Lisa Tomasetti, La Dolce Vita
Rhys Ifans crashes into a wonderful life.
Lisa Tomasetti, La Dolce Vita
Rhys Ifans crashes into a wonderful life.
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Danny Deckchair
Opens Fri., Sept. 3, at Metro
Nobody is a better makeover candidate than Rhys Ifans. In Charlie Kaufman's sex fantasy Human Nature, he magically metamorphosed from hairy, leg-humping apeman to ascot-clad opera snob (proving that opera snobs are all repressed leg-humpers at heart). This time, he's a hairy, layabout Sydney bricklayer not likely getting laid much lately by his ambitious girlfriend (twinkle-dimpled Justine Clark). She yearns to dump him for dreams of big money and TV fame. He just wants to get away to the bush for a camping holiday. She makes him host a barbecue at their home instead.
Defiantly, he ties a bouquet of weather balloons to an aluminum deck chair at the party, cuts the ropes, and streaks for the stratosphere. His flight is brief. The point of the movie is his inadvertent relocation to a remote Aussie village improbably out of touch with broadcast media. Clarence is a prelapsarian place, yet corruptly led and in need of a sleepy-eyed saint to fall out of the sky and save it.
Danny and his deck chair crash-land in a tree in the yard of Clarence's meter maid, Glenda (Miranda Otto). Otto (best known as LOTR's Eowyn) played the apeman's ooh-la-la French lab assistant in Human Nature, but here she's walking sexual frustration in a constricting uniform. When Danny inquires discreetly whether she's free to take a scooter ride, the maid is made. Soon he's clean-shaven, no longer an urban loser but a rural politico rallying the little people (and the little woman) to challenge the big guys in a pallid approximation of Capra-corn populism. Danny's original girlfriend and her TV crew track him down in a toothless spoof of media madness.
Otto is charming, Clark is amusingly crass, and Ifans is always an actor worth watching, but the fable is like Toll House cookies cooked according to boring formula- except they used too much sugar and took it out of the oven too soon. It goes down easy only if you're desperate for a summer treat and not one to gag on lukewarm goo. (PG-13) TIM APPELO
La Dolce Vita
Opens Fri., Sept. 3, at Varsity
Frolic in the Trevi Fountain with a wet movie star! Dodge roadsters on the wicked Via Veneto! Witness Jesus streaking over the Roman skyline like Superman! Stampede with the paparrazi! Visit St. Peter's and hookers, clowns, and poets, nightclubs stocked with wellborn bimbos! Pray for Anita Ekberg to fall out of her dress so those breasts can knock you senseless! Thrill as director Federico Fellini falls out of his abstemious, early neorealist mode and into the plush surrealistic pillow of his mature style at the turn of the 1960s. The climactic orgy is famous, but it can't hold a Roman candle to the frantically encyclopedic score by Nino Rota. If you miss this sparkling new print of the best movie Fellini ever made, you'll never know what the sweet life really is. TIM APPELO
Tae Guk Gi
Opens Fri., Sept. 3, at Meridian
Having already broken box-office records in its native South Korea, Tae Guk Gi could stand for decades as that country's Gone With the Wind, though its graphic violence and occasional sentimentality bring Saving Private Ryan to mind instead. Even the premise feels similar: In 1950, the South Korean army drafts two brothers for the war against the communist North (aka the Korean War). The stronger-willed brother, Jin-tae (Jang Dong-gun), makes it his personal mission to deliver his brainy, peaceable sibling, Jin-seok (Won Bin), from harm-whatever the cost. And the cost is high: Erstwhile shoe-shine boy Jin-tae becomes a feral, bloodthirsty monster, and Jin-seok regards his transformation with horror and disgust. Tae Guk Gi avoids the usual war-movie pitfall of humanizing one army while allowing the opposition to remain faceless. When one character crosses over to the communist side, we learn what we've suspected all along: North Korea's soldiers are young, confused, and scared totally shitless, just like their South Korean counterparts. Electrified by two amazing lead performances and framed by an aging veteran's visit to a relative's grave (like Ryan), this is a wrenchingly realistic portrait of a conflict many Americans know about only through M*A*S*H. NEAL SCHINDLER
Time of the Wolf
Runs Fri., Sept. 3 Thurs., Sept. 16, at Grand Illusion
I know, I know! You've had it up to here with apocalypse movies and Dogme films. Even if you wound up admiring Dogville, you still wanted to strangle Lars von Trier for pummeling your skull with three solid hours of his haughty contempt. And once you've seen one end of the world, you feel like you've seen 'em all.
No, you haven't. Austrian Michael Haneke, whose The Piano Teacher gave von Trier a run for his pretentious S&M money, has suffused his own Dogme-style apocalypse drama with a startlingly humane tenderness—despite such brutal-realist touches as a horse stabbed to death, apparently for real, on camera. The apocalypse—something vague involving a poisoned environment and the Social Darwinist reversion to chaos—happens off camera, just before we meet the bourgeois family of Anne (Isabelle Huppert) fleeing town for their woodsy cabin. Once inside, they're confronted by another refugee family who got there first. Anne's man (Daniel Duval) offers to share, but the interloper dad guns him down.
