![]() ![]() That Bad Santa works to recuperate a character that couldn’t be more mainstream speaks to an opportunity not afforded to Palestinian Suleiman. Zwigoff’s careful eye sketches his characters from the raw material of the American underground: comic book artists, record collectors, and postured disaffected youths in effort to create a hopeful, if weary, portrait of and for those operating outside of the mainstream. It’s just one startling sequence in a film full of genius and rage that completely underlines the cultural differences behind the two positions of filmmaking. Just a bloody Santa suit and a bunch of undelivered presents. Instead of Billy Bob cussin’ and fuckin’ his way to salvation, Suleiman’s West Bank Santa is anonymous, on the run, and bearing a stab wound delivered before the film even begins. Not so with Elia Suleiman’s Divine Intervention. Though Terry Zwigoff’s Bad Santa goes out of its way to demolish one of the West’s most cherished institutions, it does end up grudgingly admitting that capitalism’s bearded free agent isn’t all bad. Joel, heed this advice: less doesn’t necessarily have to be a bore. That he had to follow it with a tawdry yet completely awful piece of retro-trash like Veronica Guerin hurts a little, but this former costume designer has never seemed so comfortable as when confined with Colin Farrell in a nondescript New York City phone booth on its last day. Since nothing Schumacher’s made thus far really counts as cinema, we decided to throw him a bone for this tawdry yet enjoyable piece of retro-trash. MKīest Debut Feature: Joel Schumacher, Phone Booth Budget of $300 million aside, let’s not forget that this is still very much the director of Heavenly Creatures. The purity of Frodo’s kiss to the top of Sam’s head at the close of the series has only a precedent within the final moments of E.T. In fact, when was the last time any sort of love story, hetero or homo, was given a full 12 hours (if extended cuts are considered.and they should be) to blossom? No wonder film executives originally wanted to change Sam’s gender, much to the immediate horror of Tolkien fans everywhere: this is potent, challenging stuff. Frodo,” and Wood’s compassionate, intermittent reciprocation, Peter Jackson has given us Hollywood’s first truly developed evocation of male-male love-uncomfortable viewers want to cheapen it to intimations of lust. Hoberman’s in the Village Voice (“gayer than Angels in America”) actually do is denigrate Elijah Wood and Sean Astin’s revelatory achievement thanks to Astin’s ever-increasing commitment to his “Mr. It’s easy to crack jokes regarding their incredibly close, beyond brotherly bond, but what the tossed-off, even seemingly innocuous remarks like J. Throughout the myriad “climaxes” of the series, heroic hobbits Frodo and Sam often seemed about a quarter of an inch away from a passionate liliputian liplock. The “Oh, Just Grow Up” Award goes to all those critics who delighted in thinking they single-handedly uncovered the homoeroticism in Lord of the Rings upon witnessing The Return of the King’s mammoth, tear-stained sayonara. The “cheap twist” puts the entire previous 110 minutes into question, and makes us wonder, even in this banana-yellow and blood-red comic strip, if any of it was “justified." -Michael Koresky And it’s the very end of Volume One that’s the clincher: To chalk off the closing-line revelation as a mere cliffhanger is to miss Tarantino’s uncovering of the moral rot in genre conventions. But that odd melancholy that diffuses the supposed “catharsis” following Lucy Liu’s calligraphic beheading is no mistake. “You come out feeling nothing,” as one wizened New York critic assumed of us all. Unemotional? Every time I saw it, each scene in which a little girl must watch as her parents are slaughtered before her very eyes triggered a devastating hush in the audience. A candy-colored but not sugarcoated reconfiguration of revenge story tropes, it created a truly queasy pop-culture parable, more challenging in its refusal to grant simplified character identification than Tarantino’s ever attempted in the past. Truth is: Kill Bill: Volume One is in itself more complete than any other American film from last year. But all of the critical griping about its being incomplete was simply the safe haven for the unimaginative-without a satisfying wrap-up, many didn’t know how to mete out their emotions. Miramax-bashers and general movie cynics are not incorrect in the assumption that Harvey and Quentin’s cut-in-half/double-the-proftis strategy will undoubtedly pay off. ![]() ![]() Kill Bill’s “Volume One” designation seems almost beside the point.
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