Reviews

I remember seeing Nashville again and again and again. Short Cuts left me breathless. Gosford Park is on my all-time top ten list. His good films are so good that we can be lenient about his failures. Pret a Porter was truly awful and so, I'm afraid, is A Prairie Home Companion.

The cast is stellar and they all strive valiantly to draw us into their sweet little NPR world. However, there is no story line driving the action. The premise is very thin indeed and the tiny little hooks we are given into each of the characters' lives never catch on anything at all.

Even die-hard Garrison Kiellor fans will leave this movie wishing they could have just stayed home and listened to it on the radio. Thank goodness for Lefty and Dusty. And if that is Meryl Streep singing, she's great!

Quirky, independent, theatrical, Christian Slater--these are all teasers that made me look forward to spending an hour or so "discovering" a jewel of a film. Boy, was I disappointed. Julian Po never gets over itself. The film is relentlessly self-conscious. I found myself unable to suspend disbelief for even a moment. The overdone, obviously theatrical sets, the overdone, obviously theatrical acting, the overdone, obviously theatrical directing -- well, you get the idea.

Allegories do not need to be delivered sledge hammer style. And it's hard to feel much of anything for Julian Po because we never know much about him. The ridiculous girlfriend, the annoying townsfolk, the idiotic clergyman, the bratty kids -- why would anyone, particularly anyone with a life long ambition to get to the seaside (Slater's character), decide to stay in such a dismal place?

What, I wonder, is the superlative of pretentious. Yes, I know that it's 'most pretentious,' but that doesn't seem dramatic enough to describe this very long, long journey into total self-congratulatory eroticism. The film is based on portions of Anais Nin's diaries -- she wrote something like 9,000 pages, and you don't need to read more than a tenth of those to know that you are in the hands of one of the most self absorbed women who ever walked the planet. For one who is supposed to have been all about Art, she really seems to have been all about Anais. Nothing else much mattered. And this film, which is supposed to focus on her relationship with Henry and June Miller, really is all about her. The more libidinous she becomes the more 'innocent' she claims to be.

Anyway, about the movie: Maria de Medeiros has an amazing, triangular face with huge eyes. Her unique looks and tiny perfect body make us pay attention. I found Fred Ward's Henry Miller a bit too thick to be convincing. Somehow, from what I've read of Miller, I think he would have been a lot more intuitive and sensitive to the female psyche (we know he knew a lot about the female physique). Uma Thurman was wonderful as June. Really a stellar, moving performance. I wanted to see more of June because I was left not quite understanding how she worked. I guess Henry and Anais didn't either.

Yes, the acting was fine with every cast member turning in an honest and convincing performance. And there was plenty of atmosphere--the genteel poverty of the sisters, the rustic cottage of the scholar, the Dublin scene. But even Judy Dench and Jeremy Irons couldn't make it matter. The screenplay was so understated as to be incomprehensible. I never did figure out the business with the letters or the problem with the older sister.

Dame Judy was quite a sexy number back in the day,and the young Jeremy was--as ever--terrifically appealing and gifted (although his nose looked a lot different than it did a few years later in Brideshead Revisited!). But as hard as they work to draw us in, we keep thinking, "Why?" Why are these characters doing what they're doing, and, most of all, why are we spending two hours of our lives watching a drama that is giving us back absolutely nothing?"

I really like Paul Bettany and Dafoe is either wonderful or awful depending on the role, but always worth watching. I also think Barry Unsworth, author of the book on which this film was based, is a superb writer. So when I came across this movie, I was anxious to see it, and in some ways it did not disappoint.

It was well acted. Paul and Dafoe were both good, and the supporting players were convincing. The script was weak, however. The villain was so heinous he was almost a cartoon and the motives of our hero (Bettany's character) we muddled at best. And although the villagers certainly looked like I would imagine 14th century serfs would look, they seemed to have enough leisure time to worry about social injustice and working together for a better life (when they were not searching for roots and twigs, no doubt).

It would have been a far more interesting movie if it had concerned itself with the trials and travails of the traveling players instead of trying to be an action/suspense film.

Much as we all love Al Pacino, it was painful to see him in this movie. A publicity hack at the grubby ending of what seems to have once been a distinguished and idealistic career Pacino plays his part looking like an unmade bed and assaulting everyone with a totally bogus and inconsistent southern accent.

The plot spools out this way and that with so many loose ends and improbabilities that the mind reels (and then retreats).

Kim Basinger is there, not doing much. Her scenes with Pacino are flat and unconvincing. Hard to believe they meant a lot to each other. There's no energy there.

Tea Leone, on the other hand, lit up the screen. She was electric and her scenes with Pacino were by far the most interesting in the movie, but not enough to save Al from embarrassment.

A thoughtful, lushly produced and well directed biopic about the artist and her husband, lover, friend, mentor, partner, Diego Rivera. Although it is an absorbing film, I had a hard time with Ms. Hayek, who looked so beautiful and moved with such agility it was hard to remember that she was in chronic pain ALL the time--not just when she told us she was. The most electric scene of the movie for me was the tango. Salma became Frida for me at that moment. Mr. Molinas was wonderful as Diego, and it was fun to see Antonio Banderas and Edward Norton pop up to steal a scene or two (although in the case of Mr. Banderas, one wouldn't understand the point of his being there without some prior knowledge of the historical situation) Finally, the relationship between Frida and Trotsky. . .well, it's still a mystery to me. Maybe that needs its own movie.

The movie is lush and sophisticated and does a good job of capturing the sophistication and bawdiness of the times. Social mores have changed since the onset of indoor plumbing but class exploitation certainly hasn't. Wonderfully done.