|
Film Clips
ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER. Spain's most famous filmmaker, writer/director Pedro Almodovar, returns to the screen with his least surreal and most humane attempt to capture the complex absurdities of the female universe. Actress Cecilia Roth is a bereaved mother who returns to Barcelona to discover the identity of her son's father, only to initiate an unforeseen and uniquely interrelated series of events. Rich character development, masterful dialog (even with English subtitles) and an intelligently skewed visual and narrative perspective make this one of the year's most interestingly un-American filmsÉa trait recognized in last week's Academy Awards, where it took honors for Best Foreign Language Flick. While today's Oscar is often damnable praise, save your scorn for the cult of American Beauty: What glitters in Almodovar is indeed gold. -- Wadsworth
BOYS DON'T CRY. Eerie, beautifully shot, strongly acted and successfully emotional, Boys tells the true story of Teena Brandon, a Nebraskan girl who lived as a boy named Brandon Teena. In the desolate wastelands of the plains, her unorthodox lifestyle brought her into conflict with some extremely backwards characters, including a neanderthal sheriff and two hoodlums who befriended and then brutally betrayed her. A difficult film from an emotional perspective, Boys will probably steal an Oscar or two for the dead-on performances of Hilary Swank as Brandon Teena and Chloe Sevigny as her girlfriend Lana Tisdale. -- DiGiovanna
THE CUP. This joint Bhutanese/Australian premiere is a cinematic gem. A comedy set in a Tibetan monastery-in-exile in India, 1998, its focal point is young student Orygen (played with charismatic swagger by Jamyang Lodro), a lightning rod for the monks' clandestine obsession with professional soccer. Writer/director Kyentese Norbu (acknowledged in Buddhist circles as the reincarnation of 19th-century Tibetan saint Jamyang Khentse Wangpo) offers a colorful insider's perspective on the sacred and profane aspects of monastic life, including a humorously Zen view of national politics and World Cup soccer. Within the anecdotal attempts of Orygen and co-conspirators to catch the World Cup finals on television, The Cup captures with disarming and simple detail the bittersweet existence of refugees safe from physical harm but nonetheless struggling in a cultural and historic limbo. Based on true events and filmed on location in a Buddhist monastery, it's a sweet, philosophical tale that's as funny as it is profound. -- Wadsworth
ERIN BROCKOVICH. Steven Soderbergh directs this based-on-a-true-story about a personal injury lawyer and fallen beauty queen, the unlikely legal team to stumble across the most lucrative toxic tort case in U.S. history. Julia Roberts and Albert Finney star as Brockovich and attorney Ed Masry, who represent the small, desert town of Hinkley, California, against monolithic utility Pacific Gas and Electric. Exactly 10 years after her Pretty Woman debut, Roberts returns to the screen with the same makeup and wardrobe, augmented by three small children, a Hell's Angel boyfriend with a heart of gold, and a finely honed sense of outrage for all powers-that-be. This virtuous fight for truth and justice may be a box-office hit nationally, but it's sure to flop down the Cali coast in Avila Beach, where a post-Hinkley Brockovich and Masry blew in like ambulance chasers in 1996 after the disastrous Unocal oil spill, conflating fears and charming hundreds of clients with Brockovich's trademark cleavage. Their trumped-up charges were trounced in court, leaving Masry to a hasty retreat with 50-percent of his clients' property damage settlements. Oops. Moral of the story? Hero today, pawn tomorrow. -- Wadsworth
FINAL DESTINATION. The premise of this thriller is that high-school French student Alex Browning (Devon Sawa) wakes up one day clairvoyant and cursed with a reverse death wish that starts killing off his friends one by one. After sparing his classmates from a Paris-bound plane that explodes minutes after take off, his efforts to thwart fate land him in a high-octane web of paranoid psychosis, spurred on by grim-faced FBI agents. Which just goes to show you, kids: take Spanish. -- Wadsworth
HERE ON EARTH. The birch trees of Minnesota stand in for the Berkshires in this first-love drama starring American Pie's Chris Klein, alliterative teen beaut Leelee Sobieski (Never Been Kissed, Eyes Wide Shut), and Josh Hartnett (star of Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides, which opened with critical acclaim at Cannes and Sundance). After a fateful drag race leaves a local diner in ruins, rival bad boys Klein and Hartnett are sentenced to a summer of community service and competitive courting in small-town America. We haven't seen how it ends, so follow your instincts: if you bet by names, the producers are "Friendly" and "Downer." -- Wadsworth
HIGH FIDELITY. Top five reasons to see (or not see) this anti-romantic love story with an uncomfortably happy ending: 1) It stars John Cusack as an immature, egotistic, 30-something music geek adrift in an ecosystem of vintage vinyl, nightclubs, punk rock T-shirts, and fellow music geeks. 2) Tim Robbins appears for all of 10 minutes as the monotone, pony-tailed, incense-burning rival for demure Danish love interest Iben Hjejle. 3) SNL upstart Jack Black is hilarious as record store bully Barry. 4) It's weird to see the British humor of novelist Nick Hornby seamlessly adapted to a Chicago set (that, bonus, was actually filmed on location in Chicago). 5) There are exactly three and a half minutes of sincerity distributed throughout the other 113 of this savage comedy. -- Wadsworth
NINTH GATE. Director Roman Polanski answers the musical question "How many roads must a man walk down" in this occult thriller starring Johnny Depp and some old books. Depp plays a master text analyzer and spends much of the movie closely comparing the three surviving copies of a 17th-century Satanic tome. Only Polanski could make library work seem exciting, dangerous and sexy. The vampiric Frank Langella plays Depp's employer, a man who wears a fabulous suit and would summon Satan. Lena Olin plays a rival book collector who will do anyone in order to get her hands on the infernal volume. If you can get past some of the goofier aspects, Ninth Gate's tight plotting and odd characters promise a fun rideÉto hell! -- DiGiovanna
ROMEO MUST DIE. People who live under the disempowered delusion that "violence doesn't solve anything" have never enjoyed a Jet Li movie. Here, the kick-ass Black Mask hero breaks out of a Hong Kong prison to avenge his brother's death on the mean streets of San Francisco. Rival black and Chinese gang warfare provide the backdrop for this über-violent ballet of martial arts, automatic weapons, expensive car crashes and high-powered explosives. The only parts that hurt, though, are Isaiah Washington and D.B. Woodside's cringingly bad dialogue. Despite the hangings, betrayals, innocent deaths and gunshot wounds, this remains a good-natured action-comedy built on Republican family values like free enterprise and the power of patriarchy. Woo hoo! As Li says while buying weapons and stealing cars on the open market, "What a country!" Also starring Aaliyah, Delroy Lindo and Russel Wong. -- Wadsworth
RULES OF ENGAGEMENT. Tommy Lee Jones and Samuel L. Jackson give great performances as decorated U.S. Marine veterans who served together in the jungles of Vietnam. They are, unquestionably, fun to watch. Thirty years later, in 1998, Jackson is being court-marshaled for the slaughter of 83 unarmed Yemenite women, children and elderly people. Hung out to dry in this political op, he turns to Jones -- a second-rate, semi-retired alcoholic lawyer -- to defend him. While on the surface Rules is a battlefield and courtroom drama tackling the sticky issues of protecting conflicting U.S. interests abroad, the particular path it follows is blood-soaked and laughably propagandist. Based on a story by former U.S. Secretary of the Navy James Webb, in the hands of director William Friedkin this fiction quickly abandons moral ambiguity in favor of emotion, manipulating common fears and our sense of justice to deliver the antiseptic message that no matter what front-page pictures and outraged politicians have to say, you can bet the stars and stripes our military has a right to shoot civilians in a crisis. The closeups of black-veiled women and Arab children firing UZIs at American soldiers is second only to the scene where the North Vietnamese soldier testifies in court on Jackson's behalf, solemnly saluting him afterwards. The end notes further add to the illusion that this is a true story. Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, indeed. -- Wadsworth
WHATEVER IT TAKES. The suggestive tagline of this teen romantic comedy is, "How low will they go to get the girls of their dreams?" True to its high-school subjects, the answer is "all the wrong places." With just four weeks until "graduation," social outsider Ryan (Shane West) and dumb jock Chris (James Franco) enter into a double-Cyrano scheme of romantic deception to woo the objects, and we do mean objects, of their desire (played by Jodi Lyn O'Keefe and Marla Sokoloff). Disaster ensues, and life lessons are learned. Well, some. Others, ostensibly, await the "higher education" of college life. -- Wadsworth
Special Screenings
AMERICAN PLACE. This free, avant-garde tour of the West continues this Monday with 1995's Deseret, "a rumination on the geography and history of Utah." It's the second installment of the five-part series finale, "The West According to James Benning." The series continues on Wednesday with Four Corners (1997), which similarly tackles the region as a nexus of culture and nature.
Show time is 6:30 p.m. on April 17 and 19, with screenings in Room 202 of the UA AME Building, northeast corner of Speedway Boulevard and Mountain Avenue. Coming up Monday, April 24: Benning makes a Tucson appearance coinciding with the screening of Utopia (1998), filmed in U.S./Mexico border country. Admission to all screenings is free. For general information, call UA Media Arts at 621-7352.
CROUPIER. Now there's a word you don't hear every day. Less glamorous than a dealer and more hands-on than the house, a croupier is the person who collects and pays the money at a gaming table. In other words, it's a change of pace for an aspiring writer with writer's block (a job in which one usually pays money without collecting it first, or maybe ever). This British indie film, heralded as a "diamond-hard masterpiece" by the discriminating L.A. Weekly, is described as a complex thriller set in London's gambling world. You can preview and discuss Croupier at the series-sponsored Club Night ($18) at 7 p.m. Monday, April 17. Its two-week run opens Friday, April 21, at Loews-Catalina Cinema, as part of the ongoing Shooting Gallery Film Series. Call 881-0616 for show times and information.
|
 |
