Bringing Out the Dead review

Publciado por kimihiroreizeisblog - 29/01/10 a las 04:01:39 pm

BRINGING OUT THE DEAD: Drama. Starring Nicolas Cage, with Patricia Arquette,
John Goodman, Ving Rhames, Tom Sizemore and Marc Anthony. Written by Paul
Schrader. Directed by Martin Scorsese. (R. 118 minutes. At Bay Area
theaters.)

There are some movies, be some people, that you start out hating and
end up loving.

In “Bringing Out the Dead,'' Martin Scorsese is back prowling the
scuzzy, after-dark streets of New York City, where he is right at home.

Director Scorsese and writer Paul Schrader return there for what amounts
to the flip side of “Taxi Driver.'' It is equally shocking. It is also
surprisingly funny and very moving.

Nicolas Cage, as a burned-out paramedic in spiritual crisis, finally has
the opportunity to roll out in one movie the full range of his talent, from
wild man to soulful. He is at risk of slipping into the same gutter from
which
he tries to rescue street crazies and other lost souls.

“Bringing Out the Dead'' is heavy duty but not heavy going once Scorsese
gets his rhythm. Give it time to work. Potentially oppressive subject matter
is redeemed by impeccable moral integrity and stunning artistry.

Might as well get it out in the open right now: “Bringing Out the Dead''
is about mercy killing.

Still with me?

Anyone who can handle serious questions about life can
devote two hours of theirs to this one.

Salvation lies in how superbly it is done.

Ambulance jockey Frank (Cage) works out of the emergency room at Our Lady
of Perpetual Mercy hospital, which he calls Our Lady of Perpetual Misery.
He's got the all-too-
appropriately named graveyard shift, and for five years he's seen an endless
parade of the strung out, the wigged out, the down-and-out and the
out-and-out crazy. It's gotten to him, and now he's seeing ghosts of the
dead he failed to save.

The nighttime street setting — gritty doesn't begin to describe it — is
the same as in “Taxi Driver'' (1976), but Frank is the polar opposite of
Robert De Niro's paranoid Travis Bickle. Where Travis saw the scum of the
earth, Frank sees helplessly wandering souls.

He's got three paramedic partners in rotation. In ascending order of
impact, they are played by John Goodman (“Roseanne''), Ving Rha
mes (“Con Air'') and Tom Sizemore (“Saving Private Ryan''), and they could
well reflect different aspects of how Frank might end up. Goodman is
bighearted and gruffly conscientious, Rhames has a gleaming-
eyed sense of the absurd, and Sizemore has gone over the edge into sadistic
frustration.

When Frank brings a heart-attack victim back to life, he meets Mary
(Patricia Arquette, Cage's real-life wife), the man's estranged daughter.
Arquette (“Stigmata''), too, is vulnerable and at a crossroads; Mary could
sink or swim.

We become very familiar with the hectic emergency room where cynical,
seen-it-all doctors and nurses nonetheless heroically keep Mary's father
going with frequent defibrillation.

Scorsese doesn't blink from scenes of excruciating pain, but he
also shows us moments of extraordinary grace. Sparks from a rescue welder's
torch merge into incongruous fireworks. The medics' white uniforms turn
luminescent. The last shot of the picture is suffused with deserved peace,
and it is beautiful.

For Frank, saving someone's life is a way of saving his own, but his
string has run out. Cage's sympathetic performance encompasses manic
flashes, gallows humor and a resigned gaze into the abyss. He's capable of
the grim put-on, where he tells a failed suicide how to do it right. A
dreamlike scene in a drug dealer's blood-red apartment puts him on the
razor's edge as he stares at a tempting package of dope.

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Small roles ring large. The suicidal street crazy played by salsa singer
Marc Anthony is more of a presence than a performance, but Anthony,
dreadlocked and wrapped in steel
cable, is indelible. Cliff Curtis is both slick and ominous as a smooth-
talking drug dealer. Arthur Nascarella is Frank's supervisor, reluctant to
fire even the worst offenders and given to involuntary vocalizations. Out of
the blue, he barks like a dog.

The blues-rock soundtrack seems exactly right, what jazzed-up paramedics
would blast on the radio screaming down the street at 4 a.m.: Van Morrison
(“T.B. Sheets''), R.E.M. (“What's the Frequency, Kenneth?''), Martha
Reeves and the Vandellas (“Nowhere to Run''), the Cellos (“I Am a Japanese
Sandman''), Big Brother and the Holding Company (“Combination of the
Two'').

Listen carefully to the two dispatchers. One of them, called Love, is the
voice of Queen Latifah. The other is Scorsese himself.

..

This article appeared on page

C - 1

of the San Francisco Chronicle

The Fast Runner (2002)

Publciado por kimihiroreizeisblog - 27/01/10 a las 02:01:27 pm

Two brothers, Amaqjuaq (Pakkak Innukshuk ) and Atanarjuat (Natar Ungalaaq) are ineluctable to call into the order of pungency in a small nomadic Inuit community (many generations ago), which has been care of the toxic spell of an unresearched shaman. The chief’s son, Oki (Peter-Henry Arnatsiaq) resents Atanarjuat when the latter wins the satisfactory Atuat (Syvlvia Ivalu) as a wife, and seeks to kill him. But Atanarjuat survives escapes and runs for his freshness over the ice, with Oki in pursuit. And instead of revenge, he begins the treat of healing the community – in his own fashion.

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The Heartbreak Kid review

Publciado por kimihiroreizeisblog - 26/01/10 a las 08:01:33 am

“A poignant and witty marital
comedy.”

Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

Writer-director Elaine May (”A New Leaf”) presents a poignant and
witty marital comedy that is based on the story A Change of Plan by Bruce
Jay Friedman. Cowriter is playwright Neil Simon. It explores the meaning
of true love initially in an amusing way by showing lust as what fuels
most marriages, but as the tale gets exaggerated it builds to a tragic
ending that seems out of place (the dramatics come so suddenly that it
doesn’t quite sink until one gets a chance after the film to think how
far the narrative has shifted gears; it gives May a chance to make some
acerbic observations about how people use each other and don’t care who
they hurt to get what they want even if they don’t deserve it).

Lenny Cantrow (Charles Grodin) is a twentysomething ex-soldier, working
as a sporting goods salesman. In a singles bar Lenny meets fellow New Yorker
Lila Kolodny (Jeanne Berlin, Elaine May’s daughter) and after a short romance,
where the 22-year-old virgin frustratingly keeps the horny salesman from
having sex, they get married in a traditional Jewish wedding ceremony.
On their drive to their Miami Beach honeymoon, Lenny finds by the time
they reach Virginia a number of small things he doesn’t like about his
wife such as her singing voice, she’s too talkative during sex, keeps mentioning
that they’ll most likely spend the next 50 years together and gets smears
of egg salad over her face as she gorges herself. At the luxurious Doral
Hotel, Lila gets a severe sunburn and is confined to the hotel room. On
the beach a coy blonde beauty goddess from Minnesota, on her college winter
break with her parents, Kelly Corcoran (Cybill Shepherd), successfully
flirts with Lenny. During the course of the next three-days, the determined
Lenny decides to divorce his wife and marry the shikseh. He does this despite
Kelly not being responsive to him as a marriage partner and Kelly’s father
(Eddie Albert) making it evident he hates his guts, especially as Lenny
lays his cards on the table and tells him “there’s a slight complication–I’m
a newlywed.” 

Things turn ugly when Lenny breaks his wife’s heart on her first
night out to a restaurant by telling her he wants out of the marriage.
Lenny gets a quickie divorce by agreeing to give her everything and two
weeks after the Florida vacation visits Kelly in Minnesota. Kelly’s banker
father still can’t stand the sight of the self-absorbed upwardly mobile
wiseguy, and offers him as much as 25 grand if he’ll leave town. Lenny
ends up charming the popular coed with schmaltz that’s passed off as sincerity.
Though Kelly is escorted by members of the football team to class and is
the dream girl on campus, she’s attracted to the nebbish Lenny by thinking
of him as a teddy bear. Lenny tells Kelly, in what might be the film’s
most sardonic line, “I don’t play games with my life.” His persistence
pays off, as the film opens with a Jewish wedding and ends with a Protestant
wedding. In both weddings there were signs that things are not going to
work, as Lenny is living in a fantasy world and has no idea what he really
wants except for selfish sexual urges he has for women who keep him panting
in anticipation.

There are some brilliant performances by Berlin, Albert, and especially
Grodin, who carries the film as a nervy guy who does hurtful things but
somehow is never viewed as just a cad. If he couldn’t convey, in a magnificent
piece of acting, to the viewer that he was a somewhat sympathetic character,
the film most likely would have fallen apart. Kudos must also go to May,
who takes the film further than just the comedy Simon intended by building
a stong character-driven story that slices its way across different hypocritical
social groups in the American scene and leaves it building on gravitas.
Viewing it after all these years, after enjoying it initially in the theater,
the comedy seems just as relevant as when it was released in 1972 and seems
more powerful than The Graduate–a film by May’s usual writing partner,
Mike Nichols, that it’s often compared to.

I have a feeling we’re going …

Publciado por kimihiroreizeisblog - 25/01/10 a las 04:01:30 am

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I sooner a be wearing a feeling we’re going to be seeing these apes into a long, lengthy time to upon. The movie’s already been issued a handful times on video, on disc, and in a casket set, and we’ll undoubtedly see it again in high definition within a few years. Finish with it.

On the occasion of its thirty-fifth anniversary, the Fox studios have seen fit to let the cat out of the bag it a new DVD presentation, this adjust in a two-disc, special-edition set. For anyone who owns the earlier box differentiate b reserve of “Apes” movies, you’ll notice the extras in this new set are mostly recycled from the bonus disc in the box, and the audio and video transfers remain, as far as I can tell, the same. But for those folks who don’t already own “Planet of the Apes” on disc and have been thinking about buying it, this anniversary edition is a well-behaved road to take. The “Apes” sequels, after all, went downhill awfully fast, so it’s on the contrary the original most people indigence to be upset with.

Let me begin by committing heresy and admitting that I didn’t love “Planet of the Apes” any excel this time all over on DVD than I did the first without surcease I watched it on disc some years ago or the leading term I saw it in a theater in 1968. This is not to say I abominate the silent picture, mind you. It’s just that, differing from most critics, I don’t consider it the end-all of sci-fi classics. To do so would be to grouping it with genuine masterpieces like “2001,” “Star Wars,” or “Close Encounters,” and I reject to tolerate those conditions. Let me scarcely say I think “Planet of the Apes” is an above-customary subject-fiction movie in rancour of its contrived plot, its star’s wooden acting, its feigned allegory, and its unconvincing, Academy Award-winning, million-dollar costumes and makeup. To me the movie is simply a slick bit of Hollywood hokum that adds some nice twists and a whole division of outward philosophizing to what is essentially an old-time “Twilight Zone” script (”I Shot an Arrow into the Air,” by Rod Serling and Madelon Champion, predating the movie and Pierre Boulle’s story by several years). “Apes” cool has the distinction of getting us to urge on for a perfectly unlikable hero.

Admittedly, there probably isn’t a person on the face of the Earth who doesn’t have knowledge of the plot of “Planet of the Apes,” including persons who haven’t rhythmical seen the movie before. It’s grow so much of a cinematic icon that younger people who have not ever acquire a win near it can tell you all about it, particularly its surprise ending, which, by the way, holds up as well as ever. In the interest the infrequent of you, though, who are a little fuzzy on the details, here’s recap from my earlier review, along with a few stray thoughts.

The screenplay, written by Michael Wilson and Rod Serling, is based on the unconventional “La planete des singes,” or “The Monkey Planet,” by Pierre Boulle (”The Bridge on the River Kwai”). It begins with the ideal, George Taylor (Charlton Heston), piloting an American space journey into outer rank. Where they’re going we’re never told. Just somewhere “out there” as Captain Kirk would express. Anyhow, due to a real-life story condition affecting the relativity of time and extent, although Taylor and his company of three have only been away a complication of months, many years have passed by on Earth. When they finally boom-take captive on a strange planet, their Soil clock says that by Earth’s time it is the year 3978. Anticipated, they are themselves only a year or so older.

So far, so good, except that in transit one of the crew, the woman, has died in her hibernation chamber. Then they mark out into their hip land and try to figure out where they are. No fate. Apparently, not limerick of the three astronauts took a basic course in astronomy before leaving Earth, because none of them thinks to look into the night sky where they might have noticed a some constellations of interest. Their ship having sunk in a lake, they set out to explore, resigned to the fact that they’re quite not going back home. This seems to delight Taylor no end, however, inasmuch as he admits he left Earth hating people. He says he went exploring because “I can’t help thinking somewhere in the universe there has to be something punter than Man. Has to be.”

What he and his crew find first are aboriginal humans, living dotty the sod and impotent to speak. They are mute. Why a race of humans would evolve into mutes is anybody’s guess, but it makes for a profitable plot device. What Taylor finds next are apes that dominate the humans and probe them along the same lines as animals. They round up Taylor and the others and succeed them backwards to their ape city for medical experiments. Here we find that the apes, although masterful to talk and write and create rifles, otherwise live a totally primitive existence. This is because the skin producers could not afford a budget big enough to pay them the advanced technology described in Boulle’s paperback. Conveniently, Taylor is rule the roost in the neck rather than his capture, presentation him no more able to warn than the other mute humans on the planet. The apes, on the other hand, living in the year 3978, speak in through twentieth-century English. What are the odds?

Fashionable in the ape era, Taylor meets two compassionate simians, a psychologist named Zira (Kim Hunter) and her archaeologist cover up, Cornelius (Roddy McDowell, the only actor to appear in all the “Apes” films, both as Cornelius and, later, as Cornelius’s son). Taylor also meets some less-than-compassionate apes, Dr. Zaius (Maurice Evans) and the President of the Assembly (James Whitmore). Basically, the story line involves Taylor finally regaining his voice (”Take your stinking paws off me, you damned, dirty ape!”) and trying to take it on the lam with the aid of Zira and Cornelius, who are the only ones who come to conjecture, at least entirely, any of Taylor’s fish story about coming from another planet.

The setup of an ape-merciful edification allows the scriptwriters to make any number of social, national, and scrupulous references in a kind of dark, satiric, assign manner. But a insufficient of this goes a long method. The ape scientists refuse to believe anything Taylor tells them; it might upset their already cherished beliefs. Racial injustice, class separation, and prejudice are apparent targets. The apes participate in a three-tiered hierarchy: Light-skinned orangutans at the top, the leaders; chimpanzees next, the scientists and intellectuals; and fierce-looking gorillas at the cause, the laborers and soldiers. Humans don’t even count, as they are considered beasts (”The solely good Possibly manlike is a dead human” being a regular proverb among the apes). The filmmakers requite go so far as to depict three apes sitting in a court of inquiry putting their hands to their eyes, ears, and debouch in the classic “See no evil, hear no disastrous, speak no evil” pose. The filmmakers couldn’t resist the self-explanatory. Taylor, interval, can’t believe what he’s gotten into. “It’s a madhouse,” he exclaims, “a madhouse!” Later he asks Dr. Zaius, “How in hell did this upside-down civilization get started?” and gets his answer in the film’s shocking incline.

Heston is the perfect hero in appearance and background. Remember, he had played Moses and Ben Hur and El Cid, and audiences knew it. He is impoverished and athletic, and even if he is in a tough situation, we know he’s going to find a way gone from. Too depraved he’s more brawn than brains, though. At the beginning, when he is not able to talk, we wonder why he doesn’t make more of an travail than he does to communicate nonverbally. Eventually he does, but in spite of a trained astronaut it seems a elongated time coming. He also tends to lose his temper surely and rushes to settle things with his fists. Maybe the apes take a point after all. It is nice, regardless, to watch the irony of Taylor’s situation: a guy who hates mankind called upon to parry it with his autobiography.