Great Expectations

When Anne Bancroft, as the kooky old spinster Miss Dinsmoor, orders the young Finn (Jeremy James Kissner) to “Dance! Dance! Dance!,” I couldn’t help laughing. It reminded me of an early episode in 30 Rock when Jenna (Jane Krakowski) is at a ball trying to land an Austrian prince (played with so much grotesque brilliance by Paul Reubens), himself a long-suffering victim of the royal family’s generations of in-breeding. (He dies in the scene after drinking champaigne because his body cannot metabolize grapes.) The prince orders Jenna to “Dance!” and then keeps requesting different styles: “Jazz! Tap! Jitterbug! Charleston! Interpretive! Twirl! Do it again! Keep Twirling!”

Alfonso Cuarón’s 1998 adaptation of Great Expectations may be the most beautiful film of the 90s. And it’s no wonder, because the director of photography is Emmanuel Lubezki. (He just won his second Academy Award for his work on Birdman; his first win was for 2013’s Gravity, also directed by Caurón.) The movie is like a dance: every image connects thematically and has a rhythm; the scenes are elegant, beautiful, and complex; they are full of associations of other movies—Sunset Boulevard, A Streetcar Named Desire, maybe even a little of Bertolucci’s The Conformist—and yet they do not feel like rip-offs of other works. They may be camera-work riffs, or maybe they’re just the result of two cinematic show-offs. But who cares? The visual beauty of Great Expectations is so dazzling that it threatens to undermine my own stubborn love of plot.

Cuarón isn’t interested in telling the Dickens story faithfully in terms of plot: he changes many of the names, the setting, and the time period. But thematically, Cuarón beautifully captures the essence of Dickens’s great work and the classism at the heart of Pip’s (or Finn’s) rise from poverty to success and his deep desire to be great, to be a gentleman, to attain a girl (Estella, played as an adult by Gwyneth Paltrow) who is ranks above him. So, while Great Expectations `98 lacks some of the weight of the novel (in the same way that the stunning, naturalistically filmed 2011 Jane Eyre was gorgeous to look at it but strangely less effective than the novel itself or even some of the stagier filmings of the material).

But, while I didn’t feel as much of an emotional wallop in Cuarón’s Great Expectations, I was struck by the way he gets movies and how to turn novels into movies, more than most filmmakers. When we’re watching two masters like Cuarón and Lubezki at work, we see all that is possible in movies that cannot be achieved on a page: the splendiferous greens which permeate every image, finding themselves on clothes, furniture, drapes, and in the lighting itself; the deliciously Gothic Miss Dinsmoor (Miss Havisham in the novel), played like an even older version of Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard, with a little Blanche DuBois thrown in for good measure. (The film is set in Florida, on the Gulf.)

Ethan Hawke plays Finn, who grows up with his simple handyman brother-in-law Joe (Chris Cooper) and becomes a sensation in the New York art world thanks to an unknown benefactor. Robert De Niro plays the escaped conflict Finn assists early in the movie. The film is at its most bizarre (and delightful) when dwelling with the eccentric Miss Dinsmoor, who makes him come visit her dilapidated Spanish mansion, which looks like a resort hotel that was abandoned thirty years ago with all the furniture and the glasses still perfectly arranged (though they're now covered with a thick layer of dust). With Hank Azaria, Kim Dickens, and Josh Mostel. Cuarón co-wrote the screenplay with David Mamet and Mitch Glazer.

The Last Days of Disco

The Last Days of Disco (1998) is such a strange movie, a movie about how the night can take on a life of its own, and how that which is sexy at twelve midnight is pretty pathetic at twelve noon.  It has writer-director Whit Stillman's signature mock-intellectual dialogue (which served him so well in Metropolitan), and a terrific soundtrack (provided you like disco music), as well as one of the best long party scenes I've ever seen, taking up the first half hour of the movie and imbibing it with a kind of fluid magic.

The characters might as well be carbon copies of those in Metropolitan. One of the actors from that movie, Chris Eigeman, even plays a thinly-veiled variation on his character from that film, and newcomers Chloe Sevigny and Kate Beckinsale could be the two main girls from it, except with different hairdos. Sevigny is understated and smart but critical, and Beckinsale embodies a kind of cattiness as her observant and opinionated friend/roommate. Together they inhabit a New York nightclub and it becomes a sort of stage to enact the drama of yuppie romance and friendship.

I liked Last Days for the same reason I loved Metropolitan: The conversations, as in Metropolitan, were generally interesting, and so other-worldly in their quasi-Victorian-ness that they left me somewhat dumbfounded and fascinated. But there was also something a bit false about Last Days of Disco. The dialogue always seems to be teetering between refreshing and ridiculous. It is rather nice to hear people talking in complete sentences and using correct grammar, but when the owner of a nightclub comments on someone's wrong usage of the past perfect tense, something feels disingenuous.

Then again, director Stillman often seems like he's toying with his characters' intelligence in the first place. He lets them get puffed up on their own sophisticatedness and then watches them become caricatures, although he doesn't completely dehumanize them. It's a lot more subtle that that. They're somewhere between soap opera and sitcom, book smart and street smart, bold and terrified. And all of these contradictions are masked by a veneer of success and confidence that we the audience can generally see through. 

The real problem with Last Days is that everything about the film feels too familiar, as if Stillman were simply unable to do anything but recycle old ideas. I think it's very likely he wanted to explore the same ideas in a slightly different context. He's too interested in these types of people--educated, privileged upper-class sophisticates--not to use them in his films. This at least makes them interesting for us, up to a point, but their intelligence often morphs into myopia, and this turns them into shallow, unappealing characters toward the end of the film.

And then of course, the fact that at some point this film is acknowledging a kind of reverence for the disco era is laughable, especially at the end when passengers on the subway begin dancing to "Love Train." Was that really such a great way to end a movie that's so self-consciously clever? It's difficult to know if the film is trying to be hip, ironic, or subversive. I think perhaps it's a combination of all three. The cast includes a lot of promising young actors including Mackenzie Astin, Matt Keeslar, Robert Sean Leonard, Jennifer Beals, Matt Ross, Tara Subkoff, and David Thornton. 114 min. ★★½

Pecker

Edward Furlong as a budding young Baltimore photographer named Pecker who becomes the latest sensation among the arty metropolitan types after he's discovered by a New York art dealer (Lili Taylor). But fame and fortune completely disrupt his life--and in the process, his work--much to Pecker's chagrin.

In some ways, one might read into Pecker (1998) an autobiographical thread: writer-director John Waters started out making ultra-shocking low-budget films like Pink Flamingos (1972), which celebrated social anarchy and didn't have to adhere to any kind of censorship regulations. They were sensationalistic and edgy and even disturbing. After Waters found a bit of mainstream success with Hairspray (1988), it became harder and harder to make those kinds of movies. (Also, the midnight movie phenomenon of the 60s and 70s was dead, thanks in large part to the emergence of home video. The rules of the game, if not the game itself, had dramatically changed.) So Pecker has a bit of reflective resonance for fans of Waters, in the sense that notoriety and success had some kind of impact on Waters' career. Still, he's managed to make some pretty shocking stuff, and his most recent film (A Dirty Shame) earned an NC-17 rating.

Pecker (the name, by the way, isn't really used as a euphemism for 'penis', although you might have expected this from John Waters), also proclaims Waters' love/obsession for Baltimore, his hometown, which he portrays as eccentric, weird, unironic, and yet somehow beautiful and familiar and accepting. It's the anti-New York. (Pecker takes a picture of his dad, who runs a bar, in front of the cash register, with the 'no sale' sign in view as a joke, and the New Yorkers proclaim it as some kind of haunting celebration of poverty and economic hardship; the dad is dumbfounded at their pretentious ability to over-analyze things. In Baltimore, we take it to understand, things are what they are: weird and even disturbing, yes, but at least they're upfront about it.

Pecker is a bit uneven, but it's got the usual amount of Watersian flare and weirdness. The story, which feels lacking in any real conflict for nearly half the movie, doesn't sustain itself over the 86-minute running time, but Pecker is redeemed by a terrific cast who embody their characters with gusto and their own bizarre form of dignity. They include: Mary Kay Place (as Pecker's mom), Mark Joy (as his dad), Christina Ricci (as his girlfriend, the militant manager of a Baltimore laundromat), Martha Plimpton (as Pecker's big sister, a bartender and MC at a local gay bar), Brendan Sexton III (as Pecker's best friend, a devoted shoplifter), Mink Stole, Patricia Hearst, Jean Schertler, Lauren Hulsey, Bess Armstrong, and Mary Vivian Pearce. ★★½

Out of Sight

Out of Sight (1998) is a crime comedy that's intermittently clever and dumb. It's got George Clooney, though, as a bank robber who's tired of prison and ready to retire, if he can make a final score that's large enough to sustain him. Director Steven Soderbergh demonstrates his ability to make fun movies here: it's sort of a breezier, less show-offy version of a Tarantino movie, with an interest in developing a relatively straightforward --but layered-- story, rather than twisting it like a pretzel. I'm not so much criticizing Tarantino's movies as noting the difference between this film and say, Jackie Brown (both movies, incidentally, come from novels by Elmore Leonard). Out of Sight is content to be entertaining without being overly clever. Soderbergh is a more conventional director than Tarantino, you might say. He knows how to transcend conventional movies and turn them into something fun and unique, and that's largely what he does with Out of Sight. It has so many funny, quirky moments that are fresh and interesting, and yet it never feels like something so disdainfully self-aware as a Tarantino film.

There are moments when you wonder if the screenwriter, Scott Frank, wasn't paying attention to his material closely enough. He lets characters do things that seem illogical, even stupid, for the sake of advancing the plot in a certain direction. The movie is almost gleefully disinterested in being realistic. You admire its casualness. Clooney has that sort of casual charm to him, and he's perfect for this movie. Jennifer Lopez, as the marshal who falls in love with him, isn't a great actress, but she does have a sense of comic timing, and she's a great beauty too. Her character downplays her obsession with "bad guys," even though she must know she's lying to herself the way the movie is lying to itself, playfully. This heist-farce was made purely for entertainment. But it has enough smarts not to be totally mindless, too.

The supporting cast is a dream: Ving Rhames as Clooney's partner in crime, a tough, weathered criminal who nevertheless confesses his crimes--sometimes prior to committing them--to his ultra-religious sister, a bookkeeper for a televangelist; Don Cheadle as a fellow criminal, who agrees to join forces with Clooney and Rhames to break into the safe of a Detroit millionaire, played by Albert Brooks, who did time with them in Florida (presumably for embezzlement); Dennis Farina as Lopez's father, also in the business; Catherine Keener as one of Clooney's friends in the outside world: a former magician's assistant. She figures in a very amusing scene in which an escaped criminal, played by Luis Guzman, comes to her door to kill her, unaware that Lopez is already there questioning her about Clooney's whereabouts. Keener is another actress with a remarkable comic sensibility: she's subtle, too, never forcing herself on the camera or the audience. She lets her character's intelligence sink in gradually; Steve Zahn plays a moronic stoner who comes to Clooney's assistance (sort of), half-heartedly, and gives away more than he realizes whenever he encounters Lopez, who knows how to work him; Viola Davis as Cheadle's girlfriend; Michael Keaton as Lopez's married lover, an FBI agent who has a great scene with Farina in which he sneakily calls him out on his behavior; Nancy Allen, as Brooks' girlfriend; and, in a cameo appearance at the end, Samuel L. Jackson, as another convict.

The Big Lebowski

How does a movie acquire a cult following? The people at the not-quite-midnight screening of The Big Lebowski (1998) seemed to frolic with this movie. They were laughing like it was the first time they'd seen it, yet I imagine they'd all seen it multiple times. (Many were quoting the dialogue with the movie or even talking over it because they knew exactly what was happening onscreen). This was my first time seeing The Big Lebowski. It's one of those movies you're scolded for not seeing. People love their Coen Brothers movies with a palpable ferocity. It's bizarre until you can find yourself within that kind of ferocious love of a movie.

I'm not partial to the Coen Brothers. No Country For Old Men may be their best work, but it's also pretty hollow inside. One of the most prominent storytelling flaws in their work is the stupidity of their characters' actions. But, in the world of the Coen Brothers this is a device or a bit of storytelling genius rather than a flaw. They try to paint the characters as more real because they do stupid things. It works out being a bit infuriating--and alternately comical, depending on the moment.

As much as this movie is about anything, it's a hodgepodge of old noir movies set in L.A. The Coens appropriate elements of Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep, and Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye, and Jack Smight's Harper. But you soon realize that the plot, about a guy (Jeff Bridges, playing the ultimate chronic loser with a flair for bowling and a penchant for White Russians) who's hired to save a crippled millionaire's kidnapped wife, is subordinate to the movie's stoner inhibitions. Bridges' character calls himself the Dude, and it's a pretentious attempt to adorn this movie with qualities that will make it what it's become, an oddball midnight movie. This theater is never packed, and it was packed.

Julianne Moore shows up as the eccentric daughter of the invalid millionaire (see The Big Sleep and Harper). She resents the hell out of her sex-kitten of a step-mother (see Harper). There's also some strand of yarn about a weird-ass cult (see Harper again). And the movie has that affectless feel that Altman most certainly wove into The Long Goodbye. No one really cares about anything. Except bowling. John Goodman gives a volcanic, uproariously funny performance as Bridges' nutso bowling partner, a Vietnam vet who's obsessed with the past and completely in love with his war vet status. Steve Buscemi plays their sidekick, the brunt of their jokes and hostility and fellow bowling buddy.


I find myself riddled with mixed emotions about this movie. I laughed a lot at the craziness onscreen. It's got moments of pure madness, and the movie's nightmarish cast and nightmarishly lackadaisical story are something to be seen, but it also bugged the hell out of me. It's visually stylish and stylized (replete with trippy drug-induced dream sequences that might have come from the mind of David Lynch), but uneven. There may be reasons to care about the characters, but only if you're willing to like their idiosyncrasies. And it's dreadfully repetitive, particularly the dialogue, which is like bad Tarantino. Goodman's character was exasperating, and you wanted him to get abused more than he did (although he also delivered some truly good moments of comedy). Bridges' character constantly bungles things in a way that grows quickly tiresome. Bridges is a solid actor, though, and he carries a movie that's practically been amputated at the gut.

Primary Colors

Based on the book by Anonymous, Primary Colors (1998) is a roman a clef of the Clintons during their 1992 Whitehouse bid. John Travolta plays Southern governor Jack Stanton, Emma Thompson, his wife, Susan. Travolta dons the Bill Clinton-esque accent and that bullshit twinkle in his eye fairly well, but the supporting cast really makes this film come to life. Emma Thompson is superb--not just in concealing her English accent, but in embodying the aura of Susan Stanton (Hillary Clinton): cold enough to survive the nastiness of politics and the onslaught of scandals, smart enough to channel her ideas through her husband (who's better at connecting with the voters on an emotional level than on an intellectual one). In Short, Primary Colors offers a richly conceived glimpse at (and under) our political landscape. Sure, things have changed since 1992 particularly because of technology, but I think Primary Colors taps into a somewhat universal truth about the necessary cynicism one must have when approaching the subject of politics and politicians. Kathy Bates gives the most poignant--and frequently hilarious--performance as one of the Stantons' campaign advisers, who realizes--for the second time in her career--that ideals are lost in the political spectrum where appearances and behind-the- scenes deals carry more weight. While I was left feeling that this film was a bit of a love note to the Clintons (in spite of its frequently unflattering portrayals of them), I think it also captured the seeming hopelessness of politicians. People are constantly looking for someone to put their hope in, and if you can get that, you can do anything. ★★½