Shai Lee’s blog

Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

The cynical sci-fi film has become a cult classic. It’s based on
a novel by Walter Tevis and written by Paul Mayersberg, who keeps it both
banal and literate. Director Nicolas Roeg (”Performance”/”Walkabout”/”Don’t
Look Now”) helms with rich visuals, his usual hipster fractured style of
filmmaking and with an imaginative presentation. The overly ambitious sci-fi
film, love story and commentary on contemporary America, sometimes sparkles
like a jewel until its shine fades a bit with overcharged sex scenes and
too much trick photography. Through Roeg’s tricky visual direction there
seems to be more here than meets the eye but, again, that depends on the
eye of the beholder. What is explored in great detail are the surfaces
of a modern society—America as a wasteland, its social and cultural rituals,
and the alien’s reactions to a corrupt environment that he eventally becomes
corrupted by. One thing is certain, the casting of the androgynous-bent
rock-star David Bowie as an alien was inspired (who got the part after
Peter O’Toole turned it down). 

Thomas Jerome Newton (David Bowie) is a humanoid alien who falls
to Earth in a lake in the western part of the States. He has come to Earth
to get water for his drought-stricken planet, leaving behind his wife and
children. To make money for his definite purpose of building a spacecraft
that will carry both him and the water back home, he sells the many gold
wedding rings he brought with him in various spots across the country and
uses a British passport to identify himself. After crossing the country,
he visits reputable New York patent attorney Oliver Farnsworth (Buck Henry)
and through him obtains nine patents on his advanced electrical technology.
He makes Farnsworth the CEO of the high-tech company he creates, named
World Enterprises, and he becomes the reclusive Howard Hughes-like tycoon
behind the scenes pulling the strings. Through this company he tries to
obtain the vast fortune he needs to build the spacecraft, which costs over
$300 million. The introverted and serene reddish orange-headed alien, seeking
a quiet and private life in his visit, lives in a small-town in New Mexico.
He learned how Americans think by picking up Earth’s TV signals in his
planet and by regularly watching television while visiting. In the process,
he becomes a financial tycoon. But in his loneliness he falls in love with
a white-trash earthling New Mexico hotel maid, Mary Lou (Candy Clark),
instead of moving forward with plans to save his home planet. His plans
to built the rocket ship are viewed suspiciously by a shadowy C.I.A.-like
group that compromise his bodyguard and chauffeur (Tony Mascia); a curious,
womanizing, and untrustworthy far-reaching brilliant chemistry professor,
Nathan Bryce (Rip Torn), whom he hired to build a fuel carrying system
for the spaceship; and his clinging mistress Mary Lou. When the ET becomes
enamored with his life on Earth, he loses his innocence and declines into
a drunken state and loses his inner discipline and will to leave the Earth.

What the alien encounters upon his visit is the violent nature of
human sex, love that’s possessive, a prevailing superficial belief in God
that borders on the ridiculous, contemporary pop music that is basically
anti-music but appealing to the masses, a consumerist society that wants
things it doesn’t need, a need for technological advancement that doesn’t
increase one’s inner knowledge, a government that doesn’t trust the people
and a realization that people are flawed and in their selfishness cannot
be completely trusted and will wantonly harm others. Roeg in his inimical
way transforms your usual ET tale into a uniquely colorful kaleidoscope
of contemporary America. 

Based on the romance between Sex Pistols bassist Sid Odious and Nancy Spungen that eventually led to their deaths (both presumably by Vicious’ hand), “Sid and Nancy” is a docudrama of sorts that succeeds less as drama than as documentary. If the movie works at all, it’s through the way director Alex Cox has captured not simply the solid details but the mood and feeling of a special to way of life.

“Sid and Nancy” opens in a New York police interrogation room, shortly after Sid (Gary Oldman) has stabbed Nancy (Chloe Webb) to death. The cops ask Sid how they met. Sid drags on a cigarette, starts his answer, and we flashback to Merrie Younge England: Sid and the Sex Pistols’ lead singer Johnny Rotten (a vivid Drew Schofield), having playfully caved in the windshield of a Rolls-Royce, decide to visit their chum Linda (Ann Lambton), a dominatrix, who is hanging out with her American friend Nancy, a junkie.

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Nancy uses sex the way department stores use loss leaders, and soon enough, she’s a permanent part of Sid’s life, bringing heroin along with her. Not that Sid needs an excuse to destroy himself — destruction is his way. Early on, he clobbers an antagonistic reporter with his bass; later, he carves letters in his chest with a razor blade and walks through a glass door. In fact, his goofy disregard of physical well-being is his charm — he captures Nancy’s heart, for example, by banging his head against a brick wall.

“Sid and Nancy” creates character through setting, through the painstaking accumulation of physical details: the legend “NO FEELINGS” scrawled in lipstick on a mirror that reflects Sid and Nancy making love, or a woman dandling an infant sporting a pint-size, green-dyed Mohawk hairdo, or the toy pistols Sid and Nancy play with. The movie’s reality is thingy, grounded in paraphernalia.

But while the attention to surface reality is true to the characters and to punk rock in general, it underlines what’s superficial about the movie itself. In approaching punk, Cox has made a punk movie — alive with anarchy, and with the “how far can we go?” humor of anarchy, but dead inside. Punk rejected the idea of a moral center, of social or artistic context, of psychological motivation, but art requires all those things — in short, a sense that there’s a living, breathing filmmaker behind the film. In a metaphysical sense, the movie never ventures outside the hotel rooms where Sid and Nancy seem to spend all their time.

Cox’s approach paints the movie’s stars into a corner, and the upshot is a matched set of remarkable impersonations, but not performances. Oldman captures Vicious’ giddy daze and loose-limbed recklessness — he’s like a marionette with cut strings — just as Webb finds, with her voice, the harsh singsong of naked emotional need. But both play that same note till the end, the only notes Sid and Nancy ever played. Once a junkie, always a junkie.

The result is that “Sid and Nancy” winds up a drag. The first half of the movie rides on its playfulness, on the infantile pleasure we all share in breaking things. And Cox builds in a kind of complex comedy as Sid and Nancy outrage the squares, but yearn for the satisfactions of a square life: marriage, home, family, Paris in the springtime. (The movie’s most poignantly comic moment comes when Sid walks out on Nancy just before the band’s American tour, and she whines, “What about the farewell drugs?”) All of this is lost once the couple go into their heroin-laced tailspin. As Nancy shrieks and Sid blunders through some solo gigs and Nancy shrieks some more, the movie becomes a look at the slow (and rather dull) suicide of two addicts, and the comedy dries up.

“You’ve got no right to be strung out on that stuff,” an attendant in a methadone clinic tells the doomed lovers. “You could be selling healthy anarchy.” But it’s impossible to tell whether Cox thinks the attendant is blowing hot air or if he really believes that the punk movement was some sort of blown historical opportunity.

In the same way, there are a number of surrealistic sequences toward the end of “Sid and Nancy,” full of dollar bills and old newspapers floating in slow motion, that would suggest the movie is a commentary on the fleeting nature of contemporary fame. But if so, the commentary isn’t sustained or developed in any way. In fact, the only thing that is sustained in “Sid and Nancy” is a tone of clinical disinterest that leaves you asking why Cox would want to make a movie about them. By the end, you know more about Sid and Nancy than you care to, and about Alex Cox, quite a bit less than you’d like. Sid and Nancy, at the Key, is rated R and contains considerable profanity, graphic violence, nudity and sexual situations.

You usually have to be suspicious about a documentary that contains virtually no new footage. Constructing a story with pieces of celluloid that sooner a be wearing already been acquainted with in other productions is maybe a bit of a free gull; a jigsaw puzzle endanger rather than a film in its own healthy. At least, that's what I thought until I sat down to watch Thomas Andersen's three part documentary series on Los Angeles' place in film, Los Angeles Plays Itself. If you've not till hell freezes over been to LA previous, this documentary will fetch you craving to go soon. But if you've regurgitate a dwarf time in the City of Angels, this love letter to the hub of the west could even take a tear or two.

Thomas Andersen isn't a big name in the film industry. He doesn't have a string of successes to his name or a burgeoning rep as a PBS documentarian - he's just a guy who studied filmmaking, drove a cab, programmed a few festivals and settled in as a faculty member at the California Institute of the Arts School of Film/Video.

Does that qualify him to be the ultimate cinematic historian of the city of Los Angeles? Not by a long shot, but his undeniable knowledge, passion and love for the place sure as hell does.

In preparing this project, Andersen smartly identified that no other city in the world has had more of its history put to film than LA. From the onset of talkies way back in the 30's to the supernova years of James Dean, Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe, through the war time, the depression, civic corruption, free love, and the big budget dominance of the Hollywood industry today, the common backdrop of a multitude of films has been Los Angeles. Even when it's not playing itself, the landmarks, the landscape, the people and the places can easily be identified as LA. From Johnnie's Cafe, the famous location of Miracle Mile, to the Bradbury Building, made famous for decades by film noir directors and disaster picture producers, before finally being transformed into a futuristic ruin in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. From the hulking old observatorium that saw James Dean knife fighting in Rebel Without A Cause to the Angelyne billboards destroyed so wonderfully in Volcano.

It's all here; all of that and a whole lot more. Chinatown, Escape from LA, Cobra, LA Confidential, Who Framed Roger Rabbitt, Double Indemnity, LA Story, Bush Mama, Grand Canyon, Bless Their Little Hearts, porn, schlock, drive-in movies, exploitation films, epics, franchises, blockbusters and indies.

Andersen paints a picture of LA using scenes that others had created before him, but lashes the narrative together in a style that is one part humor, one par drama, one part university lecture and multiple parts nostalgia. I was heartbroken to learn hat Johnnie's Cafe is closed, and intrigued to learn about the destruction, rebuilding, and subsequent closure of the Angels Flight. Iwas reintroduced to the wonders of Polanski's Chinatown, with a historical perspective added to show me that the film isn't just a great work in its own right, that it actually borrows from real events.

Andersen explores the city as background, character and subject in ways that I could never have imagined were possible. The sheer scope of the films shown and the ideas, places and people remembered truly required someone with a lifelong history with the place, the medium, and of learning itself. I personally have a great passion for LA - I feel that anyone who has been but never got off the tourist bus and found their own way for a few days has missed the entire point. Every corner you turn in LA asks you to remember where you've seen it before. Every building has been seen on screens from Macau to Morocco. Every chink in its armor has rusted and adapted and become art.

Boys'N'The Hood. Tango and Cash. Die Hard. Terminator. Unlawful Entry. East of Eden. The Exiles. Even the TV series Dragnet. To us these films are pieces of entertainment, or maybe history if we take the medium seriously enough. But one thing they all have in common is that in the background, or the foreground, or as a supporting player, LA features prominently, and if you look hard enough, you can watch it growing up. Los Angeles Plays Itself gathers all of those family photos from the LA album and sorts through them, telling a story that has never stopped being told and probably never will.

With a droll, even cynical, voiceover by New York filmmaker Encke King, the film does occasionally lapse into the overtly petty. Out of context pieces of James Dean performances tend to be used as comical humor rather than as the groundbreaking moments they were, for example, which might serve to alienate some of those who don't look down their nose at the commercially successful, and it also has to be said that Andersen's fascination with architecture does tend to override other factors of the project. But did that stop me from enjoying this project immensely? Not in the slightest.

A fantastic series, a superbly constructed history lesson, and perhaps the realization of a life spent gearing up for such a task, Los Angeles Plays Itself should be a work preserved for the ages, and maybe even added to in a few decades time. A must-see for any movie fan.

Novalee Realm (Natalie Portman) is 17, pregnant and has precisely been abandoned by her
musician boyfriend Willy Jack (Dylan Bruno) at an Oklahoma Wal-Mart. With nowhere to work up,
she secretly makes her home in the sphere supply, where she gives start, giving her and
her ‘Wal-Mart’ baby celebrity reputation. She is befriended by Lexie (Ashley Judd), Forney
(James Frain), the townsman librarian, Sister Husband (Stockard Channing) and photographer
Moses Whitecotten (Keith David) and starts a new subsistence. In the meantime Willy Jack signs up
with no-nonsense Nashville agent Ruth Meyers (Joan Cusack).

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January 7, 2000

Web posted at: 2:01 p.m. EST (1901 GMT)

By Reviewer

Paul Clinton

(CNN) — In bringing "Snow Falling on Cedars" to the screen, Australian filmmaker Scott Hicks has turned David Guterson's acclaimed 1994 best-selling novel about prejudice and forbidden love — a complex book without a strong linear story structure — into a lyrical film with just the barest bones of an interlocking narrative.

 VIDEO

Ham preview for "Snow Falling on Cedars"


Real

The result is a visual and emotional feast, but one in which audience members must fully participate, or they'll easily lose their way.

On the surface, "Cedars" may seem to be a murder mystery and a courtroom drama. But in reality, this tale — set in 1950 on the fictional island of San Piedro, just north of Washington state's Puget Sound — explores the conflicts and prejudices within a small community of American fishermen and their Japanese-American counterparts during the turbulent years surrounding World War II.

In effect, San Piedro becomes a microcosm for all the hysteria concerning Japanese Americans that broke after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

A Japanese-American fisherman, Kazuo Miyamoto (Rick Yune) is on trial for the murder of another local man, a German-American fisherman named Carl Heine (Eric Thal). The two men had been boyhood friends during the pre-war years when there was a fragile sense of community between the Japanese Americans and the Anglos who lived together on this small island. When Heine's body is found entangled in his own fishing nets, suspicion falls on Miyamoto.

During the war years, Miyamoto served his country in uniform while his family — and the rest of the Japanese Americans on the island — were forcibly relocated to government internment camps. After the war, the town became racially polarized with suspicion and hatred on both sides.

Ethan Hawke — in another carefully measured and understated performance that has become his hallmark — plays a reporter named Ishmael Chambers, a man living in the large shadow cast by his father Arthur (Sam Shepard), the town's journalistic conscience whom we meet in various flashbacks. Arthur founded the local newspaper and was known throughout the island as a fair man who fought for racial harmony. Ishmael, wounded in the war, comes back to take over the paper after his father's death.

  QUICKVOTE

As Miyamoto's trial progresses, we see Chambers quietly watching the courtroom events unfold. Slowly we discover that in his childhood, he shared a forbidden love with a Japanese woman, Hatsue (Youki Kudoh), who is now married to Miyamoto, the accused killer.

When Chambers begins to uncover facts that could affect the outcome of the trial, he struggles with his own inner conflicts over his lost love, the legacy of his father, and the clashing cultures on the island.

Simple grace

Much of Hicks' film is told through flashbacks — even flashbacks-within-flashbacks — exploring the complex relationships between characters as the director unravels this convoluted mystery that he has wrapped in misty, snow-covered imagery. The wintry weather serves as a subtle metaphor in which the snow helps to cloak the past.

  MORE REVIEWS, SITES

With his 1996 Academy Award-nominated film "Shine," Hicks proved himself capable of creating arresting visuals, and with cinematographer Robert Richardson (best known for his work with director Oliver Stone), Hicks has done so again with "Cedars." These exquisite images, married to James Newton Howard's magnificent score, creates a sum greater then their parts.

Swedish actor Max von Sydow (perhaps best known as the priest in the 1973 film "The Exorcist"), turns in an Oscar-worthy, brilliant performance as defense attorney Nels Gudmundsson. He's a righteous man who fights the irrational fears and prejudices handed down for generations in his community, like so many heirlooms of questionable value. His highly charged courtroom scenes are reminiscent of another courtroom drama about racial injustice, the 1962 film version of "To Kill a Mockingbird." Not coincidentally, author Guterson credits Harper Lee's prize-winning story as a major influence.

Strong, noteworthy performances are also delivered by Kudoh, a former Japanese pop singer, James Cromwell as Judge Fielding, and Shepard as Ishmael's late father.

This deeply intricate novel posed a massive challenge for Hicks and his co-screenwriter, Ron Bass, and some subplot is lost in the translation. But the core themes of the original book — the racial divisions, the hurt and the anger forged by that time and place in history — are brought to the screen with a simple grace.

"Snow Falling On Cedars" opened in Los Angeles and in New York in December and opens nationwide Friday, January 7. The film is rated PG-13 with a running time of 126 minutes.

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In “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover,” British number one Peter Greenaway is audacious sufficient to trump up a metaphor so grand, so lavishly comprehensive, that it can sponsor as a incontrovertible, definitive assessment of the state of Western culture. Of unavoidability, his thinking is epidemic and his imagination retrospective. To articulate his views, he references public affairs, adroitness, economics, even create, finding room in the film’s densely eclectic visual design over the extent of both Jean-Paul Gaultier, who designed the costumes, and the Dutch master Frans Hals. Furthermore his conclusions, when boiled down to their essence, couldn’t be more vital: As a education, we are what we eat — or, to take it to further, what we eliminate. If anatomy is destiny, then it’s the insides that dictate past, it’s the bowels that rule. Greenaway, the bemused, coolly ironic truth-teller, has painted a cruel portrait for a diabolical values bright and early. The murkiness is savagely confrontational, and its assaults begin almost immediately. In the opening divertissement, Spica, Greenaway’s gangster protagonist, demonstrates to a victim the price of not keeping up in his payments by stripping him down and force-feeding him excrement. This bestial prelude, which culminates with Spica relieving himself on his victim, sets the movie’s brutally scatological tone. And on the eve of the film’s end, the vice-president will have showcased a vast bunch of perversions, including cannibalism, to make it with pretend the emphatic point that we are craven, inconsequential animals, choking on our own waste.

The bulk of the action takes place in a cavernous temple of haute cuisine called Le Hollandais, where Spica (Michael Gambon) and his wife, Georgina (Helen Mirren), dine every night, surrounded by the boss man’s scurrilous gang of lackeys. In symbolic terms, Spica is the ultimate consumer — a glutton ruled entirely by his amoral drive to gobble down everything and everyone in sight. In Greenaway’s scheme of things, he is the incarnation of pure capitalist evil. But, watching the film, you get the impression that while he’s condemned for being a bully and a sadist, for brutalizing his wife and, eventually, killing the Lover (Alan Howard) she takes up with at the restaurant during her visits to the loo, his greatest crime is that he has appalling table manners and mispronounces the names of the French dishes on the menu.

Just how revelatory you think this is depends, I suppose, on your orientation. With all its allusions to high culture, its imperial camera movements, classically composed tableaux and opulent production design, the film certainly carries the air of profundity. But perhaps “air” is the wrong word to use for a work this full of puke and rot and fornication. After a time, you begin to feel soiled by the film’s excesses. Yet the excesses, alone, aren’t the issue. An artist like David Lynch, director of “Blue Velvet,” violates taboos, but not simply for shock effect. He carries us inside the primal secrets that spawned them and shows why they affect us so profoundly. Greenaway, on the other hand, seems content to ride on the energy released by simply being naughty, without concerning himself with what’s underneath. He exploits taboos, cheaply, without exploring them.

Primarily, what Greenaway has showcased are his sexual aversions and his distrust of the flesh; this is the work of the most alienated of misanthropes. When Greenaway puts naked bodies on the screen — say, in the love scenes between Mirren and Howard — there’s no sex, there’s merely the director’s palpable disdain for the human body. And perhaps it’s because the artist hasn’t made clear the connections between his film’s social message and his personal preoccupations that the work seems so morally neutral.

Greenaway doesn’t flinch from the sordidness he chronicles, but because he has so thoroughly aestheticized the film, scenes like the one in which Georgina has Richard, the film’s Cook (Richard Bohringer), bake up her lover’s corpse for her husband, lose their power to disturb, even to shock. After the film’s first few minutes I watched, neither entertained nor illuminated, with something close to total indifference.

By giving the film an “X” rating, the Motion Picture Association of America has made heroes of the director and his distribution company, which is now forced to release the picture unrated, under more challenging circumstances. Certainly, the artist should have the freedom to express himself, and Miramax should be praised for its decision to release the film as is. But Greenaway’s ideas are far too facile and chicly reductionist for “Cook” to deserve revolutionary status. His extravagances and attacks on taste seem less like the bravery of the courageous artist than the empty desperation of a charlatan.

“The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover” contains both male and female nudity, cannibalism, and examples of coprophagy.