Return to Paradise is surpisingly gripping. In their carefree youth, three buddies partied in Malaysia—Penang to be precise—but two of them decided to leave the cheap hashish, the sun, and the exciting times to return to New York. Louis stayed behind with the intention of going off to rehabilitate orangutans. Two years later, a young lawyer (Anne Heche) shows up in New York to say that the day after the two guys left Penang, authorities found hash in the hut and in the garbage, enough to charge Louis with not just possession but with trafficking, an offence for which he will hang in several days—unless the two friends agree to return and admit that part of the stash was theirs, thus reducing Louis’s charge to possession (he goes free) and they spend three years each (or six years for one) in the Penang jail. Will they return to paradise? Needless to say, this movie asks more substantive questions than “Will the good guy catch the bad guy?” The only element that does not quite ring true is the romance: Both characters need more motivation. This weakens the movie considerably, but it is still a good one.
My Life So Far is an autobiographical work about growing up on a Scottish estate in the 1920s. The strange mix of comedy and tragedy, of fantasy and reality, are probably because the story is based on what it was actually like to be a boy trying to grow up in those times and conditions. The happy family is traumatized when Uncle Morris and his young French fiance arrive. Wonderfully, she is not flamboyant or outre but rather simply beautiful, talented, and charming. A light and enjoyable film, the final scene is hilarious—with not a word spoken. The acting, including that of a younger Colin Firth, is good, and the film-making is assured.
All or Nothing is relentlessly bleak, but it stayed with me. Writer and director Mike Leigh is certainly a good film maker ( e.g., Secrets and Lies). But this time every character but one is disfunctional, and nothing much happens in this doggedly dismal flick until a heart attack livens things up. But this portrait of working class families in a London housing project made an impresssion on me. Once I got through the heavy accents, the constant swearing, and the melancholic music, I found the acting wonderfully realistic.. Unlike other Leigh movies, this one does not have much narrative thrust, but I kept watching because emotions were realistically simmering just below the surface. Although the characters were, to some degree, representative of types, they were primarily not representative of anything but themselves. This movie has two unusually powerful scenes. In one excruciatingly uncomfortable episode, the dog-eared cabbie (Timothy Spall) goes to his shrewish wife, his vague daughter, and his loutish son begging change so that he can make the minimum payment to the taxi business owner at the end of the week. In the other, the son’s heart attack brings emotions to the surface and the husband and wife confront each other. But marvellous ensemble acting in a slice of life movie has to lead somewhere, and the conclusion is ambiguous, allowing some people to say that there is solidarily and hope and others to say that tiny touches of sentimentality around a hospital bed are temporary and change nothing.
Big Fish has an ending that is meant to be happy but is sad. All the people about whom Edward told tall tales show up for his funeral and are apparently having a good time reminiscing and swapping stories. But if Edward, as he said, led an “incredible life,” why was he driven to embellish and invent? Why wasn’t knowing a huge guy with the biggest feet in world (size 26 ½) enough? Why tell the tall tale about saving the town from a ravinous giant, and so on? Wasn’t having a beautiful and loving wife enough? Why the elaborate story about another woman, a witch with a glass eye, a woman William guesses was probably, in reality, his father’s mistress? Sad.
Roxanne (1987) stars a lithe Steve Martin as the fire chief (Charilie) with the incredibly long nose, and an anorexic Darryl Hannah as the gorgeous astrophysics student who falls for Chris, the handsome new guy on the fire crew. Because Chris is tongue-tied around women and because Charlie is smitten with the brainy astrophysicist, Charlie agrees to write love letters. They have a profound effect, but, of course, things get complicated. The thing that struck me most about this movie was how gentle it was. No over the top stuff, no post-modern absurdism, no nasty back-stabbing, no heavy political message underlying the comedy, no exteme anything. The gentle comedy gradually gets to you. Everyone will start to laugh at a different and probably unexpected point. I started to laugh when the fire truck turned out of the fire station and the unfastened stuff started to bounce down the street—just one of many references to classic comedy of the past. And the scene where Martin has to say 20 original things about his humungous nose is one of the funniest in film, a classic stand-up comic at work. If that’s not enough, the movie was shot, of course, in Nelson, British Columbia, Canada, one of the greatest towns on the planet, where something like this movie could happen.
Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter . . . and Spring is a Korean/German co-production and a film about Buddhism. The first two seasons are engaging, as the young boy who lives with an old monk learns some lessons and later falls madly in love. But in Fall and Winter, things get a bit weird as Buddhism is endowed with some magical powers that may be part of the Korean sensibility but are strange and confusing for Westerners. Some of the acting is forced or melodramatic. The old monk’s reactions to things, however, seem the epitome of Buddhism and, although different from typical Western reactions, are still comprehendable. The first half of the movie is unique and wonderful.