Celluloid Heroes

I tried to save my life but it didn’t work.

Damn it, I know I’m supposed to like this movie. I am a movie buff with a great deal of patience for slower, offbeat films. And Miranda July’s directorial debut has a keen sense of character and as a writer, she’s got a terrific ear for the way people talk. The problem with this film is its lack of focus. The plot has a bad case of attention deficit disorder as July crams a Robert Altman-sized cast into its brief indie-film running time.

The film would have been better served by focusing more closely on the relationship of its central characters, socially awkward shoe salesman Richard (John Hawkes) and socially awkward aspiring performance artist Christine (July). Any one of the numerous subplots would have been interesting but just not all of them. When July titled the film “Everyone We Know,” she wasn’t kidding.

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Promise me you won’t let nobody turn you into no cripple, you won’t become no charity case, and you’ll stand on your own two feet.

The most amazing thing about Jamie Foxx’s performance in Ray is how when the real Ray Charles appears briefly on screen toward the end of the movie, there is no jarring disconnect with the rest of the picture. Foxx has Charles’s vocal mannerisms down so perfectly that, when asked to lip-synch to the real performer’s recordings, it is seamless.

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Take off your clothes.

Philip Kaufman’s adaptation of Milan Kudera’s novel is a long, erotic rumination on the nature of freedom, personal, political and sexual. It follows an informal triangle involving a womanizing surgeon named Tomas (Daniel Day Lewis), his shy, sensitive wife, Tereza (Juliette Binoche), and his free-spirited lover, Sabina (Lena Olin), through the Prague Spring of 1968, the brutal Soviet crackdown and its aftermath.

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