For roughly the next month or so Screen Time and the Dive movie critics are going to be busy busy busy. The Chelsea, not even counting this week, has a solid month of notable and exciting releases scheduled, and then more in the works heading into December. The multiplex also has some highly anticipated movies on the way, what with the second "Boondock Saints" due next Friday. So Screen Time is gonna have to start getting choosy. With my general inability to be brief, I can’t cover four or five movies of that caliber every week, so I’ll be hitting the major highlights instead, and abandoning any pretense to comprehensive coverage. For this week that means ignoring a non-Pixar (and therefore probably worthless) computer-animated kid flick (“Astro Boy”), more transgressive torture-porn (“Saw VI”) and a regular old torturously unfunny John C. Reilly comedy (“Cirque du Freak”). Only two films coming our way this weekend have real potential, and they both happen to be at the Chelsea, so let’s take a look.
"Amelia":
Hillary Swank stars as the idiosyncratic aviatrix and feminist icon Amelia Earhart, the first woman to fly across the Atlantic, who tragically disappeared while attempting a solo shot around the world in 1937. This period biopic features not so much a luminous acting cast (though Richard Gere and Ewan McGregor certainly cannot be dismissed) as it does a luminous historical cast. Earhart, her husband George Putnam, her lover Gene Vidal, and his son, a very young Gore Vidal (yes, that’s THE Gore Vidal) are all featured characters, living in a tumultuous decade that I strenuously insist is the most interesting and important in 20th century America. While it’s certainly got its subject matter cut out for it, speaking both broadly in terms of its fascinating setting and specifically in its immediate biographical subject, under Mira Nair’s direction it looks like Swank goes overboard in her rendering of Earhart’s peculiar personality. It’s good to channel the spirit of any historical figure in a movie specifically about that person, but even if Earhart acted with such obnoxiously strong mannerisms, Swank might find a better way to fill the role than by simply affecting that obnoxiousness.
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"Paris":
Movie critics have a duty to evaluate movies fairly, and not to enamor themselves for European films more than equally virtuous American ones. Needless to say, movie critics are often derelict of duty. “Paris” will therefore be an interesting, and potential problematic case for critics. The impression its trailer left on me was pretty ambivalent: it looks like a standard view of a city that has been the subject of numberless films before this, only now written by someone with the sensibilities of a Hollywood studio executive. It focuses on a dying young Frenchman awaiting a heart transplant in Paris, whose sister is determined to remind him of the joys of life, and specifically of the “City of Lights.” It’s vaguely existential, of course, but it seems soft as well, like gooey Brie cheese. As if Nicholas Sparks wrote a beach romance under the influence of Camus. Paris, of course, is an amazingly dynamic and romantic place, but it won’t be served by borrowing a commercial American movie style. Therein lies the problem. I want it to be a French movie, but I don’t want it be deemed good because it is a French movie. I hope reviewers, myself included, will be able to judge it good or bad on its merits, and not its Frenchness. One can always hope.
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