BLACK NARCISSUS: A gorgeous, though overwrought, film from the team of Powell and Pressburger, who also did the sublime Stairway to Heaven (also known as A Matter of Life and Death). I'd been wanting to see this since cinematographer Jack Cardiff won an honorary Oscar this year, and this film was prominently featured in the montage of his work (he won the cinematography Oscar for it in 1947). It's about a group of British nuns who establish a convent and school on a desolate mountain in Tibet and how the wildness of the country undoes them. Excellent performance in particular from David Farrar as Dean, the sardonic British liaison who's more or less gone native. An interesting documentary on the DVD called "Painting with Light" reveals a jaw-dropping fact: the entire movie was shot on a soundstage in England. You'd never know it from the stunning vistas of the Himalayas, the exotic atmosphere, and the wide-open feel of the movie. The documentary also helps your appreciation of the use of color, light, and shadow, so it's useful to watch either before or after the film.
WITHNAIL AND I: A clever cult comedy with two down-on-their-luck actors (Richard E. Grant and Paul McGann) who con a week in the country from Grant's uncle Monty. Witty wordplay, and a great performance from Grant. Ralph Brown is hilarious in small portions as the pair's druggie friend Danny (he plays nearly the same character, six years later, as a burned-out roadie in Wayne's World 2). A featurette on the DVD includes interviews with frighteningly obsessed fans who have seen the movie 40 or more times.
GINGER SNAPS: Interesting and clever but ultimately unsatisfying and overlong horror film that equates menstruation with lycanthropy. Two outcast sisters, obsessed with death, have a run-in with a werewolf; the older one, who has just gotten her first period when she's bitten, becomes sexually voracious as she gradually turns into a hideous monster, while her younger, plainer sister tries to save her. This Canadian indie starts out as a sharp, sarcastic look at teen relationships -- from sisters to enemies to boyfriends -- but it slides into standard horror-movie schlock and gore, and it drags out the ending for so long that I didn't even complain to the video store when a glitch in the tape consistently shut my VCR off in the middle of the emotional climax -- I figured it was just doing what I felt like doing anyway. To describe it in a Player pitch, it's Heathers meets The Evil Dead.
JABBERWOCKY: I couldn't take more than 20 minutes of this early Terry Gilliam film, loosely based on Lewis Carroll's poem and starring a dull-as-dirt Michael Palin. It shouldn't have been possible to make a movie this boring with the participation of both Gilliam and Palin, but it happened.
UNDER THE SAND: Beautiful, haunting movie about love and loss. Charlotte Rampling is excellent (and speaks flawless, unaccented French) as a woman whose husband has gone missing; she refuses to accept that he is gone and probably dead and keeps him alive in her imagination, to the detriment of her personal relationships, her finances, and her job performance.
THE CAVEMAN'S VALENTINE: Good, if jumbled and overlong, though not as good as the novel upon which it's based (by George Dawes Green). Samuel L. Jackson, under a tangle of dreadlocks, plays Romulus Ledbetter, formerly a Julliard student and piano maestro, now a homeless man with certain mental problems, trying to keep in touch with his grown daughter, a policewoman. When an acquaintance's corpse is left outside his cave, he takes it personally and tries to track down the killer. A little draggy in parts, but Jackson is good, and the story is engrossing.
CARLA'S SONG: The
Glaswegian
accents are well-nigh
incomprehensible, and there are no subtitles to help you out, unlike in
director Ken Loach's previous movie, My Name
Is Joe. (Even when the movie shifts to Nicaragua and
Spanish
becomes the dominant language, there are still no subtitles -- or if
there
were, I couldn't figure out how to turn them on. Even so, I often
understood the Spanish better than the "English.") So, many of
the
finer points of this movie were probably lost to me, but the basic
sweetness
and emotion of the story come through nevertheless. Robert
Carlyle
plays George, a bus driver in Glasgow in 1987, who falls for Nicaraguan
refugee Carla. Carla is haunted by memories of her boyfriend in
Nicaragua,
Antonio -- she witnessed his brutal beating at the hands of contra
soldiers
and doesn't know if he's alive or dead. (This is one of many
points
that subtitles might have helped with; I couldn't figure out until
nearly
the end whether Carla sympathized with the Sandinistas or the
contras.)
George can't stand watching her suffer, so he takes her back to
Nicaragua,
hoping (I think) that she'll find out what happened to Antonio, get it
out of her system, and be happy with him. The movie gets preachy
here, in keeping with Loach's lefty tendencies -- aid worker Scott
Glenn
turns out to be a reformed CIA agent and gets to deliver a lengthy,
overheated
speech about the evil that Langley does. We get our noses rubbed
quite fiercely in Antonio's gruesome torture. The political stuff seems
really out of sync with the gentle love story that's developed between
George and Carla, and the ending feels very unsatisfying.
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