Author: Philip Kobylarz

Swank, this summer, just got a little swanker with the release of the Brit
ganglander Sexy Beast. Schizophrenically set in the gloomy streets of
London and a posh hillside villa on the sun-soaked coast of Spain, this debut
from Jonathan Glazer is a devilishly naughty ride into the shady other-lives
of a couple of ex-cons who get involved in a one-more-for-old-time’s-sake sure
thing.

The slightly pudgy, sharply dressing, and eminently lovable Gal Dove (Ray
Winstone) is living the life of Riley with his former porn-star wife Deedee
(Amanda Redman) on a Spanish coast magnificently captured by cinematographer
Ian Bird. In luxury’s lap, they and their friends (and eternal guests) Aitch
and Jackie fashion quite a hot and steamy poolside foursome. Their collective
dreamlives among desert lounge-rat exotica include martinis endlessly
trickling, the sun beating them into submissive bliss, and a requisite
fetching, native pool boy, as they gleefully achieve the purest form of
hedonism that exists: escaping the sordid past. Theirs is a Shangri-la with
fresh paella.

When the phone rings with Don Logan (Ben Kingsley) on the other end, paradise
is abruptly lost. The mood is further soured when ‘Malky’ Logan shows up
uninvited with an offer Gal can’t refuse which involves an impregnable bank
and a trip back to the dismal toilet of England. All bloody hell breaks loose
when Logan will not accept no for an answer from his former partner and wildly
vents his fury on anyone within striking range of his tweaked, on the verge of
boiling-over aura.

As a foul-mouthed, terribly dressed, tattoo-sporting, mean-looking, cockney-
accented, kick-ass Ghandi, Kingsley becomes the film. Like his maniacally
focused eyes, his characterization of one obsessed with the nihilism of
obsession is enthralling and creepy and will make you sink into your seat. The
film’s focus on his portrayal of a driven psychopath tiptoeing the borderline
is the beast that overpowers a see-through plot that, in light of the actor s
performance, wanes incidental. The darkness that Kingsley unleashes overpowers
all else.

The heist of a bank in Londontown, planned during a slow point of an orgy, is
what the team of pros rounded up by Logan have set their sights on.
Considering its proximity to a Turkish bath and the general improbability of
the logistics, the robbery is nevertheless filmed so imaginatively that we are
mesmerized and immersed in the scene of the crime. Known for his U.K. Guinness
commercials and videos for Radiohead and Jamiroquai, Glazer unites a gangster
tale, a love story, and a psychological Jekyll and Hyde portrait in a visual
style heavily indebted to the glitz of those fast-paced genres. Peppered with
vignettes that include slow-motion unreality colored in Dali light and
inhabited at times by a furry, disgusting creature that we never quite get to
see close-up, the story is threaded together with scenes of unadulterated
strangeness. These moments seem inspired by the desolate locale, or perhaps
they re mini-tributes to the surreal filmmaker Luis Bu§uel.

More such reveries of the fantastic could have helped the flow of a dreamily
buoyant story that opens with a silly and shocking Python-esque thrill, to say
no more. Energized by a soundtrack that ranges from pulse-pounding techno, to
the trip-hoppy Unkle and South, to the lounge sounds of Dean Martin and Latin
flavorings of Roque Ba§os, the soundtrack pumps the visuals along. Sexy
Beast sounds really good. It looks really good. It feels really good. And
if it s so, so good, then it should be bad.

But it isn t. The pace slows but never lets up entirely. This is largely due
to the lesser of two evils, Mr. Black Magic, Teddy Bass, the big boss icily
played by Ian McShane. He is as striking and collected as any recent
incarnation of Beelzebub. His presence escorts Gal through the final circles
of a personal hell. The anti-climactic resolution to their conflict is edgy
and keeps us hanging. What s spookiest and keeps Gal sleeping with one eye
open is the terror of what might happen: the ghost in the plot. Always, there
s the ghoulie waiting to reappear.

For its speedy 88-minute duration, the film is chaos controlled and unleashed
in a nouveau-noir style: light on the distractions and heavy on action and eye
candy. What makes it swing, as in any crime worth committing, is its many
unpredictable turns due to inevitable eff-ups. Overlooking the
superficialities of details, details, details, this beast of a movie owes a
little to the Coen Brothers Blood Simple and to Tarantino in its visual
nightmare a hairbreadth away from screaming reality. It really has, as
reported by Sundance News, the coolest ending of the year. This film is
definitely a weird immorality tale that s as sexy as the beast himself. Run to
see it and worship at the evil Kingsley s altar!

The attack on Pearl Harbor over half a century ago gouged in the undefeatable American psyche a deep psychological wound that still hasn t completely healed. Pearl Harbor, Touchstone s epic historical romance, recreates the vainglorious era when swing was cool, liquor and lovers flowed, and the deadly theaters of war were yet to be entered. This tale is of the United States adolescence.

Just the fact that this titanic film — starring hunky Ben Affleck and the devastating Brit Kate Beckinsale — appears the summer before the event s 60-year anniversary might make it seem like a sunken ship of a flick. What it turns out to be is a hugely ambitious triptych that mingles fiction, romance, and action adventure in an encapsulated period piece.

At its core is a buddy story. Rural Tennesseans Rafe McCawley (Affleck) and Danny Walker (Josh Hartnett) are a pair of clowning-around boys who accidentally joyride dad s crop duster a Kitty Hawk distance. Addicted at an early age to the thrill of flight, they grow up and enter the service as young flyers who hope for ace-hood and to become lady-killing war heroes.

When Rafe gets recruited by the Royal Air Force to die fighting the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain, the best buddyship is put on hold as is his innocently budding romance with nurse recruit Evelyn Johnson (Beckinsale). As the luck of the draw will have it, best friend Danny and Evelyn both get stationed on the island paradise of Oahu, at Pearl Harbor, where there s little threat of danger and miles of sand and surf.

Crisis arrives in telegram form. News comes that Rafe has been shot down in battle near Dover. Grief, as it will, unites Danny and Rafe s girl Evelyn in something steamier than mere consolation back at the island.

Much too much time is spent setting up this unintentional love triangle when, by dint of the title alone, pyrotechnics are expected. However intensely filmed and edited they are, the initial dog-fighting scenes roar by quickly, and the first hour of the movie lacks the intensity that extended air battles could have added. The bombing of Pearl Harbor, the biggest drama in this drama, finally takes place well into the double love story s telling. Like an unexpected messiah, Rafe suddenly appears just before December 7. As a surprise we all knew was coming, our hero s return from the dead is an anticlimactic cinematic moment that gets squandered.

When the bombs do fall, they hit loud and hard. Director Michael Bay uses the digitally enhanced air raid as a cue to shift from romantic sappiness to what this movie is really about: pure terror. Ships go down trapping crews, bodies acrobatically fly through the air, and beautiful, leggy nurses on the run get mowed down by machine-gun fire. The violence is more realistic and dramatic than it is grotesque — there aren t buckets of guts flung skyward for shock value. Hand-held camera techniques and fluid, shifting points of view — a newsreel reporter s, a dying soldier s — terrifyingly portray the chaos of wholesale slaughter. Even the confusion of the nurses, who plug arteries with their bare hands and are forced to take blood donations in Coke bottles, is vividly and emotively documented. In one memorable scene of horror, Evelyn learns all she ll ever need to know about triage as the paradisiacal outpost is firebombed into a hell on earth.

The story might have ended in the after-the-storm calm, but it continues into the epical third hour. FDR (John Voight) orders a morale-boosting counterattack. The boys, who had enough courage to scramble into the few planes not obliterated on the ground, volunteer for duty and off they go into the wild blue.

Many aspects don t quite live up to the historical, epic expectations of a film about our bloody initiation into World War Two. Dan Aykroyd and Alec Baldwin are miscast as one-dimensional characters, and the manner in which the Zen-wise Japanese act like emotionally detached robots is entirely superficial. An overtly maudlin score could easily have been supplanted by the incredible big band sounds and jazz that were bubbling forth in the 40s.

The painful reality that Americans faced was material and moral: the loss of most of the Pacific fleet and the instantaneous death of 2,300 young men and women on a quiet Sunday morning. Even though this get-what-you-pay-for thrill ride of a megamovie doesn t delve too deeply into the historical moment it seeks to sumptuously recreate, it does pump the adrenaline, puff up the eyes, and convey what the massive suffering must have been like on that day of infamy. In its purely entertaining conflagration of gorgeous destruction, Pearl Harbor opens a vein that makes war-time love stories a timeless obsession: the loss of innocence and the epiphany of our own vulnerability. And the realization that nothing is ever fair in love and war.