MORE REVIEWS IN A HURRY For May 2005 Everyone Says I Love You - The Game (1996) - Judge Dredd - Killer's Kiss - Love's Labour's Lost - Paris Awakens Paris Awakens (1991, 95 min, NR) ***1/2 – Directed & written by Olivier Assayas, starring Jean-Pierre Leaud, Judith Godreche, and Thomas Langmann. Now this is what I always imagined a French art film would be like: not so much out to make a point as enamored with the idea of looking at things through a camera. There’s a conversation in “Paris Awakening” that is simply masterful; we don’t need to know what they’re saying so much as we’re pulled along by the rhythm of their words, the mounting tension, the director’s sense of space, and the way his camera deftly weaves from room to room in the musty Paris flat. Modern audiences may relate it easily to “Collateral,” in that we’ve seen this story before, but we can savor the grit, the atmosphere, and the exciting camerawork. The movie feels rambling and tangential, like the actors were given great leeway with their characters and dialogue. Yet the camera is precise, not in the artificial De Palma way, but in that it always knows where everyone is going and never loses them, even in long, uninterrupted close-ups. Although there’s crime involved, it’s more of a “slipping down” story, about people dropping those last few rungs on the social ladder. Selfishness, greed, impulsiveness, bad luck, drugs—something drives them lower. We follow a callow, fresh-faced young man (Langmann) unwilling to get help from his artsy-fartsy dad, but willing to steal his flaky 18-year-old girlfriend (Godreche). The dad is played by the great Jean-Pierre Leaud, who will always be the kid from “The 400 Blows” no matter how bad his teeth get. He has one of the best faces in the movies, and gets through “Paris Awakening” on about two expressions: vaguely dissatisfied and pinched-up with constipated anger. In a great, fleeting bit, he opens his door to someone he hasn’t seen in years as if he had been expecting her. The movie loses some of its energy when he’s not around because Godreche and Langmann don’t have his presence—but then again, who does? As they get lower and lower, the movie savors episodes like the abandoned, spray-painted apartment building, the life of a tow truck driver, working in a laundromat, and, of course, clandestine exchanges in nightclubs and smoke-filled pool halls. Naturally the couple needs cigarettes more than food. Something has to give unless they’re willing to live in absolute destitution. Reviews in a Hurry for May 2005. Reviews in a Hurry for April 2005. Index of All Reviews.
Killer's Kiss (1955, 67 min, NR) **1/2 - Directed & written by Stanley Kubrick, starring Frank Silvera, Jamie Smith, and Irene Kane. A film whose chief interest is that it’s an early work of Kubrick’s (“2001,” “Barry Lyndon”), before he had the budgets, expertise, and freedom to become the mad perfectionist he always wanted to be. It’s a hard-edged B-movie of the ‘50s, made with what a 26-year-old Kubrick could scrape together, about a struggling boxer (Smith) who crosses an underworld boss (Silvera) over a working girl (Kane). That “Killer’s Kiss” is completely within the confines of its genre is not to its discredit, but the simple truth is that too much of the movie is conveyed by narration. Is it a shortage of resources or of talent? But the movie contains some memorable images that capture the oftentimes gritty, unsentimental affection that Kubrick would show for the human race in his subsequent films: the boxing match, the man hiding in the room of mannequins, the flight across the roof of a warehouse, the lingering shots of the boxer’s cramped apartment, the overall rankness of New York. There’s even Kubrick’s beloved tracking shot, the sudden spurts of merciless violence, and the cynicism about man’s short-sightedness as these tough characters follow their limited choices to bloody ends. The unaffected smile of the boxer reading a letter from his family says more than any exposition, and the doomed romantic streak in the underworld boss is all the more poignant when he effortlessly realizes violence in order to maintain his petty position. Kubrick broke the Hollywood set tradition by shooting on real locations (without permission) in New York, a method he exploited to greater effect in his subsequent fatalist noir, “The Killing.” “Kubrick’s frequent use of low camera angles,” says the DVD booklet, “originated from his experience as a still photographer. The still camera he had used was…so heavy…that the teenaged Kubrick rarely held it higher than the beltline.” Love's Labour's Lost (2000, 93 min, PG) *** - Directed & written for the screen by Kenneth Branagh, starring Branagh, Nathan Lane, Alicia Silverstone, Matthew Lillard, and Timothy Spall. Fresh from making the most faithful Shakespeare adaptation ever—his 4 hour “Hamlet” includes every single word of Shakespeare’s dialogue—Branagh has made one of the least faithful Shakespeare adaptations by turning “Love’s Labour's Lost” into an all-Gershwin musical. The overall movie may not amount to much, but it is an effervescent, giddy romp, set around 1938 and done up in muted Technicolor phoniness. It’s the usual Shakespearean silliness as the king of a made-up country and his three scholar friends swear off women for a year to devote themselves to study—then four babes show up and that’s the end of that. The highpoint is a rotund Timothy Spall, with an outrageous European accent, singing “I Get a Kick Out of You” while dropping his chauffeur out of a moving airplane and punting the moon. I also like that, even though all four men paired off with all four women, Branagh did not feel obligated to hook up the black dude with the black chick. To reach a 90-minute run time, there’s probably one more musical number than strictly necessary, but that’s okay.