Reviews

Three years of obviously hard (but undoubtedly fun!) work went into The Cockettes--and the results are as charming and uplifting as they come. While certainly a dream project given the raw material, the directors went far beyond merely letting the vintage footage speak for itself. I defy anyone to walk out of the theater not feeling a strong sense of joie de vivre (along with a keen desire for some windowpane, perhaps?). An uplifting (for the most part), frequently hilarious reminiscence that doesn't camp out in nostalgia-ville, this is a must-see for anyone who's been a drag queen or hippie, been raised by drag queens or hippies, or just plain adores drag queens and hippies--and creative, exuberant '60s-style, acid-tripped-out theater. Watching a skit like "Tricia's Wedding," an ever-so-fabulous version of that staid Nixon family affair, it's a great reminder that even in an age of Republican despoilers, it's possible for a huge reservoir of creative juice to be oozing around under the surface. GO! See! Enjoy! Take yourself out of reality-based reality for 100 whole minutes!

***SPOILERS*** ***SPOILERS***

Why do films like this get made in the first place? my female companion and I wondered as the credits rolled. We walked out of the theater suspecting that a boiled slab of sole and a carrot stick would have given us more sustenance than this half-baked action-adventure flick. But an $18.4 million feeding frenzy on opening weekend proves that many Americans flock to the movies to watch cars go crash, guns go pop, glass go smash, and John Travolta go ballistic while sporting a wildly unflattering hairdo and regrettable chin-striping.

[contains spoiler]Travolta's Gabriel Shear is not a nice man. A self-styled patriot cut from the same fanatic's cloth as Timothy McVeigh, he believes that the best way to dissuade anti-American terrorism is to scare the s**t out of would-be perpetrators with his ruthless acts. Considered the world's most dangerous spy, Gabriel `exists in a world beyond your world,' acting as a `driven, unflinching, calculating machine.' Sense a little pulp fiction ahead?

To `ensure the American way of life,' Gabriel hopes to persuade one of the planet's greatest hackers, Stan Jobson, to program a worm into a government system. To bait the hook, he recruits his comely partner, Ginger (Halle Berry), whose role is basically to keep us from having to watch Travolta kiss Stan on the mouth or lay around with his breasts exposed in various skimpy outfits.

But the hacker-savant has his own sordid past, having recently been released from Leavenworth for breaking into FBI cyber-surveillance operations. The now-penniless trailer park Texan is trying to keep his nose clean, though the prospect of $10 million and the chance to spend time with his off-limits daughter, Holly (and Halle), turns his head. Believing that Gabriel is in it for the $9.5 billion payoff, Stan has no clue he's engineering anything more than a high-tech bank heist.

As for Gabriel, he's a `patriot,' not a two-bit bank robber. The moolah he targets is part of a DEA laundering scheme, and therefore tainted to begin with, so why not put it to noble use as a slush fund for his terrorism?

From this premise, you can probably extrapolate that the film contains many scenes of explosive violence, vehicular mayhem, machine-gun volley, and buses sashaying through the air.

I won't launch into my tirade about how violence desensitizes us to our humanity, or rant about the lack of redeeming social value here. If you're going to a film like this, you're clearly not looking for much more than a Hummer giving new meaning to the words `drive-up window.' But despite my biases, I still assert that this overblown fish story doesn't even do what it does all that well. Suspense is minimal, character definition happens solely in the press materials, and the few female roles are both terribly written and sadly acted. Halle Berry has been cast solely for her physical attributes (surprise!), while young Holly is such an ACOA stereotype that her cell-phoned cries for help are hard to watch.

The main reason to go see this film is actually Travolta, who brings his usual charisma to a part that is largely one-dimensional, fleshing it out in a way that few could. Besides, there's that PULP FICTION redux hairdo, and his soul patch - something your eyes will be drawn to again and again. Wish I could say the same for the film.

A friend and I were recently discussing how the urge to create often burns more fiercely when it has been suppressed. Such is the theme of Before Night Falls, the biography of Cuban novelist/poet Reinaldo Arenas, whose life illustrates how creativity can flourish even under oppression, and what freedom truly means.

Born in an extremely poor province in 1943, Arenas nevertheless revels in the natural beauty that surrounds him. `The splendor of my childhood was unique because of its absolute poverty and absolute freedom,' he later noted. Clearly a born poet, the boy expresses himself by carving words into the family's trees, much to his grandfather's furor.

When he's 15, Arenas' family moves to Holguin, where the romance of Castro's rebel troops and their attempts to overthrow Batista inspire him to leave home and join the insurrection. Four years later he's acclimating to big city life in Havana and enjoying a job at the prestigious National Library that Communism has awarded him. But alongside Castro's revolution, a concurrent sexual revolution is brewing, and Arenas begins to embrace his homosexuality. He plunges himself into his writing, develops a circle of poets and lovers, and at age 20, writes the first of nine novels, the only one published in his homeland.

By the late 60s, Castro's jackals begin to send artists and homosexuals to concentration camps and suppress their work. Despite the lingering threat, Arenas continues to write outspokenly, and when his second book is censored, he enrages Castro by smuggling it to France for publication.

[plot spoiler?] We watch with horror as this brutal regime harasses, imprisons, and ultimately exiles Arenas to America for having `weak, nonrevolutionary (i.e., homosexual) genes.' He has dared to express beauty, and beauty, as a mentor notes, is the enemy of any dictatorship.

But Arenas' spirit is such that even in a medieval-style prison chamber, amidst the screams and cries, he finds that he has never written so much. He composes letters for the inmates, and when they reward him with cigarettes, he uses the rolling paper to pen his third novel, Before Night Falls.

Director/painter Julian Schnabel (BASQUIAT) has given us a film of many strengths, including the juxtaposition of the fertile natural world against Arenas' suffering at the hands of sadistic oppressors. The film opens with a pan through the treetops, sensually caresses the ocean tides, and when Arenas finally makes it to New York, rewards him with a magnificent baptism of snow falling gently on his face.

It's hard to play a writer. Most of us eschew Stallone-style emoting, and much of our work plays out in our heads and on the page--not the stuff of box office. But Spanish actor Javier Bardem delivers a phenomenal performance as Arenas, infusing him with depth, will and supreme sensitivity. And if you've yearned to see Sean Penn as a Cuban peasant and Johnny Depp in drag (called `Bon-Bon,' no less), here's your golden opportunity.

My wish list for this film would include a more understandable narrator and fewer unexplained incidents. This is another biopic that requires background reading to fully understand what's going on, especially after Arenas arrives in New York. I also would have loved hearing more of Arenas' voice. In the film's most successful passages, the narradore reads from his work, lines like `My grandmother was the only woman I've ever known who could pee standing up and talk to God at the same time.'

But all told, this memorable, `triumph of the human spirit' film, pulsing with Cubanismo, is well worth witnessing.

While watching this fascinating coming-of-age drama set in urban Scotland during the mid-'70s, you can't help but flash on BILLY ELLIOT. But despite many shared parallels, RATCATCHER is much less a feel-good, you-go-boy movie, more an extremely sensitive, sometimes brutally realistic portrayal of a lad with a secret and how he ultimately comes to terms with it. It's a deeper, more emotionally complex film, blessed with a languid tempo and a plethora of symbolic images sure to inspire rumination for weeks to come.

Twelve-year-old James (William Eadie) is living in a Glasgow slum during a months-long garbage strike. The rats are the only ones faring well during this bleak summer, captured in a dark documentary style in which the camera lingers long on surfaces, expressions, symbols. James' Da (Tommy Flanagan) is an unemployed alcoholic whose only use for his son is to fetch beer; his Ma (Mandy Matthews) is the resigned Al-Anon who loves her family but is hamstrung by her hardscrabble existence. The kids play, vent their anger, and even eat lunch in the stinking rubbish heaps.

[plot spoiler] One day while James swims with his friend Ryan in the canal, they play too rough and the boy drowns. As James battles his guilt, we watch the trash bags pile up, the vermin proliferate, and the boy become keenly aligned with the bleakness of his surroundings. We witness all the usual cruelty of childhood-the taunts, bullying, put-downs-but seen through this guilt-wracked boy's eyes, they become almost as unbearable as his growing alienation from himself and his family. Accents are brick thick, but the film thoughtfully provides English subtitles so you can differentiate `p**s off' from `w**k off' from `fook off.'

But even in this wretched environment, small bits of love do surface, breaking ground like flowers through cement walkways. James meets the awkwardly flirtatious Margaret Anne (Leanne Mullen), another sensitive soul, who seeks the local boys' approval by gang-banging them. The pair bond around their respective wounds, and while bubble-bathing with Margaret, James laughs for the only time during the film.

The boy also forms a tentative bond with innocent Kenny (John Miller), dubbed `the wee spastic b***ard' by the other kids because of his extreme love of animals, speech impediment, and some general squirliness that's hard to diagnose. He may be the village naif, but he ultimately discerns the truth of James' situation-and James the truth of his-and both confront each other in ways that allow them to accept reality. Kenny launches the film's most amazing image: a white mouse tied to a moon-bound helium balloon.

James becomes keenly aware of the squalor he lives in as he watches his `half-cut' father, drunk to drooling, slur `I love you' to Ma while Tom Jones rocks the Beeb. But his redemption dream comes in the guise of a new house that a city agency has promised the family. In several beautifully transcendent scenes, James rides the bus to the end of the line, where a spate of such new homes are under construction. He tumbles through the big open field before them, takes a whiz in a brand-new toilet, and absorbed in revelry, kicks a can all the way home.

Driven purely by images and emotional content, RATCATCHER is an auspicious debut by Glaswegian writer/director Lynne Ramsay, whose sensitive eye reminds us how truly excruciating childhood's tortures can be. It's a thoroughly outstanding production, from Rachel Portman's minimalist score to the wonderfully slow pacing to memorable performances by a cast of mostly newcomers.

Bravo.

To truly appreciate this film, you may either have to be French, a mystery lover or a diamond connoisseur, three things I am not. That said, the shadowy, film noir Place Vendôme, set in Paris' haute couture jewelry district, is a relatively well-crafted third film by French writer-director Nicole Garcia.

While I'm also not a huge Catherine Deneuve fan, the 57-year-old famed beauty steals the show in a performance that won her the 1998 Venice Film Festival's Best Actress award. It's a challenging, multifaceted role that she plays with due restraint, making it less maudlin and emotionally charged than it easily could have become.

Deneuve is Marianne, wife of Vincent Malivert (Bernard Fresson, with whom she starred in Buñuel's 1967 film Belle de Jour), owner of one of the most prestigious jewelry shops in the world. Once a gem broker herself, the middle-aged Marianne has fallen into an alcoholic stupor. Her relationship with Vincent is cold and hollow; she has slept at home only 17 nights in the past year, preferring instead to convalesce at various `rest homes.'

Vincent is also a troubled person. He hides the extent of his misery and the fact that his debt-ridden business is quickly going bankrupt. (plot spoiler?) When he intentionally drives his speeding Mercedes into a lumber truck, his desperation is revealed.

Garcia spends the bulk of the picture depicting Marianne's process of recovering from her addiction. Faced with relative penury in the wake of her husband's death, she relearns the art of the diamond deal as she tries to sell a handful of probably stolen gems Vincent has left her. Her turning point comes when she gazes at the stones through a loupe and revels in their inherent beauty. This in stark contrast to the rest of the cast, sundry thugs and swarthy millionaires who view the rocks as nothing more than money in the bank. In fact, one could argue that all concerned are addicts, addicted to their work and financial gain, and suitably jacked up, ruthless and miserable.

This, for me, is the film's most absorbing storyline, Marianne's renaissance and her rapprochement with actions and people from the past. Specifically, after a 20-year hiatus she reconnects with a former lover, the Russian mafia-connected Battisstelli (Jacques Dutronc in a fascinating performance), who had once sorely burned her during a jewelry sale. It's a moving moment, when she finds herself able to let go of her anger toward him, and both characters connect with their fundamental humanity. But again, it's a very subtle strand that Garcia only begins to caress near the film's end. Had she moved such human plotlines to the foreground, the film would have emerged much stronger and more poignant.

But I suppose it's unfair to expect a French film to depict Marianne's reawakening in the hat-tossing style of Mary Tyler Moore. After all, the French did coin the word anomie. Still, I wish the main character's development had become less buried in the film's insistence on utter subtlety and dreariness. I suppose the dark interior shots and seemingly unending rainy days could feel atmospheric if your antidepressant is working particularly well, but mostly they just seemed morose. That aside, Laurent Dailland's cinematography frequently stands out. I still haven't forgotten a wide-angle shot of vertical blinds in a boardroom, nor the splashes of crimson - symbolizing Marianne's suppressed then emerging passion - laced throughout the drear.

The film incorporates many classic noir-ish elements - that is, noir of the 1940s rather than the excessive, violence-parading Quentin Tarrantino variety. In the intrigue over the stolen gems, shadowy figures emerge from the woodwork. Tall, svelte beauties reveal themselves as jewelry sellers, then mistresses, then accomplices in crime. Remnants from the past, seemingly long disposed of, come back to haunt the players in nefarious ways. Truth is stark, brutal and straight, no chaser. And yet the surfaces remain as shiny and sleek as the polished glass boardroom tables at which lives and deaths, fortunes and demises are determined with stone-faced certainty.

There's something of a doppelgänger theme here too, which bears noting. Soon after Vincent's death, Marianne meets Nathalie (Emmanuelle Seigner), a young woman she suspects of being her husband's mistress. The two femmes fatale match their men as they match their hairstyles, frequently mirroring the past and future for each other.

Place Vendôme offers enough to admire that it's worth a look, especially for thriller lovers. However, it does have its share of flaws. The plot gets overly complex and becomes difficult to track in places. Though presumably adding to the air of mystery, the cuts are sometimes so quick that the action becomes confusing.

I also would have preferred more of a focus on the psychological and emotional elements, rather than the wheeling-dealings of taciturn Gallic businessmen, who seem to multiply like champagne bottles at a French wedding. Despite a good dose of suspense in some places, it was tough to care about these rapacious specimens and their greed-driven lives. In embracing her passion and extending her forgiveness, Deneuve's Marianne proves the only character truly worth watching.