People may mock the pieties of ancient biblical epics, but when I was a lad, I watched them for the gore. Ben-Hur was a particular favorite: slaves were crushed under the collapsing hulls of their ships, Charlton Heston ran around the deck throwing spears through pirates and shoving torches in their faces, and of course there was the carnage of that famous chariot race, in which, among other things, Stephen Boyd was dragged by his own horses and trampled by... Read more
“The future is listening,” say the ads, but Frequency — an imaginative but ultimately convoluted bit of hokum — is very definitely set in the past. The film takes place in two time periods simultaneously, the more recent of which is October 1999. That may be just a few months ago, but the story already feels dated, thanks to an unintentionally funny subplot concerning the riches that can be had simply by investing in the internet on the stock market.... Read more
In Jesus of Montreal, Denys Arcand’s witty satire about a group of actors who put on a revisionist Passion play, the church sponsoring the play sends in some security guards to call off the production in mid-performance. The actors have tinkered with the Gospels too much; their reconstruction of the historical Jesus challenges church tradition at nearly every point, so out it must go. But the audience objects; one woman says she wants to see the end, and the head... Read more
Well, here’s a how-de-do. British director Mike Leigh is well-known for his working-class dramas, such as Naked and Secrets and Lies, and for his uniquely improvisational approach to making them, whereby he and his actors take a premise and follow their characters’ impulses wherever they may lead. But in Topsy-Turvy, Leigh applies his technique to a true story, and of all things, it’s a richly-detailed costume drama about Gilbert and Sullivan. (more…) Read more
“Have you ever seen a man’s brains?” That question is asked by one of several old eccentrics who populate Vernon, Florida, the town after which Errol Morris named his second documentary feature in 1981. It is a question that has been at the heart of just about every film Morris has made; he seems fascinated, even haunted, by the question of how the mind works. He explored that theme in his recent docu-poem Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997).... Read more
The Tribulation Force is coming soon to a theater near you. Namesake Entertainment and Cloud Ten Pictures, the Christian movie studio founded by Canadian broadcasters Peter and Paul Lalonde, announced in July that they are ready to embark on a $17.4 million big-screen adaptation of Left Behind, the best-selling novel by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. No director or stars have yet been signed to the project, but the film has already attracted the participation of Ralph Winter, an established... Read more
The sun still shines brightly in these last days of summer, but moviegoers are showing a pronounced taste for things that go bump in the night. As I write this, no less than three of the weeks 10 most popular films are ghost stories of one sort or another, each with its own spin on this time-worn genre. The Haunting epitomizes the flawed big-studio Hollywood approach: throw lots of money at the screen, come up with all sorts of special... Read more
IT’S BEEN said so often that it’s now something of a cliché — popular culture is where a lot of people turn these days in search of myth, meaning and a general sense of community. Nowhere is this spiritual hunger more obvious than among science fiction fans, some of whom camped outside theatres for weeks — even a couple of months — to claim the best seats in the house when the new Star Wars movie arrived. The first film,... Read more
In the past few years, I have grown increasingly fond of European films. While most major American films seem intent on telling their audiences how to feel and how to think, the better foreign films take an artistic step back, eschewing music and other manipulative tricks and allowing their audiences to relate more directly to the characters. The Dreamlife of Angels is such a film. It begins with Isa (Elodie Bouchez), a 20-year-old who owns nothing but the contents of... Read more
REALITY ISN’T what it used to be. For whatever reason — premillennial anxiety, post-modern rootlessness, the increasing verisimilitude of special effects — filmmakers are increasingly obsessed with the notion that the real world is, in fact, unreal. Last year gave us The Truman Show and Dark City, in which human protagonists awoke to discover they were trapped in cages under someone else’s watchful eye. Similar themes may surface next month in The Thirteenth Floor. (more…) Read more
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