Pollock  United States, 2000
Running Length: 2:02
Cast: Ed Harris, Marcia Gay Harden, Amy Madigan, Jennifer Connelly, Jeffrey Tambor, Bud Cort, John Heard, Val Kilmer
Director: Ed Harris
Producers: Fred Berner, Ed Harris, John Kilik
Screenplay: Barbara Turner and Susan Emshwiller, based on Jackson Pollock: An American Saga by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith
Cinematography: Lisa Rinzler
Music: Jeff Beal
Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics
Ed Harris' Pollock represents the latest opportunity for an accomplished thespian to step around to the other side of the camera. In addition to donning the director's cap, Harris also wears a pair of other hats - he is one of the movie's producers and he is also the star. For a production that has been whispered about on the grapevine for years, Pollock turns out to be a bit of a disappointment. In essence, it is an erratically paced, conventional biographical treatment of the life and loves of modernist painter Jackson Pollock, who blew through the New York art scene during the 1940s and 50s before dying in a car crash. As with many great artists, Pollock was an undiagnosed manic-depressive whose life was characterized by periods of self-destructive binges followed by giddy bouts of joy and creativity.
Harris' movie chronicles Pollock's life in a straightforward, adequate manner without giving us much insight into the man behind the art. Other than depicting his wild mood swings, there's not too much to this cinematic representation of Pollock. Even after spending two hours in his company, we don't understand what makes him tick. The other characters who drift into and out of his life, including his wife of 15 years, Lee Krasner (Marcia Gay Harden), and art collector Peggy Guggenheim (Harris' real-life wife, Amy Madigan), aren't better illustrated - they need filling in. The result is that Pollock is more like an incomplete sketch than a detailed portrait.
The best scenes in this film are those that illustrate the creative process. They're wild and energetic, and it's during those sequences that Harris shows promise as a director. Colors are splashed on the canvas as Pollock tunes out the outside world to concentrate exclusively on his work. Harris' use of unconventional camera angles and quick cuts invigorates these scenes. Unfortunately, most of the movie lacks this drive, and when Pollock focuses on the tortured artist motif, which is most of the time, it is derivative and is unappealing.
The subject of Jackson Pollock has been something of an obsession for Harris, who worked steadfastly for more than a decade to bring this story to the screen. Initially, he had planned only to produce and star in the project, but, with the encouragement of co-producer Fred Berner, he agreed to take the reins as director. Regardless of how difficult his job behind the camera was, Harris' work in front of it does not suffer. His portrayal of the title character is precise and effectively realized. We see in Harris' performance a man who is driven by unseen forces to great highs and great lows. It's just a pity that the movie doesn't delve more deeply into exactly what those unseen forces were, and why Pollock should be regarded differently from the hundreds of other great artists whose lives followed essentially the same trajectory as his.
POLLOCK Rating: ** Lucia y el sexo (Sex and Lucia)  Spain, 2001
Director: Julio Medem
produced by: Sogecine, Fernando Bovaira, Enrique López Lavigne
scenario: Julio Medem
cast: Paz Vega, Tristán Ulloa, Najwa Nimri, Daniel Freire, Elena Anaya
camera: Kiko de la Rica
editor: Ivan Aledo
sound: Agustin Peinado
music: Alberto Iglesias
length: 128mins.
Visually overwhelming story in which nature, the elements, chance, and of course sex play important roles. Lucia, an attractive waitress from Madrid, hears on the phone that her boyfriend Lorenzo has been killed in an accident. Lorenzo wrote books somewhere on an idyllic island in the Mediterranean. After the accident, the desperate Lucia decides to go to the island, where she meets Elena (Najwa Nimri) and Carlos (Daniel Freire).
Lucia, however, is unaware that they both knew Lorenzo. Elena also had a relationship years before with Lorenzo: she spent one romantic night with him, but couldn't find him when nine months later she had a child: Luna. But Luna is no longer alive, the tragic circumstances gradually revealed as the tale progresses. Lucia gradually finds out more about the past of Elena and Carlos, and she is reminded of the subject of the book that Lorenzo wrote before she met him. Reality and fiction intertwine.
Lucía y el sexo is a stunning piece. Chance, nature and the elements (in this case mainly sun and water) are used to stunning effect and in the excellent cast, the enchanting Paz Vega - in Spain best known as a sitcom star, is beguiling and delightful as Lucia. Sex, commitment and guilt are pivotal in this excellent film - well worth searching out.
LUCIA Y EL SEXO Rating: **
Sexa
About a Boy  Prod cos: Working Title Films, Tribeca Productions
Prods: Jane Rosenthal, Robert De Niro, Brad Epstein, Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner
Scr: Peter Hedges, Chris & Paul Weitz, based on the novel by Nick Hornby
Cinematography: Remi Adefarasin
Prod des: Jim Clay
Ed: Nick Moore
Music: Damon Gough (Badly Drawn Boy)
Main cast: Hugh Grant, Nicholas Hoult, Toni Collette, Rachel Weisz Victoria Smurfit
Dirs: Paul and Chris Weitz. UK/US. 2002. 100mins
Will Britain's latest semi-confessional romantic comedy be the new Bridget Jones's Diary? It certainly has the right ingredients: a powerful combination of best-selling novelist Nick Hornby, Hugh Grant and the confident, commercial touch which co-producers Working Title have brought to this genre in their three previous outings with Grant (Four Weddings And A Funeral, Notting Hill and Bridget Jones). About A Boy has not - yet - been trumpeted by the massive media blitz which announced Ms Jones's arrival. But prospects look bright, thanks to all of the above elements, plus the film's overall polish and the apparently bottomless public appetite for this kind of stuff.
It will be revealing to see how the film opens internationally without, as with the other films, a major American star or even a significant female character (it's released in the US on 17 May as counter-programming to Star Wars: Episode II Attack Of the Clones). Still, Grant, seeming to get better the further he's allowed to extend his range, delivers a terrific central performance, as acerbic but more complex than his sexy snake in Bridget Jones.
Grant plays Will Freeman, the archetypal Hornby anti-hero: a commitment-phobic North Londoner in his thirties who prides himself on his terminal hipness. Living on the proceeds of a novelty Christmas hit written by his father years ago, he idles the days away in his gadget-filled apartment watching afternoon quiz shows, playing CDs and reading style magazines. "I like to think I'm an island," he muses. "I like to think I'm pretty cool. I like to think I'm... Ibiza". There's a huge chasm between his suave self-image and the sad reality.
Reasoning that single mothers are the perfect no-strings date, since they're panting for sex but prevented by their child from getting too involved with a man, Will joins a single parents' support group, inventing a young son for the purpose. Here, a chain of events leads him to Marcus (Nicholas Hoult). Marcus is 12, going on 40. His depressive mother, Fiona (Toni Collette), has raised him with hippy values and a grisly haircut which make him a target for bullying at his new school. Even the playground nerds reject him. When Fiona attempts suicide, Marcus realises that two is a dangerously small family unit and decides to expand it. Unfortunately for Will, he happens to be around on the fateful day.
Working Title made Hornby's previous novel, High Fidelity, with a British director, Stephen Frears, and an Americanised story, transposed to Chicago. About A Boy takes the opposite tack. It returns to London (trendy Clerkenwell this time, rather than Hornby's grungier stamping grounds of Holloway and Finsbury Park). But the directors and co-writers are Americans.
Paul and Chris Weitz, who previously made American Pie, seem at first an odd choice. But they keep the action moving along nimbly - often using wipes to zip between the various characters - and show an empathy for the British setting. Besides, American Pie was beneath the gross-out humour, a sweet tempered comedy of embarrassment involving emotionally arrested males: in fact, not unlike this.
Hornby's writing - so effortless on the page - presents a minefield for the screen adaptor, with its ambiguous mix of New Lad bravado and New Man anxiety. The film of Fever Pitch failed completely to capture it; High Fidelity used the uneasy device of having the protagonist speak straight to camera. About A Boy is even trickier, since the book is told from two points of view, with alternate chapters following Will and Marcus. The film weaves together their contrasting thoughts in voice-over and, while Will's inevitably dominates, Nicholas Hoult as the quirky, isolated Marcus definitely holds his own. It's elegantly done, though the film constantly threatens to turn into a male bonding two-hander, at the expense of the secondary roles.
The smart screenplay is full of lines not in the original novel but exactly nailing its sentiments. The most fundamental change is the loss of a major subplot triggered by the 1994 suicide of Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain, presumably because the setting has been updated to the present - and also because the writers felt one suicide bid was quite enough for a light comedy. While well handled, their alternative is a little pat: the essence of a Hornby novel is the unresolved messiness of his people's lives. It also has the effect of marginalising a number of characters, including the most forceful female one, Marcus's rebellious schoolmate Ellie.
Hornby's novels have always appealed to women, but translated to the screen, his female characters tend to come across as bit players (High Fidelity) or whining killjoys (Fever Pitch). It was a good move here to cast a powerful presence like Toni Collette as the potentially draggy Fiona, but Rachel Weisz, as Will's love interest, enters the story late in the game and has a struggle to establish herself.
ABOUT A BOY Rating: ***
Waking Life 
Written and Directed by
Richard Linklater
Plot Outline: A man in a dream state encounters many characters who, one by one, talk about their views on the meaning, perception, and reality of human existence. Philosophical therapy.
Cast:
Trevor Jack Brooks .... Young Boy Playing Paper Game
Lorelie Linklater .... Young Girl Playing Paper Game
Wiley Wiggins .... Main Character
Glover Gill .... Accordion Player
Bill Wise .... Boat Car Guy
Robert C. Solomon .... Philosophy Professor
Kim Krizan .... Herself
J.C. Shakespeare .... Self-Burning Man
Ethan Hawke .... Jesse
Julie Delpy .... Celine
Charles Gunning .... Angry Man in Jail
David Sosa .... Himself
Alex Jones .... Man in Car with P.A.
Carol Dawson .... Coffee Shop Chatter
Lisa Moore .... Coffee Shop Chatter
Country: USA
Language: English
Colour
Sound Mix: Dolby
Certification: 15
Hitting the viewer perceptually with constantly varying animation styles, "Waking Life" assaults you intellectually by parading a dozen plus viewpoints of people who would not necessarily disagree with one another, but show the vast importance to us of the personal way we manifest our philosophical attitudes and how much that depends on our individual interests.
Not all of us are psychologically constructed to be philosophers, but all of us can be analysed to have a philosophical set of suppositions. Waking Life challenges these suppositions by merely presenting to you, in dramatic form, people who vividly present their `takes' on the concepts and how they are affected by them, especially emotionally.
"Let me tell you about a dream I had," says the character played by Linklater, who also wrote and directed the film. With Waking Life he has created quite a vivid dreamscape for the cinema screen. In fact, this film aspires to be an entirely new kind of movie, thanks largely to its hybrid of live action and animation.
Those who remember Linklater for his grungy independent films 'Slacker' and 'Dazed and Confused' might be surprised by his latest project. Shot with off-the-shelf digital cameras and then fully animated, Waking Life looks something like a photo-realistic comic book, colourised with a Simpsons-like palette and brought to life.
Waking Life's animation was overseen by Austin artist Bob Sabiston, whose software allows animators to use video images as sketchpad template they can draw on. It's like a 21st-century update to rotoscoping - the animation technique used in films like Snow White.
The program already is something of a phenomenon. Sabiston's short videos Roadhead, Snack and Drink and Figures of Speech, created with Tommy Pallotta, have won numerous awards, and Sabiston has already seen his style replicated by advertising agencies (he considered suing Earthlink for a series of copycat ads).
The typical Sabiston-Pallotta film is filled with experimentation - characters' eyes bulge expressively; strands of hair snake around their heads. Figures and images occasionally pop up into the frame, offering a playful visual counterpoint to their dialogue.
When Linklater saw the Sabiston-Pallotta films, he realized their style of animation might help rescue a project he had nearly abandoned. Linklater says he couldn't figure out a way to turn his script, a collection of insights and musings inspired by his own dreams, into a live-action film.
"I don't think films and dreams generally go together well - they are kind of redundant," he says. "Most people participate in their dreams the same way they watch movies: uncritically, almost unconsciously, taking in the information and imagery.
"And this film uses dreams as a kind of operating system for the narrative, the hitch for most of the ideas. The realism of (live-action) film would have canceled out the ideas. This style of animation allows you to see a different state of reality."
In creating Waking Life, Linklater shot the digital footage quickly with handheld Sony cameras. That footage - monologues and conversations featuring artists, conspiracy theorists, academics and other articulate types - was uploaded onto Apple Mac workstations, each equipped with Sabiston's software and a Wacom tablet.
This animation "factory," as Linklater called it, hosted 30 animators who drew on and colored the digitized images, frame by frame. Each animator followed a character through the movie, giving that character his or her own color scheme and traits. Erratic editing of several artists' work on each character jars, however, as the respective individual styles diminish the fluidity.
(For example, the convict, filmed behind bars, burning red with anger, displays mutton chop sideburns one second, then they're gone, then back again. Minor irritances perhaps - but they're there). A film theorist talks about "holy moments," as sparks shoot from his hands. Animated characters played by Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke glow with the pastel softness of a leisurely, thoughtful morning.
Though each minute of Waking Life's raw footage took up to 250 hours to animate, the project was a bargain by Hollywood standards (a Pixar or Disney-animated feature might cost 10 or 15 times as much). The low cost meant Linklater could dare to do something the studios wouldn't: use animation to explore adult subject matter.
"I'm not a technological fetishist," Linklater says. "I want to tell a story in the right way. Technologies can help us in our human desire to express ourselves, to communicate and share our experiences. "I think that's why Waking Life is more than just an interesting moment in the history of film technology. The technology has allowed this particular story - a story that probably wouldn't have worked in any other form - to be told."
However, as a graphic artist myself (reviewer Thom Mckeown) I found the project at times to be grotesquely self indulgent in the two main areas: in terms of script it crossed the line of hyperbole, superficial propensity and overblown piffle and the artwork at times is shown to be redundantly superficial and purely for patronizing design effect. If youve got the tools stuff like this is a doddle.
Its interesting to some, sure, but ultimately not the ground-breaking, pioneering cinematic breakthrough the PR hype would have us believe will make the discerning cinemagoer salivate in awe-struck wonder.
WAKING LIFE Rating: **
Bend It Like Beckham  Directed by: Gurinder Chadha. UK. 2001. 110mins.
Prods: Deepak Nayar, Chadha
Scr: Chadha, Guljit Bindra, Paul Mayeda Berges
Cinematography: Jong Lin
Prod des: Nick Ellis
Ed: Justin Krish
Music supervisor: Liz Gallacher
Main cast: Parminder Nagra, Keira Knightley, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Juliet Stevenson, Anupam Kher
Gurinder Chadha's high-spirited, unassuming comedy about a football-mad Indian girl living in London is a real charmer which should score with teenagers but also has strong crossover potential. In the UK it will coast on the successful new wave of popular Asian comedy of which Chadha's own first film, Bhaji On The Beach (1994), about Indian women on a jaunt to the seaside resort of Blackpool, was an early example: more recently there has been the 1999 hit East Is East and the long-running TV satirical sketch show Goodness Gracious Me!. Meanwhile Anita And Me, based on GGM star Meera Syal's novel about her childhood, arrives later this year. Bend It Like Beckham should also appeal to fans of female football worldwide (though to target the Yankee market it curiously doesn't make much of its only American character, a USA talent scout). And it offers, above all, a terrific, hugely likeable young cast and that old feelgood, the triumph-over-adversity plotline which worked so well for low-budget Britpics like The Full Monty and Billy Elliot.
The title refers to Manchester United and England player David Beckham, whose signature curveball kick finds its parallel in the heroine's own determination to bend, if not to break, the roles in her favour. Beckham does not appear personally in the film, although he is said to endorse it and lookalikes of him and his wife Victoria (Posh Spice) are glimpsed briefly in the closing scenes.
Eighteen-year-old Jess (Parminder Nagra) idolises Beckham and loves to watch and above all play football. However, her family wants her to be a conventional Indian daughter who concentrates her energies on learning to cook a full Indian supper, finding a nice husband and studying for a respectable, deadly dull career like accounting.
Kicking a ball around with friends, she meets fellow football nut Jules (Keira Knightley), who's from a white working/middle-class background, but suffers from the same pressure. Her brash, frilly-bloused mother (Juliet Stevenson) insists that football is unfeminine and "there's a reason why Sporty Spice is the only one without a fella". Recruited to the local team, Jess soon blossoms into a star player, unknown to her family, under the tutelage of her stern but dashing Irish coach (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers).
The rest of this plot-lite structured flick plants a series of obstacles in her path towards her dream. Some of these impediments and misunderstandings are allowed to drag too long, and cuts here would have been highly effective.
Production values are modest but attractive, especially the West London setting in the heart of one of London's largest Asian communities, with its dramatic contrast between the colourful sari shops and street markets and the suburban semi-detached houses. It's also close by Heathrow Airport, whose low-flying planes act as a constant visual reminder of Jess's longing to escape her surroundings.
Some of the characters are drawn with very broad strokes, with rather patchy performances from the Indian family, including many familiar faces from TV including half of the Goodness Gracious Me posse in cameos. Juliet Stevenson almost steals the film as Jules' mum, just the right side of OTT. The music is produced by famed Asian dj & producer Bally Sagoo, full of stomping dance rhythms as well as some humourous asides (indie-pop versions of some 1980s soft rock classics). But the film has a lot of unmalicious fun with all of them, from Jess's bevy of arch-traditional aunties and her Sikh father, an immigrant from Kenya who works as a customs officer, to her shopaholic friends with their baby-pink cellphones, designer nails and tinted contact lenses.
Most importantly though, Chadha draws winning performances from her central trio - the two young actresses are a particular revelation and creates an enormously appealing chemistry between them.
BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM Rating: ***  |
