Review: AMERICAN BEAUTY

FINALLY, DREAMWORKS SHOWS UP WITH SOMETHING SPECIAL

(reviewed at marple 10 on halloween, 1999 with morton and stu)

   American Beauty was written for the silver screen and never appeared on stage, yet if feels like a Broadway hit in the same vein as a really good dialogue heavy hard-edged play. Kevin Spacey is a suburban husband and 9 to 5er at an advertising agency. Annette Benning is his obsessive wife whose real goal is to be the number one real estate saleswoman in the area. They have a troubled daughter and a shady video camera operating neighborhood boy who expresses zero emotion. His father is a tough military brute.
    This is American Beauty, the simple tale of these character and this life and they attempt to break free from their everyday life and into something, new, fresh, exciting, wonderful.
    Spacey quits his job, blackmails his boss, starts smoking pot and working out and lusts after his daughter’s blonde haired bombshell who is more empty headed then we can imagine. At one point in the film the blonde bimbo asks Spacey, “Am I ordinary?”, as if it were some absurd curse to be the same old thing.
    The film has a rich script which definitely feels like a good play. The film is more character driven then most flicks out there, and this is the reason why it is getting such a good dose of early Oscar buzz and critical raves. Each actor and actress has plenty of room to act their heart out and tons of enthusiastic lines and small character arcs. The plot of the film is more or less another morbid, underbelly of the suburbs type deal, but it plays out well and exciting. The movie starts off minimally okay but ends up growing on you until the final showdown with the rain pouring down and the characters doing their business.
    Kevin Spacey’s final moment with his femme fatale is especially moving, the quietness of the scene and the dialogue between them. The other characters are all well rounded except for the more or less one-note wife, Annette Benning, who isn’t the world’s best actress and proves it here. She doesn’t have much to do and it is extremely obvious that a man wrote the entire thing.
    The story that goes along with how the film ever got made goes like this: Steven Spielberg, one of the honchos at Dreamworks SKG read the script one night and the next day put it on the fast track. They got The Blue Room’s (that play where Nicole Kidman showed off her tits for an extremely short amount of time but because of it the London and New York runs were sold out) Sam Mendes to direct and got a healthy cast and a great set designer and it was their Oscar foray for the last year of the century. This is not the kind of script you would think Spielberg would love, but underneath it all it makes sense. Spielberg is stuck in his good guy happy director phase with his adopted kids and wife. Maybe he liked what Spacey did. Spacey got out of it. He started smoking his pot and lifting weights and exercising and actually got up and out of the endless pit this world supposedly is. Spielberg is like all of us after

all. ***

Review: FIGHT CLUB

RED, WHITE, BLACK & BLUE

(viewed at marple 10 on Sunday, Oct. 24th(havoc) with stu and morton)

    There is a powerful undercurrent running throughout the new David Fincher flick, Fight Club. It has been called ‘male malaise’ in the press, but in my mind it is a feeling more than a defintion. Brad Pitt’s character describes it best when he rambles out a monologue a little past the middle of the film. He more or less says after High School he called up his dad and asked him, “What now?” His dad says go to college. Five years later he calls up his dad and says, “What now?” His dad says get a job. Five years later he calls his dad up and says, “What now?” His dad says get married. This is what the film is all about. You have a job, you have a girl, you have money, nice clothes, but what now? Is that all? You hate your job, you can’t find the perfect girl. Is this it? Is this what you’re supposed to live with? A black hole of life…’male malaise’.
    Edward Norton is a white collar 9-to-5er who hates his job. His apartment is furnished with Ikea-brand furniture. His fridge is empty. He goes to work and comes home. His life is empty, he can’t sleep, he’s losing his mind.
    Norton starts to attend a group therapy (like AA) session with guys who have testicular cancer and cry their eyes out as they each tell their sob stories. Norton doesn’t have testicular cancer but he soon finds it’s a great release to have everyone listen to you and actually care about what you’re saying. He soon gets addicted to group therapy sessions and it helps him sleep.
    He meets a kinetic stranger played by Brad Pitt on an airplane. Pitt is out of his mind and sells soap, but makes a lot of sense. Norton comes home to his apartment which is blown up. He needs a place to stay, he calls Pitt, they meet in a bar, they leave, they start Fight Club.
    The film ventures into some strange areas after the duo begin their underground club. The world is different and alive, and they have it by the balls. No more white collar shit. No more cutting the grass on Saturdays and sipping lemonade next to a wife you don’t care about. Society’s walls are broken down (figuratively and literally) and Norton and Pitt are Gods.
    The film is good because it’s stylish and it makes a lot of sense. It is alive with power and directed extremely well by Fincher whose last outing (The Game) almost killed him. There are a lot of stupid parts about Fight Club. I’m sure the novel by Chuck Palahniuk is much better, but the film has more to it than meets the eye. It’s a nightmare and unrealistic but wild all the same. The ending alone is worth the price of admission. Just the quietness of it all. Everything beforehand is forgotten. It’s a great moment to an uneven movie that has an equal amount of guts and brains. *** (out of ****)

Review: THREE KINGS

RUSSEL & JONZE STRIKE GOLD WITH THREE KINGS

(reviewed at marple 10 on Sunday, october 10th, 1999 with jack –n- stu)

    One of the best aspects of the new Gulf War dramedy, Three Kings, is the simple fact that it has everything. It has laughs, heart, action, independent style and charm, pure Hollywood popcorn elements, some great actors, and an overall wild, nuts, crazy, in-sane feel to it. Three Kings is what good film making is all about. Yes, it has a lot of minor flaws, but overall it’s a solid picture that came straight out of the Hollywood machine. Surprises apparently do still occur.
    Mark Wahlberg, Ice Cube, and the hilarious scene-stealing Spike Jonze play three military brats post-Gulf War. They find a map that will lead them to gold bullion that Saddam Hussien and Iraq have stolen from Kuwait. George Clooney is an officer that finds out about the trio’s plans. He joins them and soon enough they’re off for the loot.
    The flick starts as a fun romp through the blue skied, dry-as-a-bone desert, but soon ends up as a moral victory type of film.
    The soldiers’ map leads them into an Iraquian desert village where the avergage citizens are being silenced by the strong armed Saddam army. They want their deserved freedom while the U.S. is cheering an apparently bittersweet victory.
    The plot of the film can be described as warped. It goes from one extreme to the next, and eventually plays out like a basic Hollywood film, though the outrageous style of the film is enough to realize that Three Kings is far from basic Hollywood, it’s essentially the first mainstream Independent thus far this year.
    David O. Russel and Spike Jonze deserve the most credit for this feature. Russel hit it big at Sundance with his independent incest flick, Spanking the Monkey, and later went on to direct Flirting With Disaster. For his next picture he was flipping through the Warner Brothers script collection and came upon John Ridley’s Spoils of War (Ridley wrote the novel Stray Dogs which turned into Oliver Stone’s noir film, U-Turn), a simple action film about Gulf War soldiers who find a treasure map.
    Russel studied up on the Gulf War and soon enough churned out a script that held very little resemblance to Ridley’s script. Ridley was furious about how he was treated through the ordeal. Russel admits Ridley is just mad his script has almost nothing to do with the finished flick.
    Fuck controversy, Russel knows what he is doing, no matter how much of an a-hole he is. His script is great, full of fleshed out cartoon-like but likable characters with witty lines and a lot of hilarious and furious action scenes. His filming style is wild and out-of-control in the Oliver Stone essence. He used the movie’s actual film backwards to achieve a grainy effect. He edited slow-mo techniques and closeups and shaky-cam shots.
    He knows what he’s doing.
    And speaking of knowing what you’re doing, Spike Jonze steals every frame of film he is in. Granted, Mark Wahlberg proves once again he’s a great actor, and Jamie Kennedy is pretty funny, but George Clooney and Ice Cube are just showing basic skills. Jonze started as a music video director. His biggest hits were Weezer’s ‘Buddy Holly’, Beastie Boy’s ‘Sabotage’, and Fat Boy Slim’s ‘Praise You’, where he starred as the leader of the fictional Torrance Community dance group. This fall he married Francis Ford Coppola’s daughter, Sophia Coppola (she was the Italian chick that the critics panned in The Godfather III), and his directorial debut, Being John Malkovich hits.
    Spike Jonze has been behind the scenes long enough. Finally he’s proving what a great actor he is. As Conrad, the white-collar backwoods idiot hick, he provides the majority of the humor and in the end we find that he may just be an annoying Detroit redneck, but we actually care about him.
    Jonze and Russel prove that good movies actually do come out of Hollywood. ***