1408

Grade: B-

The Shining meets Groundhog Day in this disappointing adaptation of a Stephen King short story. John Cusack plays Mike, a horror writer who - like Jack Nicholson's character in The Shining - goes crazier than a shit house rat in a hotel, growing increasingly rattled and horrified as the clock radio sounds off a distorted version of The Carpenters' "We've Only Just Begun" (calling to mind Bill Murray's grudge match with "I've Got You Babe" in Groundhog Day). The first half hour of 1408 is really dull, and the last half hour runs a confusing and idiotic course. That said, that middle section has some genuinely creepy moments, some fun cheap scares and clever set designs that capture Mike's descent into madness as the hotel room's resident ghosts confront him with images of his dead daughter and suicidal specters beckon him to join them on their trips out the window.

There Ain't No Cure

For the Honeymoon Blues

On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan (Nan A. Talese, $22)

England, 1962.

Florence and Edward, both virgins, go to Chesil Beach for their honeymoon.

Florence, a violinist, loves Edward but dreads the very thought of his touch, let alone the looming threat of wedding night groin grinding.

Edward, a history scholar, eagerly awaits connubial relations with Florence, though he's plagued by a case of performance anxiety -particularly the fear that his gun will fire before the games begin.

Intimacy and shame are on a collision course, resulting in a singularly humiliating moment that will change their lives forever.

The plot of On Chesil Beach couldn't be simpler, and at 203 pages it's much easier to get through than McEwan's previous two novels - the intricately structured Saturday and Atonement. Despite it's tiny physical stature it ranks among McEwan's best books. The story is gripping from the opening sentence to the heartrending final passage, and the prose is fluid, beautiful, intelligent and extremely accessible. It doesn't hurt that Florence and Edward feel far more raw and real than the snooty characters in McEwan's last novel, the overrated Saturday.

McEwan won the prestigious Booker Prize (now known as the Man Booker Prize) in 1998 for the terse novel Amsterdam, and it will be interesting to see how this equally worthy lightweight (in the literal sense) fares when the committee announces the 2007 nominees in August.

Girlz Gone Wild! The British Edition

I watched this 2005 release on DVD the other night and it was even better than I remembered. It's one of the strangest and moodiest summer love stories ever committed to film, and it features dynamite performances from Natalie Press and Emily Blunt (who went on to play the bitchy British office assistant in The Devil Wears Prada).

My Summer of Love

Grade: A

Two troubled teenage girls meet on the moors and become obsessed with each other. Before long they’re making out at the local swimming hole and getting down and dirty in the bedroom. They swear that their love will last forever. But maybe this is all a game, a fake romance built on lies. Who’s manipulating who?
This is the central mystery in the British film My Summer of Love. Winner of several major awards, including the BAFTA Award for Outstanding British Film, this dark and gutsy feature by Polish writer and director Pawel Pawlikowski proves that love ain’t always pretty. These volatile girls are the lesbian equivalent of Catherine and Heathcliff in the stormy romance classic Wuthering Heights.
The film owes most of its success to the brilliant acting of the young female leads. Fiery redhead Natalie Press plays Mona, a girl who lives with her ex-con, born again brother. Despite his attempts to make a good Christian out of her, Mona spends her time smoking cigarettes, speeding on a motorbike and sleeping with a married man. Press, the worthy recipient of several British acting awards, is an intense, spontaneous actress. She springs her fierce emotions on us before we can brace ourselves for the impact.
Emily Blunt is far more subdued in her portrayal of Tamsin, a wealthy boarding school brat whose parents leave her alone in a mansion most of the time. She earns Mona’s pity with sob stories about her dead anorexic sister, and seduces Mona with longing glances and sweet kisses that lead to sexy shenanigans in the boudoir. Blunt lends Mona a chilly, mysterious quality, raising the possibility that Tamsin’s worldly sophistication masks some serious ill will.
The supporting cast is also strong, especially In America’s Paddy Considine as Mona’s well-meaning but hypocritical brother. Ryszard Lenczewski's artful camera work is another highlight.
My Summer of Love has a languorous feel, creating the sensation that we’re sweating out these long hot days along with the girls. But don’t mistake the pretty scenery and the slow pacing for some tame Merchant-Ivory production. This love story has plenty of cruel tricks up its sleeve.

Cutesy Corner

Confetta welcomes Uglydog into the household

The Secret Life of Words

Grade: B+

Spanish director Isabel Coixet and Canadian actress Sarah Polley seemed to have forged a celluloid alliance, following their 2003 collaboration My Life Without Me with a drama that starts slowly, builds to a devastating climax and ends on a hopeful note that beautifully bypasses smarmy sentimentalism. Though it won four major Goya Awards - Spain's equivalent of the Oscar- it got an extremely limited theatrical release in the States. Hopefully its recent DVD release will help it find an appreciative audience.

Polley plays Hanna, an deaf Eastern European woman who works in a British factory, isolating herself from social interaction as much as she possibly can. On holiday in Northern Ireland she learns of a fire that took place on an offshore oil rig, and volunteers to nurse a severely burned man named Josef (Tim Robbins) back to health. Over the course of his convalescence, the outgoing Josef brings Hanna out of her shell, reminding her of her capacity for joy and, eventually, making her feel safe enough to share the horrific life experiences that shaped her into such a fragile creature.

Polley and Robbins are great together, and Coixet coaxes endearing supporting performances from the rest of the guys on the rig. The voiceover narration (done by a creepy squeaky-voiced woman) is irritating and obtuse, but at least it's infrequent.

Till they meet again Coixet and Polley have other projects to tend to. Coixet is currently directing Penelope Cruz and Ben Kingsley in Elegy, an adaptation of Philip Roth's short novel The Dying Animal. Meanwhile Polley can sit back and soak in the enormous critical praise for her directing debut Away From Her. It has only earned about $4 million at the box office, but it's bound to catapult Julie Christie into this year's Best Actress race.

Summer Shakes

This summer star-crossed lovers will off themselves in downtown Portland, and a bitch of epic proportions will wreck havoc at various parks. The mayhem comes to us courtesy of Portland Actors Ensemble, a company that has staged free outdoor Shakespeare productions every summer since 1970.
The season opens with Romeo & Juliet, this year’s installment in PAE’s Twilight Tragedie series. The production runs from July 6 to July 21 at Lovejoy Fountain Park. This year’s touring production is The Taming of the Shrew, a catty comedy about a man who gradually quells his wife’s fiery temper. The show makes its way to six metro-area parks from July 28 to September 3.
Local theater veteran John Monteverde directs Romeo & Juliet, reviving the modernized version of the classic that he staged for the Blue Monkey Theater Company in February. His interpretation of the tragic romance has no explicit queer content, but he suspects that the show’s dramatic costumes will appeal to queer viewers with fashion savvy.
Monteverde sets his version in contemporary Italy, using the battle between Romeo and Juliet’s families as a means of spoofing the battle between the Armani and Versace clothing empires. “Lady Capulet is styled after Donatella Versace,” he says.
For the Blue Monkey production Monteverde designed the set to resemble an indoor fashion runway. Of course the Lovejoy Fountain location forces the fashion show to go alfresco. “Now it’s an outdoor runway,” says Monteverde. “I like the strutting feel of the models. The men strut and preen.”
From the songs by Offspring to the Goth outfits and makeup worn by the teenage characters, the production boasts some serious punk attitude. Monteverde called on young costume designer Devin Clancy to ensure that the hip factor of the February production is intact in the great outdoors.
Clancy – a self-described “queer youth” and “equal opportunity lover” – is a Portland native who is currently on break from her undergraduate studies at Illinois Wesleyan University.
“I went through a Goth phase,” she says. “I also went through a high fashion phase.”
When she’s not creating or reinforcing costumes, Clancy has taken some time to reflect on a play that’s still timely 400 years after The Bard wrote it.
“There’s a lot to be drawn from it,” she says. “Fighting is not the right answer, and you shouldn’t outlaw connections between groups.”
Heed these words from Monteverde if you think you’d rather get rabies than watch a Shakespeare play: “This is one of his most beautiful and pure love stories, and it has some of his dirtiest jokes. And this version has plenty of swordplay and violence, amped up with a rock and roll feel.”


Visit http://www.portlandactors.com/ for dates, locations and showtimes.

in theaters june 22

A Mighty Heart
Grade: A-

You never know what to expect from Michael Winterbottom, the British director who tackles everything from Thomas Hardy adaptations (Jude) to graphic sex films (9 Songs). His latest is a gritty – though awkwardly sentimental at times- docudrama about the kidnapping and beheading of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Pakistan in early 2002. Thankfully Winterbottom keeps his cameras out of the torture chamber, focusing instead on the plight of Pearl’s pregnant wife, Mariane. Angelina Jolie delivers one of her best performances ever, convincingly shifting from stoicism to hopefulness to despair as Mariane hears varying reports on her husband’s fate.

Also, the movie's official website is worth looking at: http://www.amightyheartmovie.com/

In case you missed it when it hit theaters 34 years ago, here's a review of Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye that I wrote for the film's upcoming engagement (starting June 15) at Portland's Hollywood Theatre. The movie is also available on DVD.

The Long Goodbye
Grade: A

Elliott Gould was born to play the 1970s incarnation of private investigator Philip Marlowe in Robert Altman’s endearing adaptation of the Raymond Chandler novel. Altman substitutes Chandler’s hard-boiled detective stylings with a leisurely paced story and slapstick comedy – including a scene of future Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger stripping down to his tight yellow skivvies. Nina Van Pallandt, Sterling Hayden and Henry Gibson are great in their supporting roles, and Vilmos Zsigmond won top cinematography honors from the National Society of Film Critics for his mesmerizing camera work.

Once

Grade: A-

Q: How did a charming story about a Dublin street musician who collaborates with a young Czech woman fill me with feelings of stomach-churning dread?

A: My parents saw the movie two days before me and, without actually divulging the ending, implied that it was surprising and that they just had to talk with me about it after I saw the film.

Once is a modern day urban fairy tale that also happens to be a musical, and it avoids the awkward "break into song for no reason" trappings of most musicals by setting the songs in practical locations like piano stores and recording studios. Writer/director John Carney fills the low-budget production with stuttering hand-held camera shots, and he apparently ran into so much money trouble that he couldn't afford to give his characters names. Glen Hansard of the band The Frames plays "Guy" and stoic teen phenomenon Marketa Irglova from the Czech Republic plays "Girl."

Guy falls in love with Girl, but it's not exactly clear how wildly Girl's hormones are raging. The future of their relationship is entirely uncertain, but for their week-long relationship we're privy to their jam sessions, their increasingly relaxed and honest repartee and their foray into a recording studio.

Not exactly the makings of a thriller, eh? Well I felt perfectly relaxed and charmed for the first half, but as the conclusion neared I couldn't help remembering my parents' disclaimer and I thought that disaster loomed every time Guy or Girl so much as sat on a toilet. I had told my partner, Drew, that there might be a big surprise in store for us, and he simulated his bouts of anxious speculation by biting down on his fist every time the tuneful couple crossed a busy street or hopped on a motorcycle. Would they wind up as road kill before they scored a record contract? Would one of them end up being a secret IRA operative, hiding massive amounts of explosives in Guy's guitar case or the cute little vacuum cleaner that Girl wants to get fixed?

Needless to say nothing apocalyptic comes to pass, but my parents were right on the money in the sense that the final three minutes are ambiguous enough to inspire at least two or three different theories about the fate of the star-crossed (but not actually lovers in the biblical sense) folkies.

Knocked Up

Grade: A-

Judd Apatow, the twisted but kindhearted mastermind behind Freaks and Geeks and The 40 Year Old Virgin, reunites some of his favorite actors for this hilarious - but considerably overlong- morality play about a one night stand and the unexpected pregnancy that ensues. Seth Rogen, the tubby wise ass who played supporting roles in previous Apatow outings, steps into a leading role as Ben, a penniless stoner who lives with a gang of friends who hope to make it big by creating a website that documents all instances of female nudity on film (of course someone beat them to this years ago, but they're too busy smoking bongs through Darth Vader masks to notice) .

One night Ben meets a blond named Alison (the dull but tolerable Katherine Heigl) at a bar, goes home with her and, in a moment of lust-impaired communication, tosses his condom on the floor before stealing home. The main plot line, which follows their decision to have the baby and try to make a go of their relationship, is pretty cliched, but Apatow more than makes up for this with dozens of brilliantly scripted scenes with crude and playful dialogue (talking about Meg Ryan's full-frontal scenes from In the Cut, Ben says that she should have played Harry in When Harry Met Sally...yes, that's a really stupid joke, but Apatow and the cast make it all work with their giddy, child-like persistence).

Knocked Up owes much of its success to the supporting cast. Freaks and Geeks alums Jason Segel and Martin Starr are great as Ben's roomies, along with Jay Baruchel (Million Dollar Baby's borderline retarded wannabe boxer) and Jonah Hill from the upcoming comedy Superbad.

In Alison's far more upscale world we meet her controlling, biting sister (played by the hysterical Leslie Mann) and her suffocating brother-in-law (Paul Rudd: cute as ever but still not very compelling on screen).