Reviews

I approach period pieces with trepidation at best, terror at worst. Much to my surprise ‘Angels and Insects' turns out to be a remarkable film. The plot is established early on, and moves in wonderfully understated and subtle ways, staving off boredom at every turn.

William Adamson (Mark Rylance) plays a commoner, a scientist, just returned from an expedition from the Amazon where he was studying the indigenous wildlife. During his return voyage, he survives a shipwreck but his specimens and research do not. His patron (sponsor?) is sympathetic to the protagonist, and sympathetic to the sciences, so employs him to live at the estate in exchange for tutoring the family's youngest daughters. The drama unfolds through William's relationships with the patron's older children: one son, three daughters.

As requisite of any Victorian story, the costumes are breathtaking. Particularly visually amusing are the often-matching outfits of William's students.

The acting is brilliant, as one would expect from a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company in Mark Rylance and Oscar/SAG Award Nominee, Kristen Scott Thomas. Douglas Henshall as Edgar Alabaster, the elder son in the household, is a real surprise. But excellent acting aside, what gives these talents the room for such rich expression lies in the script by Phillip and Belinda Haas. Having not read the book on which it was based (Morpho Eugenia), I have no idea how much of the dialog has been transplanted and how much written anew. Regardless of where the credit belongs, there is a phenomenal depth in the lines of the dialog. These capture the repression and secrecy both of the era in general and the Alabaster house in particular exquisitely. There are times when the literary satisfaction is similar to that of reading a well-constructed novel. Very impressive for a movie.

In all, ‘Angels and Insects' is a rich romantic drama whose dialog buoys the plot through the treacherous Victorian Age. I'm still looking for the ‘Angels' though.

As a comedy, ‘Bringing Up Baby' is truly remarkable. The classic screwball, slapstick antics that I know and love from Bugs Bunny and the like play so crisply between Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant.

However, I have one particular peeve with the film. Susan (Katherine Hepburn) is an absolutely loathsome character. She represents everything I've come to dislike in people. Susan is manipulative to the point of cruelty. Rude and impatient. She never stops talking. And what's worse she does countless terrible things to David (Cary Grant), who happens to be engaged, in the name of love. Before getting lost in a tirade about the ills of this character, I should give her some credit.

The juxtaposition of David and Susan is what makes the comedic sparks of this film happen. David's frustration ebbs and flows so perfectly, he is a pristine object for the viewer's sympathy. The emotion in David that doesn't move or grow as well as it may is his love for Susan. In the end of the film, David and Susan end up together. There is no development of David's feelings (apart from frustration) towards Susan whatsoever.

It's funny, yeah. But the romantic subplot was distracting and infuriating. How could David fall for Susan? She ruins everything, and isn't even that coquettish in doing so. Without this weak attempt at romance, this would have been a quintessential buddy comedy. Two unlikely companions engage in hilarious antics. Why just because they're a man and a woman do they have to fall in love?

When I hear the term ‘art flick', I think beautiful camera work, intriguing exaggerated characters and little or no plot. Personally, I really have to be in the right mood to enjoy an ‘art flick'. I wish someone would have told me this was an ‘art flick'.

There is no defensible plot to this movie. It is a series of vignettes that take place in Xenia, Ohio. These come together to form a stark, bleak, often offensive portrait of a rural, `white trash' town torn in the wake of a tornado attack. `I saw a girl fly through the sky and I looked up her skirt.' Fortunately, for the intrepid, bold, patient viewer, many, maybe most, of these scenes follow a pair of characters, Solomon and Tummler. Solomon's could range anywhere from 8 to 15. Tummler looks a bit older. Both are dirty, ignorant except in voiceovers, and fairly ugly: the perfect portal into Xenia, a town rife with filth, and a surface ugliness that on further examination shows some insight and beauty.

‘Gummo' contains a healthy dose of cat symbolism. Solomon and Tummler kill stray cats and sell them for spending money. (Money that apparently gets spent on retarded whores, glue to sniff, and whipcream, for the nitrous oxide, natch.) Dot (Chloë Sevigny) and her sisters own a cat that may or may not be pregnant and is later lost. The cat, Foot Foot, is presumably killed by Solomon and Tummler, but nothing can be explicit in an art flick. This narrative about cats can be at best described as a subplot, a subplot to no main plot. My initial reaction to the cats is that they are a parallel to the citizens of Xenia. They amble aimlessly, just getting by, until one day their number is up, and the tornado comes to town.

eh, who knows. it's art, make up your own mind.

All in all, my best advice concerning this movie, sorry, film is caveat emptor. It is brilliant and beautiful, but you have to be ready to work for it. Where ‘Kids' held your hand through the tumults of The City, all you get from ‘Gummo' is some skinny, shirtless kid wearing bunny ears riding a skateboard.

I've found sitting down to write on `American Gigolo' very difficult, and it took a while to put my finger on why. I don't care about the flick in the slightest. It's not bad, just solidly mediocre. If it weren't for writing this blurb, it's a movie that I would remember having seen, but all the plot points would seep out of my head in a matter of weeks.

The most interesting aspect of the movie has nothing to do with its on-screen content. It's amazing that the same man, Richard Gere, has starred in the two canonical `hooker with a heart of gold' movies of the past 20 years. I am referring to this and `Pretty Woman', of course. This would be particularly standard Hollywood typecasting if it weren't for the fact that Gere played the hooker in `American Gigolo' and the flipside, the suitor in `Pretty Woman'.

The camera work is fairly uninteresting, but doesn't detract from the story. There is a vain attempt to set the mood of the entire piece by casting many shots in blue, often through shadows of Venetian blinds. The `blue movie' analogy is just heavy handed.

Julian Kaye (Richard Gere), gigolo extraordinaire, is framed in a murder case. This plotline is uninteresting, unbelievable and distracting from the love story between Julian and Michelle Stratton (Lauren Hutton), a (state?) senator's wife. It's clear that the murder is just a device so that Julian has nowhere to turn but to Michelle. Julian's career is ruined, but love conquers all, right?

The chemistry between Hutton and Gere is wonderful. If it weren't for the murder subplot, this could have been a great romantic drama. As it is it's a weak coming of age story of a naïve gigolo finding love.

Don't get excited about watching this movie, but if you want an interesting combination of movies try these. Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo followed by American Gigolo. The former will put a lovely comedic spin on the latter. American Gigolo followed by Pretty Woman. Imagine Gere in Pretty Woman as Julian Kaye plus ten years.

I just read a few comments on this film, for inspiration and direction. Some people call it one of the finest movies Hitchcock made. I disagree.

The plot is similar to `North by Northwest' in that is centers on an innocent man, unwittingly dragged into a spy game. Without spoiling much of the plot, suffice to say the protagonist, Richard Hannay, played by Robert Donat, is abandoned within a world too powerful for him with few and unlikely allies.

Were it not for the addition of the amazing character of Mr. Memory (`Am I right, sir?'), I would have been somewhat disappointed by the film as a whole. Mr. Memory has the uncanny ability to remember many facts with incredible recall and detail. In fact, he memorizes fifty new things a day. The one dimensionality of only being shown Mr. Memory while he performs is given depth by his charm and sharp wit in response to countless hecklers.

There's an interesting bit of pastoral symbolism, which may or may not have been intentional. Hannay is saved from his pursuers once by a hymnbook and a second time by a flock of sheep. I haven't set decided what to make of this, but it's an interesting conversation piece if nothing else.

If you've already seen `North by Northwest', you stand to be satisfied to seeing its predecessor, or disappointed by a slightly less suspenseful variant on the theme. If you haven't, it's definitely worth your few hours.

To be honest, I picked out this movie at Blockbuster tonight because it shares its title with an album by Tricky. (More accurately, the film lent its title to the album, but that's neither here nor there.) The image of James Cagney on the box cover was an immediate turn-on. The fact that it's a gangster flick, particularly a '30s gangster flick, sealed the deal.

I believe this is the first James Cagney movie I've ever seen in full. Much of the film was like remembering a dream. The character of James Cagney (not Rocky Sullivan, his role, but James Cagney) is one that is embedded in our common American psyche. From his wide flat face and slightly exaggerated good posture to the nasal twang of his voice and dated vernacular like `whadaya see? whadaya hear?', and `in a pig's eye!', James Cagney, the man, has been caricatured countless times. He is an American archetype, a persona I know from the Muppet Show, and Sesame Street, from Saturday Night Live, and un-attributed, nudge-nudge-you-know-who-I'm-doing impersonations on late night talk shows.

The film itself is a wonderful testament to the fame and allure of The Gangster. Rocky Sullivan, after being released from jail, returns home where he finds a boyhood brother-in-arms (now a priest), a girl he used to flirt with, and a group of teenage fledgling wise guys. He and the priest become fraternally, diametrically opposed. He gets the girl, Ann Sheridan. The pubescent gang falls in love with him. With his courage. With his money. With his power. With his gangsterdom. This idolatry is the most interesting point of the film coming down to a tantalizing, ambiguous finale.

Only adding to the pleasure that this movie brings are Humphrey Bogart as one of Cagney's associates, a John Candy look-alike as one of Bogart's middlemen, and two child actors who are the spitting image of young James Cagney and young Ann Sheridan.