|
Reservation
Road - Hotel
Rwanda’s Terry George has never conjured images
of subtlety in his films – his best work was as a
screenwriter, for Jim Sheridan’s In
the Name of the Father – and Road
is another Nothing
Is Private-ish
example of a scribe not being able to handle material as
carefully as someone with a bit more experience behind the
camera. There are
some really nice quiet moments, but George generally opts for
the screaming and the uncontrollable sobbing one might think
need accompany a film with Oscar aspirations.
Road is
about a New England rest stop hit-and-run accident that claims
the life of a young boy. His
father (Joaquin Phoenix) isn’t as sad so much as he is hell
bent on justice, especially when he begins to believe the cops
aren’t following through on the investigation.
The perp (Mark Ruffalo) is a single dad on the verge of
losing visitation of his son, which would probably happen if you
were charged with Vehicular Manslaughter (unless you were Nicole
Richie, in which case you’d go to jail for an afternoon).
Anger, guilt, anger, guilt, anger, guilt, with a
hysterical random shot of a black guy in the audience of a
school recital that smacks of an assistant telling George that
there actually are negroes in Connecticut.
Chacun son
cinema - Like any collection of shorts from a gene pool
this diverse (see Paris je
t’aime), you’re going to have a lot of hits, and a lot
of misses. I
don’t know if it’s me having the maturity of a third grader,
but the comedies always seem to stick with me the longest when
emerging from the dark after viewing something like Cinema. Very funny
stuff from the likes of Takeshi Kitano, Nanni Moretti, the Coen
brothers, Lars von Trier, Roman Polanski, David Cronenberg, and
Walter Salles. There
were a couple of humdingers that managed to be deeply touching
in a very short period of time, and for that, I’d like to
thank Abbas Kiarostami and Claude Leloach.
Very Young Girls
- Note to film festival programmers: I will see a
film called Very Young
Girls every single festival, regardless of what it’s
about. Because I’m a pervert.
This version of Girls
is a documentary about an agency that tries to rescue – wait
for it – very young girls who are turned out by unscrupulous
pimps before they’re old enough to know what they’re doing
is wrong. It’s
horrifying and shocking to see how deeply their pimp hooks have
dug into the impressionable minds of these girls (who are very
young), but in terms of a critical standpoint, Girls is more of a direct-to-Lifetime Network quality.
Ping Pong Playa'
- I first fell in love
with Jessica Yu at the 1997 Oscars, where she won the Best
Documentary Short award and announced that her dress cost more
than her film did. Yu
followed that up with some quality television work (The
West Wing; Grey’s
Anatomy) and the entertaining Henry Darger doc, In
the Realms of the Unreal.
All of which makes Yu’s comedy debut an even more
surprising departure.
Playa’ is
more like a comedy sketch ballooned into a feature film, but not
quite as awful as most of the Saturday
Night Live adventures on the big screen.
It’s genesis, actually, is a character created by star
Jimmy Tsai who appeared in online commercials for his own
sportswear company, and here, he continues his role as C-Dub, as
Asian-American NBA-wannabe with slightly less court skills than
Mark Fuhrman. After
an accident injures C-Dub’s mom (a ping pong instructor) and
brother (the reigning Golden Cock champion), the “Orient
Express” is forced to take over an after-school program to
teach table tennis to a group of nerdy youngsters.
Before you can say “The Bad News Bears,” the
film…well, it turns into The
Bad News Bears. Bet
you didn’t see that one coming.
|
