Way Too Many Movies

Which is what you get when you go too long between columns. As a result of the overload in this one, each review in this batch will have to be a bit shorter than usual. I'm sure that very few, if any, will mind.

1. "The Upside Of Anger." Or, Kevin Costner does "Terms Of Endearment." The cliched, bitter middle-aged widow role Shirley Mclaine had is played by the marvellous Joan Allen, given nothing to do in the role of the, in this case, abandoned wife and mother who has turned into an angry shrew because she no longer has a man. But look, salvation appears in the form of the wacky, colorful next door neighbor played by Jack Nicholson... oops, I mean Kevin Costner... who awakens her to life again (Costner is playing a former baseball star now working as a talk radio host, if that matters: it's still Nicholson's role through and through). There's even a serious health scare for one of Allen's daughters (played by a group of TV stars), just like there was with Debra Winger. Add all these familiar ingredients together and mix with a last-minute plot twist that will have you shaking your head in amazement wondering what in the world the film makers were thinking, and you have a lukewarm soap opera that is an ideal cure for insomnia. If you're a major Joan Allen fan, you'd probably be better off giving this one a pass our of respect, and if you're a major Kevin Costner fan, I have only one question: WHY?

2. "Spider John Koerner: Been There, Done That." Spider John Koerner has influenced an incredible number of the giants of the music world (including Bob Dylan and John Lennon) without becoming nearly as famous as any of them. Still plugging away and as vital as ever more than 40 years after his career began, this documentary feature traces Koerner's amazing musical history in a series of interviews with Koerner and colleagues like Dave Ray, Tony Glover and Willie Murphy, and a string of live performances that ought to have you heading right out to the nearest CD outlet to get all the Koerner music you can lay your hands on as soon as the film is finished. If you think you don't care for folk or blues music, you probably have never heard Spider john Koerner. And if you haven't heard him, I really envy you... you have an incredible experience awaiting you.

3. "Schultze Gets The Blues". In this ultra low-key, bittersweet comedy, a middle-aged, layed-off, depressed German miner finds a new lease on life when he hears a snippet of a Louisiana zydeco tune on the radio and eventually heads over to the land of zydeco itself to experience his new passion right at its source. The film is the absolutel epitome of deadpan, straight faced humor: which is part of its problem. Directors like Finland's Aki Kaurismaki can be hysterical with this kind of stuff, but it's a very fine line: a lot of the time the approach comes off seeming like an unenthusiastic run-through of a group of not very involved performers, and that's what we often have here. There are a few sharp, perceptive moments separated by a few too many self-sonsciously "arty" passages in which not a lot happens and the actors aren't so much performing as just reading lines. And the film's attempt at switching gears near the end is rather ill-advised (I can't say why, if you see the film you'll know). "Schultze Gets The Blues" ought to have worked... it's the kind of film and material that I've often loved in the past... but as close as it comes at times, it never quite coheres into either a particularly memorable comedy or drama. Too bad: It coulda been a contender.

4. "Downfall." From a German comedic misfire to a German drama about the darkest moment in their history... and this one works wonderfully. "Downfall" is the German attempt to come to terms with the legacy of Hitler: it tells the story of his last 12 days, down in his Berlin bunker with his closest confederates, preparing for the end as the allies adavanced on Berlin. Hitler is played by the amazing Bruno Ganz in a stunning performance: playing Hitler as a very human man whose positive, sympathetic traits were overwhelmed by his madness, Ganz goes from sympathetic listener to raging madman and back again in the blink of an eye and makes it impossible for you to take your eye off him, while also making it NEARLY impossible to believe this is the same man who played the kindly angel in "Wings Of Desire." Based in part on a book by Hitler's last secretary, "Downfall" forces its audience to confront not merely the evil of one man, but the fact that millions of seemingly normal people were totally willing to follow his every word, and makes you contemplate why so many people saw enough of themselves and their concerns in him that they were willing to follow where he led. It's not an easy film to watch, but it will virtually take you right out of your seat in your comfortable theatre and put you right in the heart of darkness, and any film that can involve the audience that totally has accomplished something rare. And maybe this is just me, but watching this film about a national leader who was determined to follow his own empire-building agenda no matter what the cost to his own people, and a people who were willing to put figurative blinders on and follow him wherever he went no matter how outrageous his policies... well, I couldn't help but think of a certain country we all know and a certain president beloved by the joke writers of late-nate talk show hosts. Of course, as I say, maybe that's just me. But maybe it isn't.

5. "Miss Congeniality II: Armed And Fabulous." From the sublime to the even more than ridiculous. It's getting harder and harder to like Sandra Bullock, or to remember when she was funny, quirky and appealing. And movies like this aren't helping. The strained premise is this: Bullock's FBI agent Gracie Hart has become too famous as a result of the events of the first movie to be an effective field agent any more, so her superiors draft her to be a goodwill ambassador for the FBI on talk shows and book signing tours... until her friend, the current Miss United States, and the pageant host (played by William Shatner and a different toupee in almost every one of his scenes) are kidnapped, and against official orders Hart snaps back into action to rescue them. The movie has about fifteen minutes' worth of plot and maybe another fifteen minutes' worth of jokes, few of them funny: so how do they stretch it all out to just five minutes short of two hours? You'll have to trust me on this: you really don't want to know. If Bullock doesn't go back to doing some riskier drama like "Murder By Numbers" or at least a comedy that involves no action or pratfalls whatsoever, her career may be nearing its end. And so may the goodwill for past films and performances that drew me to the theatre showing "Miss Congeniality II: Armed And Fabulous."

6. "Sin City." Based on the comic book/graphic novel series by Frank Miller (which I've never read... while not totally out of touch, I haven't been the comics fan I used to be for maybe 20 years now), this movie tells not one but three interlocking stories all set in a very highly stylized film-noir city called Basin City (aka "SIn City"): a scarred, deformed fighter (Mickey Rourke) searches for the killer of a prostitute,
a criminal low-life (Clive Owen) tries to avenge a wrong done to another group of criminal low-lifes, and a detective (Bruce Willis)just out of prison after 8 years for a crime he didn't commit tries to find the 11-year-old girl (now 19) he saved from a killer before he went in, and gets a big surprise. The film looks absolutely amazing, and is a sure Oscar nominee for art direction, set design and the like: it looks as much like an actual comic book as a live-action movie possibly could. But the script goes SO FAR overboard rubbing your nose in its self-conscious low-life decadence than you feel like saying "Enough, already, I get the point, it's a dangerous, violent world: do you have any other points?" The dialogue (much of which, reportedly, is right from the comics) is totally artificial: not only do no people in the real world talk like this, very few people in comics or the movies talk this way either. And even the interesting conceit of filming most of the movie in black and white except for splashes of red and yellow grows old before long... it can work wonderfully in one or two scenes, like in "Schindler's List", but stretched to feature length it just becomes a gimmick. And let's not ignore the fact that there isn't a single woman in the film who isn't a prostitute, stripper or ciminal: yes, I know the men are low-life punks too, but at least they're all intelligent and aren't cowering and helpless. It's been said that the film is scrupulously faithful to the well-loved source material: if that's the case, this is one of those cases where I'm apparently just not seeing the same story everyone else is looking at. Who knows, maybe you'll see the same one they saw.

The following three films are the first three that I've seen in this year's Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival.

7. "I Love Cinema." Not many films from Egypt make the rounds of U.S. theatres, and if more of them are on the level of "I Love Cinema", then that's a shame. This is the story of a young boy coming of age in the Cairo of the 1960's, and his strained relationship with his father as a result of dad's insistence that movies, TV, music and dancing are all sinful pursuits that will send you straight to Hell, while his son... well, the title tells you what you need to know. The film blends light farce, bittersweet drama, and even political and social commentary seemlessly, as well as having a few things to say about people of whatever nation that allow their religious beliefs to blind them to the joys and beauty of the world all around them. And in spite of its defense of cinema, it dares to suggest that some people use it as a way to avoid engaging themselves in life, which is hard to argue with.
Movies that provide you with this much food for thought aren't often as amusing as "I Love Cinema", but then this is no ordinary film.

8. "Tarfaya." This is the story of a young woman whose three brothers all died in the process of trying to get out of Morocco, and who is now, in desperation, attempting the same thing herself. She arrives in a small border town where she's supposed to meet the man who will provide her with a safe journey for a small fee, but is robbed and left without money or identification, at which point she is taken in as one of the villagers and grows to rely on "the kindness of strangers", some of whom aren't all that kind. There are moments of real power and force in "Tarfaya" (which is the name of the border town), but there are so many long, long stretches of the ordinary, everyday and not terribly interesting or dramatic life of the village in which the would-be escapee is now living in between those moments that they rob them of a lot of their power, and make it difficult for the film to have the overall impact that it could. It's by no means a bad film, but it could have been a lot more.

9. "My Stepbrother Frankenstein." No, this Russian film has nothing to do with the legendary monster... well, not much, anyway. It's the story of a Russian family whose average existence is disturbed by the news that the father has a son he never knew about, and that son... whose mother recently died, and who has just lost an eye in the service of the army of his nation... is coming to stay with them until he recovers. The son seems at first to be a fine, upstanding young man, but begins to reveal a dark, even sinister side, then seems sweet again: how is the family to know what to make of him? For that matter, how are we? Well, the fact that the true nature of the son's character is such a mystery is part of what makes the film so fascinating... just when you think you've got it all figured out, there's another unexpected twist. Is he really imagining the "people walking around in the attic", or is there something to it? Are sinister forces whom he didn't quite eliminate in the war really coming after him? And is there a slight bit of subtext in all of this about how neither people or nations generally like to face up to the misdeeds of their past? Well, at least that last one is easy to answer: yes. It's also easy to say that this unusual, moody film is already, at this early stage, the film to beat at this year's Festival.
One thing's for sure: nothing like it would ever get made by a major Hollywood studio, at least not since the seventies. That's not to say that there's anything essentially WRONG with the notion of making popular, light-hearted fare, but when potent films like this are shut out, you have to think that Hollywood could use a good revolution like the one that happened some 35 years ago. Let's hope it happens. And in the meantime, there's still the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival.