reviews

A severe insult to the brain. The Astronaut’s Wife, in a nutshell.

Can you stomach an unvarnished look into the vacant lives of young American skinheads? Pariah, like a through-the-looking-glass version of American History X, is brutally raw and often difficult to watch, but this low-budget indie is an important film that deserves to be seen by a large audience.

I’m sure Leonardo DiCaprio is hoping to leave behind the teen-dream image Titanic saddled him with and return to being seen as a Serious Actor, but The Beach isn’t going to do that for him. In fact, his core audience is sure to, like, totally love this movie in the same way that those of us over 18, like, totally won’t.

Boys Don’t Cry, director/screenwriter Kimberly Peirce’s somewhat fictionalized exploration of the last year of Brandon Teena’s life, poses those tough questions, at least obliquely, but then, frustratingly, skims right over them. We can’t expect quick and easy answers to age-old dilemmas, but I would have hoped for deeper scrutiny of them.

In 1995, Grace Quek, known to porn fans the world over as Annabel Chong, decided, as a feminist and artistic statement, that she wanted to have sex, on camera, with 300 men in one day. Why on Earth would anybody attempt such an unprecedented feat? That’s the primary question Gough Lewis’s documentary, Sex: The Annabel Chong Story, tries to answer.

Stage plays often don’t translate well to the big screen, and such is the case with Simpatico, adapted and directed by Matthew Warchus from a play by Sam Shepard. A nearly static character study, Simpatico might work within the intimate confines of a proscenium, despite the ridiculous premise at its core, but with film’s wider expanse, it falls disappointingly flat.

The Horse Whisperer is three hours long, but it doesn’t feel like it, because, to my great relief, it has slightly greater ambitions than giving bored middle-aged women a thrill with money shots of Robert Redford. It even manages to avoid some of the movie cliches you’d expect to see in a film like this, and, surprisingly, subvert some others.

Oddly enough, the bits of pop-culture detritus that the Scream movies remind me of aren’t the cheesy teen-exploitation horror movies of which they’re near-parodies, but rather cheesy sitcoms. For some reason, the scary voice on the phone rasping ‘Hello, Sidney’ makes me think of Laverne and Shirley’s Lenny (or was it Squiggy?) squeaking ‘Hello, Shoirl.’ And the movies’ penchant for offing its big-name guest stars two minutes after they’re introduced suggests nothing so much as Police Squad’s habit of killing its celeb guests (who never actually appeared) in the opening credits.

Does a film about a ‘pot-smoking, coke-snorting, pill-popping, beer-chugging, porno-watching schmuck’ sound like your kind of thing? Then The Last Late Night is for you. Written and directed by Scott Barlow, The Last Late Night won the Silver Award at 1999’s Flagstaff International Film Festival — and is coming soon to a festival near you — but I can’t say that I see the appeal in it myself.

Much of what is frustrating about Harwood are the results of Morgan Roberts’s refusal to acknowledge the limitations of ultra-low-budget indie filmmaking. When you don’t have a lot of money to make a movie, you write a tight, talky script that keeps your characters in a couple of locations, and you make them and what they’re talking about compelling. Kevin Smith’s Clerks is a terrific example, in which two guys hang around a convenience store and shoot the shit about things that are simultaneously inane and vitally important to them, like whether Luke Skywalker is a war criminal.