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thompson-14
Reviews
Capo Nord (2003)
Fine performances; rambling, gloomy script
Even the director of this film seemed rather uncertain and apologetic about it when he popped up after an open-air screening on Rome's Tiber Island, saying parts of it worked better than others, which is true enough.
Four young neapolitans travel to Hamburg to carry out a burglary which nets them nothing, but they have tickets to Oslo and so press on. Most of the film recounts their grim experience living underground in that city.
Shot in just four weeks in three countries, with a very mixed cast, it has some really fine performances and a gritty take on stateless lives. But the tone is all over the place, with bits of finely observed comedy from its hopeless protagonists veering through surreal nastiness to rather hackneyed violence before settling for depression as a principal note. The characters are too many and not well enough differentiated, the logic of the story is often weak (the boys speak neapolitan dialect, which is rather a challenge) and, like most films, it is at least half-an-hour too long.
I'm not sure why so many independent (ie: state-financed) Italian films go for suicidal gloom as a marker for seriousness. With a more focused script, and a lighter touch, this could have been the film its actors deserve.
Pinocchio (2002)
Absent-minded and flat
Despite his enthusiasm for this project, and the time and money
he spent on it, this seems an odd choice for Benigni. Collodi's
harsh, very Victorian' tale is, after all, about the suppression of that
same anarchic naughtiness which has always been Benigni's
stock in trade. That the result is rather formless and flat may be
more down to Collodi than Benigni; the story is very much just one
thing after another, as Pinocchio is systematically punished by the
world (read by God'?) for his innocence and disobedience. The
performances are monochrome: Benigni yells everything, poor
Nicoletta Braschi is given nothing to do and there is a curious
veering away from many scenes. Why do we not see the puppet
being carved, for example? The blue fairy comes and goes in the
most arbitrary fashion the story is unable to make up its mind at
times whether characters are alive or dead and the question of
Pinnochio's transformation into a real boy is almost forgotten; the
scene in the whale does not need in any way to take place in a
whale ... it is as if the screenwriters were not really paying
attention. Children may like it there is an exhilarating opening
scene, and some wonderful mice and may have enough sense
to ignore its crabbed moralism. After all, Disney ended the last
century with a tale about the divine right of kings, and nobody
thought anything of it
3000 Miles to Graceland (2001)
Incoherent and senseless
This movie is the work of people with serious short-term memory problems: they cannot remember from one scene to the next what kind of film they are trying to make. The result is wildly incoherent, redeemed only by some good performances and one unintentionally hilarious one from Costner as the world's baddest Bad Guy. His clothes are particularly Bad, as is his hair. He is the kind of man who can't get gas without blowing up the gas station, killing the owner and taking off with his teenage daughter (whom the screenwriters then forget all about - or perhaps my attention wandered). And the Baddest thing of all is his acting. The movie begins with the most ill-conceived robbery in the history of crime (OK, guys, listen up: so we steal the money and then shoot our way out, killing everybody in the place - that ought to work). There are lots of explosions and a good deal of gun porn. There is no plausibility at all (Costner is arrested driving a stolen car full of guns with a kidnaped woman in the trunk and he gets out on bail - maybe they do things that way in Utah?) There are some curious bits of dialogue clearly made up on set as they tried to plug the holes in the plot. Kurt Russell is as solid as ever, and Courtney Cox looks cute, though Monica keeps breaking through. Her part is so loosely written you can hardly blame her (except for taking the job). What all these people think they're doing spending good money on this nonsense is anybody's guess. What does it have to do with Elvis? Not much, in the end - don't worry about it. Only for audiences with severe attention deficit syndrome.
Mystery Men (1999)
Monster turkey
When I rented the video, I was puzzled: it hadn't been rewound, but wasn't at the end either, but about 20 minutes in. Now I understand: that was about where I ran out of patience, too. I was looking forward to seeing Garofolo but the movie was clearly unsalvageable. Anther puzzle: how can actors of this quality read a script that stinks as badly as this one and still think it might be worth doing? Who put up the millions? Why couldn't they have spent the money on something better? Why couldn't they have given it to me? To my cat? No stars.
Eden (2001)
Both portentous and perfunctory
Both portentous and perfunctory, 'Eden' ought to have important things to say about the origins of Israel, the failure of idealism and so forth, but someone has not done the necessary work. The opening sequence sets the tone: a long, long sequence of people building walls with cement bricks, very slowly, arduously and apparently without much skill. Though beautifully acted (especially by Samantha Morton) and photographed, the whole movie is a bit like that. There are huge absences where a script should be. Very long, slow scenes can release a lot of power - Tarkovsky is the shining example, but something actually happens in his endless shots. There are scenes in this film in which the director seems simply to have neglected to tell the actors what to do: a motorcycle drives into shot, turns round and drives out again; the heroine visits the building site and, after some considerable time, has a little interaction with a labourer, and they do a bit of business with some stones which makes no sense and merely looks made up on the spot. They seem to be waiting for the director to call `cut'. And so are we. The film is so slow and so hollow - despite its large 'themes' - that the audience is reduced to asking what ought to be trivial questions: why is the heroine so obviously English when the rest of her family are American? Why do the father and son hold all their conversations with one looking over the other's shoulder? Why would a strong-minded woman, sitting in a parked car, keep saying `Let me out! Let me out!' instead of just opening the door? Why did not Arthur Miller, who wrote the original story, not notice that some of the dialogue was literally unspeakable, when he was the one who had to speak it? Why are pretentious movies always full of Mahler? Is that man going to read the whole of Gropius' diaries aloud? Will this never end?