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Reviews
The Long Run (2001)
lots of stubbed toes in the Long Run
This is a South African propaganda film wherein all the blacks and all the whites interact as if race has never been an issue. The utter lack of tension between the haves and have nots is so distracting that for awhile I thought that this was an intentional plot device and that there would eventually be some secret revealed to explain the phony harmony. No such luck.
Whoever wrote, directed, and produced this movie knows very little about what real marathon running is like (many pudgy athletes easily cover 20-40 miles while not even one runner who looks like a long distance runner is shown!)..
The female lead is very beautiful, and she can act, but she can't run. Her backstory is tantalizingly, but no details ever are offered to explain how this illegal alien has learned such perfect English, self composure, and good mental hygiene. She is the second lead in the film and all we know is that she can run (it would be nice to know why), and that she is smarter than and unafraid of all whites, men, and governmental authorities (why and how this is so is an unforgivable omission).
I am almost always a big fan of Mueller-Stahl, but here he is given nothing to work with. He plays an embittered coach who at 60 still cannot train his athletes without reliving his own humiliating experiences in the same race 40 years before. The story unfolds in fits and starts, jumping over gaping plot holes while lingering forever on Mueller-Stahl's quite unbelievably self-absorbed and obviously ineffective dedication to training runners. By the day of the big race he is totally psychotic, becoming more and more unhinged the closer his runner comes to actually winning the race. Again, a little more backstory could have made his Germanic anal retentiveness less cliched.
It is never made clear what the coach's goal for his prodigy is: to finish, to make it past the hill he himself couldn't conquer, or to actually win. All we know is that he treats her like a robot and screams annoyingly at her to always slow down. No wonder his methods are at one point referred to as "eccentric".
This movie was made with an agenda to depict South Africa in insultingly inaccurate ways. Can anyone still spell apartheid?
Crime + Punishment in Suburbia (2000)
Pretentious failure; doesn't go far enough!
Awful acting, dumb structure (the chapter titles telegraph everything), erratic narration with random POVs, a few of your standard 2 ton truck size plot holes, and pretensions to meaning could all be easily forgiven if the violence had been grosser and the sex and nudity much more explicit. ie, as a B movie it gets a D.
Then again I thought I was renting Ozon's Criminal Lovers, which really rocks and is probably everything this movie was trying to be.
Kiss the Sky (1998)
Rare Movie About Upper Middle Class Male Angst Gets it Right
I don't know who the person was who wrote the summary, but he/she did this movie no justice by dismissing it as a couple of guys on a mid life alcohol/drug fueled crisis. My take: I've been in the video biz for 20 years because I love movies--especially those amazing auteur classics Hollywood somehow let slide for so long in the 70s-- and I'm now 48, comfortable, guilty, confused, and feeling totally misunderstood, misjudged, and about to give up. Then I run across "Kiss the Sky", this incredible movie that actually tries to honestly describe the emptiness inherent in being a successful upper middle class (probably white) American Male. How many buddy movies have you seen like "City Slickers" or "Very Bad Things" that almost get that ineffable feeling of loss and despair right only to cop out with lowest common denominator humor or cheap sentiment? "Kiss the Sky", given the times and given the state of the movie industry is the closest we'll ever get. Deftly sidestepping cliches and easy answers, this tale of 2 middle aged guys who are smart enough to know that their material success doesn't mean that much and isn't really their doing anyway goes bravely if imperfectly where no movie that I have ever seen has gone before. ("Leaving Las Vegas" has some resonance but it's ultimately a one man story, not a generational statement.) I don't know where this movie came from or how it got made or who was nuts enough to think it had any commercial viability (it doesn't except if it's hawked as a hard R straight-to-video cheapie, and the person who wants that will be disappointed by this.) Anyway, if I'm speaking to you, watch this movie!