NYLON - August 2008 - (Page 135) FILM STRIPS EDITED BY LUKE CRISELL hamlet 2 Alas, poor Dana Marschz, failed actorturned-high school drama teacher, and master transposer of blockbuster films to the cafeteria stage. Faced with losing his drama department to budget cuts, Marschz, played by British funnyman Steve Coogan, inspires his thuggish students and pens a musical followup to the archetypal tragedy. Marschz describes his pathetic life as “a parody of a tragedy” and, similarly, Hamlet 2 plays like a mashup of Waiting for Guffman meets Dangerous Minds meets School of Rock. The talented Coogan aims for a standing ovation, but ultimately the film suffers from erratic jokes and gags that sometimes fall flat, redeemed somewhat in the final act with the enthralling musical number, “Rock Me, Sexy Jesus.” The ubiquitous and brilliant Catherine Keener shines as Marschz’s vitriolic wife, and Elizabeth Shue, oddly enough, is endearing as Elizabeth Shue, while newcomer Joseph Julian Soria earns notice as thug-turned-hauntedemo-prince in the titular musical. Director Andrew Fleming (Nancy Drew) and cowriter Pam Brady (South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut) almost succeed here, but inconsistent humor and a sneaky Hollywood ending bring the curtain down on this high-budget indie film. REBECCA RODRIGUEZ MAN ON WIRE It’s so improbable, on so many levels, it’s almost as if it never happened. And yet, in 1974 Frenchman Philippe Petit not only smuggled himself, a few close friends, coils of heavy steel cable and a bow and arrow into the World Trade Center, he then managed to rig a wire (anchoring it and adjusting the tension to take into account the swaying of the buildings) between the towers and, when dawn broke, walked between them. Then he walked back. Then he did a kind of dance. At one point he even lay down. All in all he was on the wire, 1,350 feet above the streets of Manhattan, for over an hour. And he did it all wearing bellbottoms. Petit—who recently published a book called The Art of the Pickpocket in France, can kill a man with a copy of People magazine, and has walked on wires across the Sydney Harbor Bridge and between the towers of Notre Dame—had been planning the walk since he first saw renderings of the towers in a French newspaper in the late ’60s, and James Marsh’s new documentary, Man on Wire, traces his preparations with a beguiling mix of archival and re-staged moments. The line between these is mostly invisible and it lends the film a tension akin to a heist movie, with everything woven together with Petit’s breathless narrative and interviews with the other key protagonists. It’s easy to see how these accomplices to one of the most poetic crimes in a generation were seduced into participation: Petit is an enchanting raconteur and herecalls events so enthusiastically, and so vigorously, that there’s barely time to wonder at the sheer outlandishness of the whole thing, so swept up are we in the story. This is an astonishing triumph of a film—easily the best I’ve seen all year—that not only celebrates a dizzyingly beautiful feat of human athleticism but also explores its aftermath; the human emotions around which are unexpectedly, suddenly, overwhelming. LUKE CRISELL Elegy The tragicomic fictions of Philip Roth make for deceptively difficult film adaptations. Literature is all about voice, and the distraught, obsessive, and pathetic confessional from David Kepesh that comprises Elegy’s source material—the more harshly titled The Dying Animal—could easily become self-indulgent in unsure hands. Thankfully Spanish director Isabel Coixet (The Secret Life of Words) hits just the right, subtle tones for Roth’s story of a sexually “liberated” but emotionally stunted elder professor who develops an unhealthy fixation on one of his many classroom conquests. At first, Elegy takes some getting used to. Kepesh is played by Sir Ben Kingsley, whose impeccable British manner seems completely unsuited for Roth’s Jewish horndog protagonist. And yet together, Kingsley and Penélope Cruz (who plays Kepesh’s object of desire, Cuban college student Consuela) are thrillingly sensual and touchingly vulnerable. Kingsley brings out the sad isolation behind Kepesh’s intentionally superficial relationships with not only Consuela, but also with his long-time lover (Patricia Clarkson) and quasi-estranged son (Peter Sarsgaard). Dennis Hopper’s poet-friend points out the devastatingly obvious: the beautiful women with whom Kepesh staves off romantic responsibility are invisible to him as human beings. Occasionally Coixet and screenwriter Nicholas Meyer verge on humorless upper class preciousness—and their resolved ending fails Roth’s ambiguous one—but more often they find a hauntingly dark and somber atmosphere with which to tell Elegy’s stark story of mortality and sex and how the two are cruelly inseparable. MICHAEL JOSHUA ROWIN FROZEN RIVER Winner of the Grand Jury Prize for Drama at Sundance, Frozen River tells the story of Ray (Melissa Leo), a poverty-stricken mother, who teams up with Lila (Misty Upham), a young Native American woman, to smuggle illegal immigrants across an icy river running through the Mohawk Reservation, a lawless patch of land on the U.S./Canadian border. When Ray’s husband takes off with the money they saved for a new trailer, she knows to look for him at the Bingo parlor. He’s not there, but his car is, and Lila’s at the wheel. Ray assumes she’s sleeping with her husband, and a slow, snowy chase ensues, ending at a rundown trailer in the woods. The scene that follows is filled with anger and frustration, and eventually Ray pulls a gun on her. It’s a familiar action on screens today, but first-time filmmaker Courtney Hunt handles it with such a refreshing lack of choreography that it illuminates, in an instant, just how messy their lives have become. Ray and Lila’s bond is born from need and, though their friendship grows and deepens throughout the film, that need is always there. The bleak setting and storyline are unique and make for bracing cinema, but the real force of Frozen River (aside from Leo’s brave performance as Ray) lies in the careful way it reveals the modest struggles of our lives. MIKE HARVKEY IN SEARCH OF A MIDNIGHT KISS In Search of a Midnight Kiss opens with the statistic that between the dates of December 25th and January 1st each year the number of people on websites like Craigslist, MySpace, and Match.com grows by 300%. The film’s lead character, Wilson (played by Scoot McNairy) finds himself a part of this statistic when, lonely on New Years Eve, his roommate convinces him to post an ad on Craigslist looking for a date. The listing, “Misanthrope seeks Misanthrope” elicits a phone call from Vivian (Sara Simmonds) who does indeed seem to have a bit of a distaste for the human race (“I’m not wasting my New Year’s Eve with someone I don’t like, so within five minutes I know if I’ll like you or not,” she tells him over the phone). The story is framed over the course of this date—the phone call, the meet-up, the adventures that ensue, and the inevitable good-bye. The fresh camera work in the film (which is shot in Los Angeles in black and white) lends a sort of naïve quality throughout, and the shots of McNairy and Simmonds, one an aspiring writer, the other an aspiring actress, traipsing around the city, from abandoned theaters to rooftops, paint a breathtaking portrait of L.A. Writer/director Alex Holdridge’s unapologetically current dialogue results in a story that is both believable and in a strange way, quite touching—a pleasant surprise for a film with a title that sounds like a spin-off of The Notebook. MALLORY RICE http://Match.com
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.