Prettiest girl I ever seen, see her shake on the movie screen
Eat Drink Man Woman (Ang Lee, 1994). Lee's third feature and his last Taiwanese film before making the unlikely but rewarding jump to Sense and Sensibility and Hollywood employment as steady as he desired. The plot concerns the master chef father of three grown daughters and the various relationships, familial and romantic, that shape these people. The script is the usual smart, sad concoction wrought with the tender realities of human emotion that stand as the hallmark of Lee's collaborations with James Schamus (Hui-Ling Wang, co-writer of Lee's foreign language films that followed is also credited here). Yet the whole film, while inviting with its quiet charms, feels a little pedestrian. It lacks the flintiness of its predecessor and the evocative richness of that previously mentioned follow-up.
Spartan (David Mamet, 2004). He's a guy whose place in the canon of playwrights is assured, but David Mamet has never really nailed it with his big-screen writer-director efforts (though I concede that I've never seen his much lauded feature directorial debut). As the years go by, it seems less and less likely he'll concoct a movie masterpiece. His terse style has remained, but his pointedness has grown soft. Ignoring its pedigree, Spartan is a run-of-the-mill potboiler, a convoluted story involving a major political figure's daughter and the seedy world of human trafficking. The most interesting aspect is watching certain actors take on Mamet's distinctive dialogue, still as sharp and crisp as a Zippo lighter snapping shut. It tames Val Kilmer's natural hamminess and allows Kristen Bell to demonstrate that she's got impressive range that extends beyond the enthralling, endearing wit of a certain TV detective role.
Pulp (Mike Hodges, 1972). Michael Caine plays a dime store novelist who unwittingly gets pulled into a complicated plot of nefarious doings. It's the sort of revamped noir that could be found with some regularity in the rule-breaking cinema of the seventies. Caine's drowsy take on detective work has some corollary with Elliot Gould's ambling private eye in the following year's The Long Goodbye. Unfortunately, the whole thing made me pretty drowsy, too. Director Mike Hodges brings a steady restraint to the film that is probably intended to be sternly grounded, but winds up just numbing, an odd and unfortunate approach for a film that is fashioned, more than anything else, as a wry comedy.
Lenny (Bob Fosse, 1974). Armed with a Best Director Oscar for his prior film, Cabaret, Bob Fosse struck out from musicals to make a biopic about daring, influential, corrosive comedian Lenny Bruce. In its cycle of genius and self-destruction, it's a clear precursor to Fosse's superior All That Jazz. It's as if Fosse needed a less personal training ground to make an autobiographical film so awash in self-loathing. Lenny is weak in its set-up and its weirdly truncated climax. Fosse seems plainly disinterested in these portions of Bruce's journey. In the middle, though, the depiction of Bruce raising his distinctive voice and fighting a system that wants to silence it is completely engrossing, in no small part because the film lets Bruce's own routines carry the narrative. In one notable instance, deep into Bruce's decline, Fosse films a whole rambling performance as a single, unadorned master shot. Dustin Hoffman's performance as Bruce is very strong, though it's strange to see this incredibly immersive actor play the role so straight (there are a couple line readings where he sounds exactly like Michael Dorsey). He doesn't try to duplicate Bruce. He instead just taps into his passion, his frustration, his rhythms. There's also an excellent performance by Valerie Perrine as Bruce's lost, wounded wife.
The Ballad of Cable Hogue (Sam Peckinpah, 1970). One of my favorite parts of the excellent "making of" feature on the Magnolia DVD is Jason Robards talking about the sheer lunacy of working with Sam Peckinpah on this film. Inevitably, the movie itself doesn't live up to Robards' reminiscence. In fact, it's a little sedate by the exploding blood packet standards of Peckinpah, especially as a follow-up to The Wild Bunch. It's a fairly standard western with some dippy comedy elements grafted onto it. It's solid enough, if a little forgettable. As usual, Robards is a pleasure to watch, artfully finding new wrinkles within his character's curmudgeonly persona.