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Reviews
Rounders (1998)
Double Downer
R-epetitive, scene after scene
O-bvious in all ways
U-biquitously generic structure
N-ary a doubt of the outcome
D-erivative of better Gambling Films
E-vasive characters
R-epleat with phoned-in performances
S-ame old stuff, different day
I didn't like it.
Ronin (1998)
...yawn...
This morning's Hollywood Reporter has a production still from "Ronin", a "Submitted-for-Your-Approval" thingus...
Now, I saw this piece of nonsense and I'll tell ya, paying for this ad MUST be buried in SOME contract SOMEWHERE cause they COULDN'T wilfully be serious (unless the Globes or Oscars now offers a "Best Car Chase" figurine, which this Movie deserves).
There's nothing really WRONG with "Ronin" if you overlook the worst case of MacGuffin-itis (this is the correct spelling, look to the source) I've seen lately; a seemingly "complex" structure that is frighteningly easy to predict; a loconic "European" pace that mistakes Insight in favor of "thinking man action picture" (which it is NOT).
"Ronin" falls on its face every time an attempt is made (and They see fit to try A LOT) to modify the standard template of the Chase Film. Nobody gives a cold squat about the interiors of the supplementary characters they DO spend screen time investigating, CONVERSELY the screentime they spend on fleshing out the characters we DO want to squat over is mired in some "BRILLIANT CHOICE" concept that waves a wand at creating some knock-off brand EXISTENTIAL AMBIGUITY: in the same way we don't know what's in the oh-so-soughtafter ice skate box, we know as much about what's inside our main characters. This strategy CAN work, but its failure here demonstrates the difference between 'Masters' and 'Journeymen'.
Unrecommended.
The Waterboy (1998)
Absolute Garbage
I'm a flexible guy. I got an open mind. I go to silly movies, and I can usually find some kind of redeeming quality. Perhaps a smartly crafted script to pay the rent; maybe a nice performance doomed by an ineffectual director; maybe a nice effect job or a good costume, nice photography...
WHATEVER! Anything! Toss me a bone, fer cris'sakes...
This film has nothing. I respect Sandler. He has that certain something, but this piece of trash is truely USELESS.
I want my money back.
Enemy of the State (1998)
Never Look Up
Now in the ideal universe, this film would be average fare: engaging, well crafted, respectfully participating with the audience (rather than preaching or dumbing down)... Fact is, most action/techno thrillers are crappy and unbelievable so "EOTS" winds up looking a lot better than it may be.
Story is well crafted and, where a "Mission Improbable" completely falls apart for two acts and whimpers resolution in an excruciating expository conclusion, "EOTS" actually works to bring two storylines together with precision structure.
Gene Hackman reprises Harry Caul as only he can, and if the sacrifice for great action is an understanding of the character's interior reality, go see "The Conversation" for backstory.
Will Smith is a calculated necessity for big box, and I figure if he was ten years older I'd've believed it a lot more. He does journeyman work with admirable energy, and Voight continues his bad govt. franchise effectively.
The real star is the tech-based frenicity of the pursuit of the Wrong Man scenario. It works. The supporting characters move this baby along rapid fire: in that bunch there is quality and they reveal a surprising amount of personality, a key to making the genre open up. Love that gent from "Pvt. Ryan", the bible-quoting sniper. Sizemore rocks as the Mob Cheiftan. And Jack Black, the satellite guy.
Never give them a chance to breathe, always advance the plot. There are some logic errors in the story, mind you, but not to worry: as a viewer you are engaged to the point of overlooking the little stuff to stay on the ride. Totally worth a full price ticket.
Titicut Follies (1967)
Unreal
Stark, unflinching, remarkably insightful. Your perspective of sanity shifts as you experience the sometimes brutal reality in the treatment of madness. Who is in more need of assistance, the patients or the controllers? How much worse does a patient become when forced to submit to treatment like this? The depths of debasement are astonishing, and surely there is little difference now...
Documentary as a pure form, realized in this piece. Not to be missed.
Playtime (1967)
It's Tati's World. We're just living in it.
I comment 2 years after seeing "Playtime" at the Art Institute of Chicago, an event in which the film was presented in its original 70mm format for the first time since its debut. Over the years it had been cropped and recropped for standard prints and video leaving little of the original magic, which is the sheer SCOPE of this visual marvel.
Absolutely amazing sells "Play" short. The picture was so clear and the sequences so thrilling that I dare say this is Tati's Masterpiece. Apparently, he created an entire 1/5th scale city outside Paris and shot over the course of three years to get this honey in the can, and man-o-man, does it show.
This is the kind of film that reminds a viewer just how standardized modern cinematic narrative has become. Tati exists in an alternate plane of recorded consciousness; I walked out of "Play" as if hallucinating, having fully entered his perspective and adopted his suggestions as my own.
This is a film in balance with the nature of cinema itself; if Frank Lloyd Wright was a director, Tati would be his disciple: Tati's cinematic interpretations are in natural proportion to the distinctive elements of film. Visual dominance, sound hyperbarically in support of the image rhythm, help me I'm hallucinating again-thanks Jaques...
Don't miss this one, but don't see it in any other format than a special 70mm screening. Somebody put a screening together!!!
La vita è bella (1997)
Life Is...(not necessarily so) Beautiful
Saw it. Didn't knock me out. Think the piece ramps up nicely UNTIL arrival at the camp, at which point the momentum falters.
-Cute Kid Gimmick (everybody knows the drill) is not enough to carry as much "weight" as it winds up supporting.
-Nice Benigni visual/juxta sequences BEFORE he is deported; not as interesting after, save the German-Italian translation bit.
-The cinematic/content integrated interiors become disconnected without significant purpose in the second part.
-Romantic thread starts nice...but really doesn't resonate (again, all after the deportation)
Not a waste, but also NOT the home-run I expected.
Wait, one more thing-the camp was not particularly threatening. He tells The Kid a tall-tale, but there is no perspective chosen at all. Tell it from The Kid's POV so we can see it with innocence while imagining the horror the tall-tale is covering up, OR show the brutal limits of the father's reality AND the scenes in which he reshapes it for The Kid. Instead we get middle-of-the-road CLOWNERY with no reference point to make the story really ring.
Call me...The Script Doctor.
La vita è bella (1997)
Life Is...(not necessarily so) Beautiful
Saw it. Didn't knock me out. Think the piece ramps up nicely UNTIL arrival at the camp, at which point the momentum falters.
-Cute Kid Gimmick (everybody knows the drill) is not enough to carry as much "weight" as it winds up supporting.
-Nice Benigni visual/juxta sequences BEFORE he is deported; not as interesting after, save the German-Italian translation bit.
-The cinematic/content integrated interiors become disconnected without significant purpose in the second part.
-Romantic thread starts nice...but really doesn't resonate (again, all after the deportation)
Not a waste, but also NOT the home-run I expected.
Wait, one more thing-the camp was not particularly threatening. He tells The Kid a tall-tale, but there is no perspective chosen at all. Tell it from The Kid's POV so we can see it with innocence while imagining the horror the tall-tale is covering up, OR show the brutal limits of the father's reality AND the scenes in which he reshapes it for The Kid. Instead we get middle-of-the-road CLOWNERY with no reference point to make the story really ring.
Call me...The Script Doctor.
Touching Evil (1997)
Best of All Things British...
I stumbled over this one on a Sunday afternoon during a top-ot-the-hour channel surf. Readjusting my American viewing apparatus to accept a cop drama that was cut at less than 10 edits a minute, this baby snared me hard. I drooled until I was able to catch the rest of the episodes, and I found myself moving through the day hungering to answer the phone, "D.I Creegan..."
This show rocks in that the viewer is REQUIRED TO WORK to figure out the details of the backstory, relationships that existed before, and to hang onto a storyline that is not concerned with over-explaining; you need to keep up with the pace. This story is real and happening, transferring a realistic impression of copwork from the inside, tempered with just enough "X-Files" in their "Elite Special Ops Force (or whatever it's called)" to be convincing not in the fantastic/horrific, but in The REALITY. No passivity in attention here; snooze=loose.
Think the complex, multi-episodicness of "The Prisoner" with the acting/directing savvy of "NYPD Blue" and the cinematic re-par-te of, say, John Sayles if he were to shoot contemporary London. (The EXT. - NIGHT's are a little too blue for me, but hell, I ain't the shooter...)
"Touching" is pretty dang good, guv-nuh, as hard-boiled as you'll get across the Pond.
Touch of Evil (1958)
Sharper then Ever
Now, I've seen this baby probably 10 or 12 times, and I gotta tell ya that this new edit based on Welles' 58 or 68 page memo has a bit more going for it than the original release, but with the exception of a cooler final act crosscutting sequence, I didn't see a whole lotta change. I'm gonna check the net for the actual memo, 'cause even though the old noggin ain't what she used to be, I didn't see anything dramatically different...
On the other hand, I saw (and heard) a whole lot more of the film itself. There is a fantastic sharpness in the frame, and I realized that I had never really SEEN the film before. When Hank Quinlan sits on his garbage heap throne down by the river, you can read the labels on the trash. You can feel the fabrics of the costumer, the crusty, bloated, greasy, stubbly face of Quinlan, forty feet tall lookin' down on you... The sound is great, really allowing y'all to hear Hank walking all over the lines of those unfortunate enough to get in his way.
Man, is Mercedes McCambridge the most sinister heavy of all time?! Check out "Johnny Guitar"!
The Ice Storm (1997)
Now, it's only been 12 hours since I screened &quo...
Now, it's only been 12 hours since I screened "Ice Storm" and I gotta say the material falls surely into that slot in my brain reserved for material that is not disposable. "The Ice Storm" is soul source material that resonates in the long term, Cassavetes-style.
The performances are A+, the art direction exemplary, the story a well -structured, multiply parallel progression presented with a high degree of tension generated by offscreen awareness of plot/character developments.
This film IS pressure, temptation, collapse carefully dragging the viewer where you know you don't wanna go, but secretly can't help needing to find out the truth from the Truthteller, and you know you're gonna get the real magillah. Ugly, icky, and at times disturbingly stimulating (I shudder ).
"Ice" is like knowing there is going to be a serious accident on the highway at a particular road marker, you are compelled to go stand at the spot and watch it, then you can't turn away from the scene after the collision occurs.
The only problem/issue that continues to come up in my analysis is the presence of the director's hand in all this. I am recognizing that what I think is missing or lacking is not a failure of the director, but is, rather a conditioned expectation of a non-descript cinematic element that I NEED to be represented. When something unique comes along with this level of cinematic skill and quality star value/performance, I apparently have this need to also feel an awareness of the filmmaker's consciousness in an overt sense.
"Ice" is NOT this. Ang transfixes the plot/story drama with covert control techniques that simultaneously disarm and dominate your conscious faculties , while skillfully cranking up the Emotionometer by creating a conscious, quasi-real time frame/spatial identity to this suburban nightmare. I have a deep respect for those special, few-and-far-between filmmakers reminding me that there is more than one way to direct a contemporary film.
Beware, this is one that will stay with you for a long time...
Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)
Back on Solid Ground
It is with a sense of satisfaction that I report that our man in London has returned to the foal. The franchise that has, through so many incarnations , wandered aimlessly (bending uncomfortably in the 80's to cultural whims and plots dependent on novelty cinematic effects, and in the early 90's spinning in circles in search of it's own identity) seems to have landed on both legs, solidly.
"TND" is tight, moving along nicely in the spirit of the best cinematic realizations of our agent and his exploits. It offers an almost perfect balance of story, character, action and effects to, at the very least, leave any Bond junkie with a sense of optimism regarding the future of 007 's exploits in the Cloak-and-Dagger field.
Brosnan is no Connery, but he IS Bond. Which is NOT to say Connery was not Bond, but it is to say that Brosnan's Bond is not Connery's, although it SURELY is Bond nevertheless.
On another subject, Sheryl Crow is NOT Bond. k.d. lang, now THAT is Bond, all over, man, and does she have a set of pipes on her, or what?! Am I wrong?
The Spanish Prisoner (1997)
My GOD, is Pidgeon the most fascinating thing on 2 legs?!
Seems like Camp Mamet has finally taken the cinematic form by the nuts and twists with complete control. Whereas earlier works were equally script -fantastique, I got the impression that some of the more elusive elements of the medium were realized with an unequivalent success. "Prisoner", on the other hand, represents a major evolution in terms of the integration between all elements of the cinematic whole, in balance and en toto. In the end, we see the beginning all over again...