Hey folks, Harry here with the latest from the SEATTLE FILM FEST including a new film with Evan Rachel Wood, the girl from THIRTEEN - who was amazing in that film... and another with Courtney Cox. Both sound like good solid movies! Here ya go!
November
Greg Harrison’s tricky, haunting tale about a couple that stops at the wrong convenience store on the wrong night, one Friday in November.
Courtney Cox, pushing 41 and still ravishing, successfully de-Monica-izes herself (but then, she’s always been this good) to play Sophie, a photographer who, a month after her husbands shooting, starts getting strange phone calls, can’t get a particular elevator to work and finds a stray slide during one of her classes of the store where said shooting happened. She goes to the police, who don’t have the best of advice: “You need the kind of help a cop can’t give.”
Boy, does she. Without giving anything away, as part of the film’s charm is trying, sometimes frustratingly, to figure out just what the hell is going on, know that Sophie, guilt-ridden over an extra-marital affair, flashes back to events leading up to her man’s demise. She may not have all her facts straight. It’ll at least take the second time she can’t get the damned “up” arrow to work on that elevator she’d take to her shrink’s office if only she could before you catch on; the film only barely plays fair.
No new ground broken here, but the writing is solid and efficient. NOVEMBER is short, but all that says is it doesn’t take long to tell a compelling story.
Pretty Persuasion
In the mood for something nasty, and just plain wrong, try PRETTY PERSUASION, with Evan Rachel Wood (THIRTEEN) owning the screen as Kimberly Joyce, a sexpot high school sophomore, all of fifteen, who uses every ounce of already advanced feminine wiles at her disposal to seduce and destroy. “It’s like the whole world is an orchestra, and I’m the conductor.” What she lacks in social grace, she makes up for with sheer ballsy determination.
Not that it’s that difficult to get what she wants at her Beverly Hills stomping ground. Home room teacher, Mr. Anderson (Ron Livingston), drools over every girl within throwing distance – going so far as to take home an apology letter written by Kimberly during detention for his wife (Selma Blair) to read as foreplay. Kimberly, an aspiring actress, wants the lead in the school play, a production of “Diary of Anne Frank”, but one anti-semetic remark in public too many leaves the role open to her best friend, Brittany (Elisabeth Harnois), instead. Even though we all know, “Anne Frank wasn’t blonde”.
Pissed, Kim cries sexual assault on Mr. Anderson, and gets her friends – including a new arrival Randa (Adi Schnall); “In the short time I’ve known you, you haven’t tried to bomb anyone” – to corroborate. Which is where I’ll stop with story description. That’s all I knew going in, anyway, and part of the film’s brazen charm is watching, sometimes aghast, as the plot slowly pulls itself together, and just how few limits this Kimberly chick has. Her coke-snorting, phone sex junky dad (James Woods) labels her “a manipulative twat”. Harsh, but true. Credit the screenplay by first-timer Skander Halim for holding no bars on race, family, sex or the vicious, backstabbing teenage vixen genre in general. As Kim says early on, “I have respect for all races, but I’m so glad I was born white.”
Wood is a marvel at playing bemused confidence. I loved the moment she comes onto a local TV reporter (Jane Krakowski, all grown up after VACATION), using dialogue from a porno movie. It’s her nature, but also part of the plan, you see. That’s what distinguishes PRETTY PERSUASION from other films like it: the central character/monster has accusations, and moral reality checks thrown at her from all angles, without ever once stopping (until late in the game) for a moment of personal introspection. She stays the same cold, but alluring person she starts out as, and doesn’t stray the path of heartless opportunism.
The film does sort of fizzle out at the end, but I loved it.
J-Man
