The Dreamlife of Angels (1999; directed by Erick Zonca)
Isa (Elodie Bouchez) and Marie (Natacha Régnier) are two young women in Lille who meet while working in a factory and end up living together in an apartment which belongs to an older woman who is in a coma. The two friends then drift apart because of Marie's relationship with an arrogant creep. In other words, not much happens, but the actresses are wonderful (they shared the Best Actress award at Cannes), the friendship moves and changes like a real friendship, and in the end the whole thing has a much more powerful impact than you think it's going to.
Election (1999; directed by Alexander Payne)
Alexander Payne directed the wonderful Citizen Ruth, so I had high hopes for this, but I found it rather disappointing. It's certainly not bad, so maybe I was done in by my high expectations.
Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon) is convinced she is destined to be student body president of her high school, which is obviously just one step in her plan to achieve Global Domination Through Perkiness. One of her teachers (played by Matthew Broderick) is steadily screwing up his own life, and he finds the apparent inevitability of Tracy's victory galling. So, first through fair means and later by crooked ones, he tries to stop her.
It was pointed out in the Village Voice that the movie seems to be a satire, but without any clear idea what it's a satire of. It's weird to see a director go so quickly from a movie which was willing to offend everybody to one which couldn't offend anybody.
Also, as was true even with Citizen Ruth, Payne and screenwriter Jim Taylor run up against a common problem with situation comedies, which is that at least some of the time you have to do Situation, which cuts into the time you have left to do Comedy. The greats solve this by finding ways to be funny while setting up the situations, but Payne and Taylor haven't totally mastered this yet.
The best thing about the movie is definitely Reese Witherspoon, who plays Tracy right at the edge of parody but never goes over the line. One review said that in her combination of ambition and homemaking (she bakes cupcakes for the entire student body the night before the election) she's like a combination of Richard and Pat Nixon, but really she's more like Clinton in her eerie sense of entitlement, as if she was born to be student body president and anybody who stands in her way is just wasting their time fighting God's Will.
Jean Shepherd used to say that even in elementary school you can pick out the one or two students who will go on to success as politicians or network anchormen, and the rest learn early on that they might as well give up, that they're going to spend the rest of their lives owning used cars. He would have understood Tracy.
One thing which eventually becomes tedious in the film is that every time a character gives in to his or her impulses, they end up paying for it, usually right away. It's true that in farce, the next person to come in through the door should be the last person your character wants to see, but when this becomes mechanical it ceases to be funny.
Also, the film suffers from Weak Casting in the Minor Roles (my current obsession, see my essay "Why In & Out is better than The Opposite of Sex"). Citizen Ruth had a wonderful supporting cast (including Kenneth Mars, Swoozie Kurtz, Kelly Preston, Burt Reynolds, Tippi Hedren and the divine Mary Kay Place, all delivering big laughs), so I don't know what went wrong here.
Well, the good news is that the picture is apparently a success, because I'll be interested to see what Payne does next. Maybe success will encourage him to get wilder again. He's definitely still one to watch.
With Reese Witherspoon: Pleasantville
South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut (1999; directed by Trey Parker)
First, an explanation.
I don't have cable TV, and I have never seen even a single episode of South Park. I went to this movie strictly because of what I'd read about it, and I'm certainly glad I did. Not only is it the funniest movie I've seen this year, it's also funnier than any movie I saw last year except for Bulworth. Plus, based on the reaction of the people in the theater where I saw it, there were quite a few gags I didn't get because I don't watch the show.
I'm sure you've read how obscene it is (and it certainly is), and how tasteless (also true), but what isn't always mentioned is how pointed and deliberate all that obscenity and tastelessness and flatulence is. Trey Parker and Matt Stone (the creators of South Park) are not childishly saying dirty words and telling potty jokes just to shock people, they're doing it to mock a whole lot of things which need mocking.
Four little boys in South Park, Colorado go see an R-rated Canadian movie (called "Asses of Fire") and learn some new vocabulary words. When they start to use those words, their parents and teachers are not happy, and eventually war is declared on our obscene neighbour to the north, Canada. As things go along, there are many great jokes, many hilarious songs (mostly parodying the types of songs you find in Disney movies), one of the little boys gets a chip installed which gives him an electric shock if he utters a swear word, Bill Gates is shot because Windows 98 is so slow, and Satan nearly takes over the world but is defeated with a barrage of profanity.
Oh, and, as if that wasn't enough, there's also a giant talking clitoris.
Summer of Sam (1999; directed by Spike Lee)
I recently sat through all 159 minutes of "Eyes Wide Shut," so a few days later it was really great to see a New York movie which actually looks and feels like New York City. The story is from an era which I remember very well, the summer of 1977, and Spike Lee has captured the events and feeling of that time perfectly, specifically the Son of Sam murders, the blackout, and the beginnings of New Wave music at CBGBs. The use of music throughout the movie is particularly good, which was also a relief after Eyes Wide Shut.
The film is perhaps a bit too long, which gives the feeling that it's going to be more of a Major Statement than it is, but the cast is good and the story is interesting and well-told. John Leguizamo is particularly strong, playing the most fully-developed character in the movie, a guy named Vinnie who can't figure out if his life is getting screwed up because he's following the various codes of his insular Italian neighborhood too closely, or because he can't follow them closely enough.
(By the way, every detail about CBGB's is wrong for 1977, except for the awning, but the reasons Lee made the adjustments are very obvious, and they make for a much better story.)
The Sixth Sense (1999; directed by M. Night Shyamalan)
I usually don't review the most popular movies in the country, but the most popular movies aren't usually this good. It's a suspense movie, not a horror movie, and the suspense is never gratuitous. Bruce Willis is the "star" of the movie, but (good as he is) nobody is going to come out of the theater raving about him. They're going to be raving about Haley Joel Osment, who may actually get an Academy Award nomination before he starts junior high school. And, if he gets it, it will be deserved, since he gives the best performance I've seen in an American movie this year.
Anybody who's seen the trailer knows that young Cole (Osment) sees dead people, and the movie seems to take its time about revealing this, but there's a reason. The movie isn't about the dead people Cole sees, it isn't the sort of movie where ghosts will pop out and surprise you. It's about a little boy trying, with enormous seriousness, to deal with a problem which he thinks nobody around him is going to believe or understand. I won't say any more, except that it reminded me very much of the best Stephen King.
The movie ends with a "big surprise" which may or may not surprise you (I figured it out in advance by carefully reading the reviews), but no movie this good depends on a twist to make it work. Both L.A. Confidential and eXistenZ have big surprises near the end, and each is still just as enjoyable the second time around (and the third and the fourth).
With Bruce Willis: 12 Monkeys
The Source (1999; directed by Chuck Workman)
This documentary is very entertaining, rather disorganized, and so totally convinced of the importance of the Beat writers to the history of the second half of the twentieth century that it doesn't actually bother to lay out a convincing argument in case you come to it with another opinion. In this, it is very much like the Beats themselves. For better or worse, I do think that Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and (especially) William Burroughs were pretty important and entertaining guys, so I enjoyed this movie, though (as was pointed out in the Village Voice) the movie leaves out a lot of other artists of equal or greater importance, so that the light can shine on its heroes with no distractions.
The movie is roughly divided into thirds, one for each of the original three Beat writers, though many others associated with them and their "movement" are seen at various points. Michael McClure and Lawrence Ferlinghetti are especially great. Much of the footage of Burroughs is taken from the excellent documentary "Burroughs" (directed by Howard Brookner), which I also recommend. One thing which this movie shows is how the original Beats, though they considered themselves apolitical, helped to inspire the Sixties, and were then swept up in it themselves as well. There is one great shot of Burroughs and Ginsberg at an anti-war rally, like elder statesmen of the counter-culture, except of course Burroughs is still dressed impeccably in his three-piece suit, his only concession to the occasion a small flower in his lapel.
Johnny Depp, Dennis Hopper and John Turturro show up to read Kerouac, Burroughs and Ginsberg (respectively, and respectfully), but obviously only Depp understands the difference between reading and acting. Turturro is mannered and awkward reading parts of "Howl" (they should have got Patti Smith, or just shown footage of Ginsberg himself) and Dennis Hopper does okay with some Burroughs, but Burroughs himself was one of the great performers of his time, and Hopper doesn't even come close to his wonderful, arid, sardonic rasp. Depp, however, obviously knows that novels and poems, unlike plays and screenplays, are designed to deliver their effects without any additional help, so he simply reads Kerouac's words, as plainly as he can, and of course that's all that's necessary. I wish he'd done more.
Definitely worth seeing, and a useful piece of history, all the more so since Burroughs, Ginsberg and Timothy Leary have all died since the movie was shot.