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MOVIE
REVIEWS BY
ALEX GRANT
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THE
TWO TOWERS -
GANGS OF NEW YORK -
EVELYN.
CONFESSIONS
OF A DANGEROUS MIND
NARC
Alex Grant Reviews
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Normally I avoid
films that due to overhype have swiftly become "events" rather
than mere movies. I have never seen APOCALYPSE NOW, THE SOUND OF MUSIC,or
PEARL HARBOR. Nor do I intend to see them.
Martin Scorseses GANGS OF NEW YORK
has been the victim of extensive and destructive gossip about its
production and its release problems. Yet it is everything you would
anticipate from Scorsese, who like Steven Speilberg, will always be
a Peter Pan - never able to fully mature and achieve the artistic adulthood
and thematic grace that constantly elude both men. GANGS is spectacular,
brutal and self- indulgent. Not as overblown and pointless as either
CAPE FEAR or CASINO but a wannabe epic movie that falls short of greatness,
despite boasting all of the trappings of the vastly ambitious studio-
recreated panoply and pageant of "living history". It is vigorously
acted and has many parallels in its religious symbolism to Coppolas
THE GODFATHER. Basically it recreates a pagan Holy Trinity Father
(figure) Daniel Day Lewiss "William Bill The Butcher
Cutting/ Son Leonardo de Caprios Amsterdam Vallon
/ Liam Neeson ,murdered Father to Amsterdam and constantly present as
a Holy Ghost spectral figure.
Peter Jacksons sequel to FELLOWSHIP OF THE
RING is too strenuously sub-Shakespearean and too deliberately
tragic in tone and aspiration. Yet it benefits from an extraordinary
performance from Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn the weary warrior
at the end of his tether. Mortensen is soft-spoken, genteel and melancholy.
His parfait knight-errant impersonation lends a gravity
to the hectic sword-and-sorcery antics of the strenuously exertive cast.
No follow-up film could ever hope to match the majesty and the scale
of FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING. Especially a broken backed narrative
three parties separated in pursuit of the same goal like THE
TWO TOWERS is burdened with. And we have to endure far too much
of Gollum/Smeagle and of those lugubrious walking and talking
trees The Ents. The film is too readily distracted up cul-de-sacs
and false trails. Far too exotically picaresque for its own good.
EVELYN
PIERCE BROSNAN The Irish actor has produced this 'Blarney' set in Ireland
in 1953, and if the events so liltingly depicted in EVELYN were not
verifiable as actuality nobody would believe in such a fairytale. It
is the kind of movie uplifting and inspirational that
many alleged film critics/ reviewers in North
America cannot come to terms with at all.
That is such ink-stained wretches as Ray Conlogue in his GLOBE &
MAIL notice on Dec. 13,2002 are unwilling to admit to an iota of sentimentality
or sappiness just as this coterie of low-lives are never
able to admit being gullible in their responses to horror or the occult
in the movies. Their greatest fear these so-called critics flaunt is
that they be perceived as suckers to the siren- song of movies that
relish honestly earned sentiment and no less honestly earned shivers.
EVELYN is without a doubt a music-hall version of a period in Irish
history wherein the collusions between the Irish State and the Catholic
Church led to birth parents having their kids wrested from them literally
by main force if they were indigent however briefly or however innocently.
A family could only be recognized as such if it befitted the model of
Mary, Joseph, and Jesus.- The Nuclear Family so-called. Single Dads
were anathema to the powers-that-be and were to be turned into pariahs
excluded from the overbearing and cruelly avuncular patriarchy set up
by Church and State for its own esoteric purposes. And regrettably we
all know today of the evils of molesting and rape the rampant plague
of physical and emotional abuses - of those least able to defend themselves
from predators and sadists in cassocks and wimples.
Desmond Doyles wife deserted him one Christmas-time to settle
in Australia with her fancy-man, leaving the unemployed painter and
decorator played by Mr.Brosnan with their two sons and
their daughter Evelyn. The Minister of Education instructed that the
Doyle children be dispatched to either a priest-ridden Industrial School
for boys or to a nun-infested convent for girls.
Desmond had a weakness for the bottle and strove to make ends meet by
singing in bars in Dublin accompanied by his fiddle playing Dad. Not
the most salubrious environment for the wretchedly abused head
of the Doyle Clan of Dublin. Painstakingly Desmond recruited an unholy
trinity of lawyers to fight his case in the Supreme Court by invoking
parents rights as written-in-stone in the Irish Constitution per
se.
Three Oirish boyos actors Stephen Rea as a solicitor Aidan Quinn as
a barrister and Alan Bates as a retired expert in jurisprudence have
a whale of a time playing slightly burlesqued types from the Oirish
play book of colourful characters. Their enjoyment is entirely
infectious Three legal-eagle Stooges on a roll, a roll crammed with
thickly sliced ham !
The wee girl Evelyn herself is entirely winning. Now 58 years old Evelyn
Doyle wrote the radio/tv script so expertly translated for the silver
screen by Paul Pender. Young Sophie Vavasseur as the titular character
is pluperfect. Again were EVELYN not a true story and a story of triumph
over immense odds it would be scoffed at thoroughly and even laughed
off of the screen. Director Bruce Beresford has wisely opted for a larger
than life delicately Blarnified burlesque of everyday kitchen-sink
melodrama. In so doing Beresford has made a warm witty and winsome work
of charming kitsch de luxe.
CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind Year: 2002 Genre: Action, drama, comedy
Directed by: George Clooney
Written by: Chuck Barris, Charlie Kaufman Company: Miramax
Starring: Sam Rockwell, Drew Barrymore, George Clooney, Julia Roberts,
Fred Savage, Linda Tomassone, Rutger Hauer, Brad Pitt, Steve Adams,
Krista Allen, Shaun Balbar, Carlo Berardinucci, Maria Bertrand, Sara
Brookshire, Michael Cera, Bill Corday
Actor-producer George Clooney¹s directorial debut based upon the disputed
autobiography of TV l.c.d. (lowest-common-denominator) producer Chuck
ŒGong Show¹ Barris¹ is a very auspicious debut film akin to the best
entries among the nightmarish/daydreamish oeuvre of surrealist David
Lynch. It forcibly reminded me of Lynch¹s MULHOLLAND DRIVE:- an oneiric
movie from which you longed to wake up yet craved to await the ending
of, no matter how catastrophic this might turn out to be. Whether or
not the Œreal¹ Charles Barris was a hitman for the CIA his ŒGong Show¹related
trips, as a chaperone to the lucky contest winning couples, overseas
masking his nefarious deeds in Finland, East Germany and Mexico is irrelevant.
We witness Barris¹ days and nights as he Œrecollects¹ them after doing
a Howard Hughesian recluse trip holed up in a cockroach hotel looking
like Robinson Crusoe all hirsute and naked and washed-up on a desert
island of his own manufacture. Briskly, and with unerringly cheerful
vulgarity director Clooney - who also take the role of CIA recruiter
ŒJim Byrd¹, sporting a hellacious fake moustachio sets the scene in
the Fifties and Sixties and elicits bravura performances from his leading
ladies. Julia Roberts as a modern-day Mata Hari and Drew Barrymore as
a love-child bohemian sweetie, Chuckie B.¹s loyal little wifey.
Photographed in a bizarre colour scheme like a bad acid-trip dream of
American culture at its most hedonistic and crummily corny CONFESSIONS
is a laugh-out-loud valedictory to truly bad taste combining the rancid
hokiness of John Waters¹ diseased world-view with the more penetrating
visual and aural insights of David Lynch¹s off-the-wall inner -workings
as filmmaker and visionary. The most subtle and the most impressive
aspect of CONFESSIONS is the brilliant mood-swings from Hippie Era free-love
frantic antics to cold-blooded Cold War terrorist tactics. Barris is
a Twentieth Century ŒJekyll & Hyde¹ split personality an entertainer
AND a CIA operative obeying his masters on a killing spree though he
suffers the torments of Hell due to this dire split in his Œcharacter¹:
Show-biz vs. Espionage. If Barris really was a spy under the cover of
his Œpopulist¹image as TV prodigy wellŠ..life really is stranger than
fiction, let me tell you. . It¹s like discovering that Liberace was
a U.S. Goodwill Ambassador and Œmole¹ within the KGB - as well as an
Œouted¹ gay icon. Or that Rock Hudson was Second Assassin on the Hilly
Knoll on November 22nd, 1963 in Dallas: the fateful day that JFK was
rushed to his ŒAppointment in Samarra¹ - to quote John O¹Hara an author
who could have done justice to this yarn on the printed page were he
first to take a crash course in the wacky world of Kurt Vonnegut. And
add a soupcon of Jerry Lewis( a.k.a. Joseph Levitch) the Jewish American
schlub and schnook ( and schlemiel !! ).. Literary cinematic surreal
and reveling in the paranoia of the Kruschev/Castro/Mao Tse Tung era
CONFESSIONS is quite unique and not by any means accessible to all and
sundry unless you lived through these years of global suspicions and
Doomsday scenarios. Or you can respond to a tall tale based partially
upon truth that b-b-b-boggles the imagination and t-t-t-titillates the
fantasies locked inside you and I alike.
JOE CARNAHANS
" NARC "
Joe
Carnahan has re-tooled and refurbished the cop drama with NARC
The "gritty"
street-level crime drama, typical of the Seventies top directors
such as Sidney Lumet and William Friedkin ,has been energetically re-invented
and renovated by writer-director Jo Carnahan with NARC. A "Rashomon"
derivative, one that revels luxuriously in a multiplicity of unreliable
narrators, NARC is a diabolically convoluted story of undercover drug
squad cops in Detroit. Carnahan;s film-noir asks :"Just Who did What
to Whom? And Why on earth did they do it?" Told primarily from the
callous and utterly cynical perspectives, or points of view
(POVs) of hard-core veteran narcs Capt. Henry Oak (Ray Liotta)
and Sgt.Nick Tellis (Jason Patric) the film follows this hyperactive pair
of dedicated lawmen as they struggle to disentangle the events that led
to the death of a fellow undercover officer, a protegee of Oaks
whose cover may have been blown. Or had he succumbed body and soul to
the drug culture ? His wife is a recovering addict it seems., rescued
by Oak as a child from a pimping relative.
Oak is a very macho street bully , unforgiving and vindictive due to the
loss of his young wife to cancer. He has a very strict moral code which
is masked by his vicious brutality. Tellis is equally overwrought ( and
no less struttingly supermacho ) with a wife and a son whose happiness
takes a backseat to his crusade. Both men are covertly straining to create
or to inculcate family values in these lower-depths of a scummy
society where the odds against such intimacies prevailing are very steep.
Their personal agendas are very much hidden - even from themselves. Their
daily grind pushes each officer into contact with truly dumb skanky dealers
and pathetic losers and users. The French call drugs stupefiers
.And they are correct to do so. Stupid people become even more infantile
and grasping, once under the influence of controlled substances. They
become so stupefied they forget the grave damage inexorably inflicted
by gunplay, and, trigger-happy, these bugged-out bozos revel in blood-splattering
mayhem. Just for the sheer hell of it.
NARC opens with a chilling scene of dire mayhem with Tellis pursuing a
perp and in the process gunning down a pregnant bystander. This is not
a film for the squeamish. It makes the memorable cop sagas of the 70s
such as SERPICO , and THE FRENCH CONNECTION look like childs play,
mere kindergarten capers - slow, clumsy and fumbling the ball insistently.
These were exceptional films dramatically but, just as Sergio Leone re-invented
the western, spaghetti-style, with his weirdly existential null-and-void
A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS, Joe Carnahan has re-tooled and refurbished the cop
drama with NARC. Lending heft and soul (- fullness ) to the
formulaic elements of the cop genre he takes the old school rudiments
and sparks them into harrowing life-like realism.Its
a highly personal "inside dope" account of a moral maelstrom/male-strom.
Actor Ray Liotta produced NARC to rescue his floundering career and to
aid and abet the faltering career of Patric. Together they play their
roles pitch-perfectly. These two were born to be screen partners like
Laurel and Hardy or Astaire and Rogers.
© Alex Grant
2003
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