Month: July 2004

It’s pretty French for a Chinese movie, this bittersweet apparition of a flick, all train platforms and tortured romance and the filmy evanescence of love. Zhou Yu (the luminous Gong Li), a painter of ceramics, rides the train long hours twice a week to visit her boyfriend, Chen Qing (Tony Leung Ka Fai), a poet, … more…

It is a sad commentary on how Hollywood squanders talent that the first studio feature from Joe Nussbaum — the guy who made that sneakily brilliant little piece of geeky satire “George Lucas in Love” — is this atrocious misadventure in teen self-absorption. Squandering all the tomboy-charm points she earned in the Spy Kids flicks, … more…

Leather and swords and British accents and gorgeous guys wielding them all can make a gal overlook a lot of badness in a flick. But not quite this much. Not when perhaps the grandest legend of British history gets thoroughly demythologized, and nothing rushes in to fill all the empty spaces but self-conscious, naive posturing about freedom and equality and self-determination.

The cast is to die for: Robert Redford (Spy Game) as a retired executive, and Willem Dafoe (Spider-Man 2) as the blue-collar schmoe who kidnaps him for ransom; Helen Mirren (Calendar Girls) as the executive’s wife left to fend with FBI agents invading the house, and Alessandro Nivola (Laurel Canyon) as the grown son and … more…

It’s the perfect film for that most uncritically patriotic of holidays, the Fourth of July, all slo-mo stars-and-stripes in the warm breeze of apple-pie freedom and the golden light of soft-focus diversity. We’re the best! director Louis Schwartzberg cheers. There’s no denying that the United States is bursting with perfectly lovely and wonderful and funky … more…

‘This is one of those avant garde things,’ the elderly Cole Porter snorts amusedly as *De-Lovely* opens. He’s observing his own life and career unfolding before him, commenting from ‘offstage’ on the action. It’s the most unusual and delightful film-within-a-film structure I’ve ever seen, but this meta-flick is never so wrapped up in its own cleverness to forget to be heartrendingly romantic. As should be anything to do with Cole Porter and his music.