Artvoice: Buffalo's #1 Newsweekly
Home Blogs Web Features Calendar Listings Artvoice TV Real Estate Classifieds Contact


Roman De Gare

Somewhere around the midway point in Claude Lelouch’s Roman De Gare, a character refers to Balzac’s The Human Comedy, the famous French writer’s omnibus title for much of his sprawling, multifarious body of fictional and nonfictional work. Sometime afterward, the same man remarks to a woman, “I will be the author, you will be the drama,” a remark attributed to Balzac which here seems to allude to the business of these two: He is the ghost writer of a number of spectacularly successful novels published under her name.



Mongol

The most important thing you need to know about Mongol before seeing it is that it is the first part of a projected trilogy about the life of Genghis Khan. Think of it as The Youth of Khan, and bear in mind that it’s only going to take you about a third of the way through his history. The legendary Mongol leader, who united a variety of loosely related but generally feuding tribes into an army that conquered the largest contiguous empire in history, is certainly ripe fodder for an epic film (and hopefully one that will erase the memory of John Wayne as GK in the monumentally awful The Conqueror). Technically a film from Kazakhstan (at least as far as the Oscar folk are concerned, who nominated it for best Foreign Language Film earlier this year) but really a Russian production, this grand-scaled movie is worth seeing simply for the spectacular scenery of the vast Mongolian landscapes, an area too remote for tourists and therefore one of the most unspoiled places on earth. (Hollywood could film National Lampoon’s Asian Vacation here and it would be worth seeing, though thank god that will never happen.) If scenery alone isn’t good enough for you, there are massive battle sequences between horse-mounted armies and even a romantic thread involving the young leader, born Temudgin, and his wife, whom he meets at the age of nine. What it lacks is a historical-political context. We get at best only the most general idea of the relations between various tribes and nations, or of what Temudgin does to assemble his army. There are moments when it resembles last year’s 300, with Temudgin making proclamations about the nature of his people and vowing that “Mongols need laws. I will make them obey, even if I have to kill half of them.” Hopefully veteran writer-director Sergei Bodrov (Prisoner of the Mountains, also an Oscar nominee) was just trying to get our attention in the first part of his trilogy and plans to bring more depth to his subject when exploring Khan’s later years in the next two films.



The Promotion

This independent comedy about two assistant managers at a chain grocery store vying to become the manager of a new store has been getting some surprisingly poor reviews. My guess is that they’re coming from writers lucky enough never to have worked a job in the retail sector. As someone who spent four years as assistant manager of a chain drug store, The Promotion rang pretty true to me. Think of it as The Office set at Tops. Doug (Seann William Scott) is 33, married to a nurse, and living in an apartment where the walls are less soundproof than a screen door. He longs for the day when he can wear long sleeves and get called “Mister,” instead of by his first name as it’s printed on the front of his short-sleeved store tunic. He’s so sure of getting the promotion that he and his wife Jenna Fischer start shopping for a house. But he gets a competitor in William (John C. Reilly), recently moved to the area with his wife and daughter from another company store. Somewhat older and coming off a checkered past, William is desperately trying to make up for lost time. The problems of real people trying to navigate their way through a corporate system that considers them less important than arbitrary exercises of company policy is the real theme of The Promotion. Filmmaker Steve Conrad (his directorial debut after scripting The Pursuit of Happyness and The Weather Man, two other films about men in the work world) takes a deadpan approach to material that occasionally slips into farce, not always comfortably so. But it’s his essentially humanistic concerns that win out in myriad small touches, like when William, talking to his wife (Lili Taylor) on the phone after a bad day, says “I feel like I’m at camp and I want to come home.” If you’ve never had a job that made you feel that way, count your blessings. Most of us, though, will relate.



Wanted

The usual Hollywood MO is a great trailer attached to a bad movie. Let’s face it, the trailer is the only part of a movie that really counts. That’s what gets you into the movie, and once you’ve paid for your ticket, it doesn’t matter whether or not you like the movie, because they’ve already got your money. Mission accomplished.





Back to issue index