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From: owner-movies-digest@lists.xmission.com (movies-digest) To: movies-digest@lists.xmission.com Subject: movies-digest V2 #366 Reply-To: movies-digest Sender: owner-movies-digest@lists.xmission.com Errors-To: owner-movies-digest@lists.xmission.com Precedence: bulk movies-digest Tuesday, August 6 2002 Volume 02 : Number 366 Re: [MV] Moulin Rouge [MV] Li'l Abner RE: [MV] Moulin Rouge RE: [MV] Moulin Rouge Re: [MV] Moulin Rouge [MV] Favorite Movies [MV] Celebrity Real Names [MV] FULL FRONTAL / * 1/2 (R) [MV] THE MASTER OF DISGUISE / *(PG) [MV] SIGNS / **** (PG-13) [MV] THE COUNTRY BEARS / ** (G) [MV] MY WIFE IS AN ACTRESS / **1/2 (R) [MV] MARTIN LAWRENCE LIVE: RUNTELDAT / *** (R) [MV] FULL FRONTAL / * 1/2 (R) [MV] MARTIN LAWRENCE LIVE: RUNTELDAT / *** (R) [MV] MY WIFE IS AN ACTRESS / **1/2 (R) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 18 Jul 2002 00:23:21 -0600 From: Warren Woodward <scratch@xmission.com> Subject: Re: [MV] Moulin Rouge On Wed, Jul 17, 2002 at 11:59:07PM -0400, Gene Ehrich wrote: > Did Nicole Kiddman & Ewan McGreggor do their own singing in Moulin Rouge Yes. - -w [ To leave the movies mailing list, send the message "unsubscribe ] [ movies" (without the quotes) to majordomo@xmission.com ] ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 18 Jul 2002 05:04:03 -0400 From: Gene Ehrich <gehrich@tampabay.rr.com> Subject: [MV] Li'l Abner I picked up the Li'l Abner video at the library. It was a wonderful movie with great music, dancing and costumes. Never could understand why this movie wasn't more popular and most musical fans never heard of it. [ To leave the movies mailing list, send the message "unsubscribe ] [ movies" (without the quotes) to majordomo@xmission.com ] ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 18 Jul 2002 08:29:09 -0500 From: Wade Snider <wsnider@brazoselectric.com> Subject: RE: [MV] Moulin Rouge This message is in MIME format. Since your mail reader does not understand this format, some or all of this message may not be legible. - ------_=_NextPart_001_01C22E5F.191D8110 Content-Type: text/plain Can't you tell? > -----Original Message----- > From: Warren Woodward [SMTP:scratch@xmission.com] > Sent: Thursday, July 18, 2002 1:23 AM > To: movies@lists.xmission.com > Subject: Re: [MV] Moulin Rouge > > On Wed, Jul 17, 2002 at 11:59:07PM -0400, Gene Ehrich wrote: > > Did Nicole Kiddman & Ewan McGreggor do their own singing in Moulin Rouge > > > Yes. > > -w > > [ To leave the movies mailing list, send the message "unsubscribe ] > [ movies" (without the quotes) to majordomo@xmission.com ] - ------_=_NextPart_001_01C22E5F.191D8110 Content-Type: text/html Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN"> <HTML> <HEAD> <META HTTP-EQUIV=3D"Content-Type" CONTENT=3D"text/html; = charset=3DUS-ASCII"> <META NAME=3D"Generator" CONTENT=3D"MS Exchange Server version = 5.5.2653.12"> <TITLE>RE: [MV] Moulin Rouge</TITLE> </HEAD> <BODY> Can't you = tell? <UL> -----Original Message----- From: Warren Woodward = [SMTP:scratch@xmission.com] Sent: Thursday, July 18, 2002 1:23 AM To: movies@lists.xmission.com Subject: = Re: [MV] Moulin Rouge On Wed, Jul 17, 2002 at 11:59:07PM = - -0400, Gene Ehrich wrote: > Did Nicole Kiddman & Ewan = McGreggor do their own singing in Moulin Rouge Yes. -w [ To leave the movies mailing list, = send the message "unsubscribe ] [ movies" (without the quotes) = to = majordomo@xmission.com &n= bsp; ] </UL> </BODY> </HTML> - ------_=_NextPart_001_01C22E5F.191D8110-- [ To leave the movies mailing list, send the message "unsubscribe ] [ movies" (without the quotes) to majordomo@xmission.com ] ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 20 Jul 2002 01:37:43 -0500 From: Diane Christy <dchristy10@earthlink.net> Subject: RE: [MV] Moulin Rouge On Thu, 18 Jul 2002 08:29:09 -0500, Wade Snider so aptly wrote: >Can't you tell? Yes, I can. - -- Diane Christy, Homemaker Rockford, IL (N'Awlins native!) Mom to Sammie and Josh dchristy10@earthlink.net http://www.geocities.com/diane507 [ To leave the movies mailing list, send the message "unsubscribe ] [ movies" (without the quotes) to majordomo@xmission.com ] ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 13 Jul 2002 07:03:25 -0400 From: Mel Eperthener <bcassidy@usaor.net> Subject: Re: [MV] Moulin Rouge At 11.59 PM 17/07/2002 -0400, Gene Ehrich wrote: >Did Nicole Kiddman & Ewan McGreggor do their own singing in Moulin Rouge You had better believe it.:-) Sort of puts George Clooney to shame now, doesn't it?? Regards, - --Mel - --Mel Eperthener president, Gowanna Multi-media Pty, Inc http://www.webz.com/gowanna mailto:bcassidy@usaor.net mailto:gowanna@australiamail.com West Coast Video Gowanna MultiMedia Pty 4614 Liberty Avenue PO Box 95184 Pittsburgh, PA 15224 Pittsburgh, PA 15223 (412) 682-3900 (412) 781-6380 TOLL FREE COMING SOON!!!!! ____________________________________________ Look, I think we've all got something we can bring to this discussion. But I think from now on the thing you should bring is silence. ______________________________________________ [ To leave the movies mailing list, send the message "unsubscribe ] [ movies" (without the quotes) to majordomo@xmission.com ] ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 31 Jul 2002 22:06:00 -0400 From: Gene Ehrich <gehrich@tampabay.rr.com> Subject: [MV] Favorite Movies On another mailing list members are picking their ten favorite movies of all time. My ten favorites. I haven't even tried to put them in order. 12 Angry Men (Fonda) Casablanca LA Confidential Raging Bull Shawshank Redemption Showboat (Grayson/Keel) Some Like it Hot Something About Mary The Insider Titanic (the last one) "A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person." -Mignon McLaughlin [ To leave the movies mailing list, send the message "unsubscribe ] [ movies" (without the quotes) to majordomo@xmission.com ] ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 01 Aug 2002 20:05:58 -0400 From: Gene Ehrich <gehrich@tampabay.rr.com> Subject: [MV] Celebrity Real Names I have a list of Celebrity Real Names on my web site you may enjoy looking through. http://www.voicenet.com/~generic/celeb.html [ To leave the movies mailing list, send the message "unsubscribe ] [ movies" (without the quotes) to majordomo@xmission.com ] ------------------------------ Date: 06 Aug 2002 18:03:16 GMT From: gregorys@xmission.com Subject: [MV] FULL FRONTAL / * 1/2 (R) FULL FRONTAL / * 1/2 (R) August 2, 2002 Nicholas/Calvin: Blair Underwood Catherine/Francesca: Julia Roberts Carl: David Hyde Pierce Lee: Catherine Keener Linda: Mary McCormack Lucy: Erika Alexander Brian: Rainn Wilson Bill/Gus: David Duchovny Miramax Films presents a film directed by Steven Soderbergh. Written by Coleman Hough. Running time: 101 minutes. Rated R (for language and some sexual content). BY ROGER EBERT Every once in a while, perhaps as an exercise in humility, Steven Soderbergh makes a truly inexplicable film. There was the Cannes "secret screening" of his "Schizopolis" in 1996, which had audiences filing out with sad, thoughtful faces, and now here is "Full Frontal," a film so amateurish that only the professionalism of some of the actors makes it watchable. This is the sort of work we expect from a film school student with his first digital camera, not from the gifted director of "Traffic" and "Out of Sight." Soderbergh directs at far below his usual level, and his cinematography is also wretched; known as one of the few directors who shoots some of his own films, he is usually a skilled craftsman, but here, using a digital camera and available light, he produces only a demonstration of his inability to handle the style. Many shots consist of indistinct dark blobs in front of blinding backlighting. The plot involves a film within a film, on top of a documentary about some of the people in the outside film. The idea apparently is to provide a view of a day in the life of the Los Angeles entertainment industry and its satellites. The movie within the movie stars Julia Roberts as a journalist interviewing Blair Underwood; shots that are supposed to be this movie are filmed in lush 35mm, and only serve to make us yearn for the format as we see the other scenes in digital. The doc is not quite, or entirely, a doc; there are voice-overs describing and analyzing some of the characters, but other scenes play as dramatic fiction, and there's no use trying to unsort it all because Soderbergh hasn't made it sortable. If this movie is a satire of the sorts of incomprehensible, earnest "personal" films that would-be directors hand out on cassettes at film festivals, then I understand it. It's the kind of film where you need the director telling you what he meant to do and what went wrong and how the actors screwed up and how there was no money for retakes, etc. The other characters include Catherine Keener and David Hyde Pierce as Lee and Carl, an unhappily married couple. She leaves him a goodbye note in the morning, then goes off to work as a personnel director, spending the day in a series of bizarre humiliations of employees (forcing them, for example, to stand on a chair while she throws an inflated world globe at them). In these scenes, she is clearly deranged, and yet there is a "serious" lunch with her sister Linda (Mary McCormack), a masseuse who has never met Mr. Right. Linda does, however, meet Gus (David Duchovny), a producer who is having a birthday party in a big hotel, hires her for a massage, and then offers her $500 to "release his tension." She needs the money because she is flying off the next day to see a guy she met on the Internet. She thinks he's 22, but in fact he's about 40, and is not an artist as he says, but a director whose new play features Hitler as a guy who, he tells Eva Braun, has "so many responsibilities I can't think of a relationship right now." Meanwhile, Carl is fired at work ("He said I have confused my personality quirks with standards") and returns home to find his beloved dog has overdosed on hash brownies, after which he has a heart-to-heart with the veterinarian's assistant. All of these scenes feel like improvs that have been imperfectly joined, with no through-line. The scenes that work (notably McCormack's) are perhaps a tribute to the professionalism of the actor, not the director. Among the false alarms are little details like this: A love note that Underwood's character thinks came from Roberts' character is written on the same kind of red stationary as Keener's note to her husband. Is there a connection? Short answer: no. One day earlier, I saw "Sex & Lucia," also shot on digital, also involving a story within a story, with double roles for some of the characters. With it, too, I was annoyed by the digital photography (both films have more contrast between shadow and bright sunlight than their equipment seems able to handle). "Sex & Lucia" was even more confusing when it came to who was who ("Full Frontal" is fairly easy to figure out). But at least "Sex & Lucia" was made by a director who had a good idea of what he wanted to accomplish, and established a tone that gave the material weight and emotional resonance. There is a scene in "Full Frontal" where a character comes to a tragic end while masturbating. That could symbolize the method and fate of this film. Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc. [ To leave the movies mailing list, send the message "unsubscribe ] [ movies" (without the quotes) to majordomo@xmission.com ] ------------------------------ Date: 06 Aug 2002 18:03:26 GMT From: gregorys@xmission.com Subject: [MV] THE MASTER OF DISGUISE / *(PG) THE MASTER OF DISGUISE / *(PG) August 2, 2002 Pistachio: Dana Carvey Jennifer: Jennifer Esposito Grandfather: Harold Gould Frabbrizio: James Brolin Bowman: Brent Spiner Revolution Studios presents a film directed by Perry Andelin Blake. Written by Dana Carvey and Harris Goldberg. Running time: 80 minutes. Rated PG (for mild language and some crude humor). By ROGER EBERT "The Master of Disguise" pants and wheezes and hurls itself exhausted across the finish line after barely 65 minutes of movie, and then follows it with 15 minutes of end credits in an attempt to clock in as a feature film. We get outtakes, deleted scenes, flubbed lines and all the other versions of the Credit Cookie, which was once a cute idea but is getting to be a bore. The credits go on and on and on. The movie is like a party guest who thinks he is funny and is wrong. The end credits are like the same guest taking too long to leave. At one point they at last mercifully seemed to be over, and the projectionist even closed the curtains, but no: There was Dana Carvey, still visible against the red velvet, asking us what we were still doing in the theater. That is a dangerous question to ask after a movie like "The Master of Disguise." The movie is a desperate miscalculation. It gives poor Dana Carvey nothing to do that is really funny, and then expects us to laugh because he acts so goofy all the time. But acting funny is not funny. Acting in a situation that's funny--that's funny. The plot: Carvey plays an Italian waiter named Pistachio Disguisey, who is unfamiliar with the First Law of Funny Names, which is that funny names in movies are rarely funny. Pistachio comes from a long line of masters of disguise. His father, Frabbrizio (James Brolin), having capped his career by successfully impersonating Bo Derek, retires and opens a New York restaurant. He doesn't tell his son about the family trade, but then, when he's kidnapped by his old enemy Bowman (Brent Spiner), Pistachio is told the family secret by his grandfather (Harold Gould). Grandfather also gives him a crash course in disguise-craft after locating Frabbrizio's hidden workshop in the attic (a Disguisey's workshop, we learn, is known as a nest). There is now a scene representative of much of the movie, in which Pistachio puts on an inflatable suit, and it suddenly balloons so that he flies around the room and knocks over granddad. That scene may seem funny to kids. Real, real little, little kids. Carvey of course is himself a skilled impersonator, and during the film we see him as a human turtle, Al Pacino from "Scarface," Robert Shaw from "Jaws," a man in a cherry suit, a man with a cow pie for a face, George W. Bush, and many other guises. In some cases the disguises are handled by using a double and then employing digital technology to make it appear as if the double's face is a latex mask that can be removed. In other cases, such as Bush, he simply impersonates him. The plot helpfully supplies Pistachio with a girl named Jennifer (Jennifer Esposito) who becomes his sidekick in the search for Frabbrizio, and they visit a great many colorful locations. One of them is a secret headquarters where Bowman keeps his priceless trove of treasures, including the lunar landing module, which is used for one of those fight scenes where the hero dangles by one hand. The movie's director, Perry Andelin Blake, has been a production designer on 14 movies, including most of Adam Sandler's, and, to be sure, "The Master of Disguise" has an excellent production design. It is less successful at disguising itself as a comedy. Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc. [ To leave the movies mailing list, send the message "unsubscribe ] [ movies" (without the quotes) to majordomo@xmission.com ] ------------------------------ Date: 06 Aug 2002 18:03:23 GMT From: gregorys@xmission.com Subject: [MV] SIGNS / **** (PG-13) SIGNS / **** (PG-13) August 2, 2002 Father Graham Hess: Mel Gibson Merrill Hess: Joaquin Phoenix Morgan Hess: Rory Culkin Bo Hess: Abigail Breslin Officer Caroline Paski: Cherry Jones Colleen Hess: Patricia Kalember Radio Host: Jose L. Rodriguez Buena Vista Pictures presents a film written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan. Running time: 120 minutes. Rated PG-13 (for some frightening moments). BY ROGER EBERT M. Night Shyamalan's "Signs" is the work of a born filmmaker, able to summon apprehension out of thin air. When it is over, we think not how little has been decided, but how much has been experienced. Here is a movie in which the plot is the rhythm section, not the melody. A movie that stays free of labored explanations and a forced climax, and is about fear in the wind, in the trees, in a dog's bark, in a little girl's reluctance to drink the water. In signs. The posters show crop circles, those huge geometric shapes in fields of corn and wheat, which were seen all over the world in the 1970s. Their origin was explained in 1991 when several hoaxers came forward and demonstrated how they made them; it was not difficult, they said. Like many supernatural events, however, crop circles live on after their unmasking, and most people today have forgotten, or never knew, that they were explained. "Signs" uses them to evoke the possibility that ... well, the possibility of anything. The genius of the film, you see, is that it isn't really about crop circles, or the possibility that aliens created them as navigational aids. I will not even say whether aliens appear in the movie, because whether they do or not is beside the point. The purpose of the film is to evoke pure emotion through the use of skilled acting and direction, and particularly through the soundtrack. It is not just what we hear that is frightening. It is the way Shyamalan has us listening intensely when there is nothing to be heard. I cannot think of a movie where silence is scarier, and inaction is more disturbing. Mel Gibson stars as Father Graham Hess, who lives on a farm in Bucks County, Pa. We discover he is a priest only belatedly, when someone calls him "Father." "It's not 'Father' anymore," he says. Since he has two children, it takes us a beat to compute that he must be Episcopalian. Not that it matters, because he has lost his faith. The reason for that is revealed midway in the film, a personal tragedy I will not reveal. Hess lives on the farm with his brother Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix) and his children Morgan and Bo (Rory Culkin and Abigail Breslin). There is an old-fashioned farmhouse and barn, and wide cornfields, and from the very first shot there seems to be something ... out there, or up there, or in there. Hess lives with anxiety gnawing at him. The wind sounds strange. Dogs bark at nothing. There is something wrong. The crop circles do not explain the feelings so much as add to them. He catches a glimpse of something in a corn field. Something wrong. The movie uses TV news broadcasts to report on events around the world, but they're not the handy CNN capsules that supply just what the plot requires. The voices of the anchors reveal confusion and fear. A video taken at a birthday party shows a glimpse of the most alarming thing. "The history of the world's future is on TV right now," Morgan says. In a time when Hollywood mistakes volume for action, Shyamalan makes quiet films. In a time when incessant action is a style, he persuades us to play close attention to the smallest nuances. In "The Sixth Sense" (1999) he made a ghost story that until the very end seemed only to be a personal drama--although there was something there, some buried hint, that made us feel all was not as it seemed. In "Unbreakable" (2000) he created a psychological duel between two men, and it was convincing even though we later discovered its surprising underlying nature, and all was redefined. In "Signs," he does what Hitchcock said he liked to do, and plays the audience like a piano. There is as little plot as possible, and as much time and depth for the characters as he can create, all surrounded by ominous dread. The possibility of aliens is the catalyst for fear, but this family needs none, because it has already suffered a great blow. Instead of flashy special effects, Shyamalan creates his world out of everyday objects. A baby monitor that picks up inexplicable sounds. Bo's habit of leaving unfinished glasses of water everywhere. Morgan's bright idea that caps made out of aluminum foil will protect their brains from alien waves. Hess' use of a shiny kitchen knife, not as a weapon, but as a mirror. The worst attack in the film is Morgan's asthma attack, and his father tries to talk him through it, in a scene that sets the entire movie aside and is only about itself. At the end of the film, I had to smile, recognizing how Shyamalan has essentially ditched a payoff. He knows, as we all sense, that payoffs have grown boring. The mechanical resolution of a movie's problems is something we sit through at the end, but it's the setup and the buildup that keep our attention. "Signs" is all buildup. It's still building when it's over. Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc. [ To leave the movies mailing list, send the message "unsubscribe ] [ movies" (without the quotes) to majordomo@xmission.com ] ------------------------------ Date: 06 Aug 2002 18:03:44 GMT From: gregorys@xmission.com Subject: [MV] THE COUNTRY BEARS / ** (G) THE COUNTRY BEARS / ** (G) July 26, 2002 Reed Thimple: Christopher Walken Mr. Barrington: Stephen Tobolowsky Mrs. Barrington: Meagen Fay And the voices of: Beary Barrington: Haley Joel Osment Officer Cheets, Ted Bedderhead: Diedrich Bader Tennessee: Julianne Buescher Trixie St. Claire: Candy Ford Fred Bedderhead: Brad Garrett Walt Disney Pictures presents a film directed by Peter Hastings. Written by Mark Perez. Running time: 88 minutes. Rated G. BY ROGER EBERT The formidable technical skills in "The Country Bears" must not be allowed to distract from the film's terminal inanity. Here is a story about a young music fan who persuades his favorite band to reunite after 10 years for a concert--and the fan and the band members are all bears. Why they are bears, I do not know. Do they know they are bears? Not necessarily. Do any of the humans mention that they are bears? Only in passing. Are there real bears in the woods who would maul and eat their victims, or are all bears benign in this world? These are not questions one is expected to pose about a movie based on a stage show at Disney World. We simply have to accept that some of the characters in the movie are people and others are bears, and get on with it. If Stuart Little's family can have a 2-inch mouse as a son, then why not musical bears? We must celebrate diversity. The movie stars Beary Barrington (voice by Haley Joel Osment), whose human parents treat him as one of the family. Then his brother breaks the news that he was adopted after being found by a park ranger, and little Beary runs away from home. His goal: Visit legendary Country Bear Hall, the Grand Ole Opry of singing bears, and pay tribute to the band he idolizes. Alas, the band has broken up, its members have scattered, and now even Country Bear Hall itself faces the wrecker's ball, thanks to the evil banker Reed Thimple (Christopher Walken). Since the hall is an elegant wooden structure, it is a little hard to understand why Thimple wants to replace it with a vacant lot, but there you have it. Little Beary then begins to meet the members of the Country Bears, and to persuade them, in a series of adventures, to reunite and stage a benefit concert to save the hall. One of the movie's running gags is that recording stars appear as themselves, talking about the Bears. We see Willie Nelson, Bonnie Raitt, Elton John, Queen Latifah and others, all talking about the band's influence on them, none mentioning that they are bears. Is the music good enough to influence Willie and the Queen? Don't make me laugh. It's hard to figure who the movie is intended for. In shape and purpose, it's like a G-rated version of "This Is Spinal Tap," but will its wee target audience understand the joke? Anyone old enough to be interested in the music is unlikely to be interested in the bears--at least, interested in the movie's routine and wheezy plot. True, the movie does a good job of integrating the bears into the action, with animatronics by Jim Henson's Creature Shop and no doubt various CGI effects, not to mention the strong possibility that in some shots we are basically watching actors in bear suits. It's done well, yes, but why? Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc. [ To leave the movies mailing list, send the message "unsubscribe ] [ movies" (without the quotes) to majordomo@xmission.com ] ------------------------------ Date: 06 Aug 2002 18:03:21 GMT From: gregorys@xmission.com Subject: [MV] MY WIFE IS AN ACTRESS / **1/2 (R) MY WIFE IS AN ACTRESS / **1/2 (R) August 2, 2002 Charlotte: Charlotte Gainsbourg Yvan: Yvan Attal John: Terence Stamp Nathalie: Noemie Lvovsky Vincent: Laurent Bateau David, the film director: Keith Allen David's assistant: Jo McInnes Geraldine: Ludivine Sagnier Sony Pictures Classics presents a film written and directed by Yvan Attal. Running time: 93 minutes. Rated R (for language and nudity/sexuality). In French with English subtitles. BY ROGER EBERT The thing about movie love scenes is that they are acting and they are not acting, both at the same time. Two actors play "characters" who kiss or caress or thrash about. They are only "acting." When the director shouts, "cut!" they disengage and wander off to their trailers to finish the crossword puzzle. That at least is the idea they give in interviews. But consider. Most movie actors are attractive. They come wrapped in a mystique. Everyone is curious about them, including their co-stars. When the director says, "action!" and they find themselves in bed, there is the presence and warmth of the other person, the press of bosom or thigh, the pressure of a hand, the softness of lips. Does something happen that is not precisely covered by the definition of acting? If it does not, then the actors are not humans and should not be playing them. If we in the audience sometimes feel a stirring of more than artistic interest in some of the people we see on the screen, should actors, whose experience is so much more immediate, be any different? The fact that they are not different provides the subtext for half of the articles in the supermarket tabloids. Consider all that, and I will tell you a story. I interviewed Robert Mitchum many times. He co-starred with Marilyn Monroe. I never asked him anything as banal as "What was it like to kiss Marilyn Monroe?" but of course there is no woman in the history of the movies who would inspire a greater desire to ask that question. Once, though, as I was Q&A-ing Mitchum at the Virginia Film Festival, somebody in the audience asked him about Marilyn. "I loved her," he said. "I had known her since she was about 15 or 16 years old. My partner on the line at the Lockheed plant in Long Beach was her first husband. That's when I first met her. And I knew her all the way through. And she was a lovely girl--very, very shy. She had what is now recognized as agoraphobia. She was terrified of going out among people. At that time, they just thought she was being difficult. But she had that psychological, psychic fear of appearing among people. That's why when she appeared in public, she always burlesqued herself. She appeared as you would hope that she would appear. She was a very sweet, loving and loyal--unfortunately, loyal--girl. Loyal to people who used her, and a lot who misused her." So there you have it. Not what it was like to kiss her, but what it was like to know her. In one paragraph, probably as much truth as can be said about Monroe. An answer like that is beyond the new movie "My Wife Is an Actress." This is a French seriocomedy written, directed by and starring Yvan Attal, who plays a Paris sportswriter whose wife is a famous actress. She is played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, who in real life is Attal's wife. No doubt if he were to write a serious novel about his marriage, Attal would have some truths to share, but his film feels like an arm's-length job, a comedy that deliberately avoids deep waters. Yvan is a jealous man. He is driven to it by an unrelenting barrage of questions from members of the public, some of whom assume as a matter of course that Charlotte really does sleep with her co-stars. He smashes one guy in the nose, but that doesn't help, and when Charlotte goes to London to work with a big star (Terence Stamp), Yvan all but pushes her into his arms, to prove his point. Stamp, who is very good in a thankless role, plays a man so wearied by life and wear and tear that he sleeps with women more or less as a convenience. He seduces to be obliging. There is a funny moment when he propositions a woman and soberly accepts her refusal as one more interesting development, nodding thoughtfully to himself. If the movie were all comedy, it might work better. But it has an ambition to say something about its subjects, but not a willingness. It circles the possibility of mental and spiritual infidelity like a cat wondering if a mouse might still be alive. Watching it, I felt it would be fascinating to see a movie that was really, truthfully, fearlessly about this subject. Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc. [ To leave the movies mailing list, send the message "unsubscribe ] [ movies" (without the quotes) to majordomo@xmission.com ] ------------------------------ Date: 06 Aug 2002 18:03:18 GMT From: gregorys@xmission.com Subject: [MV] MARTIN LAWRENCE LIVE: RUNTELDAT / *** (R) MARTIN LAWRENCE LIVE: RUNTELDAT / *** (R) August 2, 2002 Paramount Pictures presents a live performance by Martin Lawrence. Directed by David Raynr. Written by Martin Lawrence. Running time: 100 minutes. Rated R (for strong, crude, sexual dialogue and pervasive language). BY ROGER EBERT There is no bodily fluid, secretion, emission, odor, ejaculate, orifice, protuberance, function or malfunction that Martin Lawrence overlooks in "Martin Lawrence Live: Runteldat." The word "runteldat" is short for "run and tell that," but Lawrence doesn't abbreviate much else, spelling out his insights into the human physiognomy in detail that would impress a gynecologist. If it proves nothing else, this movie establishes that it is impossible for a film to get the NC-17 rating from the MPAA for language alone. This takes the trophy for dirty talk, and I've seen the docs by Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy and Andrew Dice Clay. Pryor and Murphy are genteel humanists in comparison to Lawrence. Clay is a contender. He doesn't rise to quite the same standard of medical detail, but he has the same rage, and the same tendency to reduce the female gender to its orifices and functions. When Lawrence reveals that he was married but is now divorced because "it didn't work out," we think, "no kidding!" His attitude toward women is that of a man who has purchased a cooperative household device that works perfectly until the day it astonishes him by giving birth. The film is nevertheless funny, if you can get beyond the language or somehow learn to relate to it as the rhythm and not the lyrics. (If you can't, don't go. This movie is as verbally offensive as Lawrence can make it, and he gives it his best shot.) It is funny because Lawrence is a gifted performer with superb timing and an ability to mimic many characters and suggest attitudes and postures with lightning-quick invention. There's something almost musical in the way his riffs build, turn back on themselves, improvise detours, find the way again, and deliver. Curious, but the humor is almost all generated by the style. Buddy Hackett once demonstrated to me how you can do Catskills-style humor with irrelevant words and it's still funny because the timing and delivery instruct the audience to laugh. Lawrence raises that technique to an art form. If you read the script of this concert film, I doubt if you'd laugh much, because the content itself is not intrinsically funny. There are no jokes here that you can take home and use on your friends. You have to be there. It's all in the energy and timing of the delivery, in the way Lawrence projects astonishment, resentment, anger, relief, incredulity and delight. The film opens with a montage devoted to his well-publicized troubles, including an arrest for disturbing the peace and a collapse from heat exhaustion that put him into a coma. There are segments from news programs reporting on these difficulties--not real programs, curiously, but footage shot for this movie. The he launches into a tired attack on "the media," as if somehow it created his problems by reporting them. He also discusses those problems, not in the confessional style of Richard Pryor, but almost as if he was a bystander. He moves on to berate critics, which is unwise, because the average audience correctly decodes attacks on critics as meaning the performer got bad reviews. (No performer has ever attacked a critic for a good review.) This opening segment is shaky, as Lawrence finds his footing and gets a feel for the audience. Then he's off and running, for nearly 90 minutes, in what can only be described as a triumph of performance over the intrinsic nature of the material. His description of childbirth, for example, makes it sound simultaneously like a wonderful miracle, and like a depraved secret that women hide from men. His descriptions of sexual activities, in all imaginable variations, depend heavily on what can go wrong in terms of timing, cleanliness, technique, equipment and unforeseen developments. Sex for Lawrence seems like the kind of adventure for which you should wear protective gear. You wonder how long Lawrence can keep this up, and at the end you conclude he could keep it up forever. I would summarize more of it, except that a lot of his riffs are about events and activities that cannot tactfully be described in print. I urge you to stay for the closing credits, not because there are hilarious outtakes, but because there is one of the most astonishing credits I can imagine: A thanks to the Daughters of the American Revolution for the use of their Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. This is the same hall once denied because of racism to Marian Anderson, who then sang instead, at the invitation of Eleanor Roosevelt, from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Now Martin Lawrence records a concert film there. RuntelDAT! Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc. [ To leave the movies mailing list, send the message "unsubscribe ] [ movies" (without the quotes) to majordomo@xmission.com ] ------------------------------ Date: 06 Aug 2002 18:15:06 GMT From: gregorys@xmission.com Subject: [MV] FULL FRONTAL / * 1/2 (R) FULL FRONTAL / * 1/2 (R) August 2, 2002 Nicholas/Calvin: Blair Underwood Catherine/Francesca: Julia Roberts Carl: David Hyde Pierce Lee: Catherine Keener Linda: Mary McCormack Lucy: Erika Alexander Brian: Rainn Wilson Bill/Gus: David Duchovny Miramax Films presents a film directed by Steven Soderbergh. Written by Coleman Hough. Running time: 101 minutes. Rated R (for language and some sexual content). BY ROGER EBERT Every once in a while, perhaps as an exercise in humility, Steven Soderbergh makes a truly inexplicable film. There was the Cannes "secret screening" of his "Schizopolis" in 1996, which had audiences filing out with sad, thoughtful faces, and now here is "Full Frontal," a film so amateurish that only the professionalism of some of the actors makes it watchable. This is the sort of work we expect from a film school student with his first digital camera, not from the gifted director of "Traffic" and "Out of Sight." Soderbergh directs at far below his usual level, and his cinematography is also wretched; known as one of the few directors who shoots some of his own films, he is usually a skilled craftsman, but here, using a digital camera and available light, he produces only a demonstration of his inability to handle the style. Many shots consist of indistinct dark blobs in front of blinding backlighting. The plot involves a film within a film, on top of a documentary about some of the people in the outside film. The idea apparently is to provide a view of a day in the life of the Los Angeles entertainment industry and its satellites. The movie within the movie stars Julia Roberts as a journalist interviewing Blair Underwood; shots that are supposed to be this movie are filmed in lush 35mm, and only serve to make us yearn for the format as we see the other scenes in digital. The doc is not quite, or entirely, a doc; there are voice-overs describing and analyzing some of the characters, but other scenes play as dramatic fiction, and there's no use trying to unsort it all because Soderbergh hasn't made it sortable. If this movie is a satire of the sorts of incomprehensible, earnest "personal" films that would-be directors hand out on cassettes at film festivals, then I understand it. It's the kind of film where you need the director telling you what he meant to do and what went wrong and how the actors screwed up and how there was no money for retakes, etc. The other characters include Catherine Keener and David Hyde Pierce as Lee and Carl, an unhappily married couple. She leaves him a goodbye note in the morning, then goes off to work as a personnel director, spending the day in a series of bizarre humiliations of employees (forcing them, for example, to stand on a chair while she throws an inflated world globe at them). In these scenes, she is clearly deranged, and yet there is a "serious" lunch with her sister Linda (Mary McCormack), a masseuse who has never met Mr. Right. Linda does, however, meet Gus (David Duchovny), a producer who is having a birthday party in a big hotel, hires her for a massage, and then offers her $500 to "release his tension." She needs the money because she is flying off the next day to see a guy she met on the Internet. She thinks he's 22, but in fact he's about 40, and is not an artist as he says, but a director whose new play features Hitler as a guy who, he tells Eva Braun, has "so many responsibilities I can't think of a relationship right now." Meanwhile, Carl is fired at work ("He said I have confused my personality quirks with standards") and returns home to find his beloved dog has overdosed on hash brownies, after which he has a heart-to-heart with the veterinarian's assistant. All of these scenes feel like improvs that have been imperfectly joined, with no through-line. The scenes that work (notably McCormack's) are perhaps a tribute to the professionalism of the actor, not the director. Among the false alarms are little details like this: A love note that Underwood's character thinks came from Roberts' character is written on the same kind of red stationary as Keener's note to her husband. Is there a connection? Short answer: no. One day earlier, I saw "Sex & Lucia," also shot on digital, also involving a story within a story, with double roles for some of the characters. With it, too, I was annoyed by the digital photography (both films have more contrast between shadow and bright sunlight than their equipment seems able to handle). "Sex & Lucia" was even more confusing when it came to who was who ("Full Frontal" is fairly easy to figure out). But at least "Sex & Lucia" was made by a director who had a good idea of what he wanted to accomplish, and established a tone that gave the material weight and emotional resonance. There is a scene in "Full Frontal" where a character comes to a tragic end while masturbating. That could symbolize the method and fate of this film. Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc. [ To leave the movies mailing list, send the message "unsubscribe ] [ movies" (without the quotes) to majordomo@xmission.com ] ------------------------------ Date: 06 Aug 2002 18:15:11 GMT From: gregorys@xmission.com Subject: [MV] MARTIN LAWRENCE LIVE: RUNTELDAT / *** (R) MARTIN LAWRENCE LIVE: RUNTELDAT / *** (R) August 2, 2002 Paramount Pictures presents a live performance by Martin Lawrence. Directed by David Raynr. Written by Martin Lawrence. Running time: 100 minutes. Rated R (for strong, crude, sexual dialogue and pervasive language). BY ROGER EBERT There is no bodily fluid, secretion, emission, odor, ejaculate, orifice, protuberance, function or malfunction that Martin Lawrence overlooks in "Martin Lawrence Live: Runteldat." The word "runteldat" is short for "run and tell that," but Lawrence doesn't abbreviate much else, spelling out his insights into the human physiognomy in detail that would impress a gynecologist. If it proves nothing else, this movie establishes that it is impossible for a film to get the NC-17 rating from the MPAA for language alone. This takes the trophy for dirty talk, and I've seen the docs by Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy and Andrew Dice Clay. Pryor and Murphy are genteel humanists in comparison to Lawrence. Clay is a contender. He doesn't rise to quite the same standard of medical detail, but he has the same rage, and the same tendency to reduce the female gender to its orifices and functions. When Lawrence reveals that he was married but is now divorced because "it didn't work out," we think, "no kidding!" His attitude toward women is that of a man who has purchased a cooperative household device that works perfectly until the day it astonishes him by giving birth. The film is nevertheless funny, if you can get beyond the language or somehow learn to relate to it as the rhythm and not the lyrics. (If you can't, don't go. This movie is as verbally offensive as Lawrence can make it, and he gives it his best shot.) It is funny because Lawrence is a gifted performer with superb timing and an ability to mimic many characters and suggest attitudes and postures with lightning-quick invention. There's something almost musical in the way his riffs build, turn back on themselves, improvise detours, find the way again, and deliver. Curious, but the humor is almost all generated by the style. Buddy Hackett once demonstrated to me how you can do Catskills-style humor with irrelevant words and it's still funny because the timing and delivery instruct the audience to laugh. Lawrence raises that technique to an art form. If you read the script of this concert film, I doubt if you'd laugh much, because the content itself is not intrinsically funny. There are no jokes here that you can take home and use on your friends. You have to be there. It's all in the energy and timing of the delivery, in the way Lawrence projects astonishment, resentment, anger, relief, incredulity and delight. The film opens with a montage devoted to his well-publicized troubles, including an arrest for disturbing the peace and a collapse from heat exhaustion that put him into a coma. There are segments from news programs reporting on these difficulties--not real programs, curiously, but footage shot for this movie. The he launches into a tired attack on "the media," as if somehow it created his problems by reporting them. He also discusses those problems, not in the confessional style of Richard Pryor, but almost as if he was a bystander. He moves on to berate critics, which is unwise, because the average audience correctly decodes attacks on critics as meaning the performer got bad reviews. (No performer has ever attacked a critic for a good review.) This opening segment is shaky, as Lawrence finds his footing and gets a feel for the audience. Then he's off and running, for nearly 90 minutes, in what can only be described as a triumph of performance over the intrinsic nature of the material. His description of childbirth, for example, makes it sound simultaneously like a wonderful miracle, and like a depraved secret that women hide from men. His descriptions of sexual activities, in all imaginable variations, depend heavily on what can go wrong in terms of timing, cleanliness, technique, equipment and unforeseen developments. Sex for Lawrence seems like the kind of adventure for which you should wear protective gear. You wonder how long Lawrence can keep this up, and at the end you conclude he could keep it up forever. I would summarize more of it, except that a lot of his riffs are about events and activities that cannot tactfully be described in print. I urge you to stay for the closing credits, not because there are hilarious outtakes, but because there is one of the most astonishing credits I can imagine: A thanks to the Daughters of the American Revolution for the use of their Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. This is the same hall once denied because of racism to Marian Anderson, who then sang instead, at the invitation of Eleanor Roosevelt, from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Now Martin Lawrence records a concert film there. RuntelDAT! Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc. [ To leave the movies mailing list, send the message "unsubscribe ] [ movies" (without the quotes) to majordomo@xmission.com ] ------------------------------ Date: 06 Aug 2002 18:15:16 GMT From: gregorys@xmission.com Subject: [MV] MY WIFE IS AN ACTRESS / **1/2 (R) MY WIFE IS AN ACTRESS / **1/2 (R) August 2, 2002 Charlotte: Charlotte Gainsbourg Yvan: Yvan Attal John: Terence Stamp Nathalie: Noemie Lvovsky Vincent: Laurent Bateau David, the film director: Keith Allen David's assistant: Jo McInnes Geraldine: Ludivine Sagnier Sony Pictures Classics presents a film written and directed by Yvan Attal. Running time: 93 minutes. Rated R (for language and nudity/sexuality). In French with English subtitles. BY ROGER EBERT The thing about movie love scenes is that they are acting and they are not acting, both at the same time. Two actors play "characters" who kiss or caress or thrash about. They are only "acting." When the director shouts, "cut!" they disengage and wander off to their trailers to finish the crossword puzzle. That at least is the idea they give in interviews. But consider. Most movie actors are attractive. They come wrapped in a mystique. Everyone is curious about them, including their co-stars. When the director says, "action!" and they find themselves in bed, there is the presence and warmth of the other person, the press of bosom or thigh, the pressure of a hand, the softness of lips. Does something happen that is not precisely covered by the definition of acting? If it does not, then the actors are not humans and should not be playing them. If we in the audience sometimes feel a stirring of more than artistic interest in some of the people we see on the screen, should actors, whose experience is so much more immediate, be any different? The fact that they are not different provides the subtext for half of the articles in the supermarket tabloids. Consider all that, and I will tell you a story. I interviewed Robert Mitchum many times. He co-starred with Marilyn Monroe. I never asked him anything as banal as "What was it like to kiss Marilyn Monroe?" but of course there is no woman in the history of the movies who would inspire a greater desire to ask that question. Once, though, as I was Q&A-ing Mitchum at the Virginia Film Festival, somebody in the audience asked him about Marilyn. "I loved her," he said. "I had known her since she was about 15 or 16 years old. My partner on the line at the Lockheed plant in Long Beach was her first husband. That's when I first met her. And I knew her all the way through. And she was a lovely girl--very, very shy. She had what is now recognized as agoraphobia. She was terrified of going out among people. At that time, they just thought she was being difficult. But she had that psychological, psychic fear of appearing among people. That's why when she appeared in public, she always burlesqued herself. She appeared as you would hope that she would appear. She was a very sweet, loving and loyal--unfortunately, loyal--girl. Loyal to people who used her, and a lot who misused her." So there you have it. Not what it was like to kiss her, but what it was like to know her. In one paragraph, probably as much truth as can be said about Monroe. An answer like that is beyond the new movie "My Wife Is an Actress." This is a French seriocomedy written, directed by and starring Yvan Attal, who plays a Paris sportswriter whose wife is a famous actress. She is played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, who in real life is Attal's wife. No doubt if he were to write a serious novel about his marriage, Attal would have some truths to share, but his film feels like an arm's-length job, a comedy that deliberately avoids deep waters. Yvan is a jealous man. He is driven to it by an unrelenting barrage of questions from members of the public, some of whom assume as a matter of course that Charlotte really does sleep with her co-stars. He smashes one guy in the nose, but that doesn't help, and when Charlotte goes to London to work with a big star (Terence Stamp), Yvan all but pushes her into his arms, to prove his point. Stamp, who is very good in a thankless role, plays a man so wearied by life and wear and tear that he sleeps with women more or less as a convenience. He seduces to be obliging. There is a funny moment when he propositions a woman and soberly accepts her refusal as one more interesting development, nodding thoughtfully to himself. If the movie were all comedy, it might work better. But it has an ambition to say something about its subjects, but not a willingness. It circles the possibility of mental and spiritual infidelity like a cat wondering if a mouse might still be alive. Watching it, I felt it would be fascinating to see a movie that was really, truthfully, fearlessly about this subject. Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc. [ To leave the movies mailing list, send the message "unsubscribe ] [ movies" (without the quotes) to majordomo@xmission.com ] ------------------------------ End of movies-digest V2 #366 **************************** [ To quit the movies-digest mailing list (big mistake), send the message ] [ "unsubscribe movies-digest" (without the quotes) to majordomo@xmission.com ]