Three movie reviews

Films

Annie Leibovitz: Life Through a Lens

Directed by Barbara Leibovitz

Originally made for American TV, this is an illuminating study of the doyen (pictured) of celebrity photography, charting her rise from unaffected hippie chancer to her current position as quasi-official portrait artist for the Hollywood elite. The film revisits the defiant theater of Richard Nixon's exit from the White House, peruses the legendary shots of John Lennon and Yoko Ono and hears the stories behind her crisp, Walker Evans-esque photojournalism. Compared to these, the lucrative Vanity Fair commissions just can't compete. The fact that the documentary was shot by Leibovitz's sister, Barbara, proves to be a mixed blessing. We are allowed what at first appears to be limitless access only to suspect that the film is playing coy in certain areas, so that crucial details relating to her relationship with Susan Sontag or her apparently debilitating drug addiction are left tantalizingly out of focus.

All the Boys Love Mandy Lane

Directed by Jonathan Levine, starring Amber Heard, Anson Mount, Whitney Able, Michael Welch

Like a bit-part player at a slumber party, first-time director Jonathan Levine's film has a fatal flaw that guarantees a bloody end. Specifically, this is an apparently subversive slasher flick that is half in love with the very elements it is subverting; so seduced by the sight of terrified teens in blood-stained nightwear that it blunders hopelessly off the track. The plot dispatches a virginal nymphet (Amber Heard) to a remote ranch where she is by turns harassed by her fellow revelers and menaced by the obligatory killer in the dark. The implication here is that these two camps (the imperiled lads, the faceless psycho) are basically after the same thing. If only Levine didn't take so much glee in the retributive slaughter of his other female characters this might have been rather interesting. As it is, Mandy Lane feels bogus and compromised.

Midnight Talks

Directed by Maciej Zak, starring Magdalena Rozczka, Marcin Dorocinski, Weronika Ksiazkiewicz

With foreplay jokes, a slutty best friend and chicken fillets, this romantic comedy of 20-something Poles looking for love owes much to the Bridget Jones universal language of post-feminism. It's perhaps the most easy-access of the recent Polish releases, in which pleasantly dappy artist Matylda (Madgalena Rozczka) decides to have a baby. Happily single, she nevertheless wants to conceive the way nature intended, so she places an advert in the local paper. When a chef with poetic aspirations replies, a series of screwball misunderstandings and will-they-won't-they toing-and-froings ensue. This has the air of a particularly well-executed 90-minute moisturiser advert: all those clear-skinned handsome young things, with their glossy manes and bronzed limbs; indeed, when at home, the women are never happier than when they are plucking, teasing or applying unguents. The Guardian

(China Daily 02/28/2008 page20)