Reviews

The first time I watched Delovely, I found it annoying. Since then, it's become a movie that I watch regularly, one of my favorites. Why? Well, Kevin Kline's performance strikes me as a labor of love. That helps a lot. Ashley Judd's performance as Linda Porter is more one- dimensional, but she delivers perfect support. But what really draws me to Delovely again and again is the music. I've not been a big Cole Porter fan. I tend to find his rhymes trite, his 'sophistication' doesn't come off for me, and his melodies are too Broadway. But Delovely sold me on song after song. The film contextualizes the songs beautifully, so that their meanings become a little more apparent, and then the singers really deliver! I've noticed that the music in Delovely doesn't seem to review well. I think that must be because reviewers expected more historical authenticity. Instead what they got was contemporary pop stars freely re-interpreting Porter's songs, sometimes against expectation, with resounding success. Elvis Costello turns "Let's Misbehave" into an anthem. Alanis Morisette gives "Let's Do It" bite and energy. Sheryl Crow turns "Begin the Beguine" into a dirge.

Long before I saw Delovely, I had a chance to hear Cole Porter on record singing a song or two. I'll never forget my reaction - "so that's how those songs are MEANT to be heard!" I think this was on a tribute album, and it really started my re-appraisal of Porter's music, which I suspect has typically been miss-interpreted. Porter's songs have a lot of emotional darkness in them, that has often been lost in translation. You hear it when Porter sings them, and you hear it in Delovely. It's that dark undertone that makes the rhymes work, makes the humor funny, makes the sparkle sparkle and makes the songs kick. Whoever was the creative force behind Delovely seems to have understood that they weren't just creating the average biopic, that they were reinterpreting a misunderstood artist.

And they made the right choice when they asked Kevin Kline to set the tone for the film by singing and playing in a way that caught the dark undertone in Porter's singing and playing. I've never seen Kline rise to the occasion like this. He's always good, of course, but in Delovely, he seems to channel Cole Porter, so that one doesn't consider for a moment whether he looks like Cole Porter, acts like Cole Porter, sounds like Cole Porter, or whether the incidents portrayed are historically accurate. He does something far better. He is Cole Porter. For a night. In a play about Cole Porter.

No Oscar for Kline, of course. The truly great performances never get Oscars. No doubt they'll give him a make-up Oscar for some dreary performance in the future. It's what they usually do.

I don't know if I'll ever consider Delovely a great movie. I just don't quite accept the artifice in which Porter discusses his life with Gabe in some kind of All That Jazz derived purgatory. I recognize why they did this, and I think it works fairly well, but I can't quite get over the fact that it introduces an extraneous character who never really becomes integral to the story - even if that is sort of the point.

Doesn't matter so much though. Above all, I love the music, and most especially, I love Sheryl Crowe's version of Begin the Beguine. Of all the numbers, this is the one that dazzles. Crowe seizes the song and throttles it, combining a wildly over the top Torch Song delivery with a stunningly glitzy and sleazy physical performance, in a dress that is just a little more see-thru than you really want it to be. Sounds terrible, but it works. There could not be a better tribute to Cole Porter's mad alchemy. For me, Crowe's version of Begin the Beguine, however out of step with tradition, is definitive.

Some movies have a lot of B qualities, but are still interesting or even fascinating movies. Johnny Mnemonic, for example. Groove. Seamless is one of those. It certainly deals in its share of ridiculous clichés. But it also has some very touching moments that have to do with the search for family amongst those at loss for family. Anyone looking for a true articulation of Rave culture is looking in the wrong place with this movie, which only tangentially touches on that. It's a fantasy, not a realistic movie, though it has elements of realism. The real weak point in the movie is, perhaps surprisingly, Shannon Elizabeth's performance. The romance between her and the lead character is very weak, even though it plays a central role in motivating the ultimate tragic outcome.

It was my first time seeing Robinson on film. He's fantastic. I'll watch anything with him in it. He's intense, fluidly expressive, carries a film with ease and chews scenery like no-one else I've EVER seen!

The movie itself was, in my opinion, an interesting study in power, in the idea that power depends not only on intimidation, but also on love and loyalty; and that leadership is part inspiration, party intimidation and part entertainment.

Also interesting: Little Caesar has two parts. There is a prologue which takes place in a diner in the form of a conversation between Robinson and his crony, Douglas Fairbanks Junior, which really is a short film in itself, a beautiful short film in fact - a perfect little film. One really doesn't need to watch the rest of the movie, which basically reprises the themes of the prologue, throws in lots of Robinson scenery chewing and features production values not up to the quality of the acting and writing (unlike the prologue, which is perfectly set and filmed and where Fairbank's more restrained acting plays off Robinson perfectly).

All in all, quite an outing at the (home) theater!

You have to imagine a little bit, what would have been, had Star Is Born not been slashed by crazed studio edits, but this movie is a revelation. Judy understood, better than anyone in film history, in my opinion, how to weave acting, singing and dancing together into a whole that transcends the parts. To put it differently, she knew how to put her soul on film. Mason supports this with astonishing grace, and Cukor seems to know that he is onto something special.

You'd think that, having paid her dues the way she did, the studio system might have taken a chance on putting out Garland's magnum opus in the right form, despite it's length. They probably wouldn't do it today, sad to say.

In The Departed, a legendary director came together with a legendary actor and the results will be, I'm sure, legendary. Legendary, I say, as a tribute to the gigantic excesses of possibly the greatest ego Hollywood has ever produced, Jack Nicholson.

Think about it, for a moment. The Departed features a stellar cast, including five of the best known actors working today: Nicholson, Dicaprio, Sheen, Wahlberg and Baldwin. Four of those five, including the hottest young actor in years, Dicaprio, subordinated their egos to the greater good of the project, headed by Marty, who has directed handfuls of the best known and most influential films of the last thirty years. One actor did not choose to subordinate his ego. One actor decided to turn The Departed into yet another tawdry and showy funeral monument for an acting career that died decades ago, dispelling the hopes for rebirth of his career that a few more nuanced recent performances have encouraged.

I read somewhere that Nicholson has boasted that he did no research for his character in The Departed. That's a funny thing to do, Jack, considering that The Departed is as wedded to the cultural specifics of its locale as any movie I've ever seen.

Many reviewers have complained that The Departed lacks the frenetic energy expected from a thriller, especially a thriller modeled on Infernal Affairs. I think they are missing the point, in that, while Marty blatantly teases us with thriller energy, backed up by the hard push of Boston irish punk, Marty's real point in The Departed seems to be that all the wild action of his cops and robbers ultimately sinks into a larger passivity, a miasmic sense that nothing positive can be accomplished, that no sacrifice and no outpouring of brutalism and violence can ultimately accomplish anything.

But if that point doesn't come across to viewers the way it should, the fault is ultimately Marty's. Marty, it was your job not to hire a one-man artistic trainwreck like Jack Nicholson, or to find a way to wring a great performance out of him if you did hire him. If you really believe that it takes a monster ego to play a monster ego, then please look back on Daniel Day Lewis' performance as Bill Butcher in Gangs of New York. The opposite is more likely to be true.

A train wreck performance needed a train wreck of a movie. The Departed has the former, by Nicholson, but isn't the latter.

I'm calling for a do-over. With more Boston irish punk, by the way!

David Lynch understands filmaking. The fact that he remains an outsider filmmaker, after a career as studded with great films as Stanley Kubrick's, is a standing accusation of Hollywood, as I'm sure Kubrick's career was. Right now his latest film is out, yet my hometown isn't showing it. I can't believe that. The latest schlock from whoever is there, but not David Lynch's latest.

I keep hearing that Mulholland Drive is hard to understand. I don't get it. I think that, like almost all his films, it's much clearer than the kind of stitched together narratives that seem typical even of many good films. A gal comes to Hollywood, full of dreams - the old cliché. She doesn't do so well, but she does find love, she thinks. She ends up betrayed, on a lot of different levels, perhaps most importantly, by her own hopes, and she kills herself in despair.

I think it's a pretty simple film.

But Mulholland Drive is deep too. It's about the darkness, inside us and outside us, that can drive our lives towards nothingness, but also about the resilience that clings to hope, reaches out for redemption, even when all hope is lost.

Naomi Watts. My God, in view of what she has done since Mulholland Drive, how did she pull off such a magnificent, detailed, emotional, transcendent performance? How did she do it? Well, I guess Lynch played a role in that. But wow.

Mulholland drive is a modern day Wizard of Oz. It lives in a Valhalla of film perfection that few films ever achieve. Watt's character, like Dorothy, seeks the Emerald City and finds that her quest leads to sham and betrayal. But she also finds that what she seeks, she always had, and what she has, no one can take away.

Jon Voight is brilliant in Midnight Cowboy, but Hoffman's performance, though reminiscent of his later turn in Rainman, is the kind of performance that keeps me watching movies. As a portrayal of a New York character, only Daniel Day Lewis' portrayal of Bill Butcher in Gangs of New York comes to mind as comparable, and Day doesn't give his character the emotional depth that Hoffman gives Ratso.

It's typical of Hoffman's way of acting that the actor we tend to identify most with Midnight Cowboy is Voight. I think Hoffman is one of the 4 or 5 best actors in the history of film at playing off the people around him in such a way that he raises their performances far above their normal levels.

Voight's Buck is so naive that he would float out of the film altogether, except that Ratso pulls him down - pulls him down, but also teaches him, a lot about how to survive and, more importantly, how to live.

Midnight Cowboy is a movie about escape that turns into a movie about finding yourself. I think that, as gritty a movie as it is, it has a very beautiful message, that no matter how much a loser you might be (Ratso clearly defines "loser"), if you can find a way to be true to yourself, you are in possession of the secret of life, and you might even be able to share that insight with someone else.

I can't help but compare Midnight Cowboy to Klute, from a few years later, which I think is more like a movie about finding yourself that turns into a movie about escape.

I love Jane Fonda. I see that others found her acting in Klute artless. I found it - not quite there yet. For me, it's Sutherland who has really found his character. Fonda seems to be getting there, but doesn't quite have it. I never forget, not once during the movie, that Bree (her character) is Fonda.

Part of it is that accent. It screams California to me. Maybe the movie would have worked better set in LA? I suppose Bree could be supposed to have moved from CA to NYC, but I don't pick that up as part of her story. I'm not saying that they should have spelled it out. The accent makes me really curious about Bree's journey. It seems so out of place in NYC squalor: too California, too rich, too cultivated. She's come a long way; chasing something, escaping something? She gets into this a little with her therapist. But somehow, I just find Fonda's portrayal not nuanced enough. The movie revolves around Bree's toughness, despair, unfocused hope. But Sutherland's performance is the one that seethes with these things.

What really makes that sad is that Fonda seems to get all the good lines, while Sutherland's character is underwritten!

The cinematography is great. The writing is sometimes brilliant, though the story seems rushed; it doesn't quite seem to know whether it wants to focus more on the mystery or more on giving us insight into the characters' separate journeys as they join together.

This could have been a great movie. It's certainly a good one.

This is one of those movies that is sentimental, without being cloying. AI is another that comes to mind. As a result, it has great emotional depth, even though there are no dramatically emotional scenes. In fact, each ministory involves an important connection and separation that is made, each without fanfare. Each segment has a riveting performance by an actor so deep in character that you wonder how they ever got out! Walken gives what might be his best performance. He makes you feel like you can almost see his soul, but he always just hides it from you.

Roseland is also a wonderful tribute to the joys and despairs that addict people to clubbing, whatever their age and era and talent level. Most dance movies bend over backwards to lend significance to some dancer or pair of dancers, often improbably. Roseland is interested in the way even the most indifferent and untalented of dancers can express themselves somehow wholeheartedly on a dance floor.