reviews

‘If that was in a movie, I wouldn’t believe it.’ So says a character in Magnolia after an astounding occurrence, and that warped self-reference just about sums up how daring this film is. Writer/director P.T. Anderson (boognight) pushes the boundaries of film convention here with a three-hour exploration of chance and coincidence, the banalities of love and death, and the ‘strange things [that] happen all the time.’

I get the idea of relocating the action of a Shakespearean play temporally and physically: it can highlight the timelessness of the Bard’s work. (Baz Lurman’s Romeo + Juliet is a prime example of how excitingly contemporary Shakespeare can be.) Sometimes, though, it just sits a little oddly. For all that screenwriter/director Michael Hoffman’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is playfully sexy fun, all those references to Athens and Athenians is a tad bizarre when the story has been transported to the Italian countryside of a century ago.

Adult relationships come with trade-offs — this chilly fact is at the core of The End of the Affair. Directed by Neil Jordan (butchboy, mcollins), who also adapted Graham Greene’s novel for the screen, this simultaneously polite and strikingly erotic film gives us three people who’ve come to this realization.

Like all great animated films, The Iron Giant is at least as enthralling to grownups as it is to their kids. This one is an instant classic. In a way, I’m sorry there are no “no one understands me” and “oh no this is our darkest hour” songs here, because listening to a soundtrack over and over would be a way to relive the movie — the way I do with the Disney greats — again and again. (I’ll have to settle for Pete Townsend’s The Iron Man CD, which is also based on the children’s book by Ted Hughes and sort of serves as a soundtrack to the film. Townsend, in fact, executive produced The Iron Giant.)