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So how else can I react to Mission to Mars but with enthusiasm? Here is a mostly scientifically accurate movie about the planet that actually looks as if it were filmed there. No, it’s not a perfect film — but as one of the like-minded friends with whom I saw Mission to Mars pointed out, we’re so hungry for real science fiction on film that we can forgive its flaws.
Despite the fact that we all know how the story ends, director Ron Howard manages to make Apollo 13 not only riveting but suspenseful as well. Howard’s attention to detail goes above and beyond the call of duty.
The Scots have a dark, wry sense of humor, and perhaps only a Scottish filmmaker could have had both the audacity to attempt a black comedy about grief and the sensibility to pull it off. Best known as an actor for his award-winning performance in My Name Is Joe, Peter Mullan here he goes behind the camera in a wonderfully biting feature-film debut as writer/director. Orphans is as absurdly funny as it is heart-wrenchingly painful, and contains, in a story of apparently modest scope, some of the most poignantly real as well as some of the most bemusingly dreamy moments I think I’ve ever seen on film.
So, Go’s three interconnected tales follow a diverse group of Los Angeles twentysomethings as their lives bang up against one another in a scenario that’s the 90s in a nutshell, from the Xer point of view: sex and danger that’s both exciting and terrifying (the clever script uses the word ‘go’ both in the imperative, let’s-get-out-of-here sense and also in the imperative, orgasmic sense, as a synonym for ‘come’). And is if to demonstrate typical Xer cynicism, it all happens while holly jolly Christmas passes by practically unnoticed in the background.
I knew nothing about Dogma when I saw Mifune, the latest film to earn the seal of approval from the Danish Dogma Collective. Which is probably for the best, because otherwise I’d have ended up paying too much attention to its technical aspects, and I’d have missed what turned out to be a damned entertaining movie.
I’m guessing that Judy Berlin is at least a semi-autobiographical endeavor for writer/director Eric Mendelsohn, because David’s stipulations for his film also describes Mendelsohn’s: nothing sarcastic, and no plot. It is oddly captivating, though, if not in an entirely satisfying way. Like an American foreign film — or a Woody Allen film without the whining — Judy Berlin is a wandering meditation on death, lost dreams, and the boring realness of reality that never quite goes anywhere.
Anyone close to a child — even one not your own — knows how suddenly and dramatically children can change your outlook on life. One tiny, lost newborn is all it takes to rattle the mundane complacency of the intriguingly disparate characters in Giuseppe Piccioni’s Not of This World.
And that realistic attitude is a big part of what makes Boiler Room so refreshing: Younger doesn’t offer any pat, happy endings, doesn’t have all his characters wrap things up by kissing and making nice. The film ends on such an abrupt note — and such a perfect one — that I gasped with unexpected delight.
It was worth the wait, though. Yes, classical-music lovers complain about the cheapening of their favorite pieces — sure, Fantasia 2000 is like MTV with great composers instead of the latest boy band. But, like its predecessor, this is not only a wonderful introduction to classical music for kids (and uninitiated adults), it’s a rapturous, transporting experience the likes of which we don’t see in the multiplex often enough.
Aliens meets The Fugitive meets Con Air, is probably how writer David N. Twohy pitched his script. (Also credited as writers are Jim and Ken Wheat, which simply screams of fanboy brothers who wrote and, god knows how, managed to sell a spec script that had to be even more horrendous than what’s onscreen, if the more experience Twohy had to rewrite it.)
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