Reviews

Amanda Plummer continues her tradition of oddball and perfectly drawn characters in Butterfly Kiss. In fact, her extended cameo in Pulp Fiction comes across as somewhat well balanced in contrast to her portrayal of this dented and damaged road weary dominatrix in search of a soulmate on one of Britain's anonymous northern roads.

Thelma and Louise? Well, yes, I suppose, but Butterfly Kiss has more in common with John Huston's little known masterpiece Wise Blood than with Ridley Scott's dust-borne epic of the great American Southwest. There are two women in both movies--but Little Women is not Thelma and Louise cubed.

There are some beautiful loose ends in this one. Why is Plummer's character the way she is? Where's she been? How did this come about? Adding to that is the fact that the accents are thick as steel padlocks and what you should have is a confusing mess. Instead, Plummer pulls this off with such aplomb that you don't care about any of that. What's she going to do next? That's the real question in Butterfly Kiss, and you'll hang on just to find out.

I loved this. Rent it for a couple of days because you'll want to see it a couple of times before you're done with it.

This is a movie about the small scale. What could be more fitting for contemporary Japan?

It's too easy to give Kurosawa his laurels on the strength of the Toshiro Mifune films, his great panoramas of mist and rain, and Fuji, always, shrouded, revealed. Dodesukaden (Dodeska-Den in the US release from Janus) brings you right up into the characters, right into their faces, their homes, their hovels, their dreams. It's billed as Kurosawa's first color film. The composition is phenomenal, really. Each shot, no matter how it moves or how it doesn't, is as wonderfully framed as a painting, as balanced as a beautiful face. The color saturation is complete, and yet they seem to float above the screen rather than clobber you or intrude.

I am astounded by this film. I've never thought of Kurosawa as someone who would know how to handle squalor and the rude life of the bottom of the underclass. I was wrong. There isn't a false step in this picture, from the use of color to the editing to the choice of music and the times it's used. It's as moving a portrait of a community as I'll ever see. Dodesukaden belongs at the top of the canon of Kurosawaa's work, with Ran and The Hidden Fortress next to it.

Remember when you were in grade school and the weird kids down the block were doing something that looked, well, interesting, and your mom told you to stay away? Did you? Did you ever wonder what it was they were up to down there, behind the garage, in the basement of someone's house, over by the bowling alley?

Rent Gummo and find out. Mama wasn't as stupid as you thought.

Here's a movie that took its miniscule budget and really made the most of it.

How? Well, take a look at the looping synchronization. It can't be done well without being expensive, so they do very little of it, and get around the problem by shooting characters from obtuse angles that hide the problem. Color's expensive too, so it's in black and white. And music? You can hear the needle drop on the record.

But the money they spent went in the right areas. The visuals are so strong and the camera placement sometimes so unexpected that you find yourself wondering what it is you're looking at--and then something moves, and the tableau breaks apart into a conventional scene. The opening sequence, a long sfx pan down to the Gimli hospital, going through clouds and angels, evokes the 1940s so well that you halfway expect to see William Bendix in one of the beds. The costuming is strange and the plot seems totally unworkable, and yet it pulls you in and keeps you there, never seems to make a horrible misstep, and at times hits exactly what it's aiming for.

Sure it's an amateur film. But look at the nice smooth camera work, the well-paced editing, the good choices in music for mood. While it's all too easy to cite Cocteau, Blood of a Poet comes to mind often while watching Tales from the Gimli Hospital, thanks to the surprising interruption of the narrative by little bits of surreal magic. You don't walk away from this one saying that it could have been done better--instead, you wonder how it was done so well for so little.

This was easily the best film of 1997.

Morris has tried it all; one camera documentary, for Gates of Heaven; Rashomon tinged storytelling, with The Thin Blue Line; and now, finally, the beautiful and moving Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control.

In the earlier films, the viewer's left with the task of sifting through lots of unedited information to put together his own story from what's been gathered, rather like Ed Wood going through rolls of archival footage to see if there's a movie there. In this one, Morris had a story to tell, and he goes after it with aplomb and purpose. His camera angles are ingenious, his use of slow motion masterful, and the story--that the personality traits that lead to success are the same, regardless of the stripe of the pursuit--comes along gently. Once the connection's been made, he overlaps the voice of one participant over the work of another, and the resonances between all of them become more and more apparent.

Watching Morris come along as a filmmaker is a little like watching a favorite cousin come of age. This movie makes you want to cheer, not only for Morris, but for the cast of misfits he's put on film who've taken their lives and made something of them. These four men are workers. They're not managers, not victims of dumb luck. They're doing these jobs because they love them, and because they love them and work without pause, they've become successful. They're not geniuses. Like Morris, they've merely managed to focus. Morris shows us what a rare thing that is. Bravo.

I know you should be forgiving of an indie. And I am. Believe me, I am.

So never mind the horrid soundtrack, if you can call it that. Never mind the locations are predictable, and the looping is off. Never mind that not all the girls are model quality--after all, they're taking their clothes off, aren't they?

What's unforgivable about this one is the way the director and cinematographer run out of ideas about 20 minutes in. So let's not consult a book or another movie for some ideas--let's just shoot some clouds, and cut away to them repeatedly. Going into a pharmacy and want to show time passing? Clouds. Changing locales? Clouds. Changing days? Hey, you guessed it-more clouds.

It's also not nice to stick your actors on the screen for 20 seconds and give them nothing to do. Our hero spends much of his time staring into a miasma just in front of the camera lens and then, getting a mysterious cue, begins his speech. Mind you, they didn't have a boom mic, so it's looped--and what's the point of leaving him there all that time before the VO begins? Does he not know how to read?

I won't spoil the ending for you, as god knows if you can make it to the end you deserve something, and there's little enough there. Suffice it to say that no one had any ideas for a fitting climax, and that's truly unfortunate in a soft-core porn film.

Pass on this one. Rent Performance again and see the flip side of this completely amateurish effort.

It's interesting to see something as grainy and badly lit as this still bubble to the surface once in a while, particularly in this age of independent films produced on multi-million dollar budgets. This one obviously wasn't; from the outset, with its dated music and hokey effects, you can be sure you're in for low-tech.

What sets Born to Win apart is its solid writing and steady, well-thought out performances. George Seagal, who, strangely, might be best remembered as a cliche on the old Tonight Show, has his character down cold. Karen Black is winning, and with the two of them in the lead, the rest of the movie skims along well. I found myself ignoring the stiff camera work and the Sly and the Family Stone-styled soundtrack to actually watch actors act, to see them sometimes apparently ad-lib entire sequences and do it with gusto.

De Niro is too young for the part in which he's cast, and it shows. He looks like a child and has none of the edge we associate with his later performances. By Taxi Driver he'd toughened up, lost the baby-fat and the boy-next-door haircut. Born to Win should be the movie that argues against Seagal and Black being marginalized in film history as also-rans--Robert Downey Jr. and Ben Stiller would both do well to take a look at this before they try another independent, just to see what people of their caliber were doing 30 years ago with nothing more than a cheap camera, a couple of lights and a boom mic. Well done.