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Reviews
Huang xin jia qi (2001)
Voyeur's paradise, critic's nightmare
This film has a beautiful package--gorgeous settings, beautiful stars, astonishing photography--but surprisingly void of content. Suspending disbelief at the plot's central conceit is nigh on impossible, for starters... then, the contrivance of the kidnapping--which plays into many foreigners's worst prejudices and fears about the Arab world, and is relatively unfounded in fact--is laughable. Not as laughable as R. Junna's performance, though: basically, she utters dry English lines without conviction, or screams/cries/wails hysterically. Anita Mui's embers smolder and flame, but she seems out of place in a film of (poorly directed?) second-rate actors. I was bored silly through most of the Morocco sequences: the characterization was stereotypical (who is Mike, and why should we care about him? why on earth would any woman be interested in the callow Chinese doctor, is unimaginable, etc.) and the plot painfully predictable. A voyeur's paradise, maybe, but a critic's nightmare.
American Chai (2001)
capra goes to bollywood
I thought this was a sweet, endearing portrayal of a classic immigrants` dilemma: the struggle to balance assimilation and alienation. The performances and direction were very good; what bothered me most about it was the over-reliance on cliched formulae: boy-gets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-almost-gets-girl, a la Woody Allen`s Manhattan; outrage at arranged marriage, a la a range of British south-asian flicks, not to mention Fiddler on the Roof; and pure Capracorn. i know that the American dream is a motivating force of great power, but this movie embodies a go-go 90s blind optimism, which borders on the cloying. Character motivation for the finale is completely unconvincing, nearing deus-ex-machina levels of ineffability. Yet, as a clever and highly commercializable ethnic formula-pic, it is a hit. The blandness and conformity of the engineers and doctors, which the film so openly derides, has seeped into this project as well. But this is the kind of treacle which will probably make a small wave. At least the director`s brother and lead male, Mr. Mehta, will! But, tell me, how is this different from the stories of immigrants from dozens of other cultures? I beg other readers to name some. Finally, and most disappointingly, I learned little about India or Indians from this movie. So, though i applaud the effort to tell the American uber-tale from yet another angle, I found myself wishing it weren`t so predictable and cliched.
Ceux qui m'aiment prendront le train (1998)
one epiphany too many
One epiphany too many in this film, which had me and nearly every other filmgoer checking their watches repeatedly. No one was surprised by the graphic homosexual sex, nor the transvestite, nor the other pseudo-revelations we were forced to endure. Having recently seen THE CELEBRATION, I found Ceux...'s script boring and predictable, which forced its makers to resort to a cheezy soundtrack which made over-obvious comments on the THEMES and INNER STATES of the far-too-numerous-to-be-fully-developed characters, and, worse, to enervatingly jarring cinematography. The Danish pic carried out its more ambitious project with more flair and less pyrotechniques, and achieved pathos and fuller characterization. If this film hails the rebirth of le cinema francais, then don't be surprised if the land of degaulle is not in the forefront of european cinema in the vingt-et-unieme. Interestingly, could the big-family-reunion cycle in Europe be connected to the integraion of the continent, and deeply-held fears about the internal struggles/issues which remain unresolved? Can european cousins really get along?
Saving Private Ryan (1998)
patriotic tripe
yes: patriotic tripe.
SANDS OF IWO JIMA had a similar line about "duty", and less screen time than RYAN devoted to the Stars and Stripes; FULL METAL JACKET had more harrowing (and intellectually honest depiction of the mind's slip into insanity (as well as containing many of the models for Spielberg's shots in the final shoot-em-up); DAS BOOT achieved an existentialist dimension; ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT(1930) seared into memory the ignorance and naivete of the scared youth on BOTH sides of the battle lines; HEARTS AND MINDS had realistic footage; JURASSIC PARK used the distant roar of the approaching enemy better;
Face it: the Friend of Bill has created a monstrous emotional rollercoaster which is wrapped in mom's apple pie and American boys' mission to "deliver freedom to the world as history's agents." At this juncture in history--1998--such jingoism bespeaks an America desperately searching for a jusification for its increasingly adventurist, amoral, self-serving and self-proclaimed role as World Leader-(and leading debtor)-cum-tyrant.
This is the greatest war film ever made in the second quarter of 1998, and nothing more. Except a potful of patriotic, historically inaccurate, hopelessly implausible, racist, sadistic, and finally just maudlin...well, tripe. It rates a 3 from me, because it is so effortless and shameless a pastiche of war-movies' cliches.
What a sad state the movies are in, when this empty a film is lauded with such superlatives!
The Gingerbread Man (1998)
Altman, muzzled, falls short of greatness this time.
I found myself at sixes and sevens while watching this one. Altman's touch with zooms in and out were there, and I expected those devices to comment on characters and situations. Unfortunately, as far as I could see, they sometimes were gratuitous, sometimes witty, often barren for failing to point out some ironic or other connection. In particular, two zoom-outs from the gilt dome in savannah merely perplexed. To be fair, though, a few zooms (outs and ins) to Branagh heightened his character's increasing bewilderment, a la Pudgy McCabe's or Philip Marlow's. On the whole, the zooms were, well, inconsistent, and sometimes even trite.
Other Almanesque devices, such as multiple panes of glass between camera and subject, succeeded in suggesting characters' sollipsism or narcissism or opaque states of knowledge. Car windshields, house windows, and other screens were used effectively and fairly consistently, I felt, harking back to THE PLAYER and even THE LONG GOODBYE. A few catchy jump-cuts, especially to a suggestive tv commercial, reminded me of such usage in SHORT CUTS, to sardonic effect.
But finally, the mismatch between Altman's very personal style and the sheer weight of the Grisham-genre momentum, failed to excite me. This director's 1970s masterpieces revised and deconstructed various classic genres, including the chandler detective film which this resembled in some ways; this time around, the director seemed to have too few arrows in his analytic quiver to strike any meaningful blow to the soft underbelly of this beastly genre. Was he muzzled in by mammonist producers, perhaps? Or am I missing something, due to my feeble knowledge of the genre he takes on here?
Nonetheless, the casting was excellent all around: Tom Berenger (for his terrifying ferality), Branagh for his (deflated) hubris, Robert Downey Jr's pheromonal haze, Robert Duvall's method of trash, and Davidtz's lurking femme-fatality were near perfect choices all. And except for a few slips out of Georgia into Chicago on the part of (brunette?) Daryl Hannah, accents were convincingly southern.
Suspense and mood were engrossing, even if the story didn't quite rivet viewers. The moodiness of a coastal pre-hurricane barometric plunge was exquisitely, painstakingly rendered--I felt like yelling at the usher to turn on the swamp cooler pronto.
Torn, in the end I judged it a 7.