My reviews of movies in reverse chronological order (i.e. most-recent-first) of date-of-review (which is not necessarily the same as the date-watched).
Title: The Majestic
Review written: 24 February 2002
I consider Jim Carrey to be one of the most talented, eloquent, and expressive actors of our generation, and it is a shame that he is unable to find dramatic roles that give full reign to his immense skills.
The Majestic is a cheesy-syrupy feel-good story that combines the most smarmy aspects of It's a Wonderful Life (and other similar Capra-crapa) with a love for movies, a la, Cinema Paradiso.
Carrey plays a Hollywood screenwriter who is blacklisted during the McCarthyite pogroms. Depressed and drunk, he goes off on an aimless car ride, crashes off a bridge, and ends up in the town of Lawson (a place with really, really, nice people) in a state of complete amnesia.
He is mistaken by Lawson residents for own of their own, and begins to live that life, helping his father rebuild The Majestic---the town movie theater.
Inevitably, the milk of magnesia wears off, Carrey goes back to LA to testify against a congressional committee, and makes rousing speeches about free-speech and the American dream. This might be marginally believable, except that it comes from a major Hollywood studio film of the early 21st century and any talk about free-speech and respect for individuals and diversity seems hollow.
I think the time has come for Carrey to start choosing his dramatic roles with more care, while continuing to make us laugh our guts out in Farrelly Brothers' comedies. The Majestic is barely worth a budget visit.
Title: Nine Queens
Review written: 22 February 2002
Nine Queens is Argentina's version of the Usual Suspects style double-con plus Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels style caper. Just as one needs to set a thief to catch a thief, one needs a con to con a con.
Juan and Marcos are two small-time con-men who meet serendipitously and decide to pair up for a day of tricks. They soon find themselves in the middle of a deal of a lifetime, involving rare stamps. Neither man can trust the other because of their own nature and habitual suspicion.
So who is conning whom? See the movie to find out.
This is one of the best movies I have seen in the past few months. The plot has been very carefully constructed without any holes (that I could spot). There is no gratuitous or wasted scene, and all of them play a part in the final uncovering of the solution.
Title: Greed
Review written: 21 February 2002
What does a 4.5 hour reconstruction of a 9.5 hour movie that was cut down to 4.5 hours and then further reduced to 2 hours look like?
Greed, the 1920s epic silent film by Erich von Stroheim was clearly made for a different time and audience. After the 2 hour version was released, most of the remaining cuts were destroyed and the film has been reconstructed by filling in the "gaps", so to speak, with still photographs and the help of a continuity script.
Greed is a fairly accurate version of Frank Norris's novel McTeague, the story of an unschooled, uncultured dentist and how his life slowly descends down into the hellish depths of misery and depravity, all driven by the greed of people surrounding him.
Each of the principal characters in story: McTeague, his wife Trina, their former friend and Trina's paramour (and now a jealous madman) Marcus, are all equally culpable in the destruction of their lives. The tiniest action triggers an escalating series of quarrels till there is no return from ultimate gruesome death for everyone.
Obviously, this film is not standard entertainment. But, it is a superb example of how the craft of movie-making has evolved---for example, there are story devices (like those of a pair of love birds in a cage serving as the proxy for McTeague and Trina) that would almost never be used in today's movies, but were part of the stylistics of movies, especially silent ones, made in the 1920s where there was no exposition to speak of.
Film buffs should give Greed at least one viewing, if only as a badge of masochistic honor and a topic for dinner conversations with those who claim to have seen the 5 hour version of Fritz Lang's Dr.Mabuse.
Title: Dragonfly
Review written: 20 February 2002
Kevin "Moon Pope" Costner is like Forrest Gump---he just does not realize his moronicity, and the utter stupidity of the films he acts in.
In the latest garbage dump Dragonfly, the Moon Pope is a doctor in Chicago, while his very pregnant wife (also a doctor) goes off to Venezuela to care for poor children. She dies, but not before giving birth to a baby girl.
This would have been a great setup for a romping comedy, what with Tom Shadyac (of Nutty Professor and Liar Liar fame) directing. Instead, we are treated to a spectacle of Mrs. Moon Pope coming back in the Near Death Experiences of Moon Pope's patients to give him a message.
Do we not already have enough stupidity and irrationality in this world? Do we need this kind of open pandering to religious morons?
Skip this feces mound.
Title: The Tunnel
Review written: 18 February 2002
The human spirit and yearning for freedom raging against the machine. A veritable goldmine for novels and movies.
The Tunnel is Germany's addition to the genre, based on true incidents in the post-Berlin Wall era.
Harry Melchoir (played by Heino Ferch, who looks and acts uncannily like Bruce Willis) is the GDR swimming champion who makes it out of East Berlin just as the Wall is coming up. He teams up with fellow escapees and friends to build an underground tunnel from just inside the West Berlin territory to just inside East Berlin, across the Wall, to try and bring out his sister and family. The movie is about how they succeed in their attempt.
Naturally, there is a little bit of over-dramatization, pathos, and milking of cliches. However, the acting and direction are sufficiently good to make this 2.5+ hour movie quite enjoyable.
Title: And Your Mother Too
Review written: 17 February 2002
Film school buffs would consider And Your Mother Too to be a heart-warming, bitter-sweet tale of rites of passage from boyhood to manhood, of freedom and responsibility, and self-discovery and redemption. But fuck that shit.
And Your Mother Too is Mexican Pie. Tenoch and Julio are best buddies looking to spend their post-high-school summer vacation doing something more exciting that screwing their girlfriends and jacking off into swimming pools.
They find that Tenoch's cousin's wife, Luisa, is a willing companion for a trip to a remote beach. The three of them pack their bags and set off on a hilarious journey of tastelessness and horny sexual fiascos.
Watch this movie for its humor and forget about any "message".
Title: The Bank
Review written: 16 February 2002
The Bank is the quintessential morality play of our times. This is what a movie adaptation of Michael Lewis's Liar's Poker would be---a world filled with big swinging dicks and savagery on the trading floors of securities markets.
CentaBank is the Bank: a large conglomerate that grows through rapacious acquisition and merger, firing workforce, shutting down small accounts, and making questionable loans to unsuspecting customers based on obscure and risky currency derivatives.
Into this mix arrives math-genius Jim Doyle (played by David Weckham) with the promise of a chaos/fractal theory based model that can predict market corrections before they occur. He soon becomes the protege and favorite of CentaBank's executive Simon (played by Anthony LaPaglia)---a ruthless player who cares only about profits and the excitement of the game.
Jim convinces Simon to play the bank's entire assets in one major trade during a witching hour (the time when multiple options expire in major stock exchanges throughout the world). But as the crucial trading hour unfolds, it becomes clear that Jim is in fact exacting sweet revenge for personal reasons---vengeance that has been in the planning and making for decades.
It is rare to see a movie handle mathematical and computer jargon intelligently, while also weaving it into a larger human drama. The Bank does all of this extremely well. A not-to-be-missed movie.
Title: Open Your Eyes
Review written: 16 February 2002
Borrowing from the best of Total Recall (intriguing plot minus Ahnold blowing up entire planets) and even paying anticipatory-homage to the greatest movie ever made and other mind-benders like Existenz, Alejandro Amenabar's Open Your Eyes takes us on a journey through virtual reality.
Cesar, a handsome young playboy, is on top of the world. He has a big house, nice cars, good friends, and hot girls begging to sleep with him. And just when he thinks he might have finally met the woman of his dreams, a former girlfriend of his takes him on a wild car ride and crashes them. The accident leaves Cesar's face horribly disfigured, and he finds that he is now a freak show.
Just when things seem at their lowest, Cesar's doctors find a revolutionary new plastic surgery technique that fixes his face back to its original form, and he gets back his former playboy life and his dreamgirl.
But strange things also begin to happen to Cesar. Sometimes his girlfriend looks like the dead woman (of the car crash). Sometimes his face seems still disfigured. The sentences people around him speak keep popping up over and over again---only spoken by different people. Life seems like a deja vu with a vengeance. No one will believe him, and he eventually finds himself in a mental asylum for the criminally deranged, trying to explain his plight to a psychologist.
It is at this point that we learn the truth. Cesar's life post-accident has been mostly a hyperreal dream facilitated by a cryogenics corporation designed to give people a new lease on life. As with all good, moral-tales, the dream world is invaded by the traumatized mind of Cesar which cannot, even after centuries, forget his fears and destroys what could otherwise have been a paradisiacal life.
Open Your Eyes is uniformly well-acted and directed. Although I personally am opposed to the almost mandatory Frankensteinesque condemnation of technology (esp. when it pertains to virtual reality) in such movies, this is a excellent film.
Title: Vanilla Sky
Review written: 16 February 2002
Why is there this sudden fascination with slavish remakes among American movie directors? We are not talking about making a new movie based on the story or plotlines of earlier movies---we are talking about scene-for-scene, shot-for-shot imitations, only with new cast and crew.
Cabron Crowe, whom you will recall as the richard-head who brought us Almost Famous, the 3rd worst movie ever made, decided to remake Alejandro Amenabar's superb movie Open Your Eyes.
Okay, so the new movie Vanilla Sky is now in English instead of Spanish. It still has Penelope Cruz in the lead female role (although it is amazing what a couple of years of anorexia will do).
But, I fail to see why this idiotic movie was made, unless Cabron was so concerned that American audiences will not see a Spanish movie even if it deserved wider dissemination.
Are we supposed to be amused that the movie involves: Cruise, Cruz, Cameron, and Cameron (which has all the makings of a legal firm right up there with Dewey, Cheatham, and Howe).
Tom Cruise once again demonstrates that he cannot act. Cabron, as if this was in question, once again demonstrates that he cannot direct. The tight pacing and air of mystery that made Open Your Eyes such a delight to watch have been completely eviscerated by Cabron's sub-juvenile non-humor and supposed exposition that would be appropriate for an audience of drooling imbeciles unable to comprehend anything beyond the level of kindergarteners.
There is only one crime worse than slavishly imitating a great movie. It is botching it up. Avoid this cabron-crap.
Title: What Time Is It There?
Review written: 15 February 2002
As Agent Smith so eloquently said it: Humans define their reality through misery and suffering.
Until the modern era, life for much of humanity was a struggle for existence, and a fight against hunger and disease. One would, therefore, think that as the basic needs are satisfied, humans would find some measure of happiness and peace in their lives.
But as Tsai Ming-Liang's movie What Time Is It There? shows, human beings find a way to be lonely, sad, and irrational, no matter how little they have to worry about.
The story revolves around Hsiao Kang, a young street-vendor (of watches) living in Taipei with his mother---they have recently lost their father/husband and are in deep mourning. Hsiao Kang sells his watch to a young woman leaving on a tour of Paris, and his loneliness and fascination with the woman sets him on a journey of Frenchy discovery---he watches Frenchy films and obsessively resets all clocks he can lay his hands on to Parisian time.
The widowed mother sees the reset clocks and thinks that it is her husband back from the dead. She begins to wall up her apartment to prevent all light from coming in, and lives life according to Parisian time because that is what her dead husband's spirit seems to want.
Meanwhile, the young woman finds herself all alone in Paris---the supposedly lively charm of the Frenchy capital is nothing more than a figment of the collective tourist imagination.
The movie is paced almost glacially slowly, and one should be in the right frame of mind to avoid fidgeting with impatience.
Still, should one feel sympathy for these losers, or feel superior to them? Those who are not lonely might be the ones feeling sorry for the characters in this story; the rational (and hence lonely) viewers will have to conclude that these people deserve the unhappiness in their lives.
Title: Storytelling
Review written: 12 February 2002
Storytelling, Todd Solondz's new film, is about the perils of, well, storytelling. The post-modern disease of reflexive deconstruction is so pervasive in our culture that it seems impossible for us to ever stop over-analyzing or misinterpreting the works of an author or filmmaker. Even Freud once said that "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar".
Solondz has been both praised and criticized for making darkly-comedic, trenchantly critical movies about human depravity (in his earlier works Welcome to the Dollhouse and Happiness). Perhaps he feels that he has been grossly misunderstood, and this film is his critique of his own audiences.
The movie opens with "Fiction", a short symphonic prelude: a writing class is the stark setting for jargon-filled, vapid, theoretic deconstruction, where there is no separation between reality and fiction, comedy and tragedy, and where no one is clearly free of guilt however heinous their crime may be because they are all simply playing a role in some larger framework.
The second part of the movie "Non-fiction" features Paul Giamatti as a proxy for Solondz himself---a struggling documentary maker whose empathy for his subjects is mistaken for dark-humor and intellectual superiority by his audiences, all of them oblivious to the unfolding tragedy of the story being documented.
Solondz still finds space to make parodic references to American Beauty and American Movie (including featuring Mike Schank, the LSD brain-fried pal of hapless filmmaker Mark Borchardt of the latter film).
As with most movies featuring a movie inside a movie, there is the vague discomfort of over-analysis (and if my reading of the movie is right, over-analysis is precisely what Solondz is cautioning against). Still, fans of Solondz will have something to discuss over a post-movie cuppa joe. Film school students, on the other hand, will continue to propagate the greatest of the 20th century French diseases oblivious to their own moronicity.
A good, thought-provoking film.
Title: Slackers
Review written: 29 January 2002
Sigh!! It is getting more and more difficult to make a straight-forward teen-love movie. Paradoxically (or ironically, depending on your prejudice in these matters) this is because the ante has been upped on two different fronts: on the one hand, movies like American Pie and Road Trip have set extremely high standards for tastelessness; on the other hand, parodies like Scream and Scary Movie are so well done that every teen movie staple has been turned into a howling cliche.
The latest entry in the teen movie oeuvre is Slackers (note the plural; this is not Richard Linklater's singular Slacker, although there is a rather disturbing obsession with hair (Madonna's pubic in one case and James's head in the other) that seems to run through the two movies).
Devon Sawa is Dave, a slacker who behaves in every way that is antithetical to a slacker---including carrying out the most elaborate pranks to cheat in his courses, avoid work, and pass exams. He is caught cheating by Jason Schwartzmann, who then forces Devon into wooing babe James "It's a short-form of Jamie" King on Jason's behalf. Naturally, Devon and James fall in love, and after a few ups and downs, they get back together.
The story is not tasteless enough or filthy enough or funny enough. However, Jason Schwartzmann delivers a superb performance as a psychotic, stalker nerd who ends up winning atleast some of my sympathy even though he is supposed to be the "villian" in the plot.
If you like teen movies, give this one a budget theater visit.
Title: The Mothman Prophecies
Review written: 25 January 2002
The Mothman Prophecies squanders the potential for a great horror flick by settling for cheap parapsychology.
The Mothman is supposed to be a supernatural spirit that manifests itself in places where disaster is about to strike, attempting to warn humans of the impending danger. These contactees, needless to say, are considered cranks and never believed by anyone else---until everybody starts to die, hahaha!!
Richard Gere is a reporter for The Washington Post whose wife dies after seeing the Mothman, and who finds himself mysteriously drawn to a small hick-town in W.Va where people are going to die soon. He and local cop Laura Linney spend the rest of the movie frantically running around trying to figure it all out.
Hitchock introduced the notion of a McGuffin sparingly scattered around the real movie, just to keep audience interest alive. This movie flips things around and has a few moments of real plot wallowing in a sea of distracting McGuffins.
Skip this silly, moronic movie.
Title: I am Sam
Review written: 23 January 2002
Ladies and gentlemen. Stand in attention for the changing of the guard. The title of second worst movie ever made now goes to I am Sam (and thus pushing down all other former title holders by one spot). I did not imagine Almost Famous would lose that place of (dis)honor so soon, but as life has taught me time and time again---never, ever, underestimate the obstinacy of morons.
This has got to be one of the most repulsive, disgusting, nauseating movies I have ever seen.
Sean Penn plays Sam, a drooling retard who serves coffee at Starbucks and has difficulty making correct change---now tell me, how is this any different from the usual retards employed by that august institution who also cannot add or subtract.
Not content with being a retard, Sam violates Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes's injunction that three generations of imbeciles is enough (in fact, this movie makes the strongest possible case for the forced, irreversible sterilization of morons, idiots, and imbeciles before they can breed).
Naturally enough, Sam's daughter is taken away from him, and he engages the awesome legal expertise of Michelle Pfeiffer, working pro bono no less, to win back his parental custody rights---I mean, this is when I should have just cut my losses, called it quits, and either shot myself or walked out of the theater.
Pfeiffer once again demonstrates her finely honed career motto: (1) blonde hair: check, (2) blue eyes: check, (3) lippy pout: check---so who needs acting talent. I am baffled that anyone finds this woman even attractive. It speaks to the power of deep psychological conditioning and adolescent imprinting that her fan base is predominantly middle-aged male boomers who, as horny post-teenagers, salivated over her in Grease 2.
The crowning touch, the unbearable travesty, that earned this garbage heap 2nd place in the worst movies list was its ostensible homage to the Beatles (I won't even get into the contrivances the story went through for this). I was unable to stomach the wonderful music of perhaps the greatest popular music group ever being bastardized into whoring for a coffee chain.
And not content with mere psychological torture, this film features almost constant use of a hand-held camera---I mean, this is a movie with people standing still or sitting down talking to each other---what possible justification is there for jump-cuts and jiggly pictures????????
Everyone associated with this movie goes on my Tricky Dick list. If there is any justice in this universe, these people will never breed anything but retards.
Title: Kandahar
Review written: 22 January 2002
I consider myself fortunate, blessed even, to have seen one of the most funny movies in my lifetime. Kandahar has out-postman'd the watery depths of even Kevin "Moon Pope" Costner.
Is Kandahar a documentary, a film based-upon a true story, or fiction? Do I give a rodent's rectum about whatever depraved, deranged, drug-addled process brought about this pile of nonsense? Go on, ask me, ask me if I care, punk!!
For about the first 10 minutes, I was under the very mistaken impression that Kandahar was a documentary. This misapprehension was very quickly replaced by a dull, throbbing, thudding ache in my brain caused by the staggering incompetence in the film making, story telling, and acting (or whatever it was going on on-screen).
However, halfway into the film there occured a miracle that has happened to me only once before---during the time I endured Tea With Mussolini. I began to laugh uncontrollably at the sheer moronicity of this grabage heap so that when I came out of the theater, passers by were treated to the spectacle of a grown, otherwise respectable, man almost collapsing to the pavement in the throes of a most terrifying rictus.
Kandahar is about Afghanistan, in the sense that French postmodernism is about rational thought---a perversion. If this what that country is like, I say: bomb the turds with napalm and put them on 24-hour pay-per-view cameras; the show will out-rate Jerry Springer and Baywatch in popularity, and put an end to economic recession even in Argentina from resulting cable subscription revenues.
What I just cannot comprehend is the number of PC-ass-kissing fuckwads who wrote rave reviews about this movie in supposedly discerning publications. If this movie were made by a film-school student, he would have been flogged, coated in honey and left on a fire-anthill, and hung by the scrotum with a piano wire (assuming the formicans left anything to tie the wire around).
Had this film been a commercial studio release, I would have ranked it just below Tea With Mussolini as the second-worst movie ever made.
I know that the present circumstances in the world and in the US would make PC-ass-kissers say favorable things about this movie, but I, like Tricky Dick, am making up a list of reviewers to never trust or respect or even read in future based on this superb litmus-test.
The director of his dung-heap, however, is laughing his way to the bank because he calculated, quite accurately, that any filth he threw up on the screen, as long as it dealt with Afghanistan and as long as it did not actually come out and say that the Taliban were on par with Mother Theresa for self-sacrifice, would be swallowed up by American audiences looking for sound-bite satisfaction and too lazy to read a book or two.
Title: Brotherhood of the Wolf
Review written: 17 January 2002
It may be a sign of the coming Apocalypse that, after almost a century of making the weirdest shit, the fricking Frenchies have finally started to make some really fun, enjoyable movies. Last year, we had the utterly charming Amelie, and now it is Brotherhood of the Wolf, a tale of intrigue sufficiently complex and attention-grabbing that it would have made Alexandre Dumas go sacre bleu, mon dieu.
The story is set in pre-revolutionary France. A remote province is being tormented by The Beast, a mysterious animal of awesome power and speed. All attempts to catch or kill it fail, until a naturalist Fronsac (played by Samuel Le Bihan), recently returned from America with his Iroquois blood-brother Mani (local Portland martial-arts celebrity Mark Dacascos) slowly uncover a plot of necromancy, devil-worship, sedition, revolution, and sleaze beneath the idle and idyllic facade of the local nobility. The beast hunters are aided in their quest by the exotic (to the Frenchies, I suppose) Italian whore (played by hot Malena mama, Monica Bellucci) who is really a secret emissary of the king and the Vatican.
The film makes constant use of stop-action slo-mo for its action scenes, all of which are extremely brutal, violent, gory, and bloody (yay, yay, yay, from me). In spite of its 2+ hour running time, the movie is extremely enjoyable watching. What little melodrama there is, is never milked like one has come to expect in American crapola of recent years.
A few more of these movies, and I might actually start liking the fromagging frogs, yikes!!
Title: The Devil's Backbone
Review written: 17 January 2002
"What is a ghost? A tragedy that repeats itself again and again [...]".
So begins (and ends) The Devil's Backbone, a superb Spanish ghost story of supernatural vengeance, where the ghost of a wrongly murdered young boy seeks revenge on his killer.
The place: Spain. The time: the early days of World War II. A pair of old friends, with Communist/revolutionary sympathies, run an orphanage for the boys of those killed in the civil war. A new kid, Carlos, comes to live there and soon finds out that the place is haunted by a ghost known as the one who sighs.
The movie, then, is the slow unfolding of who the ghost is, how he came to be, and what he wants. The yearning of the ghost for revenge is so powerful that is almost isolates the orphanage from the war and destruction without its walls, until everything comes to a climax at the end of the movie.
An extremely well-acted and directed film.
Title: Snow Dogs
Review written: 15 January 2002
Cuba Gooding Jr. is Ted, a hereditary Miami denist (vanity license plates: OPN-WYD) who discovers that he was adopted and that his biological mother was, until her death, a recluse living in the Alaskan wilderness. So, he goes off up North where people have really bad teeth (except for the local hottie babe) and badder attitudes.
If that premise seems ridiculous, yes, it is. But the movie is also very very funny, and never takes itself seriously, even during the few moments of heroic cinematic cliches it has. Given what I had to endure in the cliche-ridden, pretentious turd-mound Shipping News, this film is a masterpiece by comparison.
The theater was filled with young children when I saw this movie, but I think most of the jokes are directed at the adults. A good, light-hearted comedy.
Title: Gosford Park
Review written: 9 January 2002
After a long string of utter crap since The Player, Robert Altman has finally made a good movie with Gosford Park, a film in the best traditions of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers.
Gosford Park is the English country home of Sir William, a boorish, womanizing "gentleman" and his wife and daughter. He invites his friends and relatives for a weekend of partying and pheasant shooting, but finds himself in the unfortunate predicament of being murderded---perhaps twice and by two different people!!
I am not going to give away the whodunit, obviously, but it is, when it arrives at the end of the film, an extremely satisfying explanation of the intrigues of the Gosford Park manor where most of the guests and many of the servants themselves have the motive to have committed the crime.
The movie does a superb job of portraying English class distinctions and propriety in the behavior of the above stairs upper-crust aristocracy, and the below stairs domestic help (who are known not by their own names, but by the names of their masters---just to keep things simple, you know). Even among the servants, there is a class stratification, and the only things the people below stairs resent more than their cursory treatement by those above stairs is the unpardonable crime one of the "gentlemen" commits by posing as a servant and moving among their midst.
The film features a cast that is a veritable "Who's Who" of British screen (the two token Americans (and American actors) in the party merely add to contrast of two countries separated by an ocean and divided by a common language).
An excellent film.
Title: Heist
Review written: 6 January 2002
David Mamet's Heist is an excellent addition to the jewel heist genre of movies. In this film, Mamet takes the omniscient-viewer approach to writing and directing, allowing the audience to see through to the end of the story even at the very beginning. The enjoyment of the movie, then, comes from the ice-cold, razor-sharp, crisp dialogue, and fine performances by the cast.
Gene Hackman plays Joe, an ageing gangster who still has a few tricks up his sleeve. Hackman teams up with Rebecca Pidgeon, Delroy Lindo, and Ricky Jay to pull off exquisitely planned robberies thwarting the police and security at every step.
For one final job, Hackman finds himself being double-crossed by Danny DeVito and Sam Rockwell (playing a slimy villain for yet another time). The movie is about how he gets the better of them.
A highly recommended, entertaining movie, and a welcome breath of fresh air and demonstration of Hackman's thespian talents (which were conspicuous by their absence in The Royal Tenenbaums and Behind Enemy Lines).
Title: Intimacy
Review written: 5 January 2002
Is it possible for humans to have sex without love? The best (and truest) answer to this question comes from evolutionary biology and it is a resounding no!! Human infants require extended and intensive care, and this fact alone leads to high parental investment and pair bonding that has been a characteristic of humanoids for many millions of years. Our brains have evolved extremely powerful and deeply sub-conscious mechanisms that subvert any rational, detached analyses of the separation between sex and love.
Intimacy is an exploration of the sex/love dichotomy. Jay, a former-musician turned bartender and drifter, and Claire, a theater actress with a husband and son, meet for one thing only: brutal, animal, raw sex for a couple of hours each week. However, what started off as just sex soon turns into feelings of intimacy for Jay (the movie is told from his point-of-view). Jay soon discovers Claire's family and befriends her husband Andy. Finally, unable to reconcile his growing feelings for Claire, he reveals their secret assignations to Andy.
The 3 primary characters of the movie: Jay, Claire, and Andy, are portraits of modern misery. Jay, of course, is the loser with a fear of intimacy and yet someone who longs for it. Claire is the consummate actress and it is not clear if her trysts with Jay are born of sexual need or are her way of cultivating her actor-ability to detach herself from her roles. Andy is so grateful for having Claire as his wife that he is willing to overlook her infidelity.
Intimacy paints a picture of humanity that is not an uplifting one. It works well as a movie, except for a gratuitous fellow barman of Jay's played by some fricking Frenchy, who spouts off pseudo-profound lines about love and life.
Title: Ali
Review written: 21 December 2001
Biopics are difficult movies to make, especially when they are about a living person in an age where media-attention is ubiquitous.
Focusing on the episodic public persona of the celebrity is a cop-out; one can instead watch excellent documentaries of the same public events, often with insightful commentary, and at great length on television. Biopics should attempt to provide a look into the private life of the celebrity and bring out nuances that might not be obvious.
Evaluated by these yardsticks, Ali fails. In spite of being 2.5 hours long, we learn nothing about Muhammand Ali (ne Cassius Clay) that we did not already know before (and keep in mind that Ali is the most widely recognized sports figure in the world).
The movie starts off with Ali's challenge fight against Sonny Liston and ends with his defeat of George Foreman in Kinshasa, and is peppered with Ali's association with the Nation of Islam and his public jabs with Howard Cosell. Will Smith does a reasonable job of portraying Ali.
However, for sheer excitement, tension, and drama, the documentary When We Were Kings beats Ali by miles. The former film, in fact, gives us far greater insight into why Ali was able to defeat Foreman in Kinshasa in spite of Foreman's brutally punishing strength (something glossed over in Ali).
This movie might be okay for a budget visit or for someone who knows almost nothing about Ali the boxer. Otherwise, just rent When We Were Kings.
Title: Joe Somebody
Review written: 20 December 2001
Tim Allen is a comedic talent not widely used in movies. His many years on Home Improvement have allowed him to hone to perfection the persona of the friendly, neighborly, average-guy who finds the humorous in the everyday.
Joe Somebody is a simple, non-pretentious movie that follows a formula, and does it well. Allen plays Joe, a mild-mannered nice-guy who gets beaten up by a bully cow-orker in a dispute over office parking space (really)!! Enraged, he challenges the bully to a duel and gets into training with martial arts guru John Belushi (who is fast approaching the geometric proportions of his late brother Jim). Joe suddenly finds that his challenge and new-found assertiveness win him new friends and open doors at home and work.
Naturally enough, at the end of the movie he just shakes hands with the bully, and wins the love of the office hottie wellness coordinator. An enjoyable, inoffensive, light comedy for the holiday season.
Title: The Royal Tenenbaums
Review written: 18 December 2001
The Royal Tenenbaums has got to be one of the weirdest movies I have seen. Not David Lynch weird, not French-Dadaist weird, not German postmodernist weird, but weird in the manner in which it stradles the boundary separating shit from shinola.
The movie is about Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman), a wayward father and husband, and his family: mother Etheline "alchohol" (Anjelica Houston), and children Chas, Margot, and Richie (played by Ben Stiller, The Gwyneth, and Luke Wilson rspy). The story follows their zany, crazy lives and goings-on, a world where even the most stupid, mean-spirited, dangerous things are okay because no one really gets hurt.
The director Wes Anderson's previous movie Rushmore had some of the same quirky changes in pacing and emotional flip-flops, but The Royal Tenenbaums is neither a comedy nor a tragedy, neither a parody nor profound, where nothing important or climactic happens because it is all a series of episodic jokes and pathos. The film barely manages to be borderline enjoyable only because of a strong ensemble cast (excepting, of course, The Gwyneth).
I think I might forgive Wes Anderson for this movie, but another one like it and he should be sent to a mental institution for the terminally climax-challenged. There is just no excuse for making movies about mundane people doing mundane things---I mean, why should any poor schmuck be asked to pay $8 to go see what he gets for free at home.
Title: The Business of Strangers
Review written: 13 December 2001
When asked why he climed Mt.Everest, Sir Edmund Hilary defined the quintessence of pure challenge with his reply: Because it is there.
Humans are horrified by examples of evil, but what frightens and baffles us most is evil perpetrated without seeming justifiable cause, but merely because it was possible.
The Business of Strangers is a story of a young woman Paula (Julia Stiles) who convinces her boss Julie (Stockard Channing) that a friend (of the boss) Nick (Fred Weller) had date-raped her during her college days. In a drunken haze, Julie plays along with the plan to humiliate and torture the poor guy while he is lying drugged out.
However, the next morning, Julie realizes that both she and Nick have been seriously had---there was no date rape, there was no college association, Paula probably had not even been to college, and that everything she told Julie the night before was a fabricated lie.
This movie has been compared to Neil LaBute's great In the Company of Men, and to some extent the comparison is a valid one (LaBute's version is much more chilling though). Unfortunately, Stiles's extremely incompetent acting (made all the more obvious in juxtaposition with Channing's superb performance) makes this movie less convincing than it could otherwise have been.
Nevertheless, a very enjoyable movie and a good demonstration of the rule that the f of the s is more d than the m.
Title: The Shipping News
Review written: 12 December 2001
Kevin Spacey plays a chump loser married to a bitch who slowly discovers his inner self and reconciles himself with his daughter as the movie ends. No, this is not American Beauty, but The Shipping News based on a story by E.Annie Proulx.
For the first part of his career Spacey was typecast as the snaky deranged villain, but now he gets to play only SNAG roles.
In a formulaic template that makes Oprahatic books, the story features fucked-up families, search for roots (but also cutting away ties from roots, haha), incestuous rape, feminazi lesbianism, infidelity, retards, and cheap mysticism.
To be fair, the movie takes the humorous road and the director Lasse Hallstrom never dwells on any scene long enough for the syrupy pathos to build up too much. I also suppose that certain kinds of audiences will eat up this movie (keep in mind that Hallstrom directs Frenchy crap like Chocolat).
However, if you are a man, and go to the movies to see hot babes in black leather tights kick villianous butt, avoid this sob-story.
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