Home Arts & Entertainment Some good movies roll into town

Some good movies roll into town

Written by Bruce Bellingham

Tuesday, 28 February 2006

Cristina Comencini seems to have no illusions about the commercial success in America of her new film Don't Tell, based on her novel, La Bestia nel Cuoure (The Beast in the Heart), which describes a young woman's journey to seek the truth about her childhood, which haunts her in the form of scary, mysterious dreams which coincide with her pregnancy. "I understand that American audiences do not really like to see movies with subtitles," Comencini said at a recent visit to San Francisco. The film has been nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Film. She's stunned by that. It certainly changes the status of the film. The subject of siblings coming to terms with incest and molestation is also pretty dark. But the mainstream success of recent films, such as Monster, Brokeback Mountain and Transamerica, indicates a change is apparently underway in the appetites and comfort zones of today's moviegoer.##M:[more]## "There's a big change underway in Italy," says Comencini. "Movies used to be very political but the fall of communism has a lot to do with the change. Italians come from the left, politically, but now we have to look at things beyond the black and white. You look at a terrible story in the newspaper and you say, "‘What a monster,' but perhaps there's room to look for the dark inside of a human being." This might explain the redemptive theme of her film; there are no real bad guys or good guys. The characters are excruciatingly human, seeking love and tripping over forgiveness in their own clumsy way. * * * It's far fetched to imagine a Sam Spade or a Philip Marlowe mystery set in a high school in San Clemente, but director/writer Rian Johnson pulls it off in Brick, last year's winner of the Sundance Film Festival's Special Jury Prize for Originality and Vision. "Some movies don't get released but simply escape," said a fellow at the press screening of Brick. He meant certain film are so good, the word will get out. It's getting out about Brick, with a boffo performance by Joseph Gordon Levitt, who proved his salt as an actor in Mysterious Skin. The protagonist in Brick resigns himself to a few Philip Marlowe style beatings which rival those that Harrison Ford is famous for. At 63, Ford proves in Firewall that he's the elder statesman for physical abuse. The Raymond Chandler homage really pays off in Brick with Johnson's phenomenal ability to give the kids a private language – a quirky, rapid fire patois that's a little like a crazy man crazy 50s dialect. The young femmes fatales are wonderfully conniving and seductive; the sleek, cool, bad girl is a dead ringer, Dashiell Hammett fans, for Mary Astor's Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon. Practically no adults appear in Brick. There's a small role by Richard Roundtree as the harried vice principal. Nice touch. Roundtree played Shaft, the famous black gumshoe of the 1970s. But in the world of young people, adults often don't really exist. Edna St. Vincent Millay observed, "Every generation creates its own universe." * * * Doug Bruce has been given a great gift in the wake of what seems to be a great calamity. He gets to start all over again, to reinvent himself. At the age of 35, this successful and already retired stockbroker inexplicably lost his memory. Every recollection of his life has been wiped out. He awakens from what doctors call a "fugue state" on a New York subway train on its way to Coney Island, a neighborhood that Bruce does not recognize. With no identification on him, Bruce is understandably terrified. He checks into a hospital. The staffers and the police try to unravel the mystery of who he is. Sounds a little contrived, no? Get this: it's all true. When Bruce's friend back in the U.K., Rupert Murray, finds out about this, he goes to New York to record the journey of his friend in this new documentary, Unknown White Male. It's unclear why he lost his memory. Doctors theorize that the memory loss was caused by being mugged or maybe a tumor on the pituitary gland or the buried trauma of his mother's death. It's not clear. But we watch as he visits his old friends for the first time and gets to experience first love for a second time. You really have to see this movie. Murray made an appearance at the Lumiere Theatre and was barraged with questions. The story is too impossible to be good fiction. * * * An implausible story is behind the making of Tristram Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story, based on the 18th century English comic novel by Laurence Sterne. Its a book that most English Lit students were supposed to have read, but who really did? The film, which is very funny, is basically a running gag, a film within a film about making a film about a book that is generally acknowledged to be unfilmable. As for reading the book, it appears that no one on the set has really read it – save for one production assistant. British actors Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon hilariously mug their way through the tribulations of a small budget production that teeters on the brink of anarchy. Should there be a battle scene or not? "Only if the battle scene is funny." In order to like this movie, you really have to like movies. There is the bawdy, ribald flavor of the 18th century of England, which is only made more ridiculous in the effort to make it look authentic. There's a startling cameo by Gillian Anderson as the Widow Wadman, who, confused, finally asks, "What the f happened to my scene?" That's a good question. It seems to be answered by the sly Stephen Fry, who winks at the camera after we've all fallen for the joke: "Tristram Shandy"? Did someone say unfilmable? Northside Arts & Entertainment editor Bruce Bellingham is one of San Francisco's best loved scribes and the author of ”Bellingham by the Bay: Bits, Bites, Adventures in Radio and Real Life.”

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