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REVIEW: Closer
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Boy walks down the street. Girl walks toward him from the other direction. Their eyes meet, they stop on opposite sides of an intersection… and wham, she's hit by a cab. And so it goes in Closer, Mike Nichols' adaptation of Patrick Marber's play about strangers who literally meet by accident, then do horrible things to each other on purpose.
Closer's four characters are interconnected via Dan, an obituary writer played by the ubiquitous Jude Law. Dan is dating waitress/stripper Alice (Natalie Portman) but falls for photographer Anna (Julia Roberts). Anna is married to Larry (Clive Owen), whom Dan inadvertently set her up with in a dirty chat-session prank. The foursome come together, split and pair off again in different combinations. We're in England, but it all seems so very French.
All four have familiar flaws: Dan is a self-absorbed, failed writer who has taken Alice's life story as the basis of his novel; darkly brooding Dr. Larry verges on malevolence; Anna's a prize flake who bounces back and forth between the two men. As for daffy little Alice — well, she's got more going on than you'd think. Bruised and abandoned by Dan in one scene, she's a sasspot stripper teasing and tormenting Larry in another. (Although, a warning for flesh fans: Portman requested the nudity be removed from the film.)
Casting movie stars of this caliber often makes it difficult to separate their real-life personae from those on-screen (this means you, Julia), but director Mike Nichols gets the best out of each, just as the film itself focuses on the juciest bits of each relationship: the flush of the first meeting, the disastrous end. Time skips forward in months and years, avoiding the draggy middle stuff no one remembers anyway.
In one scene, Larry learns that his new bride Anna has been having an affair with Dan for the past year. He masochistically goads Anna into comparing her two men. Anyone who's been cuckolded will recognize this conversation. In the end, Closer isn't really about which girl ends up with which boy, but a hard look at how much of ourselves we're willing to reveal to strangers. — Lily Oei
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REVIEW: I Am David
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 Few tortures compare with the agony of sitting through the ninety-something minutes of I Am David. This new film from writer/director Paul Feig (who, amazingly, created the all-time-great TV show Freaks and Geeks) tells the story of a young boy who has spent his entire life in a Bulgarian labor camp. Through completely improbable circumstances, David escapes in 1952, bound for Denmark with a mysterious envelope. He then meets all sorts of new friends who expound at endless length about love and trust and other heartwarming drivel. But poor David doesn't know anything about joy. His life has been nothing but misery and the movie never lets us forget it. In one scene, we discover that David has never learned to smile. In another, a woman who paints his portrait complains, "I'm having trouble with your eyes, I've never had to use so much black before." Subtlety is not this film's strong point. It's a tearjerker that jerks its dry-eyed audience around contemptuously. — Nic Sheff |
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Date DVD #10: How to Steal a Million
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 Sam Raimi's terrific Spider-Man 2 is the obvious Date DVD this week, but judging from the box-office tallies, you've already seen Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson coo and kiss.
So go way back to the lovely 1968 romance How to Steal a Million, one of the great William Wyler's final films. Audrey Hepburn plays the daughter of a Parisian art forger, and Peter O'Toole plays the mysterious man who might be able to save her father from prison. The plot's convoluted, but the chemistry's undeniable from the first encounter between Hepburn and O'Toole, which is utterly ridiculous and absolutely endearing.
Hearing a bump in the night, Hepburn tosses on a couture dressing gown and sneaks, lightfooted, down the stairs. Standing on the staircase, she spies his shadow — suspecting he's a thief — and pries a cartoonish antique pistol from the wall. She takes a few steps down, points the gun, and sees, in her living room, Peter O'Toole, more dashing than 007, in a drop-dead-gorgeous tuxedo. Hepburn is instantly smitten, as anyone would be. So she shoots him ("It's only a flesh wound," she says). Soon, she's yanking on a big pair of heavy black boots under her dressing gown, and headed out the door in a lovestruck daze, escorting the handsome stranger back to his hotel.
The decades have cast a kind of cutesy patina over Hepburn, but I love her for moments like these — in Breakfast at Tiffany's, Love in the Afternoon, Charade, and so many others — when her character seems like the most innocent and openhearted gal you've ever seen, and then, slyly, goes looking for trouble. — Logan Hill |
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