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Reviews
The Business of Fancydancing (2002)
A colorful and interesting collage
I saw this at the Portland International Film Festival on Feb. 10, 2002. Writer-director Alexie said they were still tinkering with it and might add in some scenes we did not see.
The "plot" is fairly sketchy. Seymour Polatkin, a young and successful gay poet who left the Spokane Reservation to go to college and settle in Seattle, returns to the res for the funeral of a close friend, a violinist named "Mouse" who committed suicide. Also present are their childhood buddy Aristotle Joseph (the rather stereotypical "fierce Indian") and Agnes, a half-Indian, half-Jewish woman with whom Seymour had a passionate college affair before accepting his homosexuality, who has returned to the res to teach.
Alexie regulars Cynthia Geary and Elaine Miles, familiar from "Northern Exposure" and Alexie's last film project, "Smoke Signals," are on hand in cameos.
The movie is a sort of collage, with many flashbacks, scenes of various characters dancing in colorful costumes on a black stage, and cheap video footage the characters ostensibly shot of each other. The acting is mostly okay, though rarely inspired; the writing much the same. Camerawork is rather dull, though Alexie chooses lovely landscapes, moods, and colors for his shots.
A narrative trick of questionable utility is "The Interviewer": a young black female journalist pinions several of the characters (particularly Seymour and Aristotle) with tough, condescending, and sometimes obvious questions in that same no-space of black stage. The writing for these scenes is decent, but I wasn't convinced of the need for them.
Alexie readily admits to doing much improvisation and gutwork -- the film was shot in 14 days with 6 additional days of fill-in shooting -- and he likes to leave plenty of questions unanswered, from the Russian origins of his protagonist's name to the meaning of the dancing sequences, the reasons for Mouse's suicide, or a rather brutal scene where Ari beats up a stranded white motorist and insists Mouse join him. This is fine, and I had no problem with most of it; in fact, it was the more obvious imagery, such as Seymour slowly and dispiritedly doffing his dance outfit toward the end of the story when he leaves the res again, presumably forever, that I found irritating.
Alexie said he was extremely annoyed by such films as "Finding Forrester," where a writer's talents (both the veteran's and the rookie's) are ballyhooed but never actually shown, so Seymour reads a number of his poems on the soundtrack over the visual action.
In sum, this is a fair, promising independent feature that is hardly outstanding but takes some laudable risks and provides further welcome exposure to Native American culture, actors, and ideas.
The Mexican (2001)
Great fun, richer than billed
The trailer leads one to expect a romantic caper movie, but "The Mexican" turns out to be stranger, more quirky, than that. The characters played by Pitt and Roberts spend most of the film separated -- probably a good thing, since they would likely run out of things to do fairly quickly -- and the story has more violence and stunning plot twists than anticipated.
Pitt plays a young tough in thrall to a crime boss sent on one last job into Mexico to fetch a beautiful historic pistol with a curse on it. His girlfriend Roberts wants him OUT of the crime business and dumps him at the beginning of the film to seek her fortune in Vegas. (They've been posing as a married couple in group therapy, so they often resort to psycho-speak in their arguments.) Instead, she runs into killers working for various unknown parties who use her as a hostage to make sure Pitt delivers the gun and does not use it for his own ends. Pitt gets stuck in Mexico with big problems trying to find, and then hold onto, the gun.
The real center of the movie is the growing relationship between Roberts and her primary captor, "Leroy," played with much depth as well as humor by James Gandolfini.
The soundtrack is perky and amusing, and there's a lovely running visual gag with traffic stoplights. At least three soft focus flashbacks recount the highly dubious story of the pistol's romantic and mysterious history -- true or not, it makes little difference. The movie sports a few plot twists that are a bit much, and is a little too exhaustively long for its genre, but in all, a highly entertaining piece of work.
Chikin Biznis ... The Whole Story! (1999)
Cute but unmemorable South African film
This 1999 South African film features decent acting and an unremarkable plot.
Jolly, middle-aged Sipho has just quit his 15-year job as a messenger for the Johannesburg stock exchange to go into business for himself. He will retail chickens at the open market with the help of a young friend. (The idiosyncratic spelling of the title copies Sipho's lackadaisical signs.) Some humor derives from his interaction with other sellers, particularly a jealous rival at the market.
A complication is that Sipho, married to an at-home dressmaker, is romancing the young wife of a tough criminal currently in jail. Crises develop when Sipho's wife discovers the affair and throws him out, and his girlfriend's man gets out of stir.
"Chikin Biznis" is not a movie I would go out of my way to see, but a pleasant diversion and a peek into South African lower class culture.
Chocolat (2000)
Pure movie magic
The year is 1959, but it might just as well be a century or more before, for all the intrusion of modern times and technology in this story of a mysterious woman (Binoche) and her daughter who arrive in a small French town and open a chocolate shop during Lent, which angers the mayor, a devout and intolerant count (Molina) who vows to put her out of business. In a sense, the story is a fairy tale about a good witch who turns a town upside down mainly due to the villagers' fear and ignorance, and does good for them despite themselves. Beautifully shot, wonderfully written, and delightfully acted, the film is as near perfection among romantic comedy-dramas as I have seen in a long time. Binoche is most fetching, Olin fine as a battered wife who blooms (it is magical just for a film buff to contemplate how the actresses and their roles have changed since they were together in "The Unbearable Lightness of Being"), Molina a wonderful "villain," and Judi Dench as a crusty diabetic landlady somehow made me cry nearly every time she came on screen. Fine as he has been elsewhere, Johnny Depp as a sort of gypsy water-rat with a curious Irish brogue is a little out of his depth in this crowd. This is one to treasure in repeated viewings.