EW review: Odd saga of other 'Exorcist'
Schrader's prequel might have been better left unseen
By Owen Gleiberman
Entertainment Weekly
(Entertainment Weekly) -- If you're a certain kind of moviegoer -- my kind -- then the announcement that Paul Schrader's prequel to "The Exorcist," was being shelved after it had been fully shot and edited only stoked your desire to see it.
After all, what crime against popcorn could Schrader, the acclaimed director of "Auto Focus" and "Affliction," possibly have perpetrated that would inspire Morgan Creek, the film's production company, to dump his version and reshoot the entire thing -- with Renny Harlin, that hack-of-all-trades, directing?
Reports at the time indicated that Schrader, working from a script co-written by novelist Caleb Carr, had delivered a slow and brooding ''art film'' instead of the gory, sensationalist head-twister the studio wanted. But one executive's pretentious dud is another's masterpiece. Could Schrader's film really have been that bad -- or was it a victim of degraded tastes, the daring and poetic franchise horror movie the Man didn't want you to see?
The strange saga of "Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist" is now complete, since the Man, in his wisdom, has chosen to release it after all. Perhaps he looked at the tepid box office grosses generated by Harlin's "Exorcist: The Beginning" and figured that he had little to lose by shoving another slab of overcooked deviled ham into theaters.
Schrader's film is a notch better than Harlin's (it's elegantly framed and stately where the other one was music-video pushy), but when you boil out the demon feathers ... it's the same damn movie.
Once again, we're treated to the dusty desert saga of the 40ish Father Merrin (Stellan Skarsgard), who undergoes a crisis of faith after being forced, at Nazi gunpoint, to make a Fatal Moral Choice.
Trading his priest's robes for an archaeologist's khakis, Merrin arrives in East Africa, where he finds a cadre of British military colonialists running roughshod over the natives. He also finds a church, buried up to its dome in sand, haunted by the spirit of the Antichrist. The key word in that sentence is ''spirit.'' "The Exorcist" showed you the devil, but "Dominion" mostly suggests him, with oodles of omens and stylishly arid tableaux.
"Dominion" is far too straightforward in its spook tactics to be pretentious. There are moments, however, when it does seem as if the director is making Diary of a Country Priest as a light show of floating dread.
The movie shares one jolting shock image with Harlin's "Exorcist" -- a bloody fetus covered in maggots -- but the relative absence of crude effects would be more compelling if Skarsgard had something to do aside from looking impotent in his anguish.
Schrader, in "Auto Focus," displayed a devious sense of sin, but in "Dominion" the Calvinist schoolboy in him insists on trumping sin with guilt. Had the movie stayed on the shelf, it might have haunted Schrader's resume as a theoretical lost gem. As it is, viewers can decide for themselves whether it was his version or Harlin's that squeezed this franchise dry.
EW Grade: C
'Modigliani'
Reviewed by Scott Brown
The lushness of a Modigliani is largely absent from "Modigliani," a seemingly made-for-BBC biopic of the volatile Montmartre painter, sculptor and Picasso contemporary.
Andy Garcia immerses himself in ''Modi,'' luxuriating in his rumpled vanity and clownish self-loathing, his bourgeois drive for financial success vying with his proud, penniless bohemianism. Beneath it all, Garcia locates a crushing insecurity, escaping in surges of exhibitionistic alcoholism and self-destructive histrionics.
But the picture itself cannot contain or contextualize his queasy, reeling energy; it is a tidy stack of snapshots, unencumbered by a point of view.
"Modigliani" pinballs between what the filmmakers consider the twin foci of their subject's career: his rivalry with Picasso (Omid Djalili, presenting Pablo as an appealing, if cartoonish, cross between a pasha and the fat kid picked last for sports) and his love affair with the last and greatest of his paramours, Jeanne Hebuterne (Elsa Zylberstein, who, with her large, capsizing eyes and elongated features, was a casting choice so eerily apt she's essentially a special effect).
Lovely muses aside, Picasso and Modigliani are the real couple to watch here, though you do wish their interactions would get beyond the Montmartre equivalent of nanny-nanny-boo-boo. (''Pablo, how do you make love to a cube?'')
The bigger problem is "Modigliani's" strange dearth of Modiglianis. Perhaps a deeper dip into his sumptuous, fever-ripe work would better illustrate how a great lover of life unconsciously, perhaps instinctively, ended up choosing death.
EW Grade: C-
'Mad Hot Ballroom'
Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman
Innocent and vivacious and charming as they are, it's easy to watch the New York City public-school children in "Mad Hot Ballroom" and think that the movie is treating them as exotic pets.
This is a documentary about fifth graders who join a 10-week after-school program in which they're taught ballroom dancing. If you want to see an image that's coyly hilarious in its incongruity, it would be hard to top that of 11-year-old boys and girls doing the merengue, the rumba, the fox-trot and the tango -- hot dances, built on the flirtation of loose hip sockets, that are borderline funny even when adults do them because they're essentially stylized foreplay.
The students in "Mad Hot Ballroom" concentrate with touching single-mindedness on their steps -- they're like munchkins puttin' on the Ritz -- yet they're blissfully oblivious to the sensual aspect of what they're doing. When one verbally precocious child displays his ''tango face'' (head down, eyebrows lowered), it's like watching a seal play water volleyball -- you don't know whether to give him a hand or toss him a snack.
Kids ... they do the darnedest things! That, for a while, appears to be the attitude of Marilyn Agrelo, who has directed "Mad Hot Ballroom" with a facile yet unmistakably clever feel for what it takes to create a crowd-pleasing documentary.
Agrelo focuses on three different schools from a trio of New York neighborhoods -- posh Tribeca, tough Bensonhurst and low-income Washington Heights -- and though she interviews a handful of the children and gives us slivers of their lives, we get to know them in only the sketchiest of ways. The movie is like a superficial version of "Spellbound" seasoned with a pinch of "Hoop Dreams" tossed with "American Idol."
But then something inspiring happens. The after-school program culminates in a competition, and as "Mad Hot Ballroom" moves from the quarterfinals to the semis and so on, the kids grow more artful, until they begin to look and move like dancers. Through the grace of their talent and the sweat of their devotion, they feel their way toward the sinuousness of the adults they're imitating.
As their moves catch fire, their herky-jerky sensuality morphing into the real thing, they stop being funny because they've grown into who they are.
"Mad Hot Ballroom" has an overly conventional children-of-the-city uplift; it offers an obligatory montage of sashaying kids cut to ''Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now).'' Yet Agrelo, to her credit, never preaches about the importance of government funding for after-school programs. She doesn't have to: Her entire movie is a testament to the discipline, humor and life of kids who swing.
EW Grade: B
'Up for Grabs'
Reviewed by Gregory Kirschling
In 2001, Barry Bonds smashed his record-setting 73rd home run of the season into an arcade at the San Francisco Giants' Pac Bell Park, where a bellowing mob moshed after a really valuable ball.
The trippiest moment in "Up for Grabs" -- a twisty little documentary about the aftermath of Bonds' fat swing -- comes when a short, doughy and eerily calm Californian named Patrick Hayashi smiles wanly right at the camera while the crowd obliviously rages around him. Somewhat impossibly, and captured in a miraculous TV-news image that looks like something out of David Lynch, he's cupping Bonds' cannonball in his mitt. It's as if Hayashi and his ball were dropped down among lions, but kept safe by baseball gods.
Unfortunately, a guy named Alex Popov sues Hayashi, claiming -- with evidence to his credit -- that he'd caught the ball first. The movie drolly documents the what's-the-world-coming-to media circus that followed, and its ''fundamental question of property law'' is a corker to chew on.
I say the movie is infuriatingly unfair to Hayashi; others will cry foul for Popov. See it with an umpire.
EW Grade: B
'Ma Mere'
Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman
How does one translate the ferocious erotic works of Georges Bataille to the screen? In his essays and his fiction, Bataille, the French philosopher of transgression, described a range of forbidden acts, and he got off on them, too, yet he was searching for a poetic extreme of desire.
In "Ma Mere," adapted from a Bataille novel, Isabelle Huppert, who after playing a timid masochist in "The Piano Teacher" now seems to be turning into the high priestess of Gallic kink, wears a smirk of superiority as she takes on the role of the most libertine mother in France.
She introduces her son (Louis Garrel), a morose gawker, to her sadomasochistic girlfriends, who are happy to initiate him into a world of threesomes, dog collars and beatings. This, however, is just her way of getting ''close'' to him.
"Ma Mere," while less prudish than Catherine Breillat's dour deconstructions of sex, is also less competent. It winds up making incest look absurdly swank. Bataille had a scandalous imagination, but that doesn't mean he was literal about it. Compelled by erotic visions, he fashioned them into fever dreams, which, in a movie like "Ma Mere," become maladroit porn.
EW Grade: C-
'Kings and Queen'
Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum
French auteur Arnaud Desplechin is as slippery as he is talented.
In "Kings and Queen," his gripping, highly original and damn sprawling dramatic study of psychologically fractured people and the relationships they botch, the filmmaker follows a broken narrative path to emphasize the jagged emotional states of a pair of divorced miserables.
Nora (Emmanuelle Devos) is a single mother and art-gallery director who, having survived a lover's suicide (among other romantic catastrophes), now has to cope with a father dying of cancer. In her aggravated distress, she's trying to find her ex-husband so he can adopt her son.
Ismael (Mathieu Amalric), the ex in question, is a shaggy, neurotic musician who has mistakenly been committed to a mental institution -- that's a whole other story -- where his antics include sparring with the chief shrink (a grandiloquent Catherine Deneuve) and seducing a young fellow patient.
The two tremulous lives don't so much intersect as bump, rub and slip by each other: The narrative is a rich and at times bewildering riot of non sequiturs, flashbacks, mythological references, rap lyrics, Hong Kong action-flick fantasies and melodramatic tropes.
But by tempering the mania and offsetting the edginess of the deeply imperfect characters in this ambitiously free-form film, Desplechin offers that most old-form of balms -- compassion.
EW Grade: A-
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