waynestedman Reviews

The Departed (2006)

Dizzy but Good

[10/10 · 6 December 2006]

However, if you can keep track of who is betraying whom and when, more like at what moment in the movie, you can join Einsteinian ranks. Also, the two young stars, Leonardo and Ben, look so much alike and are built so much similarly and have so closely linked scenarios of betrayal or loyalty...take your pick...you do not really know who is whom until almost but not quite the last frame. And yes, there is a lady angle.No more needs to be said along that line. She is fine. There are a few jabs at fags, too, but not many.

This film is filled with wonderful cult performances all around, of course. This is pro Hollywood. And it reads like some of the Best Boston Blood crime stories. Cannot right now think of the author, but he had a string of cult best sellers based on the not so dainty Boston.

But hold your seats, track this dizzy slide ride carefully. The pace is fast, the editing split second.

If you can figure out who is betraying Whom at any one point, hang on to your judgment until the last scenes. Do not be hasty.

Of course, the original story was first filmed in a movie set in L.A., and Boston is a bit more colorful than The Southland, in a film called "Internal Affairs." They are internal, that is for sure.

They mention the earlier film in the credits, that one a few years ago, set in L.A. Oddly Boston is more colorful,like red for blood.

For all these talented people, i can only say one minor thing: It takes about half of the film before you have finally figured out which one Di Caprio is playing, which one Ben is playing, and who is betraying whom. These two young actors, fine fine fine, started out roughly at the same time and resemble each other so much it is really hard to keep track. A hint, but not a giveaway, check the face hair, make a decision based on that. It works.

buckle your seat belts. YOu will not really really know until the last frame. Who is the good guy, who is the bad guy, are there really any of either. Your choice.

In other words, Yes, Virginia, it is THAT GOOD, if you like nitty gritty Boston stuff.

bloody Boston crime,accents and all.....

Conversations with Other Women (2005)

While This Is Cool, It Might Be Best to Stick With Novels.....

[17 June 2006]

This is a beautifully performed movie. In its second week in Paris at the spanking new Bibliotheque movie complex near the Gare D'Austerlitz, a few of us sat through it. The problem is that if you are not warned in advance about the technique it will take you quite a lot of time to determine whether you are watching an error or something new. Meantime, your mind works like a slot machine searching matching lineups symbols to figure out what is going on, who are these wonderfully attractive young people? Then you figure it out gradually, and by then your interest is quite well enough piqued that you will sit it out. Then you begin to enjoy it for what it is: A needle's stitch attempt to get on the screen the solitary joy of the novelists' technique of easily, gradually joining disparate stories all in one easy moment but spread across ninety minutes or so on screen and not on pages and paragraphs. In a novel, you can put the book down, think about it, go back to it. No such luxury here. And there could have been more stories here, and in fact you are left with the feeling that tons of stories have not been told at all or even touched upon. Or may even follow in a continuing stream of consciousness after you leave the film. In other words, this is a delicate examination of the choices we have to make in life just to get through it. Existence, in other words.

Bubble (I) (2005)

Blank Verse on a Dystopian Universe

[5/10 · 1 June 2006]

This very quietly preachy film was extremely interesting to someone who has not lived in the United States for about forty years, like the lady who went me to the film yesterday as it opened here with a long delay. She said to me: "So that is how my grandchildren would be living and speaking over there, so nice that i do not have to hear them."

The dialogue is so politically correct that it rarely says anything at all, and this is its point, i would venture to say. Nothing is being said. nothing is being lived. these are portraits of people working two jobs just to be able to shop at walmart, keep their cars going or share rides if they do not have cars or bikes. So the blank verse continues right through the plot. Things happen and make no noise as they happen like dropping a roll of paper on a concrete floor, there is just a slight murmur.

If you like symbolism, i.e. the culture of masks, there is plenty of that to keep a film class going for a semester.

The characters remind me of Ayn Rand's ending of Atlas Shrugged: The world ended not with a bang, but a whimper. That has been repeated so often that few persons realize that Ms Rand wrote it first.

This film definitely ends on that sort of note, but in the long run it was worth seeing. Yes Virginia, i do recommend it.

In effect, with its pervasively normal portrayal of drugs and blank minds, it is sort of an instamatic of a dystopian society.

But hey, everyone seemed happy enough.

Wassup Rockers (2005)

A Little Day Bosch all Over the Southland......

[10/10 · 9 April 2006]

Clark has hit his stride with this one. Sort of aiming the camera and letting the story flow. It feels like that at least. It is getting a good ride here in Paris, where his films are very well known and admired.

One quibble, there is a scene where the new Metro line is going the wrong way for the story..... South Central is not at Redondo Beach... but that is small time.

He poetically captures the feel of the metro on the freeway, unique. He could have filmed a bit more when the kids head down into the new Supercamp Metro station at Hollywood and Vine.

The Oscars used to be handed out right there at the Pantages, and it is the last thing you see going down into the metro, if you turn around and look back across Hollywood Blvd, the first thing when you come up out the vast new metro system there, too.

In a way, this is Clark's homage to Hollywood, and all of that. If you want a quick study of L.A.'s many minorities, ride the new Metro lines. It is cheap cheap cheap and fun.

Loved the way the kids all corrected everybody about their origins, this is not after all a film about East L.A., which has been there forever, it is about the kids of the Central Americans maids, etc., who live in South Central, on the way to Long Beach.

The actor with the gun looked so much, sounded so much like the middle generation motorcycle guy of the famous Hollywood acting Dynasty famed for Grapes of Wrath, Barbarella, They Shoot Horses Don't They, that i was surprised to check the credits just now and learn that it was not Mr. Peter in the role of the man with the gun in his back yard. Maybe it really was Mr. Peter, but too shy to admit it.

Do not go to this film expecting to find a story out of the Garden of Earthly Delights, which Hollywood now knows about, after so many day trips to the Prado. A Kellerman story, complete with gay friendliness, this definitely is NOT. On the other hand, there is no Gay Unfriendliness either. Enjoy............

Ronda nocturna (2005)

The Left Bank Lives Again

[10/10 · 17 February 2006]

Maybe, if you are old enough and you were able to be in Paris in the fifties and sixties and lived the life after midnight in the Left Bank quartiers of St. Germain and St. Michel, you will appreciate this film of a night in Buenos Aires in Our Times. Circa this year, maybe last year, certainly next year.

If you can remember the all night bar called La Pergola, where two films mentioned below were shot with hand-held cameras, you will love this new Argentine film.

Probably the major difference you will notice: The streets are less crowded than they were in the fifties and sixties of the last century in Paris and London, too. And many twentysomething rent boys started their fairly short hauls toward all kinds of stardom in Paris and London back then, making the right connections in the film business, in the nightclub business, in the fashion business all with midnight trysts. Mostly in the street. That is where the talent was.

No such luck seems in store for the kids in this Argentine night.

If you were young enough to have seen "Breathless" when it came out, and "Les Tricheurs," a few short years before, or to have lived this era yourself, you will love this pitiless new film that spares no one. You will remember the all night La Pergola party at Metro Mabillon where most of both of the films were shot..... at night, during working hours, this was the new wave of street cinema.

Print out the cast lists of those two films. It is a who's who of current French, even international cinema. I hope the fine cast of this Argentine film has such luck, but i doubt it. It is too old a subject.

Just about the only difference between the mood of the Old Paris street and the recent nights in Buenos Aires in this film and in the Paris Left Bank before the invention of the Marais Gay Quarter in the eighties, which killed the Left Bank to a slow death, is the lack of hordes of young people out after midnight.

Having lived that for several years, getting off my job at two a.m. and heading to the Left Bank, I can assure you that the mood, the lives, the people are the same except for the numbers. I guess Time Really Can Stand Still.

There are not really any crowds in this film. There is more loneliness and alienation in it than there was in Paris back then, maybe a lot more heart ache, too. And of course, i am a lot older, like everyone.

But if you love the night, wherever you are, do not miss this Brilliant film.

The Libertine (2004)

Wow

[10/10 · 8 February 2006]

Here is another one of those British Lottery funded historical pictures not to be missed. Depp is fantastically good in this piece of very careful historical film making, as opposed to Romantic films. Rupert Everett does the best ever Charles II, surpassing those fantastic actors who played the king in Forever Amber and Stage Beauty. Please watch for the Spaniel Scene, compare the dogs in this one with the dogs in the early films. Keep track of the wigs, too.

This version is much more realistic than Stage Beauty, but it is a close call.

Like Stage Beauty, it flopped in Paris. They like violent American cop films and weary eerie flicks and magical kid wizards trickery here these days. Stage Beauty lasted exactly one week and did not even go out to the small cinema houses after its week in the major theatres.

If you are interested in the subject of Charles II and the Restoration, you can still find copies of "Lord Rochester's Monkey," by Graham Greene, who wrote it in the thirties but decided to publish it much later. My copy, which I found at Amazon.Com, was published by Bodley Head in 1974. It is full of engravings and formal portraits from the Restoration era.

Blood (2005)

A Whole Lot Less Is More Here

[7/10 · 8 February 2006]

I did find the earlier reader review by someone from Mexico very useful as this film, while quite good, needed the context that the viewer gave it. There is no sense in repeating what was said. I was born within yards of the Mexican border, in Southwestern Arizona along the Colorado River, and this film reminded me of San Luis, R.C., where i once covered a murder trial for the Yuma Daily Sun. Fortunately, the accused man, a U.S. born guy of Mexican origin, was acquitted thanks to a lot of footwork all around. This film describes plainly the bleak existence for many people down in Mexico, and it does not polish the legend of Happy Cheerful People slapping backs with funny accents. It has no stereotypes of any kind. Also, it was good to see a Mexican film not set in Mexico City. I understand the director is only 29 years old. Do not expect any fables in this film. In that sense it is really a slice of life and also echos the architectural concept of Less is More....

Broken Flowers (2005)

Not Very Broken

[10/10 · 14 September 2005]

My only quibble with this fine film is that everyone looks like Sharon Stone from Start and almost to finish. The last lady definitely does not look like Sharon Stone.

So I had to get out the computer after the film and check out which one was the formidable Sharon. The person i went to the screening with said, she was the one with the obviously hacked down nose and blonde hair. I pointed out that all had that same look except the final one.

But it does not matter in the end. This is a fine film about human perplexity in its many forms. I see why Jarmisch had to have Mr. Bill do the part. I read that he wrote the film around Bill's looks. Someone actually wrote that. Jarmisch does not seem that eloquent to me, but Mr. Bill's looks certainly do.

Whatever....Please do not repeat or tell anyone anything about the ending. Enjoy. Paris audiences are wild over it. Jarmisch has a well deserved cult status in Paris and the very well oiled People TV shows industry really did a good job in getting the word out to see the new Jarmisch.

The Dreamers (2003)

French Beauty

[10 September 2005]

It is wonderful that people like Bertolucci can continue to make works of art in this magic medium called the cinema.That, in the midst of a nobrainer era, he continues to work is also magical.

As someone who was living in Paris as a student and later as one of the many young copyeditors of the paper so importantly a part of the plots of Breathless and The Dreamers, let me first congratulate those of you reader reviewers who got the name right: It was the International Edition of the New York Herald Tribune, one of the many predecessors of the present International Herald Tribune, now fully owned and operated by The New York Times.

Other than a faint link with the two names, there is absolutely no other connection between the two papers, though the IHT still runs Buchwald's very popular if corny version of Thanksgiving once a year, or did the last time i checked. Le jour de merci donnant, you can take it from there.

And yes, Both Eva Green and Jean Seberg are Breathless.

And yes, there are links between those two films that easily span the time differences.

One small trivial point: The film got an indifferent press here in Paris... yes, i still live here ..... so i watched it on TPS television, a sort of Cinematheque times one hundred or one thousand if you can afford the monthly subscription cost. Not that expensive, really. It is just that you can never get time to watch all the films that are programmed.

So when i turned it on, the American boy character was relieving himself in a sink and his facial closeup in the mirror, a Bertolucci trademark, grabbed me: What is Di Caprio doing in this film? Now, thanks to IMDb i found out just now that The Leonardo turned down the role. It is eery: I wonder if he knows he has a twin brother.

Orlando Vargas (2005)

Remote, Remote, Remote but Worthwhile.....

[6/10 · 22 June 2005]

This fine little picture takes the viewer up into northern Uruguay to the Brazilian border and a flat bleak stormy coast.

As to what happens, it is fair to say that it depends on what you might think happens.

This is one of those cases in which it seems that lots of very major events are going on but the viewer remains rather clueless. And clearly on purpose.

Still it is a good ride, opening in the suave capital city then moving darkly north.

The acting is excellent and the filming is rather majestic on the minuscule of detail. The director has a firm hand.

The sound is a mixture of French and Spanish, the Latin American kind of Spanish. And lots of wind and beach surf sounds.

This is all certainly worth the trip, if only for the haunting sound track music and some views of the parts of the world so banal that they seem extraordinary.

The main song is perhaps the one Almovodar immortalized a few years ago about three movies back, the one about the hospital, then it may not be. It is that kind of a movie.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey (2004)

Not That Bad

[5/10 · 8 June 2005]

This film, despite the rep of the novel, was in Paris for exactly one week. Not that that is a description of the film.

My verdict is mixed. I did not dislike De Niro. He had a hard part to play. That of the overseas cleric.... far from the fanatical homeland ... trying desperately to stoke up his fervor, which may not have been there really.

I thought Kathy Bates was magnificent, playing the lady of letters exactly as i remembered it from my reading of this novel in the sixties....

The scenery, as magnificent as it was, was from the Malaga region of South Spain, hardly like the Himalayas.

What overwrought critics should remember is that this story is probably the last in a long series of such tales, From Chaucer to the Decameron, even to the recent film about the young Che Guevara finding himself on an epic voyage.

Last Days (2005)

Surely the way it Was

[5/10 · 8 June 2005]

I rank it in the mid range because I know there is an audience for this sort of film, and I remain a fan of the director if not for just My Own Private Idaho.

I saw it with four other hard core movie goers in the new MK2 Bibliotheque Cinema at the Library site in the new,futuristic Paris near the Gare d'Austerlitz. We had all the heavy sound for ourselves, but there was not much actually. This film has an interesting but not so new technique, taking an event and going at it erratically from many angles, many starts and repeats, each adding new info. Fine.

If it comes out morose, the subject matter is morose. As a journalist who started by working the Police Beat in my early twenties, the film is realistic. i can really vouch for that.

As for the music. If you like it, you will love it. Enough said.

As a Van Sant loyalist, i was glad i went. Let's hope he can keep working. And that is not sure......after all, this is the opposite of an action movie.....

Mysterious Skin (2004)

A raft of future stars

[10/10 · 26 May 2005]

Rarely has a film i have seen in Paris riveted a small left bank cinema house as much as this one. I remember the same electric feeling for Losey's Servant with Dirk Bogarde and others in the sixties when i was a student. This a must see, especially with the current well justified concern about child abuse in this country, i.e. France. And elsewhere.

And for once, for all viewers, please do not give too much of that subject matter away when spreading the word on this small independent film. This kind of film making just might be a way out of the violent trends in the major world of multiplex cinema.

In a way, too, one thinks of The Architect's credo, Less Is More...

Sideways (2004)

Classic, and excuse me: Titillating too

[10/10 · 9 March 2005]

I sure hope most viewers wont be giving away too much of the plot. of course it is fine to say it is a classic boys on the road story. but try not to tell the whole story. even if the boys have grown up, or sort of.

over here in Europe this film is really getting a good ride. mainly because of the wine, of course, but also because the santa barbara area is not so well known as napa, etc., and of course anything concerning wine will draw in the crowds in Paris, especially teamed with top rate performances. and filming to die for, really. the filmers even make trashy main strip roads look exotic. most of the time anyway. this is the kind of film that makes you realize that most of our great film makers, now over sixty, started out with little hits like this one. the more the merrier.

so what if it all seems a little pat at times. it is good pat, even excellent pat. not up to jack lemmon but hey we are in a new era, too.or so i have been told.

go see. support American films by doing so. don't wait for the TV or DVD versions. this film will not be able to stand the cuts for commercials, and it clearly was not written with those eight minute dramatic action runs in mind to accommodate the commercials.

Stage Beauty (2004)

A roller coaster ride

[10/10 · 2 March 2005]

this film is a classic in all senses. sorry too many people got bogged down in the gay discussion especially, as another viewer pointed out, such issues were not present in the Restoration Era. I mean, as issues as they are now. Of course,everything under the sun has always existed. In fact, the very words heterosexual and homosexual come from the late nineteenth century with the mania for classifying things. nor will you hear either word in the film.

One can soar, slide and sink with this film by just closing one\s eyes and listening, and not just because of the accents. this should turn any doubters into Shakespeare fans. Fly with it. It is even better with your eyes as wide open as your ears.

I could care less whether the acting is the Modern style or the old Restoration style. but it was nice to learn that.

I was a bit afraid of seeing Rupert Everett in the role George Sanders made so famous, with the herd of spaniels. But Mr. Everett is just as good as Mr. Sanders was. In my humble opinion, at least.

Mean Creek (2004)

Running Water Runs Still

[14 October 2004]

It has been decades since so much young talent has been gathered in one film. Think "Rebel Without a Cause," check all its young actors.

I really sincerely predict the name of every young actor in "Mean Creek" will someday be a household word. and not in the distant future.

As i am not really sure how this film ended, there is no possible way i can give the ending away. So go see for yourself. I think you might be right up the creek with me and many other fans and viewers. But no matter.

My only gripe is an apparent constant, real tone of gay bashing, and i am not so sure it was not intentional, to get our attention, to say, hey, this is happening now. At one point, one of the young kids clearly has parents who are "Male Partners." But that is never explained. The suicide of one father, however, plays a prominent part in the very complex plot