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| by Marty & Martha Roth Film With our customary unflagging devotion to our readers we have sought out the worst movie in a summer of incomparably bad movies: The Watcher narrowly beat out Me, Myself & Irene. Although ostensibly an action flick, its dumb script, lack of tension, and wooden performances put it squarely in the genre of movies-in-which-you-couldn’t-care-less-what-happens-next. In a long-awaited casting reversal, Keanu Reeves plays a sexually deranged homicidal maniac and James Spader an ambiguous law-enforcement type (he works for every law force around) who has been traumatized by an encounter with the maniac. Watcher overuses incredibly expensive police responses to crime calls: as innumerable cars, SWAT vans and helicopters swarm onto the scene, our thoughts wandered to the city of Chicago’s budget rather than to the supposedly harrowing experience at hand. Christian Duguay’s Art of War is almost as bad. Good actor though he is, Wesley Snipes has a fatal lack of humor, and while his earlier action movies engaged us, in Art of War his presence is almost as grim and stony as Tom Cruise’s in Mission Impossible II. Art asks us to believe that the United Nations deploys a three-person secret force, about which a muddled secretary general, played absent-mindedly by Donald Sutherland, wants to know nothing, and for good reason, we think: the world’s peacekeeper with a clandestine army that carries out secret preemptive military strikes? If you can’t tell the UN from the CIA, well, the world’s really in trouble. The villain of the piece is a Republican reactionary, but the film’s real subject seems to be our current uncertainty about engaging China as a business partner. It revels in a frenzy of China-bashing, stopping just short of the time-honored act of pigtail-snipping. By contrast, Christopher McQuarrie’s Way of the Gun is a pretty good movie, a tight formula film that lives up to its pretensions. It casts Benicio del Toro and Ryan Philippe as career criminals who strut their cool and blast their guns as they wind their way along the track of some dark moral imperative, and ends with the birth of a baby. Philippe surpassed our expectations (not very high after Cruel Intentions), and Beni del Toro is everything he was born to be. Since our first sight of him in Usual Suspects we have been entranced by the possibilities of his craggy face and husky voice, and here he totally redeems that promise. A stock icon in new film noir, the old B actor (Lawrence Tierney in Reservoir Dogs) is here played by James Caan and is kind of a creaky embarrassment. You notice we’re not discussing the complicated plot; Gun is made of other films, some Reservoir Dogs, a little Pointe Blank, some Playback, a touch of Getaway remake, but mostly Peckinpah and the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone—because of its sun-drenched, ramshackle spaces, its professional derring-do, its hordes of villains, and, of course, its fatality. Once upon a time, in the old golden Hollywood, it was enough for a film to run through its formula well to win our acclamation. Gun is such a film and it wins ours. Even more to our liking is Cameron Crowe’s new film, Almost Famous, a love poem to the rock ’n’ roll music and drug scene of the 1970s. It covers no new ground, except in its continuous freshness of attack, its staging and framing of lucid moments in a young boy’s journey into love. The three principals, Patrick Fugit as an adolescent rock critic, Billy Crudup as the lead guitarist of a fictional band called Stillwater, and Kate Hudson as Penny Lane, a Band Aid (“Not a groupie” — groupies sleep with musicians), brought their own freshness and quiet to the roles. There are strong performances also by Jason Lee and Philip Seymour Hoffman, but best of all is Frances McDormand as the critic’s mother, staggering and breathless from her children’s supposed revolt against authority and aching with love for them. Among other delights is a magical moment on the tour bus when the band and their followers one by one begin to sing the unheard music of the score, Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer.” Perhaps Fugit is held in the camera’s eye for too long, photographed too seductively, showered with undue adulation, but that’s a minor quibble. We also saw a comedy, The Tao of Steve, by Jenniphr Goodman, and a documentary, The Ballad of Ramblin’ Jack, by Aiyana Elliott. Tao was a bit too low-keyed for us, too television casual as it follows the romantic fortunes of a fat babe-magnet (Donal Logue). The film desires to move him from a place of shame and self-abasement to a place of love and shame and self-abasement and consequently doesn’t have a very wide canvas to work with. Ramblin’ Jack is the story of an American folk-singing institution named Jack Elliott who inherited Woody Guthrie’s repertoire if not his mantle, kept it alive through a rock’n’rolly America, and passed the magic on to Bob Dylan. It is also the documentary of a subject who seems to have been filmed since the day he was born (this is going to become the rule — happy watching). This results in some splendid visuals, but all the home-movie footage just doesn’t add up to a film. The filmmaker, Jack’s daughter, keeps intruding, whining to her father that they never just sit down and talk as they are driving across America. What? On the other hand, many of the people she interviews have known her since babyhood, and the presence of an old friend or family member behind the camera gives the talking heads an intimacy they normally wouldn’t have. We were touched, because Elliott is a part of our youth and is, to boot, a landsman, born Elliott Adnopoz on Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn. Theatre Don Quixote de la Minny, the first production by a group called Teatro del Pueblo, attracted us because we thought the piece might capture some of the richness of Cervantes’ classic novel of obsession and delusion while poking fun at Minnesottisme. Unfortunately, between Dipankar Mukherjee’s steadfastly serious direction and Anne García-Romero stridently serious script, the Knight of the Woeful Countenance ended up in ethereal trappings that left out all humor or drama. Don Quixote’s head was turned by chivalry, and after reading medieval romances he set out to right the wrongs of an unjust world with rusty armor, a broken-down horse, and an unsuitable squire. Miguel de Cervantes spun a hilarious, touching novel from this premise, but García-Romero’s script fails to either adapt or update the original, beyond the most obvious moves like substituting motorcycles for horses and a flour mill for a windmill. We don’t like to pan a local show, especially by a young company, so let’s mention the things we admired: director Mukherjee and his designer, Tom Mays, transformed Mixed Blood into sun-drenched dream space simply, without elaborate sets or stage machinery. The music wrapped the actors effectively. And light Moorish references in the dancers’ costumes and movements gave an interesting touch to the Renaissance Spanish story. But mostly we were conscious of missed opportunities. The Insatiate Countess, a messy script by Jacobean playwright John Marston, with additions by William Barkstad and Lewis Machin, gets a spankingly stylish production from 15 Head artistic director Julia Fisher. The play is silly, with flashes of drollery and stretches of boredom, but the actors are so good, the kitsch-Japanese costumes so amusing, and the techno-rock score so well suited to the stylized movement that we had a good time. The sour misogyny of Marston’s script, about a tyrannical female ruler who can’t keep her skirts down, is tempered by cross-casting (although we thought the Countess, a strictly male fantasy of zipless sex and treachery, should have been played by a man). Set, costumes, lights, and sound are all brilliantly designed and integrated, and an interpolated puppet play made a delicious counterpoint to the action. This company continues to do the most interesting avant-garde work in the Twin Cities. Countess plays through mid-October at Red Eye.  Claudi Wilkens as Winnie in Beckett’s Happy Days. Happy Days, at the Jungle Theater, is the best production of a Samuel Beckett play
we’ve seen in many years and a personal triumph for Claudia Wilkens who plays
Winnie—the hero buried up to her waist in Act I and her neck in Act II, who keeps
despair at bay by running through a daily routine that grows more and more constricted
each time it cycles around: “Oh well, what does it matter, that is what I always say
. . .” Like Chekhov, Beckett made his plays out of well-worn words, speeches echoing
endlessly down the corridors of ordinary life. Their comedy and pathos come from our
understanding that the characters are running through routines and that the real action is
happening beneath the words. |
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