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DAREDEVIL (2003) - d. Mark Steven Johnson
Oh, god. I expected it to be bad. Really bad. But it was surreal bad.
I'm really bummed about the mess they made of this film. I used to buy a lot of super-hero comics, and while I wasn't a huge Daredevil reader - the art and often the writing never really hooked me - I was a big fan of the character. Yeah, there's a lot of similarities with Batman, but Daredevil was his own thing, a super-hero with a huge physical handicap, all kinds of strange Catholic guilt, and a real-world neighborhood - Hell's Kitchen - which he'd been sworn to protect. And the other characters in his story - Kingpin, Elektra, Bullseye, Foggy - were somehow a lot more interesting and 'real' than those in the average comic. If I was a famous A-list director and you'd asked me which super-hero movie I'd want to do, the answer would be easy: Daredevil should make a great movie.
I think the big problem with this movie starts with Mark Steven Johnson. I don't know what the fuck anyone was thinking handing this guy the directing job here. He wrote 'Big Bully' and 'Grumpy Old Men'. He directed 'Simon Birch'. Fuck that. Make a heartwarming John Irving adaptation about the handicapped starring Oliver Platt, Ashley Judd and an eleven-year old midget, and you're going to see me introducing razor to wrists. So I guess I was predisposed to hate this movie.
The Assmaster Himself
So yeah, 'Daredevil'. Ben Affleck as Matt Murdock. Great call. I was bummed when I'd originally heard that Matt Damon was going to be in it, but watching the movie, you've got to think Damon would've been a much better choice. Affleck's career has achieved a level of crassness - in terms of paycheck roles and mailed-in performances - that's hard to rival. But the worst casting isn't Affleck or even Michael Clarke Duncan as Kingpin (another brutal call), the worst part of this movie is Jennifer Garner as Elektra. She may be on her way to becoming a big star, but she's just so fricking WASPy. If there'd ever been a late-80s/early-90s girl's boarding school trend to go along with the 'Dead Poet's'/'School Ties'/'Scent of a Woman'-era, she would've been a shoe-in to star in most of them. I don't really know much about the character in the comic, but I do know that she was sexy and exotic. Garner looks great in tights, but she sure as hell doesn't look Greek or dark or mysterious. As it stands, she and Ben may look like they belong to the same country club, but neither of them belong on-screen in this movie.
Sure, Colin Farrell rips/hams it up as Bullseye, but one relatively decent performance isn't going to make up for this trash. This thing is just a total mess. I could tear at it for hours, weeks. But it's not going to change anything. And if I'm already bored writing about it, what must it be like to read about?
'Don't forget, I suck!'
156 RIVINGTON (2003) - d. Andrea Meller
'156 Rivington' is a documentary, only an hour long, and it's about this squat/artist's collective in downtown NYC called ABC No Rio. 156 Rivington is No Rio's street address. I used to go to hardcore shows there when I was a lot younger. I'm not going to write that much on the film since it's pretty self-explanatory; nothing brilliant, but good at what it is.
From the sound of things, that early 90s era was really as good as it ever got at No Rio. The film explores some of the interesting concepts behind the space, especially how the gentrification of downtown has impacted not only the building's administration, but also the nature of the services the facility provides. I haven't been to too many places like ABCNR in other parts of the country, but I liked people pointing out that there's more attitude at this address than you'll find at similar facilities in cities like Berkeley or Portland. IheartNY.
It could've pushed more buttons, it doesn't dig deep enough into the difficulties of collectivism, and it doesn't explain clearly enough how much peril the building faces in its dealings with the city (though it tries), but all in all, it's an interesting film. And it's ultimately a necessary document of an institution that - for a small but vital group - is more than just a footnote in the history of downtown New York.
DON'T YOU WORRY, IT'LL PROBABLY PASS (2003) - d. Cecilia Neant-Falk
I forgot about this yesterday. It was on Sundance at 4:00am on Thursday night/Friday morning when I got back to the house from New York.
This is a film about three young Swedish girls who are lesbians and how they individually start to come to terms with their identities as teenagers and homosexuals. Each of the subjects, Natalie, My, and Joppe, has been given a camera to create video diaries and do their own interviews with friends and families.
Clearly, if you're dealing with teenage girls, especially gay teenage girls in an exceptionally homogeneous society, you're going to get some potent material. A teenager's identity is confusing enough without adding alternative sexuality to the mix. Neant-Falk picked three incredible kids to profile in the film, and while there are common threads between the stories, each stands out for its own reasons, and you can't help hoping for happiness for all of them.
The director does a nice job of mixing up the three threads into a consistent narrative, and that grasp on her story is evident right from the introduction stage. There's a real sense of space in the film as each story has plenty of room for the telling, but you never feel that she's lingering on one subject for too long. There's some really nice montage work, and you get the sense that Neant-Falk is ready to move on to bigger stories. And most importantly, by the end of the film, you really feel like you've seen some sort of satisfying resolution in each of the three stories.
I could barely keep it together for either the sequence where My's mother explains how she felt about finding out that My was gay - parental love is never so eloquently expressed - or for the sequence where Natalie's band debuts at a Lesbian festival. Even the story of Joppe - who throughout seems like the one who's teetering closest to the edge - ends with a sense of real hope. By the end of the movie, I was totally ready to go marching with GLAD, such was the fury of my girl-power.
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