This week’s film roundup from Past the Popcorn:
For what seems like the tenth straight week, a major summer release fails to deliver on audience expectations. This week, Harry Potter — in the hands of yet another director and a greenhorn screenwriter — manages to please the hardcore fans while leaving critics unimpressed. Says Jenn Wright, who also happens to be a Potter fan, “should [Phoenix] be the first movie in the series that I watched, I would probably be scratching my head as to what the hype was all about. … In many ways, the film almost plays more like an exercise in contract stipulations — who gets how much screen time and so forth — than a piece of narrative art.” The biggest problem, she notes, is that the central characters all seem to be taken for granted. Perhaps screenwriter Steve Kloves needed a break from the series; but his knowledge of these cinematic characters is sorely missed. Still, Jenn finds reasons to praise director David Yates, and calls Phoenix “a fine film, if not the best of the five so far.”
Another interesting wide release this week is Werner Herzog’s Rescue Dawn, a dramatization of the story of Dieter Dengler, a pilot shot down over Laos during the Viet Nam War who escaped from a POW camp. Herzog himself, a German expatriate, is very pro-America, and it’s refreshing to see a film about America’s Viet Nam experience that’s not decontructionist. Still, Greg Wright finds the film a bit of a slog — and “the smart money,” he suggests, “is that you won’t much care for Rescue Dawn. But if you like cinema that demands a great deal of you, that doesn’t let you off the hook with ten-second character development, a half-hour hook, and three dazzling chase sequences, then this film may just be for you.”
Another good challenge, says Greg, can also be found in the very arty documentary Manufactured Landscapes. It follows environmental art photographer Edward Burtynsky while he words his way through China’s factories and recycling yards. Sound fascinating? Probably not. “The opening sequence alone will tell you if you have much of an appetite for the film,” says Greg. “It’s an eight-minute tracking shot down the length of a massive Chinese manufacturing plant, nearly a third of a mile of one continuous shop space, all in one shot, all at the same speed… It’s daring and fascinating; it’s also, possibly, depending on the viewer, boring as heck.” But if you get past that sequence, Greg suggests you might find your view of the world changed.
Less successful, but still a stunning portrayal of a woman’s crisis of self confidence, is Zoe Cassavetes’ Broken English. The film is a mixed bag, says Greg Wright, but one that “manages to generate some real narrative tension from what might seem to be just another conventional Drew Barrymore-esque love story.” He finds Cassavetes’ theatrical debut “savvy and serious” as a director, and her work with Parker Posey here is a marvel.”
Mike Smith is wholly unimpressed with Introducing the Dwights, however, which he finds “a dreary, plodding story of dysfunction and letting go. The story arc follows a predictable trajectory: dysfunction and conflict, followed immediately — without transition — by everybody making nice.” In the end, he says, the film is just “not worth watching.”
