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jdrew922
Reviews
The Affair of the Necklace (2001)
God awful.
There is no merit in this film. Christopher Walken, Jonathan Pryce, and Adrien Brody all offer up their signature styles, which are the only saving graces of the film. Hillary Swank reveals her 90210 roots with a vengeance. We might as well be watching Neve Campbell on the screen for all her forced tears.
The single most deadly thing about the film, aside from its leaden direction, is its insistence on connecting its historical source with the French Revolution. We are to believe that Valois "toppled a monarchy". The whole movie is like that, standing on its toes to be more important than it is.
Do not go see this movie.
À ma soeur! (2001)
Take what you will
At the NY Film Festival's Q&A with Breillat, she expressly forbid seeing "Fat Girl" (as she prefers to call it) as a morality play. She eluded any attempts to draw her into conclusions about her film, insisting that she is not a moralist.
What is clear from the questions she asks, however, is that she views sex with a certain contempt, especially as regards the male role in the act. The men that are in the film are either insensitive, duplicitous or murderous. Breillat's intent is to show how adrift any adolescent girl is when it comes to sexuality and to somehow convey that to an adult audience. She counseled young Anais during filming by saying, "We are making a film that I don't even think you can see when it is done, but it is not for you. It is supposed to scare adults."
A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)
Anthropomorphization gone awry
AI has nothing to do with Stanley Kubrick. Had we not known the film's lineage, no one would even mention the dead fellow's name in connection with this dung heap of a film.
AI barely has anything to do with Spielberg. It's middle part looks more like Joel Schumacher's torturous Batman films than anything else. More often than not, Spielberg offers limpid imitations of the very cliches which he created.
Der Krieger und die Kaiserin (2000)
Lola und Die Krieger
This is an amazing change of pace from "Lola Rennt", which moved quite literally at the speed of sound. Twyker has slowed the pace to a crawl, putting pedal tones in most of the score to heighten the dramatic limbo. As in "Lola", there are many of the same narrative devices. The heroine is associated with a certain colour (yellow, instead of Lola's red); tangential information is related in high-speed flash sequences; and of course, the musical narrative is told with ticking clocks and glockenspiels.
But where "Lola" is concerned with multiple layers of reality and the hyper-kinetic tension that they create, "Der Krieger" is concerned with the creation of forward momentum. Bodo and Sissi are both bound by tragedies to their past. Neither of them are really living, and each must suffer a great shock to their system in order to jumpstart their lives again.
Twyker's optimism is an enormous relief to the sheer dread of this film. There are several moments when the grief of the central characters seems overwhelming, but "Der Krieger" masterfully stops short of being insufferable and delivers a powerful, uplifting ending.
"Der Krieger und die Kaiserin" is by no means a companion film to "Lola Rennt", but the signature of their director is unavoidable. Twyker's films are, like so many great directors (Hitchcock, Gilliam, Kubrick, Bergman), woven of the same fabric. We should all hope that he is around as long as they were, for he will certainly provide us with a formidable body of work.
William Burroughs: Thanksgiving Prayer (1991)
A quick shot of Burroughs
Anyone who's ever felt bloated and full of self-loathing after Thanksgiving dinner will at least appreciate the tone of Burroughs missive to America. "Thanksgiving Prayer" is a pleasant shot of Burroughs for those unwilling to wade through the thickets of his masterfully unpleasant books. The film is a fine document of Burroughs' recitation style, which is as consistent as his writing. The latent humour of his writing becomes unavoidably clear in Burroughs' deadpan delivery. This "Prayer" should be heard by all Americans at least once before they sink from Thanksgiving's fatuous self-congratulations for their own good fortune, to Christmas' rampant abuse of that fortune.