tom-55

I know this writing/directing team from their previous digital series Low Life and High Life that deal with depression and bipolar disorder, so I expected sensitivity and realism in their depiction of the lead's schizophrenia. I expected them to mine humor in loads as well. There are a lot of truly funny moments, and not one of them cheap or undeserved. What is truly impressive in the story telling is how true it is to both living with mental illness and living with someone with mental illness, while still being bearable to watch. And to make it a love story story at the same time raises the degree of difficulty a lot. But Dolmans script draws real human beings that the actors deftly embody. Luke Eve's direction is masterful, delivering a pace and flow that just works. The editing and effects and amazing and just right. It is sweet, sad, thrilling, chilling, horrifying, and finally hopeful without stretching the truth. I didn't expect the ending, but the movie earned it. The makes you work and isn't mindless or escapist,, but it's totally worth it.

Pathetic attempt to use science to justify new age religion/philosophy. The two have nothing to do with each other and much of what is said about Quantum Physics in this mess is just plain wrong.

Examples? Quantum theory supports the ideas in eastern religions that reality is an illusion. How? Well, in the world of the subatomic, you can never definitely predict a particles location at a specific time. You can only give the odds of it being precisely at one spot at one time. Also, the act of observation seems to affect the event. Solid particles can pass through barriers. All of this, so far, is accurate. But then they assert that that means that if you believed sincerely enough that you could walk through a wall, you could indeed do it. This is complete poppycock. Instead, the theory asserts that at our level, it is possible for you to walk through a wall, but it is merely by chance and has nothing to do with belief. Also you'd have to keep walking into the wall for eternity to ever have even the remotest chance of passing through the wall, the odds are so astronomically against it.

This is but one example of how they misrepresent the science. But much more annoying is the narrative involving an unhappy photographer, played by Marlee Maitlan. About halfway through the picture it becomes so confused as to be incomprehensible. Something to do with negative thoughts leading to addiction and self-hate. There may be some truth to that, but Quantum physics has nothing to do with it.

Plus, string theory is the hot new thing in physics nowadays. Instead of wasting your time with this dreck, I suggest you rent The Elegant Universe, an amazing series done for NOVA on PBS that gives you a history of physics from Newton and gravity to Ed Witten and M Theory in only 3 hour-long episodes. Quantum mechanics is explained there quite well if you want to know it without the fog of metaphysical appropriation.

Austin filmmakers John Merriman, Courtney Davis, and David Layton have created a little gem in Buttons, a very funny, very smart swipe at the particularly annoying Hollywood feel-good, rebel-against-the-stuffy-institution film best exemplified by Patch Adams. It is a real shame that such a good little film has only been seen in a dozen or so film festival appearances, because it is so right on.

It gets maximum laughs by simply and honestly recreating the simplistic plot-devices of these groaners and the totally stilted and goofy dialog regularly plaguing them. On top of that is a Flowers For Algernon in reverse plot line in which a unhappy and disgruntled intellectual (Merriman as Hunter Reeves) is fed a drug that makes him simple and, like Forrest Gump, happy (Merriman as Reeves altered ego, Buttons).

Lowell Bartholomee delivers a brilliant performance as the Robin Williams-esque Dr. Lamb Williams, a clinical psychologist for a pharmacological testing lab that turns paid volunteers into lab rats. Merriman is equally brilliant as the hapless Reeves/Buttons, and Courtney Davis and T'Chaka Sikelianos are no less right on as Hunter's friends and fellow lab rats.

But the real star here is writing that knows when to go for the broad joke and when to settle for subtle irony. Combined with perfectly modulated performances, it creates a film that only gets better with repeated viewing as you discover a joke or clever observation that you might have overlooked before.

Here's hoping this film has a long life on DVD.

I came to this film with no more knowledge of it than that many critics I trust raved about it. I was sorely disappointed, and my only explanation for the praise it received was that we've been force fed so many banal and unimaginative films from the movie mill in Hollywood that any break from it will be treated like a morsel to the starving. Problem is, while GW is indeed different from the crowd, it isn't particularly original. In fact it reminds me of a vastly inferior Terry Malick film. It attempts to be a poetic, non- linear look at the lives of adolescents in a decaying small north Carolina town, and while beautiful (it is after all 35mm cinemascope), it falls flat, with gratuitous wackiness and non-sequitors. Sometimes these poor kids are forced to spout stuff that sounds like it came from Sartre or Camus. Other times they are allowed to talk like the kids they are. And the adults? Most are ludicrously over-the-top. I felt tortured by the pretentiousness of this thing at 42 minutes, but sat through the other 40 hoping for a payoff. There wasn't much of one. I had no emotional connection to anyone in here because I didn't recognize them as real. What's worse is I really could have. Some of the ideas and situations in here are rich in potential, though left unmined, unrealized. Terry Malick's version of this faux Malick film would have been much better.

If you like screwball comedies, stick with the classics. I really wanted to like this movie, being a fan of Bogdanovich and writer Buck Henry. However, this thing just doesn't ever get off the ground and I'm not sure I can explain why. One problem with it is O'Neal. Never really thought he was much of an actor, and this film just underscores that feeling. Compare Cary Grant in Bringing up Baby or My Favorite Wife to Ryan O'Neal here and you might see what I mean. While Grant is smooth and effortlessly charming, O'Neal seems to work very hard just to be acceptable in the role. Plus, what is funny repartee in the context of the 30s and 40s, isn't necessarily funny in context of the 70s--or now for that matter. Buck Henry just regurgitates gags from those old movies with no nod to the present and it just doesn't work. Streisand has presence, even if a tad annoying, and she has energy and verve to spare, and Madeline Kahn's movie debut here is worth watching. But that can't save the thing as a whole. When watching this with two well-watched siblings, I had to convince them not to turn it off after 10 minutes, and then again every 10 minutes until it finally ended. (Its 94 minutes drag and drag.) One finally left the room and started doing household chores. And believe me, I didn't argue to keep watching out of enthusiasm for the flick. I'm one of those never-walk-out types that is bound and determined to give a movie a chance.

Stick with Cary Grant, Irene Dunne and Kate Hepburn. You'll be much happier.

If Cicadas had been made before 1975, it would have snuck up on and charmed the film viewers of the time, becoming the sleeper of the year. Back then Hollywood might have even made this film. Jaws had not yet established the high-concept blockbuster formula, and Star Wars had not yet made Hollywood lustful for the mega-profit movie that has increasingly shut "small films" out of the theatrical market.

Cicadas has no "high concept", no stars, no instantly marketable hook. What is does have is deft and insightful writing, directing and editing by filmmaker Kat Candler, remarkable performances by the young cast (Lindsay Broockman, Brandon Howe, Paul Conrad, and Bryan Chafin particularly stand out), and a big, but unsentimental heart. It's a coming-of-age story focusing on young, intelligent, frustrated, misfit kids becoming adults, using the cicada's life cycle as a gentle metaphor for the youngsters' own transformation.

Candler has written subtle, honest, understated dialog that lets 16 year olds sound and act like 16 year olds and avoids stilted speeches and contrivances. They don't always know what to say or how to be with each other or why they feel the way they do. They are people, not types. They live their lives in fits and spurts, rather than follow a plot line like trains on a track.

I've purposely not focused on the plot, because it might sound agonizing familiar. Nerdy smart girl is left to care for her older and younger brother as parents travel frequently on business. Friendless, she meets the new boy in high school, a smoldering, mysterious boy who is there as a consequence of his trouble at another school. He is closed off and tough, fatherless, his mother lost in the bottle since the tragic loss of her first born son. The boy is also a remarkably sensitive poet. They are drawn to and repelled from each other throughout the twists of the tale, which weaves in the subplots of the nerdy, boy-scout, entomologist little brother and the iconoclastic, artistic older brother, both outcasts as well trying to find their place in the world.

It could have been cliche, but manages to be a rich and engrossing tale, full of little, individual rings of truth rather than trying to deliver one big one at the end. And in doing so, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Cicadas in not a perfect film, its limited budget occasionally hamstringing it for tiny moments, but it is a beautiful one, minor warts and all.

I am one of those weird people who'll sit through a bad movie just in case there might be moments or snippets worth watching. In fact, I don't remember ever quitting on a movie before. But I got an hour into this thing and had to turn it off. It was making me crazy with anger. In fact, it was one of the most infuriating things I've ever seen. Pretentious, self-indulgent, self-absorbed, and just plain unbelievable, this film inspired my brother to promise to beat the crap out of Vincent Gallo should they ever meet. The only thing I liked about it was the arty freeze frame of guy a second after being shot in the head (the camera then orbits him like in those GAP Khakis commercials). I can never trust critics again after this debacle.

Even with all the hype I had absorbed, I was not prepared for the brutality depicted in this film. Perhaps it is not possible to be prepared. Perhaps that is good. As I squirmed and cowered in my chair during the initial battle sequence, I was asking what now, where now before any of the characters did. I had become involved in the story emotionally without wanting or choosing to. I cared about these people and therefore when the plot threatened them, I felt threatened. When they relaxed. I relaxed. In that way, this film brought to me an understanding of war from the soldiers point of view that is otherwise impossible to get without being there. To me that is the measure of the film's merit. This is a great film, with subtlety and understatement sometimes lacking in Spielberg earlier films. I am heartened that a talent as technically adept as Spielberg is maturing into a true master of the art of film. Everyone who can stand it must see this movie.