SHORT REVIEWS OF NEW
RELEASES SEEN, APRIL 2003
All films from U.S.A. unless
otherwise specified.
(- seen on video; [v] video
piece; [s] short, under 30 minutes; [m] medium length, 30-69 min; * grade
changed upon repeat viewing)
[8]
City
(Ernie Gehr) [v/s]
What
does video add to the urban sensibility of Gehr’s work? In this case, an inverse relationship
between color and depth. This work, a
series of stationary shots on Market Street, begins with the shocking oranges
and greens of mass transit vehicles and the bright clothing of
pedestrians. The views are saturated
and direct, but over time, they are replaced by deeper and deeper layers of
reflection. The relay of images -- panes
of glass seen in other, spatially ambiguous panes of glass – produces ghostly
transparencies and discrepancies in scale.
(The Gehr film City most closely resembles is 1971’s Still.) But mostly the impression is of
greenish-gray inaccessibility, life kept apart from us and itself. Whether it was part of the plan or not,
certain stores (See’s Candies, Rite Aid) jump out, video somehow making their
presence even more aggressive than usual.
We watch a man buy candy through a window with a sign in it – OPEN – and
as we see white yuppies and Sikhs and Asians and blacks brush past each other,
I realized an irony, that capitalism and commerce is what brings people
together in this way. Whether we like
it or not, the market economy does tend to produce the most “open,” diverse
society. This is a rich and moving
work, much more so for me since it evocatively depicts a place I love very
much, one I am soon to leave.
[7]
Better
Luck Tomorrow (Justin Lin)
It’s
hard for me to believe that anyone would look at this film and see a bad
movie. It certainly has its flaws, but
there is so much life and exuberance coming through that I can’t understand how
it could be simply dismissed. There is
some poor acting (Roger Fan in particular), and the whole conception of
Virgil’s character is rather shaky. But
more than anything, this film is bursting at the seams. It needed to be a full
hour longer, so that (for instance), the rapid-fire descent into hardcore
criminality could actually progress, as it did in Goodfellas (an obvious
inspiration), so that we could actually encounter these kids’ parents (who
presumably play some role in
their overachievement), so that the Ben / Stephanie pas-de-deux could unfold
more meaningfully. In short, this film
has to be under two hours in order to function in the marketplace as a teen
film, but it has the potential to be so much more. The finale was a muddled mess, which again just points to the
structural difficulty to telling this story in the time allotted. Dare we hope for an expansive director’s cut
DVD?
Chaos (Coline Serreau, France)
This is an odd one. Utterly unpleasant to watch, yet compelling and ultimately
capable of earning my respect, Chaos
is several things at once. It plays
like a farce, with breakneck speed, well-choreographed implausibilities, and
cruel, stylized dialogue designed to reduce its characters to positions in the
game plan. But it isn’t remotely
funny. The thing stops dead in its
tracks for an extended flashback, wherein the central character elaborates a
tale of violence and sexual victimization whose unlikely outcome seems to serve
as a big fuck-you to Pretty Woman
and its ilk. It’s about female
empowerment, but also about how a sexist society produces some women who are so
disgustingly Machiavellian that their triumph is little cause for celebration. It’s also an Algerian fantasy, a visitation
of sweet revenge upon conservative bourgeois France. It’s Teorema
but it scrapes its men off like barnacles.
It’s Visitor Q in
reverse.
[6]
The
Core (Jon Amiel)
“And
what if the core is made of cheese?”
Stanley Tucci, channeling Dr. Smith from Lost in Space, poses
this challenge to one of the film’s straight men, Bruce Greenwood’s grim flight
commander. This sums things up pretty
well. The humor in this film operates
on two distinct tracks. First the
ensemble, playing it like some sort of ridiculous 1950s drive-in flick. (Tucci and Delroy Lindo are the
standouts. Were their characters, like,
estranged lovers?) But second, and most significantly, the disaster set-pieces
(crazy birds and Rome’s-a-poppin’ in particular) are low-budget, OTT
howlers. The ending peters out, and
periodic stabs at an emotional core are wrongheaded in the extreme. But when it’s on (e.g., Tucci’s last
testament), this thing delivers like peach flambée.
The
Good Thief (Neil Jordan, U.K. / France / Canada / Ireland)
Style
to burn, lovely to look at, and a tour de force for Nolte. I was with it for quite a while. But if Jordan and company can revise Bob
le flambeur’s ambivalent ending (bad move), why can’t it update gender
relations past 1967? Nutsa Kukhanidze’s
Anne gets most of the best lines in the well-written script, but this
ultimately doesn’t compensate for her weakness (drugs, one Bob is able to kick
like a tough guy), or the way good criminals go soft after they have sex
reassignment. These are the problems
that compromise what should have been a frivolous pleasure. Also, at this point
I think I could happily go the rest of my life never hearing Bono’s voice
again.
[5]
The
Final Flight of the Osiris (Andy Jones) [s]
This
is “The Animatrix,” and I guess if I were one of those dweebs who’s been
scouring the Web for anything Matrix-related, I would have seen several
more of these. Okay. It presents a little dollop of backstory,
but mostly it is there to remind us of the basic tenets of Matrixland
(“Look, Sentinels!”) since it’s been a long time. The first half (blindfolded fencing / equal opportunity
striptease) would have been sexy if, you know, I were one of those dweebs who
got a boner from ink and paint.
Glider
(Ernie Gehr) [v/m]
Toward
the end of this screening, I recalled that Brakhage had allegedly compared
video to sand painting. That’s pretty
apposite here, since Glider’s curving, elongated tracking shots across
the bowl of the camera obscura at Cliff House (SF) turn the Pacific Ocean and
the Great Highway into indistinct, striated bands of extreme
horizontality. The camera obscura is fixed, so Glider serves as an exploration of a specific place in the world. And while the horizontality of water is slightly distorted, the hazed abstraction of taffy-pulled coastal buildings is by far the most seductive, disorienting visual motif. The piece is somewhat unvaried in tone and rhythm. This may well be the point -- an extended imbibation in a radically altered vision -- but at the time it made the video seem undercomposed and a bit overlong. In retrospect, I think I still feel this way, but I also suspect the piece could benefit from a move in the other direction. An even longer running time might push our engagement with the images past the point of novelty and eventual familiarity, into a hypnotic, enveloping eye control.
Marion
Bridge (Wiebke von Carolsfeld, Canada)
As
I was watching this, I thought of Loach’s Sweet Sixteen. The two have nothing much in common, except
that they both contain moments of incisive characterization and poignant local
color, but smother them within heavy-handed narrative convention. After a while, the vibrant grace notes stopped
floating to the surface, and the over-articulated sibling histories and
precious family-secret structure won the day. Not bad, just undistinguished.
[4]
The
Last Letter (Frederick Wiseman) [m]
Good
to see Wiseman branching out, but there is a stultifying rigidity to this
adaptation of a not-very-interesting-looking stage play. Catherine Samie’s performance is as
expressive as it can be, given the dramatic limitations of a one-woman show. There is nothing revelatory about the
woman’s Nazi-era tale, however true it may be.
Wiseman’s turgid staging (close-up on monologuing actress / long shadow
out the door) adds little.
Raising
Victor Vargas (Peter Sollett)
Or:
I Was Swaggering, But. . . I
open myself to plenty of charges by not liking this one – that I’m an elitist,
that I loathe accessibility, that I am biased against American Independent
Cinema, etc. But mostly, I regret
skipping Real Women Have Curves, which couldn’t have been any more
hackneyed or manipulative than this.
The difference? Perhaps that most of the critics so enchanted with Victor
Vargas are men, who identify with his buffoonish braggadocio. This was sitcom material all the way: silly
secondary plot with Victor’s sister and Judy’s brother, the broad old-world
ethno-Catholicism of the grandmother, the poppy salsa interludes whose
disappearance in the final reel denote seriousness, the elision of actual sex
(which I guess demonstrates non-prurient “humanism,” contra Larry
Clark). Nice new seats at the Act I Theatre, congrats Landmark dudes.
[W/O]
Dreamcatcher
(Lawrence Kasdan)
Nice
of the Landmark Shattuck manager to bend the rules and give me a refund at the
55-minute mark. So bad it’s good? No.
What it is is a script filled with stylized phrases and motifs (e.g.,
“fuck me Freddy,” “fuckeroo / fuckeree”), all endlessly repeated, as if they
were actual literary tropes instead of a grab bag of sub-literate dogshit. Also, on the way home, I saw an abandoned
tamale husk on the floor of the BART train.
How elastic has the definition of
“finger food” gotten these days?
Come now.