e-mail

Director:
Richard Linklater

Starring:
Jack Black
Mike White
Joan Cusack
Sarah Silverman
Joey Gaydos, Jr.
Miranda Cosgrove
Kevin Alexander Clark
Robert Tsai
Rebecca Brown

Release: 3 Oct. 03
IMDb

Dewey Finn (Black) rocks. Okay, maybe it’s more like, he thinks he rocks -- regardless, he understands the key tenets of Rock (capital R, of course) that can make a great class syllabus or a great movie.

Black, working with director Richard Linklater and writer Mike White, proves that his style of rocking can be more than an inspired supporting character in High Fidelity or part of the terrific TV/record duo Tenacious D. His Dewey is manic, self-centered, and slovenly -- he’s not unlike all the characters Black plays. Yet he’s also charming and intelligent, if only in Rock history, but still has the appeal of someone who boldly knows what know man would be willing to know before.

When Dewey’s nerdy substitute teacher roommate Ned Schneebly (White) is forced by his bossy girlfriend Penny (Silverman) to pressure Dewey for his owed rent money, the recently divorced from his band rocker decides to follow suit and get a job. Getting a call from the Horace Green Prep School looking for Ned as a substitute, Dewey decides to take their hefty pay (by his standards) to make the money impersonating Ned.

At first Dewey sees this as a chance for everyone to “chill.” He can sit back and relax while the fifth graders he’s in charge of take a day-long recess. But, overhearing their music class, he gets a moment of clarity: these kids could be his key to winning the Battle of the Bands. All he has to do is convince them that learning the history and methods of Rock will be part of their new lesson plan.

This might seem inconceivably wrong to take these kids from their English and math studies to immerse them in AC/DC and Led Zeppelin, but The School of Rock makes clear that there’s formative value to rocking. These kids are mostly nerds who haven’t an ounce of courage to go out into a world that survives on more than the core curricula of Horace Green. Moreover, these kids are happy, which is more than can be said for most of the people -- students and parents, as we soon see -- involved in the school, including the Principal Rosalie Mullins (Cusack), who shows that even she has a little Stevie Nicks running through her.

As much as Dewey enlivens the kids, The School of Rock enlivens viewers. Smart, funny, and happily celebrating its clichés, the film is a pleasure, which is a rarity for any film that involves teachers awakening their students (Dangerous Minds, The Music of the Heart). This is a salve for the decades of reprehensible films in the genre that talk down to the audience while imparting some important message (just look at Mona Lisa Smile).

Key to all this working are the three men whose minds have amalgamated and spawned this treasure. Linklater, the Austin wunderkind who has careened through a career of pretentious masterpieces (Waking Life) and occasional crossover hits (Dazed and Confused), has never seemed quite as lively in any of his pictures. White, both as writer and costar, is tapped into the puerile nature of grown men, an intellect that infused his Chuck & Buck with joyous insouciance. Black, the man-child of modern cinema, is at his best, turning his shtick into a call to arms for all those who rock, and even most of us who rocked in the past but thought we’d never get to again.

Director:
Anthony Minghella

Starring:
Jude Law
Nicole Kidman
Renée Zellweger
Ray Winstone
Kathy Baker
Brendan Gleeson
Philip Seymour Hoffman
Donald Sutherland

Release: 25 Dec. 03
IMDb

In terms of Christmastime Miramax literary prestige pictures, Cold Mountain may be their most prestigious in a decade. This isn’t to say that Cold Mountain is a better film than The English Patient, The Wings of the Dove, Shakespeare in Love, The Cider House Rules, The Talented Mr. Ripley, All the Pretty Horses, Chocolat, In the Bedroom, The Hours, Gangs of New York and The Quiet American -- the film just seems to think it is.

For all its highfalutin award-hungry posturing, I happened to like Cold Mountain because, underneath its aura of importance is a story and vision that makes its self-congratulations deserved. But, of course, I’m a sucker for these films: of the 11 aforementioned prestige pictures, 5 made my year-end top 10 list and 3 received honorable mentions. Cold Mountain will likely do the latter.

With its sweeping cinematography by John Seale and filmic diction on harlequin romance under the direction of Anthony Minghella (who also made The English Patient and The Talented Mr. Ripley), the David Lean epic detail of Cold Mountain may be more than many critics can handle. I found it breathtaking, and, if a little dumpy in its beginning, a worthwhile endeavor for everyone involved.

Adapting the acclaimed 1997 novel by Charles Frazier, Minghella concerns himself with a variation on the story in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient in which a man is forced to struggle through war to get to the woman he loves. In this case, it’s W.P. Inman (Law) who has been taken from rural home in Cold Mountain, North Carolina, to fight for the Confederacy in the American Civil War. But before he leaves for war, he falls for Ada Monroe (Kidman), a woman he’s barely met and who reciprocates his hopeless devotion to a near-stranger.

The film begins at the Battle of Fredericksburg, as Confederate forces are surprised by bombs hidden under their camp by the Union Army. This sequence is bloody, extended, and tedious -- a momentary digression by the filmmaker to encourage the idea that war is miserable while not recognizing that he’s stacked his chips too high (the rest of the film, as if anyone who’s ever seen a war film didn’t know, continues on this theme, but from the ancillary point-of-view). Wounded, Inman abandons his army to make the 300 mile trek back to his home and to Ada.

Life isn’t much better for his beloved. After her father (Sutherland) dies, she’s forced to forge for herself, something that her Charleston upbringing doesn’t comprehend. To help her (and the film, which livens up after her arrival an hour into the film and never again fully faults), a southern brier named Ruby Thewes (Zellweger) moves in and starts teaching Ada how to survive until Inman, Ada hopes, returns.

The film juggles these two stories splendidly once it gets its bearings. The Homeric odyssey Inman goes through (including a cavalcade of cameos, some with great affect, by Philip Seymour Hoffman, Natalie Portman, Jena Malone, Giovanni Ribisi, and Melora Walters) feels much like it did in the novel, which is to say, it’s exhaustive. Although the movie does shortchange any realization of the state of slaves during this time, it does give a great scansion of the lives of the white Southerners left to live for themselves while much of the men in the region went off to war. From profiteers to vigilantes to pimps, the movie feels all encompassing even if forgets the racial issues that put the war into motion.

Miramax and Minghella seem to fancy Cold Mountain as a new Gone with the Wind, which it never really succeeds in equating even if its beauty and scope are comparable. There is no narrative sweep to speak of here, and that is bothersome. Plus, Vivien Leigh, perfect for Scarlet O’Hara despite being British was a far better choice for a Southern debutante than the Australian Kidman, who just feel out of place (in terms of Anglos succeeding as Southerners, look no further than Law, Ray Winstone as a local lawman, and Brendan Gleeson as Ruby’s wayward father).

This is pure melodrama, which can be fine (that’s exactly what Gone with the Wind is), but packaged in such a streamlines vehicle that one completely forgets that this wannabe Rhett and Scarlet or Heathcliff and Catherine story is just little more than one of the subplots in the North and South miniseries.

Director:
John Woo

Starring:
Ben Affleck
Uma Thurman
Aaron Eckhart
Colm Feore
Paul Giamatti

Release: 25 Dec. 03
IMDb

With Hollywood still attempting to adapt the entire works of Philip K. Dick, onetime art auteur John Woo gets his hands on the short story Paycheck, a mediocre film that shows that everything isn’t simply good (Minority Report, Blade Runner) or bad (Screamers, Imposter) in these adaptations.

Woo hasn’t been on top of his game since 1997’s Face/Off, and has suffered more from people ripping off style than his own film disappointments (Mission: Impossible II, Windtalkers). Paycheck might not be the comeback that he desperately needs, but it is a nice little treat for the time being. Hey, at least he doesn’t have the same restitution to fulfill as another Asian who hit-off with Americans in the mid ‘90s: it’ll take another The Ice Storm or two Sense and Sensibilities before Ang Lee can be forgiven for The Hulk.

Michael Jennings (Affleck) isn’t far from the standard Dick protagonist, an intelligent cog in the future dystopian system which will ultimately turn on him. Jennings is a reverse engineer who does high priced contract work for the future’s biggest industry competitors. Since his knowledge could garner the highest dollar from other competition, he must go through a process in which the brain cells which represents the memories of his work are destroyed.

Although he seems comfortable, taking into account assured inflation between now and then, his pay looks a bit minute for the work he does and the danger he goes through (if not careful, his brain will overheat and he’ll become a vegetable). So, it only takes a little pondering before he takes a contract with his friend James Rethrick (Eckhart) to spend three years working on an unnamed device that will yield an eight-figure paycheck.

Coming out of the Rethrick corporate office years later, Jennings is more than happy to ask no questions, just go to the bank and collect his cash. But he soon finds that all’s not well: he’s wanted for murder and the account contained an envelope filled with trinkets. Recognizing his abilities at unraveling the past from a product, the past Jennings has left these objects to ensure that he could save himself and stop some atrocity that he’s likely guilty of enacting.

To make matters worse, he’s fallen in love during those three years with Rethrick employee Rachel Porter (Thurman), and is now unsure how to deal with someone who desperately loves him but he cannot remember. A bit melodramatic to be sure, but the plot give Thurman, fresh off of Kill Bill, to remind everyone why she’s such a great asset to American filmmaking.

Paycheck has all the common elements of a Woo film (the pigeons, the high-speed chase), and even if none of it really feels fresh here, it is acceptable. The film isn’t stupid, which is a considerable feat for this genre. Coupled with the normal Dick irony, the razzmatazz stylings make for a nice, if forgettable diversion. Paycheck isn’t a great film, but it’s acceptable, especially considering that it’s not part of the supersaturated summer movie market. Showing that he knows Dick, Woo might not be rebounding, but at least he starting to get there.

Director:
Alejandro González Iñárritu

Starring:
Sean Penn
Naomi Watts
Benicio Del Toro
Charlotte Gainsbourg
Melissa Leo
Clea DuVall
Danny Huston

Release: 21 Nov. 03
IMDb

Alejandro González Iñárritu might be the Mexican equivalent of Lars von Trier. His films precipitate on the inner demons and moral destruction of individuals as the audience is compelled to share the misery. They both have a heady love for the experiment, so much that their films are almost overpowered by the pretensions that made them notable in the first place. They are both deeply troubled, amazingly gifted filmmakers.

For his latest hat trick, the Mexican filmmaker who created the violent masterpiece Amores Perros three years ago (note the semblance of names between Dogville and that film’s figurative translation, Love’s a Bitch) has moved his productions away from the decrepitude of his homeland, and into the urban decay of America. The central location is Memphis, Tennessee, a place that epitomizes the problems found in Youngstown, Ohio, Flint, Michigan, and Allentown, Pennsylvania. Looked at from the view of an outsider, oblivious to the once thriving economies in these places, certain parts of industrial America look like the Third World.

But Memphis and Middle America isn’t the only thing decaying in Iñárritu’s frame. His three protagonists, all part of a different social stratum, have begun their own decomposition, both physically and morally. Like the three friends in We All Loved Each Other So Much who enter into the Italian Resistance differently and come out differently, their transgressions are cathartic and destructive. Considering that Iñárritu is far more cynical than Ettore Scola, one shouldn’t be surprised that the catharsis is less likely than the destruction.

The first of these dispirit people is the academic, Paul Rivers (Penn), a math professor who is dying from a failing heart. His wife (Gainsbourg) isn’t much help -- she seems more intent on getting him to donate his sperm as soon as possible so that she might have a child after he dies. When he gets a heart transplant, it comes at a great price: he can barely put his life back together, much less get past the fact that someone died for him survive.

The person who died was the husband of Cristina Peck (Watts), who now sends her days mourning not only the loss of her spouse, but also her two daughters in a car crash. She’s struggled with substance abuse in the past, and, without the façade of a happy suburban lifestyle to ground her, she begins to regress back to her former state. Paul, unsure how to thank her for saving him, meets her but keeps their connection secret (fret not, this definitely isn’t a remake of the Minnie Driver-David Duchovny comedy Playing by Heart). He’s now like a ticking time bomb for the audience -- we wait in fear and anticipation for the moment that he destroys her again by telling her the truth.

Connecting them through the death of Cristina’s husband is Jack Jordan (Del Toro), a born-again felon who has attempted to make good with his life, at least until the day he committed a hit and run that left three for dead. Afraid to go to the authorities because of the impact it would have on his family if he spent another stint in prison, Jack lets the guilt of his action fester within him.

Not unlike Irréversible, the retribution plot sets in, but this time the question of deserved punishment is hard to grapple with. Although Jack isn’t in jail, he’s already getting the worst possible penalty by his conscience. An eye for an eye mentality may be only slight help for the bereaved -- the perpetrator is already killing himself, slowly.

Although this may seem like more information for a review than I should probably give, 21 Grams is the type of film that offers more information at once than a normal film. No two cuts connect scenes there are concurrent -- at moments the audience is ahead of the central story, at others behind. We may know more than the characters at first only to be back in the dark come the next scene.

This style isn’t quite as appealing as Iñárritu might have hoped -- the work becomes terribly hard to understand at times -- but it does provoke a similar comment on storytelling that Gespar Noe pulled off in Irréversible. How willing are we as consumers of art to accept life as a series of moments without full context? Is it confusing? Aggravating? I doubt that Iñárritu would disagree with those who are put-off with such a way to tell this story. But then again, who is happy with the way life does the same, never letting us know all we need to understand in the place we currently inhabit?

Director:
Jim Sheridan

Starring:
Paddy Considine
Samantha Morton
Sarah Bolger
Emma Bolger
Djimon Hounsou

Release: 26 Nov. 03
IMDb

Gene Siskel used to decry the majority of movies he saw with a father figure. He had been offended by a barrage of films in which the pater familias was either inept and worthy of ridicule or drunk and abandoning. His aggravation was precipitated by the fact that he was a representation of a real father: loving, well-meaning, and flawed. I wish Siskel had survived to see In America.

The father of Jim Sheridan’s film isn’t some boor worthy of contempt, but a realistic person whose attempts at creating the best opportunities for his family has left him distant and vulnerable. Based on Sheridan’s own travails upon moving to America in the early 1980s, Johnny Sullivan (Considine) sees this as his chance to do something with his life that seemed unimaginable in Ireland. Hoping to forge a living as an actor, Johnny, who mourns the death of his youngest child, a boy named Frankie, thinks there might be a chance to raise his two remaining daughters, 10-year-old Christy (Sarah Bolger) and 7-year-old Ariel (Emma Bolger) in a better world than he had across the Atlantic.

But In America isn’t so much about being a foreigner, though the film’s advertisements see this as the only way to sell the film to a wide market. This is a film about becoming accustomed to one’s own future and forgetting that past missteps. Johnny and his wife Sarah (Morton) both find blame to pass around in Frankie’s death, but no matter how much they may batter each other and themselves in fault, they are oblivious to the fact that it is arresting their own development as human beings. These people are aliens, but not in nationality -- their extraterrestrial environ is their own skin.

Enter Mateo (Hounsou), the artist who lives below them in their dingy, rundown, drug-infested apartment building. Although the film never fully explains this likely out of the ignorance of society at the time -- In America teeters around an early 1980s setting with a few modern innovations -- Meteo is dying of AIDS. He’s a soul whose decay is from the stranger within him -- unlike his neighbors, the alien properties are resolute in keeping him from continuing afterwards. For this reason, Mateo becomes the voice of reason within the lives of the Sullivans. He can articulate what it means to be alive, and what one must be willing to forget to make life sustainable. He’s able to articulate this because he can no longer sustain his own existence.

The depth with which Jim Sheridan deals with the issues at hand in his film are unlike anything he’s done before. Although this director has been successful with films like In the Name of the Father and My Left Foot, films that are ready-made for saccharine storytelling but told by a nimble narrator unwilling to take the easy ways out, Sheridan is on top of his game here. The clarity with which he writes and directs Johnny is representative of the personal relationship he has to the character. Not surprisingly, the flawless characterizations of Christy and Ariel come with the crediting of Sheridan’s real daughters, Naomi and Kirsten, as screenwriters.

All of them have no doubt felt the same way their counterparts feel in the film, allowing these characters to live and breathe unlike any inventions of filmmakers lately. Their stories are cherished by the people who brought them to the screen, and, vicariously, the audience becomes just as involved. Too often, films pit characters in dramas meant to be of utmost importance but which prove to ultimately be facile and unconvincing. In America doesn’t show contempt for viewers in such a way. This film exists to tell a story without preexisting dispositions. It respects our minds and emotions, and that is a gift almost as glorious as the film itself.