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shopping | cineview | paris scene | style | commentary
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"Holy Somoke"
©Gerald Jenkins
Cineview
by Lisa Nesselson
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Century thoughts, millenial KvetchingPicture


T
his time of year I’m often asked, “So, what was the best picture you saw in this 12-month stretch?” (Actually, nobody really says “12-month stretch,” but claiming they do saves me from having to use the word “year” twice in the same sentence.) For 1999, that’s easy. A moving picture I’ll never forget — “Solar Eclipse” — enjoyed a brief but glorious run on August 11.
The last total eclipse of the millennium offered suspense (“Will the clouds part in time for me to see heaven’s discus and its colorful corona?”), scale (“Whoa — is the sun BIG or what?”) and a cast of millions (“People all over the ‘band of totality’ are wearing funny glasses and watching the same spectacular phenomenon. We are united in our common humanity — and in our willingness to be seen in public in funny glasses.”) Eclipses were the first global blockbusters. Before there were blocks, even.
Movies — the popular entertainment and occasional art form that can arguably be said to have dominated this century — are actually a holdover from the tail end of the 19th century. “Le Ticket du Siècle,” handed out in tandem with each full-price admission sold on January 15, 1995, was originally meant as a voucher to be honored at any point during the subsequent 100 years. But the powers that be backed down, and made that “one” year (actually through December 27, 1995) instead of “one hundred.”
With the coming onslaught of digital video and digital projection, we are mere years away from losing whatever the intangibles are that make moviegoing magic. (Most moviegoers don’t give it any thought, but what you experience in a movie theater is the result of light from a projector bulb shining through a strip of celluloid, creating an image that is REFLECTED back to the audience off a white screen. In contrast, when you watch TV or stare at a computer screen, the light source is positioned BEHIND the image, pointing into your eyes and, by extension, your brain. Some theorists believe that the picture tube pointing at you, added to the “refresh” rate of a given monitor, creates a hypnotic pull. Everybody’s had the experience of watching television and thinking, “This program is awful. Why am I watching this?” — and yet continuing to do so. In digital projection, which has already debuted in some mainstream US movie houses, the essential dynamic of reflected light and shadow is forever changed.
If that’s too complicated to grasp, think of it this way: Coke drunk from a tin can or a plastic bottle tastes good enough, but Coke from a glass bottle tastes that much better. The global film industry is gearing up to dispense movies from tin and plastic rather than glass. Digital projection will be easier and “better” in many respects — no more heavy film cans to transport, no more scratched prints — but it will also be a colossal trade-off in terms of the warmth of the image when the principles of photography give way to the supremacy of zeroes and ones. This is not a problem on the order of banning and eradicating land mines, but the consequences may be just as explosive. My advice is to go to as many movies in cinemas as you can, while you still can. The Millennium Bug may come and go without lasting effect, but glorious, seemingly ubiquitous movies are breathing their figurative last.

Should the Y2K bug hit in such a way as to IMMEDIATELY render filmgoing a thing of the past, I plan to earn my keep by reciting the plots and choice passages of dialogue from the films we will no longer be able to see. I’ll start with the really good ones: “Sunset Boulevard,” “All About Eve,” “Harold and Maude.” Eventually maybe I’ll get around to more recent fare, like the flicks below the flick below.


The Wizard of Oz
(Le Magicien d’Oz)
Im often asked, “What is your favorite flying-monkey movie in the past 720-month stretch?” “The Wizard of Oz” would’ve been the US entry at the initial edition of Cannes in 1939 had WWII not broken out on the second day of the festival. Sixty years on, the depiction of dreams in movies (see “Eyes Wide Shut”) has only occasionally matched this show. Fresh prints from the restored negative make the rerelease of this Technicolor (and black-and-white) extravaganza an extra special treat. If you grew up with annual doses of “Oz,” the mere mention of key phrases (“Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.” “I’ll get you, my pretty — and your little dog, too.” “Follow the yellow brick road.” “Surrender, Dorothy.” “Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!” “There’s no place like home.”) should inspire you to don the nearest pair of ruby slippers and get thee to the cinema. If you, or youngsters you know, have never seen this movie on the big screen, DO NOT let this opportunity slip past.
(Dec 15)

A Price Above Rubies
(Sonia Horowitz)

WWriter-director Boaz Yakin’s ambitious tale follows the emancipation of a woman who marries into a devout Orthodox Jewish household in contemporary Brooklyn, only to discover she doesn’t have a prayer. Intelligent, sexy, full of defiant strategy and alliances of expediency, “A Price Above Rubies” features a very impressive central performance by Renée Zellweger.
(Jan 12)

Holy smoke
Jane (“The Piano”) Campion’s latest pic gets off to a terrific start, only to fizzle. Kate Winslet gives yet another in an uninterrupted series of fine performances as an Australian tourist who finds enlightenment while on vacation in India. Her concerned family lures her back to Australia under false pretenses and, against her clear-headed wishes, throws her into a one-on-one confrontational weekend with a world-class deprogrammer (a “cult exiter,” to be precise) played by Harvey Keitel. The stage-setting and character-establishing portions of the movie are vivid and engaging, but once Winslet and Keitel settle into their theological and sexual showdown in the outback, the proceedings struggle to be intense and revelatory only to come out arbitrary and dilute. There’s something irritatingly faux-daring about this entire enterprise, although Winslet’s character’s convictions hold up to hearty scrutiny.
(Nov 24)

Fiona
To say that “Fiona” will not be to everyone’s taste is a safe pronouncement, on the order of “Water is wet” and “Money is useful.” The harsh and haunting story of a woman with a Ph.D. from the school of hard knocks, “Fiona” follows fearless actress Anna Thomson as she portrays the title prostitute, a walking advertisement for the perils of nature-without-nurture. If you haven’t yet seen Thomson’s previous film with director Amos Kollek, “Sue” (“Sue perdue dans Manhattan”), I suggest you first take it in, as it is less dire, though equally melancholy. If you respond to “Sue” — now in its second year in Paris theaters — you might find “Fiona” of interest. No matter how many movies you’ve seen, I guarantee there’s one development in this film you’ve never seen before.
(Nov 24)

Following
(Le suiveur)

This is a very nifty low-budget item about a conceptual burglar, a chap who breaks into people’s houses and ADDS things. If most low-budget films are shot on a shoestring, then this one was shot on the little nubs at the end of the string that prevent it from unraveling. [It’s called an aglet. – Ed.] What the film lacks in cash resources it makes up for in ingenuity. “Following” is about curiosity, which, as the saying goes, has done in many a representative of the feline realm. It’s about daring to bend the rules, but without stopping to think you may be bending them into the business end of a catapult that will snap back and hit you someday. It’s about relying on the kindness of strangers — if kindness, indeed, it be. “Following” deserves to develop one.
(Dec 1)

Dogma
This meandering and juvenile picture has prompted yet another hysterical campaign by the film critics I least respect: self-appointed guardians of propriety who condemn a film without actually having seen it. Classic targets of this genre of preemptive reviewing include Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ” and Jean-Luc Godard’s “Hail Mary.” The Scorsese was a much better film than “Dogma,” but shares with it the fact that it was made by a devout Catholic. For writer-director Kevin Smith, “Dogma” is definitely a step backwards from his “Clerks” and “Chasing Amy,” but it has its moments.
This is a sprawling, silly film in which one fallen angel says to another, “You can’t be anal retentive if you don’t have an anus,” and a priest played by George Carlin introduces the user-friendly “Buddy Christ,” a sort of Jesus-as-surfer-dude, to accompany his new campaign whose slogan is: “Catholocism: Wow!” As laconic true believer Smith put it at Cannes in May: “How could anybody get offended by this movie? It’s got a Golgathan Poop Monster in it. I think when people see it, they’ll say, ‘THIS is supposed to be controversial? This is adolescent.’” Not only is it adolescent, it’s all over the map. But one can’t help but love the scene where, when confronted with a silent female deity, a youthful hipster asks, “What the **** is this — ‘The Piano’? Why can’t that broad talk?”
At the film’s Cannes press conference, Linda Fiorentino, who plays a crucial role in “Dogma,” opined: “If you think about the possibility of humans creating a heaven on earth, we wouldn’t need organized religion. God to me is that part of us that in all of us is exactly the same. That’s where faith dwells, that’s where love dwells.”
(Jan 19)


The World Is Not Enough
(Le Monde ne suffit pas)
Dumb fun, with plot holes galore, the 19th James Bond movie makes the excellent point that just because a woman is gorgeous and shapely, that shouldn’t be an impediment to her career as a nuclear physicist. And its corollary: Who says shapely nuclear physicists can’t look really intelligent in skintight wet tank tops? Other topics for debate: If 007 has a dislocated collarbone, how come he can do all that stunt work without wincing?
Sophie Marceau — who, as a host of this year’s Cannes closing ceremonies, proved that she can be the spaciest thing since Mir — does a nice turn as Elektra King, the daughter of a recently murdered international tycoon who takes over the construction of dad’s oil pipeline. She’s also one of the world’s leading practitioners of the “Gosh — although I’m in bed naked, this sheet covers me in strategic areas no matter how I move” technique. The flamboyant action is parsed by exotic locations, familiar theme music and excruciatingly bad puns. Judi Dench’s “M” is a long, long way from “The Wizard of Oz’s” Auntie Em.
(Dec 1)

Being John Malkovich
(Dans la peau de John Malkovich)

A Tilt-o-Whirl ride for the brain synapses, the film that Spike Jonze has made from Charlie Kaufman’s script is close to sublime in its take on fame and sexual longing. Simultaneously amusing and creepy, it’s the story of scruffy but gifted puppeteer Craig Schwartz (John Cusack), who upon taking a job in a very strange Manhattan office discovers a hidden passageway that turns out to be a portal into the title character’s gray matter. In what is just a fraction of the wacky yet presented-as-plausible narrative hijinks, Schwartz and his urban-to-the-bone co-worker Maxine (Catherine Keener) charge the hoi polloi $200 a head to sample the inside of Malkovich’s head for 15 minutes. Personally, I would pay ten times that for an ironclad guarantee that I will NEVER have to be John Malkovich, however briefly. But you, dear reader, should pay the going rate to experience this movie, a metaphysical bungee jump that is laugh-out-loud funny yet pleasingly bittersweet.
(Dec 8)

The Muse
(La muse)
A slightly ornery one-joke movie with a few scenes and cameos that make it worth the price of an early-bird show, “The Muse” stars screenwriter-director Albert Brooks as a “blocked” Hollywood screenwriter who is no longer perceived as a hot property in Tinseltown. His hip buddy (Jeff Bridges) reluctantly gets him a meeting with an ethereal woman he says is a bona-fide, Greek-mythology-style muse — a source of inspiration, if you will. Like all her heavenly ilk, the muse in question — played by Sharon Stone — thrives on gifts and trinkets. Her powers appear genuine, but they land in unpredictable patterns. “The Muse” is merciless with the downside of an industry where some people think the venerable exclamation “By Zeus!” is spelled “Buy Zeus!”
(Dec 22)

An Ideal Husband
(Un mari idéal)
Oscar Wilde’s vintage witty dialogue holds up better than a lot of the dialogue in the freshly minted movies mentioned elsewhere on these pages. Courtly, funny, full of good manners and jittery suspense, “An Ideal Husband” is painlessly entertaining — easy on the eye and a delight for the ear. This tale of a successful man primed for the next level of success only to be threatened by evidence of a prior indiscretion that, if revealed, will do to his standing in society what giant asteroids did for the dinosaurs, seems so contemporary it’s almost scary.
(Dec 15)


Found in translation
I am often asked, “What’s your favorite French-to-English translation of the past five minutes?” That would be the following passage from the November 25 issue of Rolling Stone: “ Laetitia Casta, the French model we chose to symbolize ‘hot’ way back in August 1998, has been chosen by her own country to embody ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’ (freedom, equality, college-guy-ness.)”

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The Wizard od Oz
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"Following"
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"Dogma"
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"The World is not enough"