October 2003

• Casa de los Babys (10/3, YSC)--Either the distributor shipped the theater the wrong second reel, or Sayles had run a ballsy and brilliant gambit: about a third of the speech in the film is in Spanish, but in the middle third of the film as I saw it, there are no subtitles. Which puts the nonfluent in the audience, me, for example, in the same position as the nonfluent American women in the film who have come to an unnamed Latin American country to adopt. Whether the effect was planned or an accident (I’m inclined to believe the former; otherwise there would presumably have been Spanish subtitles for the English in that reel), it doesn’t really matter in terms of understanding the film, which is about cultural imperialism, a frequent theme for Sayles, but one he never treats in a kneejerk way.
• Duplex (10/4, Milford Fourplex)--Wouldn’t have gone based on the trailer, but it got a pretty good Times review, and I’m a fan of both Stiller and Barrymore. A few good moments, but mostly predictable and unfunny, and it has that DeVito (he directed) mean-spiritedness about it that I just don’t respond to well. [80]
• School of Rock (10/5, NoHa)--Oh, my god, what fun. What I said about Bend It Like Beckham--completely formulaic, completely predictable, completely irresistible--applies here as well, only more so. My face still hurts from smiling.
• Intolerable Cruelty (10/14, NoHa)--Hilarious, brilliant in a popcorny forgettable sort of way. Not altogether a Coen brothers film, but the hybrid w/ TV-type comedy works surprisingly well, largely because Clooney has the cornfed panache to carry it off. And Catherine Zeta-Jones, never exactly plain, is in this film the most beautiful evil woman I’ve ever seen.
• Mystic River (10/18, Orange)--Critics are calling this Eastwood’s breakthrough to greatness, the film that represents an apology for the glorification of violence in much of his acting and directing career. Well, it is the latter, and it is remarkably effective in its atmospherics, but the more I think about it the less convinced I am that it comes anywhere near greatness. The exposition early in the film is extraordinarily clunky, and the implausibility and reliance on coincidence of the resolution is worthy of a bad Elizabethan revenge tragedy. Which is not to say I didn’t like it; it is only to say that the emperor, if not naked, is not as lavishly clothed as some have suggested.
• Kill Bill, Vol. 1 (10/19, NoHa)--Fantastic, and I mean that quite literally. There are many reasons not to like it, but that it is not brilliant filmmaking is not among them. The turning point for me, at which I moved from willingness to give it a fair shake to being absolutely mesmerized, is an anime sequence. It’s wonderful in its own right, but it also effectively reveals that the rest of the film is a live-action anime, and all the spurting blood is easier to take in those terms. An amazing film, maybe his best yet--I’d watch it again tonight if I had the DVD, and I’ll be ready for the special Vols. 1 & 2 DVD as soon as it hits the market.