The Claim is a slow-moving but gorgeous, and ultimately moving, epic inspired by Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge. Dillon (the excellent Peter Mullan) rules over the gold-mining town of Kingdom Come, which sprang from a gold claim he received years before in trade for his wife and infant daughter. Now the wife (Nastassja Kinski) and grown daughter Hope (Sarah Polley) have come looking for him. At the same time, Union Pacific surveyors, led by the handsome Dalgliesh (Wes Bentley), arrive to plot out the course of the railroad; it's very important to Dillon that it pass through his town, or Kingdom Come is gone. The film is beautifully made, and Peter Mullan is fantastic in an unsympathetic role. Its grand scale is badly diminished on a TV screen, but it's still awe-inspiring, particularly the scene in which Dillon moves an entire mansion across a snowy range for his bride.
Unbreakable is an odd film that looks and feels like it was filmed underwater, but it held my interest throughout. Bruce Willis plays a security guard who survives a train wreck with nary a scratch; a Gumby-haired Samuel L. Jackson tracks him down and tries to convince Willis that he's a superhero because he's never been sick or injured. Jackson is the opposite; he has bones as fragile as glass. His passion is comic books, and he believes that the "myths" propounded in comic books grew from an acorn of truth; in other words, that superheroes exist. Willis is quiet here the way he was in The Sixth Sense, but where in that film his subdued performance radiated empathy, in this film he just seems to be sleepwalking. The comic-book stuff gets a little ludicrous; for example, Willis wears a black poncho that billows out like a cape with the word "Security" emblazoned on the back. The ending could have come straight from an episode of the Batman animated series. And yet, the movie held me till the end.
The Contender was clearly written by someone who has little or no clue about politics. The only reason I kept watching it was the acting; strong performances by Joan Allen, Jeff Bridges, and Gary Oldman, with excellent supporting work from Sam Elliott and William Petersen, keep the movie interesting. Otherwise, for anyone who knows anything about politics, it's pretty ludicrous. No way, no how would the Senate cede the power to confirm the Vice-President to the House. No way would a politician primly refuse to answer outrageous allegations on the grounds that "it's not okay to make the accusations," even though they're sending her political career down the tubes and humiliating her in front of the country. Writer Rod Lurie didn't even bother to give his characters consistent, logical political beliefs. Oldman's slimy Republican Congressman rails against abortion and for internet censorship, yet he apparently led the fight to make hate crimes capital offenses, plus he cites John F. Kennedy as a "great" president, a position many Democrats would be unwilling to take. Allen's Senator Laine Hanson used to be a Republican, then switched to the Democratic party and is repeatedly praised as a centrist, but Congressman Runyon brands her a flaming liberal. Petersen's Gov. Hathaway is both pro-flat tax and pro-choice; plus, no way would he undercut his party as he is shown doing in the movie if he wanted any kind of future within the party. I'd recommend seeing this for the performances, but bear in mind that any resemblance to the real Washington, D.C., ends with the pretty exterior shots of the monuments.
Mississippi Mermaid is based on the same novel as the recent Angelina Jolie-Antonio Banderas soft-porn Original Sin, Cornell Woolrich's Waltz into Darkness. Only Mississippi Mermaid was directed by François Truffaut and stars Jean-Paul Belmondo and Catherine Deneuve. It's an homage to American pulp films, with the gorgeous Deneuve as the femme fatale and Belmondo as her prey, who's too obsessed with her to leave her even after he knows she's lied to him and stolen from him. I expected something more from it, but it's a decent enough movie anyway. Non-Francophones might find it a little frustrating to watch, as large parts of the dialogue are not translated to subtitles.
Tigerland is a semi-Dogme movie from bombast-meister Joel Schumacher. Rebellious draftee Bozz (Colin Farrell) incites mischief in his basic training unit in an effort to avoid going to Vietnam. The first two-thirds of the movie is stripped down: handheld camera, no music, no special effects. The grittiness of the imagery and Farrell's charisma pull you into the movie more than the story does. But then gradually, you start to hear music from a soundtrack, and then abruptly, the soldiers enter Tigerland, a training camp in the Louisiana swamp meant to replicate Vietnam, and suddenly all hell breaks loose, cinematically speaking. We've got slow-motion, choral yowling in the background, rain machines, washed-out film stock, and a voiceover at the end that irritatingly and artificially ties up loose ends. Worst of all, when the movie's over and you start to think about it, you realize that you never really learned much about the characters. Bozz is alternately selfish and altruistic, slacking off out of principle or just for the hell of it. One minute he's Cool Hand Luke, the next he's Audie Murphy. And he's the main character; we know even less about the others. Bozz teases his friend Paxton (Matthew Davis), who's keeping a journal because he plans to write a book about his experience, that he'll reduce all of them to stock characters, but that's exactly what the movie does: the college boy, the hillbilly, the psycho. It's a shame; the movie starts out with a lot of promise but fails to fulfill it.
Sunshine follows Ralph Fiennes as he plays several men in different generations of the same family in Hungary. At least, that's what I read somewhere, because when I tried to watch it, I fell asleep before he was done playing the first character.
Wonderland is another one I didn't make it through, but this time it was because the characters -- a bunch of young women in London or someplace -- bored the hell out of me after half an hour.
Time Code is a pretentiously gimmicky film from an overrated director (Mike Figgis). Four separate screens show continuous "action" (you'll see why I put that word in quotes in a minute) with the sound fading in and out of each one presumably as a way to let you know which one you're supposed to pay attention to. The problem is, there's only actual action going on in two of the screens; in the other two, a woman drones on and on in a monotone to a bored-looking therapist, and ... well, literally nothing happens in the other screen: there are long shots of blank walls or clocks. No kidding. Of the remaining two screens where some sort of movement is actually taking place, one features two of the most grating and talentless actresses to come along since Andie McDowell, Jeanne Tripplehorn and Salma Hayek, automatically disqualifying it from being watchable. The last screen looked like it might be vaguely interesting, but it was hard to tell because you couldn't concentrate on it. I don't think I lasted ten minutes into this movie; the opening credits alone gave me a splitting headache.
Back to homepage
Reviews A to F
Reviews G to L
Reviews M to R
Reviews S to Z
Search