Milla Jovovich has an unusually close encounter in horror flick
THE FOURTH KIND (Olatunde Osunsanmi, 2009)
Opens Friday, November 6
www.thefourthkind.net
While the truth might be out there somewhere, it’s not exactly going to be found in this very strange venture. Playing more like IN SEARCH OF . . . A LOST EPISODE OF THE X-FILES, director Olatunde Osunsanmi’s THE FOURTH KIND combines actual audio and video taken by psychologist Abbey Tyler in October 2000 with fictional re-creations by actors to try to lend believability to this story of possible repeated alien abduction in Nome, Alaska. Milla Jovovich, who really needs a new agent, stars as Dr. Tyler, whose husband has just been brutally murdered. Dr. Tyler is investigating a series of odd cases in which local men and women are having trouble sleeping, waking up every morning at 3:33, seeing a white owl, and suddenly speaking in Sumerian. Under hypnosis, the patients relive frightening scenes that lead to real-life violence. Osunsanmi (WITHIN) ups the ante – and complicates the narrative – by intercutting actual footage from Tyler’s studies, often playing them on a split-screen against the reenactments to prove how real this must all be. He also includes segments from an interview he conducted with Tyler at Chapman University as she details what happened to her and her family. Will Patton is annoying as the sheriff who thinks Tyler’s study is too dangerous to continue, while the solid Elias Koteas is Tyler’s mentor who refuses to believe no matter how strong the evidence might be. When THE FOURTH KIND tries to just be a horror movie, it’s not wholly awful, but when it strains and strains to assert that these close encounters are real, it borders on the edge of the ridiculous and just plain silly.
François Truffaut shot out of the blocks in 1959 with the classic 400 BLOWS, and he followed it up with this magnificent noir about a virtuoso saloon piano player and his always-in-trouble brother. French crooner Charles Aznavour is super-cool as the secretive, shy piano player with a hidden past who gets caught up in his crooked brother’s dangerous predicament, against his better judgment. Comedy mixes with pathos, dance-hall jollies lead to murder and kidnapping, and lost love holds a curse in a dark, haunting film you will never forget.
After getting a biopsy taken and drawing the death card while consulting a fortune-teller, popular French singer Cléo (Corinne Marchand) begins looking back at her life — and wondering just what’s left of it — while awaiting the dreaded results. The blonde beauty talks with old friends, asks her piano player (Michel Legrand, who composed the score) to write her a song, and meets a dapper gentleman in the park, becoming both participant and viewer in her own existence. As Cléo makes her way around town, director (and former photographer) Agnès Varda shows off early 1960s Paris, expertly winding her camera through the Rive Gauche. Just as Cléo seeks to find out what’s real (her actual name is Florence and that gorgeous hair is a wig), Varda shoots the film in a cinema verité style, almost as if it’s a documentary. She even sets the film in real time (adding chapter titles with a clock update), enhancing the audience’s connection with Cléo as she awaits her fate, but the movie runs only ninety minutes, adding mystery to what is to become of Cléo, as if she exists both on-screen and off, alongside the viewer. A central film in the French Nouvelle Vague and one of the first to be made by a woman, CLÉO DE 5 À 7 is an influential classic even as it has lost a step or two over the years. Varda, now in her eighties, has also made such well-regarded films as LE BONHEUR (1965), VAGABOND (1985), THE GLEANERS AND I (2000), and THE BEACHES OF AGNÉS (2008), among others.
Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul won the Jury Prize at Cannes for this beautiful, mystical work that will thoroughly engage you — if you allow it to. Part tender love story between a country boy (Banlop Lomnoi) and a soldier (Dakda Kaewbuadee), part folktale set in the deep forests of Thailand, TROPICAL MALADY is a like a visual poem in which details are not as important as the overall effect, which is intoxicating. The unorthodox film features ghosts, a shape-shifter, unusual characters, and a playful sense of humor that come together to form a subtle meditation on life and love.
Released a few years before the Summer of Love and Prague Spring, Miloš Forman’s LOVES OF A BLONDE is a very funny romantic black comedy that also has a lot to say about women’s burgeoning sexual freedom. The delightful Hanu Brejchovou stars as Andula, a young factory worker whose sexual liberation is ahead of its time in an old-fashioned small town. When a trainload of military reservists arrives, most of the single women do their best to attract the uniformed men at a big party, but Andula is more interested in pianist Milda (Vladimíra Pucholta). In a scene for the ages, three men try to pick up Andula and her two friends, with hysterical results. Later, when Andula visits Milda in Prague, she meets the piano player’s parents (Milada Jezková and Josef Sebánek), who are a droll riot. A Czech New Wave classic that evokes Godard and Truffaut, LOVES OF A BLONDE, which was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, caused a sensation when it played the New York Film Festival and introduced Forman (ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST, AMADEUS) to the world. Notably, assistant director and cowriter Ivan Passer, who also worked with Forman on THE FIREMEN’S BALL, defected to America following Prague Spring and went on to make such films as BORN TO WIN and CUTTER’S WAY.