drama Tagged Articles at Cinematical

UPDATE: Here's the trailer in Quicktime quality.

Of all the films I'm looking forward to this fall, Blindness ranks fairly high up there. Canadian distributor Alliance has just made available a full trailer that proves to be fairly intriguing, as an optometrist (Mark Ruffalo) and his seemingly immune wife (Julianne Moore) cope with an inexplicable epidemic of sight loss.

I'm a sucker for most anything vaguely apocalyptic, and while this very well could turn out to be akin to watching the first act of Children of Men through a milk-filled mask (which I've done, mind you), the prestige behind the project* says otherwise. We have acclaimed screenwriter Don McKellar adapting Nobel-Laureate José Saramago's novel, with Academy Award nominee Fernando Meirelles directing a cast that also includes Danny Glover, Gael Garcia Bernal, Alice Braga, and Sandra Oh.

I must say, going off that taste and last spring's teaser, I still like the look, sound, and feel of this one, especially Moore's little retort (you know the one), and that's not to mention that any trailer which employs John Murphy's underrated score from last year's Sunshine to set a rightfully ominous tone is always fine by me. We'll get to see (sorry) what trials and tribulations await the world on September 19th.

*Not to mention Rocchi's review of the film from its Cannes world premiere.

"All the characters in this book are fictitious, and anyone finding a resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, should proceed no further ..." Disclaimer from the novel 'The Number 23.' Sadly no such disclaimer was given to the beginning of this film, which could serve as a warning to people who might be wanting those two hours from their lives back, should they ignore it and watch the film. Okay, that might be a bit harsh, but not by too much. This film reunites director Joel Schumacher with star Jim Carrey, who both worked over-the-top together in 1995's Batman Forever. Oddly enough (although unrelated) that was the same year that gave us Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls. It would still be a few more years, three to be exact, until we would start to see the serious side of Jim Carrey, in 1998's The Truman Show. Since then he's dabbled in more dramatic roles in films like Simon Birch, The Majestic, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and arguably Man on the Moon, but he has never really managed to capture audiences when he plays a dramatic role the same way he does when he's in a comedy.

In fact, Bruce Almighty grossed more than those four films combined. So, with all that in mind, it might seem strange that Carrey would turn to a much darker role in a thriller like The Number 23. Although on paper the film actually sounds intriguing: a happily married man with a teenage son starts to become unraveled by a mysterious novel his wife gives him one day. It taps into a hidden obsession that some people have with "The 23 Enigma," and he soon becomes obsessed with it. He is also convinced that the book is actually written about him, and that somehow the author used his life as a template for the book. In some of the particularly darker scenes in the film, Walter (Carrey) imagines himself as the main character, Detective Fingerling, in the novel, and his wife Agatha (Virginia Madsen) as the dark and sexy Fabrizia, his love interest. His wife's friend and academic Isaac (Danny Huston) who tells Walter about the 23 enigma is also cast in his dark fantasies as psychologist Dr. Miles Phoenix.

Typical misery-laden Sundance fare all the way, Alfredo De Villa's Adrift in Manhattan offers three semi-connected stories of angst, loss, loneliness and general unhappiness. Have a ball. Story #1 -- Heather Graham (Boogie Nights) plays miserable optometrist Rose Phipps, a heartsick woman who is suffering over the loss of her young son while dismissing the offers of reconciliation that her recently estranged husband (William Baldwin, Backdraft) keeps tossing out there. Story #2 -- Victor Rasuk (Raising Victor Vargas) plays a semi-creepy young photography enthusiast who has a subtly unsettling relationship with his mother and a potentially unhealthy obsession with the aforementioned (miserable) optometrist/hottie. Story #3 -- Dominic Chianese (The Sopranos) plays an old painter who is gradually going blind, but slowly kick-starts a tentative romance with a co-worker played by (an excellent) Elizabeth Pena (Jacob's Ladder) -- but will the younger woman (gasp) accept a man who is losing his eyesight??

Do any of these mini-movies sound particularly enthralling to you? How about all three in one 89-minute block? Well, this kind of flick is the absolute bread and butter of the Sundance Film Festival, which makes for a pretty depressing afternoon or two, trust me. While not exactly what you'd call a bad movie, Adrift in Manhattan is simply too predictable, familiar and obvious to warrant much in the way of attention or enthusiasm. (Throw a rock into any year's Sundance guide and you're guaranteed to hit at least two or three multi-pronged grave and oh-so-earnest weep-dramas like Adrift in Manhattan) A well-polished indie-style soap opera, the movie is packed with quivering lips, angry tirades and cathartic sex ... but none of it really adds up to a whole heck of a lot. Director Alfredo De Villa (who traveled somewhat similar territory in his Washington Heights) has a knowing touch for emotion and nuance, but ladles the angst so liberally that the movie begins to feel a little bit like a Lifetime Channel flick.

Imagine the following scenario: a millenary cult commits a terrorist attack on a major metro subway line, filling the cars with poison gas and killing many passengers. In the investigation that follows, it is learned that the cult is not only widespread and deep-pocketed, but peopled with highly-regarded intellectuals from the nation's top universities. What kind of shockwaves would that send through the halls of power? What kind of intellectual chill would result? That's roughly the situation that Japan faced in 1995, in the aftermath of the Aum Shinri Kyo cult's nerve gas attack on the Tokyo Metropolitan Subway. Four hundred suspected collaborators and fellow travelers were arrested following that attack, although some of the leadership went uncaught. The cult -- its members, its practices, its mythology -- vaulted to the forefront of Japanese consciousness and never left. Over ten years later, stories about the potential resurfacing of the cult and its leaders still make for easy, scary headlines and gel nicely with the image Japan exports through its entertainment, of a society with ghosts practically falling out of the walls. Akihiko Shiota's Kanaria is a thinly fictionalized take on the societal fallout of the attack.

The premise of this film -- an aging woman hires a gorgeous, up-scale hooker to begin an affair with her philandering husband in order to re-learn what turns him on -- is so slight that it's reminiscent of Woody Allen's experiment in Melinda & Melinda. Comedy, drama, or thriller could be grown from this seed, depending on the director's whim. But the pleasant surprise of Anne Fontaine's Nathalie. . . is its unwillingness to fully commit to any one genre. Instead, a potential plot twist is dangled before our eyes in the opening scenes and then brushed back under the rug, leaving us with a kernel of suspense to go with an otherwise straightforward story about a woman's wounded pride and her increasing fascination with the way a beautiful, sexy woman can set a fire in her husband's mind in a way she never could.

The beautiful woman in question is Marlene, played by French star Emmanuelle Beart, who recently starred in Danis Tanovic's Hell, a not-uninteresting updating of Euripides' Medea. Even though the crossover bridge has been presumably lowered for Beart several times over the years, it's in French cinema that she's remained most prominent. To American audiences, she is still most recognizable as Claire, the foxy turncoat with the heavy French accent in Brian DePalma's Mission: Impossible.