The Films Of Tom Waits
Movies Tom Waits acts in.
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- DirectorSylvester StalloneStarsSylvester StalloneLee CanalitoArmand AssanteThree Italian-American brothers, living in the slums of 1940's New York City, try to help each other with one's wrestling career using one brother's promotional skills and another brother's con-artist tactics to thwart a sleazy manager.Film auteur Sylvester Stallone wrote, directed, and stars in this re-working of Rocky to fit an old-fashioned Hollywood formula, depicting three brothers from New York's Hell's Kitchen of the 1940s who want to claw their way out of poverty. Lee Canalito is the muscle-brained iceman Victor, and Armand Assante is the embittered, crippled war veteran Lenny. But the smooth-talking con man brother Cosmo (Sylvester Stallone), sees beef-cake Victor's fists as their ticket out of the slums. Cosmo, ever the manipulator, convinces the dull-witted Victor to participate in a series of bone-crunching wrestling matches as Kid Salami. Cosmo and Lenny exploit Victor's brute strength to grab the fast money on the wrestling circuit. But their climb to success is halted when the local gangster Stitch (Kevin Conway) puts up his malicious and dangerous wrestler Frankie the Thumper (Terry Funk) to fight against Kid Salami in a 22-round meat-pounder.
by Paul Brenner
AllMovie - DirectorMichael WadleighStarsAlbert FinneyDiane VenoraEdward James OlmosA New York cop investigates a series of brutal deaths that resemble animal attacks.This attempt to crossbreed visceral shocks and social commentary has ambition to spare, but is too muddled in its approach to really work. The key problem with Wolfen is that it burdens its plot with tons of details and messages that crowd the other aspects of its storytelling. David Eyre and Michael Wadleigh's script never successfully integrates the film's horror element into its police procedural plot line, thus making the film's scary moments feel like afterthoughts, and struggles to work in a lot of social commentary on subjects like the homeless, America's treatment of Native Americans, and the negative effects of urban renewal. As a result, the film suffers from an awkward sense of rhythm as it struggles to juggle all this material. Even worse, the preponderance of plotting and messages in Wolfen leaves little room for characterization. Albert Finney and Diane Venora struggle to breath life into their sketchy roles, but simply don't have enough to work with. Only Edward James Olmos manages to make an impression with his intense work as a wily Native American activist. On the plus side, Wolfen benefits from solid technical credits. Gerry Fisher's cinematography captures the grimy and glamorous sides of New York City with equal aplomb and James Horner's thunderous score adds a much-needed creepy atmosphere to the proceedings. However, no amount of technical slickness can make up for the Wolfen's muddled storytelling and it can only be recommended to werewolf movie completists.
by Donald Guarisco
AllMovie - DirectorFrancis Ford CoppolaStarsFrederic ForrestTeri GarrRaul JuliaA couple has a fight after living together 5 years in Las Vegas. They go out and celebrate 4th of July, each with a new partner. Breakup?Francis Ford Coppola's One From the Heart can be generously described as an experiment gone wrong, a case of style trumping substance, and of aspirations outpacing reality. But with its shallow characters and thin plot greatly overwhelmed by production design, the movie ultimately sinks under the weight of its misguided artistic pretensions. The film centers on Franny (Teri Garr) and Hank (Frederic Forrest), a clearly unhappy couple who go their separate ways for a night in Las Vegas (built entirely on a soundstage, a fact the film proudly advertises). They end up spending the night with their respective fantasies -- piano player Ray (Raul Julia) and circus performer Leila (Nastassja Kinski) -- before suddenly realizing they were meant for one another after all. Great romances have been built on less, but One From the Heart is remarkable for just how uninterested it is in its characters. With so much attention being paid to the technical elements of the film, the actors struggle to assert themselves. Garr's innate likeability mostly carries her through, Julia has a certain slippery charm, and Kinski finds a nice balance between fantasy and reality. But the miscast Forrest plays such an unlikable jerk that it's impossible to root for him. As such, the central romance between Hank and Franny never works. The narrative plays such an underdeveloped role that the main draw of One From the Heart becomes the look of the film, with its stylized, stagy cinematography and showy use of lighting and sets. There are several striking visual moments in the film, but they're mostly detached from any emotional or symbolic content, decreasing their ultimate effectiveness. More than that, the visuals are often unnecessarily distracting; for instance, one angle of a scene will be lit with what looks like natural sunlight, another with an artificial red glow. Add in some tacky special effects and misplaced attempts at comedy, and the movie veers dangerously close to Xanadu territory (the two actually have choreographer Kenny Ortega in common). But there's also a grimy, depressing undercurrent that's at odds with the forced attempts at romance and surrealism. The Oscar-nominated song score by Tom Waits doesn't help much either. Setting aside whatever intrinsic quality the songs may have on their own, they become monotonous in the context of the film. Perhaps Coppola was seeking to subvert the traditional musical by placing "ordinary" characters and unconventional music into a highly stylized genre, but the result works neither as a critique of Hollywood nor as self-contained entertainment. Watchable only as a historical and technical curio, One From the Heart finds Coppola in over his head.
by Skyler Miller
AllMovie - DirectorFrancis Ford CoppolaStarsC. Thomas HowellMatt DillonRalph MacchioIn a small Oklahoma town in 1964, the rivalry between two gangs, the poor Greasers and the rich Socs, heats up when one gang member accidentally kills a member of the other.Francis Ford Coppola's teen melodrama, which seems to include nearly every young, male star of the '80s, inflates S.E. Hinton's coming-of-age story to such Homeric proportions that it sometimes borders on camp, but it does have moments of lyricism. In a film that unsuccessfully attempts to imitate the angst and widescreen look of Rebel Without a Cause (1954), the script pits a group of wrong-side-of-the-tracks "greasers" against the affluent "socs" in '50s Oklahoma. The teen soap opera, shaped as a cautionary tale by youth writer Hinton, is so overcrowded with characters that all remain sketchy, and the consequent objectification of all the posturing young men in tight pants evokes a two-hour jeans commercial with a mildly homoerotic subtext. Matt Dillon is solid as the leader of the self-styled outsiders, and Carmine Coppola's expansive score supplies an emotional depth the film itself is unable to muster. The cast of future stars includes C. Thomas Howell, Diane Lane, Tom Cruise, Emilio Estevez, Patrick Swayze, Rob Lowe, and Ralph Macchio.
by Michael Costello
AllMovie - DirectorFrancis Ford CoppolaStarsMatt DillonMickey RourkeDiane LaneAbsent-minded street thug Rusty James struggles to live up to his legendary older brother's reputation, and longs for the days of gang warfare.Rumble Fish is one of a number of projects Francis Ford Coppola has agreed to direct during his long career either to help finance a future project or cover for the excesses of a past one. But that doesn't mean it was just tossed off; in fact, Coppola comes across as downright ambitious, shooting in black-and-white with all manner of camera angles, close-ups, and extreme depths of field. The result is a stylized fairy tale about wasted youth, rebelliousness, and the desire to exude cool, which received critical attention for its original production design. Matt Dillon and Mickey Rourke are excellent choices to portray the central hothead delinquent and the detached brother he idolizes, both archetypes in a nowhere town that recalls the small Texas hamlet of Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show. Coppola was of course able to command a first-rate supporting cast that included some of his past collaborators (including Laurence Fishburne, then known as "Larry," and Dennis Hopper from Apocalypse Now) as well as early appearances from several future Hollywood mainstays (Nicolas Cage and Chris Penn). But the acting is hardly the focus in this film, as Coppola is far more interested in creating a fantasy world involving shadow play, time-lapse photography, and thematic bursts of color breaking up the chiaroscuro design. While occasionally pretentious, Rumble Fish is a visually interesting slice of dead-end America life, featuring a cast that will forever register it as a curiosity worth seeking out.
by Derek Armstrong
AllMovie - DirectorFrancis Ford CoppolaStarsRichard GereGregory HinesDiane LaneMeet the jazz musicians, dancers, owner, and guests (like gangster Dutch Schultz) of The Cotton Club in 1928-1930s Harlem.Francis Ford Coppola's film on the fabled Harlem nightspot of the 1920s is a disappointingly disjointed and confusing work, occasionally brightened by excellent period music and dance routines. The script focuses on Dixie (Richard Gere), a cornet player in the orbit of gangster Dutch Schultz, and Schultz's teenaged mistress Vera (Diane Lane), with whom Dixie becomes involved. The film's nearly impenetrable plot tends to deflect any kind of rational analysis, but it generally involves the conflicts between various gangster factions for the control of the club and their interaction with the entertainers who work there. Coppola makes a game attempt to galvanize things with period-appropriate montage sequences, but they only serve to throw the film's emptiness into relief. Sadly, Gere and Lane, who are supposed to be the center of the film, are saddled with truly awful dialogue in addition to having no chemistry as lovers. However, Bob Hoskins does interesting work as gangster Owney Madden, as does his sidekick, played by Fred Gwynne. Tap legends Gregory and Maurice Hines and Charles "Honi" Coles also grace the film with some wonderful dance numbers.
by Michael Costello
AllMovie - DirectorJim JarmuschStarsTom WaitsJohn LurieRoberto BenigniTwo men are framed and sent to jail, where they meet a murderer who helps them escape and leave the state.Though not as critically successful as his debut, Stranger Than Paradise, director Jim Jarmusch's Down By Law is a worthy follow-up in a similar vein. It features the same deliberate rhythm, off-beat characters, deadpan humor, and emphasis on photography (by the famed German cinematographer Robby Müller). Willfully original and intensely independent, the typical Jarmusch film isn't a product that mainstream audiences are likely to enjoy. He combines his enigmatic characters with the esoteric pacing and sensibility of his peer, Wim Wenders. Down By Law is slightly more accessible than Wenders' films, however, due to the slapstick presence of Roberto Benigni. Benigni's staccato voice and mincing of English clichés are very funny, though Jarmusch occassionally lets him run on too long. Luckily, the director keeps the rest of the film generally obtuse, uncertain and interesting.
by Brendon Hanley
AllMovie - DirectorHector BabencoStarsJack NicholsonMeryl StreepCarroll BakerAn alcoholic drifter spends Halloween in his hometown of Albany, New York after returning there for the first time in decades.At first the shape simply seems to be some old debris, blown up against the side of a building, but then the shape stirs and we see that it is a man. At first we cannot quite make out his face, and when we can and see that the character is played by Jack Nicholson, there is a shock, for even in that first moment he seems to have been enveloped by the character. A little later in “Ironweed” when we see Meryl Streep, there is a similar shock, not so much because of her appearance but because of her voice, which is an amalgam of high-class breeding and low-class usage.
Nicholson and Streep play drunks in “Ironweed,” and actors are said to like to play drunks, because it gives them an excuse for overacting. But there is not much visible “acting” in this movie; the actors are too good for that. Nicholson plays a man haunted by guilt from his past. He dropped and killed his baby son years ago and has never forgiven himself. He left home soon after and dropped like a stone until he hit the gutters of Albany, his hometown, where he still lives. Streep’s guilt is less dramatic; she let herself down, or that is what she believes, for she does not understand that it is not her own fault she is a drunk.
“Ironweed,” directed by Brazilian Hector Babenco, whose familiarity with the human sewers of Sao Paolo and Rio de Janiero made “Pixote” one of the best films of 1981, is a movie of moods, locales and voices. It is not much on plot, and even when something dramatic happens - when the Nicholson character returns home after many years to face his family - the scene is played for the silences as much as for the noises. It is probably a fault of the film that it contains so little drama. We quickly sense that hopelessness is a condition of this movie, that since alcoholism has been accepted as a fact of life, none of the other facts will be able to change. The movie generates little suspense and no relief.
And yet it is worth seeing as a chamber piece, an exercise in which two great actors expand their range and work together in great sympathy. Both Nicholson and Streep have moments as good as anything they have done. Nicholson’s come in a graveyard scene at the beginning of the film and in the long stretch after he returns to his home.
Streep’s come in a barroom fantasy scene in which she sings as she remembers singing long ago and in a confessional scene in a church where she tells the Virgin Mary she is not a drunk, no matter what people say.
Nicholson’s homecoming is all the more effective because Carroll Baker is so good as his wife, who has never remarried, who in her way does not blame him for what he has made of their lives, because he had his reasons. Baker was not nearly this impressive in her “first” career, many years ago, in movies ranging from “Baby Doll” to “The Carpetbaggers.” But in “Frances” (1983), as the mother of doomed actress Frances Farmer, and again this time, she finds a whole new range. It may seem surprising to say that Baker holds the screen against Jack Nicholson, and yet she does.
The movie was shot mostly on location in upstate New York and is set in the last years of the Depression. Its visual look is heightened realism, but Babenco also uses imaginary scenes, as he did in “Kiss of the Spider Woman.” As the drunk, hallucinatory Nicholson sees the face of a trolley driver he accidentally killed years ago, we begin to understand some of the chaos within his soaked brain.
“Ironweed” has been released while “Barfly,” another movie about a Skid Row couple, is still playing around the country. Do the movies bear comparison? “Barfly,” with Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway, has more energy, more life and humor, and is more directly about advanced alcoholism. “Ironweed” carries a weight of memory and guilt, with drunkeness as a backdrop. I enjoyed “Barfly” more as a movie, but both films are well acted. The difference is that in “Barfly” the characters scream a lot, and in “Ironweed” they listen a lot, to things we cannot hear.
by Roger Ebert - DirectorRobert FrankRudy WurlitzerStarsKevin J. O'ConnorEric MitchellMary JoyA struggling musician sets out to find the legendary guitar maker Elmore Silk, with whom he hopes to strike a deal to make himself rich and famous.Watching "Candy Mountain," we're lulled into a mood of uncertain but pleasurable anticipation. It's the kind of sensation that comes from not quite knowing where you are, or where you'll wind up next, like driving through unfamiliar territory without a map. This isn't an experience that we encounter much at the movies these days, and that's not meant as a criticism; it's high praise.
Directed by Robert Frank and Rudy Wurlitzer, "Candy Mountain" feels like something out of a time capsule, like a relic from a remote but treasured time. It begins in New York City with a rather vague young lad with a head full of rock dreams named Julius (Kevin O'Connor) who walks off his job as a carpenter to devote himself full-time to music. The problem with Julius, though, is that his talents don't match his ambitions. Jumping at the chance to sub with the backup band for a rocker named Keith (David Johansen), he attracts special attention.
"How long you been playing that thing, kid?" the leader asks.
"A year," says Julius meekly.
"Yeah? On what planet?"
The atmosphere of these opening backstage scenes, in which Keith and some music business types reminisce about a legendary guitar maker named Elmore Silk who dropped out of sight some years back, is dark and smoky, and in them the filmmakers show a keen ear for knowing show biz patter. "You're telling me he disappeared," Keith says. "You'd think he'd signed with William Morris or something."
For a variety of reasons -- not the least of which being that the market value of his instruments has climbed to around $20,000 -- these men would like to find Silk. Clumsily seizing the opportunity, Julius says he worshiped the reclusive artist ("he was to the guitar what Willie Mays was to football") and claims to have been his friend. Not entirely convinced, the group decides to give the kid a chance. They stuff $2,000 in expense money into his pocket and send him out on the road.
From this point the movie (taken from Wurlitzer's screenplay) becomes essentially a loose series of encounters and interviews with the reclusive guitar maker's relatives or people who've known him. It takes the form of a classic road movie, and though Silk remains offscreen until the end, he dominates the picture, and the search for him provides a spine to connect the vignettes. After his girlfriend ditches him and runs off with the car, Julius is given a bit of sage advice ("Life ain't no candy mountain") by a toothless truck driver (Rockets Redglare), who bilks him out of $50 and deposits him at the front doorstep of Silk's brother Al (Tom Waits).
The people in "Candy Mountain" fall into two groups: those who have it made and the ones who wish they did. Al is definitely in the first group. Clad in eye-shock blue slacks and a yellow cardigan, he practices his putting in the back yard with a bottle of Jack Daniel's at hand. Chomping on his cigar, he tells Julius that the road isn't what it used to be and advises him to give it up. "You should be playing golf. You're young. You should be playing a lot of golf."
The road in "Candy Mountain" carries all the metaphorical weight it did for Kerouac in the '50s and for countless others since then. For Julius, there's a big score down the road. If he can track Silk down, if he can corral one of Silk's guitars for himself, he'll have enough dough to, as he says, "get in the game."
O'Connor, who was far from impressive as Hemingway in Alan Rudolph's "The Moderns," has a difficult job here. In a sense he's supposed to be less interesting than the characters he encounters along the way, and it would be easy to overlook the little things -- like the nervous tremor he puts in Julius' voice -- he does to sustain our interest.
As the road takes him up into Canada, he finds a Frenchwoman (Bulle Ogier) with whom Silk had an affair. And as she tells him her story, with the cruel wind whipping around the outside of her cabin, he comes across as a likable, if slightly doltish, kid. The movie celebrates the marginal, and it's characters like the one played by Ogier or the father and son (Roberts Blossom and Leon Redbone) who toss Julius in jail after he runs off the road and into their boat, who appeal to the filmmakers. They have staked their claim, and it's far away from the main roads.
When Silk (Harris Yulin) finally makes his entrance, his cagey and slightly malevolent air seems perfect. There's a hint of disgust in it. And it becomes immediately apparent, though perhaps not to Julius, that the trip was a waste of time. There's nothing despairing in this realization, though; it's uplifting, almost ecstatic. You can feel that something has shifted in Julius at the end, as he braces himself against the cold and heads back in the direction he came. But perhaps not. And somehow the thought that nothing may have happenedl except that he put in the miles, seems the best conclusion of all.
Washington Post - DirectorRobert DornhelmStarsKeith CarradineSally KirklandTom WaitsA psycho-killer with mommy issues, a charming crooked cowboy and their girl steal some jewels. The cowboy decides not to share and goes on the run with the loot. A crazy chase across the country between former partners in crime begins.If they gave a prize for chummy in-jokiness, "Cold Feet," a brain-damaged hipster Western starring Keith Carradine and Sally Kirkland, would take it. And if you feel excluded, shut out or just plain bored, join the club. You're not alone.
Set in the wide-open landscapes of Montana, the picture is an antiheroic genre piece about a pack of demented cowboys and crooks who sneak a fortune in emeralds over the Mexican border in the belly of a valuable stallion named Infidel. (Never mind how.) The story is the shaggiest imaginable and provides little more than an occasion for the characters to flaunt their eccentricities, and the writers their tough-guy poetry.
The thing is, it may actually have been funny once. The script was written some 12 years ago by novelists Tom McGuane and Jim Harrison, who worked together, mostly by mail. Ten years later, when director Robert Dornhelm showed an interest, McGuane brought it up to date. Maybe it was even funny on paper. The sensibility of the material is self-consciously insouciant -- these writers have labored hard at their anarchism. Here and there, a kinky line of dialogue will leap out and the attitude of depraved idiosyncrasies the filmmakers had hoped for comes clear.
But mostly, Dornhelm stages scenes that are brief elucidations on some cryptic crony code. Watching them is like listening to Big Sky cowpokes trying to crack each other up. Translation is what's desperately needed.
The whole point, though, is to be inaccessible, out there, shooting the hipster curl. Carradine, who's naturally off-center, plays the square to Tom Waits' demented beatnik fool. Kirkland is a nyphomaniacal moll dressed in electric pastels who can't get anyone to go to bed with her. And Rip Torn is the sheriff who arrests them (though not until he gets a pair of lizard skin cowboy boots out of the deal first). At rock bottom, the picture wears its chic peculiarity to disguise its ineptitude. It's a con. Even the stallion isn't a stallion.
Washington Post - DirectorAnn GuedesEduardo GuedesStarsTom WaitsDamon LowryJúlia BrittonOn the run from a couple of hit-men, young Johnny Fortune escapes from a life in basement poolrooms to become a dancing bear with the strangest Punch and Judy man in the business.If you can accept the idea of a Portuguese city standing in for London, you may just have no problem with the other weirdness dished up in this arty 'urban fairytale'. On the run from hoodlums, Lowry dons a bear-suit and prowls around Waits's Punch and Judy show; Bill Paterson as a guardian angel is a mite easier to accept than some of the film's other self-indulgent peculiarities.
Time Out - DirectorJack NicholsonStarsJack NicholsonHarvey KeitelMeg TillyThe sequel to Chinatown (1974) finds J.J. "Jake" Gittes investigating adultery and murder, and the money that comes from oil.Here at long last is Jack Nicholson's "The Two Jakes," seven years in the trade papers, center of prolonged teeth-gnashing at Paramount Pictures, and it turns out to be such a focused and concentrated film that every scene falls into place like clockwork; there's no feeling that it was a problem picture. It's not a thriller and it's not a whodunit, although it contains thriller elements and at the end we do find out whodunit. It's an exquisite short story about a mood, and a time, and a couple of guys who are blind-sided by love.
The movie takes place in postwar Los Angeles - the 1940s of the baby boom and housing subdivisions - instead of the 1930s city where "Chinatown" was set. It's not such a romantic city anymore. And private eyes like J. J. Gittes (Jack Nicholson) are a little more worn by time and care. The Gittes of "Chinatown" was the spiritual brother of Philip Marlowe. But now it is after the war, and Gittes has moved out of the two-room suite into a building of his own. He heads a staff of investigators. He belongs to a country club and has a fiancee and has put on some weight. One of these days he's going to stop calling himself an investigator altogether and become a security consultant.
But he still handles some of the old kinds of cases. The cases where the outraged husband bursts into the motel room and finds his wife locked in the arms of an adulterer, and then the investigator leaps in with a camera and takes photos that will look bad in divorce court. He knows, Gittes tells us in the film's opening narration, that he shouldn't get involved in messy situations like that anymore. He's outgrown them. They're beneath him. But sometimes he still takes the jobs.
That's how he meets the other Jake - Jake Berman (Harvey Keitel), a property developer who thinks his wife (Meg Tilly) is fooling around with his partner. So Gittes tutors Berman on how to act when he bursts in through the door, and what to say, and then they stake out a motel where the evil act is confidently expected to take place. But Berman doesn't follow the script. A gun appears from somewhere, and the partner is shot, and the partner's wife (Madeleine Stowe) thinks that maybe it wasn't a case of adultery at all. Maybe it was cold-blooded murder, and Berman intended to kill his partner so that he and his wife could collect the partner's share of the property development. That might make Gittes accessory to murder.
So far, what we have here is the kind of plot that any private eye movie might have been proud of. But "The Two Jakes" uses the plot only as an occasion for the deeper and more brooding things it has to say.
Everyone connected with this movie seems to have gone through the private eye genre and come out on the other side. The screenplay is by Robert Towne, who at one stage in the project's troubled history was going to direct it. He has not simply assembled some characters from his "Chinatown," added some new ones, and thrown them into a plot. This movie is written with meticulous care, to show how good and evil are never as simple as they seem, and to demonstrate that even the motives of a villain may emerge from a goodness of heart.
Jack Nicholson directed the film, and Vilmos Zsigmond photographed it, in the same spirit. This isn't a film where we ricochet from one startling revelation to another. Instead, the progress of the story is into the deeper recesses of the motives of the characters. We learn that Gittes - fiancee and all - still is deeply hurt by the murder of the Faye Dunaway character in "Chinatown"; he never will be over her.
We learn that the property being developed by Berman has been visited before by Gittes, in that long-ago time. We learn that love, pure love, is a motive sufficient to justify horrifying actions. And we learn that when the past has been important enough to us, it never will quite leave us alone.
The movie is very dark, filled with shadows and secrets and half-heard voices, and scratchy revelations on a clandestine tape recording. Out in the valley where the development is being built, the sunshine is harsh and casts black shadows, and the land is cruel - the characters are shaken by earthquakes that reveal the land rests uneasily on a dangerous pool of natural gas.
The performances are dark and gloomy, too, especially Nicholson's.
He tones down his characteristic ebullience and makes Gittes older and wiser and more easily disillusioned. And he never even talks about the loss that hangs heavily on his heart; we have to infer it from the way his friends and employees tiptoe around it.
Right from his first meeting with the Keitel character, when he notices they are wearing the same two-tone shoes, he feels a curious kinship with him, and that leads to a key final confrontation that I will not reveal. And he feels something, too, for the Meg Tilly character, who has been deeply hurt in her past and is afraid to express herself. She is like a bird with a broken wing.
The point of "The Two Jakes" is that love and loss are more important than the mechnical distribution of guilt and justice. When Nicholson and Keitel, as the two Jakes, have their final exchange of revelations, it is such a good scene because the normal considerations of a crime movie are placed on hold. The movie really is about the values that people have, and about the things that mean more to them than life and freedom. It's a deep movie, and a thoughtful one, and when it's over you can't easily put it out of your mind.
by Roger Ebert - DirectorSteve RashStarsKevin BaconLinda FiorentinoJohn MalkovichA group of lifelong friends meet again in Queens for Ray's (Ken Olin) bachelor party and wedding.As “Queens Logic” begins, the characters are gathering in the New York borough of Queens for a bachelor party and a wedding, and over the next few days these events will be the occasion for various moments of truth and self-revelation, discovery and disappointment.
Like reunion movies such as “Return of the Secaucus Seven” and “The Big Chill,” the plot gives the characters, who are now mostly in their 30s, an opportunity for a midlife evaluation of how things are going and how they are likely to go.
We share their curiosity, but for at least the first 30 minutes of the movie we’re curious about something else, as well: Who are these people, and what do they mean to one another? The screenplay by Tony Spiridakis introduces a large gallery of characters in no apparent order and then moves casually among their stories. Gradually we begin to know who the characters are and - vaguely, anyway - how they are related. And then, almost insidiously, they grow more and more familiar, until by the end of the film we’re beginning to really care what happens to them.
There’s Al, the ringleader, played by Joe Mantegna, who is seen in a title sequence climbing a rope up the vast bridge that connects Queens with Manhattan. He has always been the madcap comedian, the party animal. He sells fish for a living, but his wife complains he’s not a fishmonger, he’s a lounge act. Al’s partner is Eliot (John Malkovich), who is gay but does not act on that fact, preferring a life of celibate bachelorhood. Al’s wife is Carla (Linda Fiorentino), feisty, proud, ready to move out if Al stays out all night again.
There are others: Ray and Patricia (Ken Olin and Chloe Webb), who are the couple getting married, maybe, and Dennis (Kevin Bacon), who has gone to Hollywood to make it in the music business but hasn’t had any success as yet, and Monte (Tom Waits), who is about to drift away into his own world but shows up for the weekend anyway. Much tension centers around the character of Ray, who is not really sure he wants to marry Patricia. Ray has had some success as a painter, and maybe, he thinks, she doesn’t have the class to be an artist’s wife. She is wiser than he is and tells him, in a key scene, that she is Queens and she will always be Queens and it isn’t her, it’s his own past he isn’t proud of.
There are other good speeches and moments in the movie, which seems to have been built up out of a series of sketches rather than planned from the plot down. The center point of the movie is the rooftop garden where the bachelor party takes place, but the characters spin off from that location for fights at home, adventures in the streets, and Al’s escapade with a strange young woman (Jamie Lee Curtis) who turns up at the party, on the prowl. At the end of a long night many lessons have been learned, not the least by Al when he attempts to make the same rope climb that once so impressed his friends.
How true is “Queens Logic” to Queens reality? I suspect the movie owes more to the tradition of the coming-of-middle-age film than it does to specific Queens details. This is the kind of material actors love, because it gives them the opportunity to seem like nitty-gritty ordinary people, but a lot of the scenes seem written for punch lines rather than extracted from life. Example: Al and Eliot hold a gun on their angry employees at the fishmarket while paying their wages.
What we’re left with are some moments that do work, as when Jamie Lee Curtis boldly picks up Mantegna, or when Malkovich is approached by a homosexual during the party and makes a speech that pretty clearly defines the choices he has made in life. Those scenes could have taken place anywhere, and when you compare “Queens Logic” to “True Love” or “Spike of Bensonhurst” or certainly “GoodFellas,” so could “Queens Logic.”
by Roger Ebert - DirectorHector BabencoStarsTom BerengerJohn LithgowDaryl HannahMartin and Hazel Quarrier are small-town fundamentalist missionaries sent to the jungles of South America to convert the Indians. Their remote mission was previously run by the Catholics, before the natives murdered them all. They are sent by the pompous Leslie Huben, who runs the missionary effort in the area but who seems more concerned about competing with his Catholic 'rivals' than in the Indians themselves. Hazel is terrified of the Indians while Martin is fascinated. Soon American pilot Lewis Moon joins the Indian tribe but is attracted by Leslie's young wife, Andy. Can the interaction of these characters and cultures, and the advancing bulldozers of civilization, avoid disaster?The most striking image in Peter Matthiessen’s novel At Play in the Fields of the Lord describes an Amazonian Indian, standing in the center of a forest clearing, defiantly raising his bow and arrow against an airplane that flies between himself and the sun. The image has been used as the logo for the new film of the novel, but actually two planes cast their shadows on these Indians. One brings the drunken bush pilots Wolfie and Moon, to be hired by a tinpot jungle general to bomb the Indians. The other brings earnest missionaries from North America, to preach their religion to the tribe. In Matthiessen’s world, both of these aircraft are machines bearing destruction.
Matthiessen’s novel was published some 20 years ago, but could not be more contemporary in its issues. At the same time, few great modern novels offer more problems for those who would adapt them to the screen. So much of the action in “At Play in the Fields of the Lord” takes place inside the minds and souls of the characters - inside Andy, the blond woman missionary whose dormant sexuality is awakened, and inside Martin Quarrier, who comes to question everything about his faith after his child is taken by God, and inside Lewis Moon, the American Indian gun-runner whose identity is reawakened when he sees the Indian in the forest below, pointing his arrow at the plane. What happens in the material world of this story is not the point; it is a book about how the identities and beliefs of its characters are changed.
The film has been produced by Saul Zaentz, an independent producer who seems to seek out “unfilmable” source material (his credits include “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”).
With the Brazilian director Hector Babenco he went into the middle of the rain forest to film on location, and the mood and feel of those real places, the impenetrable, throbbing jungle on either side of the vast indifferent Amazon, is one of the central qualities of his film.
At a desperately poor but defiantly colorful little jungle settlement - the bright colors of the paint disguise the abashed rotting buildings - the first plane arrives. It bears Lewis Moon (Tom Berenger) and Wolf (Tom Waits) compadres in a series of mercenary skirmishes in minor Latin American wars, now washed up here without funds. The district commander confiscates their worthless passports and keeps them prisoner, trying to talk them into bombing a local tribe that stands in the way of “progress,” by which he means the destruction of the jungle.
On another flight, the Martin Quarrier family arrives: Aidan Quinn as a dedicated but naive missionary, Kathy Bates as his hysterical wife, and Niilo Kivirinta as Billy, their perfect child.
They are welcomed by two local missionaries, Leslie and Andy Huben (John Lithgow and Daryl Hannah), who have become legendary because of Leslie’s optimistic letters to the missionary magazines - letters that do not reflect their complete lack of progress in converting any Indians, aside from a mercenary straggler who has sold out for money.
In an atmosphere of dank rot and decay, headquartered in a foul hotel where the prostitutes outrank them, the Quarriers prepare to re-occupy a station where the previous missionaries were murdered by the Indians. The local Catholic priest, whose religion seems more pragmatic and adapted to the region, listens to their hymns and observes their preparations and wishes them well, no doubt convinced he will never see them again. Then the Quarriers (Quinn, Bates and Kivirinta) go off to staff the isolated station, their canoe filled with trinkets to use as bribes.
Meanwhile, in the other great sweep of the story, Lewis Moon grows drunk and insane on local brews and drugs, and flies his airplane off over the jungle, parachuting into the green carpet below, where he is greeted by the Indians as an emissary of the gods.
He learns bits of the language, is accepted as a member of the tribe, and then tries to lead them in a crusade to drive out the missionaries. But this is only the surface of the story, which reveals itself in a series of tragedies and a quiet, sad, sweeping conclusion.
In Matthiessen’s novel, each of the characters has his or her day. In the film, choices have been made, and in most cases they reflect the elements that could most easily be filmed. Berenger’s stay with the Indian tribe provides the most impressive scenes, and Babenco and Zaentz are patient here, providing time for us to get to know some of the tribe members and their ways. Amazonian Indians play themselves, and are subtitled; these are not screenplay Indians.
In the world of the missionaries, the Quinn character becomes the most important, because he changes the most, and the struggle between he and his wife (Bates) over the fate of their child becomes the movie’s dramatic centerpoint. The characters played by Lithgow and Hannah tend to recede because they provide fewer dramatic opportunities, and although I missed the novel’s insights into the slow deep changes within the Hannah character, I must admit I am not sure how they could have been visualized.
“At Play in the Fields of the Lord” does not build to a conventional plot climax. It is about beliefs more than actions.
Watching it, we are looking at a morality play about a world in which sincere people create unwitting mischief so that evil people can have their way. The movie essentially argues that all peoples have a right to worship their own gods without interference, but it goes further to observe that if your god lives in the land and the trees, then if we destroy your land, we kill your god. These messages are buried in the very fabric of the film, in the way it was shot, in its use of locations, and we are not told them, we absorb them.
by Roger Ebert - DirectorFrancis Ford CoppolaStarsGary OldmanWinona RyderAnthony HopkinsThe centuries old vampire Count Dracula comes to England to seduce his barrister Jonathan Harker's fiancée Mina Murray and inflict havoc in the foreign land.Think of the monstrous ego of the vampire. He thinks himself so important that he is willing to live forever, even under the dreary conditions imposed by his condition. Avoiding the sun, sleeping in coffins, feared by all, he nurses his resentments. In "Bram Stoker's Dracula," the new film by Francis Ford Coppola, the vampire shakes his fist at heaven and vows to wait forever for the return of the woman he loves. It does not occur to him that after the first two or three centuries he might not seem all that attractive to her.
The film is inspired by the original Bram Stoker novel, although the author's name is in the title for another reason (Another studio owns the rights to plain "Dracula"). It begins, as it should, with the tragic story of Vlad the Impaler, who went off to fight the Crusades and returned to find that his beloved wife, hearing he was dead, had killed herself. And not just killed herself, but hurled herself from a parapet to a stony doom far below, in one of the many spectacular shots which are the best part of this movie.
Vlad cannot see the justice in his fate. He has marched all the way to the Holy Land on God's business, only to have God play this sort of a trick on him. (Vlad is apparently not a student of the Book of Job.) He embraces Satan and vampirism, and the action moves forward to the late Victorian Age, when mankind is first beginning to embrace the gizmos (phonographs, cameras, the telegraph, motion pictures) that will dispel the silence of the nights through which he has waited fearfully for centuries.
Coppola's plot, from a screenplay by James V. Hart, exists precisely between London, where this modern age is just dawning, and Transylvania, which still sleeps unhealthily in the past. We meet a young attorney (Keanu Reeves) who has been asked to journey out to Dracula's castle to arrange certain real estate transactions. The previous man who was sent on this mission ran into some sort of difficulties . . . health or something . . . all rather vague . . .
Reeves' carriage, driven by a man whose hands are claws, hurtles at the edges of precipices until he is finally discharged in the darkness to be met and taken to Dracula's castle. There, everything is more or less as we expect it, only much more so. Count Dracula (Gary Oldman) waits here as he has for centuries for the return of his dead bride, and when he sees a photograph of Reeves' fiancee, Mina Murray (Winona Ryder), he knows his wait has been rewarded at last. She lives again.
Back in London, we meet other principals, including the fearless vampire killer Prof. Abraham Van Helsing (Anthony Hopkins), and Lucy Westenra (Sadie Frost), a free spirit who has three suitors and is Mina's best friend. When Dracula appears in town, Van Helsing's antenna start to quiver. And the movie descends into an orgy of visual decadence, in which what people do is not nearly as degraded as how they look while they do it.
Coppola directs with all the stops out, and the actors perform as if afraid they will not be audible in the other theaters of the multiplex. The sets are grand opera run riot - Gothic extravaganza intercut with the Victorian London of gaslights and fogbound streets, rogues in top hats and bad girls in bustiers. Keanu Reeves, as a serious young man of the future, hardly knows what he's up against with Count Dracula, and neither do we, since Dracula cheerfully changes form - from an ancient wreck to a presentable young man to a cat and a bat and a wolf.
Vampire movies, which run in the face of all scientific logic, are always heavily laden with pseudo-science. Hopkins lectures learnedly on the nosferatu, yet himself seems capable of teleportation and other tricks not in the physics books. And the Ryder character finds herself falling under the terrible spell of the vampire's need. Many women are flattered when a man says he has been waiting all of his life for them. But if he has been waiting four centuries? The one thing the movie lacks is headlong narrative energy and coherence. There is no story we can follow well enough to care about.
There is a chronology of events, as the characters travel back and forth from London to Transylvania, and rendezvous in bedrooms and graveyards. But Coppola seems more concerned with spectacle and set-pieces than with storytelling; the movie is particularly operatic in the way it prefers climaxes to continuity.
Faced with narrative confusions and dead ends (why does Dracula want to buy those London properties in such specific locations?), I enjoyed the movie simply for the way it looked and felt. Production designers Dante Ferreti and Thomas Sanders have outdone themselves. The cinematographer, Michael Ballhaus, gets into the spirit so completely be always seems to light with shadows.
Oldman and Ryder and Hopkins pant with eagerness. The movie is an exercise in feverish excess, and for that if for little else, I enjoyed it.
by Roger Ebert - DirectorRobert AltmanStarsAndie MacDowellJulianne MooreTim RobbinsThe day-to-day lives of several suburban Los Angeles residents.Los Angeles always seems to be waiting for something. Permanence seems out of reach; some great apocalyptic event is on the horizon, and people view the future tentatively. Robert Altman's "Short Cuts" captures that uneasiness perfectly in its interlocking stories about people who seem trapped in the present, always juggling.
The movie is based on short stories by Raymond Carver, but this is Altman's work, not Carver's, and all the film really has in common with its source is a feeling for people who are disconnected - from relatives, church, tradition - and support themselves with jobs that never seem quite real. It is hard work, no doubt, to be a pool cleaner, a chauffeur, a phone-sex provider, a birthday cake decorator, a jazz singer, a helicopter pilot, but these are professions that find you before you find them. How many people end up in jobs they planned for? Altman is fascinated by the accidental nature of life, by the way that whole decades of our lives can be shaped by events we do not understand or even know about.
"Short Cuts" understands and knows because it is filmed from an all-seeing point of view. Its characters all live at the same time in the same city, and sometimes their paths even cross, but for the most part they don't know how their lives are changed by people they meet only glancingly.
Imagine the rage of the baker (Lyle Lovett), for example, when he gets stuck with an expensive birthday cake. We could almost comprehend the cruel anonymous telephone calls he makes to the parents (Andie MacDowell and Bruce Davison) who ordered the cake, if we didn't know their child missed his birthday because he was hit by a car. Imagine what they would say to the unknown driver (Lily Tomlin) who struck their child. But we know that she wanted to take him to a doctor; the boy refused because he has been forbidden to get into the cars of strangers, and besides, he seemed OK. If you knew the whole story in this world, there'd be a lot less to be angry about.
The movie's characters all seem to be from somewhere else, and without parents. Their homes are as temporary as the trailer park two of the characters inhabit, where people come and go, no one knows from where, or to where. The grandparent (Jack Lemmon) of the injured little boy has disappeared for years. Faced with a son and grandson he hardly knows, he spends most of his time talking about himself.
The jazz singer would rather drink than know her daughter.
Sad, insoluble mysteries seem right under the surface. Three men go on a fishing trip and discover the drowned body of a dead woman. They have waited a long time and come a long way for this trip, and if they report the woman, their trip will be ruined. So, since she's already dead, what difference will a few more days make? And what would the police do, anyway? There's a motorcycle cop (Tim Robbins) in the movie, who seems to be a free-lancer, responsible to no one, using his badge simply as a way to get his will, spending a lot of time cheating on his wife (Madeleine Stowe), who finds his lies hilarious.
Almost everybody drinks all through this movie, although only a few characters ever get exactly drunk. It's as if life is a preventable disease, and booze is the medication. Sex places a very slow second. The pool cleaner's wife (Jennifer Jason Leigh) supplements the family income by working as a phone-sex performer, spinning verbal fantasies to strangers on the phone, while sitting bored in her living room, changing her baby's diapers. Her husband (Chris Penn) is angry: "How come you never talk that way to me?" Think about that. He's married to her. They sleep in the same bed. He can have actual physical sex with her. But he envies the strangers who will never meet her - who value her inaccessibility: She services their fantasies without imposing her own reality.
Some of these characters, if they could find each other, would find the answers to their needs. The baker, for example, has unexplored reserves of tenderness. He could help the sad young woman (Lori Singer) who plays the cello, and waits for those moments when her mother (Annie Ross), the jazz singer, is sober. The cop would probably be happier talking with the phonesex girl than carrying on his endless affairs, which have no purpose except to anger his wife, who is past caring. He likes the deception more than the sex, and could get off by telling the stranger on the other end of the phone that he'd been cheating with "another phone-sex girl.
Yet these people have a certain nobility to them. They keep on trying. They hope for better times. The hash-house waitress (Tomlin) loves her husband (Tom Waits), who is so good to her when he's not drinking that she forgives the dark times when he is drinking. The parents of the little boy find an unexpected consolation from the baker. The wife (Anne Archer) of one of the fly-fishermen finds a new resolve and freedom. Life goes on.
Altman has made this kind of film before, notably in "Nashville" (1976) and "The Player" (1992). He doesn't like stories that pretend that the characters control their destinies, and their actions will produce a satisfactory outcome. He likes the messiness and coincidence of real life, where you can do your best, and some days it's just not good enough. He doesn't reproduce Raymond Carver's stories so much as his attitude.
In a Carver story (and you should read one if you never have), there is typically a moment when an ordinary statement becomes crucial, or poetic, or sad. People get blinding glimpses into the real nature of their lives; the routine is peeled aside, and they can see they've been stuck in a rut for years, going through the motions.
Sometimes they see with equal clarity that they are free to take charge, that no one has sentenced them to repeat the same mistakes.
Carver died five years ago, at 50, of a brain tumor. He believed he would have died at 40, of alcoholism, if he hadn't found a way to stop drinking. When he knew the cancer would kill him, he wrote a poem about that bonus of 10 years, called "Gravy." Altman, who spent most of the 1980s in a sort of exile after Hollywood declared him noncommercial, continued to make films, but they didn't have the budgets or the distribution a great filmmaker should have had.
Then came the comeback of "The Player," and now here is "Short Cuts." Gravy.
by Roger Ebert - DirectorKinka UsherStarsBen StillerJaneane GarofaloWilliam H. MacyA group of inept amateur superheroes must try to save the day when a supervillain threatens to destroy a major superhero and the city.Mystery Men" has moments of brilliance waving their arms to attract attention in a sea of dreck. It's a long, shapeless, undisciplined mess, and every once in awhile it generates a big laugh. Since many of thel aughs seems totally in the character of the actors who get them, they play like ad libs -- as if we're hearing asides to the audience.
The premise: Captain Amazing (Greg Kinnear) is the top-rated superhero in Champion City, a special-effects metropolis made of skyscrapers, air buses and dirigibles. He wears sponsor badges on his leather suit (Ray-O-Vac, Pennzoil) like Indy 500 drivers, but the sponsors are growing restless because his recent exploits are tired and dumb.
Consulting with his publicist (Ricky Jay), he decides to spring his arch enemy from jail. Maybe Casanova Frankenstein (Geoffrey Rush) can improve his Q rating by inspiring more colorful adventures.
The problem with this strategy is that Casanova is smart and the Captain is dumb, and soon Amazing is the villain's captive. That makes an opening for second-string superheroes to try to rescue Amazing and enhance their own reputations. The B team includes The Blue Raja (Hank Azaria), who hurls forks and spoons with amazing strength; Mr. Furious (Ben Stiller), who gets bad when he gets mad, and The Shoveler (William H. Macy), who whacks people with a spade. They're joined by new hopefuls, including The Spleen (Paul Reubens), whose weapon is voluminous flatulence; the Bowler (Janeane Garofolo), whose father's skull is inside her transparent bowling ball; Invisible Boy (Kel Mitchell), whose invisibility has to be taken mostly on trust, since you can't see if he's really there; and The Sphinx (Wes Studi), whose sayings make the Psychic Friends Network look deep.
All of these characters are hurled into elaborate special-effects scenes, where they get into frenetic human traffic jams. Comedy depends on timing, and chaos is its enemy. We see noisy comic book battles of little consequence, and finally we weary: This isn't entertainment, it's an f/x demo reel.
And yet the movie has its moments. I liked William H. Macy's version of the Henry V's speech on the eve of battle ("We few...") and his portentous line, "We've got an blind date with Destiny, and it looks like she ordered the lobster." And a lot of Jeanane Garofolo's lines, as when she says, "I would like to dedicate my victory to supporters of local music and those who seek out independent films." When the smoke clears, her character is ready to retire: "Okay, now I'm going back to graduate school; that was the agreement." We share her relief.
by Roger Ebert - DirectorTony ScottStarsKeira KnightleyMickey RourkeEdgar RamírezA recounting of Domino Harvey's life story. The daughter of actor Laurence Harvey turned away from her career as a Ford model to become a bounty hunter.Boba Fett would have a *beep* Bounty hunting, according to director Tony Scott and writer Richard Kelly anyway, is no longer just about stealth, cunning and measured aggression. Now it's about stripping, too.
To explain: there's a scene in Domino so spectacularly daft it probably deserves a star on its lonesome. In it, Keira Knightley is on her first ever bust as the titular bounty hunter. The bust goes wrong, climaxing in a pump-action standoff in which she and her two colleagues, Ed and Choco, are surrounded by a roomful of hoodlums pointing guns at their heads. Fingers are poised on hair-triggers. Tension hangs thick in the air. One false move and they'll be torn apart in a hail of bullets...
And what, precisely, does our deadly heroine decide to do about this predicament? Go for her gun? A knife, maybe? Oh no. She decides to take her clothes off and give the bad guys a lapdance. You know, to calm the situation.
As Knightley inexplicably cavorts in her skimpies, it becomes apparent that this 'true story' is anything but. More affectionate tribute than strict biopic, from this point it's clear that Domino is making no attempt at factual accuracy whatsoever. Its aim is to entertain.
Fans of Scott's typical kitchen-sink aesthetic certainly won't be disappointed. Shouty, sassy and inventive, his follow-up to Man On Fire may tone down marginally on the whip-pan, crash-zooming excesses of Denzel's revenge rampage, but it's still packed with as much in the way of visual pyrotechnics as it is twisted black comedy, kinetic action and wilful, unashamed sexiness.
When she signed on to the project, some considered Knightley a casting stretch as the real-life model turned mean-machine and her awkwardly plummy trailer voiceover ("I. Am. A. Bounty. Hunter") didn't bode well. But, regardless of the amazingly brief transition period between the corsets of Pride & Prejudice and the flack jackets here, and in spite of the undeniable initial shock for the audience of seeing little Lizzy Bennet knee someone in the knackers, she generally settles into the carnage with the same athletic, saucy gusto that so dazzled in Pirates Of The Caribbean. Hipster trousers constantly at half-mast, builder's bum and G-string proudly protruding, she marches about with a cocky tomboy swagger that - apart from one or two ridiculously overplayed pieces of faux macho posturing - sees her hold her own in a sea of gangsters and grime.
In fact, not only does the porcelain-skinned, 20-year-old posh bird from Middlesex convincingly buddy up with the beefy Rourke and unhinged Ramirez, but she proves the ultimate wish-fulfilment fantasy for adolescent girls: Jean Claude Van Dame.
Disappointingly though, Richard Kelly's screenplay is an enthusiastic muddle. Like Donnie Darko, it's often hilarious and always sharp, with the uneasy love triangle between Domino and her two colleagues providing a neat central spine. But, unlike Kelly's cult calling-card, it starts sloppily and is packed with a dizzying confusion of subplots that ping around from unconvincing backstory to armed heists to reality TV and disease-of-the-week melodrama in a blink. Some tangents are terrific (Christopher Walken's hilarious, font-obsessed TV executive and ex-Beverly Hills 90210ers Brian Austin Green and Ian Ziering playing themselves as his presenters), others unnecessary vehicles for a succession of jarring cameos (oh good, it's Jerry Springer). Considering its overall satirical sparkiness and snappy dialogue, it's a shame more of the excess fat wasn't liposuctioned. If it had, then maybe, just maybe, we would be talking alchemy of Scott and Tarantino proportions...
Even so, Domino packs so much action, fun and pathos into its running time that it's impossible not to like. Sensibly spotting that as a profession, bounty hunting can be a bit, well, dull - roundup bail jumpers, collect cash - Scott introduces a convoluted Mob scam that sucks in Domino and co and builds toward a tense, explosive climax that delivers in tragic style. Throughout, he lingers on his leading lady, lasciviously - of his six-camera set-up, there must have been one permanently dedicated to focus on Knightley's rump - and frames her in enough filmmaking fireworks and excitable vibrancy to perfectly showcase his undisputed technical edge.
So who was the real Domino Harvey? Still not the foggiest. But in the meantime, this one will do nicely.
Verdict:
Terrific fun and sexy as hell, but the story's too mushy and wayward to really resonate. Still, Knightley has a ball and Rourke is a joy once more.
By Total Film - DirectorGoran DukicStarsPatrick FugitShea WhighamTom WaitsA film set in a strange afterlife way station that has been reserved for people who have committed suicide.Imagine that after you kill yourself, you don't go to heaven or hell but to an industrial wasteland where nothing works right, there are no good jobs, the fast food is generic, and everybody else who lives there committed suicide, too. Oh, and it doesn't look like anyone has sex, either, perhaps for theological reasons: Could a child be born in the land of the dead? How would you like to have a dad with a hole in his head? Think of Parents' Day.
"Wristcutters: A Love Story" stars Patrick Fugit as Zia, who has evolved from "Almost Famous" to almost dead. He has been forsaken by his girlfriend, Desiree (Leslie Bibb), and has slashed his wrists. That'll show her. Apparently fate has designed a macabre punishment for those who commit the sin of suicide: You don't die, but linger forever in a life like the one you had before, but worse, and surrounded by suicidal people.
And what kind of a name is Zia, anyway? A zia is a brachiopod, and Wiki reports that "99 percent of [this] lampshell species are both fossils and extinct." Read that again. Both fossils and extinct. Sounds like your neighbors in Wristcutterland. Zia makes a friend named Eugene (Shea Whigham), who, as you have probably guessed from his name, was a Russian rock singer. Pissed off at the audience one night, he electrocuted himself onstage. That showed them.
Zia hears from a recent arrival from the Other Side that Desiree killed herself, too. Assuming she must be on This Side somewhere, he persuades Eugene to drive around looking for her, which begins them on a journey like the ones people are always making in Dead Teenager Movies, the ones with gas stations run by Toothless Doom-Mongers. They acquire a hitchhiker named Mikal (Shannyn Sossamon), who believes she got a raw deal.
Along the road to nowhere, they come across a sort of outcast commune. It is run by just the man for the job, Tom Waits, although my vote would have gone to Keith Richards. And they find Desiree, but how much of the story do you need to know, anyway?
This idea of an afterlife for suicides is intriguing. They thought they were ending their misery, and it was just beginning. That'll show them. Zia gets a job at a place called Kamikaze Pizza, which only scratches the surface of the possible jokes. But don't get the wrong idea: The movie isn't laugh out loud funny, under the circumstances, but it is bittersweet and wistfully amusing; the actors enjoy lachrymosity. We witness the birth of a new genre, the Post-Slasher Movie.
by Roger Ebert - DirectorTerry GilliamStarsChristopher PlummerLily ColeHeath LedgerHaving made a deal with the Devil himself for immortality many millennia ago, the now decrepit mystic Doctor Parnassus fights for the freedom of his only daughter's soul.The motto of Second City is "Something Wonderful Right Away," and maybe Terry Gilliam has the words displayed on his mirror when he shaves every morning. He has never faltered. "The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus" could be seen as a sideshow version of his own life, with him playing the role of the pitchman who lures you into his fantasies. That they may seem extravagant and overheated, all smoke and mirrors, is, after all, in their very nature.
The story in Gilliam's fevered film is all over the map, as usual, but this time there's a reason. His wild inventions in character, costumes and CGI effects are accounted for by a plot that requires revolving worlds. Elements of this plot were made necessary by the death of Heath Ledger halfway into the filming, but the plot itself I think was in place from the first.
It involves a bizarre, threadbare traveling show that unfolds out of a rickety old wagon in rundown pockets of London occupied mostly by drunks and grotesques. The show consists of the (very, very) old Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) perching ominously on a stool while his barker, Anton (Andrew Garfield); his daughter, Valentina (Lily Cole), and his angry dwarf, Percy (Verne Troyer), perform for an unruly handful of lager louts.
Percy and Anton save the life of a man hanging from a bridge. Why only they can perform this task is wisely not explained. The man on the rope is Tony (Heath Ledger). I know. He joins the show, is appalled by its archaic form and suggests updates. The reason it's creaky is that Parnassus is many centuries old, having made a pact with Satan (Tom Waits, as usual) to live forever on condition that Satan can possess Valentina (Lily Cole) when she turns 16. You have to admit Parnassus didn't rush into reproduction. Of course he wants out of the deal. Satan frequently runs into credit payment risks.
Tony, it develops, can enter/evoke/control/create strange worlds on the other side of a lookingglass on the shabby stage. In these worlds, anything goes, which is always to Gilliam's liking. CGI allows the director and his designers to run riot, which they do at a gallop, and some wondrous visions materialize.
I believe Ledger was intended to be the guide through all of these realms. But Gilliam apparently completed filming all the outer-world London scenes, Ledger returned to New York for R&R, and the rest is sad history. Gilliam replaced him by casting Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell as the Tonys of Imaginariums Nos. 1 through 3 and offering no other explanation, as indeed with Imaginariums, he isn't required to do. Depp looks the most like Ledger, but it's a melancholy fact that Farrell steals the role.
My problem with Gilliam's films is that they lack a discernible storyline. I don't require A-B-C, Act 1-2-3, but I do rather appreciate having some notion of a film's own rules. Gilliam indeed practices "Something Wonderful Right Away," and you get the notion that if an idea pops into his head, he feels free to write it into his script under the Cole Porter Rule ("Anything Goes"). Knowing my history with Gilliam, who I always want to like more than I do, I attended the Cannes screening of "Doctor Parnassus" to be baffled, which I was, and then the Chicago press screening, where I had an idea what was coming and tried to reopen my mind. Gilliam is, you understand, a nice man, and has never committed the sin of failing to amaze.
Now what I see are a group of experienced actors gamely trying to keep their heads while all about are losing theirs. Can it be easy to play one-third of a guide to one-third of an arbitrary world? You just have to plunge in. Ledger himself, who makes Tony relatively grounded in the "real" world, must have been prepared to do the same and would have lent the story more continuity. Still, this is an Imaginarium indeed. The best approach is to sit there and let it happen to you; see it in the moment and not with long-term memory, which seems to be what Parnassus does. It keeps his mind off Satan's plans for his daughter.
by Roger Ebert - DirectorAlbert HughesAllen HughesStarsDenzel WashingtonMila KunisRay StevensonA drifter fights his way across a ravaged, post-apocalyptic America while protecting a sacred book that holds the secrets to humanity's salvation.Here is a very strange film from the Hughes brothers, once the pioneers of the modern African-American thriller with Menace II Society and Dead Presidents, but who seriously blotted their copybook with an uncomprehending adaptation of Alan Moore's Ripper fantasy From Hell.
It could easily be a companion-piece to The Road, to which it bears a superficial resemblance - it takes place in a similarly conceived post-apocalyptic America, deserted and desolate, with marauding gangs of cannibals and killers comprising the remaining population. Through this trudges Denzel Washington - like Viggo Mortensen in The Road - on an epic journey towards the coast; but where Mortensen's primary motivation was to save his son, Washington's plans are considerably more opaque.
He eventually finds his way to an ad-hoc frontier outpost under the sway of sneering Gary Oldman, who is frantically searching for a book he appears to believe is a weapon of awesome power. Washington is carrying such a book, and while the film affects to offer some suspense over its identity, only the most ingenuous will fail to work it out in first few minutes. It's big, covered in leather, big cross on the front ... Sadly - and I don't think this is giving too much away - screeching heavenly hordes fail to make an appearance.
It's at this point that the film metamorphises into a po-faced religious tract, interspersing elaborate action scenes with long-winded sermons about faith. (Light relief is provided by a truly remarkable scene featuring Michael Gambon and Frances de la Tour - of all people - as an eccentric couple of well-armed elderly survivors.) Despite the impressively atmospheric opening sequences the Hugheses allow their film to lurch into inspirational-literature territory - and it ends up dissipating the brooding, cryptic atmosphere of its opening scenes.
The Guardian - DirectorMartin McDonaghStarsColin FarrellWoody HarrelsonSam RockwellA struggling screenwriter inadvertently becomes entangled in the Los Angeles criminal underworld after his oddball friends kidnap a gangster's beloved Shih Tzu.Martin Mcdonagh made a lasting impression in 2008 with his debut feature, In Bruges — which has crept up many people’s favourite film lists, partly thanks to its quotability. Given that there’s been a four-year wait for a follow-up, and that Seven Psychopaths is about a blocked Irish screenwriter called Marty, there’s a possibility that McDonagh is flirting with autobiography here. Or maybe that’s as much a feint as anything else on offer.
In a set-up reminiscent of Adaptation and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, every film cliché is followed by a footnote. The funniest, most perceptive deconstructions of movie conventions come from a complete maniac. Billy (Sam Rockwell) notes that you can do anything on screen to a woman so long as you let a cute animal go unscathed.
Colin Farrell, so much better in indie dramas than product like the Fright Night or Total Recall remakes, plays it quizzical as the token non-psychopath, letting Rockwell seize the day as the hero’s collaborator/stalker/best friend. It’s the sort of role that would have a lock on a Best Supporting Actor nomination if only Christopher Walken, delivering the full-strength Walken for the first time in a while, weren’t in the same film. Walken gets a face-off moment, involving a cravat, with Woody Harrelson’s gangster that’s as good as his confrontation with Dennis Hopper in True Romance. There’s too much material here for it all to be digested, especially since the plot is basically a dance around the fact that there isn’t one… and the smart insights about lazy moviemaking still apply to this film as much as to the most average shoot ’em up.
Verdict
Enormously entertaining, endlessly quotable, perfectly cast and packed full of the richest acting you’ll see from an ensemble cast all year, but the result is ever so slightly hollow.
Empire Magazine