Rus Thompson's Short Takes

Rus Thompson’s Short Takes: December 2007

Favorite of the Month: Jesus of Montreal (1989)
This French Canadian film is a witty and provocative interpretation of Jesus’ last days, first told through a radical theatrical production staged by four actors at a Montreal church. The play garners critical praise and audience adoration, and then, once the Catholic Church threatens to close the play, the actors find themselves enduring their own version of the Stations of the Cross. The movie is engagingly unpredictable, both sly and moving, and delivered with a stimulating intelligence. What movie would Jesus recommend? This one!

New Release of the Month: Sicko (2007)
In his latest documentary, Michael Moore delivers a vital but utterly depressing piece of agitprop. He doesn’t just condemn the privatized health care business in the United States, but also finds something rotten at the very core of the country. How is it possible, Moore asks, that in the wealthiest nation in the world we are at our most poor in how we take care of each other? Thanks to lobbyists, anti-socialist rhetoric and back door political deals, America has a health care system that actually rewards CEOs and administrators for denying people medical care. The fewer mammograms, cholesterol exams, diabetes tests, etc. that a hospital performs, the fatter the bottom line will become for insurance companies and HMOs. This being America, where greed trumps every other motivation, that is a good thing. By the end of Sicko, you’ll either revoke your citizenship and move to Paris, or you’ll do exactly what the powers that be want us to do: Retreat even further into a fetal cocoon of paralysis. The most alarming theory that Moore offers is the idea that a populace locked into a cycle of debt, work and fear has neither the time nor the will to change the system, especially when their elected leaders continually betray them. Are you depressed yet?

Classic of the Month: A Hard Day’s Night (1964)
If you somehow manage to get the whole family gathered together to watch a movie this holiday season, why not skip the usual pablum starring Tim Allen in a fat suit and watch something that will truly put an ear-to-ear smile on your face. Isn’t that what Christmas should be about, happiness? This re-mastered classic starring the Fab Four is a wondrous testament to their infectious, enduring music and it also is an amazingly prescient filmmaking document. Who can deny that the sequence of the Beatles frolicking on a helicopter landing strip to “Can’t Buy Me Love” is not the first full-fledged music video ever created? Director Richard Lester and the boys were on a once-in-a-lifetime lark, full of enthusiasm and utterly lacking in guile. The songs, of course, are timeless, the performances brilliantly naturalistic and the uncle is “very clean.” Skip the screeching remake of How the Grinch Stole Christmas and rent A Hard Day’s Night. It will keep you bouncing right through New Year’s Day.

Documentary of the Month: Into Great Silence (2006)
This is without a doubt one of the most beautiful documentaries ever filmed. Set in France in a reclusive, ascetic monastery, the film follows the daily rituals of the monks as they pray, read, eat, sing, garden, get their hair cut and sled down a nearby hill. There is no real dialogue, no music other than the monks’ chanting, and only the occasional onscreen religious quotation obliquely commenting on the scenes that follow. Shot entirely with natural light and augmented by the natural sounds of life in and around the monastery, Into Great Silence is a meditative, enthralling and quite gorgeous viewing experience.

Under-the-Radar: Bug (2006)
This William Friedkin freak-out stars Ashley Judd as a white-trash loser who hooks up with a loose-screw stranger (ozone-eyed Michael Shannon) in her rent-by-the-month motel room. He claims to have escaped from an experimental laboratory where scientists injected his body with parasites, which are now breeding and infecting the room they’re staying in. This movie version of the critically lauded play by Tracy Letts is a slow-burning, wild ride in which the only creepy-crawlers present are the characters and their paranoid delusions. The performances by Judd and Shannon are astonishing in their intensity, with Harry Connick, Jr. nearly stealing the whole show as every girl’s worst nightmare of a stud ex. Bug is not for the faint-hearted, but it’s a fine return to form for the once-great Friedkin (The Exorcist, The French Connection, To Live and Die in LA).

Give this a Miss: Once (2006)
I am completely baffled by the enormous art house success of this small, grungy Irish picture, which appeared to be lit entirely with 60-watt desk lamps. Dublin couldn’t look less inviting even if the filmmakers coated the town in chimney dust. Directed by the first-timer John Carney, Once was a surprising theatrical mini-smash in the early days of summer and I wonder if its success is due to serious moviegoers’ starvation diet: denied depth, charm and organic believability in their film menu, they’re willing to gorge on the empty calories of a movie dressed up as handmade art starring two unknown musicians who turn their mediocre busking into a self-produced CD. Spine-tingling, no? There are two or three wonderful scenes of music being created seemingly in real time, and one charming sequence of a makeshift jam at a house full of beer, food, Dubliners with great voices and plenty of instruments. But the rest of the story is undernourished. The movie’s main liability could be the music, the kind of singer-songwriter folk-pop infused with opaque metaphors and sung in a high, whining key more suitable for showers than recording studios. There isn’t one hummable tune on the whole soundtrack, which is unfortunate for a movie whose main character expresses himself mostly through his lyrics.

December 7th, 2007 | Category: Rus Thompson's Short Takes | By Rustin Thompson

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Rus Thompson’s Short Takes: November 2007

Favorite of the month: The TV Set (2007)
What could be more fun than watching Sigourney Weaver as a stone-hearted bitch of a TV executive? How about the underrated David Duchovny as a compromised sitcom writer with Faulknerian delusions? This movie is a sneaky gem, a smart, scruffy painfully funny dressing down of the inside games people in the TV industry play. The best part about the movie is the way it refuses to pin down its characters. You’re never quite sure how much of Duchovny’s soul he is willing to sell, or how much of it Weaver would gladly eat in order to boost a Nielsen rating. The movie probably failed at the box office precisely because it refused to play by the rules it skewers.

New Release of the Month: A Mighty Heart (2007)
Angelina Jolie’s star power and director Michael Winterbottom’s gritty, shoot-from-the-shoulder style make for an uneasy blend in the initial scenes of this film based on the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, but the rigorous approach to details, place, language and international tensions ultimately results in a moving, powerful drama. Please don’t shy away from this film simply because we know it doesn’t have a happy ending, but instead watch it for its authentic rendering of the intimate interplay between the characters, and for what is in the end--a convincing portrayal by Jolie of Marianne Pearl, a brave and all-too-human woman whose husband was an early tragic sacrifice in Bush’s so-called “war on terror”.

Classic of the month: The Palm Beach Story (1942)
Rudy Vallee has one of the funniest scenes a human being has ever had in the history of cinema in this picture--and I say that without reservation. And this in a film made by a writer-director, Preston Sturges, who created perhaps the greatest series of comedies in the history of cinema (although Woody Allen, rightfully, would argue with that statement). Okay, hyperbole aside, Sturges wrote witty, cutting, rapid-fire dialogue for a retinue of dames, dummies, stooges, losers, winners, eccentrics, screwballs, aristocrats and bums involved in outlandish plots of goofy intrigue, cornball coincidences, mistaken identities and get-rich-quick dreams and schemes. Watching this film is like spending 90 minutes with your funniest, sharpest friend on a speedboat to a great party and you’re already working on your second martini.

Documentary of the month: To Be and To Have (2002)
This patient, respectful documentary by Nicolas Philibert takes us inside a one-room French schoolhouse in rural Saint-Etienne Sur Usson, where the dedicated Georges Lopez has the job of teaching his 13 students that life is so much rewarding if lived with a love of learning. This documentary is not for the fan of talking head smorgasbords or quaking YouTube aesthetics. It’s a quiet, watchful, real-time film, with sensitive camerawork capturing the intimate expressions of the kids and the admirable attentiveness of Lopez, a teacher we all could have used.

Under-the-Radar: Talk to Me (2007)
In this film based on a true story, Don Cheadle stars as ex-con Petey Greene, who cut a deal to get out of prison and get on the radio as one of the first AM talk and music jockeys, a man who pulled no punches on the air about the state of the black man and woman in one of the most violent and racist cities in America: Washington, D.C. He is reluctantly recruited by Dewey Hughes, a black radio executive played with style by Chiwetel Ejiofor. As the black man who has made it in the white man’s world, he is the antithesis of Petey’s ghetto jive talker. Watching these two characters verbally duke it out on screen is a marvelous and rare event in cinema: Two black actors not dressed in female fat suits. Director Kasi Lemmons engages us with thoughtful arguments about black on black racism and sets the bar higher for other films about the black experience.

Give this a miss: Zoo (2007)
Zoo is about the infamous horse-sex case in Enumclaw, WA in 2005, which resulted in the death of man from a perforated colon after being penetrated by a stallion (no, I’m not kidding). Filmmakers Robinson Devor and Charles Mudede have crafted a picture that is atmospherically beautiful and moody, but artistically and emotionally remote. If their goal was to detail the specifics of the incident that led to the man’s death on that fateful night, or to illuminate the secretive world of the zoos, or zoophiles—their motivations, their private conflicts—or to argue for a more tolerant attitude toward alternative sexual pursuits, then they botched it, badly.

Zoo is coy about delivering basic information, relying on the voiceovers of actors and, in some cases, actual participants in the horse sex incident, commenting elliptically on the lifestyle of zoos and their hidden desires, but both they and the filmmakers constantly dance around the elephant in the room: That their predilection toward bestiality is a bizarre sexual obsession practiced by misfits who came to Washington state because, at the time, sex with animals was not against the law. If Devor and Mudede had engaged with the political, moral and legal aspects of what went down on that summer night two years ago--if they had applied a bit of journalism, or even coherent storytelling to a serious exploration of the events--then they could have made an accessible and quite fascinating film without sacrificing any of the craft or imagination on display here. But instead, with its murky titillations and teasing long shots, Zoo runs ridiculously close to soft-core porn.

November 6th, 2007 | Category: Rus Thompson's Short Takes | By Rustin Thompson

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Rus Thompson’s Short Takes: October 2007

The wide shots and the close-ups

Favorite of the Month: The Lives of Others (2006)
A story of surveillance and intrigue set during the finals days of East Germany’s soul-killing embrace of Communism, this slow-burning political thriller deservedly won the Best Foreign Film Oscar over the flashy but empty Pan’s Labyrinth. Ulrich Muhe stars as a man who has given up everything for the State police, working as an expert in wiretapping and watching. But he begins to question his selfless devotion to the Party while staking out a renowned writer (the appealing Sebastian Koch) who is smuggling an anti-government manuscript to the West. The film builds scene upon scene with a quiet patience until a damning climax and then, touchingly, there is a subtle and profound coda. Muhe sadly died on July 22nd of cancer.

New Release of the Month: The Hoax (2007)
The Hoax may be the best thing Richard Gere has ever done: Better than that scene in Looking For Mr. Goodbar when he seduced the ill-fated Diane Keaton in his jockstrap; better than the sexy way he rode atop a locomotive in Days of Heaven; better than that scene in American Gigolo when he rubbed motor oil over his Ralph Lauren (or was it Calvin Klein?) shirt. Gere’s entire career seems to be composed of poses and props. But in The Hoax, Gere plays Clifford Irving—who, in 1971, pulled off the hugely entertaining feat of pretending to write the biography of Howard Hughes—as a likeable but corrupt huckster, keener on making money than honing his craft. Like so many characters spawned by the 1970s—Timothy Leary, Tiny Tim, DB Cooper—Irving’s capacity for celebrity far exceeded his talent. But unlike Leary, Tiny and (probably) DB, Irving is very much alive and still living a fine life in Aspen, Colorado.

Classic of the Month: Deliverance (1972)
I first saw this film in a drive-in theater with my mother when I was 13 years old. I’m not sure what she thought of the notorious “squeal-like-a-pig” scene, but for me it registered as one of the most shocking moments in a film that seemed to be channeling some kind of primal, undigested energy. It was raw, frightening, thrilling and beautiful and I have seen it more than a dozen times since. This 35th anniversary release features several mini-documentaries and updated commentaries, but it’s all just marketing, really, considering any version can do little to improve upon John Boorman’s fearless direction, Vilmos Zsigmond’s gorgeous ambient light cinematography and the performances of Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds, Ronny Cox and Ned Beatty. This reissue only serves to remind me why this film has remained in my personal Top 10 since that drive-in night 35 years ago.

Documentary of the Month: No End in Sight (2007)
It is now common knowledge, unless you live under a Bush-Cheney bumper sticker, that the Bush administration committed a series of grievous errors in the first few months of the Iraq War that virtually guaranteed the mess we are now in. The power of No End in Sight lies not necessarily in its recitation of these errors—although they are mind-boggling—but in the way the director of the film has managed to bring together, in one place, a veritable battering ram of experts who expose these deadly mistakes without pulling any punches. The men and women interviewed here were hired by Bush’s team because they had years of foreign policy training, and yet nearly every important decision they were paid to make was undermined or overruled by a small cadre of neo-conservative fantasists with little or no experience. Cheney, Rumsfeld and Paul Bremer formed a triad of incompetence so unprepared for an undertaking of this sort that they resorted to the only trait they were masters at: stubborn, willful, insulting obstinacy. What is great about No End in Sight is that the talking heads assembled here form a jury of such damning precision that the movie may as well have been called “Nowhere to Hide.”

Under-the-Radar: The Lookout (2007)
The movie has bad guys, good guys and good women gone bad. There are drugs, sex, guns and a shootout. It’s all pretty conventional…except that The Lookout has a few things going for it that transforms what could have been a routine, disposable thriller into one terrifically watchable Saturday afternoon matinee. What makes this movie good is not so hard to figure out: An excellent script, a tightly focused pace and top-notch performances. The talented and, it must be said, beautiful young actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays the lookout of the title, a former high school Mr. Popular who suffered brain damage in a car accident that killed two friends. As a result, he experiences short-term memory problems, writes notes to himself, always locks his keys in the car and is suited only for a job as a bank janitor. His roommate is the older, and blind, Jeff Daniels (who is excellent). One of the more surprising elements of this often surprising little film is their relationship; neither one is so debilitated that he couldn’t survive on his own, but together they keep each other laughing and dreaming of a restaurant they want to open together. The Lookout was written and directed by Scott Frank, a veteran Hollywood screenwriter who wrote the entertaining Steven Soderbergh crime picture, Out of Sight. This is his first film as a director. He doesn’t do anything fancy with the camera, but he understands that the first rule of screenwriting is to show, not tell; and the second rule (although it’s a rule I made up) is to always deliver information in an interesting way. Frank does that, and he makes sure that the loose detail he introduces in the first act will play an integral part of the action in the third. The Lookout is not, nor is it intended to be, a masterpiece, but it’s a damn fine film that will make you wonder why more movies can’t be this unpretentiously good.

Give This a Miss: Away From Her (2006)
This film is a moving one, but the reason I can’t recommend it is because it’s not particularly accurate in its depiction of the ravages of Alzheimer’s Disease. As played by Julie Christie, Fiona, a woman who sees her future and checks into a care facility much to the dismay of her husband, is all too graceful, too well-kempt and too often given to moments of poetic clarity and icy lucidity. She is, after all, Julie Christie, who simply looks too good to be dying of a bastard of a disease that leaves people looking haggard, bewildered, ground down by anxiety, wasted and completely lost. Her makeup is just right, her hair too carefully placed. She sits up and delivers perfectly timed epithets that take her husband, and us, by surprise. Director (and actress) Sarah Polley’s film would have been better, more harrowing and thereby more illuminating if she had coached Christie to play it raw rather than refined. Viewers with an Alzheimer’s patient in their own family may weep at this movie, and then go home to see their own loved one ravaged by a despair that Away From Her shies away from.