reviews

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.

The theatrical preview opens the videotape version of Valley of the Dolls, in which the announcer gleefully informs us that “every shock and sensation” of Jacqueline Susann’s bestseller is “intact” in the film. The trailer is almost funnier than the movie — it’s two hours of hilariously overacted backstabbing, catfights, shouting, insults, and intoxication condensed into two minutes. It’s Valley of the Dolls on speed. How fitting.

The only way to tell this kind of story and not turn it into a sappy Lifetime movie is the way they did it. Smart and witty screenwriter Paul Rudnick — adapting a New Yorker magazine article by Michael Korda — turned out a cheerfully catty, bouncy script, which Andrew Bergman directs with screwball-comedy charm. But the real saving graces here are Bette Midler and Nathan Lane as Jackie and Irving. Like live-action cartoons, both of them are loud, gaudy, and outrageously over the top.

An extraordinary reminder of our place in the world comes in the form of an intimate documentary from Swedish filmmaker Mikael Kristersson. Kestrel’s Eye follows a pair of smallish gray-and-brown falcons through the course of most of a year as they nest in a 13th-century church on the fringes of suburban Sweden. Kestrel’s Eye isn’t like any nature film you’ve ever seen on The Discovery Channel or PBS — Kristersson doesn’t distract us with narration or background music. This isn’t about humans observing birds and reporting on what they see — this is about learning to see the world from the viewpoint of a kestrel.

Now, from the producer of TV’s Grizzly Adams and the writer/director of Swiss Family Robinson, comes Grizzly Falls, an old-fashioned family film in a similar style. There’s lots of bears in this one, and kids will be thrilled with the adventure and the intimate focus on the majestic animals.

My Dog Skip is, in many ways, like Toy Story and its sequel: it’s a movie about childhood that, while totally appropriate for children, is probably going to affect adults much more than the kids that accompany them to the theater. No matter how rotten our childhoods (see Angela’s Ashes), most of us can look back and find some kind of sweetness in the memory of it: in making exciting new discoveries every day about ourselves and the world, in making new friends, and even in the bittersweet memory of becoming self-aware enough to realize that childhood is slipping away.

I haven’t really been able to figure about what it is about Angela’s Ashes that left me so cold. It’s certainly a handsome production, and well acted — in fact, it’s got ‘production values’ coming out the wazoo. Costumes, music, locations and sets, lighting, cinematography — all demand for Oscar to stand up and pay attention. And maybe that’s part of the problem: maybe too much attention was paid to detail and to getting everything to look and sound just so. Perhaps in the construction of Angela’s Ashes: Academy Award Winning Movie, any genuine feeling that might have been there in the beginning got lost along the way.

Director Simon West demonstrated his misogynistic tendencies with Con Air, an absurd carnival of a movie with no use for anyone not male and macho and a particular disdain for women and gays. With The General’s Daughter, West moves into the realm of the less overtly bombastic, but while Daughter might have a glossier veneer than Con Air does, but it’s just as disturbing once you peel away the shiny top layers.