Harry here... And Anton is wrapping up the loose ends of Toronto with Mike Figgis' latest bold endeavor with digital cinema... HOTEL, and this one sounds more interesting than TIMECODE, which was an experiment that didn't work for me, but applaud the attempt... There were quite a bit about it that worked totally. Anton has told me that he's gonna work on getting us that Guillermo Del Toro interview soon! Can't Wait! I might have to do a Real Audio impersonation of the conversation between Anton Sirius and Guillermo... That would be so inanely stupid as to be ridiculously fun. Hmmmm.... I will look into it. Till then...
Hotel (2001, directed by Mike Figgis)
A successor rather than a sequel to Time Code, Hotel takes the digital experimentation of the former and actually tries to do something with it. The results are mixed, but whatever else you might think of Figgis you have to admire him for going off in an entirely personal direction after the biggest success of his career (Leaving Las Vegas.)
Before I go on, I want you to keep one thing in mind about Hotel- the plot is extremely silly. I'm going to say lots of nice things about the film, but it never lets you forget for more than a couple of minutes just how silly it is at its core, and your ability to enjoy the film will in large part be determined by whether or not you can get past the plot. The film has two main storylines- one involves a self-absorbed British director attempting a Dogme95 version of the play the Duchess of Malfi on location in Venice, and the craziness attending the shoot. The other half of the plot... well, I won't give anything away, but let's just say if you're a Jeunet fan you should have this part figured out 30 seconds into the film.
Anyway, the film shoot plot spirals out of control pretty quickly. The producer (David Schwimmer, playing Ross playing Capt. Willard) is best friends with the director and horribly jealous of him (as well as having the hots for the director's girlfriend/leading lady- Saffron Burrows) so he hires a hitman to kill him and takes over the production, with the blessing of the exceedingly odd money man (Burt Reynolds). Meanwhile a psychotically perky Euro-Mary Hart sort of creature (Salma Hayek) attempts to make a Dogme95 doc on the making of the Duchess of Malfi. Meanwhile another producer has marital problems and his wife is mistaken for a prostitute by the hitman. Meanwhile the hotel staff (Julian Sands, Chiara Mastroianni and others) act weird. And Lucy Lu and Valeria Golino fit in there somewhere, along with plenty of people you probably wouldn't recognize.
As with Time Code, the performances are all (at least they seemed all) improv. To their credit for the most part the actors hold their own, with some surprisingly effective work from people like Hayek and Schwimmer. Saffron Burrows comes out looking the best, though, playing the Duchess, especially as Schwimmer's attempts at directing head upriver.
What elevates Hotel beyond all that is its direction. Figgis takes what he learned from Time Code and applies it, actually making creative decisions about which footage to show and how rather than leaving those choices up to the audience. He uses night vision. A single on-screen thread becomes two, becomes four, and then resolves itself back down to a single image. He uses the four-frame technique to break down the movements of a flamenco dancer in the best sequence of the film. Long shots of the canals get mirrored and split in two. Figgis even plays with the sound, sometimes having the audio from the image on the right in the left channel, and vice versa.
What this means is that unlike Time Code, which never seemed to feel like anything more than a good idea, Hotel is an actual film, albeit, in the end, a very silly one that takes itself a bit too seriously.
Which begs the questions: where does Figgis go next with his digital revolution? And is anyone else willing to follow him?
Kissing Jessica Stein (2001, directed by Charles Herman-Wurmfeld)
It's about time we got a good new romantic comedy.
Kissing Jessica Stein is a nice, charming, slightly sexy tale of girl meets girl. Jessica is a neurotic editor in Manhattan working for her ex-boyfriend (Scott Cohen, better known as Max Medina on Gilmore Girls), with an extremely Jewish mother and a train wreck of a dating history that includes (gasp) Jim J. Bullock. Cross-town, Helen is a gallery manager who's gotten bored with everything on three legs and decides quite arbitrarily to work the other side of the street. Armed with a Rilke quote supplied by her gay co-workers, Helen places a 'Women Seeking Women' personals ad; on a desperate whim, Jessica answers it.
Welcome to dating, post-post-post-something or other style.
Obviously a film like this lives or dies on the charisma between its leads (see: Sweethearts, American) and Helen and Jessica have it in spades. Both are smart and sexy, if complete opposites, with Helen slowly drawing Jessica further and further down paths that dare not speak their name, but neither of them really having a clue what they're doing. They're a cute couple.
They're also a very funny couple, with Jessica's micromanaging of the burgeoning relationship being a particular stand-out. The supporting cast is also spot-on, providing half a dozen memorable lines, including one about blowjobs that falls squarely into the 'funny because its true' category. Although superficially similar, the film neatly avoids all the traps Sex and the City now finds itself entangled in, not telegraphing where its going and never presuming to judge anybody. It's all good, clean, gender-bending, taboo-breaking fun.
Sadly, given that it's set in Manhattan, the film is already dated, with plenty of shots of the skyline behind Jessica as she jogs through the park. Whether that affects its release schedule I have no idea. Hopefully not- this will be exactly the antidote to whatever frothy trifle La Julia has coming up.
Address Unknown (2001, directed by Kim Ki-duk)
The latest from the director of last year’s orgy of perversion the Isle (a film I still haven’t seen yet, dammit) Address Unknown is an at times painfully beautiful, unflinchingly savage indictment of the American presence in Korea. The film takes America-bashing to previously inconceivable heights, leading its characters through a nightmarish dance of violence and emotional sadism and really really horrible performances from real-life servicemen stationed in the country.
The film is anchored by two stories- one girl with a disfigured eye, and one boy whose father was an African-American GI. The film carefully avoids using their respective problems as metaphors, instead letting the appalling conditions of their lives speak for themselves. Other Korean characters, from vicious yet honorable dog butchers to crazy mothers and layabout brothers have their own troubles, all of which can eventually be traced to the root of all evil in the Address Unknown universe, American soldiers.
It's this depiction of the average GI that sets Address Unknown apart. As I said, real servicemen stationed in Korea portray the servicemen in the film, and the result- especially when compared to some of the truly outstanding performances of the Korean cast- can only be considered intentionally cringe-worthy. The servicemen are beyond wooden, and the English dialogue they are given carries stilted and expository into new realms of bad Ed Wood could only dream of. What that means, in the final analysis, is that the Yanks are given no chance to express anything close to real emotions, instead coming across as soulless destructive barbarians, especially when set against the psychotic melodrama of the plot. And there's no way you could convince me that wasn't exactly what Ki-duk wanted.
If you're a Yank, this is a film to make you want to go home and burn your passport.
Anton SIIIIIIIRIIIIIIIUSSSSSSSS
