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Lost in the wash
Recent films worth a second glance
Staff Writer, The Prague Post (March 4, 2004) Since the only new release in English this week is the gruesome gore fest Wrong Turn, it's a good time to catch up on other films you may have missed. The biggest of the recent releases is The Last Samurai, an expensive costume drama set in 19th-century Japan. Actor and producer Tom Cruise takes on the martial-arts genre with a very heavy-handed script. He starts out as a nightmare-tormented veteran of the American wars against the Indians, headed to Japan with some fellow soldiers -- including an officer he openly hates -- to teach modern battle tactics. It doesn't work out according to plan, though, and he winds up learning to respect the rebellious samurai. The biggest annoyance is that the head of the rebellious samurai, who rejects all efforts at modernization, speaks English. Another big annoyance is that the film centers on Cruise's character rather than on a Japanese samurai. Director Edward Zwick also made Glory, a Civil War drama about doomed black American soldiers, but centered it on the white officer. This comes off as the same story in samurai drag. A more-modest action effort, The Rundown, also called Welcome to the Jungle, sets its goals low and achieves them. The Rock, as wrestler-turned-actor Dwayne Johnson is known, shows a good deal of improvement over his role in The Scorpion King. Seann William Scott, a mainstay of the American Pie films, has the same kind of semicomic support role he had in Bulletproof Monk. The plot has something to do with Scott hunting for a lost ancient relic, while The Rock is hired to kidnap him back to America. What makes this forgettable B-movie of marginal interest is a bizarre performance by Christopher Walken as the villainous owner of a mine in the Amazon. Walken seems to be doing a parody of Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now. Real events provide a basis for two offbeat dramas. Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers uses the 1968 protests in Paris that started with the politically motivated changes at the French film archives. As the protests develop into widespread anti-government demonstrations, an American film fan and a French brother and sister lock themselves in a big apartment and play sexual games in between re-enacting famous film scenes. The film blends the political awareness of Bertolucci's films such as The Conformist and the explicitness of his Last Tango in Paris. It doesn't rank with his best work, but there are echoes of his glory years. The expose Veronica Guerin, about an Irish reporter who named names in the drug trade and paid dearly for it, is based fairly closely on a true story. In spite of commendable performances by Cate Blanchett and Ciaran Hinds, the film slightly misses the mark and ends up never deciding if it is a thriller or a hagiography. The weak script also oversimplifies the reporter's search for the big man behind the operation. Still, the true story, widely known in Ireland, deserves to be told beyond that country's borders.
Raymond Johnston can be reached at
rjohnston@praguepost.com
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