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| STARSKY AND HUTCH |
| 02.23.04 (2:34 pm) [edit] |
STARSKY AND HUTCH
Cast: Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Vince vaughn,Snoop Dogg
Directed by: Todd Phillips
Written by: William Blinn (characters), Stevie Long & John O'Brien (story), John O'Brien, Todd Phillips & Scot Armstrong (screenplay)
Distributor: Warner Bros. & Dimension Films(USA 2004)
Rated:PG-13 for drug content, sexual situations, partial nudity, language and some violence
As Reviewed by: MARTIN SCRIBBS
[b]STARSKY & HUTCH[/b] overcomes its played '70s spoof material, just one notch above [i]Undercover Brother[/i]-flaccid, to become the first genuinely funny comedy of 2004. Director Todd Phillips, whose [i]Road Trip[/i] showed a rare alchemical talent for drawing big laughs from so-so set-ups, has honed his comic timing so finely that even Will Ferrell seems funny. (The last is accomplished even without CGI.) That we actually believe, on more than one occasion, that cop buddies Starsky (Stiller) and Hutch (Wilson) may kill or be killed, just raises the payoff of the eventual punchlines. The risky, sly framing evokes Stiller's short-lived, much-missed HBO show. Wilson's perfect turn as the venal Hutch more than makes up for [i]The Big Bounce[/i] and [i]Shanghai Knights[/i], both of which I'm willing to never mention again.
For the TVLand impaired, [i]Starsky and Hutch[/i] was an ABC cop drama from 1975 to 1979, starring Paul Michael Glaser and David Soul. (They make a none-too-subtle cameo in the film -- don't worry, you won't miss it.) As with much of the product of the 1970s, what was meant to be mod and knowing has become, with the passage of time, one half-twist from ludicrous. Thrill as the boys chase a cocaine dealer in Starsky's souped-up Ford Grand Torino! Revel in the gritty urban frisson of meeting local pimp and informant Huggy Bear (Snoop)! Feel your heart melt at the special cross-racial relationship of hip cop Hutch and the 'fro'd kid he looks out for afterschool!
There was a real danger that the makers of [b]S&H[/b] would have rested on the inherent goofiness of the show and its decade. I am happy to report that they did not. For every period joke (yes, there's a disco scene, an [i]Easy Rider[/i] moment, and it's set in "Bay City") there are three or four other gags that would work equally well in a contemporary movie. Most of the jokes are animated by the odd-couple relationship between the uptight, gungho Starsky and the laid-back, corrupt, lazy-cool Hutch. Starsky's eager to solve the murder of a body that washes ashore; Hutch gently prods the body with a stick, suggesting they let it go down-current to another precinct. "Trust me, you'll thank me for this." Hutch brings Starsky to Huggy Bear's inner sanctum, where Starsky demands to know if the musclemen for the pimp have licenses for their guns. The hoods explain to an apoplectic Starsky that they're like Luxembourg, "which is technically a part of Europe, but in reality a self-governing constitutional monarchy."
Vince Vaughn shines as Reese, the sleazeball, scenery-chewing, coke-trafficking heavy, and Jason Bateman (from TV's Hogan Family) is ideal as his nebbish foil. A thought during Reese's bat mitzah for his daughter, where the Jewish drug kingpin is boogying down to a wildly inappropriate song directed by a lounge singer at the kingpin's daughter: have The Passion of the Christ's detractors heard about this guy? He's as sly as Shylock, as immoral and ambitious as an elder of Zion. I didn't find Vaughn's portrayal offensive, but then I have the rare defect of having both a sense of humor and a sense of perspective.
Bottom line on [b]STARSKY & HUTCH[/b]? It pulls off the hat trick of modern comedies. It's surprisingly fresh, even funnier than its trailer, and deserves to get a sequel. Probably the funniest cop show adaptation until [i]Cop Rock: The Movie[/i], and I wouldn't hold my breath for that.
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| A FOREIGN AFFAIR |
| 02.11.04 (3:57 am) [edit] |
A FOREIGN AFFAIR
Cast:David Arquette, Tim Blake Nelson, Emily Mortimer, Allyce Beasley, Lois Smith
Directed by: Helmut Schleppi
Written by: Helmut Schleppi, Geert Heetebrij
Distributor: Innovation Film Group (USA 2004)
Rated:PG-13 for some sexual references
As Reviewed by: JILL COZZI
[i]This film was screened as part of the Winter 2004 [url=http://www.nyfilmcritics.com/...]New York Film Critics Series[/url] .[/i]
In 1999, a Dutch film producer with the utterly delightful moniker of Helmut Schleppi met Geert Heetebrij, a story editor who was about to start work on a screenplay involving mail order brides on the Internet. Schleppi and Heetebrij contacted a company called A Foreign Affair, a tour operator specializing in "romance tours" to Russia, and arrange a trip in which they would trace the footsteps that the two characters in the story, brothers Jake and Josh, would travel as they searched for a wife (yes, one wife; no one said these guys were going to be written to be rocket scientists) to take care of them after the death of their mother. Their experiences evolved into [b]A FOREIGN AFFAIR[/b], in which the fictional story of Jake and Josh Adams is set against an actual romance tour.
Not strictly a documentary, nor a mockumentary in the style of Christopher Guest,[b] A FOREIGN AFFAIR[/b] is something entirely different. While the owner of the tour company is portrayed by actor Larry Fine, the other men who accompany the protagonists on the tour are actual men who have paid to travel to St. Petersburg, attend the "mixers" organized by A Foreign Affair, and hopefully return home with one of the stunningly beautiful Russian women who sign up with this service in the hopes of snagging a ticket out of Russia and into a better life in the U.S. And a sorry lot these men are, too -- almost exclusively zhlubby, balding specimens who lament that American women don't know their place and no longer want to take care of a man. Obviously a straight documentary about these souls would make you want to go home and put a bullet in your head, so director Schleppi wisely cast the deadpan Tim Blake Nelson and the reliably goofy David Arquette as the quirkily lovable Jake and Josh, whose boorishness is at least mitigated by the fact that they seem, well, rather dim.
The whole idea of these "romance tours" is somewhat tawdry, and the other recent film that trod on similar ground, [b]BIRTHDAY GIRL[/b], made you want to take a shower when you got home, and either hold your significant other closer if you had one, or decide that solitude and celibacy perhaps wasn't so bad. Thanks largely to the deftly comic performances of Nelson, Arquette, and a luminous Emily Mortimer as a journalist appalled by the proceedings who develops an unlikely friendship with Jake, [b]A FOREIGN AFFAIR[/b] just barely manages to avoid eliciting in its audience the same level of discomfort. It's [b]BIRTHDAY GIRL[/b] if that film had been directed by the Coen brothers.
Shot in digital video on location in St. Petersburg and with a Mormon enclave in Mexico standing in for the rural midwest, [b]A FOREIGN AFFAIR[/b] looks every bit the low-budget effort it is, and yet its very sloppiness has a certain downmarket charm. A film that looks this bad has to rely on story, plot and character development if it's going to work. The film follows the relationship between the sometimes overly pragmatic Jake and the naively idiotic Josh as the latter begins to strain at the ties that have bound him both to his brother and to the urn containing the ashes of their mother, which has also accompanied them on their journey. Josh's growing confidence and drive toward independence is obviously threatening to his brother, until the latter realizes that his own freedom to live requires breaking of those ties.
Nelson and Arquette, who worked together so effectively on Nelson's Holocaust drama [b]THE GREY ZONE[/b], give a wryly comic edge to what would otherwise be a depressing venture. Nelson's Jake is a more cynical, edgier version of the kind of amiable-but-dumb yokels he's played in [b]O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU[/b] and [b]THE GOOD GIRL[/b]. Arquette has the flashier role as the "cute brother", but until his character begins to come out of his shell, he doesn't quite know what to do with it.
Despite the film's comic efforts, the sheer cynicism, if not outright sexism of the whole concept of the romance tour, mitigates the comic effect of the film's smart script and quirky characters. For all that these elements save the film from being utterly depressing, even they are not enough to save this film from its tawdry and exploitive topic.
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| MY ARCHITECT |
| 02.11.04 (3:48 am) [edit] |
MY ARCHITECT
Cast:Louis I. Kahn, Frank O. Gehry, Nathaniel Kahn, Philip Johnson, I.M. Pei
Directed by: Nathaniel Kahn
Written by: Nathaniel Kahn, Susan Rose Behr
Distributor: New Yorker Film (USA 2003)
Rated: Not Rated
As Reviewed by: NED DEPEW
The new documentary film from Nathaniel Kahn is a fascinating personal exploration into the life of Kahn's father - the highly influential architect and teacher Louis Kahn. It is an obviously compelling - if somewhat exhibitionistic - journey of discovery for the film-maker, who both narrates and appears in the footage.
Unfortunately for the overall success of the film, Nathaniel pursues his father's history - more than twenty years after his death, alone and bankrupt in New York City's Penn Station - with a delicacy and reticence that makes the elder Kahn's life both more intriguing and more obscure, This biography raises far more questions about its secretive, self-absorbed, brilliant subject than it proposes to answer.
When Nathaniel announces at the end of the film that he has come to "know" his father better, it comes as something of a surprise. While the audience has learned a great deal about the elder Kahn's career and heard some testimony about his character and personality from some who knew him, the movie gives the distinct impression of a man who was so self-contained and deeply involved in his own world as to be nearly opaque to others.
That Kahn's work had a tremendous influence on other architects is undeniable - masters from Philip Johnson to I. M. Pei testify to it before the camera. That his work was original, daring and thoughtful is demonstrated by excursions to some of his buildings. But emotionally,Louis remains as unknown as the architects of the pyramids - on whose deep awe of the monumental geometry of structure he sought to build.
And while the look into Kahn's life is interesting, he son's careful, respectful attitude renders it somewhat superficial. Louis Kahn was a man who was married for more than four decades to the same woman, with whom he raised a daughter - but he had at least two affairs on the side - with impressionable younger employees in his office - which yielded him out-of-wedlock children - of whom Nathaniel is one.
What sort of a man can split his affections and attention in such a way? What kind of a man can live the kind of "double life" Louis maintained for more than a decade? How does such duplicity at the center of one's life affect the quality of one's relationships and self-image? How does such a person see himself, explain himself to himself? Unfortunately, we learn less than we ought to - given the investment of time we are asked to make - about these and other such fascinating questions of human psychology that are at the center of Nathaniel's quest.
In the final event, Nathaniel is (understandably) reluctant to press such witnesses as his own mother and his father's other mistress (and mother of his half-sister) far enough to elicit any deep insight into either Louis's state-of-mind or their own. While he asks some difficult questions, he withdraws in the face of the strong emotions that begin to emerge, leaving many of the most interesting emotional artifacts of his father's life only half-excavated.
Louis was a man without, apparently, any very close friends. At any rate, Nathaniel doesn't include interviews with any here. Louis's professional colleagues provide some glimpses of his working style and his behavior, of his interests and eccentricities - but they don't seem to know anything about how he was feeling inside. Likewise, the mothers of his children - while both clearly harbor strong and apparently positive feelings about him - never express, within the context of the footage Nathaniel supplies, any real sense that they knew what was going on in his inner life either.
Even Nathaniel himself, who ought to have been a powerful witness, is very reserved and unemotional in responding to what he "discovers." We don't know, for instance, whether he was angry about his father's absences from the "family," or whether he felt a protective resentment on his mother's and his own behalf against the man who both nurtured and neglected them. We don't get much a glimpse of the quality of the emotional exchanges between father and son, except through a very few recollections of Nathaniel's that are related with a curiously dispassionate affect.
Nathaniel presents some evidence - a picture book of crazy boats he and his father created together and a postcard with a somewhat reflective and self-deprecatory message - but what these things symbolized, either for Nathaniel himself, and even more for his father - who is after all the subject here - remains mysterious and unresolved.
Perhaps this documentary succeeds most of all in exposing how difficult it is for us to know one another - or rather, how easy it is for us to conceal ourselves. Even a man's own father, despite a thorough dedication to learning about him, can remain in many important ways "unknown" to him.
But because of the hints that appear - particularly from Louis's two lovers and his three children - there is also an unsatisfying sense that more is actually being discovered than is revealed - that the film-maker has teased us, promised to include us in the revelations and then held back. That is of course his right, and shows a certain respect for those involved, but it has to leave the audience feeling that the film is a less satisfying and insightful experience than it might have been.
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| TEKNOLUST |
| 02.06.04 (2:15 pm) [edit] |
TEKNOLUST
Cast: Tilda Swinton, Jeremy Davies, James Urbaniak, Josh Kornbluth, and Karen Black
Directed by: Lynn Hershman-Leeson
Written by: Lynn Hershman-Leeson
Distributor: ThinkFilm, Inc. (USA 2004)
Rated: R for some sexual content
As Reviewed by: GABRIEL SHANKS
It’s not every day that a direct-to-DVD film gets a second chance at big screen glory. But that’s exactly what has happened to [b]TEKNOLUST[/b], the 2002 Tilda Swinton sci-fi thriller that, after hitting the shelves of Blockbuster last year, will be released this month in selected art houses in urban markets. Such a circuitous route to the big screen is more than unusual…it’s downright rare.
A serious cineaste might infer from the film’s newfound exposure that [b]TEKNOLUST [/b]is better than its reputation, a neglected work of merit that received a premature, unjust dump into the DVD market. Such an inference, sadly, would be completely wrong. Despite the presence of a winning cast – Swinton ([i]Orlando[/i]), Jeremy Davies ([i]Saving Private Ryan[/i]), and James Urbaniak ([i]American Splendor[/i]) among them – this turgid, nonsensical effort by writer/director Lynn Hershman-Leeson ([i]Conceiving Ada[/i]) wallows in dubious plot constructions, shoddy design, immature camera work, and a fatiguing lack of thrill.
You know you’re in trouble when your lead character goes by the cutesy name of Dr. Rosetta Stone (Swinton), a geeky biogeneticist who has cloned three versions of herself. Ruby (the red, horny vixen), Olive (the green, dimwitted one), and Marinne (the blue, angry tempest) are kept in a locked portion of Rosetta’s house that evokes the cheesy sets of 70’s-era [i]Buck Rodgers[/i]. Ruby, Marinne and Olive lounge around in silk robes all day, and stretch seductively for no apparent reason…kind of like a late-night Cinemax erotic tease without the snappy dialogue.
The clones are only able to survive through taking injections or drinking tea derived from semen – specifically, the semen of men who engage in sexual encounters with Ruby. Yes, you heard me right. Semen tea…it does a body good.
You may be wondering when the thriller portion of [b]TEKNOLUST [/b]gets underway. That comes from the men seduced by Ruby, who -- after their illicit (but decidedly unsexy) public trysts with the cold, impersonal clone -- all develop bar codes on their foreheads and are rendered impotent. As Rosetta desperately tries to hide her secret clones from her scientific colleagues, the suspicions and sexual innuendo circle in on her until…
Well, who really cares. The ending is as relentlessly stupid and idea-free as one could imagine. Giving Hershman-Leeson the great benefit of the doubt, one could argue that [b]TEKNOLUST [/b]is merely a broad social satire on the nature of female-male relationships, and that cloning is an in-the-now hipster device that gives the story currency. The film, however, lacks both the intelligence and the incisiveness that satire requires, and its limited imagination reduces it to sci-fi pap. It must have been enticing to an actress of Swinton’s caliber to play four versions of one person, but the flabby dialogue leaves only the broadest strokes of difference between each character. Jeremy Davies’ inherent minimalism is a welcome tonic for the film’s excesses, but he is lost in the story’s drifting focus. For camp lovers, Karen Black has a small role as a maverick crusader who's on to Swinton. Tilda Swinton and Karen Black onscreen together: perhaps this is, in fact, a final sign of the impending apocalypse.
Is there anything left to say? Just this: [b]TEKNOLUST [/b]is the very definition of direct-to-video. It lacks quality and depth, power and substance. It is, simply put, not good enough to be unleashed on an unsuspecting public. If, by chance, you find it playing at a theatre near now, make like the clone of a marathoner and run.
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