Raising Cain (1992, 94 min, R) *** - Directed & written by Brian De Palma, starring John Lithgow, Lolita Davidovich, Steven Bauer, and Frances Sternhagan. The victims of De Palma’s knife-wielding satire are those overactive parents who spend small fortunes on getting their one-year-olds into Harvard but won’t drop a penny for public schools. If “Raising Cain” were made in 2005 it would be about soccer-moms, SUVs, and robot-children without a second to spare. It’s a picture-perfect 1990s yuppie suburb, unaware of how it’s brimming with entitlement and self-satisfaction: all beige, oversized houses, over-powerful cars, and all the super-parents watch their kids at the same playground. But the playground is next to a Red Riding Hood forest and, yes, the protective parents might just be crazy, especially the child psychologist (Lithgow) with the evil twin (Lithgow again), the philandering wife (Davidovich), and the mad father (Lithgow a third time) who wants to kidnap babies. Chloroform, knifings, and cars in the lake ensue. Structurally, “Raising Cain” is trying to make amends for what is generally considered the weakest scene of “Psycho:” the explanation at the end. Not surprisingly, even “Raising Cain” is a bit too heavy on exposition. But we forgive it, especially since Lithgow knows when and where to go over-the-top as the man who wants to be both father and mother to his offspring, and Frances Sternhagan’s “foreign” psychiatrist is a lot of fun.
Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983, 94 min, PG) **1/2 – Directed by Jack Clayton, starring Jason Robards and Jonathan Pryce. If you’re a kid, you’ll like it more than if you’re an adult. The subgenre of live-action Disney horror films for younger audiences, given theatrical releases and then subjected to thousands of Sunday afternoon broadcasts on “The Wonderful World of Disney,” is now half-forgotten. It was a hit-and-miss endeavor specializing in lush, atmospheric production design, unnervingly sterile direction, and middling child actors. The result are films like “The Watcher in the Woods,” “The Black Hole,” and “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” Ray Bradbury’s tale of a small town unknowingly besieged by an evil carnival. It would be too much to ask that a Disney adaptation would capture the crooked allegory of Bradbury’s gloriously overwritten novel, even though Bradbury wrote the screenplay, in which the young fear the future while craving to be grown-up, and the elderly live with unsaid regrets while craving to be children. But I get the feeling that “Something Wicked” would be more effective if it were more self-confident: narration tells us things that we see later and the movie loses some of its creepy, small-town atmosphere by being in such a hurry. Maybe it’s afraid that if it lingers it will lose our attention. Still, when you’re nine-years-old you won’t notice the mouthy child acting or how impatient the movie is. When you’re nine you might need narration to tell you what’s already on the screen, whereas when you’re twenty-nine you’ll say “okay, I get it, their punishments are all ironic!” When you’re nine, mostly you’ll be carried along by demonic merry-go-rounds going backwards, the freak parade, the hall of mirrors, the eerily calm autumn woods, and the James Horner score. Lightning crashes and leaves are sun-dappled. Jonathan Pryce gnaws a little scenery as the Satanic carnival owner who will grant you your deepest desires, for a price. He matches wits not with a dashing or great man, but with a too-old father (an effectively somber Jason Robards) who lives with vague regret. There’s also not enough Pam Grier, who’s painted gold and dressed as a beaded harem girl. Hell yeeeeeeeeah.
The Sweet Hereafter (1997, 112 min, R) ***1/2 – Directed & co-written by Atom Egoyan, starring Ian Holm, Bruce Greenwood, and Sarah Polley. Unsettling morality tale about a lawyer (Holm) in the empty cold of Canada, looking to cash in on a small town’s school bus tragedy. The film follows several richly developed characters, including the bus driver, some of the parents, and one of the survivors (Polley). Many questions are raised without being given proper answers, and the movie, through flashbacks, culminates in the tragedy itself, as if, like the parents, we put off coming to terms with what happened.
for June 2005
Touch of Evil (1958, 112 min, NR) **** - Directed & written for the screen by Orson Welles, starring Charlton Heston, Welles, and Janet Leigh. One of the highest, most glorious pieces of trash ever put to film. Welles, the master of shadows, is sometimes credited with making the first proper film noir (“Citizen Kane”) and the last film noir (“Touch of Evil”). Besides its elements of autobiography—Welles’ crooked police captain is a bloated waster who’s never lived up to his early potential—“Touch of Evil” is a pure genre film, brought to greatness 90 per cent by phenomenal camera work and 10 per cent by good acting. The famous opening shot lasts minutes and minutes and follows competing storylines on the same street, one a happy couple and the other a car with a bomb in the trunk, as different music washes in and out. An honest cop fades two crooks in the shadow of an old ferris wheel, leering thugs are shot gigantic from below, unnatural shadows go wild across menacing walls. Story? A play on racial mores of the time, a straight-arrow Mexican cop (yeah, Charlton Heston, genius miscasting) and an ogre of an American police captain (Welles, beneath pounds of padding) compete to solve a bordertown murder. Heston’s blonde bombshell wife (Leigh) gets caught in the middle of dirty cops, honorable crooks, betrayal, and gangs. The definition of atmospheric and the winner of the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival.
The Trial (1963, 118 min, B&W, NR) **** - Directed & written for the screen by Orson Welles, starring Anthony Perkins, Welles, and Jeanne Moreau. The best opening line to any book since Genesis? “Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.” My favorite writer? Franz Kafka. My favorite novel? “The Trial.” The most seminal book of the 20th century? A strong, strong argument can be made that the last two questions have the same answer. (My wife? A genius for getting me Welles’ brilliant adaptation of “The Trial” for Christmas.) Kafka’s mindboggling masterpiece about an “innocent” man hurled ignorantly into the legal system captures the modern, industrial world’s sense of dislocation and confusion. The world is dominated by massive states in bed with massive corporations, populated by mindless functionaries moving like broken robots, with heads too cluttered with “facts” and neuroses to straighten out what they think of God and laws and what they’ll be doing later this week, outside of their dogmatic routine. The novel and film follow Josef K. (Anthony Perkins, as nervous as ever) as he takes on a staggering bureaucracy that, nightmarishly, connects the state to corporations to small businesses and even seems to intrude into private spaces and houses and apartments. Even K.’s family knows something he doesn’t. Kafka writes with utter, meticulous precision about poses, stances, and phrases, resulting in the complete opacity of meaning, the inability to be certain about any piece of reality or metaphysics. (He is hung up on details but unwilling to reveal his protagonist’s last name.) Welles transforms the byzantine complexity of Kafka’s prose and his vision of the legal system into a baroque maze of Gothic architecture, secret passages, dusty libraries, vast piles of books, claustrophobic spaces, and desolate cityscapes. The shadowy black-and-white and narrative uncertainty of “Citizen Kane” is natural and appropriate in this surreal world.
U2 Rattle and Hum (1987, 99 min, B&W/Color, PG13) *** - Directed by Phil Joanou, featuring U2. At times pretentious but genuinely involving black-and-white documentary about the Irish rock band’s first gigantic US tour. The movie mixes vibrant concert footage with interviews and interludes of the rockers exploring America. The personalities of the bandmates are sublimated by the film’s desire to show their fascination with America; the idea of foreigners showing America to Americans may offend some, but sometimes we need new eyes and a new perspective to see something we’ve seen a thousand times before as if for the first time.
Reviews in a Hurry for May 2005.
Index of All Reviews