Category Archives: indie

Mulholland Drive

Posted on November 7, 2002

Tivo used the following description of this film: “An aspiring actress in Los Angeles for an audition with a young director helps the amnesiac victim of an automobile accident.” Now, I realize they have limited space but that’s about the least useful description I can imagine for this one. At first, I was going to end this write up with the previous two sentences but I’ll go a little deeper.

Simply put, Mulholland Drive is one of the stranger movies of the past few years. Compelling, raw, surreal, emotional, vivid, sensual, sure, but strange. I couldn’t even begin to explain the plot to you. Things happen on screen, and they seem to be connected to each other, like a word that’s just on the tip of your tongue but you can’t say it. As Roger Ebert said (in his 4 star review): “The movie is a surrealist dreamscape in the form of a Hollywood film noir, and the less sense it makes, the more we can’t stop watching it.” Such a response is completely expected since the film was written and directed by David Lynch (Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, The Elephant Man).

Naomi Watts (currently in theaters with The Ring) and Laura Elena Harring (she’ll be co-starring in next year’s remake of Willard) play the lead roles and Lynch demands, and gets, excellent performances from both. There are, by the way, a few lesbian scenes between the two, hot though not as much as a friend of mine claimed. The women play actresses and the plot(?) also involves a director played by Justin Theroux–yeah, who is he–and Monty Montgomery as Cowboy, who has one of the more memorable lines, which is spoken to Theroux’s Adam: “Now, you will see me one more time if you do good. You’ll see me two more times if you do bad. Goodnight.” Another actress earlier in the film is shown playing a character named Camilla Rhodes, and then towards the end, Harring plays an actress named Camilla Rhodes. Watts is introduced as Betty Elms, then later plays Diane Selwyn.

Don’t expect to understand this, just go along with the flow and you should enjoy it. Perhaps if you read the Ebert review linked above you can get a better sense of the film though I doubt it.

Recommended

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Welcome to Woop Woop

Posted on October 8, 2002

I have this thing for off-beat Australian movies. Among the more well-known are The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Muriel’s Wedding. But this one is really strange, very psychedelic. One minute our protagonist (played by Johnathon Schaech) is in midtown Manhattan trying to pawn off some cockatoos and the next he’s driving a beat down old VW minibus across the Australian outback.

Welcome to Woop Woop, released in 1997, is actually the next directorial effort from Stephan Elliot (he wrote and directed Priscilla). Elliot will next year be writing and directing the 30th anniversary TV remake of Rocky Horror Picture Show. Anyway, Woop Woop is a town that’s not on anyone’s map, just a bunch–a hundred or so–of Australians led by Rod Taylor who embody the “leave me alone” lifestyle. When one of them needs a mate, they go off and see who likes to fuck them; the lucky winner gets drugged and shanghaied back to the little outpost. And not only is the place ringed by steep rock embankments, Taylor has guards with rifles and shoot to kill orders to keep pontential deserters in line.

Schaech catches the eye of Susie Porter, a tasty blonde hitchhiker who jumps his bones while he drives her to the sea. She decides she loves him, asks him if he feels the same way. The stupid schmuck, thinking it will keep her in bed a little longer, says he does. Let’s face it, if the boy was so smart he would not have needed to scram from NYC.

The actors all do fine jobs but this is a film that you need to be open to, be willing to not worry quite so much about the reality of the lives. And then you will enjoy the job that Elliot has done.

Recommended

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Tadpole

Posted on September 17, 2002

A modern variation on Catcher in the Rye, Tadpole sets an upper west side Manhattan 15 year old boy on a Thanksgiving school break he’ll never forget. Mature beyond his years, capable of discussing Voltaire in the original French and so worldweary he has no difficulty being served in a bar, Oscar Grubman (Aaron Stanford, who’ll follow this up by playing Pyro in X-Men 2) has taken the train home from his Connecticut prep school to tell his stepmother Eve (the always alluring Sigourney Weaver) that his father (John Ritter) doesn’t treat her well enough and he is in love with her. Hijinks, of course, ensue though this is not major studio teen romantic comedy.

No, in Tadpole, director/co-writer Gary Winick has created the latest intelligent independent comedy, a worthy follower to My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Stanford and Weaver are excellent, Ritter is a weak link, Bebe Neuwirth is luscious and lascivious as stepmom’s best friend and even Robert Iler (Tony’s son on the Sopranos) is quite good as the Grubber’s best friend.

Note that although there is no nudity or blood splatter (well, no violence at all) and essentially no cursing, Tadpole deserves at least the PG-13 rating for it’s sophisticated subject matter.

Another Dollar Movie Night excursion that more than paid off!

Definitely recommended

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Local Hero

Posted on September 14, 2002

I’d been looking for this film for months, since I started spending so much time with the Sweet One, because it’s one of my all time favorites and she’d never seen it. Fortunately BBC America cablecast it earlier in the week and Tivo stored it until we had some time. I consider it one of a trio of smaller, character-driven movies that came out in the early 1980s along with Chariots of Fire (also produced by Sir David Puttnam) and Barry Levinson’s Diner.

Dealmaker Peter Riegert is sent by corporate head/crazy old man Burt Lancaster to negotiate the purchase of a small coastal village in very northwest Scotland so that their company can build a new terminal and refinery. Picking up a native, though not local, lackey when he arrives in Scotland, he needs to work out the deal with the wily, randy hotelier/accountant/barkeep Denis Lawson. The locals decide to keep Riegert on the hook to get the most money but this is mainly a way for writer/director Bill Forsyth to keep us in the quaint little village (two fisherman argue over whether dollar has one or two l’s in it) and introduce us to people who really aren’t terribly well acquainted with the second half of the 20th century. Plus the amazing natural beauty of the barely touched by human hands territory and, I would guess, they filmed in late Spring or mid-Fall.

Peter Riegert never really lived up to his promise as an actor but he did make three really good movies: Animal House (his film debut), this one, and 1988′s Crossing Delancy, where he was amazing as Amy Irving’s reluctant, old-style matchmaker-arranged suitor. In Local Hero he really delivers as we fall in love with Furness through his eyes and feel his heart melt. At the open he is pissed about having to go on the road (“I’m more of a Telex man, really. I could wrap this up in an afternoon from the office.”) but at he end he is sad and reluctant to leave. Lawson is his key counterpart, a classic city versus country faceoff, befriending Riegert yet keeping him at enough distance to try for every last bit of money. The one mistake, though it does give Forsyth a way to his ending, is bringing Lancaster to Scotland to finish the deal when a last minnute obstacle appears to derail the entire deal.

I would write more about why this is such a favorite of mine but I’m having difficulty putting the reasons into words well: Riegert and Lawson’s performances, the beauty of the locale and Jenny Seagrove, Mark Knopfler’s enchanting music, Forsyth’s script. Just see it.

Absolutely recommended

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Wirey Spindell

Posted on August 20, 2002

Wow, this was a weird movie, the kind you watch and then ask yourself where the fuck did writer/director/lead actor Eric Schaeffer come up with this? Wirey Spindell is an autobiography of someone named Wirey Spindell, the child of hippies, a kid who doesn’t make it to age seven without becoming a sexual predator, who shuttles from school to divorced parent to elsewhere, always fueled by drugs, alcohol, and sex. Until, in college, he realizes that he either stops or dies. And so he goes into rehab and gives up the toxins…and the sex. Until he meets the lovely Callie Thorne (who was a detective towards the end of Homicide: Life on the Streets). Schaeffer tells this story through flashbacks, with three actors playing his younger self, until we get back to the present. Let’s just pray this wasn’t his autobiography.

Recommended if you like weird artsy films

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Run Lola Run

Posted on June 22, 2002

Took me a few years and the urging of The Sweet One to finally catch up with this quirky German production. Run Lola Run stars Franka Potente and Moritz Bleibtreu as pait of young lovers caught up in circumstances threatening him with death at the hands of his ruthless drug dealer boss. They have 20 minutes to come up with 100,000 Deusche Marks that he was to deliver but lost.

Director Tom Tykwer has Potenta (Bourne Identity) literally running for Bleibtreu’s life. Three times he retells those 20 crucial minutes, from the phone call from him to her explaining until the scenario runs out. Though the starting point, with Potente hanging up the phone and racing out of her apartment, is the same, each runthrough quickly takes a different turn. Lola’s father is featured in a short subplot and gives Tykwer a strong mirror story. He’s involved with a woman at work and his results more or less reverse Lola’s. As the director himself explains: “It is this woman’s passion alone that brings down the rigid rules and regulations of the world surrounding her. Love can move mountains, and does. Over and above all the action, the central driving force of this film is romance.”

Like most movies, this one has fans willing to be more enthusiastic and detailed than me.

Recommended

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The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert

Posted on May 30, 2002

Agent Smith, General Zod, and Leonard Shelby turn the conventions of the road movie upside down all across the Australian desert on a lavender bus in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Priscilla, of course, is the bus. The stars are Hugo Weaving (Smith), Terence Stamp (Zod),and Guy Pearce (Shelby) and they play a trio of drag queens who fix up an old bus in order to drive from Sydney to Alice Springs to perform their act at a casino theater run by Weaving’s lesbian wife.

Amazingly, the movie is even funnier than it sounds. For example, at one point they get lost on a shortcut out in the middle of nowhere–after all way back in 1993, when this movie was made, civilian GPS wasn’t available, was it?–and are rescued by a roving band of Aboriginals. To say thanks, they get out their full kit and perform. Then there is the late in life romance between Stamp and their auto mechanic, Bob. And I knew I’d seen the actor playing Bob before, Bill Hunter. Turns out he played Muriel’s sleazy politician father in that other 1994 Australian hit comedy, Muriel’s Wedding.

Acting is all about submerging the actor in the role and bringing the character to life, right? Well after seeing The Adventures of Priscilla, I have to say that Hugo Weaving is a terrific actor, just on the range of roles he’s pulled off. The drag queen here, Agent Smith in The Matrix, and Elrond (the Elven King) in Fellowship of the Ring. Someone needs to explain to me why he isn’t getting more big roles. Maybe after the Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions films come out next year he’ll get busy.

Heartily Recommended

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You Can Count on Me

Posted on April 22, 2002

Turns out that Matthew Broderick has one of the leads in You Can Count on Me because he was high school buddies with writer/director Kenneth Lonergan, how’s that for a juicy tidbit! Okay, this is Lonergan’s first major film and getting someone of Broderick’s history probably helped more with getting the financing. This is an odd little film that had a lot of critical acclaim and got nominated for a lot of awards so I figured to give it a shot. Can’t really recommend it to others unless you like really small scale character studies where the characters undergo almost no growth at all. None of the actors give all that exciting performances although Laura Linney comes closest in what I suppose is the lead role.

not recommended

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Best in Show

Posted on June 10, 2001

Christopher Guest has been making us laugh for around 25 years now, even if you don’t recognize his name or face. He wrote, directed, and co-stars in Best In Show, a pseudo-documentary about the Mayflower Kennel Club Dog Show and some of its participants. Guest is best-known for the 1996 film Waiting for Guffman, in which he also wrote, directed, and co-starred, for playing bassist Nigel Tufnel in the hilarious This is Spinal Tap, and writing and performing on Saturday Night Live.

Best in Show has a lot of similarities to Spinal Tap, which he co-wrote, in that there isn’t a plot per se (just like most lives lack a nice, tidy, Hollywood-esque plot), and instead finds humor in the quirkiness of its characters and situations. For example, one of the funniest running gags is that husband and wife (co-writer and Second City TV alumnus) Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara (also an SCTV alum) make the trip up to the show from Florida with their terrier, discovering along the way that every man they meet is one of O’Hara’s former lovers.

recommended

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