For Spring 2006
Sleepy Hollow (1999, 105 min, R) *** - Directed by Tim Burton, starring Johnny Depp, Christina Ricci, Miranda Richardson, and Jeffrey Jones. Blood spurts and heads roll in this fun, spooky, and lavish adaptation of Washington Irving’s classic. The change of Irving’s hero from a schoolteacher to a big city inspector (Depp) investigating rural beheadings is not an inspired one; it speaks of filmmakers unable to think beyond cops and robbers. But that’s not the point of this “Sleepy Hollow,” which is all about phenomenal production design, about an autumnal Northeast that’s like something out of Rembrandt: all gray skies knifed by trees; pale men in black coats and white wigs; spooky clearings and ominous forests; all spattered with the reddest blood this side of Bram Stoker. Depp gives a relatively sane performance (for him, at least) as the skeptical, self-contained inspector who doesn’t like to believe that his killer doesn’t have a head. Director Burton (“Batman,” “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”) gives us some great carriage chases that combine the excitement of a theme park ride with both the macabre and Buster Keaton’s twirling logic. Famous for exploring his antisocial persona, Burton probably takes great pleasure in the dark-haired outcast surviving while the blonde pretty boy (Casper van Diem) gets cut in half. The handling of the religious themes is a little too juvenile and simplistic for my taste—pagans good, Christians bad and of course hypocrites—but it leads to some great visuals, including Depp’s mother floating up under a spell, and later suffering the wrath of her nearly headless husband. The cameo casting of the horseman is dead-on.
Still Crazy (1999, 95 min, R) **1/2 – Directed by Paul Gibson, starring Stephen Rea, Billy Connelly, Bill Nighy, Timothy Spall, Jimmy Nail, and Juliet Aubrey. Bawdy, insightful, and sentimental comedy in the vein of “The Full Monty,” in which a group of middle-aged men from the British working class get one last shot at publicly-acknowledged self-worth. Instead of unemployed factory workers putting on a crowd-pleasing striptease, it’s Strange Fruit, a ‘70s glam rock band, now living as salesmen, roofers, and recluses, getting together for a reunion tour. The rockers are all sharply drawn, swear a lot, and carry heavy hearts about dead bandmates. Bill Nighy is the preening, insecure singer who needs his wife to look after him; Timothy Spall is the goofball recluse; Stephen Rea is the soft-spoken keyboardist; and Juliet Aubrey is the ex-groupie who wants to put it all back together. “Still Crazy” is narrated in a vulgar brogue by the band’s roadie (Billy Connelly), and there are jokes about drugs, pointless sex, porn, flatulence, and personality conflicts along the way. The movie has a lot of fun showing how these former pop-culture deities have to put up with common life. Still, we know exactly where all this is headed, and “Still Crazy” is probably the most fun for fans of British character actors familiar with the names I’ve listed. Interestingly, Nighy’s washed-up singer is the obvious inspiration for a similar character he played in “Love Actually.” In “Love Actually” he accepts and invites his status as a living joke, whereas in “Still Crazy” he’s still hung up on it. Many of the songs are co-written by Foreigner rocker Mick Jones, who gives them the pompous lyrics of the era, all having to do with darkness, dragons, and freedom.
Throne of Blood (Kumonosu-ju/Castle of the Spider’s Web) (1957, 109 min, B&W, NR) **** - Directed & co-written by Akira Kurosawa, starring Toshiro Mifune, Isuzu Yamada, Minuro Chiaki, and Takashi Shimura. Kurosawa’s take-no-prisoners transposition of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” to feudal Japan is a film characterized by vast open spaces: desolate fields of with fog, foreboding canyons, wide and empty rooms. It is only in the tangled maze of Spider’s Web Forest that “Throne of Blood’s” players find themselves lost. It is there that the samurai general Washizu (Mifune) is tempted with a demon’s vision of a future in which he is Great Lord. Coaxed by his wife (Yamada), Washizu does not begin a cycle of deceit and bloodshed but merely enters one that stretches endlessly through history. Performances are infused with Japanese Noh theater (much like Kurosawa’s final cut-and-slash epic “Ran”): movements are exaggerated, faces are single-expression masks, and the players need these big open spaces to act out how they’re feeling. Kurosawa gets some truly grand and haunting imagery out of the forest, which combines the real thing with sets, and the vision of the trees walking through the fog isn’t so much a special effects wonder as it is like something out of a dream. Oh yeah, and everyone screams all the time. According to the Criterion DVD commentary, Kurosawa turned off the treble when recording the male voices, so that all the guys sound like they’re barking and grunting.
A Time to Kill (1996, 150 min, R) ** - Directed by Joel Schumacher, starring Matthew McConaghey, Sandra Bullock, Samuel L. Jackson, and Kevin Spacey. A fake “topical” movie, ostensibly about the death penalty and race, but not really about anything. A poor black guy (Samuel L. Jackson) avenges the men who raped his daughter by blowing them away on their way to trial. The movie provides a compelling argument (from his lawyer, Matthew McConaghey) for why Jackson should be freed but, instead of providing a good argument for why Jackson should be sent up the river, it gives us an egotistical, power-hungry district attorney (Kevin Spacey) who has no real opinion in the trial. “A Time to Kill” is deliriously, boringly one-sided, like an action movie where the hero has all the cool guns and the villain is a wussy. Racial stuff is tacked on for sensationalism. Compare “A Time to Kill” to the TV movie “Roe v. Wade,” which makes no qualms about being pro-choice, but also provides the pro-life lawyer with honest, thought-out, well-meaning motivations (“think of all the little babies.”) “Roe v. Wade” does this not for lame reasons like “being fair” or “nonpolitical,” but simply because the soul of drama is opposition.
Reviews in a Hurry for Spring 2006
Total Recall (1990, 113 min, R) *** - Directed by Paul Verhoeven, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rachel Ticotin, Ronny Cox, Michael Ironside, and Sharon Stone. “Total Wreck All” is more like it; here is a movie that takes real delight in blowing up everything, killing everyone, and solving all its problems at gunpoint or the severing of limbs. At one point, characters who could have just as easily come in through the door blast an 8-foot hole in the wall. In the not-so-distant future, Doug Quaid (unlikely everyman Schwarzenegger) seems to have it all: a nice home, a blonde wife who looks like that babe from “Basic Instinct” (Stone), and a well-paying job as a construction worker. But something’s missing, so he goes on a “virtual vacation,” where false memories of a made-up life as a secret agent on Mars can be implanted in his brain. Then something crazy happens: the tinkering with his brain reveals that he IS a secret agent who is needed on Mars! The premise is daring but hardly used as well as it could be; most of Quaid’s time is spent blowing away and/or running from bad guys. Still, the director is Paul Verhoeven (“Basic Instinct,” “Starship Troopers”), who has an obvious fascination not just with violence but with why we enjoy it. His “Robocop” is so outlandishly bloody that it becomes a parody of anti-crime hardliners. With “Total Recall,” he doesn’t just give us a bloody action movie, but walks us through the steps of why we see bloody action movies. When men are dissatisfied with their lives, they fantasize about being 007-types, and, when liberated from all consequence, are happy to obliterate everything in sight. The violence becomes jokey: it’s not enough for the Governator to use an innocent passerby as a human shield, the villains even squishily step on him after he’s dead. The production design is top-notch in the ‘80s style of “Terminators,” “Predators,” and “Running Men,” creating a utilitarian and unattractive Mars. The red planet is populated by irradiated freaks so kooky that Verhoeven can’t resists using them for jokes (the three-breasted hooker, for instance). The script (from a short story by Philip K. Dick, no doubt heavily worked over by “Alien” creators Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett) gives Ah-nold plenty of good one-liners. For instance, “screw you!” accompanies the impaling of a guy with a drill. Great stuff.
Yes (2004, 100 min, R) *** - Directed & written by Sally Potter, starring Joan Allen, Simon Abkarian, and Sam Neill. More like “Maybe.” Underneath all the affectations, it’s just another movie about a bored middle-aged wife having an affair with a younger man from the wrong side of the tracks. Still, God is in the details, and the affectations include dialogue in iambic pentameter that sounds like Shakespeare crossed with Dr. Suess. The woman (Allen) is Irish-American and the man (Abkarian) is from Beirut, and there’s a fair amount of talk about religion. This is writer-director Potter’s response to September 11th (9/11 is almost as much of a godsend to filmmakers as it is to politicoes; tack “in a post-9/11 world” on the end of any sentence and presto!). He works in a fancy kitchen but used to be a doctor, she works with microscopes. There’s something charmingly amateurish about director Potter’s wonky camera angles, and her use of narration to divulge feelings without advancing plot is reminiscent of Malick. “Yes” is too mouthy, and of course it’s pretentious and contrived, but at least it’s different. It’s also the only movie in recent memory in which characters are open to ideas like abortion being bad and Communism being good.