The Hudsucker Proxy

The Hudsucker Proxy is a weird mixture of old film cliches thrown together in the hope of recapturing the romantic comedies of times forgotten. But by stealing bits from Capra and Hawks and Hecht and Welles, Joel and Ethan Coen have a lot to live up to. The plot is straight from Preston Sturges: simple, small town boy (Tim Robbins) is promoted to president of a huge, 50's-style company by the evil board chairman (Paul Newman) who wants to devalue the stock and buy it doesn’t work because she's not saying anything half the time, she's just filling in the gaps with nonsense. Which is really the problem with the whole film. They use a little Capra here and some Sturges there, but in between, it's a film hanging on nothing, waiting for the next stolen plot twist to save it from utter boredom. The twists they find, some from the 30's, some from the 40's and some from the 50's, have a hard time finding relevance today partly because they are from disparate times themselves and partly because the time we live in now has yet to find a single ideology to sum it up.   The sets and the rather than allow it to get into the hands of the unwashed masses." Jennifer Jason Leigh plays a hardworking reporter who wants to get the story. Her character is, basically, Rosalind Russell from The Front Page, and while she does a great job keeping up with Russell's pace, it shots are incredibly rich, and of course there's a happy ending, but, like fat-free food and the rest of the 90's, it leaves us empty and unsatisfied.

Bitter Moon

It took a few years for Polanski's latest film to make its way to America and it's easy to see why. Both excellent and awful, it is a hard film to pin down. Hugh Grant plays a callow, unemotional British man on a cruise with his wife. The cruise is supposed to be helping them bring some warmth into their stale marriage. Unfortunately, they find the pleasant company of Oscar (Peter Coyote) and Mimi (Emmanuelle Seigner), a couple weathered by their intense love experiences. Peter tells Hugh their story, and most of the film takes place in the flashback that is that story. It's hard to take a lot of this story seriously and at times it's hard to figure out if you're supposed to. Polanski himself grabs a laugh at the S&M sex in the film every time he can. Polanski has always had a weird sense of humor about sex; in many ways it's what makes 1~ other films so great. His films that aren't about sex are usually driven by sexual tension. The sex in Bitter Moon is completely direct, something new for Polanski, which is also what makes the experience so awkward. It is never boring, though, and sometimes great. Besides, we don't get to see new Polanski films very often. MM