flakfizer

The only Dogma movie at the 2000 Cannes film festival, The King is Alive is, like all Dogmas, pumped with negative energy and pessimism, yet remains strangely humorous and always entertaining. It tells the story of a bus breakdown in the North African desert, and the decent into lunacy of the already-eccentric group of passengers, who eventually decide to put on an absurd production of King Lear to pass the time.

Admittedly, the injection of Shakespeare feels like something of a stunt, and some dissenters even complained that the desert was too unfairly photogenic for the Dogma principals. But The King is Alive grows horrific on its own terms, like a sophisticated Blair Witch Project but without an evil other for them (or us) to run away from.

The offbeat cast includes Jennifer Jason Leigh, Bruce Davison, the great David Bradley, the late Brion James, and Janet McTeer who, as a neurotic American, vulgarizes her way through a killer scene where she demands to know about her husband's taste in women.

O Brother Where Art Thou is much too episodic and anecdotal to offer a strong narrative, though it does get better as it goes along. Then again, I should mention that the story is based on Homer's The Odyssey (he's even credited in the opening titles), updated to the Depression-era deep South.

Costarring John Turturro, newcomer Tim Blake Nelson, and a very uncomfortable George Clooney (and Holly Hunter, who's utterly wasted), the film succeeds mainly on the level of production design, cinematography, and music, but not much else. All Coen films suceed technically; the mediocre ones like this do nothing else.

Directed by Darren Aronofsky, who made a name for himself in 1998 with his art house success Pi, Requiem for a Dream is virtually a continual montage which apparently has more single cuts than any mainstream feature ever made.

Comparable to a cinematic fireworks show (with a grand finale included), it is distinguished by an unexpectedly poignant center, the hopes and dreams of a pitiable group of drug addicts longing for a better life. Ellen Burstyn, who's been erroneously ignored by Hollywood lately, is heartbreaking as a bleary-eyed Brooklynite who, in the movie's only tranquil scene, sobs about her fruitless quest for happiness.

Yet even she is at the mercy of the film's visual style, a clobbering assault on the senses that makes the experience of watching it nearly interactive. The Magnolia of 2000, which, depending on your taste, could be a good thing or a bad one.