Amsterdam Weekly_18-24 September 2008
AGENDA: FILM
like a hideously deformed troll doll. He has zero chemistry with love interest Jessica Alba, and only Justin Timberlake manages to elicit a few laughs as the ridiculously well-endowed Canuck ice hockey goalie Jacques ‘Le Coq’ Grande. The Love Guru is a grating, juvenile and terribly unfunny experience that makes you feel sorry for Myers, and is definitive proof that he’s lost his mojo. (LvH) 86 min. Pathé ArenA, Pathé De Munt
Coixet, with Patricia Clarkson, Dennis Hopper and Deborah Harry. 107min. (GR) 107 min. Cinecenter, Pathé Tuschinski Elle s’appelle Sabine French actress Sandrine Bonnaire makes her directorial debut with a documentary about her autistic sister Sabine, intercutting home movies from the past with recent footage. The director wants to make the audience aware of the ravages brought about by inadequate health care systems. The adolescent Sabine was a gorgeous, vivacious and talented woman, but after being institutionalised at the age of 28 for five years, Sabine—now 38—is altered in an overweight, dispirited and sometimes aggressive person. This is extremely shocking to see, but Elle S’Appelle Sabine is not balanced and leaves too many questions unanswered. What actually happened at the psychiatric institution, for instance, is never explained. A missed opportunity. In French with Dutch subtitles. (GR) 85 min. Het Ketelhuis, The Movies Estômago Drifter Raimundo Nonato (João Miguel) arrives penniless in a big Brazilian city and lands a job at a snack bar for food and lodging. But when he ends up in the kitchen, it turns out Raimundo is surprisingly talented, working miracles with the simplest of ingredients. His cooking not only wins him the affection of prostitute Íria, who is happy to sleep with him in return for good food, but a wealthy restaurant owner offers him a dream job. Course, things are never as they seem in this delicious comedy drama from Brazil. In Portuguese with Dutch subtitles. 100 min. Cinecenter, Pathé Tuschinski Factory Girl Edie Sedgwick was Andy Warhol’s superstar for a little while before getting cast out of the Factory, having an affair with Bob Dylan and subsequently dying in her sleep before reaching her 29th birthday. The rise and fall of the troubled starlet feels strangely current in our celebrity-crazed postBritney society, while at the same time utterly depressing in its familiarity. Sienna Miller bares body and soul to successfully play the charming socialite, while Guy Pearce doesn’t romanticise Warhol, but portrays him as the immature, conniving vampire he probably really was. Directed by George Hickenlooper, with Hayden Christensen as the Dylan figure. (LvH) 99 min. Kriterion Le Fils de l’épicier A road movie of sorts, with a very French twist. The story is a bit flimsy: a young man (the grocer’s son of the title) helps his parents when they’re in trouble and sorts himself out along the way. The film’s strength is in its humane view of its characters and painterly eye for the landscape. As Antoine (Nicolas Cazalé) grudgingly drives his dad’s delivery van around, his brusqueness doing little for his sales or relations with the old clientele, we’re treated to breathtaking wideangle shots of Provence. Close friend Claire (Clotilde Hesme), former femme fatale Lucienne (Liliane Rovère) and increasingly senile father Clément (Paul Crauchet) play crucial, and sometimes very funny, roles while Antoine adjusts to his new life. Eric Guirado directed this feel-good film with an eye for the individual. In French with Dutch subtitles. (KE) 96 min. De Uitkijk Get Smart Remaking Get Smart, the 1960s Mel Brooks/Buck Henry spy parody series, without the original stars is like remaking My Little Chickadee without Mae West and WC Fields—the best possible outcome is disappointment. This big-budget comedy updates the action, with Maxwell Smart (Steve Carell) and Agent 99 (Anne Hathaway) foiling a plot to detonate loose nuclear bombs from Chechnya. The geopolitics haven’t required as much revision as the gender politics: on the show, 99 clung to Max’s side, but here Max is a neophyte and 99 a hardened veteran. This PC inversion robs Max of the crisp certitude Don Adams brought to the role, which was the comic linchpin of the series; all that’s left is an assortment of recycled gags and catchphrases. Peter Segal directed. (JJ) 111 min. Pathé ArenA
Happy-Go-Lucky Poppy (Sally Hawkins) teaches
kindergarten in North London, lives in a flatshare with her best friend and fellow teacher Zoe, goes clubbing on Friday nights, and is the kind of person who, in the words of Eric Idle, always looks on the bright side of life. For example, she regards the fact that her bike has been stolen as motivation to improve her skills and decides to take driving lessons instead. That’s how she ends up meeting Scott (Eddie Marsan), who’s basically her opposite. Not much happens in Mike Leigh’s latest film, but Hawkins’s Poppy is one of the great characters of the current cinematic year. (MB) 118 min. Cinema Amstelveen, Studio K, De Uitkijk
19
Mataharis Three women work at a seedy detective agency in this lively, likable film by Icíar Bollaín (Take My Eyes). Each of the female detectives has her own charm, but all of them are real women— overbites, underbites, bumpy noses and all. Will they sell out? Will a comatose marriage be revived with the help of lovers and lingerie? The empowering choices they eventually make inspire a hearty ‘good for you, girl’. In Spanish with Dutch subtitles. (KE) 100 min. Het Ketelhuis
New this week:
Brideshead Revisited Pathe ArenA, Pathe Tuchinski
Hellboy II: The Golden Army The second outing of the grumpy but good-hearted demon commonly known as ‘Red’ focuses on the bonds between him and his supernatural companions, the amphibious Abe Sapien, human firecracker Liz Sherman and the new ectoplasmic addition Johann Krauss. Their occasionally rocky relationship is disrupted by vengeful Elf prince Nuada, who plans to awaken the mythical Golden Army to wage war on humanity. Director Guillermo del Toro delivers a film filled with visually stunning flights of fancy, brought to life by a combination of old-school special effects and newfangled computer wizardry. But the film belongs to Ron Perlman’s cranky yet lovable Hellboy. (LvH) 120 min. Pathé ArenA, Pathé De Munt Il y a longtemps que je t’aime Kristin Scott Thomas is a talent who cannot be used often enough. Her characters are usually hard-as-nails socialites, who fanatically guard their real emotions with cynicism and acerbic wit. In Il y a longtemps que je t’aime (I loved you for so long), she has never been more brittle, or so tough. Her Juliette has just been released after 15 years in prison for a crime that seems beyond comprehension. Still, Juliette has refused to defend her actions, even to her younger sister Léa (Elsa Zylberstein), who desperately wants to understand. A strong, composed debut by novelist Philippe Claudel. In French with Dutch subtitles. (BS) 115 min. Cinecenter, Het Ketelhuis
Into
the Wild Moving, if somewhat overlong, account of the life of Christopher McCandless, with a bravura performance from Emile Hirsch. At the age of 22, McCandless left his wealthy, dysfunctional family, gave his college cash to Oxfam and took off into the breathtaking beauty of the American wilderness. What starts as a run-of-the-mill road movie twists into an American Odyssey as, after two years away from it all, McCandless meets an untimely death in the wilds of Alaska. The usual Characters Met Along the Way include Catherine Keener, Vince Vaughn and Hal Holbrook. McCandless won’t stick with any of them, and gradually begins to unravel in his determined solitude. The film becomes a meditation on the human need for human company, framed against some of the most glorious scenery the world has to offer. A triumph for Sean Penn as a director, backed by a custom soundtrack from Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder. (AD) 140 min. Cinema Amstelveen, Kriterion, The Movies, Pathé Tuschinski Julia The title character of this new film by Erick Zonca and Camille Natta resembles Gloria, the Gena Rowlands character in the 1980 John Cassavetes film of the same name. Like Gloria, Julia (a superb and brazenly unglamorous Tilda Swinton) harbours little maternal instinct beneath her tough exterior. But where Rowlands slowly turns into a grudging heroine, cold-hearted, scheming Julia, who kidnaps a rich man’s grandson for ransom, stubbornly sticks to her plan—until the inevitable redeeming final act, that is. It’s a shame Zonca (director of the awardwinning La Vie rêvée des anges) and Natta didn’t dare go all the way. (BS) 138 min. Kriterion
Keane
This sobering drama about a schizophrenic man desperately trying to be normal is finally, after four years, getting a Dutch release. Damian Lewis (Dreamcatcher, Friends & Crocodiles) is superb as the tormented lead, but he is helped by two equally excellent supporting actresses, Amy Ryan (the lousy mother in Gone
Go on, see Keane. And bring lots of tissue.
Baby Gone) and Abigail Breslin, who play a woman and her 7-year-old daughter living in the same shabby hotel. The scenes between Keane and the little girl are the beating heart of the film, filled with love and sadness—not for who Keane is, but for who he could have been. Directed by Lodge Kerrigan. (BS) 100 min. Filmmuseum Lake Tahoe A teenager crashes his family car and desperately looks for a way to fix it before going home. On his way, he meets a bizarre parade of characters who provide some mild, dry comedy bits. Borrowing heavily from the likes of Jim Jarmusch, Hal Hartley and Aki Kaurismaki, Mexican director Fernando Eimbcke is able to bring in a laugh or two, but ultimately his Lake Tahoe lacks the concrete sense of humor to be a successful comedy, while it doesn’t have enough depth for a strong social observation on Mexican youth. In Spanish with Dutch subtitles. 85 min. Cinecenter, Rialto
Lemon Tree This bittersweet comedy-drama by
Israeli director Eran Riklis tells the story of Salma, a Palestinian widow whose lemon grove stands dangerously close to the new country house of the Israeli Defence Minister. When an order is issued to cut down the trees for security reasons, her fight to defend them takes on a greater significance. Hiam Abbass, the Anna Magnani of the Middle East, turns in a great performance as Salma, amid a strong supporting cast. In Arabic/Hebrew/English with Dutch subtitles. (MB) 106 min. Rialto The Life Before Her Eyes Adapted from a novel by Laura Kasischke, this gauzy drama by Vadim Perelman (House of Sand and Fog) is an unfortunate combination of real-life horror and narrative game playing. A high school shooting rampage culminates in two friends (Evan Rachel Wood and Eva Amurri) being held at gunpoint by a deranged classmate, who threatens to kill one of them. From there the movie cuts back and forth between the girls’ friendship leading up to the crisis and events 15 years later, when Wood has aged into an emotionally damaged Uma Thurman. Perelman never overcomes the disjuncture of having two familiar actresses play the same grown character, and despite the endless crosscutting, the two halves settle respectively into ghoulish foreboding and murky psychological drama. (JJ) 90 min. De Uitkijk The Love Guru Mike Myers reportedly developed the character of guru Pitka during stand-up comedy skits over the course of several years, but it doesn’t show in this painfully pun-free comedy. Myers mugs and giggles like a hyperactive toddler, but he looks
Webtip
‘A Few Good Creative Men’ www.youtube.com/ watch?v=gYEf8XZKlUU
Midnight Meat Train This grim and sick adaptation of a story by Clive Barker suffered from a prolonged stay in distribution hell, and the only thing that prevented it from becoming a straight-to-DVD title was a flaming legion of horror fans. They will get what they expected and then some, as director Ryuhei Kitamura assaults your senses like Sam Raimi on acid. The titular subway line is haunted by a Frankensteinian brute (a truly menacing Vinnie Jones) and when a nosy photographer (Bradley Cooper) goes investigating, the situation quickly turns crimson. If you’re looking for the goriest film this year, look no further. (LvH) 85 min. Pathé ArenA, Pathé De Munt Mongol At last, here’s proof that a bold, big-budget epic from the Eastern steppes can compete with the classics from Hollywood and New Zealand. This German/Russian/Kazakh coproduction is the first of a planned series of biopics on the life of the legendary Genghis Khan, and the bloody battles, excellent cinematography and sprawling locations are very impressive. However, the first act of the film suffers from repetition and Asano Tadanobu’s practically saintly Genghis is a little hard to take. The utter anticlimax of an ending also makes Mongol hard to recommend. In Mongolian with Dutch subtitles. (LvH) 120 min. Pathé Tuschinski La Noche de los girasoles If you had plans to visit the lovely Spanish countryside for your summer holidays, you might reconsider after watching this grim and downbeat Hitchcockian Spanish art house thriller. A rape and murder in a rural town set up the Rashomon-like structure in which six characters are followed in six seperate chapters, with each chapter cleverly expanding the audience’s knowledge and deftly expanding our point of view. The depravity and dark view of human nature might be too much to stomach for the faint of heart, as every ounce of innocence is squeezed from the film throughout the two hours of running time. In Spanish with Dutch subtitles. (LvH) 118 min. Kriterion North by Northwest Hitchcock’s classic 1959 comic mistaken-identity thriller. Cary Grant plays an unsuspecting businessman caught up in a cheerfully complicated web of intrigue involving some microfilm, the United Nations, a crop duster, Eva Marie Saint and Mt Rushmore. What more could you ask for? 136 min. Filmmuseum The Panman: Rhythm of the Palms Steelpan player Harry Daniel wants to pass on the traditions of steelpan music to the younger generation so badly that, in his attempts to do so, he jeopardises his family life. When he meets the young and talented Jacko, he believes he’s finally fulfilled his wishes. But when Harry’s glory begins to fade, Jacko turns against him and switches to rock music. Panman, the opening film at the Africa in the Picture festival, is the first independent film production made on the island of Saint Martin and also received the Best Film Award at the Hollywood Black Film Festival. In English with Dutch subtitles. 90 min. Het Ketelhuis, Rialto