At last count, there were at least nine movies opening locally this week, and only one of them is Freddy vs. Jason. Almost any way you look at it, that's good news. That's a lot of movies to be opening, meaning the odds are you're going to have a bona fide reason to visit the theaters this week. What's more, we actually managed to get an advance look at almost all of these films — and, at the risk of overkill, just can't resist the urge to cover a proverbial slew of them in this week's column.
You can blame our eagerness to overload everybody's cinematic plate on the fact that last week's plate was very nearly empty. (Secrets of a film critic, part 317: Not one but two columns were written and then scrapped in rapid succession last week when the respective bookers of the movies we'd reviewed informed us right before deadline that the films' opening dates had been postponed. The film column that eventually materialized in print was, excuse the indelicacy, pretty much pulled out of your humble reviewer's posterior.)
Given the vagaries of the movie business, some of the films scheduled to open this week may not actually show up either. But since we're covering a whopping five (count 'em, five!) titles here, we figure we're safe. Even if one or two wind up getting yanked, we can at least be certain that the lion's share of these movies will, in fact, appear.
And for the truly perverse among us, there's even a review of Freddy vs. Jason. You'll have to turn to the outtakes section for that one, though.
Let's begin with what is arguably the best of the batch, and certainly the strangest. Northfork is the latest film by Mark and Michael Polish, twin brothers who, like those more famous siblings called Coen, share writing, producing and directing credits, and display a marked penchant for the bizarre. On the evidence of Northfork, the Polish brothers' surrealist tendencies exceed even the Coens', approaching heights and depths of weirdness that are positively Lynchian. (Lynch regular Kyle MacLachlan even makes a cameo, as if to seal the connection.)
Northfork is ostensibly the story of a small Montana town about to be flooded by the waters created by a new hydroelectric dam. Several teams of strange, identically dressed men are charged with evacuating the even stranger, last inhabitants of Northfork, several of whom seem to be symbolic poster children for various Big Metaphysical Ideas, and at least one of whom may or may not be a bona fide angel.
The film unfolds like an extended dream sequence, complete with a cast of characters who often seem to be sleepwalking and who mostly speak in the measured, halting monotones of someone who's been hypnotized. (Only big-name stars Nick Nolte, James Woods and Daryl Hannah are occasionally allowed to emote.) Wildly enigmatic images and sequences abound, filling the film with one-of-a-kind moments of astonishing visual and thematic richness.
Sadly, more than a few of these moments either reach too high or veer way off course, becoming terribly pretentious or just plain silly — so much so that, from time to time, Northfork plays like an unintentional spoof of a bad art film. The brothers Polish also display an unfortunate over-fondness for bad puns and coy, goofball humor, much of which works against the film, breaking the spell of its mysterious poetry.
I suspect there's not much middle ground with Northfork — people are either going to love it or hate it. Frankly, it's probably an easy film to hate with its aggressively odd approach and its sometimes-awkward mix of elegiac artiness and over-the-top slapstick. Take all that in stride, though, and the movie becomes a cosmic cartoon crammed with original and innovative touches. If Northfork occasionally falls hard on its face, its only because it aims higher than any movie released so far this year.
The so-called New Wave of Mexican Cinema is represented in this week's offerings by Lucia, Lucia, a film with only the slightest connection to recent Mex-successes like Amores Perros and Y Tu Mama Tambien. The auteur here is Antonio Serrano, whose previous film was called Sex, Shame and Tears, but let's forgive him that and move on.
The titular Lucia is played by Cecila Roth from All About My Mother and other Almodovar films, and, indeed, Lucia, Lucia sometimes comes off like an overly polite take on early Almodovar. Roth's character has issues, as they say, and the film seems to be about her midlife crisis and personal awakening, although it's also about a convoluted scheme to kidnap her husband. Oh, and did we mention the subplots with the handsome young hunk, the obligatory, eccentric parents or the cute little dog?
The movie isn't really very good at fusing its various threads, and, despite an energetic sense of style, Lucia, Lucia is ultimately pretty slow and messy going. Nothing really hangs together, so there's never a clear sense of where the movie's headed, although a few of the individual elements do offer some nice, unexpected fun here and there. The best thing about the film is probably its soundtrack, a collection of contemporary Mexican lounge-rock that manages to sound hip, sensuous, a bit odd and a bit whimsical, all at the same time. It's a bit like the movie itself, only better.
The British are represented as well this week, with I Capture the Castle, a charming but otherwise ordinary film about extraordinary people. The film is a coming of age tale, among other things, narrated by the coming-of-ager herself. That would be Cassandra (Romola Garai), a sensitive 17-year-old who's part of a family of mad hatters stuck in a once grand, now badly deteriorated castle in the English countryside. Dad, the author of a single, famous novel, hasn't written a word in more than a decade and can no longer pay the bills. Stepmom, a professional muse, is given to wandering the grounds in the nude for creative inspiration. Beautiful sister Rose just wants to get the hell out of the castle.
Cassandra, like the rest of her tightly wound, emotionally unstable clan, experiences life in convulsive lurches, spewing and soaking up feelings as if they were bursts of rapidly misfiring synapses. And when a family of rich Americans comes calling, including a pair of handsome young brothers, things get particularly complicated.
Everything that can go wrong does, but the movie gets too caught up in the nuts and bolts of its vaguely soap opera-ish plot for its own good. Will loony old Dad ever write again? Will Cassandra find true love? Will sister Rose wind up with either of the eligible young Americans? I Capture the Castle makes us care about these things, but just barely. The movie is literate, but a bit on the light side, a little like a lesser Masterpiece Theatre production re-imagined as a BBC sitcom.
By far the worst of this week's offerings is Uptown Girls, another predictable blast of stale air from director Boaz Yakin, who's tortured us in the past with drek like A Price Above Rubies and Remember the Titans. Brittany Murphy is in full-tilt Look at Me! I'm Quirky! mode as a pampered Manhattanite who gets her trust fund stolen and finds herself forced to take a job as nanny to a neurotic, 8-year-old neo-Fascist with big baby-blue eyes (Dakota Fanning, last seen warming hearts in I Am Sam).
The two females are — surprise, surprise — complete opposites who spend the first half of the movie trading insults before the inevitable bonding that takes place in the film's second half. That bonding process is initiated by an astonishingly inept moment of mutual soul baring that comes right out of the blue, with virtually no emotional build-up and no sense of story logic. It's supposed to be a pivotal dramatic scene, but it actually elicited a good amount of outright laughter at the preview screening I attended. I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume that laughter was not the intended response.
Uptown Girls is a mess, a steaming heap of miscalculated emotional cues, clumsy manipulation, lazy screenwriting and pedestrian direction. The characters Learn, Grow, Change, Reach Out and engage in several other upper-case clichés that seem to happen almost exclusively to fictional characters in clueless movies like this. The humor mainly consists of pratfalls, close-ups of a pet potbellied pig (pigs are funny, right?) and words like "crack" and "whore" issuing from an 8-year-old mouth.
On the plus side, the Billy Joel song for which the movie is titled is never heard.
Last but certainly not the least of the movies opening this week, we have Respiro a curiously appealing blend of lush travelogue, gritty Italian Neo-Realism and Diary of a Mad Housewife hysteria. The film is set on a little island off the coast of Sicily and stars Valeria Golino (Charlie Sheen's main squeeze from Hot Shots) as the manic-depressive mother of a family of fishermen.
Respiro isn't so much concerned with plot as it is with the daily rhythms of life in its small fishing community and the naturalistic feel is underscored by unaffected performances from a cast peppered with nonprofessionals. The film's melodramatic tendencies sometimes feel forced, and there's a quasi-mystical final act that seems to come out of nowhere, but, for all its flaws, Respiro remains a lovely little film. Golino projects a raw, earthy sensuality that recalls the young Anna Magnani. And the movie itself is warm, funny, mysterious and always very human. You'd be hard pressed to find a better way to end a week filled with too many movies.
Film Critic Lance Goldenberg can be reached at lgoldenb@tampabay.rr.com or 813-248-8888 ext. 157.
This article appears in Aug 14-20, 2003.