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Capsule Reviews
- The Decalogue: If you haven't seen this series of ten films by a true genius of the cinema, Krzysztof Kieslowski, you must go to the video store and rent them now. Finally released in the U.S., each of the ten hour-long tales is loosely based on one of the Ten Commandments. The first one is my favorite (it's in my visionary masterpieces category). The actors are all extraordinary. The father and son have a playful and loving intimacy not often captured on film. You want to be this child, who has such a father, and you want to be this father, who has such a son.
The child, Pavel, is caught between two views of life: his aunt (his mother is gone) teaches him to believe in the mystery of religion. His father, a professor who theorizes about artificial intelligence, believes in the cold, hard logic of science. After Pavel sees a dead dog, he asks his father, at the breakfast table, "What is death?" The father replies with brutal honesty: "The heart stops pumping blood...it doesn't reach the brain, movement ceases, everything stops. It's the end." "So what's left?" the child asks. "What a person has achieved, the memory of that person. The memory's important. The memory that someone moved in a certain way, or that they were kind...you remember their face, their smile, that a tooth was missing... It's too early. What do you expect of me so early in the morning?" The father pours milk into his coffee. It's sour--something is off, not working. Pavel points out to his father that in his account of death, he didn't mention a soul. "It's a form of farewell; there is no soul," the father replies. "Auntie says there is." The father looks at him. "Some find it easier to live thinking that." "And you?" "Me, frankly, I don't know."
And the aunt is equally emphatic and convincing. When Pavel says "Do you believe in God? So who is he?" she hugs him tight. "What do you feel now?" she asks. "I love you." "Exactly, that's where he is."
Few films pose such questions as these. Few films take on such issues; few deal with our world so humbly, so brilliantly, leaving out nothing along the way.
The child is a prodigy--he has rigged up his computer to turn the lights and the faucet on and off; he's asking existential questions about the Muppets; he's beating grandmasters at chess. To top it off, he is utterly adorable, honest, earnest, innocent, and loving--all that is best about the human species.
But this film is a tragedy, and so it gives us something and then it takes it away. The father's belief that everything can be measured is tested, and he pays the ultimate price for his agnosticism, for his faith in technology. The haunting music echoes and articulates his ache, his loss, his mistake, his love.
The ending of the film contains something that can only be described as a miracle.
It's that he does so much with so little that makes you admire the brilliance of Kieslowski's direction. Everything he does he does with simplicity and grace, and the result is great beauty. Some people were born to make films; he was one of them.
If I had to pick one hour of film to send off in a spacecraft, to represent to any alien intelligence that found it what humans beings are and what they are capable of, I would send Decalogue One. It's breathtaking.
- Richard Pryor Live in Concert (1979): This guy's so hot he went up in flames. Pryor in his prime is like no other: you sit and laugh and wonder at the mind that spins out the tales. But what makes me love Pryor the most are his impressions of animals. The man has love in his heart. He also salutes Huey P. Newton.
- Dead Man (1995): The great acid-western. Shot in beautiful black and white, the film keeps your mind spinning like a set of train wheels. Its evocation of the American West is confident and realistic--it creates the atmosphere of the frontier by letting us know early on that anything goes in this world. Johnny Depp, Gary Farmer, and Crispin Glover give notable performances, but it is Robert Mitchum, in his last role, who steals the show. He did it once more and then he left us.
- Miller's Crossing is up here because of its hard boiled dialogue, its Irish cops chawin' on toothpicks and talkin' out of the sides of their mouths, its Albert Finny listening to "O Danny Boy" in his pajamas, and its Gabriel Byrne brooding through the night.
- Out of Sight: This film has everything, and it's one for the ages. Clooney and Lopez give performances that will likely be the highlight of each of their careers. The director, Steven Soderberg and his crew do a beautiful job of lighting the film. My favorite scene is the one which cuts between Clooney and Lopez talking over drinks and Clooney and Lopez in the hotel room upstairs. The music just slides into a deep, deep groove, and the snowflakes that fall past the window look like little stars.
- Princess Mononoke: Let me make an aside here and say that this film shows me how much one's expectations, in conjunction with the actual, physical viewing experience, shape the way one reacts to a film. I saw Princess Mononoke in Paris, a year and a half before its U.S. release, while staying with a French cartoonist who had a pirate copy of the film. The only problem was that it was in Japanese, with no subtitles. We made sense of it somehow, but sense didn't even seem that important in the face of such beautiful animations.
- Insomnia: a provocative "film blanc" that owes a lot to both The Third Man and The Silence of the Lambs. Read the full-length review.
- How crass is Hamlet?--I've never seen such shameless product placements this side of an infomercial. Pepsi and Blockbuster must be thrilled. Those advertising dollars paid off big time. If this is independent filmmaking, I'm Pauline Kael.
- Karakter (Character) (1997): The film has a feel, a look, and a pace all its own. It's a fairy tale with a pocketwatch.
- How Green Was My Valley (1941): a strong, square film that should be essential viewing for Marxists and union activists everywhere. Beautiful cinematography.
- The Man Who Knew Too Little (1998): if you keep your expectations reasonable, you'll really enjoy this film. The premise is great: Bill Murray plays Wallace Ritchie, a hapless American tourist in London who thinks he's spending the night acting the part of a secret agent character in a "Live Theatre" TV show. When he gets mixed up with a real secret agent, though, all hell breaks loose. Faced with danger, Ritchie never breaks a sweat (except to discuss his craft), because he thinks everyone around him is acting. Since the way he thinks about secret agents is shaped by the movies, he acts out a compendium of film cliches, and brings every last one of them back to life. There are a few false notes (Alfred Molina as a Russian?), but you just have to see Bill Murray's dance at the end to believe it. This film gets my vote as one of the most underrated comedies of the nineties.
That's all for now. Write to me to let me know what you think.
Matt
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