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Indie Flix
By STEVE PERSALL
© St. Petersburg Times,
published August 9, 2001
Movies in limited release:
Swinger 'Sopranos'
[Photo: Artisan Entertainment]
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Vince Vaughn, left, and Jon Favreau get a taste of mob life when they're hired to transport $200,000 to New York.
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Made (R) (96 min.) -- Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn are "money," to borrow a compliment they devised in 1996 for the cocktail culture comedy Swingers. The same loud-mouthed, ill-mannered appeal surfaces again in Made, a mobster yarn filled with snappy, profane patter and hipster cool, although the two heroes are anything except cool.
Bobby (Favreau) and Ricky (Vaughn) are part-time boxers and construction workers who always wanted to move in gangland circles. They get the chance when a low-level money launderer (Peter Falk) hires them to take $200,000 to New York. The assignment isn't important; it's the ways Bobby and Ricky constantly mishandle it. They're enjoying the rush of mob life without doing anything to earn it.
Favreau directs Made in a style recalling the works of John Cassavetes, with hand-held cameras imposing on circuitous conversations that sound improvised. They reveal humorously, but only to viewers ready to overlook the static action and listen closely to the call-back jokes. The appearance of Falk, a favorite of Cassavetes, seals the aesthetic connection to the late filmmaker.
Vaughn has sorely needed a role like this to affirm the potential unveiled in Swingers. Ricky is a guy you'd like to strangle, but he would still be able to say something stupid to get on your nerves. Like Edward Norton's character in Rounders, Ricky is unavoidable bad news, a kid playing in a possibly violent candy store. Favreau is fine as Vaughn's dumbstruck straight man.
Made fits perfectly into the Sopranos/Analyze This image of organized crime with quirky personalities and best-laid plans going awry. You're expecting something criminally romantic such as The Godfather? Fuggedaboudit.
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Opens Friday at Tampa Theater. B+
Nothing to see here, folks
Fast Food, Fast Women (R) (98 min.) -- Another pocket of New York neuroses gets explored by a filmmaker not as clever as he believes. Writer-director Amos Kollek creates some interesting weirdos who quickly lose their novelty in these fractured, contrived circumstances.
The central loony is Bella (Anna Thomson, above), a diner waitress who continually reminds everyone that she's approaching 35. Her married lover (Austin Pendleton) babbles about strange plays he's producing as alibis not to see her. Bella's new fling is a rude author (Jamie Harris) who shares custody of two children and time with other women. The diner has a resident hooker who stutters, an assortment of know-it-alls and other familiar metro-types.
Everybody talks about sex and few do anything constructive with it. Bella's low self-esteem seems contagious as doubts continually block people from something happier than they're doing now.
Kollek's cumbersome screenplay lacks wit, his casting -- especially Thomson -- is questionable, and the recurring peep show themes seem more like a fetish than an artistic flourish.
Opens Friday at Channelside Cinemas in Tampa. D
A new vessel for Mamet's wordplay
Lakeboat (R) (98 min.) -- Years before playwright-screenwriter David Mamet blistered our ears with Glengarry Glen Ross, he worked as a summer intern on a steel freighter in Chicago. The job inspired his 10th produced play, Lakeboat, now directed for the screen by longtime Mamet collaborator Joe Mantegna.
Mamet's younger brother, Tony, plays the author's alter ego, a new ear for the dockworkers to bend with their secrets and lies. The film is essentially a series of monologues conveyed by an ensemble cast including Charles Durning, George Wendt, Denis Leary and Robert Forster (Jackie Brown).
New York Times film critic A.O. Scott wrote: "The film's chief pleasure, a considerable one, is in hearing Mr. Mamet's characteristic idiom -- the rude, sprung-rhythm wordplay, the dialogue-of-the-deaf philosophizing -- so close to its real-world source. . . .
"The dialogue bubbles with disquisitions on women, work and booze ('It's a curse and an elevation'), with roughneck koans ('I knew a guy who ate a chair, just because nobody stopped him') and with heated arguments about nothing. . . . The film unfolds with the leisurely swing of a summer spent doing nothing very strenuous."
Opens Friday at Channelside Cinemas in Tampa.
Road trip to romance
Jump Tomorrow (PG) (96 min.) -- A shy, Nigerian-born office worker (Tunde Adebimpe) misses the airport arrival of his fiancee, instead meeting a lively Latina named Alicia (Natalia Verbeke) who might change his arranged-marriage plans. Alicia is also engaged, but a road trip with other eccentrics to her parents' home makes her reconsider.
Los Angeles Times film critic Kevin Thomas wrote: "Many try but few succeed as well as writer-director Joel Hopkins with his beguiling first feature in giving a fresh spin to 1930s screwball comedy. His inspired sense of humor is equaled only by his inspired casting, and that's a sure-fire combination, especially when it's been blended with a warm, embracing sensibility and a jaunty score. It's very likely that Hopkins and his colleagues on both sides of the camera will be heard from again."
Opens Friday at Channelside Cinemas in Tampa.
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