The Taming of the Shrew

Liz. Dick. A young Michael York. What's not to like?

Quite a lot, actually. While the Zeffirelli TAMING OF THE SHREW looks great with its stunning sets and costumes even Joan Crawford would envy, this movie fails to take flight. I posit two reasons. First, I just couldn't buy Richard Burton's Petruchio. Burton plays Petruchio as a man long on bravado, but I never got the sense that he knew what he was doing or that he possessed the resolution and cruelty that the role requires. Perhaps it was the actor's decision to grin like a monkey throughout the production; it's hard to say. Second, the film takes too much time with its setup and not enough with the actual taming. When the last act shows us the depth of Katherine's retraining, we don't buy it because we didn't get enough of a sense of her sufferings.

I wanted to like THE TAMING OF THE SHREW. I really did. Unfortunately, Zeffirelli's is one of the less satisfying of play's incarnations that I've seen.

Once Upon a Time in the West

If you happened to be riding the Red Line this morning, you may have noticed a guy in a suit gazing into his laptop with a big, goofy grin spread across his face. The guy was me, and the goofy grin was in response to the final showdown in Sergio Leone's fabulously entertaining ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST. This is a western that loves westerns, and that love is no more evident than in this faceoff. The adversaries are perfect: the villain tall, thin, dressed in black, and evil as can be; the hero short, burly, dressed in tattered and sun-bleached clothes, utterly implacable. They're both at the top of their game, and their grudging respect for one another shows in their complete and total focus. Ennio Morricone's music swells, the camera moves, and if you aren't completely carried away in the joy of film, well then, you just plain don't like movies.

The movie starts slowly, letting tension build as a gang of toughs, led by the formidable Jack Elam, takes over a remote rail outpost and awaits a coming train. Who or what is on that train, and what will it mean? When you see, and when you see what happens next, you're going to know whether or not you're in for the rest of ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, because if it doesn't hook you, nothing will.

This may be the most lavish of the spaghetti westerns, as Leone had Paramount's backing for the production. He used some of his money to hire first-class actors such as Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson, Claudia Cardinale, Gabriele Ferzetti, and Jason Robards. Fonda plays one of the most evil men I've ever seen on screen, and he is uttely delightful. Bronson thoroughly redeems his work in this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CV3gA7hNItY&eurl=), and he gives Clint Eastwood a serious run for his money in the Man With No Name sweepstakes. Claudia Cardinale is beautiful, strong, vulnerable, and makes us believe in her journey from "tough but lost" to "budding grande dame." Ferzetti, a familiar face to fans of Italian media, mixes craft, cunning, and weakness into a dangerous combination; and watching him think, struggle, and think some more is a joy. Finally, there's Robards like I've never seen him before: dangerous, charismatic, noble, and fun - and he gets the best theme music.

ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST's most attractive feature, isn't its stars, however. It's its own swooning, ecstatic love for film in general and westerns in particular. This movie embraces every noble archetype, every heaving bosom, every bleak panorama, every plywood town, and every deadly bullet with a delirious joy that can't help but capture our imaginations. I loved, loved, loved this movie. It may well be the best picture I've seen so far this year.

Land of the Dead

In LAND OF THE DEAD, the zombies have won. A city full of remaining humans have walled themselves in to Pittsburgh, and they've established a brutally Darwinist social system, with Dennis Hopper at the apex.

So, the first thing LAND OF THE DEAD has going for it is Dennis Hopper at the apex of a social system. And really, it just gets better from there. The viewer could start wondering about how that's possible, but this is one movie that asks you to not ask too many questions. Once you start down that road, it isn't long before you're thinking, "How do they generate electricity?" and "What, exactly, is the foundation of their economy?" I think you're better off enjoying the jump-scares, wierding out on Leguizamo's unmistakeably ICE AGE Sloth -like vocal inflections, and admiring the creative and professional effects and makeup work.

LAND OF THE DEAD is big, audacious, splattery fun, with a helping of social commentary on the side. I enjoyed it so much, I give it four nnnnnnnnggggggghhhhhhhhssssssss out of five.

Amores Perros

I watch movies in roughly 30-minute swaths while riding public transportation. This generally works pretty well, as most movies are roughly 90 minutes long and hew to a 3-act structure. It’s like reading chapters of a book. AMORES PERROS is 150 minutes long, with three separate and intersecting stories, and it is simply not conducive to serialized viewing. It needs to be consumed in one large gulp of time, which allows it to cast a cohesive spell.

Of its three tales, the film’s first one had the greatest effect on me. It’s about a young man who’s in love with his abusive brother’s wife and hits upon a scheme to earn some quick dough and run away with her. Things go poorly.

In the second, a man leaves his family for a new love. Things go poorly, no thanks to the young man in tale #1.

The third story follows a homicidal vagrant whom we meet early in story #1. He left his family to become a revolutionary, but (say it with me now) things go poorly.

All three stories give us people swimming against the tides of their love, and wreaking varying degrees of havoc along the way. They’re beautifully done, and I think this movie could have carried me away. If only I had seen it under different circumstances.

Callas Forever

I'm not an opera guy. Yeah, I bought a few CDs in college, when I was trying to convince my (very musical) girlfriend that I was cultured (Hey, it worked: she married me.), but I've never been to a live performance. I knew that Maria Callas existed, but I'd never heard her sing: she was just another (of many) undiscovered countries. In other words, I came in to CALLAS FOREVER with a clean slate.

CALLAS FOREVER begins with Jeremy Irons handling the press at DeGaulle Airport. Now, I've seen creepy Irons, scary Irons, pathetic Irons, even silly Irons ("Throw me the rod," indeed.), but this is the first time I've seen supercool Irons. Stylishly dressed, with a pony tail that actually doesn't look silly, Irons is a music promoter who has it all together. He's worked with Hendrix, the Stones, and Callas herself, and he's in town to promote his current act, a punk bad named Bad Dream. This guy has it all together, from the way he handles a crowd to the way he prepares for a concert to the way he flirts with pretty much every attractive young man in sight. As the movie gathered steam, even adding the always reliable Joan Plowright to the mix, I kicked back and got ready to simply enjoy the man's performance.

Then Fanny Ardent enters the picture. At first, she's not much. She's a lost Callas, a ghost of her former self with a broken voice and a broken will. She's a recluse, confining herself to her (fabulous) Paris apartment and weeping over lost days. It takes Irons and Plowright to rouse her to life once again, involving her in a filmed production of Carmen with a challenging ethical twist that I'll leave for you to discover. Callas comes alive, and when we see her performing she is sizzling sex on a silver platter. It's magical to see her character transform before our eyes, to become fully alive after years of wandering in the wilderness. The sumptuous production numbers, and even Irons' extraordinary performance, almost fade into the background. This movie is all about Ardent, and the woman works magic.

Wow, did I enjoy this movie. I have got to go to the opera.