Apr

12

Just saw "The Lookout." It's "Fargo" without the twang-y Dakotan accent or snowbound meat-grinder. Though it celebrates the Gen X cynicism and party-hearty drug-culture. In the end I enjoyed it, not least because its star is a solid new performer, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, formerly the runt in 3rd Rock from the Sun. Jeff Daniels plays a mysteriously visionary blind cohabite. Isn't it always that way with blind guys in flicks? and the film is a rare entry in good finishing up battered but best in the end.

Here, broody Gordon-Levitt, a face and force to be contended with, is coping with head injury difficulties that have rarely, if ever, been treated before. His confusion and malleability make him a prime target for petty thugs bent on a heist of mom-n-pop local banks. Not autistic, not schizoid, the character he plays has an affliction that few understand, though externally he looks unfazed and unchallenged. His overcoming of the considerable odds against him is compelling. He has a mesmerizing presence, at once innocent yet deeply at war and coiled. Gordon-Levitt is probably, what Adam Sandler wishes he could be in that strange and unfilling current "Reign Over Me."

Along with "Grindhouse" (not reviewed here), Lookout also features what we shall call amputation porn. What is a society saying that gets its rocks off over women with replacement extremities [some with strategic weapons of mass destruction screwed into the available apertures]? Is Heather Mills McCartney setting the stage for a slew of limb-lock oeuvres?

What to say about "Reign Over Me?" Someone must have paid previous reviewers to give this oddity, with its catatonic, rageaholic, stupidaholic Sandler a thumbs up. Don Cheadle, with all his graceful understatement and silken downplaying could not rescue this peculiar indulgence from its formicary plot elements.

Many scenes with Sandler evoke guffaws of disbelief, though the predicament of a man destroyed by the loss of his entire family to the murderers of 9/11 is a valid conceit that still awaits its Boswell. He lacks the necessary gravitas from too many "Waterboy" moments.

"Black Book," Paul Verhoeven's important "Schindler'' offering, is an important contribution to the Holocaust canon, despite a few quibbles with plotline liberties–offers style, noir nudity, authentic-feel sets, spine-tingling suspense, unlikely delicious costumes, authentic-sounding dialogue (Dutch, German, French, English, excellently subtitled, for a welcome change) historical settings, and a few not-likely scenes or predicaments.

Russian sci-fi "Day Watch" (to be released May) is a hipper-than-thou update of a decrepit modern-day Russia pitting Forces of Light vs. Forces of Dark. It is extremely popular in the former USSR, upsetting all box office records. It has a "Minority Report" and "Matrix Unloaded" trick slo-mo and transmogrifications with a bit of in-your-face Tarantino and splashy gore ghosting over all the CGI, amazing cinematographic effects, especially considering the Wal-Marty $4 mm bargain-basement budget. Even more surprising than the plush look of this intriguing futuristic thriller, the credit roll includes, uh, about 3.5 million cast and crew. How such Terry Gilliam-like fancy footwork and eye-popping effects were achieved on so modest a budget is a caution for eager Western filmmakers.

Then, decidedly not recommended is Fassbinder's incomprehensible, s-l-o-w homage to what must be narcoleptic Warholiana. This is interminable filmmaking and overall misogyny, "Katzelmacher" ("Cat-Maker,"1969) (MoMA). A companion left after only 15 minutes. In black and white, of historical if not entertainment value, "Katzel" left me wondering how Fassbinder managed to scrape up funding for further filmic enterprises after this one. It features an abuse of one of his key repertory females every couple of minutes. It is enchanting to see that they don't even react at the oafish louts who perpetrate the casual assaults. An optimist, this reviewer stuck it out, then bemoaned the theft of 88 minutes. Fassbinder did, however, make other and far better films, one of which, "Berlin Alexanderplatz," Parts I - 13 (1979/80) occupies almost the same number of hours as a post doc degree.

Bringing up the rear is the satirical long-suffering "The TV Set." It is a beady stare at the disemboweling compromises necessitated by participating in the TV drama field, whether one is David Chase (Sopranos) or just humiliated journeyman Mike Klein, the congested David Duchovny, playing a non-X-Files, all-too-human scriptwriter. "TV Set" shows in sly, warty close-up how one must sell not only one's soul to become finally green-lighted for the average TV pilot, but lower and higher portions of one's anatomy. Rapacious producers (Sigourney Weaver is particularly hilarious as an acid-reflux-afflicted power-punchy exec) vie with all the hierarchy of self-important crowd and crew in gnawing off chunks of the heart of a production, until it is a freakish smidgen of its original.

"The Hoax," presents Richard Gere as Clifford Irving, the scammer par excellence who persuaded a whole corporation that he had entrée into the forbidden walled city of obsessive Howard Hughes. The experience of this film was one of discomfort. It teetered between empathy for the sham-meister and disbelief that his shamelessness was bought into hook, line, and stinker, by gullible McGraw-Hill.

In the end, I do not think I would go again, though Hope Davis ("American Splendor," "The Secret Lives of Dentists," "Proof") and Alfred Molina ("Chocolate," "Spider-Man 2," "Frida," "Murder on the Orient Express") are heartbreakingly good (as we have come to expect). The normally sexy Gere is, well, smarmy, not fully inhabiting the skin of this slippery individual. One could ask how the hoax could have succeeded in the first place. As one could question why one would make a film about this embarrassing episode in America's ever-bankable nincompoop season.


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