This week's films represent a veritable trip around the world as moviegoers who buy a ticket will travel from London to Colorado Springs to Massachusetts to New York City to Kansas before finally settling in South Africa.
"The Prestige" is a London-based drama about deception of the magic kind as two illusionists played by Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale battle it out on stage to deliver what both describe as the ability to transport a human from one space to another. In the late-1800s, making a canary disappear was already considered old hat; therefore, masters of the art of illusion dared to conquer time and space, all the while attempting to steal each other's secrets.
The very well-acted movie, written by "Memento" brothers Christopher and Jonathan Nolan and directed by Christopher, is a terrific entertainment, filled with enough duplicity and romantic entanglement to make Broadway backstabbing seem positively serene. Along for the magic carpet ride is Michael Caine as a clever gent who seems to control all of the secrets. Add Scarlett Johannson as a stage assistant and David Bowie as electrical genius Nikola Tesla (hanging out in Colorado), and you've got a mystery worth puzzling over. Chicanery has rarely been this much fun.
"Running With Scissors" takes eccentric New England family life further than it's ever been in this roller-coaster ride through dysfunction. The film is based on the hugely popular memoir by Augusten Burroughs, who survived the life depicted.
The occasionally hilarious movie, set in the 1970s with attendant music, sets and costuming, relishes the decidedly off-beat, wildly turbulent childhood spent by Augusten as he's shunted off by his wacky parents (alcoholic father Alec Baldwin and delusional mother Annette Bening) to live with her therapist (Brian Cox). He's the patriarch of a family even nuttier than the one from which Augusten came. As written and directed by Ryan Murphy (the presiding genius over the bizarre television series "Nip/Tuck"), the film is more episodic than it should be, but it provides fuel for exceptional acting by all, especially Bening, who will be visited by Oscar with a nomination next year.
"Infamous" travels down a very familiar road, especially if you saw last year's Academy Award winner "Capote." It's basically the same movie, as writer Truman Capote comes to grips with the murder of the Clutter family in Kansas and discovers he's overwhelmed by demons and passions not even he may understand.
An excellent Toby Jones, who looks exactly like Capote, offers an interpretation of the famed In Cold Blood author different from the one delivered by Philip Seymour Hoffman. The very lively movie, well written and perfectly directed by Douglas McGrath, spends more time among the fellow travelers of Capote's fabulous New York social scene.
The top-notch cast includes Sigourney Weaver, Isabella Rossellini, Peter Bogdanovich, Hope Davis and Gwyneth Paltrow as denizens of the fun-loving Manhattan crowd. Also onboard are Jeff Daniels as the key Kansas detective, Daniel Craig as murderer Perry Smith, and Sandra Bullock as novelist Harper Lee, who accompanies Capote to the murder scene and helps him with his writing. All three deliver quality performances. You'll be denying yourself some good things if you miss this movie simply because you saw the other one.
"Catch A Fire" is a history lesson rife with power. Tim Robbins stars as a South African policeman who leads the investigation of "terrorist" activities during the 1980s as cracks begin to show in the system of apartheid. Derek Luke is a simple working man who finds himself radicalized by a false accusation and arrest. The film plays out like a thriller, but offers telling glimpses of life in South Africa, a nation where 25 million blacks confronted three million whites, some of them trained as "freedom fighters" in neighboring states.
The movie is tightly directed by Phillip Noyce from a screenplay by Shawn Slovo, whose parents were white anti-apartheid activists. Slovo's father Joe is a character in the movie, and the entire enterprise rings with the sound of truth.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | October 31 2006 |