Gob-smackingly ill-suited to the small screen, Gus Van Sant's infuriating and addictive road movie is a tale of two Gerrys (Matt Damon and Casey Affleck) lost in the desert. It's also a sumptuous Utah travelogue. And a pompous Beckettian comedy. And a sly parable on human frailty. But by then you'll have switched off the TV.
IN 1966, ROGER CORMAN MADE an offer to young assistant Peter Bogdanovich that the wannabe director couldn't refuse. Corman had two days left to run on a contract with Boris Karloff, and the challenge was this: use that time to film 20 minutes of new material with the veteran actor, edit in another 20 minutes of Karloff footage from Corman's The Terror, shoot another 40 minutes with other actors, then stitch the lot together. The result was Bogdanovich's first and, arguably, greatest movie.
Reuniting Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney from his glossily perverse Laura, and adding uncharacteristic grit to compositional elegance, the great Otto Preminger delivered this noir about a violently ambiguous cop two decades before Dirty Harry appeared. Andrews is the splintering anti-hero, a brutal Manhattan detective coming apart while trying to cover up his killing of a suspect. Two more of Preminger's most neglected crime movies—superbly seedy small-town murder Fallen Angel and psychodrama Whirlpool—are also making (overdue) DVD debuts.
Following the success of Jean De Florette and Manon Des Sources, interest was sufficiently stirred in author Marcel Pagnol to fuel two features based on his childhood memoirs in a sun-drenched Provence. Picture-postcard landscapes figure prominently in Yves Robert's polished recreation of the summer of 1900, although the human drama goes no deeper than minor family arguments and slender rites-of-passage rituals. This was hugely successful, but adds up to little more than an oppressively tasteful tourist-board panorama.
OPENS APRIL 2, CERT 15,99 MINS
Halle Berry plays a prison psychologist whose most interesting patient (Penélope Cruz) claims she's being raped by the Devil. While she ponders this, Berry sees a ghost, passes out and wakes up a prisoner in her own jail. Colleague Robert Downey Jr explains she's murdered her own husband with an axe, but she can't remember a thing. What's more, she keeps seeing the ghost, and has the eerie message "not alone" somehow carved into her arm, Richie Manic-style.
What's going on? Is she already dead, like in Jacob's Ladder?
BUSH HALL, LONDON
Monday March 1, 2004
Rouse closes the first of two nights here with a version of Neil Young's "For The Turnstiles" so intense and intimate that when he sings the line "though your confidence may be shattered" we all inwardly go "uh-oh",and when he adds "it doesn't matter" we all go "phew, what a relief". His crowd are rapt throughout, whooping at every intro like he's just won the Superbowl.
