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Also this issue: Blax Power Tiny Spies Clod, James Clod |
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August 8-14, 2002
movie shorts
BLOOD WORK
Clint Eastwood has come to know himself. The Aging Clint knows his limits, his strengths, and his particular appeals as a movie star, actor and filmmaker. In Blood Work, he’s at it again. As Terry McCaleb, the hero of Michael Connelly’s L.A.-based detective novels, he’s an FBI profiler who, within five minutes, has a heart attack while chasing a particularly ornery serial killer. “Two years later,” he has a new heart, courtesy of surgeon Anjelica Huston, and a new case, courtesy of Wanda De Jesus, whose murdered sister provided him with that heart. He also has a friendly neighbor (Jeff Daniels), an enthusiastic supporter on the force (very sharp Tina Lifford), and a less happy cop (Paul Rodriguez) on his case. Though the plot is too neat and predictable (its structure is literary, with much play on the word and concept of “blood”), the look is shadowy-lush, the editing efficient and the Eastwood character at once grand and vulnerable. Okay, he feels most “alive” when he’s working (he calls it “connected”), he gets the beautiful girl (contrived), but when he takes off after a car with a shotgun, he’s Dirty Harry, old and still really mad (entertaining). The Aging Clint has also learned from his own past (say, True Crime), here using racial differences and identifications not only as “color,” but as complexities of plot and ideology. --Cindy Fuchs (AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; Ritz 16; Roxy; UA Grant; UA Riverview)
HAPPY TIMES
To call Zhang Yimou’s oeuvre unpredictable would be an understatement -- following his early ’90s run of elegant, politically pointed period pieces (all starring the magnificent Gong Li), Yimou was reined in by the Chinese government, and emerged as a social realist despite the whiff of propaganda, Not One Less and The Road Home were powerfully conceived and well-executed, if they lacked the aesthetic charge of a movie like Raise the Red Lantern. Now, with Happy Times, Yimou has reinvented himself as a comedian, although only in a classical sense. Zhao Benshan plays an unemployed factory worker, also named Zhao, who’s so desperate to find a mate that he continues to call on a portly, selfish woman (Dong Lihua), even after it’s clear she’s only out to exploit him for as long as possible. This partly involves foisting her blind, unloved stepdaughter Wu Ying (Dong Jie) off on the eager-to-please Zhao, who goes to ever-greater lengths to convince her (and through her, her stepmother) that he is, in fact, a well-off hotel owner -- among other things, setting up a phony massage room in an abandoned factory, where Wu Ying is paid with fake money while taped street sounds play in the background. Happy Times is the comedy of the disenfranchised, and therefore bittersweet -- it harks back to The Story of Qiu Ju in its unflinching depiction of metropolitan poverty and its discontents. Happy Times doesn’t aim for greatness, but it achieves truth on a small scale, in itself a kind of miracle. --Sam Adams (Ritz Bourse)
THE KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE
Less a documentary than an illustrated autobiography, this moving picture version of Robert Evans’ 1994 memoir was originally conceived as a Vanity Fair DVD giveaway, and it has that magazine’s glossy, celeb-sucking tone (and none of its occasional journalistic edge). Evans didn’t direct -- Brett Morgen and Nanette Burstein (On the Ropes) did -- but it’s as self-serving as if Evans had hand-drawn every frame. Luckily, no one knows how to serve himself like Evans, the outsize Hollywood personality who was at Paramount’s helm during its 1970s heyday: Love Story, Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown and both Godfathers came to fruition under his watch. (A true mogul, Evans seems more proud of the first picture’s financial success than the latter’s Oscars.) Evans, whose smoked glasses and laconic drawl were swiped by Dustin Hoffman for his Wag the Dog performance -- a hilarious credits sequence features footage of Hoffman imitating the producer on the set of Marathon Man -- made himself a legend by always acting as if he was one, and Kid reproduces that surface perfectly; it just never gets any further beneath it than Evans chooses to go. --S.A. (Ritz Five; Ritz 16)
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