..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..RJ Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Kim Voynar
..Michael Wilmington

Appaloosa
plus reviews of Ghost Town, Igor, Lakeview Terrace and Hounddog
Plus Quick Hits On This Week's DVDs

..MCN Critics Roundup ..MCN Review Vault

Appaloosa [Three stars]
U.S.; Ed Harris

Right up to the midway point, I thought director-star Ed Harris' Appaloosa -- a good town-taming western adapted from Robert Parker's novel -- had a chance to be a great one. It was lean, smart, simmering with
tension. It looked terrific and the actors -- Ed Harris, Viggo Mortensen, Renee Zellweger, Jeremy Irons, Timothy Spall, et. al. -- were top notch and obviously enjoying themselves. Overall, Appaloosa had the same bracing mix of classicism and realism that marked last year's fine The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Unfortunately, Appaloosa doesn't finish great, or even very strong. Yet it's still an honorable effort by a moviemaker who knows his stuff and loves his work -- and who should probably take another crack at this particular genre some day.

Appaloosa -- not to be confused with the pretty good 1966 Marlon Brando-Sidney Furie Western -- is the story of a bloody, expert gun-for-hire, Sheriff Virgil Cole (Harris), his enigmatic and deadly deputy Everett Hitch (Viggo Mortensen) and the tyrannical and murderous rancher Randall Bragg (Jeremy Irons), a bloody bully whose reign of terror prompts the town fathers to hire Cole and Hitch.

The movie begins superbly, suffers a credibility gap midway, and then gets way too rushed and over-explanatory toward the end. (Appaloosa also suffers from its own narration, and though narration is a convention I often like, it should be dropped here.) But somehow, maybe mostly because after a long cinematic drought, I really like seeing the current revival of the
Western (Robert Ford, 3:10 to Yuma) and its latter-day variations (No Country for Old Men, There Will be Blood), I didn't lose faith in it. It survives despite its flaws.

If Appaloosa doesn't measure up to great town-tamers like My Darling Clementine, John Ford's masterpiece about the Earp-Clanton feud, or his late-career revisit to the same themes The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the new movie is still picturesque and psychologically trenchant, an epic with a dark side. It's set and shot (vividly and lyrically by Dean Semler) in the two great movie Western arenas: the frontier town, with its frightened, weaselly shopkeepers, and stolid solid citizens (Timothy Spall engagingly travesties one here) and the outdoors, the sun-scorched plains and mountains through which cowboys and Indians ride and gunslingers blast each other.

Harris makes the movie work, at its best, as both a classic and a revisionist piece. We see the old prototypes of the western in its commercial heyday, but we also sense more complex psychological forces operating beneath the surfaces. In some ways, Appaloosa is a model of the old post-war adult Western and it's at least as good, as a similarly dark town-taming tale, Edward Dmytryk's Warlock. That's not a small compliment; Dmytryk's 1959 movie, from the Oakley Hall novel, with Henry Fonda as a taciturn death-dealing sheriff (a role that was part of the inspiration for his black-clad killer role in Once Upon a Time in the West), Richard Widmark as a straighter lawman, and Anthony Quinn as Fonda's tormented friend, was one of the all-time favorite Westerns of Sergio Leone. (Liberty Valance was another).

Harris is both a superb movie actor in the John Garfield tradition and a good craftsmanlike director -- and he's also someone who likes to share the wealth with his fellow actors, to give them stellar opportiunities too. As in his previous directorial effort, the fiercely unsentimental artist bio, Pollock, where he played Pollock and handed a prize part to his costar Marcia Gay Harden (as Pollock's mate), Harris gives himself a plum role here, as grim gunslinger Cole, and then hands an even better part to his movie partner/deputy Viggo Mortensen. Mortensen, with a touch of Gary Cooper, plays the laconic Hitch, who's as deadly as Cole but has less narcissism and more integrity.

These two, who are obviously descended on some level, from the Earp boys and Doc Holliday, face the movie's equivalent of vicious Old Man (or Ike) Clanton -- elegant Brit Jeremy Irons as ruthless cattle rancher Randall Bragg, a man whose capacity for evil explodes in the first few scenes-- and the sexiest, most conniving pseudo-Clementine ever: Renee Zellweger, smiling like a little fox, as the promiscuous schoolteacher and avid piano-tinkler Alison French.

Harris and Mortensen, I think, are unimprovable here, or would be if somebody would just cut the last narration out. Irons has been ridiculed for his English origins by some reviewers heavily into type-casting. (But didn't many American westerners have English or Irish origins too?) I thought he was a fine, arrogant heavy; the casting was no more eccentric than Daniel
Day-Lewis as the John Hustonish oil king of There Will be Blood -- one of the greatest performances of the last several years.

Zellweger is also one of the naughtiest of pseudo-heroines; it's as if Ford's archetypal characters of prim schoolteacher Clementine (Cathy Downs) and fiery dance hall slut Chihuahua (Linda Darnell) had somehow gotten scrambled together and lost all their morals in their process. The often cutie-pie Zellweger has a field day in this bitch/manipulative vein. When French double-crosses her lover Cole, after first making a play for Hitch, the movie begins to abandon completely the old black-and-white morality of the earlier pre-film noir Westerns. French's sexuality exposes Cole's flaws and Hitch's virtues. And Appaloosa keeps hinting at deeper stuff, though the last gunfight is pretty black-and-white.

It doesn't really matter. If you like Westerns, you should ultimately like most of this one. I did.

Ghost Town [Three stars]
U.S.; David Koepp

Ghost Town, starring the unusual threesome of Ricky Gervais, Greg Kinnear and Tea Leoni, is a movie throwback to the Golden Age -- a pleasant trip back,.

Back in the '30s and '40s, in the vaunted Golden Age of the Hollywood dream factory system, there was such a regular supply of wit, feeling and verbal style in the best American movie romantic comedies -- from the Sturgeses, the Wilders, the Kanins, the Hechts and their comrades, that audiences got used to it, almost inured to it. Those qualities have been in
shorter supply in our movies today, especially since Woody Allen fled Manhattan for England and Europe. That's not so, though, in David Koepp's spookily amusing Manhattan melody Ghost Town, a Topper-like little gem about ghosts, seduction, and not so painless dentistry.

Koepp, who's already had one script out this summer -- Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Crystal Skull -- works almost as much as the old Golden Age scribes; since his breakthrough script Apartment Zero, he's rarely seemed inactive. He's less prolific as a writer-director, though he has a flaiur for scien`ce fiction and fantasy and his A Stir of Echoes is one of the best modern ghost story movies; this film is in the same league. It's a movie that has a lot to offer: spot-on actors, brainy writing, and some of the high style, sparkle and narrative agility we loved in those old Golden Age screwballers.

What it doesn't have is a classic romantic comedy hero -- a Cary Grant type -- in the lead. Instead Ghost Town has Gervais, the hilariously persnickety boss of the British TV version of The Office, and an actor who reminds you more of tart-tongued '30s movie comedians like Eric Blore, Franklin Pangborn or Groucho Marx -- or even of Roland Young, the wry chap who played Cosmo Topper, the gent who could see the spectral antics of the playboy ghost played by young Grant.

There's a parallel here: Gervais's persnickety dentist Bertram is the only human here who can observe the somewhat Grant-like Kinnear's recently departed two-timer Frank Herlihy, as well as a whole Sixth Sense horde of ghostly others around him. Why? Bertram actually died briefly (for seven minutes) during an emergency colonoscopy at his malpractice-riddled hospital -- performed by a ditzy surgeon (Kristen Wiig) more concerned with her new artificial tan -- and he survives that near-death with the ability to see scads of ghosts that are apparently everywhere around us, many trying to wrap up the unfinished business they left behind on Earth.

Frank was a suave, quick-talking philanderer when he was alive and he, his cheated-on wife Gwen (Leoni) and Bertram all sharfed the same apartment building; now Franks wants to use Bertram to make sure that knockout museum archeologist Gwen (played with Carole Lombard-ish sexy pizzazz by Tea Leoni) doesn't marry her new fiancé, a too-good-to-be-true human rights lawyer named Richard (Billy Campbell.)

That's the set-up and Koepp, cowriter John Kamps and the cast spin it out with such verve and snap, that the movie's pace never flags; Koepp and company carry you from wisecracking comedy to supernatural high jinks to subtlety/poignancy with ease. But much as I enjoyed Ghost Town, I did have a problem -- beyond those occasional scenes when Bertram talks to Frank in public and the people around them puzzlingly fail to react. (Maybe they think he's on a cell-phone.)

I don't want to sound privy the looks-ism that runs rampant in TV and the movies (and in politics, if you count the flabbergasting Sarah Palin). But, if Frank objects so strongly to Gwen-and-Richard, why does he promote a second romance between Gwen and Bertram, given that the dentist is initially a nasty snob who, in every way, seems a worse choice for her? From the first scene, where he condescendingly stiffs his fellow dentist, Dr. Prashar
(played by the very empathetic Aasif Mandui), Bertram Pincus (or Pink-Ass, as Frank tends to call him) is so mean, bitchy and dismissive, such an all-around pill, that we start longing immediately for this pasty-faced turkey's comeuppance.

That come-uppance, and a spiritual awakening as well, will arrive. But Bertram's jerkiness still makes the Gwen-Bertram romance harder to accept, not so much because Bertram is plainer-looking than the other two contestants, but because, as a nice guy, he's less interesting. He's only really funny and lively here when he's nasty.

Is that a flaw? In a film so bristling with wit, screwball personality, clever twists and autumnal Manhattan beauties, perhaps not. Ghost Town is a romantic comedy for connoisseurs of the old style and its best imitators. It's also a movie that has a swell, cross-talking ensemble and one of the great dark comedy sight gags -- the sudden bus motif -- in recent memory.

Igor [Three stars]
U.S.; Tony Leondis

Igor, which I enjoyed, is an animated feature that also tends to keep alive the old screwball tradition of the Production Code era American comedy -- and even some post-Code classics like Young Frankenstein, in which popeyed Marty Feldman played Dr. Fronkenstein's factotum Eye-gore. Like Ghost Town, it's a good picture with added plusses for knowledgeable moviegoers.

This new horror movie parody is about a mad scientist's assistant named Igor (pronounced ee-gore and played by John Cusack), who takes over when his boss, Dr. Glickenstein (John Cleese), while experimenting, buys the Frankensteinian farm. On his own, Igor winds up inventing a monster who just won't be monstrous: sweet, hulking, seam-faced Eva (Molly Shannon), who seems too nice for the yearly evil-monster science fair that Igor desperately wants to win.

Director Tony Leondis and writer Chris McKenna's movie is deliberately pitched in an early Tim Burtonesque key -- the Burton who made sporty, spooky little shorts like Vincent and Frankenweenie or who, a little later, produced The Nightmare Before Christmas. It's full of horrific, cutesy characters, nimble cross-talk, weird puppety animation and sharp-witted actors: Cusack, Cleese, Steve Buscemi, Molly Shannon, Jennifer Coolidge, Eddie Izzard, Sean Hayes, and even Jay Leno, typecast as a power-crazed king of darkness.

This Igor is a cute, bright little guy who was forced into a life as a Dwight Frye-style assistant -- after earning his "Yes, Master" degree at the local Gooniversity -- and is then pushed into the evil creature science fair contest by Glickenstein's demise, his own ambition and the insane competitiveness of maniacal Dr. Schadenfreude (Izzard) and his duplicitous femme fatale mistress Jaclyn (Coolidge -- who also plays Jaclyn's alter-ego, the clumpy lousefrau Heidi). Igor has two spiffy helpmates, a couple of his own failed inventions, called Brian (Brain misspelled -- and in this case misapplied) and Scamper (a streetwise wabbit with a death wish), played snappily by Buscemi and Hayes. And he has the huge and goodhearted would-be actress Eva (Shannon), who, though she may not be able to kill a fly, sure as hell massacres that overdone showstopper "Tomorrow" from her favorite show Annie.

Much of the movie takes place in Dr, Glickenstein's stormy castle (Its alive! it's alive!) and King Malbert's (Leno) palace, surrounded by play-German expressionist doom and gloom. And it has an ending you expect -- but would probably be mad if you didn't get.

Igor is pretty obvious. But it's smart, it's funny, and adults don't have to cringe over it when accompanying their children to the show. They might even consider attending it without kids, which you sure couldn't say about about Fly Me to the Moon or Space Chimps (though you could say it about Pixar's urbane and sweet Wall-E).

And though Igor doesn't have an original song score, it has a brace of zippy archive songs by that manic scat-singer Louis Prima (joined once by his deadpan delish dish Keely Smith), composer of the jazz classic "Sing, Sing, Sing" -- the classic big-beat number Benny Goodman and his great semi-pickup band swung, swung, swung to Carnegie Hall immortality. That ought to be enough to brand any feature cartoon as a hip article.

Lakeview Terrace [Two and a half stars]
U.S.; Neil LaBute

I don't know what it is about movie endings this week. The pseudo-bang-up finish for Lakeview Terrace doesn't work for me either. The climactic sections of this flashy anti-bigotry message melodrama -- in which Samuel L. Jackson, as a suburbanite divorced dad LAPD cop, is the prejudiced sadist and Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington, as the interracial couple next door, are his victims -- go way over the top and drag apart the whole movie.

Skip this next graph if you don't want a tipoff, but I've always thought it was a waste to take an interesting, and even infuriating villain like Jackson's Abel Turner, and simply kill him off at the end. Instead, I wanted to see his reactions (more than a moment's worth, at least) when the tables are finally turned and rammed against him. But instead we get the usual showdown/wipeout. Like in a Western. (But that's a different story.) Lakeview Terrace does grip you; director LaBute doesn't seem very personally invested, but he keeps it humming. Yet the movie's wildly clichéd ending tends to submerge a bit Jackson's performance, which is tremendous. Jackson never betrays an attitude about Abel; he plays him from deep inside,
which makes him twice as scary. It's impressive to see that the actor who played the ultra-mellow Senor Love Daddy in Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing can generate so much venom here. Was the climax a waste? Well, Denzel Washington survived a poor ending in Training Day...

Hounddog [Two and a half stars]
U.S.; Deborah Kampmeier

Unfairly stigmatized as the Dakota Fanning rape movie, this is actually a pretty good, sensitive regional drama with very fine acting from Fanning as the Elvis loving waif, an intense job by David Morse as her lightning-struck idiot of a father, and a nice melodramatic turn by Piper Laurie as her bigoted grandma. The movie is not distasteful and exploitive, though it could nave used a bigger budget. (Check that church social looking parking lot at what's supposed to be a '50s-60s Presley concert.)

Hounddog is Southern gothic with a pop edge; director Kampmeier has talent. Fanning sort of blows you away in this role, managing a sexiness and vulnerability that don't cross the line but often are scary. And it's always nice to hear Elvis in a good movie, considering how many bad ones the Colonel stuck him in.

 

MW on DVD
Picks of the Week

NEW RELEASES

Snow Angels [Three and a half stars]
U.S.; David Gordon Green, 2007

Small towns are often romanticized and sentimentalized in the movies, turned into fantasies of good will and fond memories that sometimes make the consummately homey visions of painter Norman Rockwell look like the slashing works of a cynical satirist. David Gordon Green's Snow Angels takes the opposite course. It's nastier and more realistic, though, in the end, almost as poetic. There's a weird blend of melancholy and madness in this movie; Green plunges us into a doom-haunted, nerve-jangling family drama that suggests a soap opera veering into tabloid pathology and horror.

But, even as the violence and trauma begin to mount up here -- even as central character Glenn Marchand (Sam Rockwell), a gun nut and Jesus freak with a bent toward sado-masochism, begins to go crazier and crazier over beauteous, wary wife Annie (Kate Beckinsale) -- the move keeps a core of gentleness. Glenn may be one of the two or three worst humans Green has portrayed in his small-town epics, and this may be one of the director's saddest stories, but compassion is never fully absent from his canvas.

The source here is a novel by Stewart O'Nan and the story is told in flashback after an introverted teenager, Arthur Parkinson (Michael Angarano) hears two gunshots while the bandleader rants at his outdoor school band practice. That's the setup. Green ('George Washington) gives it to us with his usual mix of toughness and sensitivity. He's a director attracted to melodramatic subjects with a kink of violence, but he's also a rhapsodic observer of small town life and alienated youth. In a way, Glenn --who survived a suicide attempt and now misperceives himself as somehow blessed by God -- is a childish, murderous fallen angel, thrust out of paradise and his emotional immaturity into adult passions that consume him.

As Glenn keeps trying pathetically to reconcile with Annie, driving her further and further away in the process, you watch him with a horror not completely untinged by weird sympathy. He's a small town monster, one easy to spot, and bringing Jesus and God in on his craziness only heightens the chill.

The novel Snow Angels is set in Pennsylvania in the '70s, but the movie, laid in the present, has no specific locale. (It was shot in Nova Scotia.) The film's wintry backgrounds, somber forests and deceptively peaceful waters, are almost as lyrically rendered as the Southern climes of Green's and cinematographer Tim Orr's other films, but you don't quite feel the same intense connection. There is a strong link to these people however. Watching this harsh, but very human, tale of mad love, you get a sense of the real underlife of some small towns, of a suburban peace hovering on the lip of chaos.

CLASSIC RELEASES

La Ronde [Four stars]
France; Max Ophuls, 1950 (Criterion Collection)

Le Plaisir [Four stars]
France; Max Ophuls, 1951 (Criterion Collection)

The Earrings of Madame de... [Four stars]
France; Max Ophuls, 1953 (Criterion Collection)

Three great films, released separately, directed by a sometimes neglected giant of the cinema, continental master of bittersweet romance Max Ophuls -- all in splendid Criterion editions.

James Mason once famously wrote A shot that does not call for tracks/is agony for poor, dear Max/ who, separated from his dolly/ is plunged in deepest melancholy. And indeed, for Ophuls (born Max Oppenheimer, a German Jew in Saarbrucken on the French-German border), movement in a movie was life itself, an expression of both its excitement and its evanescence, the way life thrills us and then vanishes before our eyes, all caught in the same reckless moment.

No one, not long shot masters like Kenji Mizoguchi, F. W. Murnau, Miklos Jansco, Theo Angelopoulos, Alexander Sokurov (in the phenomenal Russian Ark), nor Welles himself -- who filmed the great Magnificent Ambersons ballroom scene in a single shot -- ever wrung more beauty out of the moving camera as Ophuls. (If Welles is the Beethoven of the long take, Murnau its Bach and Sokurov its Stravinsky, then Ophuls is its Mozart.) No one more than Ophuls followed and preceded his actors with a camera so wondrously, or so fully conveyed life as a dance of love -- and death.

Ophuls' best films include Lola Montes, once described by Andrew Sarris as the greatest film of all time. I love Lola, but I wouldn't rank it above Citizen Kane, The Rules of the Game Vertigo, Singin' in the Rain, The Searchers, The Godfather Trilogy, Seven Samurai, Fanny and Alexander and several others. Yet it belongs among them. And so does Ophuls' Hollywood classic Letter from an Unknown Woman and his other French masterpieces La Ronde, Le Plaisir and The Earrings of Madame de... If you've never seen them, an extraordinary, sublime, track-filled treat awaits you. Extras: Numerous documentaries and interviews, and booklets with essays by Terrence Rafferty, Robin Wood and Molly Haskell, plus Louise de Vilmorin's short novel, The Earrings of Madame de...

BOX SET

Aki Kaurismaki's Proletariat Trilogy 3 discs [Four stars]
Finland; Aki Kaurismaki, 1986-90 (Criterion Collection)

Finland's fierce minimalist Kaurismaki applies the austere, rigorously precise style of a Robert Bresson or a Jean-Pierre Melville to his own harsh, despairing yet oddly funny portrayals of the hopeless lives of the Scandinavian underclass. These are among his most characteristic films, starring favorite actors like dour Matti Pellonpaa, stringy-haired Kati Outinen and hulking Esko Nikkari. People stare. People suffer. Life, and Kaurismaki, are bleak. (All the films are in Finnish, with English subtitles.)

Includes: Shadows in Paradise (Aki Kaurismaki, 1986) [Four stars.]
Ariel (Kaurismaki, 1988)[Four stars.] The Little Match Girl (Kaurismaki,
1990). [Four stars.] No extras.

 

- Michael Wilmington
September 11, 2008

 

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