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Reviews
Starter for 10 (2006)
An Entertaining Piffle
Though he's been acting since 1995, young James McAvoy is poised to become the next great European import based on his kindly faun Mr. Tumnus in The Chronicles of Narnia and his wide-eyed work in The Last King of Scotland alongside Forest Whittaker's fierce Idi Amin. Yet sometimes a performer's measure isn't in their solid ensemble acting, but how they carry a minor work with the sheer force of talent or personality.
McAvoy's turn in Starter for Ten as frosh geek Brian Jackson, at University in 1985, is wondrously physical and inspired. He's graced with an infinitely pliable, benevolent face that's both plain and handsome. As a smart, shy working class boy, still reeling from the loss of his father years ago, McAvoy wields Jackson's intelligence as both sword and shield he draws you to him with his wit, and keeps you at arm's length with the same. For all his smarts, he's at a loss when drawn to both the enigmatic Julie (the piercingly funny Catherine Tate) a partner on the school's quiz team and the politically active Rebecca (the gangly beauty Rebecca Hall who hits low vocal notes reminiscent of Emma Thompson).
Directed by Tom Vaughan from an agile screenplay by David Nicholls, Starter for Ten is the best movie John Hughes would have made if he was English and set his comedies in college instead of high school. Though predictable and erratically paced, there's a real suggestion of university life in it. And McAvoy's creation wrings true emotion. He has a showcase scene in a restaurant where he goes from laughter to tears within the same sentence you're with him all the way. The movie is an entertaining piffle, but it serves notice that you just might be watching the birth of a star.
The Oh in Ohio (2006)
Sexual Bliss in Ohio
Parker Posey got game. If that wasn't evidenced in Party Girl, there's ample proof of her comic gifts in Billy Kent's frosh comedy The Oh in Ohio.
That's "oh" as in orgasm, only Priscilla Chase (Posey) doesn't know it yet. She's content with her job luring business to Cleveland. Her husband Jack (Paul Rudd), a teacher and formidable cocksman, is despondent over his frigid wife's inability to come. To save her marriage, she enrolls in a masturbation class (taught by Liza Minnelli), but favors technology instead, and purchases a vibrator from a shop run by an unbilled Heather Graham.
Once Priscilla experiences plastic bliss, she's hooked. Marriage ends; life begins. Posey's expert at playing the uptight, pre-orgasmic Priscilla, and the pansexual aftermath (she beds everyone, including Graham). In a classic scene involving a strategically placed vibrating pager and the frantic calls of her husband, she throws herself around in the throes of passion during a boardroom pitch meeting like a priapic marionette. The scene is foolish, but Posey wills it to life. (Earlier, after slipping the pager into her underwear, she calls herself.) Posey's not the whole show. Rudd illuminates the disconnect between sensitivity and aggression, especially when after a night with a teenage girl he boasts about his "magnificent cock" with bravado and a hint of relief. As Coach, Keith David steals his scenes with impish gleam and a dirty cackle. And Liza Minnelli's masturbation guru is scenery chewing at its finest.
The Oh in Ohio could be better. It runs out of steam; the various plot elements never resonate. But a film about a woman discovering not just sex but joy is a wondrous thing. Posey keeps it floating. She's got a shimmer in her smile, a dirty thought in her mind that she's never going to share. You stick around on the off chance that she might just let you in on it.
Catch a Fire (2006)
The Fugitive in Political Drag
Derek Luke has a serene, focused presence. His beautiful skin, cheekbones, sensuous lips, soulful eyes are easy to take in. In the film Antwone Fisher he displayed a wounded sensitivity like that of James Dean. His performance was revelatory: fresh, precise, tender. In Phillip Noyce's Catch a Fire Luke's work is again revealing.
He is glaringly miscast.
As Patrick Chamusso, a foreman at South Africa's Secunda oil refinery during apartheid, Luke must transform from an apolitical family man into an impassioned African National Congress "terrorist" against the Boer's Police Security Branch. Luke's accent is flawless; he's effective early on as a man determined to live fully amidst horrific circumstances. Yet once he's falsely accused of masterminding an explosion at Secunda, then he and his wife Precious (Bonnie Henna) are beaten and demoralized, he leaves his family to train in Mozambique with the ANC.
Here's where the film falters. The actor delivers lines in a fluid monotone, seduced by the musicality of that lovely patois. He spends so much time on the accent that he forgets to act. He has no range; no depth. He's a little boy trapped in political mire. Which may be part of the point, yet without an actor to suggest the shadings of injustice and to hold his own against Tim Robbin's expertly awful Nic Vos we're left with a version of The Fugitive wearing fancy political drag.
One other note: there's singing in Catch a Fire. Tons of it. African folk singing. Beautiful, in fact. However, every time a crowd opens its collective mouth, they sound remarkably like Ladysmith Black Mambazo even when they are the workers at the oil factory standing in line. In the interest of verisimilitude, would it be too much to ask that at least one person be tone deaf and unable to carry a tune?
Le temps qui reste (2005)
Stunning 'Time'
François Ozon's films produce a cool admiration. From naturalism (Under the Sea) to visual sophistication (8 Women) his work creates distance. This may be a "French thing"; their films move more naturally towards philosophy than drama. His stunning Time to Leave (Le Temps Qui Reste) has delicately meditative moments, yet it's hard to remain aloof.
This second of a proposed trilogy about grief is a masterwork. Ozon may be a cool observer, but there's no detachment in the story of Romain (the extraordinary Melvin Poupaud), a gay photographer with terminal cancer. We get little of his pre-diagnosis life he seems to have always been a prick but we ride his volatile emotions to the end. He tells almost no one of his illness; pushes away his family, his lover; acts cruelly. Ozon neither glorifies nor excuses these actions. Yet the accretion of details as Romain hurtles towards our common end creates a tense empathy in the audience. We may disagree with Romain's behavior, but we understand his every exploit.
Ozon's screenplay flows with incisive scenes; one of the best involves Romain's grandmother (Jeanne Moreau), herself close to death. Better still is the director's handling of sex scenes: a brief, violent one with his lover after he has been diagnosed, another with a woman and her husband who've asked him to help them have a child. Movie sex scenes are perfunctory; when one has heat and acuity, real eroticism, they're exhilarating. Ozon's are more they're resonant; the threesome in particular, because we're profoundly aware of what's at stake for all the players.
Slated for release in the middle of summer movie madness, Time to Leave is an anti-blockbuster. Who wants to see a film about the death of a gay hedonist when there are superheroes out to save the world? I suppose only those who'd like to understand what it is about that world that's worth saving.
Stoned (2005)
A Great Producer
The mystique of the Rolling Stones isn't well served by Stoned, a speculative film about the last three months of the life of original guitarist Brian Jones. But nor will their legend be marred by this inept and ineffectual bio-pic.
Directed by famed producer Stephen Woolley (The Crying Game, Breakfast On Pluto), Stoned shows us Jones final days through the eyes of Frank Thorogood (Paddy Considine), a contractor brought into the fold by the Stones road manager Tom Keylock (David Morrissey) to help with the landscaping of his East Sussex manse and, eventually, keep an eye on the free-spirited rock star.
Since we know that Jones (Leo Gregory) drowned in his pool, Wooley stages it with a flash forward of the body's discovery near the start of the film. But any mystery about the relationship of the working-class Thorogood and the rich Jones begs for more incisive scenes than the clichéd mise-en-scene of all too familiar 60's tropes. To believe that the contractor could be moved to murder Jones, we need more than a mild scene of humiliation and a dismissal without final pay. We need shadings of Thorogood's psychological discord, and a fuller performance from the usually reliable Considine.
Not that the other actors fare any better. Gregory plays Jones as a Lost Boy and an opportunist, sporting a Little Lord Fauntleroy shag that turns him into David Spade's somewhat sexier brother. The women are lovely, but basically negligible whores or hangers-on and the rest of the band loose approximations of the younger Stones, with Keith Richards the moral center of the film.
Neither the script, by Neil Purvis and Robert Wade, nor the director, shapes scenes for drama. Jones life, like the film, seems aimless; we never understand his importance as the architect of the original Stones. On the evidence of Stoned, one can rightly say that as a director, Woolley is a great producer.
Jesus Camp (2006)
Religious Wars
Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady's documentary Jesus Camp plays like a horror movie. It doesn't feature werewolves or vampires or other creatures, but it does follow a group of evangelical Christians, headed by Pastor Becky Fischer, at a summer camp that indoctrinates children to "take back America for Christ."
For some of us, that's terror enough.
Jesus Camp doesn't demonize its subjects (they do that to themselves). The filmmakers mix interviews with footage culled from a summer session at the "Kids on Fire" camp in Devil's Lake, North Dakota. The camp differs from other Christian retreats in that its end result isn't just to celebrate a love of God, but to prepare children for active political service. For the evangelicals, as featured here, America was created from Judeo-Christian ethics; division of "church" and "state" should not exist. Elected officials (like Bush, whom they hold up as their ideal) should support and legislate from the word of God. And if you aren't with them, you are going to hell.
People who aren't with them include those who defend pro-choice, advocate (or at least don't punish) homosexuality, and, it seems, all those who believe in all other forms of Christianity as well as any other religion. "One nation," they say in their pledge of allegiance, "under a Christian God." They also believe in a "Christian" democracy. The way evangelicals have manifested their voting block in the last ten years proves they may one day have their prayers answered.
Like I said, it's a horror movie. And for those too smug to be bothered, keep your eyes closed, ignore them, and pray they'll go away. Or, better yet, see the movie, understand how the number of evangelicals continues to grow (80 million and counting), and prepare for the "war" they blatantly say they are waging.
Candy (2006)
Addictive
Heath Ledger is an attractive mess. The grungier he looks, the more disheveled his character, the better his acting. Witness: Brokeback Mountain, Monster's Ball.
And now Candy.
Ledger plays Dan, a junkie in love with a young painter named Candy (Abbie Cornish) and heroin. Once Candy's addicted to both love and drugs, the film delves effectively into the spiral of addiction.
Directed by Australian Neil Armfield, Candy is a double-junkie story; it suffers from some of the similarities of the genre. There's the letdown of recognition: how much does anyone really want to watch junkies devolving? How many close-ups of syringes do we need? Yet for those not put off by the subject there's much to recommend here starting with a wonderfully apt credit sequence where the junkie lovers ride the Rotor at a fair (that's the one where the floor drops out beneath you and you're pinned with centrifugal force against the wall). That opening compresses the film into a potent image that gives the pleasure of drugs their due while acting as a warning.
Armstrong's compositional sense is unobtrusive yet expressive; he wrings beauty from squalor, and suggests the addicts' points-of-view without pictorial distortion.
And he has amazing actors. Ledger's performance is a non-showy tour-de-force that solidifies his buzz from Brokeback Mountain. Cornish, in the complicated title role, is luminous. She goes through wrenching changes yet doesn't showboat once. As the gay dealer/professor/mentor Casper, the ever reliable Geoffrey Rush wrings pathos from gallows humor. He ignites every scene he's in.
Still, Candy is a junkie movie. We're never asked to identify. The characters are who they are no reasons or excuses offered. And watching the film might require an act of tough love from the viewer. But the cast compels us forward. Great acting, for some of us, is its own addiction.
American Hardcore (2006)
Passion Above Expertise
American Hardcore is a relatively thorough examination of the hardcore punk movement in this country from 1980 through 1986. Set against Reagan's 50's vision of the 1980's, these bands from SoCal to Vancouver, Minneapolis to New York, D.C. to Boston channeled their youthful rage into an industrial buzzsaw angst that politicized American homogeneity, and paved the way for the triumph of Nirvana and the "alternative nation" of the nineties.
Paul Rachman's documentary, based on Steven Blush's book American Hardcore: A Tribal History, plays a lot like the music sounds: lo-fi, blurry, energetic, confused, and often very funny. A lot of screen time is given to two of the best bands from the movement SoCal's Black Flag and D.C.'s Bad Brains but the live performance clips, most of them from lo-tech sources, don't give the lockstep rhythms and passionate intensity of the music its due. The grungy footage is distant, historical; it places a gauze around the chaos of the time. Considered in perspective, too many of the bands sound similar, the effect monochromatic and, ultimately, uninteresting. Which is too bad, because many of the major players from that period the two mentioned above, as well as Flipper, Minor Threat and Hüsker Dü left behind seminal work. If the filmmakers could have used snippets of the actual recordings, the movie might have been more cohesive and involving, and envisioned the next phase of this endlessly regenerating culture.
Documentaries, regardless of subject, should expand their subject. American Hardcore often feels as insular as the underground community of dissenters it features. But for music lovers who should include this subgenre on their list of interests it's refreshing to be reminded how technical expertise and craft can pale in the face of true passion.
Shut Up & Sing (2006)
Casualty of War
If you need an example of the punishment not fitting the crime, look at Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck's Shut Up & Sing, a documentary about the country superstars the Dixie Chicks.
In 2003, at the height of their popularity and on the verge of the U.S. war with Iraq the Chicks played a show in the UK where their firebrand singer Natalie Maines told a London audience that they were ashamed that President Bush was from Texas. The firestorm of controversy, their blackballing from country radio, and their struggle against misguided patriotic fervor, death threats, declining sales, and artistic stagnation is well documented here, moving between the events of 2003 through the recording of 2006's Taking the Long Way, a work that staunchly faced their critics.
The film is entertaining and frightening. Shot in rich colors it's one of the must lustrous documentaries I've ever seen Shut Up & Sing is a joyous paean to the Dixie Chicks gorgeous harmonies. They face the hatred of the country with astonishment how could this be happening? Yet as they are dragged into the mire of a political arena they'd never planned on playing, you realize those harmonies go deeper than their voices. These women are united in their love of music, their right to speak their minds.
For the longest stretch of the film, it seems that these American women will become another casualty of war. They refuse to pander to the largely conservative country audience, and score a best-selling CD to new listeners in the process. But the divisive roots of the Iraqi war run deep the Chicks arena tour is a financial nightmare. In the ongoing war for our freedom of speech, the Dixie Chicks come out a draw. It's bracing to realize this story has become an archetype, not an exception.