Smoke

Rating:
Summary: A pure gem!
Review: Smoke performs a rare feat. It captivates you, and takes you on a journey. It does this without much action. This is an actors movie, Wang leaves it to the performers to move the story along. No special effects, or uneccessary action sequences here. Just down to earth charachters with flaws. The story intertwines these charachters, and we learn each of their sad stories and regrets. From Paul(William Hurt)a novelist who lost his passion, to Auggie(Harvey Keitel) a tobbaco store owner who wades through life each day. You and I know these kind of people.We see them in restaurants, on the bus, and everywhere else we go. Smoke not only is a joy too watch, but it provides a valuable lesson as well. The realization that everyone has their own story to tell.

Rating:
Summary: Same time...same place...
Review: SMOKE....A NEW LEVEL OF ENTERTAINMENT!
If you thought your life was boring, meaningless, and without any deeper perspective than what you see on the surface...then you haven't seen SMOKE! This brilliant story was created by author Paul Auster and brought to life through the extroadinary talents of Harvey Keitel and William Hurt. Keitel plays Brooklyn tobacco store owner, Auggie Wren. Hurt portrays his customer/friend, Paul, a struggling writer,left emotionally devastated by the death of his pregnant wife and unborn child. There is so much to absorb in this film, but the show belongs to Auggie who finds some order in his disorderly life through photos he takes of his store front....at the same exact time...same exact place...every single day into the years. As time passes before him, the store front is the same, but life evolves into a procession of changing faces and scenes. This unique concept unravels to express the greater continuity of life and totally captivates the viewer. Exceptional photography adds depth to this startling level of awareness and totally captures your complete attention. Stockard Channing, Forest Whitaker, and Ashley Judd are perfect supporting characters in this intertwining tale of tales. Keitel's Christmas story is so thought provoking that characters and audience alike are perfectly connected in the rarest of moments. Sadly, the movie leaves many questions fully unanswered, but perhaps as in life itself, that is the final point to be made!

AN INEXCUSABLE OMISSION FOR HARVEY KEITEL AT THE OSCARS!

Rating:
Summary: Smoke / Blue In The Face
Review: There's no way you can ever explain the significance of a cigarette to someone who doesn't smoke. In fact, when I started smoking I didn't even realize I'd started smoking, I just found that the friends I was making, the most interesting and creative folk I wanted to hang around with, were smokers. I soon realized that there's a ritualistic bonding that happens over a slight sliver of tobacco that in these fascistic times may be seen as merely a nervous habit or as a disgusting way to treat your body however self-righteously one cares to look at it, but the things you learn, the secrets you hear, the confessions you're a witness to over a smoke can be so spiritually nourishing that the health risks have a tendency to pale in comparison. (Think of Nat "King" Cole's voice. That's not natural. That is the timbre of a man who had smoked JUST ENOUGH cigarettes to achieve that rich, sonorous tone.) Sometimes a cigarette is the only friend you've got; sometimes it's the only thing you have available to offer to show there's no hard feelings, or to offer solace in a time of despair. In Europe when someone reaches for a cigarette everyone else you're speaking with is offered one before the person offering takes their own cigarette. Smoke is a film about this sort of bonding, exploring how a half dozen lives intersect at the Brooklyn Cigar Co., at the corner of 3rd Street and 8th Avenue in New York City.

For Auggie Wren, who owns it, the store is the center of the world-so much so that every single morning he stands across the street from it and takes a photograph. He shows his photo albums to Paul (William Hurt), a writer who is a regular customer: "That's my project. What you'd call my life's work." Paul observes that all the photos are the same. "They're all the same," Auggie says, "but each one is different from all the others."

Then Paul sees someone he knows in one of the photos: His wife, who was pregnant when she was shot and killed one morning on the street outside the store. "It's Ellen," he says. "Look at her. Look at my sweet darling." And he begins to cry. Now all the photos do not look the same any more.

One of the subjects of "Smoke" is the way lives are changed by small details. Auggie sometimes reflects that if Ellen hadn't given him exact change on that sad morning, if any little thing at all had slowed her by a second, she would not have walked into the path of the bullet.

Paul, too, has his life changed. One day after buying his Te-Amos at the store, he is walking absentmindedly down the street when he almost steps into the path of a truck. He is pulled back and saved by a young black man named Rashid (Harold Perrineau). Paul insists he do something for Rashid; it's a universal rule, when someone saves your life, that you just repay them. Rashid resists, but finally settles for a lemonade. What with one thing and another, Rashid eventually ends up living in Paul's apartment for a few days, to the indignation of Rashid's aunt, who doesn't understand the situation.

Life goes on. Auggie's old girlfriend from years ago (Stockard Channing) materializes with the news that Felicity (Ashley Judd, who can do more in five minutes of film than Drew Barrymore can in two hours.), who may or may not be his daughter, is pregnant. Rashid, who speaks in careful, intellectual terms, turns out to be another lost child: After his mother's death years ago, his father disappeared. Then Rashid (whose real name turns out to be Thomas Jefferson Cole) tracks his father (Forest Whitaker) down to a small-town gas station, where ...

Well, where yet another coincidence reveals that life does not unfold by plan, but by chance, often assisted by coincidence, irony and luck-both good and bad. Even though the entire cast is strong on many different levels, William Hurt and Harvey Keitel make this film their own. When we first meet William Hurt's character he looks and acts just like your stereotypical alcoholic writer whose life is just one long inexorable wait for the inevitable, but through the course of the film he begins to realize that suffering solo is an indulgence he really can't afford when the people he finds himself encountering don't have the luxury of self-pity, as they each stick their necks out however awkwardly or gracefully as they can to try and connect with each other.

When it comes to Harvey Keitel, however, I can think of no other working actor in America right now who has the talent and self-assurance (and the prodigious pace) to handle the kinds of roles he's been tackling in the past few years. He works all the time, in big roles and small, and throughout his career he has always made himself available for projects that are risky or experimental or just plain goofy. Here he is as the cigar store philosopher. Look back at his recent films and he is the vile "BAD LIEUTENANT," and Mr. Fixit in "PULP FICTION," and the outcast neighbor in "THE PIANO," and a crook in "RESERVOIR DOGS," and as a filmmaker in the yet-to-be-released "ULYSSES' GAZE" which was lauded at this year's Cannes Film Festival. Best known for his edgy, intense and sometimes unnerving characterizations, Keitel has made a career out of bringing to light the gears at work in the mind of an embattled regular guy.

Keitel came to prominence in the early films of Martin Scorsese and went on to become Scorsese's second most important acting collaborator after Robert De Niro (both Keitel's and De Niro's careers were jump-started with Scorsese's 1973 masterpiece "Mean Streets,") and something struck me as I was watching Keitel in Smoke. I started to think about the similarities and differences between Keitel and De Niro, of the macho, streetwise undertow they each mine for their performances, why De Niro doesn't excite me like he used to, why my admiration of Keitel keeps growing, and whether or not De Niro could have done as effective a job in Keitel's role in Smoke. I think it has to do with the fact that with De Niro, no matter how much of an incredible actor he is, I always know he's acting. Don't get me wrong. He has left me transfixed countless times over the years, but I never get the feeling he's dealing on as many different levels as Keitel.

Keitel has a stage presence that is that much more worldly wise than De Niro's, and for the roles Keitel tackles you always feel as if he actually has lived that particular role at one time or another. With De Niro you can just tell that he'll never tell you his last secret no matter how chummy he appears. Ever. But, with Keitel, he wants to tell you his last secret (no matter how long it takes for him to reveal it) as not only a way of unburdening his own soul, but to also serve as a precautionary tale of how you, too, could learn from his mistakes.

Maybe De Niro's incessant limelight and Keitel's comparative obscurity has something to do with this. For so long when I was growing up De Niro was this silent enigma who just happened to show up in practically every significant American film released in a fifteen year stretch. But for Harvey Keitel, originally cast in the leading role in Francis Ford Coppola's APOCALYPSE NOW (1979), the actor had a falling out with the director because he wouldn't sign a contract that would hold him to Coppola for seven years and was fired on location in the Philippines. Keitel was replaced by Martin Sheen (who has never made another film with Coppola). Instead of starring in one of the most publicized films in recent history, he was featured in Ridley Scott's considerably more modest (and commercially unsuccessful) directoral debut, THE DUELLISTS, adapted from the story by Joseph Conrad. This marked the beginning of a very busy but unsatisfying period during which Keitel appeared in 20 films and three plays in ten years. Though he continued to give strong performances, many of the films were mediocre and/or little-seen. Because the word got around that he was "difficult" simply because he didn't care to be beholden to a director, Keitel became a regular in minor fare from once major international directors, while former co-star Robert De Niro went on to glory in some of the most respected films of the decade. The role of Judas (irony of ironies) in Scorsese's THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST marked the beginning of Keitel's Hollywood comeback. Though the film was a commercial flop, it brought the actor back into the eye of the general public. Keitel starred in several more flops before the banner year 1991, when he had meaty roles in three major motion pictures: MORTAL THOUGHTS, THELMA & LOUISE and BUGSY. Since then he has been reinstated on the industry's A-list.

The fact that Harvey Keitel perfectly captures the spirit of Auggie Wren in SMOKE is indicative of the way the tide is turning in film these days. The oral tradition is making a comeback. Words and storytelling are beating out car chases and explosions, and when Keitel sits down with Hurt at the end of the film to tell the greatest Christmas story of all time you're absolutely mesme

Rating:
Summary: It's hard to be a writer in New York City
Review: This film is one of the strangest films you may encounter. The search for a father that turns sour-sweet, sour first because the father does not want to believe the boy is his son, sweet then because after some negociating with several witnesses of the meeting he will accept the idea and come to some fatherly agreement. The search for a father by a mother for her daughter in order to attempt her salvation from drugs and the salvation of the baby she is carrying. It turns frankly sour if not even bitter without any hope for recognition from the daughter and any salvation. The search for some financial success that has to do with hard work on the side of Auggie and pure luck on the side of Thomas, aka Rashid. And the good luck of one will compensate for his negligence that turned the hard work of the other into destruction and loss. And it all ends with a strange Christmas story, for the New York Times, mind you, where Auggie assumes the identity of a shoplifter of his and celebrates Christmas with the shoplifter's blind grandmother and shoplifts her apartment of a brand new camera that was probably stolen anyway in the first place. The film ends thus on pictures of the obvious pleasure of the black grandmother kissing and hugging the white Auggie as if he were her black grandson who had of course forgotten to come and celebrate Christmas with his grandmother, too busy he was shoplifting magazines, or other valueless goods, here and there.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

Rating:
Summary: This movie is pure art
Review: This movie is pure art. And Wang and Auster are fine craftsman. Auster with a wonderfully dense and intricate image of the 4 main characters and the half-dozen others. And Wang in his tableau presentation of each story. The scene with Keitel and Hurt looking through Auggie's photo album reminded me of Monet's paintings at Giverney. Each painting of the same spot, but with different light, or fog or seasonal vegetation. The same of the photos. When Auggie has Paul slow down and look at each photo, true art. And of course the stark realism of the final scene with Keitel telling the Christmas story. We again see Wang the artist. First with a simple scene in a deli and the magnificent acting of Keitel and Hurt. And then the artist clears his pallette and tells it again in pictures and music with Tom Waits. Unbelieveable! The best movie of that year.

Rating:
Summary: Wonderfully well-made movie!
Review: Very good screen play with wonderful actors and director. This film is perfect for people at midnight to "read" and "deliberate" it over.(Better with a cup of your favorite herbal tea.)

Rating:
Summary: A two-hour smile
Review: When I started watching Smoke for the first time it was just another indie film with big actors. When I finished watching Smoke it was a great story....actors not included. Though this movie does have a great cast, it doesn't need it. Smoke is a classic story-movie that makes you confused whether to smile or frown towards the end. If you're looking for a classic book on film, or story with vision, this is the one. Harvey Keitel is perfect as the lead role and William Hurt does his usual underrated performance. The bit parts by Ashley Judd, Harold Perrineau Jr., Forest Whitaker and Stockard Channing is the right mix. Rent this for yourself, by yourself.