Claire Dolan (1998)

Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Simply Perfect

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

"Claire Dolan" isn't normally my kind of film - sex and betrayal and self-hate and the like - but it has a few things going for it. Vincent D'Onofrio gives a typically good performance, with the kind of subtlety that he does so well. Colm Meaney is also good, extremely unlikable here. Katrin Cartlidge, in the title role, is a bit of a mystery. She's excellent, but tough to identify with.I watched the film mainly for Lodge Kerrigan. I'd previously seen his other two films in a similar vein. Which is, to say, stories of loners emotionally cut off from the world around them. But in this case, I found myself thinking that a little more distance would be appreciated. In his first and second films, "Clean, Shaven" and "Keane", the characters are so distant that they're practically on another planet. That is an approach that Kerrigan is much more successful at. Here, the relationships drag down and unfocus things a bit too much. Which brings me back to D'Onofrio. He is the best part of "Claire Dolan". All scenes with him are the best, the most intense.The cinematography is good. Clean, crisp, and harsh. Teodoro Maniaci does great work here. He shot Kerrigan's first film, "Clean, Shaven", and he brings out the same sense of alienation here. In the end, this is a pretty good film. Not nearly as good as it might have been, but there's something to be gained from the experience.

I saw this atrocious film recently on the Sundance channel and unfortunately didn't follow my first instinct, which was to turn it off after 10 minutes. Instead, I watched it through to the end. Big mistake; the boredom only intensifies.The film begins, as background while the credits are running, with silent views of modern glass and steel Manhattan high rises; although this lasts only a few minutes, it seems interminable. Shots of the high rises reappear throughout the film. I guess the director was trying to say something about the soullessness of modern urban alienation. This is the film's first cliche; Antonioni and other European directors were using the same images to say the same thing 35 years earlier. The next cliche, which I'm sure the director intended to be revelatory, is that hookers lie to their johns, tell them they're special, etc., because it's good business. The last film I remember doing this is Klute in 1971. Oh yes, another original insight: pimps can be mean and vicious.With the exception of Vincent D'Onofrio, the acting is uniformly atrocious. Katrin Cartlidge has to be the most wooden, inexpressive actress in recent memory. She makes Clint Eastwood in his spaghetti westerns look expressive. Moreover, throughout the film her johns repeatedly refer to her as beautiful, when actually Cartlidge is quite plain. This appears to be a low budget film. Perhaps they couldn't afford a truly beautiful actress for the part. Equally likely, no self-respecting actress would touch such a dud. Colm Meaney was equally wooden, but then again he wasn't given a whole lot to do. Vincent D'Onofrio at least brought some life to his character. One redeeming feature: if you're a dirty old man like me, at least the tedium is punctuated by frequent glimpses of Cartlidge's rather lovely breasts.All in all, one to miss. 4/10

I attended a screening of this film with great anticipation. I liked "Clean Shaven," an earlier effort from this director. This is a story that has been done before - a man falling in love with a whore. You root for that man, but he is cheated by the whore. I guess I was most disappointed in how impersonal it was, kind of like Punch Drunk Love. The title character kept you wondering what she was going to do and I guess she broke my heart. You never really got the sense that Claire liked sex and liked being a whore. I thought she couldn't stand being one and just wanted to pay off her family debt. She ends up running away, presumably to be a whore somewhere with a child? I dunno, I was disappointed.

This movie is unlike any other american movie I've seen in quite a long time now. It is good to know that there is still hope for the american cinema industry, that not everyone is interested in making horrible films only because they might be successful, because, honestly, I am tired of watching movies with weak scripts, horrible acting and incompetent direction. This movie proves that not everything is lost, specially because it was made by a young director, which means he can and, hopefully, will still surprise us with lots of wonderful films. "Claire Dolan" along with "Judy Berlin" are two of the best american movies of the new generation I've seen.