dir. Chris Columbus
So this one time, a guy was trying to hit on a friend of mine in a bar and she was having none of it. My friend wears glasses and looks younger than she is. The would-be suitor (actually an aggressive drunk) had the kind of speech impediment that makes people not be able to say the letter "r." And so, when my friend kept on ignoring him, he came up with the following gem of a thwarted pickup line, which has been repeated so many times by now as to have become somewhat legendary: "You look like Hawee Pottoo."
I mention this story in the context of a film review for two reasons: (1) because there is more humor in it than in the two Harry Potter films combined and multiplied by a billion, and (2) because the inept flirt at the bar exemplified the same critical lack of self-knowledge that makes the new film, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, such a thunderous bore. The plot is some garbage about destiny and magic and spiders and snakes. Only a kid could stand it, but no kid worth a damn is going to want to sit through a 161-minute movie in which nothing exciting or funny happens, and in which our hero is never truly jeopardized. Harry is just a charmed little guy who gets everything he wants and always saves the day. I call that bowing. SEAN NELSON
The Weight of Water
dir. Kathryn Bigelow
Sean Penn is a poet with a mustache. Catherine McCormack is his photojournalist wife. Josh Lucas is his brother. Elizabeth Hurley is the brother's über-flirtatious girlfriend. All four congregate on the brother's sailboat for a bit of sexual tension and artistic/historical speculation with a dab of violence (a little Knife in the Water, a little Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) in this flawed-but-worthy Kathryn Bigelow movie. The boat party coincides with McCormack's assignment to photograph the scene of a grisly 19th-century multiple murder. This story, crosscut with the present day, offers the great Sarah Polley and the late Katrin Cartlidge as Norwegian settlers trying to make a life on a remote New England island. Needless to say, the murder is solved anew, the bizarre love quadrangle is put to the test, and some protracted parallels between the two narratives are drawn. What distinguishes the film--aside from top-flight acting--is the war of atmospheres that Bigelow sets in motion. The boat scenes move from sun-drenched and lusty to stormy and tempestuous as emotions flare. Meanwhile in the 1800s, all is puritanical restraint and suppressed desire ready to explode. When it does, the results are predictable, but satisfying nonetheless. SEAN NELSON
Horns and Halos
dir. Suki Hawley and
Michael Galinsky
This gripping video documentary follows the tortured path of a hack author who writes a critical biography of George W. Bush, and in the process, summons the demonic force of fate until he is a total wretch, unemployable and utterly discredited. Originally published by a reputable house, the book Fortunate Son (the one that claimed W. had been arrested for cocaine but listed no sources) was an instant bestseller in 1999, but was recalled when it was discovered that author J. H. Hatfield had spent time in jail for attempted murder. A few weeks later, the book was picked up by an independent, punk rock pseudoanarchist press, and so began Hatfield's descent into indignity. The movie chronicles the dopey passion of the new publisher, the mounting frustration of Hatfield, and the eerie sense of doom that enshrouds their efforts to get this specious piece of unsubstantiated journalism out into the world. The question that still burns as the credits roll (following an ending as chilling as any '70s conspiracy thriller) is why, if the book, author, and publisher are each such a joke, the campaign against them all feels so ominous, and so concerted? SEAN NELSON
Stray Dog
Drunken Angel
dir. Akira Kurosawa
Fri-Sat Nov 15-16
at the Varsity
The noir of noirs, Stray Dog (1949) follows a young detective's desperate search to recover his lost gun before the criminal who stole it uses all six bullets. Toshiro Mifune, playing the detective (the first role of his life), demonstrated his willingness right from the beginning to explore unattractive, even repulsive sides of the characters he played. Akira Kurosawa had already made a dozen films before this one, some of them quite wonderful, but here he hits his stride. For Kurosawa, casting the protean, vivid, and utterly wild Mifune must have been like Michelangelo finding the statue in the stone. It was in some sense there all along, but only a great artist could liberate it.
Drunken Angel (1948) is a wrenching noir drama about a sick gangster and an alcoholic doctor, acted by one of the great film pairings, Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura. If they were surfaces, Mifune would be convex and Shimura concave; if they were textures, Mifune would be brassy, Shimura would be pith; if they were colors, Mifune would be red and black, Shimura would be tawny gray; if they were animals, Mifune would be a mangy panther, Shimura would be an old coon dog. Their interactions in this movie, the superb roles Kurosawa and Keinosuke Uegusa wrote for them, are a high point of the 45 movies they made together. BARLEY BLAIR
Red Beard
dir. Akira Kurosawa
Sun-Mon Nov 17-18
at the Varsity.
This bracing, wide-ranging story is about a young doctor (Yuzo Kayama) and an old doctor (Toshiro Mifune) in a public clinic, how each learns from the other and from their patients. Although every moment of the film is enjoyable and the ending seems happy, it's difficult to grok; it reminds me of another movie of Kurosawa's, his mysterious final film, Madadayo, but nearly everybody (except me) hates Madadayo while nearly everybody (including me) loves Red Beard. Both films seem to be struggling to teach a lesson, but they are so existentially complex that we leave them unable to summarize what we feel we have learned. Not necessarily a bad thing. BARLEY BLAIR
The Bad Sleep Well
dir. Akira Kurosawa
Tues Nov 19 at the Varsity.
As you will gather from the title, this is a rather dark film, a story of corruption, murder, and revenge, if not actually based on Hamlet then nonetheless having many interesting parallels. Toshiro Mifune plays a young corporate functionary out to destroy the executives who killed his father; human feelings complicate his strategies and render him less able than the bad, who... well, who sleep awfully well, don't they? The opening 20-minute wedding scene is among the most famous in the history of film. BARLEY BLAIR
