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mschottlan
Reviews
You Can Count on Me (2000)
Lonergan - Look for this name
My favorite drama from 2000. An orphaned brother and sister grow up and apart. When itinerate brother Terry (Mark Ruffalo - excellent) drifts into town to stay with his sister Sammy (Laura Linney) and her son, the loving entanglements of family life conspire to keep Terry from drifting out the back door. Sammy's son gets a father, Sammy gets her brother, and Terry gets the family he never had, right? Not so fast.
Writer/director Ken Lonergan steers WAY clear of the weepy bathos meted out in Terms of Endearment-style blubber parties. The results: grace, warmth, and lots of comedy. The actors and script are so natural, so honest, you'll wonder where the Oscars went.
Heartwarming, heartbreaking, this impressive debut is comparable to films by Bruce Beresford (Tender Mercies, Driving Miss Daisy), and Paul Cox (Innocence, Man of Flowers). Matthew Broderick keeps things light as Sammy's tyrant boss. Three cheers for American cinema!
Walkabout (1971)
IMAX drama
Abandoned in the Australian Outback, a fourteen year old girl and her little brother stagger around until they are saved by an Aborigine boy on his six month walkabout. Director Roeg captures the details of the sunburnt landscape, the flora and fauna, and renders them like Ansel Adams portraits. Roeg's mysterious cinema tricks must have impressed Terrence Malick (Badlands, Thin Red Line); Malick often peels Roeg's images out of this film and pastes them right into his own work.
The story is mainly a vehicle to get Roeg into the Outback with a camera. And given that he served as David Lean's photographer on Dr. Zhivago and Lawrence of Arabia, the setting is a safe bet. Maybe the THIS IS AN ALLEGORY gets thick at times, but the spare dialog, especially the long silences, constantly draw attention away from any obvious literary device. Besides, Roeg's rich cinematic vocabulary (jump cuts, deep focus, parallel motion, stills) give the film such a sense of wonder, there's no telling what he wants us to think. Walkabout has so much gorgeous scenery that you'll want to hit pause, grab a Fosters, then sit back marveling at the pretty pictures.
For All Mankind (1989)
Praise for NASA documentary
`It feels just like it sounds,' says astronaut Ken Mattingly as Apollo 16 roars off the launch pad, ice crystals shattering an avalanche across the rocket's skin, the engines shouting lava.
From 1968 to 1972, there were nine manned flights to the moon, all as part of the Apollo space program. Twenty-four men made the round trip. Twelve walked on the moon. They brought back six million feet of footage. Director Al Reinert condensed the NASA films, dubbed in his interviews with the astronauts, and mixed in Brian Eno's weightless score. The result is the Oscar winning For All Mankind. And despite its many players, cosmic tableaus, venue shifts, malfunctions, space walks, and varied narrators, the film runs seamlessly. Reinert abridged all the moon shots into one eighty- minute trip. Not a simple mission in its own right.
What attains is a kind of spiritual velocity.
`If the glass breaks or the computers quit, you're not going to get back home. We had a lot of time to think about that,' says Apollo 12 astronaut Alan Bean while the camera drifts through the command module.
Minutes pass wordlessly. Reinert lets the footage speak for itself; staging, landing, earthrise appear ineffably beautiful. Set off by the intense black of space, the colors glow. Someone muses about the serenity of space travel. All goes quiet until suddenly the speakers crackle to life.
`Houston, we've had a problem here. The fuel cell's disconnected, buss overload in 1 and 2. Main buss A and B are out. Everything in the world just dropped out.We are venting something into space.' What little footage there is from the Apollo 13 malfunction is enough to make me wonder why Ron Howard bothered re-shooting.
`You get ready to land on the surface. Then you look up, and there's that old moon growing fast, filling up the hatch window as you're drifting into its shadow. 2001 stuff,' says Apollo 14's Stuart Roosa.
From countdown to splashdown, not a moment passes without some scenic revelation, some eerie silence, some prayer, some pride. Through it all, the cameras capture details within details.
An audio track on the dvd features commentary by Reinert and Apollo 17's Eugene Cernan, who sounds more like a poet than a pilot, which fits. Only a poem could express in words the tranquility, honor, and wonder of this fine documentary.
eXistenZ (1999)
overall review
Think of this philosophical thriller as Matrix without the plot holes, silly dialog, dumb names, and big budget. I like Matrix. Existenz, however, delivers on a brainier level. Cronenberg is up to his usual tricks: blurred personal identity, espionage, sex, machines, and Jennifer Jason Leigh in a tight skirt. Phantasmagoria and paranoia prevail in the video game movie.
Anti-game assassins close in on fugitive game designer Leigh and Jude Law, who essay their escape in Leigh's not-so-virtual reality game. To play, you just plug the fleshy gamepod's umbilical cord right into your spine! Features Ian Holm, organic weapons, and Willem Dafoe in a role the would freak out David Lynch. Claustrophobic stuff.