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Reviews
Alone (2002)
A mere gesture in the vain of better flicks
Plain put, Claydon produced a vaguely distorted remake of "Halloween' in the style one cannot eschew after watching the likes of "Seven' and "The Cell' till they left a drone in one's ears: he left out Brad Pit and Jennifer Lopez, but managed to get a fine sound-track and a superbly over the top Miriam Margolyes, who delivers a memorable study in grotesque realism.
The horror, however, coming in about three waves of identical pattern, gets pretty repetitive very soon and culminates in an anticlimax entirely out of sorts. Claydon might need to watch "Nightshift' and "When the Bough Breaks' to get a better grasp on plot-development or the urge to have a point before shooting. But I'm miffed anyway because I wanted to see a Korean thriller by Sung-Hong Kim and dreamily trudged to the wrong festival-theatre, therefore my judgement might be somewhat biased by self-loathing...
10 Things I Hate About You (1999)
Jane Austen is much funner
"10 Things" tries hard and but in vain to revive the twinkle-toed atmosphere of Amy Heckerlings great Jane Austen adaption of "Emma" as a teenage-comedy in "Clueless" (1995). However, compared to the many truly mindless teenage-comedies excessively tiring our patience of(f) late (with "American Pie" just the epitome of the lot, repeating everything that has been said before conclusively and therefore the single one movie poised to have closed that sorry chapter for good enough) "10 Things" annoys ever the more by mistaking its classic groundwork to make amends for dull improbabilities that weren't even funny enough at the masters times (like: moron father says dumb younger sister can only get laid by some moron when older sister gets a moron first): a glorious source is no excuse for a dumb movie. And someone who wrote "Hamlet" is not a glorious source when it comes to judging "The Taming of the Shrew", "Love Labours Lost" or "The Merry Wives of Windsor".
Given that ancient drama and classical works became as lasting as they are because they basically deal with eternal human frailties, any pubescent teenage nonsense will have grecian models somehow or has been made into a play when Shakespeare, when Moliere, Goldoni, anyone of those, where at their times in need of easy cash - they remain tales told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing.
Best Laid Plans (1999)
Mamet redux - just a matter of applied arts
This movie belongs to a genre that, I believe, came into being in
1973 with "The Sting' and then was entirely dominated by David
Mamet before he stopped working after "Oleanna' in 1994, his last
original work, and lapsed to become a mere carpenter of
mainstream script crafting a genre not of twice tellable tales but
those with a twist which allow for no satisfactory second watching.
The MacGuffin of its plot, a pardon signed by Abraham Lincoln
himself, is so much Mamets "American Buffalo' (1996) slotted into
his flawless "House of Games' (1987) that "Best Laid Plans' at
best accomplishes the allure of a cover version: we like it
somewhat, but could easily have done without it.
Clay Pigeons (1998)
a second hand clay pigeon
This is a second hand clay pigeon, meticulously pieced together from previous shootings: set in the mildly upgraded small town village of `The Hot Spot' (1990), `Red Rock West' (1992) or `U-turn' (1997), it takes the plot from `Hitcher' (1986) with Vince Vaughn just failing to successfully perform Rutger Hauer's part: he got better in same year's terrible remake of `Psycho' (1998) tunes it down both with funny characters from `Fargo' (1996) (this Agent Reynard as deeply unhappy to miss his Lassie-reruns as our wives are when interrupted in their daily soap marathons) and `To Die For' (1995) (Joaquin Phoenix this time double-crossed by some Amanda). All this results in a motion picture of the likes of `Heathers" (1989) and `Free Money' (1998). However, listing these, I find `Clay Pigeons' still fairly entertaining, however little original substance it has of its own.
He liu (1997)
A World not ready for the presence
Not to let anyone walk into this unawares: a voice from the audience understandably commented the somewhat contrived, but cinematographically superbly rendered catharsis of this movie, when son and father make out in the dark room of a smudgy sauna club, thus: `O Lord, will you not spare me anything today?'
`He Liu' is a disturbing tale of urban disruption, solitude and rot, not told but evolved in a series of carefully composed real-time-scenes circling about a family afflicted by a sudden and scary medical condition befalling the Son after he took a plunge in polluted river: Their harrowing quest for a cure just serves to depict the utter hopelessness of traditional (Chinese and universal) values in modern society. The disruption of the individual has gone to a degree that it takes the audience about 45 minutes to even get the fact it is watching the plight of familially related protagonists. We watch people engaged in homosexual intercourse without feeling they're gay: In their context, homosexuality is a token of disorientation as much as the porn-watching of the mother whose lover is as little interested in her physically as her husband: Satisfaction is beyond reach for every inhabitant of this chill world - a place not geographically limited to Taipeh but given as a state of present time urban society.
This, of course, is the gist of about 95% of all the movies with a message. What Ming-liang Tsai manages is a bit more special: Underneath the phenomena of isolation there runs a counterpoint of unexpected solidarity - father and mother, still without ever talking to each other again, are immediately available in a matter of course way as soon as their son's condition deteriorates: `family' is still an extant institution, a should-be, could-be, would-be harbor not yet ready for the ice storm that has seized the world.
Redeveloping many of the same elements, this movie compares favorably with Ang Lees more expansive and considerably less focused `Yin shi nan nu' (Eat Drink Man Woman) from 1994 and is somewhat echoed in his more accomplished `Ice Storm' from 1997, the same year when `He Liu' was made.
Resident Evil (2002)
somnolent strip-slaying with Milla Jovovich
Most remarkably, a counter-gradient atones for the relatively banal plot of ever more devastating and insurmountable enemies getting their due: starting out with a smashing red negligee, Milla Jovovich manages to lose apparel with each new adversary (zombies surpassed by skinned watch-dogs surpassed by even more terrible zombies topped by "the licker" who will surely reappear as Alien V soon), till finally she is about to encounter "the nameless" wrapped in little less than a measly kitchen-towel, offering her the welcome opportunity to repeat her celebrated appearance as Leeloo in Besson's abysmal "Fifth Element": Applying the mathematics of horror to our expectations, a genetically modified dinosaur, long dead and carnivorous now, is the least we want to see her stalked by next, vested in but little else than the shotgun she grabbed before she took to the deserted streets...
Thomas Pynchon: A Journey Into the Mind of P. (2002)
losers gibbering about a winner
Stunning experience to find, how little can be revealed in such a length of time - the oh so clever and appropriate-like point intended (to s h o w that nothing can be shown, yep) could as well have been made in half an hour - IF the choice of experts asked about Pynchon had been revealing at all: it must be an art in itself to find people belonging that much to the outskirts of the literary scene. Don't let yourselves be tricked by the topic - one does not have to admire this arty-farty-stuff, because little is less than an art-movie that has not enough to it.