Sunday, September 14, 2008

Ishtar, Wicker Man, Little Man Tate, Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!, Next, Speed, Bowfinger, Deconstructing Harry, Dolores Claiborne

Ishtar
Its reputation as a bad movie is accurate, mostly because scenes in the desert with Isabelle Adjani shrouded in a scarf have an inherent silliness and her performance is anything but silly. But it's not just her fault: The premise of the movie, two songwriting friends who go to Ishtar and find themselves in some political hot potato, gets dumber and dumber as it goes along. What's mostly disheartening about the movie is that the first twenty minutes, of Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman bantering back and forth and singing out loud their ideas for songs, are funny in the same dumb-comedy way that's become extremely popular now. The montage scenes that Elaine May makes out of their ideas are often pretty funny, and had she just stuck to that the movie could have probably worked pretty well.

The Wicker Man
To make a movie with some kind of spooky, culty quality to it you may need the added benefit of making your movie in a low-budget way. What drains this remake of any scariness is that the plot and the way it's presented to us has been drained of anything remotely archaic, it's glossy and professional and not at all spooky. (Ellen Burstyn's face make-up is so perfectly applied that you admire its perfection rather than find it creepy or ominous.) It's also bereft of any kind of pleasure because Neil LaBute is so humorless in his approach; many scenes of Nicolas Cage crying out in anguish are effective only in how increasingly funny it becomes to see the seriousness of the movie lacquered on with the stupidity of the plot.

Little Man Tate
The benefit of having actors direct movies isn't that they've been around film sets and have a little on-the-job training, it's that most serious actors -- or actors who care about acting rather than being models -- bring a greater attention to human beings than a director would. The downside is that sometimes these actors are not very familiar with the film medium as an art, so while they may make more interesting and truthful choices regarding characterization and behavior, they can lack an overall sense of the film as an art itself; the film can be conventional while the acting is special.

Jodie Foster's film isn't necessarily a great drama, although it obviously has similarities to her own life. (Interestingly, she casts herself as a downtrodden mother with the prodigy child.) What it has going for it is that it has a great deal of empathy, especially for children (as well as their families). While she gives a certain degree of fairness to both the mother of this prodigy and the academic who sees potential in him, eventually she sides with the mother who lets him just be a kid, but who doesn't challenge him mentally. (The academic who challenges him does so with kindness, but also with an order based on book-reading rather than messy life experiences.)

What Foster lacks is a visual flair; she tries to liven things up with dream sequences and images of the way the boy sees the world mathematically, but her staging is overly obvious -- there are a great deal of wide, open shots to emphasize loneliness and a lack of closeness.

Win a Date with Tad Hamtilon!
It's not the type of movie that knocks it out of the park, but from moment to moment it's an affable affair, both due to the enormously appealing performers and the slightly farcical tone (although, save for Nathan Lane, the timing isn't sharp enough to have the quality of good farce). The movie ultimately adopts the outlook that life can be like a movie even though the "right" choice (picking your childhood love over a movie star) isn't very plausible. It might have been more believable for the girl to go off with the movie star first, be crushed when it doesn't work, and then return to her childhood love. But "love" as a notion of ending up with someone as a result of available options would be too depressing for teenage girls to think about, and this wants the optimism of movies with the "true love" message that makes girls feel happy about their boyfriends who've gone to see the movie with them.

Next
Although the ending essentially makes what excitement the movie has generated pointless it's a quickly-paced B movie. It's not ineptly made, just not very plausible. (For a guy who has a superpower with strict rules there seem to be a lot of exceptions.) There's a pleasantly ludicrous quality to Nicolas Cage as a hero, and he's never bothered me the way he bothers some other people. His hair is absurd and his expressions are too, but he's the definition of a stylish actor, and there's something fun about an actor made famous for his risky, offbeat choices becoming the headline star of Hollywood action movies. There's not much that's clever about the film -- the conceit of looking into the future is pretty hokey and never aptly explained (nor is the generic threat of terrorism, with old-fashioned Russian terrorists to keep from any unsettling qualities invoked from, you know, real-life terrorism). Julianne Moore doesn't have many notes to play, but she does the efficient, calculated professional type as well as you can. And the surprise of Peter Falk would make any movie more enjoyable.

Speed
The cool, icy opening credits made me take notice and think maybe "Speed" was as good as I remember it being when I saw it at eight years old. It turns out the director worked as a cinematographer for Paul Verhoeven, so he would have some experience in glossy thrills. The opening set piece in an elevator, with its echoes of "Silence of the Lambs," is terrifically sustained, and Dennis Hopper and Jeff Daniels fill the movie out nicely. While the idea for the speed-detonated bomb is often exciting, it loses that excitement the moment the bus jumps over that ramp (all the set-up shots make it look impossible). And when they repeat the entire movie as a subway chase for the last 15 minutes it degrades into outright silliness. But there are enough distractions along the way -- oh no, Hopper has an underground money tunnel! -- that make it entertaining, and ultimately it's Keanu Reeves' show. He was never more sleekly beautiful.

Bowfinger
Its good nature makes its shortcomings more acceptable (such as Eddie Murphy's second role as a movie star's geeky brother), and while generally you could say that it's a "satire" of the movie industry it's more specifically satirizing obsession with celebrity and actor pretentions. (There's an exchange of gold when Steve Martin tells Christine Baranski that their film is in a new style, "Cinema Nouveau," and she slowly replies "Ohhh" as if she understands.) Murphy's perfirmance as the movie star reminds you what makes him such a vital, exciting comedy presence (contrasted against Martin's braininess).

Deconstructing Harry
The most jarring thing about it is how full of foul language it is, and then how nonchalant it is about things like prostitution. But it's still as watchable as any Allen movie. The cast seems weirdly dated -- Billy Crystal, Demi Moore -- and Judy Davis' performance is so frenzied it barely resembles a human being.

Dolores Claiborne
I haven't read Stephen King's story, but the characters have been created with such richness that his depictions are sympathetic simply by virtue of his intense interest. The movie has been filmed like a stern melodrama from the '30s -- the stylized, accented performances easily bring to mind Katharine Hepburn (in particular the amazing Judy Parfitt). The cast is incredible, but it's not a stunt assembly; they fall perfectly in their roles. Kathy Bates and Parfitt have the fortune of being able to play two ages, and we can clearly, beautifully see how their relationship changes over time (and how Bates changes from polite and subservient to a hardened woman). The movie will have a sudden burst of violence, as when David Strathairn hits Bates, but more often the drama comes from emotional abuse, how Bates and Parfitt eventually bond over their mistreatment by men, or a bank scene in which Bates realizes her money is gone, or a distressing scene where Strathairn abuses his daughter and her face goes slack when she finally relents. The movie has many beautiful lines, the best being the doctrine that Parfitt passes down to Bates: "Sometimes being a bitch is all a woman has to hold onto." It's definitely a woman's movie, but not necessarily man-hating; even the reprehensible Strathairn character calls his wife the shortened "D," alternating between impotent frustration and wanting her approval. The bleak, rotten blue tones of the present against the warmer tones of the past give the movie a visual beauty.

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