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Forgive me, for a second, if I gush: I consider Wolfgang Petersen
(Das Boot, In the Line of Fire) to be one of the greatest action
directors world cinema has ever produced. That will immediately
discredit me in the eyes of many readers — especially those
who chortle whenever anyone mentions such misunderstood classics
as The Perfect Storm and Troy. And I know Poseidon is doomed in
the eyes of many, who see it as a money-grubbing attempt
to mix the melodrama of Titanic with the whiz-bang-boom of a summer
action movie. That may be true, but attention must still be paid:
The Master is at work.
The story — borrowed from Irwin Allen and Ronald
Neame's disasterrific 1972 action opus The Poseidon Adventure — is about as bare-bones
as it gets. Big-ass luxury liner hits a rogue wave on New Year's Eve and flips
upside down, and a ragtag band of plucky passengers (in the new version, they're
led by a stolid Kurt Russell and a freaked-out Josh Lucas) makes its way through
the burning and the drowning and the screaming and the dying, trying to escape.
James Cameron brought to Titanic an engineer's eye: The drama there came from
all the ways its writer-director imagined a ship might begin to come apart after
taking on a massive hole. While Poseidon provides more than its share of stuff
cracking and exploding (I am resisting the urge to call it Das Upside-down Boot),
Petersen has more of a humanist's perspective. He's interested in the ways characters
bounce off each other to create suspense. Alas, it's for better and worse: A
scene where one woman's claustrophobia prevents a dramatic escape through an
air duct is harrowing, whereas some unfortunate early moments with Kevin Dillon
as an annoying, drunken gambler are just godawful.
I suppose, like several other Petersen films, Poseidon will
be remembered as a flawed but ultimately effective Hollywood action thriller,
its success chalked up to zillion-dollar special effects and a streamlined running
time, the kind of film destined for endless reruns on TNT years from now. And
I'm sure it'll get dissed for being just another cold and calculating summer
blockbuster. But I'd like to differ — Poseidon, for all its technological
sturm und drang, is a movie that lives and dies by its characters. Many will
disagree vehemently, but it's a solid example of action done right. — Bilge
Ebiri |
 In
1991, Amy Grapell was one of several actors from the downtown New York experimental theater La MaMa
who traveled to the Ukraine — then still part of a
Soviet Union in the midst of Gorbachev's reforms — to
participate in a play
based on the life of Les Kurbas, a legendary stage director
who was killed during Stalin's purges. She brought along
her cameraman-boyfriend, Christian Moore, to document the
proceedings. When they found themselves in the midst of an
attempted (and briefly successful) coup by the Communist
Party's more reactionary elements, who tried to shuttle Gorbachev
off to his dacha, Grapell and Moore must have felt that they'd
stumbled inadvertently on a riveting story. And they had:
While the first part of Light from the East is a serviceable
account of the stage production, intercutting with flashes
of Kurbas' life and career, the tension builds up considerably
in the second half. As the tanks begin to roll through the
streets, people begin to wonder if the "openness" of Glasnost
was just some kind of fever dream.
Why the fifteen-year lag time, then, between those events
and the release of Grapell's compact, engaging documentary? To be sure, the footage
does an excellent job of conveying the tension felt by its subjects — Ukranians
and Americans alike — as they watch news reports of the Moscow coup, and
later empty out into the streets to protest for independence. But there's also
a certain shapelessness to the film that might have prevented it from adding
up to much back in the early-to-late-'90s — as if Grapell and Moore didn't
really intend to make a film, but just document an interesting period in their
lives. Today's video doc revolution has made it safe for such formless art. Light
from the East isn't going to blow anyone away with its singularity of vision,
but it is a hypnotic time capsule back to the Cold War's final death rattle. — Bilge
Ebiri |
 Buddhism
is really hip in the west! This news flash comes courtesy
of Refuge, a competent but slight documentary on Buddhism
and East-West relations. Not to suggest that staying on top
of hot trends is really the job of documentary cinema, but
Refuge isn't really a substantial look at Buddhism's popularity
in the States — at less than an hour, how could it
be? Given the presence of a hyperactive Martin Scorsese,
it comes off more like an enjoyable bonus featurette off
the DVD of Kundun. All that said, Refuge is admirably earnest,
and it avoids the closet-orientalist tendency to mysticize
the East, acknowledging that contrary to what your yoga instructor
might tell you, the Eastern Hemisphere is not inherently
more spiritual or sincere than the Western. It's also hard
not to be charmed by the Dalai Lama, interviewed herein.
Any religious leader who admits that he's far from infallible
gains a lot of credibility. The guy should be in pictures. — Peter
Smith |
 About
halfway through Rumor Has It — right as Jennifer Aniston
and her maybe-father Kevin Costner were making out in the middle
of a gala, after a trip in his private helicopter — I
became convinced the stars were in fact machines. Like Disneyland's animatronic Abe
Lincoln or figures in the crown of a cuckoo
clock, the two wobbled and teetered and froze.
Like too many recent romantic comedies, the movie lacked any trace of an animal instinct. That's why you'd do much better
on a date with the new DVD of David Attenborough's amazing BBC nature series Life
in the Undergrowth.
Attenborough is himself a bit sexy
in an upper-crusty English kind of way, but
it's the leopard slugs who steal the show. About twenty-five
minutes into the first episode is an insect sex scene like
none you've ever seen. What? You've seen grizzly bears humping
in Yosemite? Cheetahs banging at supersonic speed in the Sahara?
Spiders in sixteen-legged sex acts? Bah! You haven't seen anything
like this.
Two viscous-looking, tendril-antennaed sex freaks crawl
out onto a tiny tree limb and then entwine while hanging
upside down on a dangling rope of mucus until their hermaphroditic
sex organs emerge from behind their heads, blossoming into this gelatinous flower twice the size of their
bodies. The Wachowski Brothers couldn't dream of a special effect as weird and
hot as this. Watch it on a date and it will make even your wildest sex trick seem tame by comparison. — Logan
Hill |
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©2006 Nerve.com.
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