Movies: December 2006 Archives

The odd, unbalanced structure of The Painted Veil becomes apparent early on, when an opening scene set in the lush green wilds of China, where a couple of Westerners sit silent and unperturbed by the falling rain, is abruptly interrupted by a flashback. The film seesaws for a while back and forth between the enigmatic scenes of the man and woman being carried by Chinese men to their ultimate remote destination and a parallel narrative taking place first in London and then Shanghai, which details how the man, a bacteriologist named Walter (Edward Norton), met the woman, a socialite named Kitty (Naomi Watts), and the circumstances of their emotionally spectacular falling-out.

Will Smith suffers so comprehensively at the hands of an uncaring world in The Pursuit of Happyness — his car is towed, his wife abandons him, he’s jailed, and he’s finally kicked out of his apartment — that I half expected, by the final reel, he’d be stricken with consumption, or that his son would be torn apart by wolverines. But, hey, it’s the holidays. And this is a rags-to-riches biopic that’s tailored for maximum inspirational, triumph-against-the-odds potential. It’s based on the life story of Christopher Gardner (Smith), a real can-do type who, according to his official bio, slept with his son at a San Francisco homeless shelter by night while working for Dean Witter Reynolds by day in a training position that paid peanuts (in the film, it’s an unpaid internship).

Like his movie about William Wallace and the one about Christ, Mel Gibson’s unsubtle film about the final days of the Mayans is soaked in blood, sweat and tears. A small tribe of happy-go-lucky hunters lives with their wives and children in a remote village in the Central American jungle. Gibson’s approach to this material is audacious – an opening gambit involving a group of men trapping and killing a tapir, then divvying up various savory and unsavory bits of the animal among themselves, is written and staged almost like a scene that might open a high-school sex comedy circa the early 1980s. (Well, a Mayan high-school sex comedy, anyway.) It’s part of Gibson’s strategy to set the good Mayans — simple villagers, live off the land, mean no harm, etc etc etc — apart from the bad Mayans.

I was walking on 57th Street the other day, heading toward the Hudson River, and noticed the side-street façade of the new Time Warner building, constructed at great expense just off Columbus Circle, for the first time. “It looks just like the Metreon in San Francisco,” I thought to myself. Later, walking down Broadway in Times Square, the glass-fronted building that will house the M&M’s Store caught my eye. “And this looks just like Las Vegas.”

I remember seeing The Double Life of Véronique in the tiny upstairs auditorium (it had previously been the balcony) at the Esquire Theatre in Denver sometime in 1992. There were, I believe, seven people in the theater on a Thursday night. It was the last night of the film's run in Denver, and I had recruited a friend to accompany me that night on the drive from Boulder to downtown Denver. (I had driven in by myself the night before, and was essentially cold-cocked by what I saw, so I knew I had to return.)

Gong Li plus Chow Yun Fat sounds like some kind of superstar pairing, all right. Too bad it comes on the downslope of a precipitous decline in the watchability of director Zhang Yimou's work. Gong is the Empress and Chow her Emperor in this grand soap-opera pageant of color and sound that seems born more from a desire to see how closely Chinese cinema can hew to the high digital standard set by the Lord of the Rings movies than by any honest attempt at storytelling on a human scale.

Notorious for its resolutely sordid look at a woman’s place in the American socioeconomic structure, circa 1933, Baby Face was the film that pushed the movie studios to start enforcing the production code that would, for decades forward, strictly control the content of American movies. Barbara Stanwyck rules — she rules! — as Lily Powers, a sardonic barmaid who, liberated by the chance death of her dominating father and emboldened by the advice of an old German who quotes Nietzsche at her and lectures her on the art of using men but not being used by them, embarks on a quest to sleep her way to the top of a New York City bank.

The pre-Code Waterloo Bridge doesn’t boast early Barbara Stanwyck, but it’s a lot more fun than Baby Face. And auteurists may suspect the reason why — the man behind the camera was no less a heavyweight than James Whale. Granted, when he made Waterloo Bridge he was not yet the James Whale — but it’s said that when he finished this one his studio bosses at Universal were so impressed they gave him the run of the studio to select his next film, and of course he opted to make Frankenstein, casting his Waterloo star Mae Clarke as Elizabeth and working again with ace D.P. Arthur Edeson, who would go on to shoot They Drive By Night, The Maltese Falcon, and Casablanca.

The latest in a new cycle of horror film where the money shots depict beautiful young people getting terrorized, paralyzed, maimed, disfigured, dismembered or simply humiliated is Turistas, which explores cloddishness and xenophobia among the beautiful people traveling abroad. Director John Stockwell made the spunky surfer-girl movie Blue Crush, which boasted some interesting cinematography in and around the water, and a surprisingly large portion of Turistas is dedicated to simply watching a small group of Americans and Australians cavorting, half-naked, on the beach and in the water in Brazil. It turns out that their pale good looks are as good as a target painted on their collective backside — when they strike out on their own, heading away from their tour group, they’re stalked by [SPOILER!] a group of medical opportunists who aim to take them hostage, harvest their internal organs, and redistribute them to needy Brazilians. Vivisection ensues.

Catherine Hardwicke got hired to direct this latest in a long line of Biblio-pics -- probably juiced up to green-light status in the immediate aftermath of Mel Gibson's lucrative Passion play -- based, no doubt, upon her résumé. It stands to reason (doesn't it?) that the director of Thirteen and Lords of Dogtown might be able to bring a new perspective to the story of Mary, mother of Jesus — the ultimate troubled teen. But, beyond one mild, short-lived objection to her arranged marriage to Joseph, there’s not much here that could be construed as revisionism.