Reviews

The only Dogma movie at the 2000 Cannes film festival, The King is Alive is, like all Dogmas, pumped with negative energy and pessimism, yet remains strangely humorous and always entertaining. It tells the story of a bus breakdown in the North African desert, and the decent into lunacy of the already-eccentric group of passengers, who eventually decide to put on an absurd production of King Lear to pass the time.

Admittedly, the injection of Shakespeare feels like something of a stunt, and some dissenters even complained that the desert was too unfairly photogenic for the Dogma principals. But The King is Alive grows horrific on its own terms, like a sophisticated Blair Witch Project but without an evil other for them (or us) to run away from.

The offbeat cast includes Jennifer Jason Leigh, Bruce Davison, the great David Bradley, the late Brion James, and Janet McTeer who, as a neurotic American, vulgarizes her way through a killer scene where she demands to know about her husband's taste in women.

O Brother Where Art Thou is much too episodic and anecdotal to offer a strong narrative, though it does get better as it goes along. Then again, I should mention that the story is based on Homer's The Odyssey (he's even credited in the opening titles), updated to the Depression-era deep South.

Costarring John Turturro, newcomer Tim Blake Nelson, and a very uncomfortable George Clooney (and Holly Hunter, who's utterly wasted), the film succeeds mainly on the level of production design, cinematography, and music, but not much else. All Coen films suceed technically; the mediocre ones like this do nothing else.

Directed by Darren Aronofsky, who made a name for himself in 1998 with his art house success Pi, Requiem for a Dream is virtually a continual montage which apparently has more single cuts than any mainstream feature ever made.

Comparable to a cinematic fireworks show (with a grand finale included), it is distinguished by an unexpectedly poignant center, the hopes and dreams of a pitiable group of drug addicts longing for a better life. Ellen Burstyn, who's been erroneously ignored by Hollywood lately, is heartbreaking as a bleary-eyed Brooklynite who, in the movie's only tranquil scene, sobs about her fruitless quest for happiness.

Yet even she is at the mercy of the film's visual style, a clobbering assault on the senses that makes the experience of watching it nearly interactive. The Magnolia of 2000, which, depending on your taste, could be a good thing or a bad one.

As coincidence would have it, the last truly great film of the century is a genuine whopper that positions itself on the inherent belief in random coincidences. Magnolia, though, is not an essay on the chaos theory--while its balls are pressed firmly against the wall, it instead digs at the less obvious nuances that make us all collectively tick. As the sublime tagline suggests, "Things fall down. People look up. And when it rains, it pours." Barrelhousing its way through Los Angeles on a single eventful day, the film is both actor and director driven, virtually plotless from beginning to end, overflowing with excess, and as long and laborious as a cardiovascular workout (and with several notable faults, but as to be expected of such a watershed). Having shown his liberal tendency to footnote in Hard Eight and Boogie Nights, Anderson patently borrows from Altman, Scorsese, even Godard and Fellini, but infuses their ghosts with a new life--even in their primes, while their narratives might have been tighter, those directors never ever had this big of a heart. Scene after scene, he taps into reservoirs of emotion that link parents and children, conflict and forgiveness, crisis and opportunity, sunshine and rain.

Maintaining a daredevil grip on all of his concepts and characters, Anderson's filmmaking is magnetized with a fearlessness that, for better or worse, is unparalleled in contemporary American cinema. Additionally, one gets the impression from watching Magnolia that he would do absolutely anything for his actors, and they would do absolutely anything for him (especially Philip Seymour Hoffman, Julianne Moore, William H. Macy, and Philip Baker Hall, all of whose work in Magnolia is easily among their best). The only worry about Anderson (Oscar-nominated for his Magnolia screenplay) is that he will never be able to top this film's artistic success. How easily, for instance, could he go the way of Spike Lee, another puzzling, ambitious filmmaker who exactly ten years before Magnolia released his own third film, Do the Right Thing, and has never been quite the same since. Time will tell, of course, but my money is on Anderson--his seeds are much too rich not to sprout. In what will in due time be regarded as one of the most eloquent expressions of human emotion ever in a movie, Anderson uses the haunting Aimee Mann song "Wise Up" as a poignant narrative thread. Mann begins by singing: "It's not what you thought / when you first began it." And given the fact that Magnolia opens with a hand-cranked camera shot of the hangman's gallows (circa 1911), and closes with a woman drenched in sunlight, smiling for the first time, I'm going to take Mann's vocals for all the comprehensive optimism they're worth.

I was a fan of Neil LaBute's nasty, low-budget In the Company of Men, but I found his third film Nurse Betty to be an awkward, clumsy, and almost unwatchable mess. It tells the story of Betty (intolerably scrunched-faced Renee Zellweger) who, after witnessing her degenerate husband being scalped in her living room by black marauders, goes crazy and imagines her favorite soap opera to be real life. Morgan Freeman is passable as a hard-luck hit man, but the real shocker is Chris Rock, who is at his absolute unfunniest in a depthless role as Freeman's son. The movie is never once incisive, meaningful, or even warm; each character has a whole lot of problems, but I'd to say that at this point, none are as serious as LaBute's.

At Cannes, some said that Dancer in the Dark was perhaps the most emotionally devastating film they had ever experienced, while Variety, in an instantly famous hate-opus, and others called it `auteurist self-importance that's artistically bankrupt on almost every level.' My reaction fell somewhere between the two, seriously underwhelmed yet not seriously offended. Shot on video, the movie looks crummy and amateurish, like a film school remake of von Trier's 1996 legitimate masterpiece Breaking the Waves. Playing a blind factor worker in love with Hollowood musicals, pop star Bjork is satisfactory, though it is disconcerting to hear her repeat `I'm from Czechoslovakia' over and over in her broken Icelandic accent. Supporting actors Catherine Deneuve, David Morse, and Peter Stormare are all negligible.

The movie's main problem lies in its awful musical set-pieces, all of which are technically inextricable and thematically worthless--instead of recreating the Hollywood musical numbers that his heroine fantasizes about, von Trier indulges himself, attempting to reinvent the genre and even going so far as employing an obnoxious 100 digital video cameras for a single scene. (Advocates of the movie give him great credit for this.)

Von Trier's winning of the coveted Palme d'Or at Cannes was easy to call. All the chips were in place: it was his sixth time at Cannes, having come close but never won (and having been quite verbal about losing, even cursing jury president Roman Polanski in 1991 and throwing his token technical award in the garbage); the tragic heroine angle was right up Jury President Luc Besson's alley--von Trier has admitted the influence of Joan of Arc and on his work, and Besson is obviously no stranger, his screen biography The Messenger having been an epic flop the following fall; and most interestingly, the choice is history making, being the first digital video (albeit not a Dogma) to be awarded the Palme d'Or.

From America's choice surrealist, something even more unexpected than finding a dismembered body part in the grass. A simple true tale about an arthritic lawnmower man named Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth), the G-rating and overall pure goodness of the film automatically lends itself to gooey sentimentalism, but it triumphs for being eerie when it could have easily been dull, heartfelt when it could have been trite.

And the director does not go unnoticed: the small-town aesthetic, the opening and closing shots of outer space and, of course, the deer lady, all make for a quintessential Lynch-ing experience. Together with Angelo Badalamenti's spooky score and Freddie Francis's sumptuous cinematography, this is one of the greatest American filmmaking accomplishments of 1999.

Less than sixty-seconds into Danny Boyle's paradise-lost story The Beach, and we already know we're in dangerously shallow water. "My name is Richard," announces the tedious voice of our protagonist. "So what else do you want to know?" Presumably the question is rhetorical, but it surely doesn't make our souls feel less tested two hours down the road. Based on a mildly acclaimed 1997 novel by Alex Garland, The Beach has absolutely nothing to say, not a sentence, not two words, not a cough of profundity in its entire length--but it's going to talk away anyway.

But the movie is nothing more than harmless junk. Leonardo DiCaprio, in his first major movie role in two years, does have his moments and, while none of them are perfect, this film ultimately proved that his supposed mighty post-Titanic power over Hollywood was wildly overestimated.

Nothing satisfies like watching a pig out of its pen, running rampant in the parlor--especially when that parlor is not only Hollywood but mother America as well. The movie South Park, based on an overrated scatological cable show, was an absolute declaration of war, an robust indictment against America's bulging irresponsibility, vile narrow-mindedness, and arch-conservatism.

The humor is foul-mouthed, cynical, and very funny, but more than anything else it's subversive and topical, unprecedented even by the standards of satire. What movie has even commented upon the MPAA rating system or the television V-chip or the US military or Bill Gates or Barbara Streisand (among others), no less attack them so unabashedly?

The crude aesthetic, of course, was integral, as were the fabulous musical numbers--on top of everything else, South Park is the best musical, as well as the best musical critique, in decades. I have met people who, quoting that old retarded adage, say that they "just know they wouldn't like this movie" But I predict that history will reward South Park the way it has Dr. Strangelove and Network--as a thunderously realized, albeit cartoonish, reflection of its time.

Despite way too much so-called "fictionalizing for dramatic effect" in the third act, Mann's riveting whistle-blower epic is high drama of the finest pedigree. It's a soft subject matter for the creator of Miami Vice and Heat (minimal violence, no one dies, no one really gets hurt), and Mann has been roundly accused of self-importance because of his overblown styling. The movie is indeed too long and too tumultuous--but if this is a product of a filmmaker's self-importance, then I wish more directors would wake up and start thinking more of themselves.

After being revered as a screenwriting pioneer for his systematic translation of Michael Ondaatje's professedly untranslatable novel of The English Patient, Anthony Minghella, a onetime playwright turned quintessential Miramaxer, may have rightfully concluded that adaptation was his strong point--yet the screenplay for his adaptation of Talented Mr. Ripley is by far its most tremendous shortcoming. Patricia Highsmith's terrifically readable 1955 crime fiction is written as tidily as any screenwriter could hope for (she also wrote Strangers on a Train). Scenes of psychological game playing mixed with insidious deception and droll humor leap off the page as if practically begging to be filmed. But instead of a straightforward adaptation, Minghella seems obliged to radically alter Highsmith's prose, as if this somehow was the only way to further secure his place as screenwriter extraordinaire. As it turns out, his alterations, particularly having to do with the trajectory of the title character--some mildly provocative yet most flamingly, gratuitously needless--cause the entire film's downfall, punching holes in the narrative instead of strengthening it. The picture is certainly adequate enough to pass for a guilty pleasure, though still one deeply problematic, highly irregular, fiercely misguided job. Luckily for Minghella, though, the film's sharpest tool is Matt Damon, whose characteristically dauntless, hugely difficult to pull off, near-perfect performance as Ripley is easily his best to date.

Disemboweled by critics and rejected by audiences when it opened in theaters, this camp-period-horror-supernatural-comedy-action-adventure-western-romance about spiritual cannibalism during western expansion is way beyond description. The momentum slows down in the second half and the allegory to manifest destiny is questionable, but it is still a great, inexplicable picture.

Released by the pre-Phantom Menace 20th Century Fox, Ravenous also has an unforgettable soundtrack--a macabre, kinky mix by Michael Nyman (Gattaca, The Piano) and Damon Albarn (of the rock group Blur). All together delicious!

Taking place in the early 1940s, the hollow Cider House Rules begins with an establishing shot of a train pulling into a snowy, rundown station in Maine, and you can bet your life that as it depicts our hero's elliptical journey, it will end more-or-less the same exact way. We meet Dr. Larch (saving grace Michael Caine), a patriarchal orphanage director who, in private, sucks as much gas as Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet and performs illegal abortion in the back room, dumping the fetuses out in the incinerator. "I just give these women what they want," presses Larch, "an orphan or an abortion."

Larch's medical prodigy and surrogate son is one of the older orphans named Homer Wells (grotesquely dull Tobey Maguire), a teenager who knows all about birthin' babies, yet, for artificial-sounding moral reasons, refuses to participate in the abortions. When a friendly Air Force pilot (Paul Rudd) and his platinum-blond fiancie, Candy (Charlize Theron) arrive at the orphanage for a first-trimester abortion, Homer decides to hitch a ride with them in order to explore the outside world. His journey is bound to be haphazard and undetermined, and the tough-lover Dr. Larch is opposed to it, but acts aloof.

Charlize Theron, by the way, is as laughably bad here as she was in this summer's Astronaut's Wife--and equally easy on the eyes. She is perhaps the only actress who can get away with looking so damn stunning post-operation. She pulls off the unthinkable--she actually makes abortion look sexy!

While on his travels, Homer toils along with a kindly crew of black apple pickers, headed by the intensified actor Delroy Lindo from Clockers (whose role here is far too unrealized to even be considered offensive) and R&B artist Erykah Badu as his tight-lipped daughter. Homer also falls for Candy (or so he thinks), who lives on the same property as the apple cider house, and whose fiancé' has conveniently gone off to fight in the war.

As it murderously belabors their romance with much too little parallel action, the film seems to be boring itself to death. The script calls for the characters to be engaging in an affair that is both passionate and chilly, yet Maguire and Theron are unthawable in their disastrous scenes together. Even when they make love, Theron's expression is spiritless enough to make one remark that she has a 5-inch icicle inside her--and indeed coming from Maguire, she very well might. This might be the oddest couple of all time, that is if it weren't for the even nuttier actualization of Maguire and pop-songstress Jewel in Ride with the Devil.

Twice as ambitious as an Altman ensemble yet half as accessible, this lurid drama from the French director of Queen Margot begins at full-speed-ahead and hardly slows down thereafter.

The film follows a disjointed, motley crew as they travel by train to the funeral of a condescending painter they all once loved. Director Chereau has enough faith in his ideas to incite scenes of tortuous incoherence, most in the first 20 minutes, but when the dust settles the film develops into a character-driven masterpiece in which every scene is the big one.

The ensemble is superb, especially Jean-Louis Trintignant as both the painter and his brother, and the Americanized-in-vain Vincent Perez, back in his homeland where he belongs as a sharp-tongued transsexual.

There is a moment early on in Breaking the Waves where the lank-haired, doe-eyed Bess frolics out to the oceanside during a particularly joyous period in her life and, without premeditating it, turns to us, the audience, and offers a sharp blink and a smile. More than any other self-reflexive moment I can remember, Bess's greeting, a sweet salutation really, cuts right through me. Directed by the Dane Lars Von Trier (The Kingdom 1 and 2) and photographed by Robby Muller (Beyond the Clouds, Dead Man), the film's outward appearance is pretentious Euro-trash--seasickly handheld camera movement, long dramatic pauses, direct addresses to God, and panoramic shots of surrealistic landmasses in between acts, backed up by Elton John pop tunes.

These precise elements, though, are what make the experience so unforgettable. It is a cruel classic, one that requires a dedicated, corn-fed viewer to properly absorb all of its emotion. Telling the ostensible story of a simple woman who is shattered by the paralysis of her husband, it's much more literate than it might seem. Love, it illustrates, is a very mighty power.

The performances of Stellan Skarsgard, as Jan, Bess's starry-eyed husband, and Katrin Cartlidge, as her down to earth sister-in-law, permeate every quiet moment with unspeakable compassion.

But in the lead role, Emily Watson delivers what is doubtlessly one of the three or four greatest screen performances of all time, a haunting, meditative, lurid, and astoundingly courageous job in which is she conveys supposedly misbehaved emotions that other actors would need a lifetime to draw out, if ever at all. A first-time actress, almost every scene of the film could have easily been screwed up by her, particularly a number of moments which require Bess to talk to directly to God, playing both parts. (Her literal interpretation of religion must be rationalized properly if we are to understand this film--especially its highly contested final shot, which I won't even get started on.) Watson, who hasn't been half as good in anything since, makes every exquisite second of the film, indeed every little smile, though-provoking and multi-meaningful. More than any other film of the 1990s, and despite (or maybe because of) some truly disturbing subject matter, Breaking the Waves is the kind of movie to watch with someone you love.

For all of its magic, enchantment, and uncorrupted feel-goodness, I am always taken back to the first lines of narration whenever I think of this unmitigated cinematic masterpiece, Babe. "This is the tale of an unprejudiced heart," pronounces the sonorous narrator, "and how it changed life in our valley forever." Now come on, has any movie ever had a pitch as emotionally loaded, as uncynical, and as singularly immaculate as that? Culled from an original fable, but reminiscent of the most fanciful writings of Aesop, Potter, and Orwell, Babe is indeed a talking-pig movie, but only in the most superficial terms. Seen through the eyes of a small white piglet who embodies the purest of existential ambitions, the film is a perfect metaphor for societal prejudice, individual aspiration to achieve, and the grim realities of animal life. And although it has its cheerless, manufactured moments, it is never preachy (saying more with two words--"That'll do"--than most movies say altogether), and extends its message of love and harmony without a drop of sentimentalism. Won by a Farmer (James Cromwell) at a state fair for use as a future Christmas ham, Babe the pig is taken in by his surrogate mother Fly, a sheepdog. Immediately the pig wants to be a sheepdog as well, and--being completely unaware of the rigid social dynamic of the farm--sees no viable reason why he shouldn't be one.

One of the most lovable aspects of little Babe is that oftentimes we do doubt his intelligence--pigs are indicated as being the stupidest creatures on the farm, and there are occasions when Babe's bumbling disposition suggests exactly that. But what saves Babe is his sincerely good heart. The tenderness and benevolence in his sweet voice manages to affect every living thing on the farm--including the Farmer. While special credit goes to the combination of computer animation, live animals, and puppets that make up the expressionistic barnyard posse, a very unique mention should go to Cromwell too, so humbly transcendent and human as the Farmer, and making for one-half of the most memorable screen friendship of the decade. The role is almost speechless throughout, but it climaxes with his singing of the lullaby "If I Had Words to Make a Day For You" to the frail and gloomy Babe, a scene that might be second to none in terms of its emotional punch. Babe and his friends were seen again in a sequel, Babe: Pig in the City, which was a terrible financial disappointment but actually equals its predecessor in many respects, tackling even darker issues. Both movies exist as if the medium was invented exactly for this--to tell the tale of an unprejudiced heart.