Reviews

Showtime captured Mario Cantone's one-man comedic tour DE force on Broadway at the Court theater flawlessly in HD.

Countless popular icons & family members are impersonated,seemingly channeled at staggering lengths, one forgets it's all but one man on stage. And Cantone can sing!

Director Joe Mantello's efforts are deftly unobtrusive in this apparent improvisation borne free-flow of movement & voice. Lighting and set design are brilliantly adaptive.

This is classic homo-socio insight, performed with such precision and stunning energy and invention, one is left quite literally exhausted from laughter.

I just finished watching the Kultur 4 DVD set of this epic bio-pic, taken at a leisurely pace over five daily installments.

Tony Palmer directs a dream cast, headed by an inimitable Richard Burton as Richard Wagner.

Vittorio Storaro's sensitive cinematography on stunning European locations put this viewer immediately in that era. Too bad this transfer didn't get a digital remastering.

Sets & costumes are convincingly authentic.

Graham Bunn's exemplary editing spins an involving web of interest and keeps pace, seldom failing.

All in all, a compelling work of an expansive, complex musical genius.

Tracey directs this one, with much the same rhythm and truth as her "Takes On" series.

Surprises include legend Debbie Reynolds playing it straight to Ruby Romaine's booze-soaked stream of consciousness; new characters Svetlana and Pepper Kane; veterans Barbara Bain, Paul Dooley & M. Emmet Walsh all casted brilliantly in flashbacks (the tales as spun by Ruby).

Ruby is certainly among the most inspired of Ms. Ullman's characters. This HBO special is long overdue & much appreciated. Viva Romaine!!!

An honest-to-God American road movie on a nail clip budget. Edie Falco (the Addiction,Judy Berlin,Oz,Sopranos,et al) plays a nihilistic post-feminist drifter with stunning honesty. The supporting cast & crew are clearly up to the task as well. A riveting effort.

PANIC ROOM would otherwise be a B half of a drive-in double-bill if the economic landscape and collective movie going median IQ were to flashback a few decades. Is this why I can't remember the last time I ventured outside the darkened recess of my SafeCave to endure the multiplex hurlyburly?

Fincher's got the goods: the same slick, dank, A-list elegance on-screen; honed, maybe overly conscious professionals on all fronts; the hype; and, God-love-him, a fervent cult core fan base (a virtual sub-culture if several devoted websites are any clue). But it's tedious in all its huffing puffery.

A flawless superbit transfer to DVD and the DTS audio mix are the best that this myopic LOA cinephile can say for it.

from blood to brains to flesh and back...

hardly has the passion of creation been so splendidly emblazoned on screen as this flawless adaptation of Doug Wright's play by director Philip Kaufman. i actually walked out on a first release theatrical screening of QUILLS - reduced as it was by the tiny matchbox proportions of the local arthouse multiplex auditorium, suffocated by fidgety, wheezing audience members. finally presented on DVD, the film gets its proper due, as one in my permanent collection. own it!

An elementary tale of prejudice in a small Japanese town against the unknown, but imminently fatal AIDS, as carried by a returning native school girl, Akiko. The first fifty minutes or so - on a first of two night screening - seemed simple and vapid; but the second half, after a couple of glasses of wine, drew me in ... and the film made sense as an instructive plea for understanding suffering and overcoming fear. The film is almost shockingly sober.

One could run this film in reverse and have just as good a trip through Altman & Rapp's vaginal whirlwinded terrain that is Dallas,Tx - here a fizzy, Escada cloaked, Champagne flute clinking girls town. Richard Gere holds his own quite convincingly as the magnetic male totem DR. T amid the swirling estrogen currents that sweep the picture along. Delightful at every turn (Where's Shelly Long been for so long?), it's not to be missed or misread. It came from a woman, dammit!

most astonishing of all is how this project ever attracted the energy and resources to get off the ground, on the page, on set, on the screen, on to dvd (with such lavish treatment from Columbia-TriStar)! Sure, it's sooo intentionaly HIP - the somber, muted, shadowy gungy urbania, a course of visual cult cues and obvious references kept me sighing and rolling my eyes... and wishing for some tension, some engagement, some smart dialog...YIKES! Sadly, almost two hours of this lifetime I'll never recover.

Viva Figgis!!!

It wasn't until I got my hands on the DVD of "Timecode" that this extraordinary work truely came together (and stays with me). Not that I wasn't impressed on its theatrical release, however trapped it felt then by the confines of a traditional context of cinematic exhibition. No surprise no one much caught it. As Figgis himself discusses on the disc's commentary tracks: this is an evolutionary process, progressing with changes, always different, in the moment, as jazz is, at the core an infinite opportunity for chance ... Too bad the ensemble had to stop at #15.

A golden honeyed set piece of repressed longings, misfired egos, simmering tempers, exhausted resignation - as put on by privileged white folks - in a wooden-blinds-drawn Vermont "piece of paradise." A recent rekindling of Stritch interest brought me back to take another look at Elaine in this Americanization of Bergman - more an evocation now in retrospect than what I handedly dismissed as a rip-off then at its original release. Mia's wounded whimpering Cocker turn still provokes cringes while Denholm Elliott and Sam Waterston gallantly escort the wondrous Dianne Wiest gracefully away with the picture.

With the video-to-film transfer setting a grabbed-from-the-shelf camcorder tone of CHUCK & BUCK - I might've gone further with Fisher-Price PixelVision, less with the Tootsie-Pop sucking set pieces - one feels immediate unease not just by the regressive vacuum sealed obsession Buck runs on, but the sissy-to-sissy empathy it yanks from our own pasts (and yes, the present). The lingering pangs needn't be spun as infantile emancipation as they are here. Someone could use a good spanking!

And much better in sunny L'Italia, under Anthony Minghella's skillfull direction and the razor sharp cutting of Walter Murch. The cast is flawless, the music cues and score even more striking when swelling up & surrounding one at home in a blissful dvd experience. Big budget studio (two here) literary adaptation multo magnifico!

. . . but butterier - creamier,smoother,richer - no, please - this is cheese - a lip smackin' smoked Hickory Farms log rolled in nuts! This lusciousness sticks to the roof of your cinematic dome and won't slide off until you've seen it again . . . and again and again (and dragged how many neophite friends through it with you) - howling, pointing at the screen, whipping our heads around toward each other, throwing our manes back . . . or just clinkin' our Champagne flutes, winkin' our false lashes, puckering our gloss slicked lips and sizin' each other up, DARLIN'

And I'm lapping from a deep Liza Renaissance trough right now ... having screened NEW YORK, NEW YORK & CABARET with a friend in the past couple weeks, caught LUCKY LADY & TELL ME THAT YOU LOVE ME, JUNIE MOON on cable in the past 48 hours, with THE STERILE CUCKOO coming on within the next 24 ... Even dug into boxes during the wee hours this morning to recover the almost forgotten Pet Shop Boys produced RESULTS album ... this is scaring me! No scarier I dare say than Otto Preminger's scatter shot continuity on this picture, its stunning relentlessness at bleeding a tender hearted menagerie of social outcasts dry, Ms. Minnelli's rubbery lattice work of a facial scar... all quite hard to believe yet unforgettable.

Through one way mirrors,disparate characters are smuggling things, exotic forbidden things -- birds eggs, lust for lost youth, remorseful compulsion; nothing ever as it first appears -- this film in particular, a virtual clearing house for Egoyan's recurring themes and motifs, I dismissed when it first opened as a SHOWGIRLS for the coffee house set . . . though after an interim of several years, several viewings (and THE SWEET HEREAFTER), one can only admire the audacious fortitude of its creator.

At the center of Egoyan's dark journey into moral and materialistic devastation is Elias Koteas' Noah, the mortal bearing the film's title, carrying its weight -- certainly delivering the goods in what must be considered his finest ninety-plus minutes on film. He never disappoints this viewer (his cameo turn as "the Kisser" in LaGravenese's LIVING OUT LOUD was a landmark in my memory simply as a point of relief, an answered prayer).

Mychael Danna's score and Steven Munro's sound design push THE ADJUSTER past the dream world threshold, unraveling it strand by strand to catch and spin in the viewer's subconscious. This is one you wont shake easily. Egoyan magic.

David O. Russell's war movie is a battle of yin and yang, karmic forces played out in a Desert Storm final act, on a bleached white terrain as an animated Polaroid One Shot of journalistic immediacy. He cheats a lot using music video visual gimmickry and casting two disparate rap stars plus a t.v. pin-up hunk as the kings (choices no doubt endorsed by the studio money men), but you forgive him 'cause he's the bearer of such true black wit. This is the mind that brought us SPANKING THE MONKEY.

United States soldiers clutching faux Vuitton baggage laden with Kuwaiti booty, dodging explosives and gunfire while looking for a way out of their day jobs, in search of a war, somehow makes sense of the nonsense.

If Howard Shore's exquisite score hasn't pulled you in by the end of the riveting opening title & credit sequence then you're asleep at the wheel and deserve a J.C. sized "King of the World!" head-on with a North Atlantic iceberg, without rescue.

Cronenberg is Master of the Universe in his brilliant adaptation of this J.G.Ballard classic tale of tantalizing techno-fetishism. After each viewing (I've stopped counting.),I carry the lingering buzz of transcendental longing evoked by so many of the scenes, the whispered dialog, haunting performances by everyone in it (Elias Koteas can take me any time,anywhere in his rumbling "bed on wheels.").

CRASH is the perdurable parable of love for our modern selves.

Director,Mark Illsley & writer,Ed Stone have concocted probably the funniest,zestiest,certainly most exposition stuffed,poppin' fresh opening/title sequence to come down the pike in this delicious comedy of crime & mistaken sexual identities.

And blazing character arcs, not entirely believable -- but,heck,it's a comedy -- for Jeremy Northam & Steve Zahn as cons,Harry Sawyer & Wayne Wayne Wayne Jr. on the lam careening through tiny Happy,TX, raising the skirts (and some consciousness) of Ally Walker,marvelous as banker "Jo," & the always infectious Illeana Douglas as kinder-pedagogue Ms. Schaefer. William H. Macy,though, as Sheriff "Chappy" Dent was touching and gracefully transcendent in a role that by any lesser talented actor would've been condescending or smarmy.

Y'all come back now!

Note to Mr. Pitt: Dark glasses and a scruffy somewhat swollen face isn't working. We understand you're a male actor (and I'm certain a good spirit) with pretty much a pick of the A list in tinsletown, but cut your losses,kiddo. Golden Boy ain't so bad a draw. Hey,I'd welcome you into my own dilapidated boudoir anytime,bright yellow Playtex gloves or not,but on screen,keep it simple. I think girls prefer you that way too.

Question for Mr. Fincher: Are you too hip for your own good, or not enough to know better?

I escaped with barely a bruise to my patience after an hour and ten minutes,feeling immediate relief in dusk's warm radiance while fleeing homeward,convinced once more that reality is so much hipper than Hollywood spends so many billions contriving it to be otherwise.

A woman's rumblings from her inner most source of need, desire, reluctance, here explicit and succinctly constructed as a cinematic thesis on sex between the sexes, is ultimately a tract for her own domestic emancipation.

In so many scenes, she could've been me talking to a transient partner in bed . . . of course, I've never had a husband waiting at home, among other things; but the film is fearlessly relevant regardless of gender.

ROMANCE should be compulsory viewing for any adult who has even thought about having sex with anyone.

Begin with a snazzy opening title sequence, rinse using plenty of amber honeyed hues in the production design, flood interiors with low golden light at filtered angels, cast beautiful actors in the lead roles, set in touchy historical political context sure to illicit controversy, fold in romance, simple dialog, a pinch of sex, sprinkle with an all-purpose rhythmic score, serve with a child's perspective.

Pass the papadam.

One's on her way up, the other is long since over it and dripping on the underling's nose as she reads while bathing in an apartment she shares with her soon-to-be ex-boyfriend below. Another plumbing brings women together flick? (Remember BOUND?)

Forget it.

This is a woman's picture by a woman for anyone ambitious enough to slip into something lofty & stuporous. Ally Sheedy smolders a few frames slinking around in cotton tank tops & cords, a marvel as smack-hip-lesbian photographer, Lucy Berliner.

Watch it closely. Imagine yourself as her next subject. Shudder to think, listen.

Framed with precision, quietly assured, flawlessly cut & cued, dense with nuance in such a way that for some time afterward you cannot help but wonder if it wasn't what was seen or heard that makes this film indelible.

HEAVY is everything that cinema has the potential of being.