfect; he might in fact be the kind of guy who’d let his friend (and ad agency co-worker) talk him into holding auditions for a movie that doesn’t exist, just so he can meet some lovely young actresses. But if he did this, as slimy as it is, and as deceitful as it is, does he deserve to be dumped, perhaps humiliated, and maybe to lose his job? Probably. But does he deserve to be incapacitated and violently tortured for hours on end, put into wave after wave of agonizing pain by a completely psychopathic freak-bitch who keeps another guy in a burlap sack in her apartment? No, I’d say that the punishment is a bit extreme for the crime. But that’s exactly what happens.
It all starts off light and breezy. The guy is likable, and the film seems to be leading towards being a situation comedy, given the pacing, the script, and the performances. Then, it all goes horribly wrong, taking a dark and bleak turn.
Maybe the point of this film is that the guy gets a lot worse than what he deserves, and maybe we’re supposed to feel sympathy for him because of his suffering. But, perhaps the film would be a lot more effective if he wasn’t tortured, and if he’d simply suffered the humiliation of being exposed as a loser who did something slightly creepy to meet girls. That is something we can empathize with, and that might make all of us think twice about being slimy or deceitful in any way. The sort of inventive and nightmarish torture inflicted upon him is so far outside of the realm of anything that most people will ever experience, that the film overshoots any message it might have carried about honesty. The story loses its grip on reality, and falls into the realm of gratuitous gross-out... which sells tickets in Asia, and DVDs all over the world.
I guess.
Review by James Teitelbaum
©2007 All Rights Reserved
v.1.1
When obsessive billionaire Howard Hughes (born in 1905) did something, he did it big. He made big movies, made big money, designed big planes, and went big crazy. He threw everything he had into everything he did, and seemed to be successful more often than not. Like Hughes himself, everything in this bio-flick (covering the years 1927 to about 1948) is over the top. The sets are huge (check out that nightclub scene near the beginning), and even the smaller ones look amazing, such as the Pan-Am offices, and Ava Gardner’s apartment. The performances are broad, and the colors are exaggerated. The camera never stops moving, the pace is fast, and the music - be it the score or the source music - is right in your face. Even the length is big - the film weighs in at just under three hours. More or less, it all works, except perhaps for Cate Blanchett, who is laughably over the top in her role as Katherine Hepburn. Star Leonardo DeCaprio - who never appears to age, either in real life or in this film - does a nice job from an acting perspective, but he’s just too pretty and not nearly scruffy enough to be believable as Hughes in his forties, or even in his thirties.
As the film progresses, the tone becomes less manic as Hughes begins to go nuts. The arc of the story is a little obvious: a rise and fall sort of thing, with the hero eventually overcoming adversity to come out on top. However the ending seems a little abrupt, as if the alotted running time had been reached, and so the action had been simply stopped at a random point in the charater's life. There are a lot of questions left unanswered, and Hughes’ fate beyond the late 1940s is still very much left unexplored. The last time we see him, he has just had a few successive triumphs in his life, but is nonetheless locked into a bathroom by his major domos. There he babbles at himself in a mirror, his fate completely up in the air. This illness seems to come and go at the whim of director Martin Scorsese. In one scene late in the film, Hughes is hiding out in his private movie theater, naked, unwashed, pissing in milk jars, unable to face humanity. In the next scene, he’s being cleaned up by Ava Gardner (Kate Beckinsale flexing some acting muscle), and he is apparently made completely sane as she shaves him - he immediately goes to a courtroom and kicks ass, clearing his name and smiting his adversaries with sharp words and a confident manner. Then he takes his legendary Hercules airplane for an inaugural spin... and then goes nuts again. Maybe Hughes' illness was also intermittent in real life, but since we get no explanation for his convenient recoveries (in both his mind and in his body, which is also gravely damaged in the film), it all seems just a bit to slick.
Entertaining but flawed.
Review by James Teitelbaum
©2007 All Rights Reserved
v.1.1
The Cohen Brothers rock, and their 1991 effort Barton Fink is good example of why. The plot is almost irrelevant - this is a character study. But here goes: Barton Fink (John Turturro) writes arty, highbrow plays in New York. After a big success, he’s invited to Hollywood to write for the movies. He gets assigned to a “B” wrestling flick. In addition to thinking the material is below him, and is not something he is even remotely interested in, he has no idea how to approach it. He alternates between meetings with the studio during which he is mercilessly berated, and in bouts of fitful typing, during which he is continually interrupted by a bizarre neighbor (John Goodman). Things get stranger from there. See? Doesn’t sound like anything special, does it?
What makes this movie great is the writing, alternately hilarious, dramatic, and surreal, plus assured direction, nice cinematography (by Roger Deakins - starting with this one, he’s been with the Cohens for every film they've done), and great performances from Turturo and Goodman. This film also has one of my favorite endings. It sort of leaves things hanging, ending the film on a comma rather than a period. Although it ties into something seen elsewhere in the film, it isn’t particularly meaningful. Almost like a shrug of the shoulders: ‘That’s it. Go home’. Something about it really kills though.
Although the Cohen Brothers already had a few films under their belt when they made Barton Fink, it was here that they hit their stride, releasing five excellent movies in ten years (by 2000 they had also given us The Hudsucker Proxy, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, and Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?, in that order). Truly, these guys owned the 1990s (sorry, Quentin Tarantino), and it all starts here.
A must-see.
Review by James Teitelbaum
©2007 All Rights Reserved
v.1.0
With all the anti-hype last year about how truly awful, how truly wretched, how truly miserable Basic Instinct 2 was, I decided that I’d have to revisit the original, which I had previously seen once before, on video, shortly after it came out (1992). Sharon Stone plays a crime novelist who is being investigated by the San Francisco police department (Michael Douglas is on the case) for a series of murders that are similar to ones described in her novels. Douglas had been romancing a psychiatrist from the internal affairs department (ha freakin’ ha) at the SFPD; she (Jeanne Tripplehorn) wants him back. This is all established in ten minutes. The rest of the film is a did-she-or-didn't-she, with Stone alternately seeming like she is the killer, and then seeming like she is definitely not the killer, and then seeming like she is, or maybe she isn't. Meanwhile, the recently-reformed Douglass sinks back into smoking, drinking, fighting, and Tripplehorn, all while also screwing Stone. Three-quarters of the way through the film, a new suspect seems to be guilty. The new suspect's motive (revealed towards the end of the film) is so contrived, so improbable, and so plain stupid that it sinks the entire movie. I didn’t buy it, and you won't either. And of course after that, there’s the mandatory “final shot that leaves you guessing”. Well, only if you care enough to waste time guessing. I didn't.
This is an almost decently made thriller, full of all sorts of gratuitous sex and violence, with no socially redeeming content whatsoever. It’d be a guilty pleasure, except that is only marginally pleasurable. Bad dialogue, worse delivery. Stone is over-rated in both her acting and her looks; the real beauty in this one is Tripplehorn. She went on to star in nothing very interesting, and ended up with some bad plastic surgery by the time she showed up in a 2006 television series (man, was that the cattiest thing I ever typed, or what? There goes all of my credibility in one fell swoop). Director Paul Verhoeven followed this one up with Showgirls and Starship Troopers back-to-back, making him the 1990s king of high-budget schlock.
Too bad about that ending.
Review by James Teitelbaum
©2007 All Rights Reserved
v.1.0
What a waste. This entry in the new wave of extreme Asian cinema is about the fate of forty Japanese middle school students who are dropped on an island, with one weapon each (some implements obvious in their deadliness, and some less so), and ordered to kill each other. Last kid standing wins. Lots of potential for either mindless action and murder here, or for a really tense character piece. We get neither. The action is limp, suspense does not exist, characters are thin, the backstory is incomprehensible, and there aren’t even many good gross-out killings. The plot twist that the winner faces is clear from before the film even starts. Bleh.
Looks like they’re remaking this 2000 turkey in Engrish for 2008.
Why?
Review by James Teitelbaum
©2007 All Rights Reserved
v.1.0
Before Sunrise features Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy as an American guy and a French girl who meet on a train while travelling across Europe. He has to get off of the train in Vienna, in order to catch a flight to America the next morning. They have a nice conversation on the train, and he convinces her to get off of the train with him in Vienna, rather than going on to her home in Paris. The idea is that they’d hang out together all night, until he has to fly home, and then she’ll go home to Paris the next day. She agrees to join him. The rest of the movie is the two of them aimlessly wandering around Vienna, talking. There’s no real story here, just a snapshot of two smart young people enjoying each other and sharing a lot of what is going on inside themselves.
They discuss politics, art, love, religion, social rituals, gender issues, friendship, music, family, monkeys, their hopes and fears, the future and the past, all while seeing the town, laughing, and meeting interesting characters. They debate back and forth about whether or not to arrange another meeting in the future, and eventually agree on the plan of action they deem best.
The strength of the movie is in that Hawke and Delpy have real chemistry, and also seem completely comfortable in their roles, almost as if they’re just playing themselves. This may be more or less true: the film is little more than two creative and hip twenty-somethings having a conversation, and at the time it was shot, Hawke and Delpy were probably not too far removed as people from the characters they were playing. Their relationship is quite believable, but what will make or break the film for the viewer is your ability to relate to the conversation. It is almost like you’re listening in on someone else’s table at a restaurant - you're secretly in on the conversation, and you can’t reply to them. Personally, I was only about two or three years older than Hawke and Delpy when this movie came out (1995), but I didn’t see the movie until 2006. This was an interesting phenomenon, because I saw a lot of myself, circa 1995, in both characters, in their personalities, world views, and interests. Although I never wandered around Vienna with a French girl, there were perhaps other experiences in my own life that fulfilled the sense of adventure, the thrill of whirlwind romance, and the sharing of ideas that seem so exciting at that time in life. These things are all captured here. Clearly, director Richard Linklater’s goal in making this film may have been to encapsulate the points of view - on many topics - of a specific cosmopolitan, educated, left-leaning, middle class generation. Had I seen this film a decade earlier, I would have found it profound, but as things are, I find it sentimental and quaint.
So, as it is, the film is fine, if you happen to be living in the right moment of your life and the right mind frame to connect with it.
What makes the film matter is the sequel. There was no need to continue the story of Before Sunrise, but Linklater did it anyway in 2004. Before Sunset picks up the characters' lives in real-time, nine years later. Hawke is now a writer, living in New York, married with a kid. He is in Paris signing books, and runs into Delpy. He has to leave Paris that evening, but they decide to spend the afternoon getting caught up with each other’s lives. They run around Paris, and when it comes time for Hawke to leave, he makes a surprising and fateful decision... one that opens up a lot of questions.
The best part about the second film is how it opens up a new dimension in the first film, casting unexpected spins on the story we thought we’d seen. In other words, as a sequel, it is very effective.
The film opens up with Hawke responding to questions from French journalists about his new book, which is apparently his fictionalized accounting of the events seen in the first film. The questions the interviewers ask are exactly the same questions that viewers of the first film may have debated during discussion of that movie. Just as Linklater left these questions unanswered, Hawke is dodgy with the journalists. Neither the journalists nor audience get solid answers. In the first movie, during the scene early in the film in which Hawke is trying to convince Delpy to leave the train with him, he describes a possible future scenario in which she may find herself. What we come to find is that in the second film, he is in that exact scenario.
After Delpy shows up, they go for a walk, and largely repeat the non-story of the first movie. They talk animatedly, covering a lot of the same issues from the first film, but from the perspective of people in their thirties instead of their twenties. Revisiting these people after a decade, even if you watch the films back-to-back (recommended) feels like revisiting old pals. I like the older Delpy character in the film, and agree with most of what she has to say. Hawke’s character, on the other hand, has become a bit cocky, interrupting Delpy often, and making wise cracks that aren’t really funny. As they have aged, she has become more European, and he more American.
As a stand-alone piece of film, the second film doesn’t seem to have as much energy as the first, but then again, the characters (or any given real-life equivalents) probably don’t either. Also, in spite of the new light and added dimension the second film adds to the first, it does feel a bit repetitive, and just isn't as good.
Still, Linklater could probably keep this series going in a style not unlike Paul Almond’s “7-Up” series, revisiting these characters every nine years, and leaving them hanging with a question mark at the end of each movie. We’ll see if he can get Hawke and Delpy back together in 2013 to continue documenting this specific generation’s progress through the decades, via the medium of conversation on film.
Review by James Teitelbaum
©2007 All Rights Reserved
v.1.0
This is a 1955 B-movie with Martha Vickers leading a cast of unknowns. After the death of her rich husband, Valerie (Vickers) has fallen into a serious illness. Her best friend Marsha is taking care of her. Valerie decides to take off for California to enjoy the remainder of her life. Charming doctor Kirk is on hand to show her around - but they only go to the tranquil and relaxing sites; anything too exciting will worsen her condition. Marsha goes out to a very cool exotic nightclub where she meets the Clark Gable-esque Ricardo DeVilla, who is also seeing the club dancer Fritzi... who’s husband Don is the conga player providing the savage rhythms she dances to. Turns out that Fritzi wants to leave Don for Ricardo, after Ricardo carries out his plan to romance Valerie, wait until she dies, and inherit her cash. Marsha and Kirk end up together. Fritzi reluctantly agrees to let Val marry Ric; a Hawaiian honeymoon (complete with stock footage of hula dancers and Waikiki beach) ensues. There’s a few red herrings leading up to a big plot twist involving Valerie’s heart condition, and the whole thing turns into a crime drama.