fateslieutenant Reviews

Bright Lights, Big City (1988)

takes place in all the cleanest bathrooms in NY

[5/10 · 22 April 2011]

A lot of the scenes take place in nightclub restrooms and other bathrooms. This is where the characters snort their coke, and stare at their own disappointed faces. What's remarkable for NYC in the 80s (in any decade, really) is that every single toilet stall and urinal is fantastically clean. I take this as a symbol for the movie as a whole - all rather sanitized.

It's not bad, but the plot falls off rather suddenly at the end. Some viewers might not notice, of course, since nothing was ever that worrying, in any case: it's all too well-scrubbed. All the main character ever has to do to fix things is tell his friends he's going to go home and get a good night's sleep. It's hard on a movie when the big question is "will he nap, or won't he?"

Ken Park (2002)

Dull

[1/10 · 24 March 2006]

It takes a special kind of genius to make group sex, incest, suicide, and murder quite this dull. That genius is Larry Clark. Overwhelmed by exactly the fragmentary voyeurism that is the essence of his photography, Clark is seemingly unwilling or unable to extend any of the sensational moments he films far enough into either the past or the future to give them meaning; they remain instead iconic snapshots of Clark's private sexual obsessions. This means that while Clark is clearly very excited to pose his actors, he doesn't trouble at all with their characters, and this fixation on a physical presence (specifically of willing young men) that the viewer can't access becomes a black hole at the movie's centre.

Many of the things that happen - a young man who kills his grandparents, a boy who sleeps with his girlfriend's mother, a young woman forced to marry her insanely religious father - could have been the basis of a really interesting film if only they were followed through: each one is a beginning or a conclusion, but none is a story.The characters don't develop or change, the situations don't evolve, what occurs is without causes or repercussions. What happens to the girl who marries her father? How does the boy cope with cheating on his girlfriend with her adolescence-obsessed mother, and why would a grown woman do such a thing? Why does Tate kill his grandparents, and what happens to him? I'd be curious to know, but Larry Clark, clearly, is not: greedily, he wants only each story's most climactic moment, again and again, without context, without structure - and finally, unless you share just his taste in sexual imagery, without interest.

I Am Josh Polonski's Brother (2001)

Like staring at a beautiful painting for longer than is natural

[5/10 · 20 March 2006]

Spoilers.

A lot of indie films are just low-budget nods to Hollywood: they say, "I want in, here are my bona fides. Imagine this movie with two more zeros on the price tag and you'll know what I'm really about." Filmed in two weeks for hardly more than it costs to eat lunch, largely improvised, completely unmanipulative, I Am Josh Polonski's Brother doesn't stoop to knock at Hollywood's door. With a couple of exceptions, the acting is good, and the movie (which was filmed on Super8 and with a very different, almost old-fashioned eye for composition) looks incredible.

Richard Edson plays Abe, one of three brothers who own and manage the family wholesale cloth business on Orchard Street. Before the opening titles, Abe's brother Josh is killed in a drive-by shooting. Abe starts to run after the car - or is he just running away from Josh's bloody body? - and for a moment it seems the action has already begun. It hasn't, though, and in a sense, it never does. Perhaps when Abe ventures into Josh's seedy world in search of his friend Igor? How about when he flaunts his lack of faith during shiva? Maybe now, when Abe visits and then sleeps with Josh's girlfriend, Jill, a $600-a-fling prostitute? Now, as his relationship with surviving older brother Ben becomes strained? No, in fact: at none of these points does Abe cross a threshold over which he cannot return. Each of these things occurs, but seemingly independently of the others, and without a web of interlinking causes and effects, they remain vignettes.

The film is perhaps most hampered by its lack of script. Improvised dialogue often sounds less natural than the "unnatural" act of recitation.The cast mostly overcome that, albeit at the expense of the story: they can't overcome how little their exchanges advance the plot, especially at important moments.

Within the expectations of the film, for example, the confession Abe makes to his dead brother's prostitute ex-girlfriend ("I'm Josh Polonski's brother") couldn't be more important, but the words have no impact whatsoever. When Abe goes on in later scenes to act as if they did, you can't help but feel that the improv and the storyboard are gravely at odds - or are we meant to think Abe's insane? And because the dialogue doesn't give a sense of building causality, the action seems random. In a random narrative universe the viewer can't experience anticipation, and the capacity for tension is lost. At no time until the very last scenes, for example, does Abe do something which he can't undo. Now, trapped by the consequences of his actions, it seems, he will have to struggle until the situation is righted. It took us a long time to get there, but we have at last achieved an irreversible moment in the plot: now something will happen. Instead, the film ends.

I liked I Am Josh Polonski's Brother. There are lots of sympathetic characters, and plenty of good acting. Richard Edson, Meg Hartig, and Etta Barkus are all terrific. The camera work is unusual and appealing, and some of the "slice of life" moments are undeniably engaging: shabbas dinner at the Polonski family apartment, or the eating of the egg after Josh's funeral. Sadly, though, there is little or no tension, and watching it becomes a bit of an effort, like staring at a beautiful painting for longer than is natural.

Highball (1997)

Disappointing waste of a great cast.

[15 September 2003]

What a shame this movie was so dull. So many great actors, some doing a terrific job. Chris Eigeman, for example, is a master of this type of intimate, low-budget film which, with far less editing than is seen in slicker productions, is at times closer to theater than to Hollywood; his delivery is natural and his body conveys enough that the extensive cutting it takes to make some actors come alive can be safely dispensed with. For pure fun, the great Peter Bogdanovich spoofs the insider impersonations that are a well-known aspect of his conversation.

Sadly, such quality is not the standard. John Lehr starts out painfully over the top as Miles, and Carlos Jacott as Felix is barely believable until the bar scene well into the middle of the film - although he redeems himself with a strong and funny performance in the last ten minutes of the film. The couple whose apartment is the only setting are an unlikeable and unconvincing pair much given to excesses of acting that bring out rather than overcome the weaker points of the script.

In fact, unlikeability is at the center of the film: Felix, about whom what little plot there is revolves, is known to all but his 'best friend', Jessie, as a louse; Jessie's wife describes Felix accurately as an asshole. Unfortunately few characters are more sympathetic, and only Eigeman's Fletcher, who rarely appears, is pleasant enough to carry the viewer past the stilted dialogue and melodramatic hamming that are the movie's basic features.

Real Women Have Curves (2002)

Real Movies Have Scripts

[27 June 2003]

Good acting and a nice idea betrayed by a script that continually states and re-states the obvious, is full of holes (wouldn't the father have offered the money to save the factory considering that both his daughters and his wife depended on it for their livelihood?) and talks down both to its own characters and to the audience. All in all a tremendous disappointment. Nowhere near as good a film about the Latino community of America as I Like It Like That, which I recommend instead.

Girl, Interrupted (1999)

Book, Discarded

[1/10 · 29 January 2003]

Not only a bad film, but perhaps a dangerous one, this movie betrays the serious and thoughtful book on which is was based in favour of asylum-as-summer-camp hijinx. The author's original critique of the system is replaced with a knuckle-under philosophy that plays into the hands of a system that the book shows may or may not have created some of the very diseases it claims to treat. Apart from a great performance by Angelina Jolie, Girl, Interrupted has nothing to recommend it and much to its discredit.

The Business of Strangers (2001)

A strange business

[3/10 · 26 January 2003]

Watch the first fifteen minutes for Stockard Channing's subtle but amazing portrayal of a woman alone at the top and afraid of tumbling; strong and intelligent but uncertain of her choices and seemingly alone in the world but for her therapist, secretary, and other employees, she cannot tell success from disaster. Clever editing keeps us in the dark, too, and her promotion is at first easily mistaken for a lover's rupture. The pleasure of her good fortune is soured when we realise that she has no lover, just a job.

The quality of the plot plummets inexplicably with the arrival of Julia Stiles' character, and the quality of the acting plummets just as violently with the arrival of Julia Stiles. It's not entirely her fault: she gets nothing but ridiculous lines. The story that ensues is a betrayal of the movie's first quarter-hour: there is no real story to speak of, just a series of picaresque moments, and the gentle but invasive probing of character that was promised is dismissed in favour of a meaningless attack on someone's life. Murder, especially of the wanton variety, is the thing Hollywood uses to give a film a sense of intellectual depth when it has none; ironically, it is fast becoming the thing independents use when they are scared of being thought dull and overly-intellectual. Sadly, it didn't improve this film.