“Kill Bill Volume 2” is officially out now and I am officially giddy. I’ve been gearing up for this shit for a while. So psyched! 10 PM show! Please be in Theater 1 and not in Theater 11. We’re talking about film as event, here. When was the last time you went to a movie and it was an event? I imagine the picture palaces of yore. You show up for the matinee and there’s a stage show and an organ player and stuff. I want events, but I don’t know how much the movies that come out today can be events. In my dreams, I always go to a movie opening weekend and all of my friends are there, and we’re all whooping it up, talking back at the screen, whooping it up.
When I went to see “Hellboy” on opening weekend, I expected the small group I went with to be entering into an event world when we went through the door to Theater 12. Instead, our rowdy gang perished. Benh fell asleep within a minute and Ray was really wasted. The theater was pretty empty. Halfway through the damn thing, we realized that Ray had vanished. A couple minutes later he reappeared a couple rows ahead, sitting kind of on top of the seat. Whenever something good happened, Ray would raise a modified black power fist to the screen. Chris and I laughed. During the scene where Hellboy saves a bunch of kittens, Bess squealed and cooed. When we walked out of Destinta, Benh fell into a big cardboard standee of Denzel Washington. Was it an event? Not in the traditional sense. But, in our world, it most certainly was one.
Another event was when I saw “The Triplets of Belleville,” and Danny DeVito and family were there, and throughout the movie I kept hearing DeVito laughing his DeVito laugh. Or when I saw “Mystic River” in Manhattan with Dan and his Israeli cousin Pork. I didn’t love the movie all that much, but we saw it on an Imax screen for no apparent reason whatsoever, and that made it an event.
Anyway, I treasure the events. But I want to talk a little about “Mystic River,” for a moment. Now, we’re sorry we didn’t show it a week and a half ago. Sometimes distributors make scheduling changes and don’t make their prints of films available when they had originally said they would, forcing the exhibitor who has booked a print in advance (the film series = the exhibitor) to change their plans. The irony is that the same thing happened last year with “Lord of The Rings: The Two Towers,” and we couldn’t show it. So, we showed “Return of the King” to make up for last time, and because it’s the first movie in a long time to be totally deserving of all the accolades bestowed upon it lately.
Anyway….“Mystic River.” So we didn’t show it. But Sean Penn won best actor for it. I, however, liked his performance in “21 Grams” better. I thought that it was subtler. Often, when actors are in a starring role designed to garner accolades, they over-do it. I think Penn is tremendously talented, but I felt that his Oscar-winning performance was calculated to hit all the right notes necessary for it to attain a “great performance” status: a yell here, a cry there, now a combination of yelling and crying. In “21 Grams” he exercises much more restraint.
“21 Grams” is an ensemble film in a truer sense than “Mystic River.” The three stars of the former must share the weight of carrying the film together, which they do masterfully. It isn’t Benecio Del Toro and Naomi Watts supporting Penn. It is a shared weight. Del Toro is so fucking good in this movie. Look at the different roles he’s played in his career: from Fenster in “The Usual Suspects,” to Dr. Gonzo in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” to the upcoming Steven Soderbergh directed Che Guevara biopic. The man is unbelievably versatile. One of the best actors working today, in my eyes.
Then there’s Watts, who I’ve never loved. I’m a big fan of “Mulholland Drive,” but I think her performance works because Betty is supposed to be kind of over-the-top, which was maybe David Lynch’s brilliant way of covering up her so-so acting. More of the same from her in “The Ring.” Didn’t see “Le Divorce,” and I’m okay with that. But I have to say, that her acting really did it for me in “21 Grams.” And I was not expecting to like her performance.
Now, it’s definitely not a fun time at the old picture show. It is a depressing film, filled with desperation and human ugliness. But the good thing is that it is very well made. It is the first English language film by Alejandro González Iñárritu, director of “Amores Perros,” and despite having a similar central conceit (disparate people are connected by a car crash), and a similarly non-linearly structured chronology, they are very different films. This is highly recommended if you like “Amores Perros,” and want to see a more mature work by its maker.
“21 Grams” plays Friday and Saturday, April 16 and 17, at 7:30 and10pm, in the CFA Cinema. $3.
Simultaneously and for free in the Science Center:
Before Johnny Depp was a 41-year old matinee idol on the cover of Teen Beat for playing a foppish pirate based on Keith Richards (who looks more and more like Skeletor from “Masters of the Universe” every day), he was in his 20s, playing a guy with scissors instead of hands. “Edward Scissorhands,” is one of Tim Burton’s most original pictures, made years before he moved on to planets full of apes and stuff (God, I hope he can make a movie as good as “Ed Wood” again). Co-starring my ultimate celebrity crush, Winona Ryder (who has been keeping the lowest profile since her run in with the law at Sacks. I heart her so much. Remember “Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael?” She was only 19, I think), and Vincent Price (who was so effing cool—Dr. Phibes and Dr. Goldfoot, sheesh).
Like the Coen Brothers? Like “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” Well, the bros got the title for the film from a film within this film “Sullivan’s Travels,” written and directed by comic genius Preston Sturges (don’t know his work? Now’d be a great time to get familiar with it…). This amazingly funny film stars Joel McCrea as a Hollywood director who hits the road disguised as a hobo in order to learn about life in poverty so he can make a social-problem picture entitled, you guessed it, “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” Along the way he meets up with aspiring actress and looker Veronica Lake (Va-va-voom!). It’s a screwball comedy, it’s a social commentary, it’s what the Coen Brothers would have made had they been working (or alive) in the early 40s.
“Edward Scissorhands,” Friday the 16th, 7:30 and 10pm, Science Center. “Sullivan’s Travels,” Saturday the 17th, 7:30 and 10pm, Science Center. And next Wednesday: The provocative new Brazilian documentary “Bus174,” about an hours-long hostage standoff aboard a city bus in Rio de Janeiro.
Leave a Reply