A tortured probe of the disintegration of a Mid-western family, The Indian Runner is decidedly much actors’ cinema. Spreading, relaxed and joltingly raw at times, Sean Penn’s first outing as a director takes a light amount of patience to get toe but has an integrity that intermittently serves it well.

Inspired by the Bruce Springsteen song ‘Highway Patrolman,’ overwrought piece looks at the muted tragedy of two brothers in the late 1960s. Joe (David Morse) is a small-town Nebraska cop who tries to welcome his brother Frank (Viggo Mortensen) back into the fold after the latter returns from a stint in Vietnam, but Frank immediately takes off.

Learning that Frank has been in prison, Joe goes to pick him up but Frank shacks up with a blonde sprite named Dorothy (Patricia Arquette). Along the way, traumas hit the family like clockwork.

All this takes more than two hours to get through because Penn, as writer and director, lets his scenes play out at great length. Actors, notably Morse and Mortensen, come off to decent advantage. Charles Bronson puts in a supporting interp of repressed hysteria as the father, while Sandy Dennis and Dennis Hopper are in briefly as the mother and a local bartender. Valeria Golino and Arquette are vital as the women in the brothers’ lives.

All anent my girlfriend in a coma
Pedro Almodovar shows the same marks of genius as in his zanier films but continues to delve deeper into the human drama in "Talk to Her," with reference to a handcuffs dealing with the loss of his lover.

By

FRANK VIGORITO


Offoffoff.com

(Originally reviewed at the 2002 Budding York International Film Festival at Lincoln Center.)
The obvious voice of Spanish cinema over the extent of almost more than twenty years, writer and director Pedro Almodovar's latest blear "Hable con Ella" ("Talk to Her") is as much a must be wise to persevere as "Women on the Brink of a Nervous Breakdown" or "All About My Mother," not barely because of the tender, extraordinary human drama it recounts, but also because it finds the master challenging himself, creating a new cinematic vocabulary that touches the viewer as powerfully as all the blood, guts and sex that has come in preference to.
TALK TO HER
Individualist title:
Hable con Ella
.

Written and directed by:
Pedro Almodovar.
Rosario Flores, Javier Camara, Dario Grandinetti, Leonor Watling, Roberto Alvarez.

In Spanish with English subtitles.
Related links:


Official site


The first scene of the dusting, a with it dance performance, is considerable. In dance, it is quickly apparent, Almodovar has learned to present, and by filming dance express, the revolting and blissful messages that the Possibly manlike body communicates in movement. An older handmaiden, seemingly eclipse, agonizes and stumbles hither a stage filled with clumsy chairs. A young cover shackles struggles to prompt the chairs out of harm's way as she stumbles across the floor and falls, quite exactly, into disheartenment. Upstage, a younger abigail dressed similarly echoes her movements in smaller, more casuistic action.

The film is infused with these scenes of human motion ? the deadly dance of a matador and a bull, the hands of a nurse sensuously massaging the association of a beautiful offspring woman, the minuet of lava-lamp globules breaking asunder except for and ricocheting in a trust of oil. Watching the drama unfold on condition are Marco and Benigno, two men who intent later careen and tumble emotionally across the flicks screen. That these men sit however inches apart, but do not reply to each other, is as much a dance of characters for Almodovar as the costumed ballerinas on stage.

The manhood of the haze takes rooms in The Forest, an aptly named clinic for patients who suffer from comas, trapped in a royal of unreality that recalls the dreamy nighttime woods of Shakespeare. Marco (Dario Grandinetti) and Benigno (Javier Camara) are waiting at the clinic for their loved ones to return to the Brummagem-drenched world of the living. Marco is the most newly arrived, his toreador girlfriend having been gored in the ring ? their history together has been brief and he's uncomfortable amidst former lovers and hysterical relatives.


Marco's frustrated answer, "She's brain dead," only elicits the glib, yet nuanced Almodovarism, "Yes, but women are complex."

He finds shelter with Benigno, a nurse at The Forest whose at best charge is a beautiful young dancer whom he had developed a crush on before her accident. While able to speak freely with sole another, the men are plagued by what they never said to their respective loves. Benigno had innocently stalked Alicia (Leonor Watling) upward of the course of two weeks, no more than to note her ditty date as his new unaggressive at the clinic. Marco, a writer, fatigued too much of his down time with Lydia (Rosario Flores) talking, as writers do, and not listening.
The story follows the suffering of these two unrequited lovers using a series of flashbacks and flashforwards to tell each of their individual stories. The knowingly experience-stamped sections are a new narrative tool as Almodovar, who typically has progressive things up to his audience to get a fix on at large. The sequencing gives the impression of jumping forward sole to cut off back twice ? not in a disjointed, Tarantino-esque fashion, but in a manner that allows each story and relationship to develop, construction slowly and fleshing out the complexities of the men who bear in mind.

Benigno's constant care and fondness for Alicia is a bit quaint, but his carriage is what one would promise conducive to from a good angel of mercy ? he truly believes that Alicia, and perhaps all the patients, will unified day miraculously awaken. As a battle-scarred of the coma ward, he advises Marco to talk to his girlfriend in a coma, "talk to her." Marco's frustrated response, "She's brain dead," at best elicits the facile, notwithstanding nuanced Almodovarism, "Yes, but women are involved." Benigno's unworldly yearning is ultimately his downfall, but in a refashion, it is also Marco's salvation when the two forge an uncongenial, everlasting friendship of the prototype that can only come to light from communal tribulation. When Marco eventually does take Benigno's piece of counsel in the final sight of the covering, there's a calm, a peace that he seems to repossess; to whom he does the talking is Almodovar's first-class-kept secret.
Since 1997's "Live Human," Almodovar's films have been maturing thematically as spring as narratively. After exploring the visceral and abject in films like "Matador," "Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!" and "Kika," he's shown more interest lately in the subtlety of the magnanimous condition: growth and enlightenment, continually born of pain. He no longer needs to color the strainer with blood, guts and irrational going to bed. Where once there might have been a disturbing commotion of sexual assault (think "Kika"), there are at this very moment intimations of action offscreen, or equally effective, favourable camp.
The two Almodovars come into inauguration relief by way of an prototypical unspeaking fade away that punctuates the narrative of "Talk to Her." The exquisitely executed short "The Shrinking Lover" (think Bela Lugosi's "Dracula") is a technical gem, but more importantly it serves as a comic venue where Almodovar can bare his teeth. The bratty, low-class coupling-fiend Almodovar returns and lets fly with a scene of intercourse only he is capable of delivering: a shrunken curb, a six-foot tall vagina, and an all-consuming horniness. It's a OK champion laugh in the direction of the audience, but the consequences for the intended audience of this film within the film, Benigno, are ironically quite confusing and morose.
"Talk to Her" is full of surprises wish these ? for Almodovar veterans and newcomers ? not single in its slowly unfolding plot, but also in the new and inventive way Almodovar has found to tell his story. With a filmography that reads take to "El Quijote," it's no wonder Almodovar has begun to interest himself in not only what story to tell, but how to asseverate it. Certainty a tough assignment to replace the success of "All About My Spoil," "Talk to Her" proves once upon a time again that Almodovar is at the scale of his game and truly one of the world's to the fullest extent, most original filmmakers.

NOVEMBER 22, 2002

OFFOFFOFF.COM ? THE ORIENT TO VARIANT NEW YORK


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Deaf mute nine year-old Frankie (Jack McElhone) and his distinct Keep quiet, Lizzie (Emily Mortimer), have been on the ruse ever since Frankie can recall, most recently arriving in a Scottish seaside town away Glasgow. Lacking to care for her unconcerned son from the truth that they’ve run away from his clergyman, Lizzie has been writing letters, theoretically from his old man, influential of his adventures in belly lands as a sea dog on the HMS Accra. Frankie tracks the ship’s development around the sphere, and he learns that it is directly to falsify in his hometown. Now Lizzie must chose between letting the cat out of the bag Frankie the truth or judgement a stand in, a stranger (Gerard Butler), to play Frankie’s father for just one day.

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It’s often been said that drunk teaching is the perfect surroundings for a horror smokescreen. Within its clique-driven walls are gallons of self-repugnance, hundreds of hurtful and hateful emotions, and enough adolescent angst to fuel a million psychogenic exercises. Mournfully, no single film macabre has ever made wealthy buying of the scholastic situations. Of sure, there bear been movies featuring killers run amuck, carving up students with surprising cheer. And Dario Argento’s Suspiria is a beautiful example of a magical shocker with a ballet academy at its center. But instead of getting into the interpersonal dynamic between the kids, the Italian master merely acquainted with the philosophy as a backdrop for all his sensational butchery setpieces. The inherent pain in education was under no circumstances explored, nor was the covert awe in peer pressure and competition employed. No, the classroom is not the preferred strike it rich for the paranormal that it should be.

So it’s interesting to note that the successful Korean scare saga Whispering Corridors is itself set inside the often harsh Asian educational system. Certainly the movie employed the typical Eastern “ghost story” moodiness, but it seemed to overcome said stereotypes to bring freshness to its fear factors. After an equally effective sequel (Memento Mori) the series moved to a dance school and a haunted staircase. Wishing Stairs, from 2003, wants to explore all the elements of schooling that other horror films merely flirt with. And for a while, it does so very well. But this is a typical Eastern terror, and as if by mandate, the movie de-evolves into an incoherent series of increasingly illogical vignettes, all seeming to revolve around…you guessed, a dead girl with evil eyes and long black hair. After almost breaking tradition with its tale of illicit love and rivalry, we end up with a standard spook show - and not a very good one at that.

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The most conventionally tilted movie that director Richard Linklater or scenarist Mike Dead white have been involved with, “The School of Rock” is a genial comedy toplining Jack Insidious as a rock ‘n’ bread-roll lifer/loser teaching all things he knows to a classroom of 10-year-olds. Although a tad quirkier than, power, “Kindergarten Cop” or “Daddy Daytime Care,” this high-concept, an individual-gimmick pic won’t automatically entice grownups. Guide to tapping sleeper passive will lie in convincing teen to thirtysomething auds that “School” isn’t merely a kidpic — and that semistar Black is act enough to see a film. Which, in this trunk, happens to be true.

First seen annoying his blase bandmates with stadium-scale, over-the-top Rock God moves and riffing, Black’s Dewey Finn is the consummate stalled-adolescent headbanger. Waking up next ayem with a bad hangover combined with general damage from the prior night’s stage dive/pratfall, he gets a double shot of bad news. First, longtime pal Ned (White), goaded by prissy g.f. Patty (Sarah Silverman), demands Dewey’s rent must be paid — even if it means latter must get actual gainful employment. (Balking, Dewey protests “I serve society by rocking!”) Second, everyone else in Dewey-founded Loverboy-type hard-rock unit No Vacancy has just voted him out of the band.

Thus desperation drives protag to pretend he is respected substitute teacher Ned when he happens to answer a call to Ned from Manhattan’s most prestigious private prep school, Horace Green Elementary. Showing up in his roadie van and some scraped-together “real world” clothes, Dewey barely manages to fool principal Rosalie Mullins (Joan Cusack), then tells his classroom of junior overachievers to take an all-day recess.

After a few days of this, the students are restless. Fortunately, Dewey discovers many of them already play in the school band, deciding on the spot to turn their M.I.A. curriculum into one long rehearsal. His goal: To use the kids as his backing unit in an upcoming Battle of the Bands contest.

This plan rolls with credulity-straining ease, as several students switch from classical to electric musicianship, while others are “assigned” roles as backup singers, tech crew, stylist, even groupie. The most type-A child in the bunch (Miranda Cosgrove) is fittingly appointed band manager.

Temporary disaster strikes when Patty and Ned expose Dewey’s ruse, just as a nighttime meeting with persnickety parents is going south. But the kids use their ingenuity to get themselves and their teacher to the battle just in time, where of course they wow a jaded crowd.

Linklater and White avoid opportunities for excess cuteness, generally letting adults get the laughs while allowing the juveniles some quizzical dignity. White scores some felicitous moments in another of his patented pasty ubernerd roles, while Cusack is very good in one of her more sizable parts of late.

But the whole show is basically Black’s, and while he has done variations on this ranting, cartoon-rawk chubster before (not least as one half of satirical outfit Tenacious D), “School of Rock” is ideally suited to harness his shtick as its engine. He really can riff and shriek like every bedroom Led Zep fantasist dreams of doing.

Combined with hilarious physical business and perfectly overearnest delivery of pseudocool lines like, “Let your fingers do the rocking!,” he pretty much single-handedly keeps the formulaic progress funny. His performances of such originals as “Step Off” and “Math Is a Wonderful Thing,” not to mention numerous classic rock staples (”Smoke on the Water,” etc.) are worth admission price in themselves.

Design and tech aspects are solidly handled; natch, soundtrack manages to incorporate large lineup of oldies as well as tracks actually performed by Black and junior cast members.

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'Baghead'

Rating:

July 23, 2008

By
RAFER GUZMÁN

rafer.guzman@newsday.com

The mundane indie genre - all those talky, slightly trivial movies by and about talky, slightly trivial young people - gets a little shot of adrenaline in "Baghead," in which four would-be filmmakers are terrorized by a being of their own creation. The slasher is wearing not a hockey mask but a lower-budget prop: a paper bag.

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Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

Richard Thorpe directs with gusto this black and white B Western;
it’s from the short story by Ernest Haycox and penned by Maurice Geraghty. 

The snappy opening has hanging Judge Keeley (George Watts) riding
through town on the stagecoach to pass sentence on Tom Folliard (William
Lundigan); the Judge never sets foot outside of the stage. After briefly
hearing what the Marshal states, the Judge releases Tom for the three months
served. Tom was supposedly involved in the stagecoach robbery his career-criminal
brother Trigger Bill (Lloyd Nolan) committed but, as it turns out, he was
only forced to go along with the robbery by his big brother. The still
on the loose Trigger meets his brother when freed and tells him, I only
wanted to toughen you up and show you it’s a dog-eat-dog world and you
have to look out for Number One.

Refused his old job riding shotgun on the stagecoach, even though
he’s regarded as the fastest draw in the territory and was absolved of
his crime, the manager (Emory Parnell), who knows Tom’s family, hires him
as the stage agent in a remote outpost in Apache territory. It’s a post
no other agent wants because of constant Indian raids. Tom arrives to find
his longtime friends, Señora Martinez (Connie Gilchrist) and her
18 year old daughter Rosalia (Donna Reed), and they decide to stay because
Rosalia has a crush on the handsome Tom. He builds a fortress with the
help of stagecoach workers Amber and Juke, and stagecoach driver Lestrade
and shotgun rider Ed. He also hires a young Apache Cochee (Tito Renaldo),
who admires the white people.

A stage heading for California arrives with the beautiful widow Constance
Seldon (Ayars) and she flirts with a receptive Tom, who’s jealously watched
by Rosalia and her mother. Also an ailing artist (Miles Mander) and his
wife (Gloria Holden) are passengers, who are disturbed the stagecoach can’t
leave because the Indians are on the warpath. That’s reported by cavalry
officer Major Lowden (Frank Thomas) who rides to the outpost to warn Tom
and quickly leaves to get back to the fort to alert the troops. Shortly
afterwards, Trigger comes to the gate and is granted entry only after giving
up his guns, which are stored in the same safe as Tom stored the Wells
Fargo box the stage just brought in that contained the army payroll at
the fort.

Tom leaves the outpost to determine why the Apaches are going on
their uprising. While he’s gone, Trigger fools the artist into giving him
his guns and then robs the safe, taking the widow with him as hostage.
But Tom, who just rescued the injured ‘Pike’ Skelton (Chill Wills) from
the Apaches, forces his brother into a gun duel and outdraws him–shooting
him in both hands instead of killing him. Skelton mentions the reason for
the uprising is because Trigger stole their sacred ceremonial peace pipe.
The outpost weathers one Indian attack with only three casualties. When
the Indians offer a proposal that if they release Trigger the attacks will
cease, Tom has everyone vote and he becomes the tie breaking vote of whether
or not to send his brother out to the Indians. 

The MGM Western looked good, the acting was first-rate, and the directing
kept things moving at a fast-clip. It was was remade in Technicolor in
1952 as Apache War Smoke. 

The Jacket is a drama — not the sort of thriller that the trailer implies — centered all over Opening Conflict seasoned Jack Starks (Adrien Brody). After entrancing a bullet to the utterly during the wage war with, Jack’s memory fades away. He keeps his dog tags within arm’s reach to prompt him of his indistinguishability as he trots throughout Vermont, where one snowy winter he bumps into a callow girl and her drunken mother whose truck is stalled. Jack’s capable to treat their truck up and running in short order, almost as immediately as he establishes a empathy with young Jackie.

Jack hands her his dog tags and hitches a ride with another stranger towards the Canadian border, no greater than to soon find himself with both a bullet and a murder rap on his head. Jack’s perceived mental state is such that he’s institutionalized, but he may make been better unsatisfactory in clink. Dr. Thomas Becker (Kris Kristofferson) has been experimenting with a drill go he believes will strip away the layers of hate in his patients, pumping them full of a cocktail of distinct drugs, strapping them into a borderline-disturbing looking straightjacket, and locking them in a morgue drawer for hours at a time. Most of them react with vivid hallucinations. Jack, on the other hand… Jack finds himself standing outside a mom-and-pop diner where he encounters a depressed young chambermaid (Keira Knightley). After she takes him back to her hamlet and passes out in a drunken stupor, Jack mills around a bit and stumbles upon his old dog tags. It turns old-fashioned that he’s holed up with Jackie and that he’s been flung more than a decade into the following. Upon culture that he died in 1993, Jack bounds across time to bring to light how he was killed and predictably falls in love in the process.

The Jacket is the sort of movie where I’m sorely tempted to dash off some barely-polysyllabic review like “it’s alright, I guess” and fade away insane. Neither impressed nor disheartened by much of anything just about it, I’m not to a T sure what to symbolize. A person disapproval I’ve heard leveled against The Jacket repeatedly is that it’s too incoherent to follow, and on that, I’d disagree. The storytelling is non-linear, but I found it painless enough to piece together. Jack’s not leaping chaotically through time — he’s either in the past or the future, and two sets of timelines aren’t particularly tough to follow. As for how to the letter Jack’s body is being transported over a decade into the expected, if that’s even happening at all…? That’s not made entirely clear, but I accepted the opinion of an also gaolbird hopping into the past in 12 Monkeys in much the same way, so I guess I can endure the flipside of that coin too. Solitary major gripe I could floor is that the ending seems too thrilled and cloudless considering what had unfolded in the previous hour and a half. Since it’s not plainly established if what we’re seeing in the end is actually happening, there is a very valid interpretation that it’s bittersweet rather than a saccharine Hollywood on cloud nine ending, but it’s more fun to nagging if I represent that it’s a cop-in default.

Adrien Brody has played enough brooding, battered men to effortlessly take off d withdraw away a role like this, and his Jack has a categorize of endearing awkwardness about him. There positively isn’t much chemistry between the two leads, and the way he strokes the hair of Jackie’s younger incarnation after banging the older one is more than a little bit creepy. Keira Knightley adopts an indeterminate American accent for The Jacket, although her impersonation doesn’t appearance of to extend all that far beyond The Supportive Love Interest™.

Her character’s underdeveloped, and although some of the tragedies in her life have driven her to penury, depression, and alcoholism, The Jacket doesn’t really invest any struggle in trying to make her character sympathetic. Sure, she smokes in the bathtub and wears black nail polish…tortured! I get it. Not indubitable why I’m supposed to care, conceding that. On the upside, she does get topless, although it’s brief sufficiency that most viewers will have to rewind and adjudge to perceive out if they’re looking at Keira Knightley’s case or Adrien Brody’s. Keira Knightley is underutilized, but Jennifer Jason Leigh’s at once wasted, with her brand having unimaginative to no impact on much of anything.

I’m almost exactly indifferent towards The Jacket. Not compelling enough to seek out or dreadful enough to keep away from, this is a film best-suited for a rental or waiting for its inevitable appearance on joke of the cable film channels.

“Morning Light,” sailor’s delight.

All others be forewarned. This documentary chronicling the crew of young adults who participated in the 2007 “Transpac” — a yacht race from California to Hawaii — seems destined to leave most landlubbers in its wake. Notwithstanding the gorgeous cinematography of cavorting dolphins and sunsets on the open sea, there’s not a lot for non-sailing fans to dive into. Much of the film deals with tacking and jibing.

Oh, sure, there’s the requisite theme of personal growth, too. The film follows the recruitment and training of 15 college-age sailors, 11 of whom were ultimately picked to man (and, in one case, woman) the titular 52-foot sailboat, competing against a flotilla of more-experienced yachtsmen in one of sailboat racing’s most grueling competitions. Over the course of the months-long process, they grow up, and together.

That’s a given in any film that tells us not once, but twice, that it doesn’t really matter who ultimately wins. “It’s about the journey,” coos Roy E. Disney, the film’s executive producer and Hawaiian-shirt-clad Buddha. (Wait a minute. I think I’ve heard that tidbit of wisdom somewhere before, and I didn’t need to cross the Pacific Ocean to get it.)

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But I’m being churlish. “Morning Light” is a sunny, saltwater-splashed tale of inspiration. The kids — a couple of whom have cute nicknames like “Troll” and “Turtle” — are all likable. And the boating scenes are beautiful. As for the white-knuckle suspense of the race itself, well, how much of a life-or-death matter could it have been — despite the constant reminders about drowning from the crew’s coaches — when you stop to think that another boat had to be following along with a camera crew, recording it all for posterity?

The Soviet film “Scarecrow” is like an after-kindergarten specialized but with moxie. The cinema was made in 1983, and after sitting on the shelf for three years — it was opposed by the Denomination Teachers Combination — in 1986 it became the country’s biggest commercial hit ever. Directed by Rolan Bykov, it deals with the problems of a rate of sixth-graders and its newest increment, a pale-eyed, anorexic blond with bows tied in her pigtails, named Lena (Christina Orbakaite) and nicknamed Scarecrow. The children are planning a visit to Moscow, but one time when their master is ill they conclude to play hooky. When one of the class members, a dynamic young fellow named Dima who has taken a liking to Lena, is caught, he tells on the interlude of his friends. As a conclusion, the class is punished and its trip to the capital is canceled.

To protect her boyfriend, Lena takes the blame for tattling on her classmates and is branded a snitch. Consequently, at the encouragement of a tight-faced little despot named Iron Tack — she’s like a fascist Shirley Temple — Lena is declared a nonperson, taunted and ridiculed. Isolated from all except her old grandfather (Yuri Nikulin), the town laughingstock who passionately combs the village for historical paintings, Lena endures the children’s abuse, which culminates in a mock burning at the stake, all the while expecting Dima to come forward with the truth. But by the time he confesses it’s too late, and Lena and her grandfather, having donated his collection of ancestral artwork and his home to the village, leave town.

I don’t think you have to have had bad experiences as a kid in school to empathize with the lacerating pain and confusion that Lena experiences as the result of her ostracism. And as Lena, Orbakaite has the kind of open, expressive face that grows more interesting as the movie progresses; there are complicated emotions working within this character and she’s more than up to the task of conveying them.

The movie itself works nicely on a number of levels: first, as a story about the casual brutality of children, and also as an allegorical tale about the costs of individual action in a closed society. However, Bykov’s storytelling style is a liability. You want him to penetrate to the heart of the story and when he doesn’t it’s frustrating (and, at times, confusing). It’s padded out at just the instant when you want directness, when you want the story to peak.