2003
2002

December 28, 2002

The Tops of 2002. People who look for perfect movies are like people who search for the ideal lover: disappointed and dull. I think of movies the way the poet, essayist and novelist Randall Jarrell defined the novel: “A novel is a prose work of a certain length that has something wrong with it.” What I treasure in movies are the moments that have nothing wrong with them.

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December 20, 2002

Martin Scorsese and innumerable conspirators have struggled for almost three decades to produce Gangs of New York, and yet it is a terrible movie. This hellish horror of failed ambition should freeze the blood of any artist who has held too long to a primal obsession and fears that a life's work will be shown up as a Promethean folly.

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December 13, 2002

Evelyn is a much more modest affair, a tidy tearjerker from melodrama journeyman Bruce Beresford. What’s Irish painter and decorator Desmond Doyle (Pierce Brosnan) to do when his wife scoots out on him the day after Christmas with an Englishman, leaving him with two young boys and a small girl? Bruce Beresford’s Evelyn, from a script by Paul Pender (and developed and produced by Brosnan’s company, Irish Dreamtime), offers the answer: hold your breath, worse is coming. Based on an actual groundbreaking 1950s family-law case in Ireland, Evelyn traces the efforts of the single, but not widowed, father to reclaim his kids once they’re taken away and imprisoned in what lawyer Stephen Rea dubs “a cozy conspiracy between the Catholic Church and the Irish government.”

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December 6, 2002

What is more beautiful than the one who has gone away?

Absence makes the heart grow fonder, fantasy forgives, desire embellishes. Sentiments like these lie at the heart of Solaris, Steven Soderbergh's marital drama in a science-fiction setting. It's more “Scenes from an Intergalactic Marriage" than a true revisiting of Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 adaptation of Stanislaw Lem's novel, with Soderbergh's usual take on female-male relationships as being essentially parasitic. Soderbergh's Solaris (which draws conspicuously from Tarkovsky's script with only a modest credit to its current rights holders), is a different beast from the Russian master's fatiguing 165-minute version.

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November 29, 2002

I’m still working to digest Roman Polanski’s beautifully detailed act of witness, The Pianist, and hoping to catch Solaris and Adaptation in the next few days. In the meantime, a few brief notes on Ararat, and a link to a personal Christmas story.  More next Friday.

Atom Egoyan is a methodical man. When distinctions are made between art that`s heavy and art that`s light, he`ll always wind up on the somber, sober, Canadian side of the equation. In all of his features, from the superbly accomplished, like Calendar, Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter  to sleek yet unsurprising, like Felicia`s Journey, narrative strategies wreak havoc with expectations. And in the case of Ararat, the strategies may have gone awry. Egoyan has said that this attempt to come to terms with the 1915 Armenian genocide, in which a third of the country`s population was killed, including many members of his family, began as "a straightforward historical story." But not for long.

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November 22, 2002

Masturbation and masterpieces, isn’t there room for both in the movies? While there’s a new James Bond film opening today, with all the expected ridiculousness, and Criterion has a long-awaited DVD release of some sublime, Jean-Luc Godard’s acidulous dissection of marital love, Contempt.

First, the foolishness.  At the age of 40, James Bond’s in the midst of a colorful midlife crisis, but at least in Die Another Day, partner-in-smirk Halle Berry can hold her own again Pierce Brosnan's increasingly craggy air. Their interplay doesn’t strike memorable sparks, but they’re both pleasant to watch, which was especially important at the press screening I caught. The print on show had some of the crispest music and sound effects I’ve heard in ages, yet the dialogue was often nearly inaudible. There’s always been hope that the Broccoli family that owns the franchise would bring the extremely profitable series into the modern age, but they’ve always seemed content to attain a high level of mediocrity rather than make truly memorable entertainment or, God forbid, art. I’m no particular fan of the series, and thinking about the movies over the weekend, I couldn’t remember plots, locations, quips, from the last four or five. (So much for fanboy cred.)

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November 15, 2002

Let’s go ahead and be hyperbolic, melodramatic, over the top and emotional: Far From Heaven is a miracle. It’s an unlikely proof of the great maker of fables, the Argentine master Jorge Luis Borges, whose unflappably wry short story, Pierre Menard, the Author of Quixote, in which the driven protagonist attempts, against impossible odds, to compose Cervantes’ "Don Quixote" word-for-word in the modern age. Gus van Sant, vamping, said that was the rationale for his Psycho remake.

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November 8, 2002

It’s the day before the opening of one of my favorite film festivals of the year, the International Thessaloniki Film Festival so I’m going to have to break down and see My Big Fat Greek Wedding tonight… in Greece. It’s a hit here, too, and my friends who’ve seen it can’t believe I havne’t seen what they call “My Beeg Fat Wedding.” There are other movies on screens here that I haven’t caught yet, such as David Cronenberg’s Spider and Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible, but someday, maybe someday, I’ll get to see those in the States. But My Big Fat Greek Wedding in Greece? It sounds just right. And afterwards? A night of marvelous Greek food in this teeming, very young port city.

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November 1, 2002

Peculiar and sometimes precious comic performances are the highlight of dogged director George Hickenlooper’s latest, The Man from Elysian Fields. Floating on a rave review from Roger Ebert, Hickenlooper foregoes the kind of quiet, Hal Ashby-ish rhythms of his earlier movies like Dogtown. Here, he charts the implausible, but often kicky, misadventures of down-on-his-luck “quality” novelist Andy Garcia who becomes a gigolo to man-pimp Mick Jagger (notably twerpy for someone of his advancing years), proprietor of the establishment of the title. Juliana Margulies plays Garcia’s wife in this 2000 production; James Coburn sets roaring fires with his performance as a dying Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist whose comely young wife (Olivia Williams) brings Garcia into their stately fold for literary and sexual services.

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October 25, 2002
The holiday movies are being shown to critics, and I’m champing at the bit to write about several I’ve seen, but I’ll hold off until closer to release dates. One quick preview: I’m not sure what audiences will make of 8 Mile when it opens November 8, but I was pretty darn pleased by a packed screening earlier this week. One notable contributor to Curtis Hanson’s smartly modest making-of-the-rapper tale is cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto (Amores Perros), whose handheld camerawork, tight close-ups and gritty, grainy images, makes the movie seem like the first Mexican film shot entirely in Detroit.

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October 18, 2002
From those first moments you know you’re in for an aggressive portrait of disconnection and externalized inner chaos that will either disturb or annoy the shit out of you. It’s a comedy about OCD with OCD. For me, it’s the 32-year-old director’s best picture. Why? Because I can cite you a half dozen influences or parallel bits of art and it still won’t give you a clean picture of what Anderson does, not with Sandler’s persona, but with Sandler himself. His performance is frightening, spot on, utterly haunted. Oscar? Don’t laugh. Won’t happen, but it’s not unworthy. Great acting? Actually great typage, as the French call casting a role to type.

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