Alright folks, looks like the coverage of SUNDANCE is beginning to trickle in. Hopefully, as the various adventurers in that frozen mountain town defrost... we'll hear more. But in this episode of coverage we have looks at two of the big QUESTION MARKS for the festival... AMERICAN PSYCHO and JOE GOULD'S SECRET... both of which had great expectations... and then there's a film we hadn't heard too much about called EVERYTHING PUT TOGETHER which sounds as though it's a pretty damn good movie! So let's listen to Max, The Mad Gourmet!!!!
Max the mad gourmet back with a few more Sundance reviews. These are just the three movies I've gotten around to typing up. Post what you will. Enjoy.
AMERICAN PSYCHO
Christian Bale’s performance in American Psycho reminded me of Jim Carrey. I think that’s a bad thing. After all, Carrey specializes in giving voice (and contorted face) to audiences’ desire for anarchy. To have this desire expressed through the person of Patrick Bateman, a heartless, sadistic murderer, is more than a bit disturbing. There are scenes where we are clearly meant to applaud and enjoy Bateman’s sick sense of humor and unhinged sense of control; even in our horror, we admire his “work.” If the movie seemed to be eliciting this kind of response in order to then berate us for being such sick puppies, it might at least be called a stand-offish and manipulative morality tale. As it is, it’s like the sickest joke you ever heard - stretched out to 104 minutes.
Why did I react with such violent disgust to this movie, even though I was a great admirer of The Talented Mr. Ripley, which similarly compelled its audience to root for a murderer? Perhaps because Ripley felt more like a character study and less like a glossy B-movie. Why was I so offended by American Psycho’s jokey attitude, even though I enjoyed the similarly ironic tone of last year’s Fight Club? I will suggest two reasons: one, that Fight Club’s narrator, however weak or disturbed, served as a kind of moral center; and two, that Tyler Durden would rather change lives than take them away. Patrick Bateman has no social agenda; he kills for fun. He is unredeemed and unredeemable. As for the movie: it’s slick, precise, and coolly executed. Ultimately, though, it’s as soulless as its main character. I’m tempted to say it’s as sick.
JOE GOULD'S SECRET
Some movies seem to exist primarily to introduce us to a new and utterly unique character. Joe Gould’s Secret is one of those movies, and Joe Gould is as colorful a fellow as you’d ever care to meet. Broken down intellectual, performance artist before the term was coined, prophet of the underground, martyr to his own crackpot cause: Joe Gould is a magnetic and fascinating creature, played by Ian Holm as a kind of driven wartime Falstaff, living off of the kindness of others and rewarding them with a glimpse into his fractured but luminous soul. Joe Gould is homeless, but he feels at home in the nooks and crannies of New York City. We meet him in one such cranny through the eyes of our narrator, New Yorker contributor Joseph Mitchell, played by Stanley Tucci (who also wrote and directed the film). Tucci’s performance is easy to underrate, drowned out as it is by the sheer fury and vehemence of Holm’s tour de force. But in fact Tucci’s Mitchell is a perfect foil for Joe Gould; his gentle North Carolina accent and quiet sense of decorum give the movie its light touch, and his amused, slightly taken-aback attitude to the title character mirrors the audience’s feelings.
This is a gentle movie. It is subtle, reflective, and empathetic, with plenty of conflict but no real villains. When it is funny, it is warmly funny; when it is bitter, it is bittersweet. Once again Tucci has crafted a delicate ode to the middle of the century, and for my money Joe Gould’s Secret surpasses his critically acclaimed Big Night - it has a more graceful story arc, a richer mystique, and that one unforgettable character.
EVERYTHING PUT TOGETHER
Everything Put Together takes a very simple story and uses it to put the audience through an intense emotional wringer. It follows the personal journey of Angie (High Art’s Radha Mitchell, beautiful and compellingly truthful) as she endures a deeply personal tragedy in an antiseptic and isolating world. The movie’s visual style plays with hand-held camera, background/foreground, and the extremes of light and dark to make its audience experience a world both alien and familiar, a world with a vaguely sinister quality lurking just beneath its bright, shiny exterior. The more nightmarish sequences have a wrenching visceral impact; these later scenes are all the more devastating because the film’s beginning has an intensely realistic, documentary-like aesthetic. As the heroine seems to flirt with madness, the film itself begins to go mad, assaulting us with a rush of powerful and completely disorienting images.
Even the most minor characters in Everything Put Together are quirky and interesting (I particularly liked the wry but tender doctor played by Matt Malloy), and all of the acting is subtle and effective. Mitchell’s magnetic, unflinching performance in the lead is a triumph of bravery and self-effacement. Angie is never made to be hollowly sympathetic; she is a complicated human being, a woman of extremes who is capable of great love but also of tremendous anger and alienation. In the end Angie seems to have regained some semblance of a normal life, but we sense that she is changed, incapable of taking the world around her at face value or taking her stability for granted. The ending of the movie is not fully satisfying; it resolves very little and seems a bit judgmental of characters who had been depicted as flawed but well-meaning. Still, director Marc Forster has crafted an ambitious and rewarding drama. I left Everything Put Together with a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. In a good way.
another thrilling recipe of cinefilmcritique from,
Max the Mad Gourmet!!!
