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Reviews
Driving Lessons (2006)
A cliché saved by its performers
The plot of this movie is a very old one. Religious people are weak at best or hypocrites at worst. Real life is to be found in friendship, drinks, one night stands, and secular art. The main character predictably discovers this in the end and is thereby saved from a life of saintly drudgery.
That said, the performances are spectacular and save the movie from being a dull cliché. There are only really four main characters -- Rupert Grint (the parson's kid), Nicholas Farrell (his weak cuckolded father), Laura Linney (the parson's errant wife), and Julie Walters (the alcoholic aging actress who hires Grint on as a kind of personal servant and teaches him about "real" life).
Grint can say more with his angry, furrowed stare than with any line. So they don't give him much to say. He even managed to maintain that stare when he sank beneath his bathwater. Linney plays a truly frightening holy witch. Farrell is depressingly repressed with a hopeless stoicism. Walters goes way over the top -- demanding, manipulating, cursing and generally playing the outrageous English eccentric. It's all been done many times before, but this cast does a very good job of it too.
Yes, the film obviously was inspired by Harold and Maude, but thankfully Grint and Walters do not consummate their relationship. At least as far as we know, although they spend lots of time sleeping together in a tent. They just become pals and Grint grows up. He learns his "driving lesson."
It's not a bad movie, but I wouldn't fight for a parking place to see it. You've seen it all before.
Hotel Rwanda (2004)
Help me Rwanda
I just finished watching Hotel Rwanda moments ago. It certainly didn't bore me. And I suppose I should say it was a good movie. But it's really just all part of that greater genre, the misery revolutions do to regular folks. It's something of a Doctor Zhivago in black skin.
Still, it had it's contemporary twists. Like when the main character, an hotelier, informs the Hutu five-star general that although the Americans and Europeans may have left for now, they certainly have his name on their list as a war criminal for judgment later. "That's how these people operate," he says. True enough.
You should probably give it a squint. But I don't get the premise that the whites are somehow responsible for not stopping the bloodshed. Didn't colonization end a long time ago? Aren't these people responsible for managing their own fate now? And if not, then are we obligated morally to renew occupation? These questions, of course, are not explored.
But the end titles do tell us that the hotelier is now happilly living with his extended family in Brussells. When the colonizers leave the colonized want to go with them. And who could blame them. Sub-Saharan Africa, as ever it has, sucks.
Bright Young Things (2003)
Not so bad
I saw Bright Young Things tonight. Sorry. But it had to be done.
Since I expected it to be awful, it didn't seem so bad. It's certainly a very pretty film. The main character I suppose is intended to be Evelyn Waugh. And he does a good job, and a bad one. Sometimes he behaves and talks just like you would think Waugh would have. At other times he's a million miles off. And the same with the plot lines. Some remind you of Saki, but others of Spielberg. I laughed out loud at times, and cringed at others. The ending is more shamelessly syrupy than anything even Spielberg would dare. Almost Bollywood. Waugh would have hated it.
I think this is a confused effort. Stephen Fry didn't know if he wanted to do Pinewood or Hollywood. So he did them both. Unfortunately it's an uneven mix that falls apart at the end.
Schultze Gets the Blues (2003)
Many subtle layers
I loved this movie. First of all there's the surface. Schultze is just so goddammed lovable. He pulls you in. Then there are the layers. And there are so many.
The juxtapositions. Schultze riding his bicycle on one side of the screen and the dirt bikers buzzing over the top of slag heaps on the other. His small garden house, a little Eden, overshadowed, of course, by a very large and nearly ancient slag heap.
Then the odd wanderlust. The woman at his mother's nursing home who insists she's French despite the fact that she's in a nursing home in East Germany. Followed by his sojourn to Louisiana, which insists on being French despite the fact that it's in America. Did he go there looking for her?
Then the premonitions. Early on a brief sound bite on the radio about lung cancer. Then near the end, he's offered a meal of crabs in the bayou. "Ja, Krebs," he says. Krebs means cancer in German. And he was a miner, so worked every day breathing radon. Did he have cancer?
And of course the music. An accordionist who plays the local polka, he picks up zydeco by ear and loves it. But his fellow Germans don't like it, and they're even less interested in the US. In fact he stops playing after he gets to America. They want polka even more than the Germans do, albeit a strange American kind that includes yodeling.
Then the unspoken. So much of this story is told by pictures, not dialog. It's a subtlety that Hollywood has completely lost touch with. It's so refreshing to see it again.
This movie is a delight. I defy anyone to dislike it. There's something of An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge in it, but it's not quite that facile.
It's a quiet tour de force. I want more.
Moloch (1999)
Middlebrow history
While a good movie certainly could be made about Hitler's time at the Berghof, this one is wide of the mark.
None of the characters, except Borman, is convincing. Goebbels, who albeit wittier was nearly as much of a sycophant as Borman, is not so here. Hitler often comes off like a frightened little boy which seems silly and gratuitous. And Hitler didn't have blue eyes, or any other Aryan features particularly; which is one of the great paradoxes about the man. Didn't they have enough money in the budget to get brown contact lenses?
But they really get onto tricky ground when they try to explore Hitler's sexuality. He is depicted, of course, as being a misfit who is aroused in an odd way. That's just too easy, and just as poorly thought out as everything else in this movie. Everything I've read about him indicates that he was a crushing bore off stage. My guess is he was just as tedious at bedtime matters.
If you want to know what life was like in the Eagle's Nest, read Inside the Third Reich yourself. If you want another fantastic "here's how I think Hitler was a weirdo" story, watch this movie.