Reviews: July 2007 Archives

The following review was originally published July 15, 2004. It seemed appropriate to re-publish it today, with a few minor edits.

Fanny and Alexander, Ingmar Bergman's ostensible valedictory film, is most clearly and obviously about the pleasures of family — even the farting, adulterous and shame-faced family that’s so often exposed here. In that respect, I suppose, it’s an old man’s film. Bergman may identify, to some degree, with the matriarch of the Ekdahls, who is seen early on gazing out her window as her relatives stumbling noisily through the snow outside toward home. She murmurs happily, “Here comes my family.” What surprises, then, is the way the story becomes a sort of fairy-tale-cum-horror-movie – this is a ghost story whose subjects are the living and the dead, magic and imagination and the nature of God.

There are movies within this movie.

Early in Sunshine, the new Danny Boyle movie about astronauts on an earth-saving mission to the surface of the sun -- following on the heels of an earlier, mysteriously failed attempt -- one of the crew members visits an observation deck that gives him a well-framed view of the enormous, burning star his spaceship is approaching. His view of the retina-scorching spectacle is heavily filtered to protect his eyes; he suggests the onboard computer let a little more light in, dons a pair of shades, and absorbs the superheated spectacle. The molten textures and angry fire give way to a blazing whiteness that dilates and spreads into all corners of the theatrical frame, as though the photochemical shadows burned into celluloid were being eaten away, as if by acid, in the light of a purer expression of the very idea of image.

Talk about a disaster movie — this biopic about the 1960s scene surrounding Andy Warhol (Guy Pearce), as seen through the eyes of blueblood ingénue Edie Sedgwick (Sienna Miller), is less a coherent narrative than a whole bunch of bad ideas put together in sequence. Sedgwick’s druggy tumble from the celebrity stratosphere into an unmade bed at the Chelsea Hotel really does feel like a tragedy, even in this limp film, but something about Factory Girl’s vision of the events remains unusually unconvincing. Here, Sedgwick is depicted as an unsuspecting victim of Warhol (portrayed as a sunken-faced near-sociopath compensating for his insecurities by exploiting the more-talented people around him) and a musician named Quinn (played monotonously by Hayden Christensen as a lazy caricature of Bob Dylan circa Blonde on Blonde), both of whom befriend but eventually abandon her.

If you ever felt, as I did, there was some missing backstory associated with the smartly amusing Shaun of the Dead and its somewhat-less-brilliant follow-up, Hot Fuzz, you may be excited to make the acquaintance of Spaced, the consistently ingenious British TV show where director Edgar Wright and actors Simon Pegg and Nick Frost cut their comic teeth. Storywise, it’s no relation to Shaun of the Dead, even though it feels somewhat like a prequel — and it’s a bit thrilling to think of Tim Bisley, the videogame-addicted comic-book artist Pegg plays in Spaced finally given a chance to face the zombies who populate his dreams in a real-world post-apocalyptic showdown.