It’s difficult to understand a person who thought a shot-for-shot re-make of Psycho was anything more than a self-indulgent exercise, but faced with writer/director Gus Van Sant’s puzzling Elephant, I’m forced to try.
A marker of getting old – not old old, but well beyond one’s 20s – is recognizing the flaws of something once adored in youth. Twice recently I’ve had that experience, once while watching Peter Weir’s Fearless (from 1993) and more recently with Dolores Claiborne, the 1995 movie directed by Taylor Hackford and adapted from the Stephen King novel by Tony Gilroy.
Most reviews of the Oscar-nominated animated French movie The Triplets of Belleville suggest the film is a wonderfully wacky laugh riot. I liked it, but its strength for me was the way it balanced an inspired visual stylization with a dark human reality: the way people sleepwalk through their lives with single-minded purpose but little joy.
House of Sand and Fog features one shooting, one murder (distinct from the shooting), one suicide, two failed suicide attempts, one hostage situation, an aborted arson, one incident of physical domestic violence, one incident of verbal domestic abuse bordering on physical, and an affair. And the amazing thing is that the portrayals are convincing enough that all this feels only a touch silly.
I agree with Roger Ebert’s assessment of Errol Morris’ Gates of Heaven as “bottomless,” with the disclaimer that it’s as much a function of the movie’s open-ended nature as its depth. The filmmaker’s debut has no clearly articulated subject or thesis, and it’s so wide-ranging, with so little guidance from Morris, that its effect and meaning will depend a lot on who watches it and where they are in life. Plus: People I Know and Invincible.
On paper, Shattered Glass sounds like an earnest bore. It’s the now-familiar story of Stephen Glass, a writer for The New Republic who in the late 1990s made a bunch of shit up in his articles. Oh, the stuff of great cinema! Yet the film is amazingly peppy, smart, and light. It might be the most fun you’ll ever have watching a movie that’s good for you.
21 Grams is a beautifully made formal exercise – a story chopped up into so many bits that the audience spends almost all of its energy putting the pieces together. But the structure is so overpowering that it’s difficult to evaluate the content; one viewing suggests the narrative is too under-developed to survive scrutiny or a linear telling.
What, exactly, is one supposed to get from Errol Morris’ latest movie, The Fog of War, winner of this year’s Oscar for best documentary? This feature-length interview with Robert McNamara – secretary of defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations – is more mirror than painting, allowing many critics to read into it exactly what they bring in. It’s a curious effect, but not entirely surprising.
My dictionary says a requiem is a musical composition or somber chant in honor of the dead, but Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream is more like a howl of pain that builds slowly over 100 minutes to an intensity that’s nearly impossible to bear.
It’s finally time to look at Charlie Kaufman as a serious screen artist. The scribe who gave us Being John Malkovich and Adaptation has always been imposingly intelligent, clever, and inventive in both his conceits and plots, but it was easy to question his heart. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind finally shows that he has more to offer than left-field premise and ambitious narrative structure.
