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Indie Flix
By STEVE PERSALL and PHILIP BOOTH
© St. Petersburg Times,
published June 21, 2001
Movies in limited release:
Lives of the party
The Anniversary Party (R) (115 min.) -- Ecstasy is the drug that detonates a Hollywood Hills celebration of a marriage that just got off the rocks. Agony of all sorts, some darkly amusing, is all that's left in the wreckage. By the end of the night, those rocks seem like a safer place to be for Joe (Alan Cumming) and Sally (Jennifer Jason Leigh, above, with Jennifer Beals, left, and Cumming).
They're a typical show biz couple, a writer and an actor, heading in different career directions. Sally is flubbing her roles, and Joe's novel about their life is being turned into a movie, with him directing. Sally is too old to play herself now, so starlet Skye Davidson (Gwyneth Paltrow) is set to portray her. Inviting Skye to the party isn't a good idea. She brings the ecstasy tablets, fueling a night of anger, lust and misguided lunges at wisdom, a hangover before the party even ends.
On the guest list are Sally's director (John C. Reilly) and his ultra-nervous wife (Jane Adams), an Oscar-winning actor (Kevin Kline) and his wife (Phoebe Cates), who gave up show biz for parenthood. Business associates with various agendas include Parker Posey, Beals and John Benjamin Hickey. There's also the couple next door, a priggish author and his overly patient wife, who have a bone to pick about Joe and Sally's barking dog.
The Anniversary Party is a minor triumph for Cumming and Leigh, as actors and especially in their first effort as co-writers and co-directors. Inspired by today's digital ease, they cobbled an idea, invited friends for a 19-day shoot and created a New Age Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It's a place where a game of charades can erupt into rage or a swimmer can simply forget to breathe. Material fulfillment is everything, from real estate handled like drug deals to children becoming accessories.
Kline's presence is a cagey link to The Ice Storm and The Big Chill, two films The Anniversary Party resembles in structure and tone. One of the script's most telling moments occurs when Cates' character complains that having children takes away the option of committing suicide. That same gallows humor fatalism marks each role. This isn't a pleasant story, and nobody earns any sympathy, but moral decay on-screen is seldom so stylish.
Opens Friday at Tampa Theatre. A-
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-- STEVE PERSALL, Times film critic
A rousing ode to Latin jazz
Calle 54 (G) (105 min.) -- Fans of Latin jazz will be thrilled by Calle 54, an alternately exuberant and genteel valentine to the genre from Belle Epoque director Fernando Trueba. And newcomers may become converts.
Trueba's movie, more of a concert film than a documentary, is the year's best show of its kind, a collection of blue chip performances by saxophonist Paquito D'Rivera, the late Tito Puente, Cuban piano genius Chucho Valdes, trumpeter-percussionist Jerry Gonzalez (above), Chico O'Farrill's orchestra and others, all caught at the fabled Sony Studios in New York.
The sound is crystal clear, as Trueba's cameras caress the musicians. And the filmmaker demonstrates creativity in his use of color, with Gonzalez's quintet, a.k.a. the Fort Apache Band, seen against a background of blood red, and the divine Puente and his bandmates shot in white on white.
The single most exhilarating performance is given by Michel Camilo, a pianist born in the Dominican Republic, with drummer Horacio "El Negro" Hernandez and bassist Anthony Jackson. Camilo's fingers are a blur during one speedy passage, and the three interact as one highly creative, rhythmically complex unit.
There are plenty of other performances to celebrate, including those by Brazilian-born pianist Eliane Elias; Arturo O'Farrill's big band; and a pair of duets featuring pianist Bebo Valdes, born in Cuba but living in Sweden since the '60s. He is seen on-screen with his son, Chucho, and with fellow octogenarian Cachao, the legendary Cuban bassist. It would be nearly impossible not to be moved by the rootsy folksiness of the music and the deep bonds Bebo shares with both men. A
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-- PHILIP BOOTH, Times correspondent
Stranded tourists do Shakespeare
The King Is Alive (R) (110 min.) -- A busload of tourists is stranded in a North African desert where personal truths scorch hotter than the sun. Staging a makeshift version of Shakespeare's King Lear becomes their method of passing time and expressing repressed emotions. The film is directed by Kristian Levring, a member of the Dogme 95 consortium of independent filmmakers (including Lars von Trier), who believe no-frills movies come closer to achieving dramatic purity.
Film critic Michael Atkinson of the Village Voice wrote: "Levring's movie attains a stunning sun-and-sand-blasted ambience. But the inevitable 'fantastic striptease of basic human need' becomes collateral narrative; you don't maroon bourgeois in the African outlands anymore (at least not since Antonioni's The Passenger) unless you're creating a parable on alienation or social collapse.
"The characters are stock (Janet McTeer and Bruce Davison's discontented married couple, Jennifer Jason Leigh's empty-headed hipster, Romane Bohringer's brooding student (above, with Jason Leigh), Brion James' hotheaded Ugly American, etc.), and their petty battles and outbursts are perfectly rote."
Opens Friday at Channelside Cinemas in Tampa.
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