Serious moviegoers can be thankful today for the official opening of Madstone Theaters in Tampa's Hyde Park shopping district. The renovated former home of AMC Hyde Park 7 showcases independent and foreign films usually squeezed out of megaplexes by more profitable, often inferior Hollywood productions.
The inaugural lineup includes the local debuts of Gus Van Sant's Elephant (see review in this section), the organized crime drama This Thing of Ours and In My Skin, a French psychodrama about self-mutilation (it was unavailable for preview).
This Thing of Ours (R) is notable only as the vanity project of Danny Provenzano, who directed, co-wrote and stars as the hot-headed mastermind of a $2-billion Internet scam financed by the mob. Provenzano, a grandnephew of mobster Tony "Tony Pro" Provenzano, knows something about organized crime; he accepted a plea bargain in 2002 to settle a 44-count indictment for racketeering. He was sentenced in September to 10 years in prison. As a filmmaker, Provenzano is guilty of leaden dialogue, static camera work and ragged pacing. This Thing of Ours simply proves that Scorsese and Coppola got it right years ago and scores of gangster films have imitated their style into insignificance ever since. Even the familiar mugs of Frank Vincent and The Sopranos' Vinnie Pastore are cliches by now. Scenes linger without spark no matter how many f-words and smashed bones Provenzano crams into the picture.
The only new wrinkle in Provenzano's mob's-eye view is having goodfellas talk business in an Asian restaurant rather than an Italian one. Other than that, the movie is a mess of questioned loyalties and plotted revenge. The only good scene features a cameo monologue by James Caan that begins the story and gets reprised in full near the end. Between is the same old bada-bing. Grade: D.
In My Skin (not rated) is a psychological drama in the vein of David Cronenberg's Crash, centered on a woman (played by writer-director Marina de Van) filling the emptiness of her life by cutting and occasionally tasting her skin. The film is shown with English subtitles.
Village Voice film critic Dennis Lim wrote, "Without deploying reductive back story or simplistic psychology, this fearless movie - easily the year's best debut feature - illuminates Esther's pathology as an extreme response to the mind-body split.
"If this sounds unwatchable, it sometimes is. But relentless as she is in detailing Esther's gruesome experiments in transfiguration, de Van realizes too that the situation is ripe for morbid comedy."
Madstone's schedule also includes Shattered Glass (PG-13), a fact-based account of how New Republic reporter Stephen Glass (Hayden Christensen) fabricated at least 27 articles before getting caught. Writer-director Billy Ray's film was recently reviewed in the St. Petersburg Times and received an A grade.
Gwyneth Paltrow's performance as morbid poet-author Sylvia Plath is the best thing about another Madstone offering, Sylvia. More soap opera than insightful about Plath's art, the film also was reviewed recently in the Times, earning a B- grade.
Madstone has bills to pay, so a couple of screens will be reserved for Hollywood studio productions with promising artistic merit. For now they're Clint Eastwood's Mystic River (grade A-) and Ron Howard's The Missing (see blistering review in this section). Oh well, one out of two isn't bad.
