Sunshine
dir. Danny Boyle
Nifty sprinting zombies aside, the neatest trick of Danny Boyle’s
28 Days Later was how it went absolutely all out with its
convictions, injecting energy and unexpected grace notes into a
moribund genre. Sunshine, Boyle’s largest-scale film since the
disastrous The Beach, tries a similar trick with another moldy
premise—space mission goes wrong—with equally stunning results. It’s a
trip and a half.
Alex Garland’s script posits a future that might make Al Gore reach
for the Zantac: With earth on the brink of icy extinction, a spaceship
tows a city-sized bomb to the sun in hopes of a quick jumpstart. The
premise may not be entirely original (see, or rather don’t, Chuck
Heston in 1990’s Solar Crisis for further evidence), but it
proves to be fertile ground for serious claustrophobia and some
unexpected philosophical avenues, as the dwindling astronauts
(including dreamy scientist Cillian Murphy, serene botanist Michelle
Yeoh, and Chris Evans, winningly countercast as the most sensible
member of the crew) come increasingly close to their ultimate
destiny.
Boyle handles the flashy set pieces and overall downbeat melancholy
with equal aplomb (when talking with the director recently, he happily
copped to being a fan of John Carpenter’s Dark Star, which did
cosmic cabin fever better than anybody). Still, for all of
Sunshine‘s considerable lean, B-movie virtuosity, the most
impressive part (and what’s made the film stick in my head for nearly
two months now) comes when the narrative jumps the rails in the third
act, with results both quick-cut frenzied and downright lyrical. The term
“visionary” gets batted around a lot when it comes to the sci-fi genre,
but in its final, blazing moments, Boyle’s dazzling, triphoppy space
opera comes closer than most. ANDREW WRIGHT
Talk to Me
dir. Kasi Lemmons
The mystery is this: Why is Talk to Me not a great movie?
It has an interesting story (how an ex-convict became a popular radio
DJ); it’s set in the mid-’60s (the most exciting period in America’s
political history); it has two of the five best black actors in the
world (Don Cheadle, Chiwetel Ejiofor); and it’s directed by the second
most important black female director in all of cinema (Kasi
Lemmons—number one is, of course, Julie Dash). All of the right
ingredients were there to make this movie work—and for its first 30
minutes it really looks like something big is going to happen. But the
moment the second act starts, things slow down and never pick up again.
The majority of Talk to Me is a flatline: neither bad nor
good, neither boring nor interesting, neither brilliant nor dull. We
see Petey Greene (Cheadle) leave prison and get a job on a DC radio
station managed by an educated black man, Dewey Hughes (Ejiofor). We
see his spectacular rise to fame, and his long fall to misery and
obscurity. But somehow we are never drawn into the life of Greene, into
his love affairs, friendships, betrayals, hopes, and failures. It’s not
the actor’s fault (as in his films, Cheadle masters his character), and
it may not be the fault of the director (Lemmons is talented; her film
Eve’s Bayou is almost as rich and thick as Charles Burnett’s
To Sleep with Anger). My guess is the fault lies with the
writing and the cinematography; both are merely functional. The writing
gets this and that point across, and the cinematography is stiff and
steady. With a better script, and more life in the camera, Talk to
Me might have become the movie everybody is talking about. CHARLES
MUDEDE
Read an interview with director Kasi Lemmons
My Best Friend
dir. Patrice Leconte
You know that certain kind of foreign film? The one that just sort
of sits there amiably and gets called stuff like “heartwarming” and
“delightful” on the poster? The type where the trailer features a lot
of shots of people looking tentatively over their shoulder and then
smiling, while Loreena McKennitt warbles on the soundtrack? You know,
the sort of thing that, no offense intended, your mom would like?
The recent SIFF entry My Best Friend fits snugly in the
category above. Which would be perfectly fine and all, except for the
fact that it happens to be directed by Patrice Leconte, the filmmaker
whose previous work—movies like The Man on the Train and
The Girl on the Bridge—displayed a sly, zingy grasp of inner
life. Despite a promising black-comedic concept and the presence of the
dependably wonderful Daniel Auteuil, that inner dimension just ain’t
happening here.
Auteuil plays a stuffy antique dealer whose foundations are shaken
when his business partner refuses to believe that he has an actual
friend in the world. Faced with the loss of a valuable Greek vase
unless he can produce a devoted buddy within the week, he turns to a
gabby, quiz-show-obsessed cab driver (Dany Boon) for tips. You can
guess where it goes from here. (Seriously, you really can.) I’d go into
more detail, but, to be honest, this movie carried me to such a state
of ennui that, god help me, I couldn’t help but wish that a giant
transforming robot would come in and shake the place up. In recent
interviews, Leconte has indicated a general weariness with filmmaking,
stating that he perhaps only has a few more films to go before
retirement. No disrespect to the man, but here’s hoping he keeps this
one off of the final tally. ANDREW WRIGHT
No Reservations
dir. Scott Hicks
Kate (Catherine Zeta-Jones), a fancy New York chef, rules her
kitchen with fury and efficient passion. I know you know the type: No
time for romance! I’ve got far too much inane rhapsodizing to do! I’d
love to not be a bitch, but I’ve got to go steal a deep breath
in the walk-in freezer, and then whip up my next horrible quail
metaphor. “I wish there was a cookbook for life, you know?”
Cookbook for life? Try a recipe for disaster (ho ho!) when
Kate’s sister kicks the bucket, leaving Kate in possession of a sassy
baby-child named Zoe (Abigail Breslin). And for dessert it’s mayhem
brûlée (ta-daaah!) when Kate’s new sous-chef turns out to be not
just wacky (he likes opera), but also a hunk who’s great with kids!
Spoiler: They fall in love and stuff. Whatever.
Zeta-Jones is too impossibly beautiful to be anything other than a
movie star’s wife. I don’t dislike her; I just don’t believe a word she
says. She glides around like some kind of alien jaguar, as if at any
moment she might climb a tree and, like, start eating a toucan or
something. In outer space. A space toucan. What was I talking about
again?
Oh, right. Most of No Reservations (adapted from the 2001
German film Mostly Martha) is dated and boring—therapy jokes,
quirky kids, sensual food clichés, fish sticks. The fun part is
watching Aaron Eckhart (as Nick, the aforementioned wacky sous-chef)
crack Kate and Zoe’s prickly, defensive shells. I used to be
anti-Eckhart (just too much face, you know?), but shit, that
dude is charming. I don’t care if he’s wearing Crocs and kooky pants
and doing something incredibly corny with saffron sauce. I also don’t
care if he reminds me how similar kissing is to eating another person’s
face. Crack my shell, Eckhart! Crack it! LINDY WEST
The Trials of Darryl Hunt
dir. Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg
Deborah Sykes was a 26-year-old copyeditor at North Carolina’s
Winston-Salem Sentinel in the summer of 1984, and one Monday
morning she didn’t come to work. It wasn’t like her to be late. The
editor of the Sentinel sent some staffers to look for her.
They found her car just blocks away from the office and, later that
afternoon, her body. She’d been raped and stabbed to death.
Earlier in the day, police had received a call from a pay phone. The
caller identified himself as Sammy Mitchell and said that he’d seen a
black man and a white woman together in the area where Sykes’s body was
found. A shy, smiling, 19-year-old black kid named Darryl Hunt became a
suspect because he was friends with a local minor convict named Sammy
Mitchell, although, crucially, the person who made that pay phone call
wasn’t Sammy Mitchell at all—it was some guy making up a name off the
top of his head. When the saliva and pubic hair found on Sykes’s body
didn’t match Hunt, police offered him $12,000 to say that his friend
Sammy Mitchell committed the crime. Hunt refused. Authorities told Hunt
that if he didn’t say what they wanted him to say, they were going to
pursue the death penalty against him. Hunt still refused.
So they went after him. There was no physical evidence linking Hunt
to the crime. The only witnesses were an ex–Ku Klux Klansman and a
white hotel employee who chose Hunt in a lineup months after another picture of Hunt appeared in newspapers. The jury—all but one of
them white—convicted Hunt and sent him to jail for life. What I’ve just
summarized is only the first 20 minutes of The Trials of Darryl
Hunt, and only the very beginning of Hunt’s 20-year legal
nightmare, an unbelievable theater of disgust involving smug white
lawyers, lots of Christian racists, ignored DNA evidence, witnesses
who’d been intimidated out of coming forward, gullible TV news
reporters, the North Carolina and United States Supreme Courts, and, at
the end of it all, the actual killer. Every American should see this
movie. CHRISTOPHER FRIZZELLE
Interview
dir. Steve Buscemi
In this remake of one of murdered Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh’s
final films, Steve Buscemi stars as the ridiculously named Pierre
Peders, a journalist in the midst of a career combustion. Reduced to
penning a puff piece on rising ingenue Katya (Sienna Miller), Pierre
arrives for their sit-down in full disgruntled mode, his extensive ego
raging at the reduction of his journalistic importance. Katya is
equally bruised, which makes for a long night of bickering, boozing,
irrational chatter, and extorted secrets. Plus a little making out for
good measure.
Directing his third film, Buscemi uses only a handful of locations
in Interview, which helps to induce a sense of claustrophobia.
The conversation—which is pretty much all the film has to offer—has a
nice rhythm, and often feels entirely natural. What humor there
is—including a smart running gag about the world’s most annoying ring
tone—swings in from unexpected places, as Pierre and Katya chatter
incessantly about just about everything but their honest feelings. And
for a while, surprisingly, the entire mess works.
But as the night stretches on with little to offer but unfinished
arguments and two supremely unlikable main characters, interest can’t
help but wane. Both Miller and Buscemi deliver decent performances, but
so much of Interview is simply watching two assholes bicker
that the ideas the film aims to tackle—combat between interviewers and
subjects, between men and women, between the beautiful and the
muskratty—are overburdened by the unpleasantness of watching, and
listening, to the two leads. Even a pseudo-twist ending falls flat due
to sheer exhaustion. When you come to despise the only faces you’re
given to watch, it’s hard to keep caring. BRADLEY STEINBACHER
