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out of **** stars
Rushmore (****)
What's great about this movie is the affection
the director feels for his main characters. So often in
teenage movies, the main character is the subject of ridicule,
either by his peers, the audience, or the director himself.
Max often is defeated, in love or in school, but never in spirit.
Wes Anderson has created a virtual world, its artificiality heightened
by the stage curtain transitions from scene to scene, in which
a fifteen-year-old boy can take bold chances--falling in love
with a teacher, getting expelled from prep school, staging a production
of Apocalypse Now in a high school gym--and avoid the tragedies
of the typical teenage film, indeed, of life. That's not
to say the movie is devoid of pain, but it is a pain borne of
deeply-felt passion, Max's, Anderson's, and the audience's.
eXistenZ (***)
What's great about this movie is that while David Cronenburg doesn't abandon his fascination
with squishy body parts and viscous bodily fluids, here he puts
them in place to support a cerebral tale about millennial angst
and the limits of the imagination. Set in the context of
virtual reality, the movie blurs the distinction between the game
and life; asked if one has free will in the game, Allegra Gellar,
(how refreshing to see Jennifer Jason Leigh acting without her
annoying Katherine Hepburn snarl), answers "only enough to
make it interesting, the same as in life." Players
of the game are able to take risks, acting on sexual fantasies
or homicidal impulses, but only within the parameters of their
characters. The game, like life, is limited by the imaginations
of its players.
Matrix (***)
What's great about this movie is that in the midst
of flashy special effects (characters' movements, for example,
are not limited by laws of gravity or physics), is an attempt
to tell a fairly brainy story about perception and reality.
Like The Truman Show, the Matrix portrays
characters trapped a virtual world designed to keep its inhabitants
from questioning the true nature of reality. The main characters
of those movies, Truman and Neo, risk routine and life to break
free of their prescribed realities, even if the alternative, "true,"
reality is unknown or malevolent. As William Blake wrote,
"I must create a world or be enslaved by another man's."
Keanu Reeves, who would have made a great silent screen star,
gives his typically wooden performance. It's aided, however,
by an apparent clause in his contract that insisted everyone else
in the movie deliver lines in a more stilted fashion than he.
Star Wars Episode One: Phantom Menace
(** 1/2)
What's great about this movie is the sheer beauty
of the vision. So often in science fiction movies, the future
is envisioned as a place without combs, showers, or a decent tailor.
Characters deliver their lines through the strands of greasy hair
that hang in their unwashed face, as they scamper over piles of
abandoned cars and steaming garbage. Not so in Lucas' worlds,
where window boxes adorn mosque-like buildings, queens wear elaborate
gowns, and Jedi knights sport braided tails from their spiky haircuts.
Even the villains are attentive to color coordination and proper
grooming. This movie passed the "gasp" criteria:
my seven-year-old son gasped at each new screen (it's worth the
price of admission for that).