This weekend marks the 18 1/2 Philadelphia Film Festival. Stay tuned for three days of film coverage and mini-reviews, beginning with three films from Friday's selection.
John Woo's Red Cliff -- Messy Truncation of a Towering Epic
At literally half its original length, it's no wonder Red Cliff comes off like something of a mess. John Woo's epic Three Kingdoms-era Chinese war pic starts of choppy -- American territories receive a truncated version while Asia has the movie split in two, a la Che -- but hurdles on in all-out fury. Significant chunks of character and back story seem lost (or hastily explained via an English-speaking narrator), which may or may not have contributed to something far more lasting than what was screened in Philadelphia Friday afternoon.
As it stands (at least in this country), Red Cliff isn't so much about history, unity or heroism -- it's a giant war pageant, a visual ode to the art of war. Woo pulls out every last stop. treating the strategic meetings as dynamic battles of the mind, no less exciting than the extended sequences on the physical battle field.
Hong Kong acting treasure Tony Leung makes the greatest impression as the Southlands army viceroy, Zhou You. Though the actors largely play second fiddle to the pleasurably excessive action, they manage to steal the spotlight from Woo and cinematographers Yu Lue and Li Zhang every so often -- no small feat in such a self-consciously big production.
RATING: 3 out of 5 stars
Rebecca Miller's The Private Lives of Pippa Lee -- There Goes Another Dysfunctional Indie Dramedy
Especially when seen in conjunction with Antichrist, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee is impossible to take seriously. The vision of borderline mental illness set forth by writer/director Rebecca Miller (daughter of the great playwright, Arthur Miller) is pulled right out of the tidy little indie film playbook of quirky issues that wrap up in 100 minutes or less.
Pippa Lee (Robin Wright Penn) is sort of losing her mind as she moves into a Connecticut retirement community with her older husband Herb (Alan Arkin), a semi-retired publisher with a troubling bill of health. Apparently, the best way to explain Pippa's current predicament is to slog it out in her past, complete with dysfunctional, drug-addled mother (Maria Bello) and play-by-play voice over. Of course, we are to conveniently believe that when Pippa met Herb, she conveniently buried all her problems for what appears to be 25 years or so -- this includes her being an amateur S&M model, art scene-ster and pill popper and, oh, witness to a bloody suicide.
The resurfacing of these issues, and subsequent re-burying and resurfacing and on and on, reeks of Film Psych 101. As one character berates to another, "Can you come up with one thing that isn't a weird little cliche?" as if posing the question to Pippa Lee's entire lineage of ridiculous dysfunctional family dramedies.
Problem is, the line is delivered within a film that isn't slightly self-aware. Quite a few big names show up (Winona Ryder, Julianne Moore, Keanu Reeves) , and at least on one side of the camera, everyone seems to be doing their darndest to imbue these characters with some kind of real life believability. Ultimately, it's a lost cause.
RATING: 1.5 out of 5 stars
Lars von Trier's Antichrist -- Beautiful, Horrifying, Puzzling ... All That, and Just In The Prologue
You would probably be hard pressed to find anyone who came out of this year's Cannes Film Festival calling Antichrist the most enjoyable (or even best) film of the festival. But it is quite literally the film everyone was talking about then, and as Lars von Trier's controversial art house spook rolls out in subsequent festivals and limited release, the dialogue isn't exactly about to die down.
It'd be too easy (and sadistic) to rattle off a laundry list of the film's most disturbing images, and decidedly unfair. Call the film repulsive (it is, often), brilliant (it can be, sometimes) or some combination of the two, Antichrist is greater than just the sum of its independent shock value clips. Von Trier is dedicated to his vision -- of grief? misanthropy? schizophrenia? religion? devolution? -- however puzzling or sickening it may be.
A man (Willem Dafoe) and his wife (Charlotte Gainsbourg) hole up in the woods to ward off grief, and plot-wise, that's really all you should know going in. Because if you do have the cinematic fortitude to withstand Antichrist, better to go in blind and come out, well, fully experienced.
Awarding the two principal actors with Purple Hearts might make more sense than Oscar statuettes -- the sheer emotional and physical demands of their roles is unthinkable, almost unprecedented for names of that caliber. There's a million and one explanations to be extrapolated from Antichrist, and with that sort of cerebral flexibility, it's good to have two raw performances somewhat anchoring the film.
Of those explanations -- entire books could be written about what Antichrist, but you could just as easily argue the film as a art house, over-intellectualized version of Saw. Either way, there's something engrossing about the film, even if you may never want to see it more than once.
RATING: 3.5 out of 5 stars (seriously though, stars really lose meaning in this case)
Stay tuned for more Philadelphia Film Festival coverage!
Previous review: A Serious Man
 |
