e-mail

Director:
Christine Jeffs

Starring:
Gwyneth Paltrow
Daniel Craig
Jared Harris
Blythe Danner
Michael Gambon

Release: 17 Oct. 03
IMDb

Sylvia Plath took her life 11 February 1963 by asphyxiation after turning on the gas stove in her apartment. She was a great poet married to a rotten, philandering man. She is the poet icon of the feminist movement.

Such a broad overview of Plath’s life is actually the most information most people have of a writer whose prose gave a rare chance to look into the soul of a person destroyed from within. I’m not a great Plath cheerleader, but her tragic poems are among some of the greatest self-referential works in Western literature.

Thus it has been maddening the way the final chapter in that opening overview has dominated the presence of Plath in contemporary discussions of her work. Too many literary critics have fed the beast that is her public persona to the point that nothing remains of her work to speak for it- (or her-) self.

The latest in the lexicon of the protofeminist bell jar is a biopic by Christine Jeffs that only glazes over the dimensions of her psyche in a hope that her suicide becomes the clear product of an unmistakably evil man.

Ted Hughes, poet laureate, married Plath because they shared a love for the written word. In life, she saw his popularity grow while her own barely existed. When the temptations of his adoring female readers became too much for her to handle, Plath, as the film seems to hint, was brought to the conclusion that her only out was to kill herself. I’m not trying to campaign for infidelity, but the way Jeffs and screenwriter John Brownlow indict Hughes for his sins is abhorrent.

Their only moments of concession -- that Plath was in fact deeply troubled long before the two ever met -- are huddled together in a vacation to Massachusetts. The person who gives the most commanding performance and serves as the single voice of reason, Plath’s mother Aurelia (Danner), is portrayed as cold and barely caring about her child. Compare this to a film that illuminates Plath’s face like a halo as she leaves milk and cookies for her two children before retiring to the kitchen stove, and it becomes clear who the paean of good motherhood is.

I find it telling that the loudest criticisms of Sylvia have come from her daughter Frieda Hughes who chose to withdraw all permission to Plath’s work for the film. Of course, without it, the film is lacking in understanding anything of her potential as a writer, but the extraction makes it clear that this film hadn’t anything to carry it outside of canonization for the suicidal.

Frieda Hughes’ work, “My Mother,” becomes the clearest representation of not only the mistake in drawing on such a source for high-minded melodrama but also the disinterest of a world more inclined to buy into Plath’s martyrdom than her artistry. Printed in The Tattler newspaper during Sylvia’s production, Hughes offered her feelings in the plainest of poetic rebellion: “Now they want to make a film / For anyone lacking the ability / To imagine the body, head in oven / Orphaning children.”

Director:
Ron Howard

Starring:
Cate Blanchett
Tommy Lee Jones
Evan Rachel Wood
Jenna Boyd
Aaron Eckhart
Sergio Calderón

Release: 26 Nov. 03
IMDb

Ron Howard, possibly the worst of today’s A-list directors, didn’t waste much time after A Beautiful Mind’s disappointing success to turn his sites to another story that might have had bite and lets it dwindle into a deluge of overburdened artiness and flaccid storytelling. His love letter to John Ford’s The Searchers, one of the most important Westerns of all-time, turns into a piecemeal collection of words and phrases more likely to be the product of eight-year-old Opie Taylor than 16-year-old Richie Cunningham or 49-year-old Ronnie Howard.

What we ultimately have is a story of search and redemption that plays like a person who sees masterful, intricate art in the depths and cannot extract it enough for us laymen to get a grasp on what he’s aiming for. A few more shots of vast, dusty landscapes and rigidly edited action sequences, and one might almost confuse Howard with a artist. Almost.

The film begins with the reunion between Maggie Gilkeson, a healer in 1885 New Mexico, and her father Samuel (Jones), an estranged patriarch who has been with the Apaches for most of Maggie’s life. The reunion isn’t happy or loving; Maggie does her medical job for him and asks that he leave. It seems that she is happy now and sees Samuel as a catalyst for discontent. Her life is full with a boyfriend Brake (Eckhart) and two daughters, Lily (Wood), who aspires to be a nor’easter socialite, and Dot (Boyd), who aspires to be a boy.

Of course, she turns out needing him when Brake is killed and Lily is abducted by ravaging natives who are pillaging, murdering, and abducting (note, in this toned-down dredge, that these savages choose to not rape anyone) locals. They have found that the beautiful women of the West are a hot commodity for trade into prostitution across the Mexican border. His Apache background means that Samuel might be able to follow their trail and save his family from the mystical curses of witchdoctor Chidin (Schweig).

Violence ensues, time lapses, and nothing really ever amounts to much in The Missing. At 135 minutes, the film lies fallow for much of its duration, attempting an ugly blending of The Searchers, Taxi Driver, and Dances with Wolves. But it feels amazingly (and justifiably) insecure of its lofty aspirations, and the giant leaps in narrative depth Howard occasionally takes are coupled with meager crawls of neophyte cinematics.

He, of course, won the Oscar two years ago for A Beautiful Mind, but had to struggle with a near unanimity among critics that his film was, in the least, mediocre. The Missing has the touches of a man trying to appease both his core audience and the film intelligentsia that has never embraced him (Apollo 13 being a minor, blip-on-the-screen exception), and, although I respect that he wants to find the good graces of my colleagues, I wish that he’d at least stick with what he can do, which is simple, meaningless entertainment. I may not like most of those films, but at least they have the stroke of an expert of audience manipulation.

In hopes of finding the art in this B-movie story, Howard has brought in two A-list actors, one of whom is known for great performances in bad films (Jones), and other who is known for her stunning abilities to transcend beyond good films (Blanchett). The Missing is helped by these two, both of whom give strong performances in the middle of a director’s breakdown of communication between himself and the audience. Although the film isn’t quite The Searchers, at least Jones and Blanchett blow away John Wayne and Natalie Wood.

Director:
Peter Hedges

Starring:
Katie Holmes
Patricia Clarkson
Oliver Platt
Derek Luke
Sean Hayes
Alison Phil
John Gallagher, Jr.
Alice Drummond

Release: 17 Oct. 03
IMDb

There are three stories in Peter Hedges’ Pieces of April, but none of them are really worth the 20-30 minutes they comprise. A good film would have the viewer wishing that each one could be a feature film unto itself, much like waht Richard Curtis achieved with Love Actually. By the end of Pieces of April, the audience is likely wishing that none had existed in the first place.

First is the story of April (Holmes), a well-meaning, quasi-goth twentysomething who is preparing to cook Thanksgiving dinner for her distant (geographically and emotionally) nuclear family. Inside a cramped but warm Lower East Side apartment, amidst what looks like pre-Giuliani crime, April finds that her stove, which has likely never been used in the time she’s lived there, doesn’t work. Thus, with time ticking away until the family’s arrival, she runs around the building trying to find a neighbor who is willing to donate a stove for the day.

Thank heavens April lives in the Rainbow Coalition Plaza Apartment, because she needs to have the various minorities that live near her to help April understand the meaning of family/forgiveness/Thanksgiving. The African American couple gets to show what love truly is while injecting a bit of white (wo)man’s burden on her; the Chinese family, who, of course, cannot speak English, get to invent a venue in which April can explain the holiday and find parallels between it and her own unloving family life; and the gay guy (Hayes) gets to be nothing more than a chance for her to recognize the weight of her words and how something seemingly meaningless can cause great pain for someone else (how this helps him, now that he is hurt by her statements, is a bit of an oversight).

Second is the story of Bobby (Luke), April’s boyfriend. Hedges continues to play his parade of racial-prejudice-as-humor by vaguely toying with Bobby’s story so that this upstanding young black man can seem like a criminal thug when he’s outside April’s view. The racism found in this segment is likely unintentional, but still striking as the audience is forced to use clichés of his race as a jumping point for forced humor at his expense. No laughs are ever earned, and the intentions feel lost in transit during its browbeating of one of it’s kindest characters (it doesn’t help that Luke is an amazingly poor actor).

Third is the story of April’s family as they drive to Manhattan for the holiday they are sure to hate. Evidently, all has been unwell with April and her parents Joy (Clarkson) and Jim (Platt; who has been both underused and misused in films for years now) since she rebelled as a youth. Now they have a son (Gallagher, Jr.) and another daughter (Pill) to show the perfection that April evidently lacks. Their style of flawlessness (especially for the cloying Pill) is shallow and poorly explained. The dynamics between April and her siblings isn’t fully clarified, which makes the hatred she exposes in them completely unforgivable.

To make matters even more pressing, Joy is dying of a terminal disease, meaning that this holiday is probably their last together as a family (she didn’t seem to be within a month of death, though, which means Christmas would likely be their last together had Hedges not found more symbolic meaning in Thanksgiving). Since no one other than the forgetful grandmother Dottie (Drummond) seems to like April, most of the trip is dedicated to explaining why they each want to turn around and give up on this ill-fated holiday experience ahead of them.

And ultimately, all this becomes a summation of what’s wrong with Pieces of April. For a film dedicated to finding levity in misfortune and ultimately salvation of family and community, it’s an awfully mean-spirited experience. Most of these actors deserve better material, and such lofty goals and strong sentiments deserve a better exploration.

Director:
Rob Minkoff

Starring:
Eddie Murphy
Marsha Thomason
Terence Stamp
Nathaniel Parker
Jennifer Tilly
Wallace Shawn
Dina Waters
Marc John Jeffries
Aree Davis

Release: 26 Nov. 03
IMDb

Universal Studios can be a great experience with theme rides created for people who know the movies and TV shows that catalyzed them. A person enjoying Back to the Future, Terminator 2, Jaws, or Alfred Hitchcock’s later films will find something to fit their fancy at every turn walking through the place. It’s like heaven on earth for someone who gets their kicks researching and analyzing films.

Earlier this year Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl became a new hybrid for this type of crossover. Instead of having a ride based on the movie, it was a movie based on the ride. Not since Clue has a blending of both worlds seemed so harmonious.

However, note how many memorable films based on board games (or, for that matter, any type of game) have come since Clue: it’s a fairly bare list. The same looks likely for the world of rides-come-movies as Disney turns another one of their classic rides into a family adventure with The Haunted Mansion.

The key to what is wrong with this film is not unlike my feelings of Disneyworld. While I can go to MGM Studios or Universal Studios as an adult, enjoying the experience without ever feeling pandered to, the opposite is true at Disney, where the park has given up on aiming at the adults, instead investing everything in the enjoyment of the kids who have come with the parents.

While Pirates of the Caribbean invited everyone into its hodgepodge of swashbuckling adventure and well-veiled entendres, The Haunted Mansion seems willing to forget about anyone in the audience over the age of twelve. Their reversal is likely to pay off: some will go because Pirates of the Caribbean showed so much promise for a series of live action family (i.e., enjoyable for the entire family) films from Disney unseen since their 1950s masterpieces.

Like Pirates of the Caribbean, there’s not much story to take from the rides, so much of the material is fairly new. But The Haunted Mansion ride, which is merely a series of minor scares and special effects, hasn’t the same storytelling values that Pirates of the Caribbean had. Instead, most of the film serves as little more than a filmic variation on what the ride comprises: connecting ideas to bring together minor scares and special effects.

Eddie Murphy, who is likely one of the last people most would have considered as a family film star (this building on his work in the two Dr. Dolittle films), was likely expected to improvise enough material to make the staid script feel alive. He doesn’t fully deliver, although Wallace Shawn and Dina Waters, as two poltergeists forever stuck in servitude, do their best to liven up their parts of the story.

Although the film does deal with taboo issues like suicide that seemed to have been hidden by the Spockean correctness of the last few decades of Disney films, it has all the stuffiness of one of the studio’s ‘70s and ‘80s productions, just with better effects, even if none of it really adds up to more than just a minor pleasure for the kids. Like the ride it simulates, those smoke and mirrors are started to show their age.

Director:
Richard Donner

Starring:
Paul Walker
Frances O'Connor
Gerald Butler
Billy Connolly
David Thewlis
Anna Friel
Neal McDonough
Matt Craven
Ethan Embry

Release: 26 Nov. 03
IMDb

As a diehard Francophile, I should be willing to embrace Timeline if only for its willingness to spurn modern political mores by celebrating the French. But, with Woody Allen preparing to produce pro-France commercials for the country’s Ministry of Tourism, I feel that Timeline serves only to give a kitschy, counterproductive view of Frenchmen in a positive light. Regardless of the way it may commemorate the French, how much respect can a film hold when it tries to mix the Hundred Years War with cybernetic FedEx? Worse yet, how can any respect be found when said film stars Paul Walker, blander and whiter than Muenster cheese?

Timeline, based on the Michael Crichton novel of the same name, is mainly about modern characters who have been transported through a space-time wormhole into 1357 Castlegard, France. Although they are mostly comprised of archaeologists, their interests in scientific study is lacking, to say the least, as they find love, honor, and heroics to keep them from real scientific discovery during their short timeframe they have before returning to the space-time wormhole.

How did they find themselves centuries in the past? Well, it couldn’t be a Crichton novel unless there was some greedy corporation tinkering with science. In this case it is the generically named International Technology Corporation run by shady millionaire Robert Doniger (Thewlis), which has spent massive resources on a huge contraption meant to immediately “fax” objects to a desired location -- they deconstruct the object into a molecular code and pass it through lines where another device will reconstruct it. In the process, the company has found an open door into Castlegard, where they’ve been testing the waters by sending unsuspecting lackeys and scientists to their sure doom.

That’s where the kids from the archaeological dig come in. With their camp leader, Professor Johnston (Connolly), stuck in the past, and their preexisting knowledge of the terrain and its history, they are drafted to get back the professor and tie up any loose threads that ITC has created by jumping back and forth in time.

If all this sounds absurd, it should. Part of the draw of Crichton’s work is in its ability to overcome B-level camp with remarkable scientific and dramatic clarity. That’s why Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain, to name two, have produced great films -- they are practically bound film scripts manufactured with science geek theories.

But then there are the times when everything collapses, and film producers either over-intellectualize Crichton (Coma; although the blame lies mostly on the author since he directed) or overtly dumb him down (Congo). It is in the latter camp that Timeline rests. Where it shows potential, director Richard Donner evidently finds boredom between the action. The screenplay, which features some of the year’s best unintentionally funny dialogue, couldn’t be more piecemeal, and the way the whole thing treats theoretical time travel is simplified to the point of nonexistence (and this coming from someone with an education on time travel developed only from the Back to the Future films and a college philosophy course).

The action sequences do offer moments of stunning inspiration -- a shot of archers simultaneously shooting, showing the ricocheting of arrows in the air is especially worth seeing -- but Timeline is mostly just Crichton Science for Dummies. When I first read Jurassic Park, I quit because I found its technical speak to be too much for my tastes -- it says volumes about the intelligence level of this adaptation in that I felt smarter than its deepest of conjectures. For my money, if my mind is going to be this vacant for a couple hours, watching 14th century costumes choreographed in jousting patterns, I’d rather just go to Medieval Times and get a meal out of it.