If you can put up with all the archness and self-consciousness—there’s quite a bit of both—this is an enjoyable romantic comedy (2000) about a pop music junkie (John Cusack) in Wicker Park who runs an old-fashioned record store and can’t seem to sustain a long-term relationship. Cusack joined forces with fellow producers D.V. DeVincentis and Steve Pink as well as Scott Rosenberg on the script, an adaptation of Nick Hornby’s English novel that transposes settings with ease, and director Stephen Frears keeps things simmering. Two pluses: the humor about male neurosis doesn’t try to remind you of Woody Allen at every turn, and the Chicago settings and atmosphere are made to seem relatively cutting edge for a change, rather than appropriate only for car chases. With Jack Black and Lisa Bonet. 113 min. (JR) Read more
Writer-director James Toback manages to combine the worst traits of his own braggadocio style of formless filmmaking with those of Henry Jaglom and Robert Altman, in an extravagant mess that awaits exegesis from Pauline Kael’s disciples regarding its Dostoyevskian qualities. Expect a lot of improvisation or semi-improvisation from the actors and just as much crosscutting from the director. Wealthy white teenage girls in New York lust after hip-hop black crime, a documentary filmmaker (Brooke Shields) with a gay husband (Robert Downey Jr.) follows them around, and the gay husband comes on to Mike Tyson, who plays himself. The point is to create a few desultory sparks, all of them unrehearsed, and land a piece of promo in the New Yorker’s The Talk of the Town. Among the other actors are Oli Power Grant, Ben Stiller, Knicks guard Allan Houston, Claudia Schiffer, Stacy Edwards, and Toback himself. 98 min. (JR) Read more
If you assumed, as I did, that this feature by Tom Tykwer (1997, 122 min.) followed his monstrously successful and seemingly less personal Run Lola Run, you’d be wrong. An odd, ambitious melodrama about two couples who share an Alpine villa in scenic Berchtesgaden, this is very much a rural film, and though it’s every bit as striking visually and self-consciously contrived in terms of storytelling as Lola, it’s a lot likelier to leave you querulous. A translator (Floriane Daniel) becomes involved with a ski instructor (Heino Ferch) and her housemate, a nurse (Marie-Lou Sellem) who becomes involved with a film projectionist (Ulrich Matthes); there’s also a local farmer (Josef Bierbichler) whose daughter is critically injured in a car accident in the film’s opening moments. None of these characters is standard issue, and Tykwer works overtime with his ‘Scope framing, elaborate color coding, and metaphysical thematics to make their interactions seem significant, and at times erotic as well. I can’t yet decide whether the film works or not, but it certainly held me for its full two hours. (JR) Read more
