Four different assertions of company ownership ran continuously over the preview tape of this $18 million blockbuster–reportedly the most expensive movie ever made in Poland–so after the first hour I kept reaching for the fast-forward button. Still, I could see that this Roman spectacular with 1,700 extras will look great on a full-size movie screen when the corporate dross isn’t blocking everything. The film premiered at the Vatican in late August for 6,000 spectators, including Pope John Paul II, even though it’s much racier and gorier than anything Cecil B. De Mille did in the 50s, with bare-breasted dancers, severed body parts when the Christians are thrown to the lions (occasioning some lively editing), and plenty more. The fifth or sixth adaptation of Nobel Prize winner Henryk Sienkiewicz’s novel–the first was in 1902–it’s not the longest, despite a running time of 170 minutes. It stacks up pretty well alongside the MGM version directed by Mervyn LeRoy in 1951, though Peter Ustinov’s Nero beats Michal Bajor’s. (Many reviewers who lamented Hollywood’s abandonment of the genre, including me, overrated Gladiator.) The director, Jerzy Kawalerowicz, is one of the most prestigious in Polish cinema, best known for such 60s features as Mother Joan of the Angels and Pharaoh. Read more
Predictably melancholy, this is a documentary by Scott Gill about the most famous (as well as the most ordinary looking) of all porn starssomeone I frankly hadn’t heard of before seeing this picture, though he’s appeared in more than 1,600 skin flicks. Paradoxically, it’s most interesting for how little it tells us about what Jeremy is actually like. Maybe there’s a lesson here along the lines of, when you live by the sound bite you get bitten by the sound bite: the fragmented editing and interviewing creates a kind of mosaic that says everything and nothing at more or less the same intensity for all of the film’s 79 minutes. I found it watchable and entertaining, but also opaqueand frighteningly familiar. (JR) Read more
Richard Linklater’s edgy, gripping 2001 feature, adapted from a Stephen Belber play, unfolds in real time in a motel room. Two supposed old friends from college (Ethan Hawke and Robert Sean Leonard) meet up ten years later, and the woman both were involved with (Uma Thurman) eventually joins them. This resembles Linklater’s animated Waking Life, made around the same time, in only a few particulars: it was shot on digital video, it’s very talky, and it indirectly expresses a certain amount of skepticism about whether objective reality exists. None of the characters emerges as very sympathetic. (Hawke plays a dope dealer, and the drama suggests on occasion a kind of slacker Strindberg.) The comparison that’s been made with Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope seems aptthough here there’s a lot of editing, in contrast to Rope’s use of lengthy takes. In both cases, a technical experiment becomes the occasion for fairly rigorous self-scrutiny. R, 84 min. (JR) Read more
Steve Martin plays a dentist who turns into a murder suspect and all-around neonoir victim when a sexy patient (Helena Bonham Carter) after the drugs he can prescribe lures him away from his fiancee (Laura Dern). Much as I like most of the actors here (who also include Scott Caan, Elias Koteas, and an uncredited Kevin Bacon), the script and story (by Paul Felopulos and director David Atkins) treat the characters with the sort of amused contempt I associate with the Coen brothers, but without the Coens’ cleverness. There’s a mechanical desire to work in as many outlandish twists as possible, and shallow grotesquerie quickly takes over. 95 min. (JR) Read more
Rob Morrow, who played Albert Brooks’s brother in Mother, stars in his own first feature, which he wrote with Bradley White, helped produce, and directed. He plays a sculptor with Tourette’s syndrome, Lyle Maze, who falls in love with the girlfriend (Laura Linney) of his best friend (Craig Sheffer) while the latter is working as a doctor in Africa after unknowingly making his girlfriend pregnant. This is so likable as an acting exerciseand as an exercise in directorial empathy, when Morrow tries to convey the hero’s attacks cinematicallythat you may want to overlook its utopian notions about the everyday behavior of friends and acquaintances of Tourette’s sufferers. (According to the script, only the hero’s late father, seen in a flashback, is intolerant.) The depiction of the hero’s career as a sculptor is no less problematic. But Morrow and his collaborators so clearly believe in this project that I was carried along, often charmed and never bored. 97 min. (JR) Read more
Patrick Stettner’s intriguing debut feature is a psychological drama about two women, stranded at an airport hotel, who find themselves at opposite ends of the career track: a middle-aged go-getter (Stockard Channing) and the young assistant (Julia Stiles) she’s just fired. Things get increasingly complicated and ambiguous once they start drinking and a corporate headhunter (Frederick Weller) joins them. The film raises many interesting questions about our own responses, but it may finally be too open-ended for its own good. 84 min. (JR) Read more
I hear the J.K. Rowling books are great, and on the basis of this 2001 movie I’m ready to believe it; the fantasy of empowerment whereby the Cinderella-like hero (Daniel Radcliffe) takes a 19th-century train from the present back to the medieval Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry is by itself worth the price of admission. I also got a kick out of some of the digital effectsespecially the cat that turns into a professor (Maggie Smith) and a giant and ferocious three-headed dog. But this 152-minute movie seems both padded and undernourished. It’s designed for kids who’ve read the books, with underdeveloped characters and clunky storytelling for those who haven’t, and portions that are too draggy or mechanically fast for anyone. The English cast is fun, but the Steve Kloves script deserves better handling than director Chris Columbus has given it. With Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Robbie Coltrane, John Cleese, Richard Griffiths, Richard Harris, John Hurt, Alan Rickman, Fiona Shaw, and Julie Walters. PG. (JR) Read more
A screening of clips from Ziba Mir-Hosseini and Kim Longinotto’s excellent 1998 documentary Divorce Iranian Style will precede a panel discussion on related issues, moderated by Columbia College film professor Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa. The panelists include Mir-Hosseini, Debra Zimmerman (director of Women Make Movies), and Mehranghiz Kar (lawyer, activist, and expert in Iranian and Islamic law). (JR) Read more
I still haven’t forgiven George Hickenlooper for his egregious rewriting of Orson Welles in The Big Brass Ring (1999), but in this 2001 drama he reveals himself to be a skilled handler of actors. Philip Jayson Lasker’s script, about a happily married but unsuccessful novelist in Pasadena (Andy Garcia) who hires on at a male escort service, seems familiar and obvious (the moral seems to be that if you become a prostitute other people will treat you like one). But the castincluding Julianna Margulies, Olivia Williams, James Coburn, and Anjelica Hustonkeeps this pretty watchable, and casting Mick Jagger as director of the escort service was inspired. 105 min. (JR) Read more
In 1919, between the first and second (and, as it turned out, only) episodes of his crime serial The Spiders, Fritz Lang directed this 80-minute version of Madame Butterfly. It’s beautifully designed pictorially but lacks the urgency and craft of his early masterpiece Destiny, released two years later. Lil Dagover plays the poised (if not very Japanese-looking) heroine who gets involved with an American naval officer. (JR) Read more
Having won more mainstream accolades than most of his other work combined, this enjoyable romantic comedy by 73-year-old Jacques Rivette may be his first real hit (1991’s La belle noiseuse is the only other contender). I can’t begrudge this fine director a rare commercial success, but aside from Hurlevent (1985) this is the only one of his 20 features that I have no desire to see again. After showing much distinction as a modernist (1960-’76) and a postmodernist (1978-’98) Rivette has made his first premodernist film: it’s fluffy, sometimes funny, and likably acted by Jeanne Balibar, Sergio Castellitto, Marianne Basler, Jacques Bonnaffe, Helene de Fougerolles, and Bruno Todeschini (call it Rivette Lite or, because it involves an Italian production of As You Desire Me being staged in Paris, call it Six Characters in Search of Billy Wilder). But it lacks the scariness, the mystery, and even much of the curiosity of Rivette’s better work; if you can’t stand something like Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974), there’s a good chance that you’ll love this one. In French with subtitles. 150 min. (JR) Read more
A slight misnomer, because not all the artists are Hollywood directors or renowned, and one who’s both (Gregg Toland) isn’t renowned as a director. But this sounds like an interesting program all the same: Frank Capra’s Fulta Fisher’s Boarding House (1921), Charles Vidor’s The Bridge (1929), Robert Florey and Slavko Vorkapich’s The Life and Death of 9413A Hollywood Extra (on which Toland worked, 1927), Orson Welles’s Hearts of Age (1934, five minutes of juvinelia codirected by William Vance), Lewis Jacobs’s Tree Trunk to Head (1936), and Warren Newcombe’s The Enchanted City (1922). (JR) Read more
I like the French title better, which is more descriptive and accuratePresque rien, meaning almost nothing. This first feature by Sebastien Lifshitz is a gay coming-of-age story that resembles so many others I’ve seen that for weeks I’ve been trying and failing to come up with something that might distinguish it apart from the clumsy flashback structure. Teenage boy meets teenage boy during a summer vacation near the beach (lots of rolling around in the surf), falls in love, comes out, and decides to move in with his lover rather than go to college. Neither of the boys is especially interesting, and the few other characters in the story are even more forgettable. If you’ve seen it all before, here’s your chance to see it once again. 100 min. (JR) Read more
Andre de Toth’s 1954 noir is gritty, powerful, and economically told. Sterling Hayden plays a sour, toothpick-chewing LA cop on the trail of an ex-con (a rare dramatic role by dancer Gene Nelson) who’s forced to participate in a bank robbery. Among the secondary cast are Crane Wilbur, Brian Foy, Phyllis Kirk, and Charles Buchinsky (later known as Charles Bronson). 74 min. (JR) Read more
