Griffin Mill
(Tim Robbins)
It lacked certain elements that we need to market a film successfully.
June
(Greta Scacchi)
What elements?
Griffin Mill
Suspense, laughter, violence. Hope, heart, nudity, sex. Happy endings.
Mainly happy endings.
June
What about reality?
From THE PLAYER (1992)
Us film babblers have avoided the big summer sequels except for SPIDERMAN 2 which I believe the consensus is - it's the same quality as the first and that's a good thing. A small summer sequel that at least I'm itching to see (not all film babblers have the same itch) is Richard Linklater's BEFORE SUNSET - I'll get back to you when I see it. Meanwhile we've been watching election coverage, devouring DVD releases, and mourning the deaths of Marlon Brando, Robert Quine, and Rick James.
Until we get out to the theaters again here's some DVD Reviews :
INDEPENDENT'S DAY - THE ULTIMATE INSIDER'S LOOK AT THE CRAZY WORLD OF SUNDANCE. Dir. Marina Zenovich. (1997) (DVD-2004)
"It's like taking the worst part of LA and the worst part of New York and just jamming it into Park City."
- Tressa Von Bargen (Park City Resident)
This fascinating albeit brief (54 min.) look at the booming indendent film world in 1997 gives you a glimpse of the fun of film and the stress of competition that goes on in the most notable of American film festivals - Sundance. Indeed filmmaker Jay Chandrasekhar laments "everyone I talked to said Sundance is a blast unless you have a film in it." Unfortunately the lack of background info and absence of Robert Redford (Sundance founder) make it not as intensely deep a documentary as I wanted but still an interesting walk through. Worth watching alone for an amusing set-up sequence involving Parker Posey this film is begging for a sequel - so much has happened in the years since 1997 in independent film and in digital video so I hope Zenovich returns to Park City some day with camera in tow.
- Anderson Moran
THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT (2004) Dir. Eric Bress & J. Mackye Gruber. First let me get this out of the way - it's not just that I find Ashton Kutcher to be untalented - he strikes me as obnoxiously untalented! But that's the least of our worries with this contrived derivative nonsense. The plot is to ridiculous to go into at any length so simply - it's a story about a guy who travels back and forth through time to try and fix the circumstances surrounding a traumatic childhood incident so that the present day outcome is A-okay. He does this somehow by concentration on reading old journals (I guess like Christopher Reeve used his mind to go back in time in SOMEWHERE IN TIME) and that's just one of the hundreds of elements that don't really work here. What really makes this so laughingly bad is how drastically this flick overshoots - it wants to be a cool cerebral movie like DONNIE DARKO, it wants to be a 'love conquers all' movie like WHEN DREAMS MAY COME, Hell it even wants to be an episode of OZ at one point too! The title quotes the standard chaos theory - with the example of a butterfly who gently flaps its wings in one part of the world, creating the potential for a monsoon somewhere else in the world but that really has nothing to do with this story. I mean nothing in the world changes after the time warps except the lives of the microcosm of the handful of Kutcher's friends. If he returned to the present to find that America had been taken over by some vast skinhead regime after a coldwar attack in the 80's or some other world changing effect we might have something here. As such we've got nothing but yet another exercise in sci-fi stupidity. Wish I could use my journal to go back in time and not watch it.
- D C J
More later...
is the Green Art Nail
