I was tempted to see the film in its home turf of Jackson Heights, Queens to see the locals' reaction, but it wasn't clear if the print showing there had English subtitles. (8/5/2004)
From The New York Times August 5, 2004: Playing Himself, the Drug Mule's Last Friend By Corey Kilgannon
Poor Orlando Tobón has no time to pack for Hollywood. His
phone keeps ringing. People want things: vacation packages,
immigration papers, job leads, help with tax forms and
eviction notices.
So he stays in his office, a small booth between a lingerie
shop and a perfume store in a mini-mall in Jackson Heights,
Queens, where English is rarely heard. Mr. Tobón, 58, runs
a travel agency and income tax business, but he is known
locally as the mayor of Little Colombia - or to those in
his debt, Don Orlando - for helping his fellow transplants,
including noncitizens and illegal immigrants.
Over the past 30 years, though, he has become best known in
this Colombian community as an "undertaker of mules,"
arranging proper burials for some 400 drug mules: people
who agreed to swallow bags of narcotics in Colombia and
smuggle them to New York, but died when the bags burst
inside them. In this role, he has been rather mulelike
himself, working tirelessly, with little reward or
recognition, in the shadow of the elevated No. 7 train
along Roosevelt Avenue.
The undertaker is finally getting his day in the sun,
having landed a role in Maria Full of Grace, a film that
opened last month to widespread acclaim. The movie, which
is set partly in Jackson Heights, tells of a teenage
Colombian girl who becomes a drug mule. Mr. Tobón plays Don
Fernando, who ships mules' bodies back once he locates the
families in Colombia. Joshua Marston, the Brooklyn
filmmaker who wrote and directed Maria, met Mr. Tobón
while researching the film and rewrote the script to
include him.
"This movie is so real, you won't believe it," Mr. Tobón
said in his Yogi Berra-esque style. "And not just because
I'm in it."
Now that the film's premiere and media blitz have come and
gone, "the only thing that has changed is more people come
to me with their problems," he said, sitting in his office.
"Only now they call me Don Fernando, instead of Don
Orlando."
"One business owner just called looking for a few workers,"
he said, holding a stack of index cards with Spanish names
on them. "I do it all for free. Of course, I hope they'll
remember me when they need their income tax done, or want
to book a vacation."
Mr. Tobón's limited wall space is covered with aging civic
awards and photographs of him with celebrities and
politicians, including Rudolph W. Giuliani and both
Clintons. A profile from a Spanish-language magazine
describes Mr. Tobón as having "una figura robusta."
Mr. Tobón came to New York at 21, a poor man working menial
jobs. He eventually earned a degree in accounting and
started his business, Orlando Travel. His first encounter
with drug swallowers, he said, came when he helped a local
woman bury a daughter who had died in a car accident.
"We went to the city morgue in Jamaica to claim the body,
and an employee said there were other bodies there that
were Colombian drug mules that no one had claimed," he
recalled.
Mr. Tobón said he began getting tips from the morgue and
the police when drug mules died in hospitals or were
discovered in some hotel near Kennedy International
Airport. There was the 16-year-old boy left to die by his
terrified mother in an airport hotel. There was the
82-year-old woman who began dying during a cab ride from
Kennedy.
Drug mules can earn up to $10,000 for ingesting and
carrying two pounds of narcotics in condoms or rubber
gloves. "One woman died in the hotel, and the drug dealers
just slashed her open and took the drugs and left her body
there," Mr. Tobón said.
However they die, his first task is to identify the body,
often through fingerprints or dental records. Then he must
get a death certificate and locate the family in Colombia,
which can be difficult if the drug mule was using false
identification. He often seeks help from the Colombian
police or Colombian Consulate. He said that preparing and
shipping the body costs $3,000, which he raises through
contributions solicited in bars during broadcasts of
Colombian soccer games and in announcements on local
Colombian radio and cable stations.
If the body has been sitting for weeks or is mutilated,
cremation is the only option, reducing transportation costs
to about $800. If no family can be located, Mr. Tobón said,
he arranges a lonely burial in New York.
His somber account was interrupted every few minutes by the
phone. Mr. Tobón answered and cheerily quoted prices on
vacation packages.
Mr. Tobón, who is married but said he never had time for
children, was taught to lead a charitable life by his
mother, who died in the 1990 Avianca plane crash on Long
Island as she returned from a trip to deliver clothing to
poor Colombians.
Detractors have criticized him for diverting his time and
energy from law-abiding immigrants to help dead
lawbreakers, but he insisted that most mules act out of
desperation, not greed. They have already paid too dearly
for it, he said, and should be afforded the dignity of a
funeral.
He pulled out a pile of thank-you cards from Colombians
whose loved ones became mules. The first was from the
family of a 24-year-old woman named Liliana. They wrote to
"Dr. Tobón," thanking him and enclosing a family photo.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
Manchurian Candidate is a crackling thriller with top notch acting and superb production design, particularly in the use of NYC settings.
A couple of hours after returning from the theater I happened to re-watch the original and I was surprised to confirm my memory that the new version actually improves on many aspects of the old one, as groundbreaking and nailbiting as it was, though Demme's is more of a suspense story and less of a political statement. It is less talky and more sophisticated about the brainwashing, which was a new concept at the time of Condon's book and the first movie. The new version is less heavy-handed about politicians (the boozy McCarthyite senator in the original is a clown, albeit a dangerous one) and the enemy (North Korean Communists in the original, a multi-national corporation in the new one, though the corporate stuff doesn't really come across more threatening than those in James Bond movies that want to take over the world). The relationships among the brainwashed characters and their programmed deeds are also made more interestingly complex, as Harvey was just used as a murderer.
The key difference is that the women's roles are more credible. Janet Leigh's role in the original is simply ridiculous -- just a sexy lady who drops everything for Frank Sinatra and believes his fantastic story immediately. Though Denzel's lady isn't 100% credible in her new somewhat duplicitous focus, she's more credible than Janet was. While Angela Lansbury was simply unforgettable as the Mom, Meryl Streep is brilliant as Lady MacBeth. While much has been made of whether she's channelling Hilary Clinton (and she says she was inspired more by Liddy Dole who is a more calculating trophy wife), I think she's really playing what Barbara Bush senior would have been like if she'd been born a generation later, complete with the pearls and pedigree. The Oedipal stuff was over the top though. The girlfriend --Laurence Harvey's in the original, Liev Schreiber's here -- is given a bit more reality, as she's more grounded in the real world, not his fantasy.
Each of my fellow attendees had different plot points each found unconvincing that others felt had been explained adequately. I note a factual error - this wouldn't be the first bought and paid-for VP - Agnew was. That's why he resigned.
Demme takes note of the media's expanded role in a very sophisticated way, with the continual news announcements dropping little background touches of context. He also uses music almost as well as Wag the Dog did though not as cynically, particularly Wycleef Jean’s cover of John Fogarty's “Fortunate Son” whose original version has been used in just about every movie about the Viet Nam War. But there's good music selections throughout, including the Fountains of Wayne's cover of the Kinks’ “Better Days” as a convention song.(8/4/2004)
Spider-Man 2 doesn't even bother with a post colon title, as it continues smoothly from where Spider-Man left off, even though some time has passed.
The time passage has allowed Peter Parker's friends (and CGI) to become spectacularly successful and he to be a poignant failure in his every day life, even as Spider-Man is an exhaustively successful crime-fighter. The movie spends a lot of time, and perhaps too many tight close-ups, on Peter's financial and psychological struggles with his conflicting roles and feelings, and raises this film way beyond the usual comic book fare, beyond what X Men
and Hellboy emotionally evoke.
There's also warm humor coming out of Peter's continuing, and increasingly unsuccessful, efforts to keep his identity secret and through other references, such as to Maguire's post-Seabiscuit injuries, and a cameo by Hal Sparks of Queer as Folk is meant to add another layer of flirtation.
The secondary actors were very effective, particularly a maturing James Franco (who we are obviously shown at the end will figure prominently in Spider-Man 3) and Alfred Molina's victimized villain "Doc Ock." Rosemary Harris adds depth as the aunt, though poor Kirsten Dunst just doesn't have a lot to do, so no wonder she's only signed up through 3.
I saw the large-scale production filming around New York City last summer at several locales and enjoyed seeing the products of the authenticity, including showing a nicely multi-ethnic city, so I was completely thrown for a loop when somehow what sure looked like a Metro-North train in danger along the upper Park Avenue route to Grand Central Station somehow morphed into a downtown Chicago elevated subway train to nowhere, with Chicago even thanked in the credits. While my mind did wander a bit during Peter's tortured decision-makings and revelations, I didn't think I'd missed his move to another city! (7/28/2004)
Super Size Me is a very entertaining gonzo journalism documentary.
Inserting himself very personally in the tradition of Michael Moore and Hunter Thompson, Morgan Spurlock still manages to cover plenty of carefully researched, objective, serious material while keeping the extensive statistical information visually interesting with charming graphics, including clever animation. I especially liked his original surveys of nutritionists and comparisons of different age groups' familiarity with various U.S. icons vs. McDonald's advertising.
While his attempts to get an official response from McDonald's recalls Roger and Me for Moore's efforts to get an interview with the head of General Motors, the audience gets really involved in the suspense of the condition of his health over his carefully documented 30 days of eating McDonald's meals, so it was a relief to see him looking thin and healthy on The Daily Show this week.
The DVD should be packaged with a copy of Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal by Eric Schlosser, which provides a wider perspective on the same issue and only occasionally covers some of the same points.
Spurlock is original in taking on the PC-issues around obesity and drawing many parallels with the tobacco industry and smokers -- do fat people bring this on themselves or are they helpless victims of relentless marketing? Obesity is brought on by eating addiction --as I have witnessed first-hand in my family -- so personal responsibility should be more a factor in dealing with this addiction than how corporate America feeds off of that addiction. I grew up in an obsessively healthy-eating, ingredient-checking, fat-mocking household, which no doubt contributed to my dad's long term healthy recovery from an early heart attack parallel to a family history of arteriosclerosis. But it was only after my grandmother died in the 1970's that I found out my mom's roots in challenging his proclivities: my namesake great uncle graduated Ohio State at the turn of the last century with a degree as a vet -- but as a Jew the only job he could get was as an inspector in the Chicago stock yards, just about the time The Jungle came out. That experience turned him and his sister into lifelong vegetarians. I never set foot in a fast food restaurant until dating The Grouch in college and he led me astray, to my parents' great disdain. But when The Scion at 8 years old was diagnosed as having high cholesterol and high risk for heart disease, I returned to the family fold. My son did announce he would become a vegetarian, but as he didn't eat any vegetables he thought this meant he would eat pizza 3X a day, so as in all things, moderation in eating is our solution. I do like the baked potatoes at Wendy's. (6/13/2004)
Duane Incarnate is a charming and humorous use of magic realism in New York City to explore relationships, recalling the sweet Happy Accidents.
Because it focuses on four women friends, it is inevitable that the film will be pegged to Sex and the City (the word of mouth on line at the Tribeca Film Festival was it was that "for the beer-drinking set"), but it is much more humanistic and sympathetic about relationships than that series' male-written scripts. Writer/director Hal Salwen explained his inspiration in the Q & A after the screening that it will always be an utterly baffling mystery as to what it is that attracts people to each other and keeps them together, a chemistry that people outside the relationship can never fully understand. If he could afford the rights and switch the gender, a play on Joe Jackson's "Is She Really Going Out With Him?" would be a good theme song.
Salwen has a particularly good ear for realistic girl talk. The whole ensemble is excellent at comically playing off each other, though only two of the actresses are immediately recognizable, for their sit com work, Kristen Johnston of Third Rock from the Sun and Cynthia Watros of Titus. While their guys are buffooned, it is done playfully and the exaggerations are fantasized. Salwen said he originally had the genders switched and it probably would not have been as amusing to stereotype the women.
I particularly enjoyed that the finale has a more open-ended explanation than the not dissimilar doings of A Midsummer Night's Dream.
The New York City interiors and exteriors are used very well to establish each couple's environment (the woman behind me on line at the Festival owned the downtown loft that is a main locale), if lit a bit darkly, and it was the best use of an old stairwell in a walk-up apartment I've seen other than Pieces of April. They even got the New York Film Office to let them bring a car into Central Park.
Salwen said he walked the film cans over to the Festival in time for qualifying for inclusion and that it didn't have distribution yet. Such a delightful movie certainly deserves and should be able to find an audience, if given the chance. (5/11/2004)
13 Going on 30 is an enjoyable distaff Big that's better than it might have been, but misses opportunities to be really smart.
The successes are largely due to the un-bland casting of the exuberant Jennifer Garner (a young teen is one secret identity she doesn't have on Alias, but I was first captivated by her as the Other Girl on Felicity where she literally stole Scott Foley's heart) and her antithesis in acting styles, the charmingly naturalistic Mark Ruffalo.
Their uptown/downtown contrasts anchor what would just otherwise be a completely silly movie and which I would have put under Chick Flicks if director Gary Winick hadn't filmed it as loyally in NYC as he did his much more NY-sharp and factually accurate Tadpole.
Husband-and-wife writing partners Cathy Yuspa and Josh Goldsmith (who met, much more realistically, in college not high school) just manage to avoid some of the logical extensions of the problems of having a 13-year-old naif brain in Garner's future 30-year-old body by cutely avoiding serious sexual situations and having Ruffalo's character make an important point about grown-up responsibilities and commitments that is not the usual theme of these nostalgia-infested body-switching movies.
I respect that the competing fiancée isn't the stereotypical witch, but then why give her a fluffy career as a TV weather woman?
I didn't get MTV until 1989, so I can't testify to what 13-year-olds were watching in 1987, but I'm pretty sure the movie's pop music choices are not altogether accurate nor that the Clash were unknown to suburban girls at that point, though I wasn't a teen in 1987 to know if kids memorized the "Thriller" choreography.
Too bad someone made the decision to exclude most of the humor a la Kate and Leopold from the differences even between '87 and '04 -- how does she call her parents in NJ from NYC without dialing "1" first? How come she's not surprised at her fancy Starbucks drink, let alone cell phones or e-mail? etc. etc.
The concluding triumph of successfully marketing wholesomeness to teen-age girls is as much a fantasy as anything else in the film. (5/2/2004)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is the best adaptation of a story that Philip K. Dick never wrote.
There's glimpses of movies actually inspired by Dick, like Paycheck and Total Recall, as well as elements from The Neverending Story with its encroaching "nothing" to Groundhog Day to Pinter's Betrayal or Memento, and the various permutations of Here Comes Mr. Jordan. But it's altogether completely original in the inventive writing imagination of Charlie Kaufman and visualization by video-maker Michel Gondry, known more up to now for illustrating Bjork's odd songs.
Yes, it takes awhile to quite figure out what's going on until you can sort out what's contemporaneously happening before your eyes, what's dream, what's memory, what's fantasy, and what's flashback -- within a one-person Rashomon roller coaster ride we literally see the tricks memory plays. It's a wonderful evocation of the fallacies of memory, as it's that elusiveness that allows people to fall in love with people who bring out something hidden in them, and then try to stay in or out of love with them. Almost every actor plays against their usual type -- here Kate Winslet is the kooky, spontaneous one, even more so than in Sense and Sensibility and Hideous Kinky (tracking her hair colors helps you track the film's trajectory and her British accent only slips through twice), Jim Carrey is the serious, shy introvert (though his comedic talents fit nicely as the character incongruously explores the hidden recesses of his subconscious), and Mark Ruffalo and Elijah Wood are nerds living vicariously, though Kirsten Dunst is just a slightly older nymphet than she was in Bring It On or Virgin Suicides.
Unlike most of the films this borrows from, Eternal Sunshine has a humanistic heart -- yes, love hurts, but we wouldn't trade a moment of the pain for the joy and comfort it brings. And well-worth seeing again to try and remember it better.
Lovely score by Jon Brion that helps ratchet up the tensions without overwhelming them.
While the LIRR is used nicely as a setting and metaphor, I'm not 100% convinced that the suburban scenes were filmed in what they claim is Rockville Centre, LI, as it looked more like parts of NYC to me [I've read reports that the train stations scenes were actually filmed in Westchester]-- which would be a nice change for Queens or wherever standing in for another locale.
The title comes from Alexander Pope's poem Eloisa to Abelard. (3/22/2004) (supplemented 4/8/2004)
Elf is a laugh-out-loud with a tear-in-your-eye charming, updated tribute to one of my favorite movies Miracle on 34th Street, much better than the tepid actual re-make.
Here, the plot turns in a now-vanished Gimbel's, but the family in much need of "faith means believing in something even when your common sense tells you not to" again lives in an apartment on the Upper West Side overlooking Central Park. While I couldn't tell from the credits just how much was actually filmed in NYC vs. Vancouver, I'll credit whatever it does, as it is such a Valentine to Christmas in New York, to mix holidays.
While Ed Asner makes me believe that he too thinks that Edmund Glenn really was Santa Claus, it is Will Ferrell's consistent wide-eyed innocence that carries the movie.
The product placements do get annoying, but mostly serve the script. Who knows if director Jon Favreau, who also has a cameo role, punched-up debut writer David Berenbaum's script, but it is delightful.
Zooey Deschanel is a sweetheart, while James Caan and Mary Steenburgen just pretty much get to reprise their TV roles, in, respectively, Las Vegas and Joan of Arcadia.
The visual references to other movies are amusing, from the Disney-like animation at the North Pole to treating the Urban Park Rangers like the Dark Riders from Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.
The holiday song selections are mostly classic, though it's nice to hear new Leon Redbone interpretations on two tracks.(1/19/2004)
Something's Gotta Give won me over. Or rather, I was charmed by writer/director Nancy Meyers' laugh out loud, knowing quips and those two old pro's Diane Keaton, in her best role since, and basically playing an older, Annie Hall, and Jack Nicholson playing himself, or at least the audience's perception of his real self.
A certain amount of movie magic suspension of disbelief has to be called for -- that Keaton's "Erica Barry" could have a hit play that would pay for an expensive beachfront house in the Hamptons and that younger women are still finding Nicholson's "Harry Sanborn", who has made no pretense at keeping physically fit, his income and lifestyle enough of an aphrodisiac.
I did enjoy that Keanu Reeves is honestly played for eye candy competition; I got a kick that he had a brain enough to admire "Erica's" work but I believed that he's a doctor as much as I believed that Denise Richards was an astrophysicist as a Bond girl.
It was odd to have Keaton spouting Yiddishisms like schmata, but I guess we're supposed to assume she picked those up in a 20 year marriage to a director named Klein, and her daughter, played by Amanda Peet with no frontal nudity for a change, does end up with a Jewish guy too.
Frances MacDormand is briefly along as a somewhat stereotypical Women Studies professor, though for a change in the movies that character is not gay. (
. Earlier of my full film reviews are at IMDb's comments, where full credits are available, and click through if you find them helpful.