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Also this issue: Blax Power Tiny Spies Clod, James Clod |
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August 8-14, 2002
screen picks
Isle of Forgotten Sins/The Baby of Mâcon (Sat., Aug. 10, 7:30 and 9:15 p.m., Prince Music Theater, 1412 Chestnut St., 215-569-9700, www.princemusictheater.org) Say what you like about Andrew Repasky McElhinney's movies -- you have to admire the fella's tenacity. Who else could engineer two Edgar Ulmer-Peter Greenaway double bills inside of a month? After the Chestnut Hill Film Group's Prospero's Books/Strange Illusion twofer comes this even odder pairing: Ulmer's South Seas adventure (starring Gale Sondergaard and John Carradine) and Greenaway's elaborate, ornate, sometimes bewildering essay on the theater of religion (and vice versa). It's not surprising that the only available print of Greenaway's 1993 Baby is adorned with French subtitles -- it was never released (and hardly even screened) in the U.S., and tanked even in Greenaway's native England. Nominally set in France in the 1600s, the film is an overwrought spectacle as theatrical as it is cinematic. Lengthy shots take in tableaux with hundreds of vividly costumed extras; at times the actors even comment with dissatisfaction on the lines they've been given. On the one hand, Greenaway's runaway posturing is sometimes no more than baffling, his dialogue stilted, the movie's gory violence an attempt to provoke the audience by turning its stomach (a frequent Greenaway trick; see The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover). On the other, it's visually stunning, on a level few directors ever have the resources to play with; such pageantry is rarely seen outside the opera house. The story of a famine-plagued medieval town whose hunger for salvation reaches mass hysterical levels, Baby frequently echoes their delusions, and engages in bits of stagy sleight of hand which don't translate well to film. (The child's lines, for example, are all sung by an offscreen voice, which on screen is merely distracting.) But it's hard to regret having witnessed such a monumental display, even if it's no easier to explain its appeal.
Sing-a-Long Grease (Fri., Aug. 9, 8 p.m., $25; Sat., Aug. 10 and Sundays in August at 2 p.m.; Thursdays in August at 7:30 p.m., $18, Prince Music Theater) Looking to re-bottle the lightning of Sing-a-Long Sound of Music, the Prince fires up the T-bird for a monthlong rama-lama-ding-dong, kicked off by an opening night extravaganza featuring a post-film sock hop. Myself, I've heard enough mangled karaoke versions of "Summer Lovin'" that the mere thought of one more is enough to get my D.A. in a tizzy, but it's hard to resist the thought that someone might try and dress up as the movie's title. Or consider this: Two of the movie's stars, John Travolta and Stockard Channing, ended up playing the president and first lady. Now if we could only get Dubya to learn how to change a tire.
McCabe and Mrs. Miller/Gosford Park ($19.98/$26.98 DVD) Somehow Robert Altman never struck me as an ultra-realist, but these two movies, released almost 30 years apart, betray a surprising consistency with regard to historical verisimilitude. On Gosford Park’s disc, writer Julian Fellowes reveals the substantial extent to which the script and the film itself drew on his own British aristocratic upbringing, and on McCabe’s supplemental track, Altman chalks the movie’s revisionist-Western approach up to a desire to reproduce the truth, and not the legend, of frontier life. (That explains, among other things, the absence of cowboy hats.) At this remove, the latter seems as much an anti-Vietnam movie as Altman’s M*A*S*H, with its ruthless teenage killers and complacent townspeople who are stirred to action only too late, and misdirect their energies into protecting symbols while real injustices are committed out of their sight. Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond’s experiment with “flashing” (pre-exposing the film) to achieve a diffuse, sepia look isn’t particularly noticeable on the DVD, but on the print shown at the Prince last week, certain scenes seemed as if they were filmed through gauze, beset by a haze arguably more common to the jungles of Southeast Asia than the mountains of Washington. (Given Altman’s own legendary drug use, it’s intriguing to consider the movie’s depiction of Julie Christie’s world-wise madam, who loses herself in an opium haze rather than intervene.) Gosford Park’s social commentary, though more explicit, still seems tamer -- the British class system’s been dead so long, it’s like kicking a corpse. Flawlessly well-observed, elegantly choreographed, it’s a masterpiece of technique, but there’s nothing as startling as the moment in McCabe when a beaming Keith Carradine is gunned down by a teenager eager to test out his marksmanship. McCabe is set further in the past, but it’s Gosford Park that feels like a relic.
Traffic After Full Frontal, Steven Soderbergh fans need some comforting, and if Sundance Channel's monthlong tribute to his Oscar-winning narcotic epic doesn't do the trick, perhaps the Criterion Collection's recently issued DVD will. Traffic airs several times on Sundance this month, along with all six episodes of the British miniseries that inspired it. (The film, followed by the first two episodes, airs Friday at 9 p.m.; the remaining episodes air in pairs each Friday at 11:30 p.m., or all in a row on Aug. 28, starting at 9 p.m.) Notice how Michael Douglas gets to act the part of the drug czar without making a big deal of his movie-star status, or how the jagged style of the film's Mexico sequences serves the story without drawing undue attention to it. A detailed description of the complex process used to achieve that look graces Criterion's disc, along with a whopping three audio commentaries. (The one by composer and former Red Hot Chili Pepper Cliff Martinez is surprisingly engaging.) Soderbergh seems eminently aware of the film's flaws, particularly the thinness in Catherine Zeta-Jones' character, who fell prey to the director's mania for pacing. (Several deleted scenes which, for once, would have improved the movie, are included.) Still, these are the risks Soderbergh needs to be taking, not farting around with digital video cameras and his famous friends. (One startling piece of news from this weekend's releases: Full Frontal has been so poorly received by critics and audiences that it will almost surely lose money in its theatrical release, despite its tiny $2 million budget.) The Thanksgiving release of Solaris, Soderbergh's big-budget remake of Andrei Tarkovsky's impenetrable sci-fi art flick should tell the tale of whether Full Frontal is just a bump in the road, or a signpost on the way to nowhere.
Stand By Me/Carrie (Tue., Aug. 13, 7:30 p.m., free, Chestnut Hill Free Library, 8711 Germantown Ave., www.armcinema25.com/tuesdaynights.html) The worst thing that ever happened to Stephen King was that his movies turned into prestige pictures: Give me Children of the Corn over Hearts in Atlantis any day. And, like so many other things, it's Rob Reiner's fault. Brian De Palma's Carrie is funky, fresh, and a tad disreputable; Reiner's Stand By Me, adapted from King's novella "The Body" (from the same collection that produced the execrable Apt Pupil) is denatured, plummy, harmless. Maybe it's time for a Salem's Lot remake.
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