Reviews
Festen (1998)
A cliche is a cliche even with a hand-held camera
There's a small but fiercely loyal audience for films in which children--best if they're gay--"reveal" what monsters their parents were. To these people, any such film is automatically great.
Those outside this audience fall into two broad categories: those whose parents weren't monsters (yes, such families do exist); and those whose parents--and this is most parents--were monsters and whose children, the human condition being what it is, themselves will be monsters as parents.
"The Celebration" is yet another recent example of one of these "domestic-monster" movies ("Affliction" comes to mind) which are neither fictions nor documentaries; instead they are something in between, "fictimenaries" maybe, that recreate a situation but tell us nothing about it.
The hand-held camera and weird camera angles complement the material insofar as you feel you are seeing a home movie of something horrible that happened at home, and you do watch with the sort of sick fascination with which you watch "real" TV shows. These movies make voyeurs of us all. But I don't go to movies to see what I already know. If it's already in my head, I don't need to sit in a theater to review it. I go to movies to see what I don't know, or to see a fresh angle on what I know.
I already know that there are parents who are monsters, and there was absolutely nothing surprising or new in the version told by "The Celebration." I learned nothing about the monster that I didn't already know, and I learned nothing about the monster's offspring that I didn't know.
In fact, I left the theater convinced I'd just watched a satire of this kind of movie.
Though not perfect, a successful version of one of these domestic-monster movies is "High Art," which transcends the weight of its own ponderous "truth" and becomes a fiction. Seeing this is a much more rewarding way to spend a couple of hours.
High Art (1998)
A successful transformation from film school to film
Though not a great film, this is a good film with an amazing performance. Ally Sheedy gets so far inside the character of Lucy Berliner that you sometimes feel you're watching a documentary. And though this film veers close to the "this really happened so I don't have to make a movie" category, except for the finale it generally avoids this trap. Fortunately there's so much good stuff that comes before the ending that I'm willing to suspend my disappointment. (Please, directors: It doesn't matter if something has actually happened in real life. This isn't real life; it's reel life. What you do has to work as a fiction.)
And generally "High Art" does. It's worth seeing just for Sheedy's acting, but there's a bonus: You'll have the rare pleasure of hearing characters in a film use the words "critical theory" and "deconstruced" appropriately.
Little Voice (1998)
Great entertainment
In the right frame of mind, which I was when I saw it, this is a delightful way to spend a couple of hours. In the wrong frame of mind, it would be easy to be put off by Brenda Blethyn's blowsy, too-far-over-the-top performance, but if you're feeling good yourself, it's just fun. Michael Caine brings back Alfie, but grown old and unredeemed, and Jane Horrock's impressions are a hoot (though not as eerie as the hype would like you to believe).
This is fairly slight fare, but very entertaining; you'll be happy if you're expecting only a snack.
The General (1998)
an incomplete dinner
This film's main fault is the same one made by so many directors who attempt to make films about "true-life" events or "real-life" characters: These directors believe that there's so much drama and interest inherent in the event or character they're portraying that they forget to give us a complete film.
This is clearly what happened here. John Boorman recreates for us what I guess are famous parts of the Martin Cahill (aka The General) legend, but he leaves out of the script much indication of who this man is or why he turned out the way he did. And if, like me, you'd never heard of him, you're left wondering what you're supposed to be getting from this film. It's not terribly funny; it's not terribly clever; and Cahill as he's portrayed by Brendan Gleeson, is not terribly smart. What he is is bold and ruthless in a way that the (as portrayed by Boorman) mild Irish temperament is not equipped to handle.
I suspect that this film would play better for an Anglo-Irish audience, people who knew who Cahill was and who understood the culture in which he developed. For me, it wasn't a good caper movie, it wasn't a good comedy, and it wasn't a good character study.
And I'm getting a little overfull of films portraying the Irish as large leprechauns.
Affliction (1997)
Good acting, cliches galore
There's a good deal of buzz about Nick Nolte's performance as the tortured son of James Coburn's physically abusive father, and the buzz is deserved, but the impact of Nolte's performance is blunted by a nearly incoherent script.
The point of what's on screen (I haven't read the novel, so I don't know if it's any more sophisticated than this), is that physical abuse, like a disease, is passed from generation to generation; oh, and it causes low self-esteem and the inability to form close relationships. If you already know this, there's nothing more here to learn.
Watching this, I wondered if director Paul Schrader had seen Fargo too often but without really getting it. There's an attempt at injecting a murder mystery into the spine of the film, but in the end you're not sure if there even was a murder, much less who did it.
The only reason to see this film is if you're a major Nolte fan. Coburn's performance is intense but one-dimensional, Sissy Spacek plays the Anne Archer character but with a weird southern accent that is wholly out of place in the backwater New Hampshire town in which she's supposed to have grown up, and Holmse Osborne's French Canadian accent seems borrowed from Twin Peaks. Oh, and Willem Dafoe's narrator/brother can't seem to figure out why he's in this film in the first place.
Pass. Seriously.
A Simple Plan (1998)
The feelbad movie of the year
Although terrific, this is not a film you'll want to take suicidal friends to. Like the novel on which it's based, this film takes a simple premise--3 "regular" guys, all lower middle class, find a big chunk of cash that doesn't seem to belong to anyone--to its logical conclusion. And like the book (the book's author wrote the screenplay), its strength lies in its ability to make the choices each man makes along the way seem like the correct choice; but the film's gloominess derives from the sad fact that the correct choice is sometimes not the right choice.
Strong performances by Bill Paxton, Billy Bob Thornton, and Brent Briscoe make this film watchable and believable. Except for Bridget Fonda, who's merely good, the supporting cast is also excellent, particularly Chelcie Ross as the sheriff.
Alar Kivilo's spare and sadly beautiful cinematography of a poor community's snowed-in loneliness perfectly complements the plot, which to director Sam Raimi's credit, completes nearly all of its own threads. (What happens to the dog?)
Will a lot of people see this? I doubt it. It's sure to bum out the happiest holiday. Better to have released it on Halloween.
The Faculty (1998)
pretty good, considering
First allow me to make a distinction between a movie and a film:
A movie is primarily an entertainment. It makes no claims to seriousness or art or enlightenment; it's there just please and help you enjoy a couple of hours.
A film, on the other hand, makes claims to all of the above, and if it entertains you too, so much the better.
That said, The Faculty is a pretty entertaining movie, providing you don't worry too much about stupid plot tricks. Part send-up, part tribute to "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (the original, not the awful remake), it shares a lot with director Robert Rodriguez's "From Dusk till Dawn" and "El Mariachi," at least insofar as action caroms without transition from slightly wacky calm to mindless, bloody violence.
There's humor, some cliched high-school satire, and some decent special effects. Good for a rainy Saturday afternoon, but definitely not a date movie unless the date is turned on by alien parasites with really big teeth.
Hurlyburly (1998)
Drug-addled creeps hate women
I'd like to know what director Anthony Drazen thought this film was about, because it's hard to know from what's on the screen.
From watching the major figures overact, it appears this film is supposed to be yet another indictment of Hollywood, or at least one of Hollywood's subcultures. I'm sure there are people like this in Hollywood--drug-crazed, sexual predators surrounded by the most sexually pliant women imaginable (Post-pubescent Anna Paquin, showing up uninvited to crash at the Hollywood Hills house that Sean Penn shares with Kevin Spacey, asks Penn, "Would you like to f*** me before I go to sleep?" Or this: With her 6-year-old daughter watching from the front seat, Meg Ryan's character is described as having given a blowjob to a stranger in the back seat of Sean Penn's car because she's been told that the stranger "needs to relax"). But what's new here? Who hasn't seen this stuff a hundred times? Who doesn't already know this subculture exists in Hollywood? And where on earth won't you find a subculture like this?
There's some humor of the "I recognize that one" variety for those of us who've spent time in drug-induced frenzies. In fact, most of the humor is of the snickering insider variety. Giving Penn a Venice best-actor award for playing a member of his own in-group smacks of the incest this type of film is always in danger of slipping into.
Kevin Spacey is the best thing here, but Spaceyphiles may begin to see the emergence of Spacey cliches: the dead-pan delivery, the trenchant distinction, the dryly uttered cutting remark; we've seen this same character a few times now, albeit in different situations.
Gary Shandling is wasted as a character Drazen doesn't quite know what to do with, and Meg Ryan is unconvincing as an amoral and air-headed party girl whom an unraveling Chazz Palminteri throws from a moving car. Like the others, Palminteri's acting is revved too high here. In fact, the only actors not over-revved here are Anna Paquin, who seems like she's in a different film entirely (or confused to find herself in this one); and Robin Wright Penn, managing to be believable in a fiction that asks the audience to suspend not just disbelief but common sense.
This is a good film to see if you don't get enough of a testosterone fix from the Super Bowl. This is not a good film to see if you are offended by the traditional treatment of women in American film. Or if you expect a film's director to express a coherent point of view.