Yearly Archives: 2001

The Malady Of Death

Adapted from a Marguerite Duras story that’s read offscreen by J.D. Trow, about sexual encounters between a man and woman, this 1994 film by Jeffrey Skoller explores the male body like a landscape, softly intercutting ocean waves, a bit of found footage, and a lot of very Durasian black leader; the overall effect is legato, lyrical, hypnotic, and incantatory. 43 min. (JR) Read more

Boesman & Lena

Danny Glover and Angela Bassett are highly impressive as a quarrelsome derelict couple in this 1999 film adaptation of Athol Fugard’s play about the internal damage caused by racism and poverty in South Africa. Director-screenwriter John Berry staged a successful production of the play off-Broadway in 1970, starring James Earl Jones, and his film, shot on location in and around Cape Town, plays rather daringly with the similarities and differences between theater and cinema, making the locales seem stagy yet using the ‘Scope format in an exciting, dynamic manner that recalls the 50s mise en scene of Nicholas Ray. Berry died shortly after the film was completed, and it stands as a deeply affecting conclusion to a stage and screen career that included acting with Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre in the 30s and being blacklisted by Hollywood in the early 50s. A white man whose family had its ups and downs, economically speaking, Berry always had a particular feeling for what it means to be poor as well as black, and with the help of his wonderful actors he makes the most of it here. 88 min. (JR) Read more

The Wedding Planner

Dopey but charming, this romantic comedyabout a San Francisco wedding planner (Jennifer Lopez) experiencing love at first sight vis-a-vis a pediatrician (Matthew McConaughey) who turns out to be the expectant groom in one of her assignmentsdraws much of its allure from the two leads. Most of the remainder comes from a clear desire to emulate and approximate various second-tier studio musicals and comedies that one might associate with the early 50s. This never rises above such treacle but happily lives up to it every chance it gets. With Bridgette Wilson-Sampras, Justin Chambers, Judy Greer, and Kathy Najimy; written by Pamela Falk and Michael Ellis and directed by Adam Shankman. 100 min. (JR) Read more

Antitrust

A silly but fairly harmless industrial espionage thriller in which Tim Robbins plays a ruthless software billionaire transparently based on Bill Gates. Ryan Phillippe (Cruel Intentions) is the pretty-boy genius programmer in Silicon Valley who gets enlisted into the tycoon’s Portland-based company and satellite communications program, where he starts to become aware of foul play long after the viewer has figured everything out. The paranoid romantic subplot, delirious and intermittently good campy fun, suggests that this movie might have been called I Married a Capitalist, though the nonstop product placementsplus the fact that, given the nonenforcement of antitrust laws, you aren’t likely to see this studio effort in many independent theaterstend to interfere somewhat with this purity of intention. Peter Howitt unexceptionally directed the unexceptional Howard Franklin script; with Rachael Leigh Cook, Claire Forlani, and Yee Jee Tso. 108 min. (JR) Read more

Company Man

I certainly wanted to like this belatedly released comedy, about the bumbling inefficiency of the CIAthe organization that under the inspired auspices of George Bush sponsored and promoted Saddam Hussein, and also inspired Elaine May’s underrated satire Ishtar. But this is the unfunniest comedy I can recall seeing in ages, and considering that it was copyrighted in 1999, many others must have felt the same way; why it’s being released now is anyone’s guess. The star is cowriter and codirector Douglas McGrath, who also cowrote Bullets Over Broadway; he plays a wimpy grammar teacher who finds himself working for the CIA in Cuba in the early 60s, trying to overthrow Castro (Anthony LaPaglia). As an actor he isn’t bad, and as a scriptwriter he’s no slouch, but when it comes to the direction that’s credited to him and cowriter Peter Askin, the CIA itself might have done a better job. The main instruction to the cast appears to have been Overactperhaps the unfortunate legacy of Askin’s stage backgroundwhich has a murderous effect on the performances of John Turturro, Woody Allen, and Sigourney Weaver, among others. 81 min. (JR) Read more

Blow Dry

The English national hair championships pit a former prizewinner (Alan Rickman), who works with his son (Josh Hartnett), against his former wife (Natasha Richardson), who’s been involved with his former model (Rachel Griffiths) for the past decade. This comedy-drama was written by Simon Beaufoy, who brought us The Full Monty, and it has some of the same gamy mix of alternative sexuality and working-class heart; Paddy Breathnach furnishes the adequate direction. 100 min. (JR) Read more

Love 101

Adrian Fulle wrote and directed this independent feature, though I can’t imagine what differentiates his competently made teenage-sex movie from Hollywood teenage-sex movies, apart from the absence of a studio logo at the beginning. Maybe it’s the independent sense of humor expressed in its dialogue: Women are like Democrats, man. You can’t live with them, but you can sure get fucked by them. Just as you have to rule out the existence of female Democrats to find this funny, you’ll probably have to rule out the existence of independent films unencumbered by studiothink to find this even halfway bearable. Once you’ve accomplished that, you may or may not find that the skillful camera work and adequate performancesby Michael Muhney, Mary Kay Cook, Jon Collins, Jim Slonina, Heidi Mokrycki, and Jeff Andersonenhance this familiar tale of sexual rivalry between roommates and sexual confidence triumphing over insecurity, complete with elevator music. (JR) Read more

Moonlight Whispers

Akihiko Shiota’s first feature (1999, 100 min.), improbably based on a Japanese comic strip, is a disturbing look at a teenage boy’s sadomasochistic relationship with a 17-year-old girl he worships. At first he becomes fetishistically attached to her socks, photographs he takes of her legs, and sounds he records in her bathroom; eventually he volunteers to become her slave, which leads to cruel exploitation and diverse humiliations and traps both of them in the same compulsive games. Shiota seems uncertain whether to play this story for laughs or to treat his characters more compassionately, so the film starts wavering and wobbling toward the end, but it’s pungent and unsettling nonetheless. Interestingly, his second feature, Don’t Look Back, made the same year, took on very different material, a sensitive and unsensational story about two ten-year-old boys. (JR) Read more

The Castle

Made for Austrian TV, Michael Haneke’s serious and reasonably faithful 1997 adaptation of Kafka’s best novel isn’t the best or most interesting film made from the writer’s work; I’d give that honor either to Orson Welles’s flawed but fascinating The Trial (1962) or to Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet’s eccentric rendition of Amerika, Class Relations (1983). But this is almost certainly the truest interpretation of one of Kafka’s novels, all of which were left unfinished; it even literally ends in the middle of a sentence. If memory serves, there’s plenty of Kafka’s humor here as well. 123 min. (JR) Read more

The Pledge

The third feature directed by Sean Penn and the first one that I’ve liked. Adapted by the couple Jerzy Kromolowski and Mary Olson-Kromolowski from a 1958 Friedrich D Read more

Taboo

Poetry and style aren’t qualities one ordinarily associates with writer-director Nagisa Oshima (In the Realm of the Senses), but this haunting, dreamlike tale of a beautiful and narcissistic military recruit (Ryuhei Matsuda) in 1865 training to become a samurai warrior, who bewitches and obsesses the men around him, is a triple-distilled example of poetic style, action and violence included. Because the central character is something of an angel of death, the film isn’t exactly politically correct in its treatment of homosexuality, but it’s debatable whether it can be called homophobic either, at least in any ordinary sense. Though it’s based on two novellas from Ryotaro Shiba’s Shinsengumi Keppuroku, it suggests a tribute to the great Kenji Mizoguchi, a Japanese master Oshima hasn’t shown much reverence for in the past. Its long takes, its lyrical and nearly constant camera movements, and its ghostly and atmospheric studio sets all suggest Mizoguchi, and the dialogue makes reference to Tales of Moonlight and Rain, the literary source of Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu Monogatari. Originally titled Gohatto, this 1999 feature was Oshima’s first in 13 years, directed mainly from a wheelchair due to his 1996 stroke, and it includes some of the biggest stars in contemporary Japanese cinema, including Takeshi Kitano (impressive in a noncomic role), Tadanobu Asano, and Shinji Takeda, as well as a score by Ryuichi Sakamoto. Read more

Photos Of Alix

An 18-minute short by French director Jean Eustache, in which Alix-Clio Roubaud, the wife of poet Jacques Roubaud, talks about her photographs with Eustache’s young son Boris. The 1980 short bears an interesting resemblance to Hollis Frampton’s Nostalgia, in that the photographs discussed aren’t the ones we’re seeing. (JR) Read more

Santa Claus Has Blue Eyes

Jean Eustache (The Mother and the Whore) directed this touching portrait of small-town life in his native Narbonne, where a poor young man trying to meet girls gets a job dressing up as Santa Claus. The film was shot on black-and-white 35-millimeter stock left over from Jean-Luc Godard’s Masculine Feminine and stars Jean-Pierre Léaud, the lead actor in that film and in many ways the principal icon of the French New Wave. In French with subtitles. 47 min. Read more

Le Cochon

Jean Eustache’s 1970 documentary, codirected with Jean-Michel Barjol and shot over one day, is a remarkable materialist rendering of everything that happens to a pig in central France from its slaughter to its conversion into sausages. This was produced by the great critic-filmmaker Luc Moullet, and bears an interesting thematic relation to his own Genesis of a Meal (1978), about the routes and processes of various raw ingredients on their way to a simple meal. 50 min. (JR) Read more