A Simple Plan (Un plan simple) A small town accountant, his slow-witted, unemployed brother and another penniless pal happen across a downed airplane containing over $4 million in cash. They decide it's probably drug money so there'd be nothing overtly heinous about dividing up the loot. As it turns out, that's not the truth and they're soon submerged in consequences. Conveyed mostly from the accountant's point of view, this is a darkly amusing, well-told tale of greed and suspense that gradually and inexorably turns a neighborly community into a new circle drive on Dante's tour of Hell. (March 24) A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries (Le fille d'un soldat ne pleure jamais) Kaylie Jones and her adopted brother grew up on the Ile St. Louis in the 1960s while their father, novelist James Jones, wrote. Director James Ivory has adapted Kaylie's semi-autobiographical novel about her experiences in Paris and her rocky transition to life in America when Jones, his heart condition worsening, took his family back there in the early 1970s. More European than American, Jones' kids struggled with a foreign culture that should have been their own but whose codes and clues lay just out of reach. A subtle, beautifully observed film brimming with terrific performances, in which the Jones clan has been fictionalized as Bill and Marcella Willis and their children Channe and Billy, "A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries" will be of special interest to local audiences for its look at cultural differences, societal upheaval and the path of the artist. If that sounds like a trip to the dentist, rest assured that it's more like a trip down memory lane crossed with a trip to the Ile for Berthillon ice cream nostalgic and sweet, but not smarmy or saccharine. If you're a grown-up, it'll remind you why you're thrilled to no longer be going through adolescence. And if you're a teenager, you'll be heartened to know that other teens have had it rough, too. If cooler parents ever lived than Mr. and Mrs. Jones/Willis (Kris Kristofferson and Barbara Hershey) as depicted here, I want notarized proof. Leelee Sobieski is astonishingly good as Kaylie's stand-in, Channe, and Anthony Roth Costanzo is a knock-out as her flamboyant pal, Francis. Jane Birkin puts in a brief but memorable appearance as Francis's free-spirited mom. And Macha Meril is terrifyingly spot-on as the principal of a bilingual school who thinks mortal embarrassment is as important as the three R's. A portrait of simpler times that were still terribly complex, "A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries" may depict battles less bloody than those in Jones' "From Here to Eternity" and "The Thin Red Line," but they're pitch-perfect dispatches from the trenches of everyday life. (April 21) Monkey Shines In conjunction with the venerable French detergent Omo, whose spokepersons are chimpanzees (American chimps, as it turns out, although you'd swear they were French), the Mac-Mahon cinema is presenting a brief festival of simian-themed films April 16-19. If you've never seen the original "King Kong" (1933) or "Mighty Joe Young" (1949) on the big screen, use the legs that evolution has provided you with to run, not walk, to the theater at 5, av Mac-Mahon, 17e. Scarface Brian De Palma's 1983 remake of "Scarface" teaches us that crime pays very handsomely but for a limited, increasingly paranoid time only. It also teaches us that a crime kingpin with a cocaine habit requires a spacious desktop to accommodate piles of blow where most execs would have piles of, say, papers. Paris residents who have been put off by the ofttimes fastidious ways of French banking will delight in the scenes in which ill-gotten gains are welcomed, literally by the sackload, in one of Miami's fiduciary institutions. The rise and fall of Cuban refugee Tony Montana (Al Pacino) is a paean to excess, pumped up by screenwriter Oliver Stone and directed with full-throttle glee by De Palma. By the way, that's a young diaphanous Michelle Pfeiffer swaying in the background. She's very slim but even so, a good percentage of her body weight is cocaine. This re-release in crispy new wide-screen prints kicks off a six-film De Palma tribute that runs through year's end, century's end, millennium's end. (April 14) |
