The School of Rock

(2003)dir. Richard Linklater
starring Jack Black, Joan Cusack

A comedy built on a suspension bridge of disbelief.

A socially-impaired, self-aggrandizing fattish narcissist (Jack Black, as always) finds an outlet for his considerable creative impulses by posing as a teacher in an uptight private elementary school.

We’re meant to believe that Black’s anarchic mania is liberating to everyone involved, but he’s so unhinged, and everyone else is so profoundly unaware, it’s hard to buy. The fact that Black is left alone with the children for three weeks, without an iota of faculty concern or interference isn’t just improbable…It’s creepy.

Black’s considerable comic presence is rooted in his relentless baring of every awkward, antisocial, strange or perverse impulse that pulses through his twitching frame. He lives in the middle of a manic episode. It’s good for distraction, as in High Fidelity, but as the film’s center, it reaches saturation point pretty quickly.

The funniest lines in the film comes when the students begin to imitate Black’s anarchic insensitivity—“You’re fat and you have body odor,” a student tells him…It’s not just funny, it’s humanizing, and it brings this fantasy sharply into reality.

(1999)
written/dir. George Lucas
starring Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor, Ian McDiarmid

George Lucas’s Pokemon movie. But no Star Wars in sight. Don’t be fooled by the superficial similarites. This is not the film made by the George Lucas who had the insight to let Lawrence Kasdan help him write “The Empire Strikes Back,” the greatest Jungian thrill ride evermade…

This is the son of “Howard the Duck.”

The dvd bonus disk documentaries let you see how hundreds of talented and otherwise intelligent writers, artists, actors, and movie industry guppies stood around, bowing before the twenty-five year old Vision, not knowing, or just not saying that the Vision was a substantial and saccharin as a bag of pixie stix and a box of fruity pebbles. Same color scheme, too.

Who’ll tell the emperor he’s got no clothes, and he’s woefully out of shape to boot?

Pola X

(1999)
dir. Leos Carax
starring Guillaume Depardieu, Yekaterina Golubeva, Catherine Deneuve

Notable for an inspired, and realistic two minute sex scene an hour and twenty minutes into the film, the rest of this picture is a dark morass, impossible to follow, drawn from the inner, illucid workings of the writer/ director’s mind.

A young man (Depardieu the younger), grown far too close to his mother (Deneuve), throws himself into grisley poverty to be far too close to his sister/girlfriend.

One gets a sense that the young and handsome actors are trying to exorcise their youth and beauty and replace it with something substantial, but they come up painfully, masochistically empty. And we’re along for the um, journey.

Similarly abusive to character as Larry Clark’s Kids, but less interesting. Give it a miss, or fast forward.

Memento

(2000)dir. Christopher Nolan
starring Guy Pearce, Carrie-Anne Moss

A skillfully made, cold-blooded little exercise of a film. And an exercise is what it is.

A clever time-travel literary device is used to trace the steps of our hero as he discovers that people can be bad, and most importantly, people lie to themselves in order to justify their badness.

The considerable filmmaking and writing skill is used up in cleverness, the acting talent is used as a cog in the machine-like story. In the end, it’s just an icy-cold, sadistically clever, cruel little movie, that tells us people can be wicked.

I wonder if the central idea – that we are the cause of our most serious problems – will be lost to viewers, who are too busy enjoying being manipulated to see the parable behind the exercise.

The staging is certainly top-rate, but after the trick was sprung, it left me wanting. A better bet is Martin Amis’ excellent novella, Time’s Arrow, which employs the same inverted time structure to tell a better story.

(I liked Nolan’s follow-ups a good deal better – the better-than-it-was-reviewed remake of “Insomnia” (2002) and the very strong “Batman Begins” (2005).