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dan-303
Reviews
Musikk for bryllup og begravelser (2002)
Transcendent
I saw this film at Sundance over a year ago, and I'm quite puzzled why it hasn't been released yet...you typically expect Swedish films about death and grief to be tedious and depressing exercises in audience endurance ("Italian for Beginners" springs to mind), but this was a sensitive, eloquent and elegiac film with an effective dash of eroticism; Lena Endre plays a recent widow who, after her husband's accidental death, forges relationships with her husband's previous lovers. In the process she begins a romance with a Serbian musician who moves into her basement. The film runs into a couple of creaky metaphors that keep it from hitting all the right notes - Endre's character lives in the home her husband built, a creepy and clinical modernist prison made out of cement; the blood stain from the husband's fatal fall lingers on the floor of the basement, a mess which Endre and the mistresses reluctantly clean up together - but the film as a whole is refreshing, honest and deeply satisfying. I hope to see it in art house theaters soon.
Scream 3 (2000)
A success...In the spirit of the first two
I have to say that this was a rather satisfying conclusion to one of my favorite films. Scream 3 strengthened the relationships between its three original stars, squeezed in some catchy one-liners and kept me on the edge of my seat. While I can't exactly say it matched the quality of the first Scream, it's easy to forget how fresh the original must have seemed at the time. In that sense, comparisons made between Scream 3 and its predecessors are not fair. While the horror genre is more stale than it was in 1996, Scream 3 works with the material leftover from the first two films and comes out a winner.
8MM (1999)
tiresome
Nic Cage plays a private detective who learns first-hand that people who become sexually aroused while watching defenseless girls being brutally raped and stabbed to death are both slightly deranged and boring to talk to. As the film progresses, Cage's character is submerged into the dark side of human nature, while the audience is submerged into the world of MPAA-approved sodomy, rape, bondage and slasher-style sex scenes that forces them to grope for the exits. 8mm may have been more redeeming if there was something resembling a coherent script holding it together, but as such it's just another dumb action movie with an intriguing premise. While a lot of people might think of it as an intensely disturbing psychological examination of human sexual depravity, I thought of 8mm as little more than 2 hours of watching Nicolas Cage act worried. The porno scenes were nicely edited, though, and the glimpses of violence and gore that director Joel Schumacher slips in are subtle enough to make you cringe but not explicit enough to warrant an NC-17 rating, a small miracle that I'm still marvelling at. All in all, if you're looking for entertainment tonight, I suggest another often overlooked yet entertaining Nicolas Cage film, Raising Arizona, perhaps the only film where Cage's acting ability isn't called into question. Or better yet, rent The Big Lebowski, a movie that involves a similar plot (Girl gets kidnapped, guy investigates girl's disappearance, wacky antics ensue) but doesn't attempt to aggressively confront the viewer's stomach for raunchy sex scenes.
Goodbye Lover (1998)
A sexy, noirish thriller that keeps you guessing
The opening scene of Goodbye Lover is perhaps the most subtle part of the whole film: Patricia Arquette as Sandra, an LA realtor, is shown driving down a busy LA freeway while listening intently to a self-motivational tape. With this as evidence, we just _know_ this chick's nuts. And as the movie goes on, our suspicions are proved correct: we watch as Sandra schemes to kill her husband, Jake (Dermot Mulroney), along with her lover, who also happens to be Jake's brother, Ben (Don Johnson, in a particularly solid performance). But after Sandra's plan "succeeds", we learn that things aren't nearly as simple as they seem.
Rather, as we meet more and more characters, we find that each one is secretly screwing the other (In both senses of the word). A "good" girl played by Mary-Louise Parker and a cynical LA cop played by Ellen DeGeneres become embroiled in Sandra's web of deceit, and as each person succumbs to his/her avarice, the script gets funnier and funnier. In the end, it's a close tie between Arquette and Ellen for the most memorable moments in the film, but both characters have certain qualities that make them enjoyable to watch. Arquette's Sandra is a seductive and especially shrewd femme fatale who hums choruses from the Sound of Music while prancing about other people's homes (Arquette is the perfect Real Estate Agent From Hell). Meanwhile, DeGeneres' Rita Pompano is hilariously aloof to the lives of the people around her, casually dropping off-hand (And almost always crude and sarcastic) comments that demonstrate just how wise she is to Sandra's lusty motivations.
Sorry to say, I can't divulge too much of the film without spoiling it, but Goodbye Lover is something like a cross between The Last Seduction and Wild Things. However, unlike the ridiculous series of plot twists that just about ruined Wild Things, Goodbye Lover manages to avoid being too obvious in order to fulfill one's desire for a satisfying conclusion. Overall, I'd have to rate this sexy, noirish thriller with a well-deserved "A".