|
Review: Memory
Written and Directed
by Bennett Davlin
There are reasons why some films spend years on the shelf.
Companies go
broke, producers fight with each other over rights, distributors
forget where they
put the print, and so on and so forth.
Which brings us to Bennet Dalvin's “Memory.” There's nothing
actually
'wrong' with this film. The dialogue is actually rather good, in
a naturalistic sort of way, and the acting is fine, too, but
there was a problem selling it
because most of the cast USED to be major movie stars, and
people on the way down
generally don't attract the attention of distributors and
theater owners as
well as a cast of shiny unknowns or the hotties of the moment.
The plot is somewhat intriguing, Dr. Taylor Briggs (Billy Zane)
and his
sidekick Dr. Deepra Chang (Terry Chen) are at a conference
somewhere in Brazil, when they are called to a hospital to
consult on a strange case of a researcher found in the Amazon
jungle, and through a series of happenstances, Briggs
finds himself having visions of a serial killer who did his
nasty deeds before our hero was born.
Going back to Boston, he is plagued by these visions while he's
trying to go
on with his life, which means taking care of his mother(Deirdre
Blades), who has advanced Alzheimer's, and hanging out with old
family friends Max Lichtenstein(Dennis Hopper) and Carol
Hargrave(Ann-Margret), with whom he has a loving relationship.
Somehow, he discovers a painting by a certain Stephanie
Jacobs(Tricia
Helfer), who he woos and starts seeing romantically while he
gets more and more into the mystery wracking is brain.
The problem is that the story isn't compelling or believable, or
at least
when it comes to the supernatural pseudoscience. Zane underplays
his character, who is relatively banal, and when he's not
conversing with the various other characters about other things,
he's downright boring. The problem is that when everyone's doing
normal things the actors shine, Hopper especially. The whole
thing is rather a waste of talent.
Since it's theatrical run is only a brief stop on the journey to
the video
counter, save your money and wait until it arrives.
The Last Mimzy
Directed by
Bob Shaye
The Christian right has been making inroads into Hollywood of
late, and
obviously those evil secular humanists have to push back. Call
it the “revenge of the New Age.”
This is one of those inspirational kiddy flicks that is supposed
to have some sort of cosmic message but doesn't. Instead the
viewers are given a mishmash of New Age slop and pseudo-Buddhist
mysticism, which isn't nearly as bad as it could have been.
That's because the people who made this film, New Line head
honchos Bob Shaye, who directed, and Toby Emmerich, who wrote
the screenplay with Bruce Joel Rubin, James V. Hart and Carol
Skilken Pride are professionals with decades of experience and
know that if you want to make a successful kiddy flick, you
can't talk down to the kiddies like too many filmmakers do.
Emmerich and company's update of Lewis Padgett's (Henry Kuttner
and C. L. Moore) 1943 short story “And Mimsy went the Borogroves”
begins in the middle of “THE NEW AGE®” where a history teacher
is going to telepathically tell her students the story of how
the would was saved centuries before…
Noah(Chris O'Neil) and Emma Wilder(Rhiannon Leigh Wryn) are two
extremely normal children who live in Seattle, where her mother
Jo (Joely Richardson) is a housewife and father David(Timothy
Hutton) is a bigshot lawyer. It's Easter Vacation, and Mom takes
the kids to the beach house, where they find a mysterious box in
the ocean, which, on further inspection, contains a bunch of
mysterious plastic things, some green rocks, and a toy bunny
rabbit. Clearly, they are either magic or from outer space, and
clearly Mom and Dad will take them away if their origins are
found out.
The kids develop super-powers, and this is noticed by both the
parents [who aren't THAT clueless] and Noah's science teacher
Mr. White(Rainn Wilson), who sees a vast improvement in Noah's
grades, and strange drawings in his notebooks, which is where
the New Age® claptrap comes in.
There's also a subplot concerning the FBI and blacking out half
the state of Washington, but since this takes place during the
end of the Bush 2
administration, that's par for the course. What's good, is that
while the clichés are indeed there, they're not as annoying as
they could have been. The action and special effects are
actually well integrated, and the kids, while not particularly
compelling as actors as are the grownups, Wilson and Naomi
Schwartz(Kathryn Hahn, as his wife, are delightfully dizty, and
Michael Clarke Duncan is wonderful but underused as the FBI guy.
A workmanlike film, it's effective as a standard kiddy adventure
flick, but
not anything genuinely brilliant, like that which is advertised.
It would have been nice if a real adaptation of the original
short story, which is still
beloved after more than half a century, had been made, but this
is generally harmless and is worth taking the kids.
Reign Over Me
Written and Directed
by Mike Binder
New York can be a very lonely place. This is a film about that
kind of
loneliness. Charlie Fineman (Adam Sandler) lost his family
during 9/11 and has been drifting along in a daze for five
years. Alan Johnson (Don Cheadle), who's a wealthy dentist, has
been drifting along in a daze to some extent too. His marriage
is getting stale and when a nutcase named Donna (Saffron
Burrows) arrives and screws up his life, he gets no support from
the other members of the practice. It's a midlife crisis in the
making.
So when Johnson comes upon Charlie by accident for the second
time in as many weeks after not seeing each other for decades, a
strange bond begins to grow.
Each sees something in the other that they are lacking and as
Johnson begins to spend more and more time with Charlie, he
finds a kind of freedom and Charlie finds a new companionship
that really annoys Johnson's wife Janeane(Jada
Pinkett Smith) to no end, which is an interesting conflict. The
emotions are complicated than in most comedies, which is
understandable since this is most definitely NOT a comedy.
Sandler's violent streak, as seen in previous movies, is used to
it's best
advantage here, and the otherwise understated portrayal of his
usual character, makes up for an unusual performance, and the
deadpan and serious performances of the other characters,
notably Pinkett Smith, Liv Tyler as Johnson's friend
and Charlie's shrink Angela, Robert Klein and Melinda Dillon as
Charlie's
in-laws, and Donald Southerland as the judge in the climax,
actually make the film more affecting. This is heavy stuff, and
Mike Binder, who has “graduated” from comedy to drama, has shown
that he can do it rather well.
This is an Adam Sandler movie for those who think themselves too
good for Adam Sandler movies.
The Prisoner Or How I Planned To Kill Tony
Blair
A Documentary Directed by
Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker
In Epperman and Tucker's “Gunner Palace” journalist Yunis
Khatayer Abbas and his brothers are taken and detained,
allegedly for trying to construct bombs in order to blow up
British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Many months later, the
documentarians heard that someone was making a film about
incident and they decided to take the project over as a sequel
to their previous film…and that's exactly what they did.
Using a long interview with Yunnis; outtakes from “Gunner
Palace” Yunnis' home movies and photos; an interview with former
Abu Ghraib guard Benjamin Thompson and a bunch of animatic
illustrations to fill in the visual gaps. The documentarians put
together a reasonable reconstruction of the events that took
place. The only problem is that they try to do it with a touch
of humor about the whole thing, and that takes away from the
basic message of the film.
The thing starts with a series of faked home movies of Yunnis
with his
relations clowning at the lake, where we get to see that he's a
nice guy. Then he begins to tell the story of his life, and how
he was in the army during the Iran/Iraq war and then was later
imprisoned by Saddam Hussein and his disgusting son Uday. How
this proves his innocence is problematic. We went to war
because they did things like that, and a lot of the insurgents
were oppressed by the Baathist regime and worked very hard to
keep their oppressors in power, but since this is a personal
story, we don't get into that.
Since the filmmakers were there when Yunnis was arrested, we get
to see it, and there's footage of US troops discussing it. What
we don't get footage is of Yunnis' interrogation, and for that
they substitute comic book style
animatics, which doesn't work all that well, especially with the
lousy choice in background music.
The style of the animatics really hurts the film when Yunnis
gets talking
about the months and months he spent in the detention camp at
AbuGhraib prison, where the food was inedible, the water
unsanitary, and the prisoners alleged allies, the insurgents,
would do their best to kill them by bombing them with morter
shells.
The interviews with Ben Thompson give more of a balanced picture
of the whole sad mess, and in the end the film does it's job in
getting the viewer mad at the Bush administration for all the
usual reasons. It's a good tool for research, but not something
that one would spend eleven bucks on to waste an afternoon.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Written and Directed
by Kevin Munroe
Back in the mid 1980s, Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird were among
the many artists taking part in the comics “black and white
revolution” in which all sorts of self-published titles were
thrust onto the public and for a brief time, were the forefront
of a great creative movement. The corporate media pounced on
these artists, and the vast majority, with their exaggerated
sense of integrity, pointedly refused to deal with them. The
main exceptions were Eastman and Laird, who's “Teenaged Mutant
Ninja Turtles” [fun title that], was turned into
a Saturday morning cartoon with all the licensed trimmings.
Everyone else, with the exception of Dave Sim's “Cerebus the
Aardvark”, vanished into oblivion.
TMNT came and went, and by 2000, when Eastman and Laird finally
split up, they had pretty much joined Strawberry Shortcake and
He-man, gathering dust in Gen-Y closets. But if something was
popular once, it might be popular again, you never know.
So Laird and animation director Kevin Munroe have come up with a
revival of the turtles, and with Gen Y now becoming parents
themselves [who are called? Gen Z is almost sixteen by now,
right?], the “I thought this stuff was good when I was your age”
concept, which has rarely worked, is now in action once
again.
So, with an omnipotent narrator (Laurence Fishburne) telling the
tale of
astrological conquest three millennia ago, and updating us as to
what's going on with Leonardo (James Arnold Taylor),
Michelangelo (Mikey Kelley), Donatello (Mitchell Whitfield),
Raphael (Nolan North) and Master Splinter (Mako). It's not
pretty.
So, we find Mike in Central America, where he's working as a
superhero in the jungle, here he meets former sidekick April
O'Neil (Sarah Michelle Gellar), who's collecting valuable
antiquities for a mysterious zillionaire named Max Winters
(Patrick Stewart), she convinces him to return to New York,
where there's all sorts of angst, and personality conflicts, and
a major plotline involving the end of the world [isn't there
ALWAYS in these things?] and mistaken identities. All things
considered, it's not nearly as bad as I feared.
The voice cast is fine, the animation is professionally done,
and the script
is relatively intelligent. Whether or not the Ninja Turtles will
reignite the
minds of today's kids is anyone's guess. It all has to do with
whether or not the parents are fond enough of the franchise to
force their kids to see this or wait until it comes out on
video. My guess is the latter, although watching this stuff on
the big screen in the dark is always better, but it may not be
worth the extra bucks.
The Page Turner
Written and Directed
by Denis Dercourt
Revenge is a dish best served cold, or so says the proverb.
Auteur Denis
Dercourt certainly thinks so, and he serves it right out of the
fridge.
It's the early 1990s, and 11-year-old Melanie Prouvost (Julie
Richalet) is
practicing for her big day. She's auditioning for a fancy-schmancy
concervitory and if she gets in, the tuition is free, something
that would greatly ease the financial burden on her working
class parents(Jacques Bonnaffe and Christine Citti). But then
comes the inciting incident, which ruins that dream. An extra
barges into the room where Melenie is in the process of
auditioning, and demands an autograph from one of the juges,
concert pianist Ariane Fouchecourt (Catherine Frot). This throws
Melenie completely off, and she blows the rest of the piece. Her
career as a concert pianist is over.
Cut to a decade later, and the beauteous Deborah Francois now
plays Melanie. She's got an internship with a major law firm
headed by Jean Fouchecourt (Pascal Greggory), who, by a strange
coincidence, is the husband of the very person who inadvertently
destroyed her dreams all those years ago. So when she discovers
that the Fouchecourt's au pare [they have a 12 year old son
named Tristan(Antoine Martynciow)] is going on holiday, and
offers to replace her for a while. Thus our protagonist is able
to worm her way into Ariane's life and
destroy it.
Melanie does this in a stealthy way, winning the love of Tristan
and Ariane, who gives her an extra duty as the title implies,
and starting what seems to be the beginnings of a lesbian
relationship. There is also the problem with Ariane's
partners(Xavier De Guillebon and Martine Chevallier), in the
trio she tours with, and that leads to one of the more delicious
scenes in the entire
film.
At only 85 minutes, this is a surprisingly leisurely film.
Dercourt takes his
sweet time, and except for a couple of brief scenes, including
that one I
mentioned about one of Ariane's partners, there's absolutely no
violence. Ms. Francois is passive and for the most part
unemotional. She smiles little, except for one scene where she
meets a friend, and appears to have the makings of a female
Hannibal Lector. The supporting cast is quite excellent. This
is one of the better films to come out of France in the past
year. See it.
Offside
Written and Directed
by Jafar Panahi
There are many people nowadays who are sympathizing with the
Government of Iran. They rail against Bush for his naming Iran
as part of the so-called “axis of evil” and…guess what? Bush is
right.
The Government of Iran is very evil indeed. Fortunately, the
Iranian people aren't and there are many talented filmmakers who
are willing to take on their fascistic government and expose
these monsters for what they are. The
filmmaker is named Jafar Panahi and his weapon against
oppression is a cheery sports
comedy.
One of the lesser crimes against humanity that the Iranian
regime has
committed is one of misogyny. Women are not allowed to attend
public sports matches, and if they try to attend, say, a soccer
match, they will be arrested and sent to jail. One would think
that in a civilized country that sort of thing wouldn't even be
considered.
In the spring of 2005, Iran was fighting Bahrain for a berth on
the next rung of the World Cup, and naturally, the stadium was
packed. Since being a sports fan is a gender-free occupation,
there are plenty of women who are enamored of the sport, and a
certain number of the ladies are brave enough to try to crash
the party.
The film begins with an old man(Reza Farhadi) flagging down a
minibus filled with rowdy [male] fans to try to grab his
daughter before she can commit the crime of gate-crashing. She's
not aboard the vehicle, but another woman(Sima Mobarak Shahi)
is, and this is her first attempt at crashing a game. The boys
in the bus are all on her side, but she wants to get in on her
own, and this includes getting ripped off for a scalped ticket,
and getting frisked by the army, something that gets her caught.
So she's sent to the holding pen, which is occupied by a half a
dozen
others(Shayesteh Irani, Nazanin Sedighzadeh, Golnaz Farmani and
Mahnaz Zabihi) and are guarded by three young army conscripts
(Safdar Samandar, Mohammed Kheir-abadi, and Masoud
Kheymeh-kaboud) who don't want to be there and actually
sympathize to some extent with their prisoners. But orders are
orders and everyone has to remain there while waiting for the
bus to take the women to the vice squad.
So the results of the situation is a debate over the sexual
policies of the
Iranian government and whether or not women should be protected
from “naughty” language and good ol' fashioned cussing,
something that is illustrated when one of the gals(Sadeqi) has
to go to the bathroom, and her minder(Samandar) has to clear it
of men who have to go as badly as she does. This is the old
trick of making injustice look ridiculous, which in this case it
is.
The acting is terrific, and had Iran been a free country the
gals would be
major international movie stars [they might be in Iran, but
popular films from over there don't generally make it over
here], but there you have it. This is thought provoking and lots
and lots of fun. Worth the bucks.
Colour Me Kubrick
Directed by
Brian Cook
They say truth is stranger than fiction, and sometimes we've got
evidence for this maxim. Take the con man who spent a number of
years impersonating director Stanley Kubrick during the last
couple of years of his and Kubrik's life.
This is the story of Alan Conway(John Malkovich) a con man who
goes around fleecing innocent artistic types, pretending to be
Kubrick, promising his marks the moon, and disappearing when the
loans come due. The film begins with two punkers who were thus
fleeced harassing some rich shlub demanding that Kubrick pay
them the money they lent.
Conway is a flaming queen and a chameleon who changes accents
and mannerisms whenever he meets someone new, and he's also a
bit lazy, he gets caught by anyone who knows the work of the
real Kubrick just a little bit. Apparently, the real Conway
never saw any of his films.
The film is basically a one-man show. Malkovich gives the
performance of a lifetime, while the hamminess drips out of
every pore, there's an honesty in the dishonesty of it all which
makes the performance priceless. He's so brazen that he goes up
to NY Times film critic Frank Rich (William Hootkins) and his
wife Alix (Marisa Berenson) in a London restaurant screaming his
displeasure at what the newspapers have been saying about him.
This proves the beginning of the end. Rich is suspicious, and so
are quite a few others, including the cops.
Meanwhile Conway continues his impersonation, and this time hits
real
paydirt, a midlevel celebrity(Jim Davidson) who thinks he could
make it big in the US. It's a hoot. The supporting cast, which
is made up of has-been TV stars are really good.
Anthony Frewin's script is a bit erratic. The film goes on in a
hpahasard way for the first half at least, but Malkovitch's
perfornace makes up for it.
This is a perfect revenge by two of Kubrick's most loyal
assistant. Had he lived, I'm sure Kubrick would have wanted to
make this film himself.
Sacco And Vanzetti
A documentary
by Peter Miller
The best way to get sympathy for the bad guys is to frame them
for something they clearly didn't do. That's what happened to
two terrorists named Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in the
year 1920, and the repercussions are still felt to this day.
“Terrorists?!?” I hear you say, “I thought they were innocent
victims” Well actually, they were both, for as the documentary,
clearly admits, they belonged to a terrorist organization headed
by Luigi Galleani, which was responsible for quite a few
murders, and fled with him to Mexico to wait for the fall of the
American Government when the first world war started. On the
other hand, as the doc also clearly shows, they had nothing to
do with the particular murder that they were charged with.
Peter Miller, who was a collaborator the renowned documentarian
Ken Burns, goes about telling the story in a workmanlike way. He
interviews the usual suspects (Howard Zinn, Arlo Guthrie, Studs
Terkel and others of the left) as well as Sacco's niece [one
wonders whether his children or grandchildren cooperated or
not], and the daughter of the murder victim [one wonders if
Miller actually did the interviews or found them in an archive
somewhere]. The tone of the film is rather dispassionate at
first, being somewhat unsure as to whether or not to depict
Sacco and Vanzetti as saints or not. John Turturro and Tony
Shalhoub read the letters of the doomed pair, and ones they read
tend to the former, while the facts of the case tend to the
latter.
However, there's no problem about how to depict the government
of
Massachusetts. They get the full demonization treatment, and
that's something they clearly deserve. The trial was clearly a
farce, and so was the cover-up that followed. The whole thing
was an embarrassment to both the governments of Massachusetts
and the United States as a whole, making the S&V case a cause
celeb throughout the world.
With a case of such importance, it's always a good idea to be
reminded every now and then as to how things can go wrong, and
justice means that just because a person is guilty of SOMETHING,
doesn't mean that it's okay for the state frame them for
something else. This is worth a look when it comes out on video
or PBS.
Shooter
Directed by
Antoine Fuqua
Well, the studio wanted a franchise, and I think they might have
one. It's obvious that Gunnery Sergeant Bob Lee Swagger (Mark
Wahlberg) has the makings of a superhero, and Jonathan Lemkin's
adaptation of Stephen Hunter's novel pushes all the right
buttons.
We open in the Horn of Africa, where Sergeant Swagger is doing
his thing as part of a covert op in the War on Terror, or so he
thinks, and is left behind by his platoon. Hoo=ya!
Cut to Montana a couple of years later, where our hero is
hanging out minding his own business, when Colonel Isaac Johnson
(Danny Glover) of the Secret Intelligence Agency [or whatever]
arrives from Washington and says that there's an evil conspiracy
to assassinate THE PRESIDENT and only HE, as the best marksman
in the known universe, can figure out how to save him.
So being a patriot, he decides to go for it, only to have been
set up as the fall guy for the assassination of “The Archbishop
of Ethiopia” who was going to make a speech right after the
prexy.
So while Swagger is off to Tennessee to get repaired by the
beauteous Sarah (Kate Mara), who was the fiancée of his pal who
got blown up in the prologue, FBI special agent Nick
Memphis(Michael Peña) is fighting the power in the FBI because
he was a witness and they want him to cover the truth up.
The politics of the film is the usual left-wing “it's all for
oil” crap, but that doesn't really matter. What really matters
is whether there's a whole bunch of nifty car chases and stuff
gets blown up in abundance. The answer to both questions is yes,
and it's done in a way to make it look less gratuitous than
usual.
Peña and Marky Mark do a more than professional job, Ned Beatty
Elias Koteas and Rade Serbedzija are really sleazy as bad guys,
Rhona Mitra, who plays Peña's associate and Mara have really
nice breasts, and Danny Glover is Danny Glover. In other words,
Halfway decent script, good acting, good chases and stuff gets
blown up. What more do you want? Godzilla? Worth the bucks.
The
Hills Have Eyes II
Directed by
Martin Weisz
It's a law. I think it was passed by the California legislature
back in the middle of the 1930s and signed into law by Governor
Earl Warren. If a horror film is a hit, there must be a sequel.
If that is a hit, IT must be a sequel, and if the producers run
out of ideas for sequels, then a remake of the original is
required. Wes Craven and his son, Jonathan know all about this,
and that is why they wrote a script for the remake of the
sequel. I'm sorry. It just had to be done.
The most incompetent brigade in the entire US National Guard
[apparently, all fifty states, the three territories, two
commonwealths and the District of Columbia refused to let their
names be mentioned in this thing] is on a training mission in
New Mexico, when they hear a distress call from a top secret
base, where, as you remember Emile De Raven and her family were
mostly decimated by mutant hillbillies in the previous flick.
So Sergeant Millstone (Flex Alexander) takes his merry band of
troopers(Jacob Vargas, Michael McMillan, Daniella Alonso,
Jessica Stroup and a few other interchangeable pre-corpses) into
the hills where they get sliced up by the remaining mutants or
by their own incompetence. Then they go down into the mine in
the middle of the mountain, where a couple of more of the group
get killed by the magically endowed, though horribly disfigured
mutants [They can kill someone with his wallet!].
Think of this as a kind of guessing game, you get a bunch of
dislikable morons, and you guess who's going to get it in which
order. It's kind of fun and there are a number of genuine
scares. The acting is okay, but there's not really much to do
besides run, yell and scream through the desert and the
soundstage.
Happily, I don't think there's going to be a “III”, but you
never know.
In the meantime, don't bother.
Eric Lurio
|
