April 2004

• Hellboy (4/3--NoHa)--And went to this on the basis of a good Times review and the fact that it was directed by Guillermo Del Toro (Cronos, The Devil's Backbone). It's a very smart, very funny comic-book movie, but ultimately it doesn't rise above that, and I couldn't really see that Del Toro brought anything to the material that a lot of other directors couldn't have brought. There is one laugh-out-loud line, though without the benefit of Ron Perlman's dead-on deadpan delivery, it will no doubt fall flat: a beast has slimed him, touching him "for a second," and when a fellow superhero examines him, he reports, "a one-second touch, three eggs implanted." Hellboy barks, "He didn't even buy me a drink!"
• Bon Voyage (4/16, YSC)--Was describing this to people before seeing it as "a French sex farce," but in fact, there's not much sex. It's actually a thriller, and a pretty good one, set in France just before and after the onset of the German occupation.
• Kill Bill Vol. 2 (4/17, NoHa)--Was really anticipating this, having loved Vol. 1 (in contrast to most critics). But (again in contrast to most critics) I really felt let down. It just seems all over the map thematically, ending up in a treatise on self and family that just seems way out of left field--or out of a completely different movie. I'll probably still buy the pair on DVD, when the pair is available as a pair, on the hopes that I'll continue to like 1 and will grow to appreciate 2.
• The Return (4/18, YSC)--A quite remarkable Russian film about a man, who has been inexplicably absent from his wife and two sons (one a teen, one a preteen), inexplicably showing up one day and taking the boys on a trip, which is actually a mission on which he is to retrieve a mysterious buried box. The most likely explanation would seem to be that he has been in prison and that this is loot, but all the evidence is circumstantial, and that's not what matters anyway, except that the mystery further complicates his already complex character, and his excruciating relationship w/ the boys, who are understandably bitter about his long absence. Very human, and a wonderful performance by the younger boy.
• Spring Summer Fall Winter . . . and Spring (4/23, YSC)--A beautiful tone poem--yeah, I know that sounds pretentious, but what are ya gonna do? A Korean film focusing on life lessons learned by a young Buddhist monk from his master on an isolated island.
• Dogville (4/24, Orange)--More interesting than good, and it's hard for me to urge anyone to go out and sit through a 3-hour experiment in narrative and brutality, but I'm glad I went. It's sort of Lars Von Trier's Our Town--in fact, it just occurred to me that it even used that play's device of an unnamed narrator (here, John Hurt, whose voice over starts the very different Hellboy, though he then appears in that one as a character) with an unexplained connection to the town. But as dark as Out Town ultimately becomes, this takes as a starting point.
• Intermission (4/30, YSC)--Another one of those everybody-has-a-story-and-the-stories-all-eventually-intersect stories, but carried off with enough Irish brio (or whatever the Irish version of brio is--craigh?) that it works despite the formula. Most stunning opening scene set in a diner since Pulp Fiction.