Reviews

I'm glad to see that IMDb users were not fooled by Almereyda's ultimately empty, though pretty, adaptation of Hamlet. In reading press for the film, visions of mass delusions and payola danced through my head. This is a lush, beautifully paced film that fails miserably, because the director forgot that you must make a movie do more than look good.

I've read that the director did copious research on the play, watching other adaptations, etc. before embarking on his own journey. Apparently he didn't watch closely enough. His script relies heavily on a viewer already familiar with the play, and cuts or rearranges some of the most important scenes. The bulk of the scene between Polonius and Hamlet which begins with Hamlet calling the elder a fishmonger is gone. The final scene is so chopped up to fit Almereyda's modern conceits that it is virtually unrecognizable. That scene is also hastily and sloppily filmed. When does the King poison the wine? A viewer who does not already know that it is poisoned is lost. As was this production.

Problems with Almereyda's ham-handed script and spotty direction aside, the real problem here can be reduced to three words: acting, acting, acting. I haven't seen Shakespeare handled this badly since high school. Kyle MacLachlan shines above the rest in his role, and Diane Venora and Leif Schreiber are passable and sometimes even good in their roles. Steve Zahn appears to have the best handle on how to effectively play Rosencrantz as a modern day drinkin' bud, but unfortunately Almereyda has cut most of his role. But aside from them, much of the rest is embarassing and laughable. Julia Stiles comes off as a rank amateur; the cringe factor in her readings is off the meter. The coup de grace is the scene when she fully goes mad and goes cross-eyed as she's flinging polaroids about. She looks more like she's trying to approach a slapstick approximation of drunkenness than a despair-filled descent into madness. Bill Murray, who I love, and who I think is one of the most underrated actors around, is completely out of his depth. Afraid that by playing Polonius too funny, people will accuse him of putting his "stamp" on it, he plays it dry and manages to rip all the laughs out of the funniest character in the play. Polonius is a clown, and should be played as such. Ian Holm's definitive performance in the less-than-definitive Mel Gibson Hamlet is the high watermark, and Holm plays him like a proper court jester. Even Sam Shepard seems a little lost. Granted, Shakespeare isn't really his area of theater, but one would have thought he'd have a better handle on it. And then we come to Ethan Hawke, who I generally think is a very talented actor as well. But his sullen, brooding Hamlet is a one-note prince, and a pretty tedious note at that. While the much-talked about To be or not to be speech is wonderfully conceived in that monument of indecision, Blockbuster, with the not-too-subtle "Action" signs passing by our mirthless heir, Hawke reads the speech without ever getting out of first gear, without ever giving a hint of meaningful inflection. In my Brit.Lit. class in high school we had to memorize and recite this monologue...there were better readings in my class than Hawke offers up here, and his entire performance pretty much follows suit. His jovial, consoling advice to Ophelia to "get thee to a nunnery" is laughable, and while he hits the right note in the also well-conceived, but displaced finish to the scene, leaving the rest of the speech on her answering machine, we're still so busy laughing that the rage loses it's power.

This Hamlet is style lacking substance, as Almereyda tries to bind the limitless space of Shakespeare's text within a nutshell, only to find that there's nothing left inside when he's done.

...so why couldn't they find a more imaginative director? Michael Corrente's direction of this would have seemed static and lethargic even if it had been done on the stage, which it practically was. If you're going to do a filmed staging, do a filmed staging. But if you're going to go through the motions of making a film, try to make it the least bit visually interesting. What does this guy have against moving the camera, for chrissake?? It's a shame, really, as Franz and Hoffman are flawless, and really have a handle on the tough delivery of Mamet dialogue. To see how easy it is to make Mamet-speak sound odd and out of place, check out the performance of Pinky in the recent "Heist". Mamet is as difficult to act as Shakespeare, all submerged rhythms and unusual language. American Buffalo is a powerful work, and the performances reflect the power of the text...but all that power crashes to the ground like a 747 with Corrente's static presentation. I'm giving this a 7/10, simply because the script and performances were SO brilliant. If directing were all I was taking into account, it'd be a 3/10. So disappointing.

Fincher has made for yet another reason to give pause while walking past the usually mundane action/thriller section at the video store. Certainly not as complex as Seven, and without the social commentary of Fight Club, Panic Room is just a good, old fashioned, tension filled game of thrilling cat and mouse. Most films of this sort have plot holes big enough to drive trucks through. You find yourself hating the protagonists for being so stupid as to miss the obvious way out of the situation, or the writer/director for thinking the audience is so stupid as to not see the obvious way out. Fincher and Koepp cover all their bases, at least that I saw. There is only one thing I saw that they didn't do at first, and it was completely understandable that they forgot about it in their panic...and they DO get to it, just not right off the bat. (Those who've seen the movie know what I mean, for the rest of you I won't clue you in)

Don't look for subtext or deeper social significance, it's not there, though I did like the gradations of "badness" among the "bad guys" which lent a little bit of moral ambiguity to the proceedings. Fincher is unapologetic in his gleeful pursuit of the simple goal of scaring the pants off us. And when it's done this well, that's enough.

Harmony Korine is about the biggest joke to be played on hipsters in years. Less a director than a catch phrase for those in the know, his movies are exercises in practising the worst tendencies of the cinematic fringe. His movies thrive on bad taste and the underbelly of society, but do so without the benefit of John Waters' sense of humor. They are paced so sluggishly as to be completely lacking in narrative movement, yet they are without the mesmerizing subtext and hypnotic feel of Werner Herzog (why Herzog agreed to play a part in this film I will never understand). They revel in unusual looks, from odd lighting to alternate film stocks and even video, yet he lacks the painterly framing ability of a Kubrick, Gilliam or Kurasawa that might actually make his experiments in texture actually INTERESTING and not just an exercise. In the DVD version of Julien, Korine praises the aesthetic of video, as if the cold, flat, lifeless picture was something to strive for. It's a cop-out, and the easy, cheap cop-out at that. One can make film cold and dank without making it boring and lifeless, which is the essense of video and low-end DV. Julien Donkey-boy brings to us the worst of all these attributes. The icing on the cake is the much publicized fight of Korine to gain Dogme certification, which is laughable, since from the first scene he flagrantly flaunts the rules of the system. I have mixed personal feelings about Dogme in general, but if you're going to try to get the certification, play by the rules. His use of non-environmental music, use of video rather than 35mm (transferred eventually to Academy 35 in the end to conform to the rule, but obviously violating the spirit), and use of superficial action (murder is mentioned specifically in the vow of chastity, and I'd say incest counts as well) all are flagrant violations. For a long time, Dogme didn't even list Julien on their website, and early on, there was no certificate displayed with the film. Presumably to bank on Korine's (somewhat) marketable and recognizable name, they caved and issued a vague press release about how the film seemed to them to conform to the standards, along with some odd and seeminly non-sequitor comment on the process of signing the certificate. Whatever. I gave up on trying to figure out exactly what is was that makes Von Trier and his misogynist boy's club tick quite a long time ago. Julien Donkey-boy is an exercise in futility for the viewer, as is Korine's career up to this point, aside from the compelling narrative force he gave to his script for KIDS. Here's to hoping he can remember how to tell a story a little less self-consciously in the future.

Easily the best thing about the Lenny Bruce: Performance Film video. While the performance portion is one of Bruce's worst, this short shows him at his satirical best. The riff on homophobia isn't even the best part...the commentary on accepting thank-yous and the resultant egotism and self-aggrandizement are priceless, especially when the Mask Man goes to his mailbox only to discover that the Messiah has returned, and society has no need for him once evil has been eliminated.

I remember watching Fosse's biopic, Lenny, and seeing Hoffman's portrayal of the performance documented on this video, and thinking, how sad, that he went from such brilliance to such self-indulgent, self-serving self-defense. I didn't realize until I started watching the video that this was a recording of THAT performance, and it was interesting to watch from that historical perspective. But taken by itself it's more sad than funny. A great comedian, orator, commentator, oh, hell, just the great Lenny reduced to stumbling through court transcripts and embarrassingly trying to remember bits that he did years before. It's disjointed and often makes little sense; ironically, exactly the charges he levels at the "peace officer" assigned to "recreate" his act for the court and the transcripts made from an inaudible recording of one of his shows. Rent this one for a sense of perspective...as an example of Bruce's work, his art, it's a poor specimen, and will have you alternately feeling sorry for him and annoyed by him more than it will make you laugh or think; and those were the two things that, in his prime, Lenny made us do best.

I'll have to admit being pretty disappointed with this one. I thought Polanski's performance saved it from being an utter failure, but the oppressive paranoia took until the second half to establish itself, making the first half a plodding mess. Everyone has been lauding the cinematography, and I don't know if the video was transferred from a particularly bad print, but the photography was dull and fairly lifeless from where I was sitting. Movement and framing were nice, but it was just poorly lit, undoubtedly with the excuse that it was a noirish film...but we all know that dark does not have to mean poorly lit. The worst problem, though, was the horrible sound editing. I don't know if his actors spoke with accents that were too heavy, but the overdubbed voices were SO out of sync with the picture so as to make it look like they weren't even speaking the same language sometimes. And in the party scene, the voices seemed disembodied and quite obviously not coming from the room that we were seeing in the picture. It was highly distracting, to the point where it detracted from the movie as a whole.

That said, the last 20 minutes were quite good, and nearly made what had come before worth it. Nearly.

I can only assume that the current low rating of this film, despite generally positive comments, is a result of a bunch of idiotic guys renting this thinking it'll be some nice T&A and then being p***ed off because not only are they being asked to THINK, but they're also being asked to show sex industry workers some RESPECT. Looking at the gender breakdown of the votes only further supports this theory. This fact only goes to show why the actions taken by the women of the Lusty Lady are SO important. My fiancee is a stripper, not because she finds it to be fun work, but because it's a decent paying job for a freelance artist between jobs. The funny thing is, people want to believe that those girls are there because they have some sexual compulsion to; hence girls are often asked, "So what do you do for a living?" Any guy reading this who has ever asked a stripper this question, please go jump off the nearest bridge. We don't need morons like you in the gene pool.

Anyway, this mentality, that strippers aren't workers (and try dancing in 8 inch platform heels for 8 hours and tell me it's not hard work), but are sex crazed exhibitionists, fuels the concept that they can be mistreated in the workplace. This movie shows how these women stood up to a negative cultural perception of them to take control of their workplace and fight for the same rights afforded to other workers. It's an inspiring story, and I'd like to think that if more people saw it, and were presented with stories like this more often, maybe we could finally change the public perception of these women.

OK, am I the only one that was bothered throughout the whole of this film by the fact that people that were supposed to be 21 or 22 were all quite obviously in their mid-to-late 20s, most of whom looked even older? I thought the male lead had to be 30, and it was just very distracting. Someone fire the casting director, because this sort of thing just shouldn't jump out at you. Otherwise, a rather clever and witty movie on the whole, though nothing to get too excited about. The sudden attempted trip to Prague I found particularly annoying; this is college-to-real-life transition crisis here, not mid-life crisis; they might as well have had him go buy a Porsche and a new wardrobe at that point.