FALLON, NEVADA: DEADLY OASIS
Anyone who's been living in Nevada since 2002 and pays some attention to the news likely knows at least the basics of the Fallon cancer cluster: 16 children who are or had been living in the area diagnosed with a rare childhood form of leukemia—and no one knows exactly why. Is it the naturally high level of arsenic in the water? The jet fuel pipeline that runs through the town? Dumped jet fuel by Navy aircraft? A virus? Something else entirely?
Fallon, Nevada: Deadly Oasis fleshes out those basics somewhat as it portrays, and sides with, residents' fears and alacrity to assign blame. (For more on these issues, see Page 16.) It may be informative to anyone not familiar or only rudimentarily familiar with the case, but the film spends more time on its principals' not-so-well-established accusations than it does at getting at the truth.
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It's also a sad fact that there are dozens of communities in the U.S. that are "sick" from chemical contamination: the Ohio towns around the Fernald uranium processing plant, the cases portrayed in such films as Erin Brockovich and A Civil Action, and the granddaddy of them all, Love Canal. If there's a case to be made for Fallon's uniqueness, Deadly Oasis doesn't make it, and you have to wonder whether the typical viewer will be moved to outrage and action, or will shake her head in sympathy, feel terrible about it for a minute, and then ask what's on next.
Fallon, Nevada: Deadly Oasis premiered on KLVX Channel 10 last month, and is being shown on public stations around the country. Consult http://itvs.org for broadcast dates and locations.
THE NEST
A man walks into a room. He looks around, goes over and turns on a lamp, then another. Next he fluffs some pillows and lies down on the bed. This goes on for about ten minutes. It doesn't get real exciting until later when we get to see him brush his teeth.
Drama, it's been said, is life with all the boring parts left out. With the under-lit and overindulgent quagmire The Nest, director James Fotopoulos has decided to dispense with drama, and leave all that humdrum stuff in. The CineVegas program says the film involves "black-sunglassed secret agents, dog-headed beings," and something about "silver-wigged doppelgangers and transgendered lurkers." This makes the movie sound interesting, which it is not.
Those things do appear in the film, but with no discernable rhyme or reason. We never learn who the two lead characters (an unnamed man and woman) are, or what their motives may be. Their troubled but tedious existence is interspersed with static shots of cows or aliens. At one point the man wonders, "I don't know how something like this could happen." To which the woman replies, "Things like this happen all the time to all kinds of people."
THE INDIAN RUNNER
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Set in 1968, Sean Penn's writing and directing debut chronicles the age-old story of good brother against bad. Joe (David Morse) is a small town deputy with a beautiful wife (Valeria Golino) and son. His troubled brother, Frank (Viggo Mortensen), returns from Vietnam, tries to go straight and marries his pregnant girlfriend (Patricia Arquette). But he eventually succumbs to his violent side. Based on Bruce Springsteen's song "Highway Patrolman," The Indian Runner (1991) deliberately strolls in John Cassavetes' territory, concentrating on dialogue, characters and acting above all else. But Penn succumbs to too many cutesy montages and too much "Indian" dream imagery, explaining and exploiting the title again and again. Even so, the excellent cast—including Charles Bronson as the boys' dad and Dennis Hopper as a bartender who fuels Frank's rage—more than carries the weight. The actors are so subtle and so in touch with the moment that Cassavetes himself would have been proud. Arquette in particular contributes some wonderful moments as a partially reformed flower child, letting out cheerful primal screams whenever she's in the mood. Bonuses include: Benicio Del Toro in a small role, trading marijuana for English-language classes; and a clip from John Ford's Rio Grande playing on television.
SHE'S SO LOVELY
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For his second film (1997), Nick Cassavetes filmed the final, unproduced screenplay by his father, legendary independent filmmaker John Cassavetes. But times had changed and trouble arose when the studio decided that John's title, She's De Lovely, had to be changed because audiences wouldn't know it was a reference to a Cole Porter song. This slap in the face unfortunately carries over into the finished film, which actually seems only half-finished. Maureen (Robin Wright-Penn) lives a miserable, lowdown existence, spending half of it wondering when her violent, drunken husband Eddie (Sean Penn) will be home.
At the end of one long, alcohol-soaked day, Eddie finally snaps and goes to the nuthouse for "three months." Ten years later, Maureen has shaped up, married Joey (John Travolta), and had three kids when Eddie is finally released and shows up, looking for his life back. It would be easy to assign the more cohesive, more grounded first part to John and the overwritten, irrational, nonsensical second part to Nick. But the reality is probably far more complex. The final movie has patches of brilliance where father and son seem to be in tune, and patches of opaqueness where no one seems to know what to do. Fortunately, the acting is universally first-rate, and the credit for that goes to Nick.
THE PIANO
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Jane Campion's pet themes and ideas never came together with more physical clarity and emotional resonance than with her 1993 masterpiece, The Piano. Ada (Holly Hunter), a mute Scottish woman, and her daughter (Anna Paquin) arrive in a remote corner of Victorian era New Zealand to complete an arranged marriage to farmer Sam Neill. She has her beloved piano with her and won't budge until someone moves it from the beach. It winds up in the cabin of a tattoo-covered, Maori convert (Harvey Keitel), who offers to "trade" it back to her one black key at a time in exchange for various, sometimes sexual, favors. Campion manages a brilliant visual equivalent for every emotion. Nothing quite fits together in Ada's world: her giant petticoat scraping over uneven tree roots and moss-covered bogs, her voiceless lips and her wondrously expressive piano separated into different houses, and above all, the image of the piano in the jungle—civilization clashing with animalistic urges. If the movie has a flaw, it's that Neill plays the husband as too much of a cuckold. But Keitel is dangerously fascinating and Paquin gives one of the screen's all-time great juvenile performances. Hunter is miraculous, channeling every passionate release through her eyes and hands. She, Paquin and Campion deservedly won Oscars.
REMEMBER ME, MY LOVE
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Proposed alternative title: The O.C. Italiano.
Bored with network and Latino soap operas on the networks and Telemundo? Try one with Italian spice, because director Gabriele Muccino has packed enough soap bubbles into Remember Me, My Love to wash a dozen heavy loads.
Brightened mostly by the radiant presence of crossover star Monica Belluci, Remember follows the fracturing family life of the Ristuccias, with mom and pop drifting apart and into midlife crisis mode (he, an affair with old flame Belluci; she, reviving the acting dream she abandoned for marriage) while the offspring cope with teen-life crises (she, trying to parlay her hotness into a TV career; he, trying to shed his loser label with peers and his unrequited object d'amour).
Credit Muccino for keeping the screen hopping—this movie nearly gallops along, bouncing from one desperately disintegrating Ristuccia to the next, just long enough to advance their own story line. And on. And on. And on. All that's missing is those lingering reaction shots just before the commercials. And, of course, the commercials.
I'll spare you the details and simply summarize the action. Totaling up the quartet's quirks, we're witness to: infidelity, teen sex and masturbation, blowout arguments, bitterness, recriminations, accusations, separation, a horrible accident, a hospital crying scene, a shallow TV star, a woman's crush on a gay guy, a man telling his boss to screw off, inspirational recovery, tender reconciliation, weed, hash and a cute mutt. All soaked in operatic screaming, crying and gesticulating.
The cast make their characters as real as mannered stereotypes will allow, and Belluci is a graceful scene-stealer, but as "the other woman," she's shortchanged by a screenplay that trashes her dignity, turning her into a patsy.
IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE EYE
LE SACREDU PRINTEMPS
These two avant-garde shorts are being shown together. There is certainly a segment of readers who will be instantly turned off by the phrase "avant-garde shorts." It's an unfair prejudice, but these entries are unlikely to disabuse anyone of their preconceptions. Then again, avant-garde cinema engages viewers on a more personal level, so perhaps my experience won't be yours.
Picture postcards, a staple of Teutonic culture, figure heavily in Eye, providing montages of Austrian images, focusing on Erzberg in Eisenerz, and Salzburg, home to Mozart and The Sound of Music. The presentation doesn't shirk from history's darker aspects: Erzberg's use of slave labor during World War II is discussed, as is Salzburg's pre-Anschluss Nazi inclinations. (One rather affecting postcard features a swastika-shaped sun shining down on the city.)
What brings this 45-minute short down is its tedious framing device: an Austrian poet puttering around his cluttered apartment, leafing through the postcards, on some search or quest that's never defined—all the while shot through a lens outfitted with an upper and lower eyelid that opens and closes squishily.
Eye also features some neat animation—balls of bread exploding out of a mountain (representing Erzberg) become the houses of the city beneath it (Eisenerz); the poet himself transforms into a two-dimensional metal sculpture fighting the wind in an empty field—but it's only intermittent and it never amounts to much. I'll stick to the postcards.
Le Sacre is a 38-minute wordless short scored to its title music, Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring." Overseen by God from Her aerie, when She's not baking new cherubim, the film follows three people in various states of dysfunction: a widow consumed by grief, an obsessive-compulsive surgeon and a nymphomaniacal teenager rebelling against her possibly abusive father. The three each go through parallel Santeria rituals, through which they overcome their respective psychoses.
Ho-hum. It's difficult to sustain interest in characters who can only express themselves in the most rudimentary of fashions. Printemps has some visual appeal (God's kitchen is suffused with surrealism), and the obvious auditory appeal for those so inclined, but not much more.
BRIGHT YOUNG THINGS
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Evelyn Waugh was one of the great satirists of his day, and Stephen Fry (probably best known for his portrayal of Oscar Wilde in Wilde) can be counted among the great modern British wits. It would seem a natural, then, for Fry to adapt Waugh's Vile Bodies, a caricature of the late-1920s London party set (think the precursors of the Hilton sisters), for the big screen.
Unfortunately, little of Fry's own wit shines through in Bright Young Things, and Waugh's literary brand of satire may be more suited to the printed page. (I'm not sure I can call the adaptation faithful either; Waugh wrote the novel in 1930, yet the film takes us into World War II.)
Bright Young Things centers on Adam Fenwick-Symes (Campbell Moore), an earnest hanger-on among the so-called "Bright Young People," who's perpetually broke and so cannot marry Nina (Mortimer), another of their social crowd. Adam would be more sympathetic, though, if he didn't bet the £1,000 he's just won performing parlor tricks on a horse he doesn't know and in the trust of a stranger he may never see again.
As the the film vacillates between these libertines at play and their consequences, it's hard for us to care one way or the other. Still, Bright Young Things is frequently sumptuous and seductive, and Fry displays remarkable craftsmanship.
Jeremy Parker
ALL THE WAY
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Dennis Hopper as Frank Sinatra? Well, yes. Hopper doesn't really look or talk like Sinatra, but as long as you don't expect a full-on embodiment of ole Blue Eyes, the effect can be accepted.
All the Way recounts Sinatra's disastrous 1974 Australia tour. Upon his arrival, he's ambushed by reporters armed with questions dredging up Sinatra's past indiscretions. During the concert that night, Sinatra unloads on the Australian press, calling them "fags and hookers." In solidarity with the offended writers, the country's powerful trade unions "black-ban" Sinatra. His subsequent concerts are cancelled; his private plane is grounded; his hotel room service and even running water are shut off.
The film is also about the struggles of (fictional) young music promoter, Rod Blue (Edgerton), who brings Sinatra to Australia, and Rod's budding relationship with his new assistant. The love story supposedly intertwines with that of Sinatra and his new paramour Barbara Marx (Griffith), where the feelings the young Aussies show for each other bring Frank and Barbara closer together.
But All the Way doesn't devote enough time to that angle to make it believable. The story of the tour and its resolution, and Rod's endeavors to put (and later hold) everything together, is passable, even if the timing of events feels telescoped, and some opportunities go unexplored.