A Perfect Circle seemed, at first, like one of the world’s most blatant rip-offs. Its leader, Billy Howerdel, was a Tool guitar tech, and its vocalist was none other than Maynard James Keenan. And the sound of the band’s debut, 2000’s Mer de Noms, was Tool Lite – less abrasive and more oriented toward traditional songs, but still strikingly similar.
Just as Pulp Fiction spawned a number of crude imitations, it appears that Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves has inspired young filmmakers to mimic his bleak depictions of degradation. The British film Under the Skin brings with it the affectations of von Trier’s film – the hand-held cameras, the grim natural light, the misogyny, the attempted shocks – in the service of a painfully immature story without a shred of psychological understanding or depth in its main character.
Most hot young actors wouldn’t dare trying to play vacuous, affected, manipulative, selfish, back-stabbing rich kids. It would look too much like reality. Ryan Phillippe, though, is one of our great screen artists. He has the guts to play a vacuous, affected, manipulative, selfish, back-stabbing rich kid, and to avoid the criticism that he is simply being himself, he decides to play the role badly.
The two movies at which I’ve had the most fun in the past 15 or so years both came courtesy of Albert Brooks. In each, Brooks played weenie-boy whiners in search of something important: courage (Defending Your Life) or the reason all his relationships with women fail (Mother). In The Muse, the Brooks character isn’t looking for anything nearly so deep; he just wants a good script – something Brooks could have used as well.
If two young women characters in a movie decide to take a vacation to an exotic locale before going to their respective colleges, the viewer can be certain one of two things will happen: They’ll have passionate sexual awakenings at the hands of a handsome stranger, or they’ll be unjustly imprisoned in a fucked-up judicial system with seemingly no hope of ever getting out. In the case of Brokedown Palace, we get both.
As filmmaking goes, Nick Broomfield’s Monster in a Box doesn’t have much to offer. It’s basically Spalding Gray sitting at a desk talking, with some lighting effects and unobtrusive but effective mood music by Laurie Anderson. So, naturally, it’s one of my favorite movies.
No good movie in recent memory has made me feel as perfectly awful and unsettled as David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ. The movie is beautifully made, engaging, and sometimes even funny, but it’s also repulsive and disturbing, and not just because of the director’s now-standard disfigurement fetish.
Takeshi Kitano’s Fireworks is remarkable for many reasons, but its greatest achievement is taking a character capable of extreme violence and sweet tenderness and absolutely nothing in between and making him believable and rich. The feat looks all the more impressive considering the character’s perpetual mask of blank impassivity.
