BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE
Two refugees from the former Yugoslavia, a Croat and a Serb, get into a slap-fight on a London bus and then continue their running battle in a chase through the crowded streets and into a hospital ward. There are a lot of other characters and several interwoven plot lines in Jasmin Dizdar's film, a Bosnian ex-pat's aerial view of his adopted city that plays deft variations on themes of dislocation and nationalism. But those two fuming ethnic soreheads keep on popping up, like the single-minded cartoon adversaries in Spy vs. Spy, the teensy comic strip printed in the margins that used to thread through entire issues of Mad magazine. Beautiful People takes on some wrenching issues, but it keeps flashing back to this boisterous motif of the clownishness of violence.
Dizdar was trained as filmmaker both in Prague and, over the last ten years, in the British TV industry. His debut feature recalls both the gritty Czech comedies of the 1960s and the Stephen Frears and Hanif Kureshi telefilms about modern multi-cultural London and its racist shadow side. This film works on a broad social canvas; there are major characters who are doctors and aristocrats and BBC journalists. But thematically the pivotal characters are Pero (Edin Dzandzanovic), a sweetly dazed immigrant from the Bosnian war zone, and Griffin (Danny Nussbaum), a teenage skinhead being lured by his blockhead pals into drugs and violence.
Dizdar obviously loves the mechanics of storytelling. He deploys breezy narrative devices with infectious relish. The accident that transports Griffin to the war zone in Bosnia and back again over the course of a single day feels like a misguided magic-realistic extravagance---until we're are brought up short by what Dizdar makes of it. (There is a moment of dovetailing virtuosity in this sequence that is so perfect it can give you chills.) This writer-director doesn't have to make heavy-handed speeches about how we're all brothers under the skin, driven by the same dark (and light) impulses. He gives us all the evidence we need to arrive at that conclusion on our own.
BENJAMIN SMOKE
This self-consciously impressionistic music documentary, shot and edited to an MTV beat by Jem Cohen and Peter Sillen, is a hero-worshipping memorial to the late Robert Curtis Dickerson, aka Benjamin Smoke [http://www.benjaminremembered.com/], a cult-favorite punk-poet songwriter from Atlanta. In unflinching interviews and slyly staged performance segments (they appear to have been shot on a sound stage, but with an audience just off camera) the movie gives us a too-close-for-comfort view of this emaciated, HIV-positive walking-skeleton, who died last year just after his 39th birthday. "A rhine-stone encrusted can of worms" (in the words of one admirer), Smoke lived in cultivated squalor in Cabbagetown, Atlanta's scuzziest red-neck ghetto, chain-smoking and shooting speed almost to the bitter end.
The movie's reverent tone is a bit hard to swallow. Was Smoke a tragic art-martyr (as the film implies) or just a self-destructive drama queen who carried his "outlaw" pose a few steps too far? There are echoes of Patti Smith and the Velvets, of Iggy Pop and Tom Verlaine, in the snaking dirge-like lines of Smoke's music; it has some power (especially in this context) but it's also derivative and a bit monotonous. "Have you ever seen death singing?" Smith asks, in her song about Smoke, and the filmmakers seem to be pushing the same line, the sophomoric neo-decadent view that Smoke's art was inseparable from his illness, that it was the heat given off by the process of decay. But they may have miscalculated in bringing us so intimately close to Smoke as a living, breathing, pain-wracked individual. Art or no art, it's impossible to watch this skull-beneath-the-skin portrait without a twinge of horror.
BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS
The character Kilgore Trout may be novelist Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s, greatest single creation. A visionary if not actively demented science fiction writer, loosely modeled on Philip K. Dick, Trout is ceaselessly inventive and prolific, but so blindingly eccentric that his work is published mostly in porno magazines. A sort of pulp fiction Ed Wood with genius, he's a stand-in for all the unsung primitive masters exiled to the fringes of American pop culture. In Alan Rudolph's garish and banal adaptation of Vonnegut's 19TK bestseller, a surreal-farce trash job on suburban go-getters, Trout is played by Albert Finney as a borderline vagrant who lives in a basement and wanders around unshaven in filthy baggy clothes, talking to himself.
Declaring this portrayal a waste of both a great actor and a great role would be understating the case. It's especially baffling coming from Rudolph, who cut his teeth on Z-movies like Barn of the Naked Dead and should therefore feel some kinship with poor Kilgore. There's enough humiliation to go around, however, in a movie that doesn't just make its performers look foolish but shoves their distorted, screaming-red faces at us, in close-ups that would not be out of place in a training film for dermatologists. Of the major players Bruce Willis, as a hot-wired used car dealer suffering a breakdown, surprisingly comes off best; he seems to enjoy playing a desperate phony with a flyway comb-over. Nick Nolte, on the other hand, goes down in flames, shoving massive inhalers up his nose and prancing around in high heels and a red silk teddy as Willis' transvestite sales manager.
A couple of critics have suggested that the film might play better if it was shoved back a in time decade or two, to around the time the book was written, and it does waste a lot of energy beating stone-dead horses. (Do we really need another parody of clownish home made used car commercials?) The truth, I suspect, is that to work at all the project would have had to be re-imagined so thoroughly that it would tell a different story altogether.
CHICKEN RUN
The jaunty model-animated hens (and one rooster) in Peter Lord and Nick Park's Chicken Run are pop-eyed optimists. With voices supplied by some of Britain's most dexterous character actors, from Jane Horrocks (Little Voice) to Imelda Staunton (Shakespeare in Love), they seem perpetually flustered yet impervious to discouragement in their efforts to fly the coop, to avoid being processed into quick-frozen pot pies.
The startling expressiveness of the lumpy clay faces, and the wry shrugged-off quality of some of the gags, will come as no surprise to fans of Wallace and Gromit, the Oscar(tm)-winning creations of co-director Park. Most of Park's trademarks, like the laconic high-British vocal humor, has survived this collaboration between Aardman Animations, of Bristol, England, and DreamWorks SKG, of Hollywood, USA. But there are some dispiriting additions.
All animated movies in the post-Katzenberg era seem to be required to have the same storyline, the one about the search for a better world just over the horizon, where all the chickens (or mice or lizards or bugs) can live together in harmony. This movie is the same kind of bleeding-heart liberation saga as Dinosaurs and Antz and The Search for El Dorado, only with feathers. The tiresome scenes in Chicken Run in which coop leader Ginger (Julie Sawalha), rhapsodizes about life beyond the barbed-wire boundary of her grim poultry farm (it looks like a POW camp in an old WW2 movie) are really just filler, sawdust in the chicken feed.
But you can tap your fingers impatiently through this stuff and still have a great time. As a pair of larcenous farmyard rats, Timothy Spall (Secrets & Lies) and Phil Daniels (Quadrophenia) bounce insults off each other like a well-oiled comedy team. And a building-filling spit-and-baling-wire machine designed to process live birds into marketable comestibles ("Chickens go in, pies come out") is a triumph of ingenuity, a contraption that chugs along with a witty, syncopated rhythm. Just like the movie.
THE CLOSER YOU GET
The winsome vein of small-town UK humor opened up by The Full Monty and Waking Ned Devine was bound to produce some lackluster wannabes sooner or later, films that self-consciously attempted to cash in on this highly exportable trend. In this one, the puppyish dim males in a small town on the Irish seacoast, tired of stumbling home from the pub every night to an empty nest, send off a "Brides Wanted" ad to the Miami Herald and then strut around anxiously, awaiting an influx of long-legged beauties. (They must have been watching one of those sun-blinded spring break specials on MTV.)
As soon as we get a load of the impressive local women the lads have overlooked, we know exactly how this set-up is going to play out. This is a "right in your own back yard" story, with only a couple of minor swerves that we can't see coming a kilometer away. We're so far ahead of the characters that we don't get to share their elated sense of discovery. Without at least a glimmer of delighted surprise the romance-when-you-least-expect-it theme doesn't give us the lift we're hoping for.
It's a shame the picture doesn't have more flirtatious zest, because all the performers create appealing, flaky characters, and we wish them well: Sean McGinley, last seen being nailed to a pool table in The General, is a hang-dog, love-lorn sheep farmer; Niamh Cusak is the exasperated wife of a philandering tavern owner, an alert and un-foolable woman who makes frank common sense look sexy; and ferrety Ian Hart is the harmless blowhard who instigates the brides-wanted scheme, a new-wave butcher whose bottle-blonde jug-head is full of crackpot schemes. The actors manage to stem the rising tide of quaintness, but only just.
COMMITTED
The title of this wide-open affectionate comedy is a pun, of sorts. Is it possible to carry devotion ---to a person, to a cause--- to the point of madness and beyond? Joline (Heather Graham), who manages a grungy Manhattan rock club, seems to have a talent for commitment, the way other people are accident-prone. Surrounded by colorful weirdoes who lead amorphous, fluid lives, she grounds herself by being almost fanatical about keeping promises.
Joline's mettle is tested when her husband of less than two years (played with frazzled eloquence by Luke Wilson) takes off to parts unknown---to get his head together, as we used to say. She boldly ventures forth to win him back, and soon finds herself camped out in a rented car on a remote desert highway in El Paso, Texas, keeping a vigil watch on her errant partner's motor home. Graham brings an ideal combination of wide-eyed sincerity and toughness to the role, and the film plays partly as a romantic comedy of errors, with paths that divertingly cross and recross, and partly as a Jonathan Demme-style salute to eccentricity American style.
The writer-director, Lisa Krueger (Manny & Lo), has structured the story to suggest that Fate itself is vibrating in sympathy with Joline. She deploys some native charms supplied a local shaman (Alfonso Arau), and they actually seem to work. And she hits the jackpot with a gorgeous new suitor almost as single-minded as she is. This rakish desert-rat sculptor, played by sultry ER hunk Goran Visnjic, is the sexiest rebound boyfriend since the furry painter played by Alan Bates in An Unmarried Woman. The movie comes tantalizingly close to suggesting that life isn't just a series of ping-ponging accidents; that it actually makes sense, and that we can, too.
COTTON MARY
Ismail Merchant usually produces the high-toned literary adaptations directed by James Ivory---Howard's End, Remains of the Day, et al. In the personal "side projects" he directs himself, Merchant is a much more rigorous analyst of cultures at the turning point. His lovingly textured In Custody (1993) celebrated the splendors, and mourned the demise, of traditional poetry written in Urdu, the ancient language of his native India. And the new Cotton Mary is an intimate, almost claustrophobic chamber psycho-drama (from a play by Alexandra Viets) that x-rays the tensions between Brits and Indians in the awkward period just after Independence in the early 1950s.
The British no longer rule India but they still comprise the society's ruling class, and the natives who serve them are working through a torturous process of psychological readjustment, an inner war of liberation that is more painful than just throwing off a political yoke. The title character here, a Machiavellian scheming servant in the household of a BBC radio journalist (James Wilby) and his enervated wife (Gretta Scacchi), isn't navigating the transition very effectively; in fact, she is slowly being unhinged by it. As Mary, Madhur Jaffrey calibrates the drift from snide eccentricity to outright madness with alarming vividness; she sneers and twitches with complete conviction.
The movie could easily have mutated into a post-colonial psycho-thriller, Benito Cerino meets The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. But Merchant isn't interested in that kind of blunt, illusory catharsis. He leaves all the nagging complexities intact. He is especially astute on the differences between the colonial experiences of British men and British women, the former engaging actively with the seductive local culture, the latter maintaining hermetic enclaves of Englishness in their clubs and households. Is the name Cotton Mary meant to echo the moniker of the legendary fever-carrier, Typhoid Mary? You could say that smuggles a disruptive social virus into the quarantined domestic sphere, which hasn't developed the mental anti-bodies needed to resist it.
DINOSAUR
Disney's latest, a computer-animated talking-thunder-lizard fantasy, is being marketed with the grab-'em-and-squeeze ferocity the studio has become famous for. And the movie is, at the very least, a technical milestone. The precisely detailed surfaces and the bone-deep realistic movements of the dino characters establish a new high water mark for CGI animation. These creatures actually seem to have fat and flesh under their rippling hides, and their integration into the live-action landscapes is all but seamless. In some sequences there are hundreds of individually distinct longnecks milling about, and every one of them seems pixel-perfect.
It's a shame that the storyline devised as a showcase for these marvels is standard-issue Disney whimsy, the sort of politically correct, Hollywood liberal uplift that has been chewed and re-chewed in all of the studio's recent animated offerings. After a crypto-nuclear meteor shower the dinosaurs are migrating to a legendary peaceful valley that has plenty of fresh water and leafy green vegetables, with a couple a nasty meat eaters nipping at their heels, the gross and scary Carnotaurs. Nice-guy Aladar (voiced by D.B. Sweeney) pipes up to resist Kron (Samuel E. Wright), the snarling bully leading the expedition, rallying the troops to cooperate---and to assist the weak and the infirm rather than abandoning them to their Darwinian fate. You don't have to be a paranoid conservative to interpret this as subliminal welfare-state propaganda, the ironic political agenda of the most carnivorous movie studio in Hollywood.
Dinosaur is being projected digitally in some venues, and if this technology still has any major bugs in it, they are not visible to the naked eye. The images are crystal clear and artifact-free; superior to all but the very best first-generation prints on celluloid. We have seen the future...
8 1/2 WOMEN
The reference to Fellini in the title of Peter Greenaway's new film is both deliberate and sadly revealing: the great Italian's 1963 classic 8 1/2 was, famously, a semi-improvised autobiographical work cobbled together from thematic odds and ends during a creative dry spell. Greenaway, however, is not a life-embracing dynamo like Fellini; his spirit is soul-killingly clinical. Women plays like a Greenaway's Greatest Hits album: there are flashes of the hip pop-Orientalism of The Pillow Book, and a nod toward the male-on-male incest of a A Zed and Two Naughts. The movie is so stiffly mannered that it slips into self-parody.
The premise, along with the tone, could have been lifted from a De Sade novel: It's a panorama of sexual adventurism among the depraved rich, punctuated with fatuous pseudo-philosophical conversations. A super-solvent father and son, middle-ager Philip Emmenthal (John Standing) and his snide offspring Storey (Matthew Delemere), are polaxed by grief when the sainted Mrs. E., wife and mother, expires unexpectedly, and set out to drown their sorrows in a sea of flesh. They collect a group of amenable women (Vivian Wu, Polly Walker, Amanda Plummer, Toni Collete, and more) at the family palais outside Geneva, and have at it.
There's a great deal of saggy male and female epidermis on display, draped across the expensive furnishings and framed in pristine symmetrical images. Ms. Plummer, starkers, gives a large pink hog a soapy sponge bath. Collete, wearing only a nun's wimple and a garter belt, enacts a blasphemous parody of Catholic liturgy. In interviews, Greenaway tries to palm himself as a rigorously intellectual moviemaker. But the actual driving force behind his work seems to be raw Id and aggression, directed squarely at the audience. These days, Peter Greenaway looks about as intellectual as the Farrelley brothers. He's certainly a lot less entertaining.
THE FIVE SENSES
An alarm bell goes off when you hear that one of the characters is "a widowed massage therapist who must learn to truly touch again." There is also an optometrist (Philippe Volter) who is in the process of going deaf, and a boutique birthday cake designer (Mary-Louise Parker) whose gorgeous creations taste like sawdust. The Five Senses, written and directed by the young Canadian (Eclipse), has a somber string quartet-like score and unfolds mostly in wood-paneled dark interiors. It's an art movie in the worst sense. Every detail is freighted with significance.
But it never seems to get much of a kick out of the ping-ponging accidental intersections. There's also a nod toward The Sweet Hereafter, in which tension is generated by a hunt for a lost three-year-old who wanders away from a Toronto park. Because Podeswa lets the audience know right away that the child will be safe, it's only the movie's characters who are being put through the wringer, so that we can watch them writhe.
Daniel MacIvor, playing a bi-sexual house-cleaner with a super-sensitive honker, adds some sly, mournful humor to his scenes. And no movie that includes the magnetic French-Canadian Pascale Bussi?res, who may have the world's most beautiful all-seeing eyes, can possibly be a total washout. Bussi?res seems to be getting a lot of outlandish roles lately: She was a sylvan fantasy figure dressed in leaves in Guy Maddin's Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, and a repressed lesbian theology professor seduced by a butch circus performer in Patricia Rozema's When Night is Falling. In The Five Senses, as another of Podeswa's glossy concept characters, an intellectual high-fashion prostitute with a deaf daughter, Bussi?res glides in toward the end to give the hangdog optometrist a new lease on life. She has a similar effect on hangdog moviegoers.
FLAWLESS
It's a buddy picture with guns and feathers. A snarly homophobic ex-cop suffers a stroke (while playing the hero, of course) and is forced to take therapeutic singing lessons from the flamboyant drag queen next door. These two have been shouting inventive obscenities at each other for years, across the airshaft of their building in lower Manhattan, and now they're sharing a piano bench and riffing on "The Name Game," including the inevitable "Chuck" chorus.
The actors, Robert De Niro and Philip Seymour Hoffman, do amazing things with their cut-and-paste roles, working at opposite physical extremes. All of Hoffman's gestures are outsized and self-dramatizing, full of melodic swoops and swirls, and De Niro's resources have been boiled down to a shrug, a squint and a barely intelligible gargle. Yet they both manage to act and get laughs and to connect with the audience from inside the elaborate carapace of stunt mannerisms they've adopted---an analogy, perhaps, for the overall concept of living out your life in drag. Hoffman even manages to integrate the thudding obviousness of Joel Schumacher's script into his character's penchant for blurting out heartfelt platitudes. (There are some nice moments in the supporting performances, too, especially from Daphne Rubin-Vega, who created the role of Mimi in Rent and brings an unaffected sweetness to her underwritten role as a lovelorn taxi dancer.)
But Joel Schumacher, who also directed, has the Midas touch in reverse: everything he touches turns to schlock. The New York drag scene, which has been explored sympathetically many times in independent features and documentaries (cf. Is Paris Burning? ) is processed here into commercial cheese-food. Scenes of elaborately decked out drag monarchs screaming and scratching at each other will probably get big laughs in the mall cinemas of Kansas. And as he demonstrated in last year's 8 mm, Schumacher has the ingenuity of a camp sadist when it come to cooking up scenes of gut-wrenching menace; a sub-plot about a lizard-eyed crime boss scouring the building for a missing cache of drug money includes a sportive episode in which a tattooed Mr. Clean squishes a helpless old woman's canary. Put this stuff together with the sensibility that stuck cod pieces and rubber nipples on the superhero outfits in Batman Forever and you've really got something: a rancid fruitcake for the holidays.
42 UP
The documentary series that began in 1964, when 7 Up was originally broadcast in Britain, has evolved into one of the richest non-fiction film projects ever undertaken. The director, Michael Apted, profiled fourteen representative seven-year-olds, from a wide range of class backgrounds, offering viewers "a glimpse of England in the year 2000." He has since revisited his subjects every seven years, catching them at 14, 21, 28 and 35. Some of these individuals are coming into their own only now, as they enter middle age.
There have been surprises, certainly, but these can often be ascribed to signals that were mis-read, or traits that came to the fore as others receded with age. Tough little Tony, from the East End of London, wanted to be a jockey. When the dream collapsed he seemed to be drifting toward the dark side. Yet here he is at 42, still a hustler at heart but also a hardworking London cab driver with a stable home life. Like another participant, Suzy, out from under the clouds of gloom that darkened her life at 21, Tony had inner resources that took a while to manifest themselves. In this sense, 42 can be read as the most encouraging chapter of the Up series so far. By and large, things have come out right for these people---startlingly so, at times. The troubled Neil, homeless at 28 and a recluse at 35, hasn't so much transcended his limitations as made an end run around them.
At times, though, the people who haven't changed at all are as inspiring as the ones who have turned their lives around. The most sympathetic personality, Bruce, was a pampered public school student who surprisingly announced at seven that he wanted to grow up to be a teacher in Africa. Bruce has retained his generous spirit into adulthood (although his missionary years were spent in India) and he participates in an exhilarating surprise in this installment, an eye-opening turn of events worthy of a great novelist. The new film gives a hopeful spin to the Jesuit maxim that inspired the entire project: "Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man."
GET BRUCE!
Your reaction to this talking-heads documentary will depend on your reaction to its subject, Bruce Vilanch, a prolific gag writer to the stars who has scripted the quips at most of the televised awards show you've groaned through over the last couple of decades. Now a celeb in his own right on the new Hollywood Squares TV show, where he's the head writer and a frequent box holder, Vilanch is either a charming, funny, cuddly wag, or a chilling cautionary figure so steeped in pop culture smarm that he can spit out sly verbal elbow jabs at the drop of a hat---or of a large check. Vilanch was a celebrity journalist in Chicago when he made the jump to writing high-octane patter for Bette Midler's early stage performances. (For that feat alone he deserves a solid footnote in showbiz history.) But from that point on he's been a wise-ass for hire, a master of the toothless in-joke and a favorite resource of, among others, Billy Crystal. (Vilanch wrote all of Crystal's recent Oscars appearances, and won two Emmys for his pains.) Andrew J. Kuehn's worshipful film depicts this spherical, Muppet-haired joke machine as some kind of weird stunted genius, a mutant of the media, a bonsai tree in human form.
GONE IN SIXTY SECONDS
The most astonishing single car stunt in this gleamingly re-tooled B-movie, the latest heavy-metal action picture from the Jerry Bruckheimer motorwerke, is paid off not with an explosion but with a raised eyebrow. The scene is a supercharged CGI marvel, but it's driven home almost entirely by the wide-eyed look of amazement on the face of Nicolas Cage, who plays an ace car thief astonished by his own prowess.
The primitive dialog that actors like Cage, Robert Duvall, and Delroy Lindo are asked to play here is so flagrantly beneath their gifts that you wonder how they could have gotten through a lot of it with a straight face. Cage doesn't even try, but he makes his puzzled skepticism ---his "how could I have gotten myself into this mess?" expression---work for the movie. He plays star "booster" Memphis Raines as a guy who's way too smart and skillful for the dunderheaded bind he's become embroiled in. (Raines' strung-out kid brother, played with dangling greasy locks by Giovanni Ribisi, has stiffed a Euro-trash car smuggler, and Memphis has to lift 50 cars in four days to pay off his arrears.) Cage's ironic twinkle frees us to scoff and sneer at this stuff and still have fun.
A movie like this is all about the expensive thunderous embellishments. Even the smash-cuts and the mini-zooms in the chase sequences must have been painstakingly storyboarded. The producers may even get a kick out of how rudimentary the Scott Rosenberg script is, as if he was savoring the challenge of trying to coast across the finish line on fumes and production values. Gone in Sixty Seconds operates on a brute force aesthetic, and if it finds an audience I'm moving to New Zealand.
HIGH FIDELITY
This disheveled, desperately romantic comedy assumes a standoffish ironic attitude that it practically begs us to see through. An aging slacker (John Cusack), the owner of a vinyl-purist used record store in Chicago, finds that his encyclopedic knowledge of pop music is of limited use when his long-time girlfriend (the Danish actress Iben Hjejle) unexpectedly walks out on him. On the surface that's pretty much all that happens. At its center the film is about the ludicrous hurdles a lot of boys have to scramble over when they are confronted with the necessity of finally turning into men.
The hard and fast opposition that is set up here between "what you're like and what you like" is probably a false one. In an odd way the movie makes both too much and too little of the role art can play in people's lives. This is especially problematic in a film in which the characters use their favorite songs as vehicles of self-expression. The directness and the emotional honesty of the music Cusack's Rob Gordon embraces, his abhorrence of sentimentality, seems to be inextricably connected with the aspects of his character that are solid and honorable. He is a fundamentally honest man who has a sharp ear for honesty in music.
This is a consistently funny and likable movie, and Cusack is terrific in it. He seems perfectly comfortable delivering reams of slyly self-deprecating first person commentary, most of it lifted word-for-word from Nick Hornby's popular novel. There are dozens of vintage pop songs on the soundtrack, and some of the cues are so spine-chillingly perfect that there are audible gasps of recognition in the audience. The almost anthropological observation of a bizarre sub-species of (mostly male) human beings who fetishize the detritus of pop culture is terrifyingly precise. For quite a few pop-crazed awkward people, High Fidelity is likely to become a touchstone film.
THE HURRICANE
Norman Jewison has been making movies for almost 35 years, and by now the director of In the Heat of the Night and Moonstruck knows how to get the effects he wants with an absolute minimum of fuss and bluster, and without making us feel that we're being squeezed. (This is the kind of filmmaking that the young punks of the post-Tarantino generation should be studying, the kind that makes the really hard stuff look easy.) Jewison's new picture tells the story of the liberation of boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, who spent 20 years in prison after being framed for a triple murder in 1967, and it draws startling emotional power from its tough-minded clarity, from a narrative structure seemingly designed just to lay out all the evidence as crisply as possible.
In the title role, Denzel Washington delivers a master-class demonstration of his own. He seems to vanish into the role, as if the soul of another person has taken up residence in his body. As a ferocious young contender, hunching his shoulders and charging across the ring at his startled opponents, Washington's Carter is a man who owes his victories to the sheer driving force of his personality. When Carter is imprisoned all this power turns inward, and Washington keeps the flame burning, shrewdly taking the measure of the unlikely trio of Canadian environmentalists (Liev Schreiber, Deborah Kara Unger, and John Hannah) who have managed to get his case reopened, years after the celebrity speeches and the protest songs have faded.
The movie is partly about the slender thread of coincidence that led to Rubin Carter's eventual release, beginning when a tattered used copy of his memoir The 16th Round turned up in the 25˘ bin at a library book sale in Toronto. There it just happened to catch the eye of an African-American teenager from the Bronx (Vicellous Reon Shannon), an uneasy adoptee in a house full of white do-gooders, who desperately needed a role model in his own struggle for self-definition. Norman Jewison tells this circuitous true story very simply, and he is experienced enough to know that the inspirational implications don't need to underlined. There are no accidents, not in a movie as expertly crafted as The Hurricane.
I DREAMED OF AFRICA
This could be a first: a movie in which the heroine's lawn gives the game away. This is no ordinary lawn, however, it's a surreal emerald marvel maintained by Kuki Gallman (Kim Basinger), an Italian society-dame-turned-conservationist, smack in the middle of the brown scrub plains of Kenya. From the air, in director Hugh Hudson's sweepingly romantic panoramic images, it looks like the putting green of a suburban golf course, snipped off and transported to the Dark Continent by sheer force of will---or perhaps by turf-carrying helicopters. Continuously watered by a battery of chirping sprinklers, it's a perfect emblem of Gallman's determination to impose a neatly trimmed country club sensibility upon the savage chaos of Africa.
It is also, of course, an odd household project for a environmentalist, especially in the context of a lethal drought that leaves bony native cattle wallowing in pits of sucking mud. The fact-based I Dreamed of Africa is one of those stories of the creation of a hero in which hindsight becomes predestination and every object and character and twist of plot, including the deaths of a couple of loved ones, are seen entirely in terms of their effect on the protagonist: The actual deaths get less screen time than the lame poems Kuki reads over the graves.
There are a couple of bizarre lacunae. A secret message left behind by a dead man is repeatedly alluded to, but it's never opened or read. And a boy who grows up in this lion-infested paradise turns into some kind of willowy African fop, as languid and pasty-pale as a decadent poet of the Yellow Nineties. And as Basinger plays her, with a mixture of wide-eyed sincerity and snooty superiority that seems just about perfect, Kuki Gallman simply isn't interesting enough to justify all this heavy lifting.
KEEPING THE FAITH
It's being sold as a wacky comedy about rambunctious boyhood chums in New York who grow up to be a stumblebum priest and a hipster rabbi. ("I think I've heard that joke," says a bartender in an early scene.) But apart from what the protagonists do for a living Keeping the Faith turns out is a conventional sniffly romantic comedy, with a fair amount of heartfelt emotion in the clinches. It runs true to form even in presenting the sturdy friendship between Edward Norton's Father Brian and Ben Stiller's Rabbi Jake as the truly pivotal interpersonal bond. When they fall in love with the same woman the suspense factor isn't which of them she will chose but whether their ecumenical buddy vows can stand the strain.
The movie's greatest asset, though, is the woman who comes between them. Looking sleek and efficient as some vague sort of high-powered business consultant, Jenna Elfman has been glamorized without being deprived of the goofy looseness of an inspired comedienne; she creates a new kind of comic heroine, here, a non-neurotic, zestful workaholic. (The comparison with Carole Lombard in the press notes isn't too far off the mark.) Elfman makes it easy to understand why Father Brian might begin to get hot under the collar as he gazes at her, grinning foolishly.
Norton also directed the movie, and to his credit he handed Stiller the stronger role. It may actually be a little too strong. Although Jake is perfectly comfortable shocking his congregation awake with a gospel choir, we are asked to believe that he is paralyzed with anxiety over its reaction to his relationship with a goy girl. The opposition of conservative elements in the temple becomes a synthetic obstacle that is set up only to be knocked over with a feather. In fact, the movie comes closest to choosing sides in a religious dispute when it places the guardians of Jewish tradition in the same position, plot-wise, as the stuffy corporate bosses in a gray-flannel comedy of the 1950s, vetting the "suitability" of a junior executive's fiancZ˙e. Their position is wrong-headed by definition, and theology be damned.
KESTREL'S EYE
Mikael Kristersson could be the Frederic Wiseman of nature documentarians. He wants us to experience the lives and the life cycles of his subjects from all the way the inside, almost to put us into their skins. Which in this case have feathers on them. A family of kestrels (European falcons) living in the tower-niches of a village church in rural Sweden, are photographed with startling intimacy, with cameras concealed way back inside the nest and seemingly suspended in mid-air beside them as they are wafted by updrafts, waiting to drop down like death from above upon blithely unsuspecting rats and lizards. (A scaly tail disappears gulp, gulp, gulp into the daddy kestrel's tummy.) The human life of the town is observed, too, from a discreet distance, and almost always from a great height; a bird's eyes view, as it were. There isn't a Disney-phony fabricated plot development in sight, nor a smidgen of music, and not so much as a single whispered word of voice-over narration. Events unfold on their own schedule, and the viewer's time sense has to adjust; you can practically feel your heart rate slowing down. The organic pace and the steady, uninflected gaze of this beautifully crafted film will drive some people batty. Others will relish the feeling of slipping into an alien state of consciousness.
LAST NIGHT
This end-of-the-world anti-epic from Canada is sure to draw some condescending faint praise for the standard elements it doesn't waste time on---special effects, for starters, and glib hysteria and melodrama. It elides even the obligatory pseudo-science explanations, though if you pay attention you can work them out. Yet on it's own terms Last Night is completely satisfying; it's a full dramatic meal. This intimate multi-character drama by Don McKellar, who wrote, directed and stars in the film, focuses alertly on an odd assortment of individuals facing certain death in Toronto as the last six hours of life on earth tick away. By American standards the film's measured seriousness is practically surreal: These sober Canadians don't exactly rage against the dying of the light. Even the marauding crowds of looters are observed calmly, almost clinically.
But for a first-timer McKellar is an extraordinarily assured storyteller. Every piece of this elaborate puzzle fits smoothly into place; you may still be making connections as you think back over it hours later. There isn't a single weak link in the large cast: Sandra Oh and Cullum Keith Rennie are indelible, and McKellar has written a perfect, pivotal role for himself, as a brooder whose private sorrow seems to him to outweigh even the apocalypse. But then, McKellar has been doing strong work in Canadian movies for years, writing and performing in films with directors Bruce McDonald (Highway 61) and Fran?ois Girard (The Red Violin); he was the egg-smuggling pet-shop owner in Atom Egoyan's Exotica and shaggy, sinister Yevgeny Nourish in David Cronenberg's eXistenZ. As a performer, and now as a director, he always seems to be holding some power in reserve; you can feel the impacted energy churning beneath the surface. In a period of moviemaking in which when the dominate aesthetic mandates pulling out all the stops in every single shot, Don McKellar's clenched restraint is positively bracing.
LIGHT IT UP
Demonstrators gather on a frosty winter evening, outside a besieged Brooklyn high school, to wave signs and bellow their support for a group of well-meaning inner-city kids who have (almost accidentally) taken a security guard hostage and barricaded themselves inside the building. Pegged initially as gang-bangers, the rebels have finally managed to get their message out over the Internet: we have no books, the classrooms are unheated, and our favorite teacher was fired for sticking up for us. The crowd gets a an eerily familiar chant going, an unmistakable three-beat echo of the "Attica!" cheer led by Al Pacino in the 1975 hostage-crisis melodrama Dog Day Afternoon. This picture is not in the same class, but in a number of refreshing ways Light it Up is a throw back, full-hearted and almost anachronistically well-crafted. Critics have compared it to a socially conscious Warner Brothers rabble-rouser of the 1930s; minus a few four-letter words it could also be a Young Adult heart-tugger about commitment and brotherhood.
One thing it's not is a nuanced piece of storytelling: it dredges up conventional character types that should have been put out to pasture ages ago. There's the skinny abused kid in a floppy hat (Robert Ri'chard) who is also a gifted painter, and the hip white teacher (Judd Nelson) who inspires the homeboys with tales of Gandhi and Martin Luther King. But the movie has been shrewdly structured and handsomely staged by the writer-director, Craig G. Bolotin, and the young cast is revved up and engaging. The pop singer Usher Raymond, as the leader of the insurgents, has charisma to burn and manages to convey decency without sounding like a simp. When the predictable big emotional pay offs arrive, right on schedule, they deliver the goods in spite of everything. The Production Designer, Laurence G. Paull (Blade Runner) probably deserves a co-auteur credit; a couple of the most potent sequences hinge upon the expressive impact of his work.
THE MESSENGER
The mud-and-blood spattered French soldiers in Luc Besson's cluttered Joan of Arc pageant are an engaging pack of bright-eyed rogues, like the pugnacious Gauls in the old Asterix comic books. And as long as Besson is charging around the battlefields of the Loire Valley in the 15th century, shooting punchy close ups of gap-toothed faces and severed limbs with his very own hand-held camera, The Messenger has some hectic energy. But the director of La Femme Nikita and The Professional seems a lot more comfortable with the grunts on the front lines than with the twitchy, petulant Joan portrayed by Milla Jovavich, who is supposedly the central character. He literally doesn't know what to make of her---a startling failure of imagination when there are so many alternate Joans to choose from. For the Catholic filmmaker Robert Bresson, she was a sort of divine alien. (She heard her famous voices, Bresson proposed, because "she was a more perfect being than we are, more sensitive. She combined her five senses in a new way. She convinces us of a world at the farthest reaches of our faculties.") For Shakespeare, who depicted her raving in the heat of battle in Henry IV, Part 1, she was a lunatic and probably a witch to boot. At the very least she is one of history's richest case studies, and Besson never sits still long enough to come to terms with her. He an impatient, headlong, sloppy moviemaker who only seems to be truly in his element when he is elbowing his way through crowds of leering extras. Even the French court he depicts is claustrophobically jammed with bodies. Off in the corner we occasionally catch a glimpse of a fidgety John Malkovich, as the Dauphin, and of an imperious Faye Dunaway, as the manipulative Queen Mother-in-Law. As Besson's bullying camera bears down on them, these astute performers take cover behind the tapestries.
MAN ON THE MOON
There is a wonderful quote from Chevy Chase (of all people) in Bill Zehme's book Lost in the Funhouse: The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman, which is excerpted on-line at Amazon.com. The late comedian's SNL colleague warns us to be skeptical of Kaufman's fluttery tweety-bird persona, the basis of his beloved Latka Gravas character on Taxi: "Those eyes were like the eyes of a tiger," Chase recalls. "They were always looking around for fresh prey." The most (although by no means the only) impressive thing about Jim Carrey's seamless performance as Kaufman in Milos Foreman's Man on the Moon is that he nails this underlying ferocity, the glint of low cunning that lights up his face whenever Andy catches the scent of a great practical joke, an unheard of new way of messing with everybody's head.
The movie dabbles with the idea that in the process of burrowing deeply enough into assumed roles to convince the rest of us that an actual unscripted fist fight or mental breakdown was underway, Kaufman sometimes came dangerously close to stepping over the line himself. But watching these reenactments of Kaufman's most famous stunts, and then seeing how knowingly they were set up, a more mundane explanation may occur to us: that Kaufman simply got locked into a pattern of delivering fake-out shocks to the audience, and the law of diminishing returns set in. When Carrey's Kaufman expresses a wistful desire to reveal "the real me" to his audience, his girlfriend, Lynne (an effectively subdued Courtney Love), briskly snaps him back to reality: "There isn't a real you, remember?" Lynne comes on like the Guardian of the Persona in this scene: Harpo Marx never spoke and Andy Kaufman can never be "real."
If Kaufman had a truly delusional alter-ego, though, it wasn't Latka (who he came to hate), it was Tony Clifton, the abusive and talentless lantern-jawed lounge crooner, a veritable monster from the Id, who is depicted here screaming obscenities at fans and smashing props on the set of Taxi. And in his Inter-Gender Wrestling Champion phase Kaufman taunted innocent female bystanders with obvious venomous relish. There is probably a limit to how much frankness we can expect from a film that lists both Kaufman's former agent, George Shapiro, and his best friend and coconspirator, Bob Zmuda, as producers, and that works both men into the storyline as pivotal participants. (Shapiro and Zmuda are portrayed, respectively, by Danny De Vito and Paul Giamatti.) Still, the movie is a little too glib about shrugging off the implications of Kaufman's nastier bits. That stuff didn't just come out of nowhere; it was too ferociously convincing. Kaufman's comedy drew both upon his inner child and his inner shithead.
Jim Carrey is a much more boisterous and "external" performer than Kaufman, a mime-athlete. So it makes sense that Carrey is especially effective in the Tony Clifton scenes, with his familiar flexible mug concealed behind hipster shades and a yellowish prosthetic jaw. To some extent Carrey restores a sense of balance to the film's overly benign view of Kaufman. He uses his whole body---the path-clearing sway of the shoulders, the battering-ram thrust of the padded belly-- to suggest the bullying impulses that found an outlet in the Clifton character. Carrey's Kaufman is a real performance, fully inhabited---which is not to say that there aren't elements of mimicry involved. Carrey uses his own shape-shifting abilities as a tool, to get inside the head of this compulsive role-player.
There is inevitably something poignant about a performer with such a deep hunger to get a rise out of people, to keep on winning and then challenging their affection. But Man on the Moon doesn't really try to get to the bottom of the sadness it hints at in Kaufman; it takes his desperation for granted and milks it for sniffles. There is a suggestion that Kaufman himself came to understand, toward the end, after he was diagnosed with cancer at 35, that his audience-baiting shtick was a dead end; and that he was beginning to move toward a more generous and relaxed style. The emotional climax of the picture, appropriately enough, occurs on stage during a performance, at a glorious Carnegie Hall concert (the famous milk 'n' cookies show) in which all the awkward mis-matched elements of Kaufman's humor seem finally to be falling into place. It's as if he's come to terms with his ability to make audiences happy. He might have gotten there a lot sooner if that prick Clifton hadn't loused things up.
MISSION TO MARS
Moviegoers who wasted a significant portion of their youth watching earnest space-exploration pictures like Destination Moon and its rust-bucket imitators may find a soft spot in their hearts for Brian De Palma's flat-footed space opera about a rescue mission to the red planet. It's a lot snazzier than those old films on a purely visual level, but it's every bit as square and silly, and its dunder-headed solemnity is oddly moving. Cheesy stargazing dialog that would once have been handed to B-movie stiffs like John Agar and William Lundegan has been entrusted to real actors (chiefly to Gary Sinise, Tim Robbins, and Don Cheadle), but this only serves to draw attention to its clunkiness. The writing is often so lame that my alert ten-year-old daughter was coming up with the lines a few beats ahead of the performers. ("I knew he was going to say that," she announced happily, after one particularly fatuous exchange.)
Effects supervisor Dennis Muren and his team from Industrial Light and Magic have done some truly astonishing work here; the space travel and alien encounter effects are majestically imagined. But the effects are just freestanding wonders; they aren't supported or prepared for by the storytelling. The picture has a stuttering, choppy structure that suggests a draconian last-minute trim-job, and a lot of crucial information is doled out in looped lines of dialog that are applied like Spackle, to seal the gaping joints. Leap-frogging clumsily from one dramatic high point to another, the movie never develops a smooth internal rhythm; there's no pleasurable suspenseful build-up to the big CGI blowouts. The poor actors, who are asked to express a sense of flabbergasted awe that the movie hasn't earned, end up looking awfully foolish.
The picture is a milestone in one sense: So much of the imagery was created with miniatures and on computers that Mission to Mars is to all effects and purposes an animated movie, with occasional awkward human inserts. (The performers often appear only as goggle-eyed facial ovals composited into space helmets.) Its no wonder the movie feels stiff and soulless. A couple of enjoyable, literally dizzying sequences inside the cylindrical spacecraft, in which the artificial-gravity rotation of the vehicle is redoubled by De Palma's sinuous camera moves, are the only flourishes that seem truly magical. The machines in this picture are livelier than the people.
THE NINTH GATE
Johnny Depp has been up to his earlobes in occult occurrences recently. Just a few months ago he was a scientific sleuth tracking The Headless Horseman in Tim Burton's luscious Sleepy Hollow. Now he's a globe-trotting rare book dealer racing to stay a few jumps ahead of a conspiracy of power-mad Satanists in The Ninth Gate. Roman Polanski's film version is a cerebral thriller by motion picture standards, although it is radically less cerebral than the novel it is based on, Arturo Perez-Reverte's labyrinthine The Club Dumas. It took Perez-Reverte upwards of 20 pages to explain how the clues hidden in the macabre illustrations in three surviving copies of a 17th century demonology manual are to be decoded, yielding a formula for summoning You Know Who. All of the elaborate geometrical puzzle-work has simply been omitted from this leisurely supernatural detective movie. Here, apparently, you simply lay the etchings down on a table side by side, and magic happens.
Still, it is hard to think of another youngish actor who could play a brainy sleuth with as much alert conviction as Mr. Depp; he manages to spout an awful lot arcane bibliophile lore in this movie without making an ass of himself. And as his butt-kicking sidekick he has the good fortune to enlist Emmauelle Seignier (Mrs. Polanski) who has feline green eyes, a winning sarcastic demeanor, and some snazzy martial arts moves. Tracking the missing hellish tomes across a great expanse of picturesque European scenery, Depp and Seignier make a simmeringly sexy team of paranormal investigators. The film provides a lovely smooth flow of tastefully composed images but very little in the way of pulse-pounding excitement. That isn't necessarily a bad thing. Compared with gruesome headbangers like Stigmata and End of Days, this may strike you as welcome change of pace. This is a remarkably languid and relaxing suspense picture, well worth gazing at for an hour or two. .
THE PATRIOT
Mel Gibson's shrewd adaptation of the gruff and grimy Braveheart style of heroism to the Revolutionary War in The Patriot is triumphantly, defiantly square. By making ponderous emotional blatancy look like a new form of manly frankness, Gibson gets away with strokes of melodrama that D.W. Griffith might have balked at: a little girl who has never spoken blurting out her first words as her father marches off to battle; a crusty veteran fighting back tears as he melts down and molds into bullets the toy soldiers treasured by his dead son, brutally executed by the British. The grim "revisionist" details (the colonial freedom fighters who are also slave owners; the meat-grinding horror of 18th century warfare) are included not to undercut the full-hearted male-weepie elements, but to soften us up for them.
Gibson's Benjamin Martin is loosely based on the real-life revolutionary hero Francis Marion, the "Swamp Fox" who mastered guerrilla combat techniques during the French and Indian War and turned them against the British in the Carolinas. As Gibson plays him, Martin is a foursquare American classic. Like Cooper's hero in The Last of the Mohicans he may have the savage skills required to tame the forest primeval, but there is no natural place for him in the civilized society he helps to build. If The Patriot was truly internally consistent Martin would eventually expire in a blaze of masochistic glory, or at the very least he would wander off by himself like John Wayne at the end of The Searchers. Not in today's Hollywood, though, and certainly not in a 2 1/2 hour inspirational epic directed by Roland Independence Day Emmerich.
THE QUARRY
The Belgian writer-director Marion Hansel (The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea) creates a terrific dusty-desolate mood in this existential crime picture set in rural South Africa. The landscape is tabletop flat and moistureless all the way to the horizon, visibly inhospitable to human life. And the star, the stick-thin Brit John Lynch (Sliding Doors) seems to have been born to play haunted and hunted men, his thick dark eyebrows an ideogram of dismay. Lynch's nameless drifter, seemingly on the run from the police (no back story is supplied), snuffs a Baptist minister who picks him up on the highway and, on impulse, assumes the Reverend's identity. Taking over the pulpit in a remote township, offering something more precious than cool water to the dusty and the downtrodden, the killer is startled to discover that he has a gift for this demanding work. (He opens the Bible initially with trepidation and then with amazement. Who knew?)
In its individual scenes this is a beautifully controlled movie, spare and precise, with delicate editing rhythms. Takeshi Kako's ominous twangy score is seductively bleak, like a painfully extended blues riff. But instead of settling in to explore the questions she's raised (can a bad man transform himself merely by pretending to be good?), Hansel gets sidetracked by a switchback plot that hinges upon coincidence at almost every turn. The snoopy local police captain (Jonny Miller), a Teutonic Lex Barker-type, never evolves into the false-minister's philosophical nemesis, as he would have in the Graham Greene version of the story. This nazi cop is just an agent of doom bearing down upon the redeemed fugitive. The Quarry has the insinuating mood and the taut craftsmanship of a memorable thriller, but it squanders its most promising implications.
REINDEER GAMES
Way back in the 1970s, when an R-rating still meant something, my movie-mad friend Fred used the word "vicious" as one of his highest terms of praise. He applied it sparingly, though, only to the curdled cream of the crop of the explosively violent, inexhaustibly cynical genre films that were the underside of flower-power chic in the Vietnam era. I think Fred will love John Frankenheimer's new Reindeer Games. The film is so relentlessly unpleasant that it could have been knowingly designed as the reductio ad absurdum of the heartless, empty, violence-as-sideshow thriller. "You like this, do you? Well here it is, and this time without a shred of pretense."
Although masquerading as a major studio release, with rising stars Ben Affleck and Charlize Theron as the protagonists (way too glamorous for their low-life roles) and Oscar-winner Gary Sinise as the sociopathic heavy (a sadistic gun-running trucker), Games is at heart a nasty little B-movie, a headlong heist picture about a botched casino robbery that unfolds in a brown-on-gray landscape of cheap motels and dingy truck stops. Affleck is a gullible ex-con drawn into a crackpot scheme to rip off a seedy Indian gambling complex in Michigan. At regular intervals he is tied up and worked over by the grinning crooks, a picturesque trio of sub-Elmore Leonard thugs portrayed by Donal Logue, Danny Trejo, and Clarence Williams III.
As he demonstrated in 1998 in Ronin ---and in 52 Pickup and in the underrated Dead Bang a few years back--- the director of The Manchurian Candidate is also a work-over specialist. Nobody else designs dynamic deep-focus images with this kind of rabbit-punch effectiveness. But this time Frankenheimer seems to be using his peerless craftsmanship to chip away at the very notion that a thriller has to have a functioning moral compass to be fully satisfying. The theme of moral bankruptcy is pursued with ruthless consistency. The script by Ehren Kruger (Arlington Road) peels away one layer of betrayal after another, until there's nothing left; the amorality of all the characters (and we do mean all) seems to be bottomless. Wickedly well crafted, Reindeer Games is also vicious to a fault, and it leaves a rancid aftertaste.
ROMEO MUST DIE
Although they've now made two films together, the sledgehammer action producer Joel Silver and the light-footed martial arts superstar Jet Li aren't really a good match. (Li stunned American audiences as a monosyllabic head-kicking mobster in the fourth installment of Silver's trademark Lethal Weapon series.) In his best Hong Kong vehicles, like Tsui Hark's Once Upon a Time in China, Li seems miraculously agile, lighter than air; he's the Gene Kelly of kung fu. Silver makes films that resemble hydraulic industrial machines that try to hammer us into the ground. In Romeo Must Die even the soundtrack, which is wall-to-wall migraine rap, seems to be slapping us upside the head.
In his directorial debut, the ace cinematographer Andrzej Bartkowiak (Speed) gets a certain amount of tasty juice out of the culture-clash rivalry between two families of Oakland mobsters, one Chinese, one African-American. As the title indicates, the plot revolves around an unsuitable relationship between the estranged offspring of the dueling bosses, who are inching toward a rapprochement until violence erupts. Li is an honorable Hong Kong cop who went to prison rather than rat out his Triad relatives; in an smashing early sequence he busts out and smuggles himself into the US to track down his brother's killer. The spunky young pop singer Aaliyah is the straight-arrow daughter of black godfather Delroy Lindo. The two of them meet cute and stay cute, but in the film's best fight sequence they team up to trounce a pack of motorcycle goons, using nifty kung fu variations on over-the shoulder ballroom dancing moves.
There is one startling innovation here, a new devise for the visual amplification of violence: quick-flash CGI overlays, like multi-colored x-rays, that illustrate the effects of pulverizing blows upon human bones and inner organs. The really revolutionary step at this point, though, would have been to back off and lighten up and let Jet Li's flashing feet speak for themselves. Romeo Must Die seems to be trying to smuggle this amazing performer into the US, implausibly disguised as something he clearly isn't; a brute-force American-style headbanger.
SHAFT
The first big surprise in the sleek new John Singleton version of Shaft is that it's an honest-to-God detective story, a solid police procedural with real clues and a rich urban-underbelly atmosphere. It may owe more to the bracing example of Elmore Leonard than to Gordon Park's 1971 original film, which was exhilarating but also a little cheesy. With Samuel L. Jackson in the title role we get to eavesdrop as ace NYPD homicide detective John Shaft prowls a crime scene, bristlingly alert, picking up signals that others have missed. For once, we can actually see the detective detecting. We can just about pinpoint the zing of revelation.
The movie has an absorbing precision about the tones and textures and especially the class tensions of life in the big city. (The script is credited to Richard Price, who wrote both the source novel and the screenplay of Spike Lee's Clockers.) A negotiation at cross purposes between a wealthy white racist scofflaw (Christian Bale), who wants to sub-contract the elimination of a murder witness, and an ambitious small-time Latino drug dealer (Jeffrey Wright), who sees this smug twerp as his entree to the uptown market, is a small masterpiece of miscommunication. These guys could be clueless diplomats from hostile neighbor states, obliviously pursuing contradictory agendas.
The second big surprise is that Jackson, the most magnetic star presence in modern movies, isn't the whole show. Bale and Wright and Toni Collette, who plays the hunted witness, all make vivid impressions. The movie does seem to have a blind spot on the subject of vigilante justice, which is seen as righteous, but only when it's dished out by a high-minded black officer, the people's cop. Jackson's grim Shaft seems to be living by Dirty Harry's old motto: "There's nothing wrong with a little shooting as long as the right people get shot."
SLEEPY HOLLOW
Reviewers of Sleepy Hollow will be sorely tempted to just rattle off a list of the half-remembered touchstone images that Tim Burton has folded into his gorgeously creepy adaptation of Washington Irving's Id-tickling tale---the one about brainy, twitchy Ichabod Crane and his showdown with the Headless Horseman. The look of the film is keyed to the 18th century period setting, but dream logic scoffs at normal conceptions of time and space, and anachronism rules. Within the first five minutes there are sly references to the gothic Hammer horror movies and to the paintings of the Hudson River School. But the director's omnivorous enthusiasm for all things eccentric and crooked and creepy-crawly has never before been as smoothly integrated into a shrewdly structured, smoothly orchestrated story. The images have a consistent steel-gray sheen, as if they've been rescued from an antique photographic medium, and everything is drenched in a low-lying viscous fog that seems to be lit from within. When the headless apparition takes shape and come thundering toward us, it appears to be sculpted out of the mist itself, a condensation of the movie's clammy atmosphere.
Sleepy Hollow burrows more deeply into our brains than any previous Burton film. For starters, there is a slight, significant shift of emphasis in the story: Crane (Johnny Depp) is no longer a goofy but intrepid local schoolteacher. He's now he's a police detective imported from the big city, with a head full of newfangled notions about applying scientific methods to criminal investigations. (Depp says he modeled his performance partly on Basil Rathbone's high-strung Sherlock Holmes.) This swashbuckling 18th century nerd-boy comes face to face with something ravenous and implacable in the Western Woods, a phenomenon that reason can't explain---exactly the sort of googly stuff that Tim Burton loves best.
Some of the imagery is pretty easy to absorb: Christina Ricci, for instance, doll-faced in blonde curls, could be the long-lost third Gish sister, a rural princess in a silent melodrama. Other visual emblems are a lot more ambiguous, and they recur throughout the movie, and evolve. The movie's retro high tech gizmos all look vaguely skeletal, for instance: The menacing bony shapes of Ichabod's homemade autopsy tools, the torture devices that haunt his dreams of childhood, the fantastic jointed machinery inside an archetypal Old Mill. Was this a conscious pictorial motif or just a happy accident? Or an eruption from the unconscious?
Sleepy Hollow is partly a fairy tale set in a fun house landscape of gnarly trees and thatched "witch house" cottages, and partly a waking nightmare in which the thin skin of reality is always in danger of splitting open to reveal something rancid and gelatinous. All of these excrescences, the droll and the ghoulish alike, are of course just outlandish tendrils sprouting from the forebrain of Mr. Burton, a visionary entertainer who has never made a cooler movie.
SNOW DAY
A snow day in this movie means that there's no school, and also that the streets are blocked and everything stops in this small town. So it's more than just a day off. The kids sort of take over the town because the grown ups are too busy trying to clear the snow away. This is a fun idea, because anything could happen, but it's not that much fun because the characters don't think up stuff to do that's very interesting. Maybe they just aren't smart enough.
This main character is Hal (Mark Webber), whose dad (Chevy Chase) is the local weatherman on TV. The dad wears funny hats and makes a fool of himself on the air, but he's still a nice guy and spends way more time with his kids then his wife does. (She even talks on her cell phone at the breakfast table.) Hal is an ordinary kid who likes a girl in his class, Claire (Emmamuelle Chiqui), who is popular and snobby, and he uses the snow day to try to make her notice him. But his best friend Lane (Schuyler Fisk) is also a girl, and really nice, so even though she's a tomboy it's kind of obvious what's going to happen. At the same time, Hal's kid sister Natalie (Zena Grey) and her friends are trying to keep the Snowplow Man (Chris Elliott) from cleaning the streets, so they can have a second snow day. The Snowplow Man is the funniest character. He has a pet crow and really yucky teeth and he calls the snowplow Clementine.
This is a pretty funny movie but it's not exactly sophisticated. Like there's a fat kid in it who farts a lot? Also, Snow Day might not be that interesting to people in places like Hawaii, where there isn't any snow. Unless they wish there was snow, or want to see what snow looks like. Anyway, it's a Nickelodeon movie, even though Rosie O'Donnell isn't in it, so you could just wait and see it on TV this summer, when it will be hot and it might be fun to see some snow for a change. (by Nora Chute, age 10, with David Chute, age withheld)
SNOW FALLING ON CEDARS
Boil down this flashy, foggy movie to its core elements and what you're left with is a conventional socially conscious melodrama about the trial of a Japanese-American for murder in a small seacoast town in Washington in the late 1940s---To Kill a Mockingbird with fish and snow. The picture is occasionally effective, especially in the flashback sequences of American citizens being carted off to "relocation camps" in the early days of the war. But the director, Scott Hicks (Shine), doesn't know when to leave well enough alone. He cuts restlessly back and forth between the events surrounding the trial and past occurrences that presumably explain them, and he chops up the gorgeous, silvery high-contrast images of cinematographer Robert Richardson into expressionistic fragments.
Some of the rhetorical inflation may have been built into the material supplied by David Guterson's book-group bestseller---like the inexplicable Herman Melville reference in the name of the central character, the one-armed local newspaper editor Ismail Chandler, played by Ethan Hawke. (Chandler has been decked out, hat and all, to resemble the Spencer Tracy hero in John Sturges' 1955 classic Bad Day at Black Rock, a one-armed vet who investigates the murder of a Japanese-American army buddy. So if we spot the resemblance it can palmed off as an "homage.") The central plot device creaks loudly: Will the brooding journalist hand over the new evidence he's uncovered to the crusty humanitarian defense attorney, Max Von Sydow, or withhold it in order to punish the defendant's wife (Youki Kudoh), the childhood sweetheart who sent him a "Dear Ismail" letter when he was serving overseas? You tell me.
SURVIVING PARADISE
The most useful section of Surviving Paradise, an awkward cross-cultural thriller by the Iranian-American writer-director Kamshad Kooshan, takes place in a Persian restaurant. It includes detailed instructions on the correct procedure for eating a kabob plate. (The butter, baked tomato, and egg yolks are mixed with the rice prior to consumption.) It's an actual restaurant, too, a fairly famous place a few blocks from my apartment in Los Angeles. I plan to eat there soon. But if you come out of a movie looking forward to your next meal, something is perhaps amiss.
The MacGuffin in this story is the manuscript of a missing section of Aristotle's Physics. A gang of generic thugs wants to intercept the ms. before it can be sold, presumably on the underground Greek-philosophy market. Two goons kidnap a Persian woman who may or may not be trying to smuggle the precious papyrus into the States, stranding her two plucky kids at LAX. The children wander off on their own through some fairly grim sections of Downtown and South Central. (Kooshan told the Hollywood Reporter that "The lost children's search is a metaphor for the Iranian people's struggle and search for identity in the 21st century.")
One pivotal problem is the nerveless performance of soap star Joe Alvarez (The Young and the Restless), as the lapsed-preppy hitman who should be the driving force of the story. Alvarez magically drains the energy out every scene he's in. The kids may not be actors, either, but they are real troupers, and the handsome actress who plays their captive mother, Shohreh Aghdashloo, is the genuine article: she worked with Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami before emigrating to the US. But this limply structured would-be suspense film has no narrative engine under its rusty hood, no sense of urgency even when the clock is supposedly ticking toward a rub-out. Save your money for the lunch special at Javan.
THIRD WORLD COP
Third World Cop, is a crafty police-action thriller from Jamaica, with a fistful of strong performances and a blistering reggae/dub soundtrack. The foreground story is one we've seen a hundred times before in classic Western and crime films---the one about the wild boyhood running mates who re-connect as adults and find themselves on opposite sides of the law. But this familiar fable feels almost fresh when it's played out against the backdrop of the festering standpipe ghettos of Kingston. It's a radically updated cover version of a worn out old pop tune, a dancehall/dub re-mix of "The Streets of Laredo.
Capone (Paul Campbell, from Dancehall Queen) is the shoot-first vigilante cop, a homegrown Wyatt Earp or Dirty Harry, ruthlessly judgmental. Ratty (newcomer Mark Danvers) is the charismatic Billy the Kid figure, a rising young music promoter who lacks the last crucial measure of faith in his own future. He has been seduced by the promise of quick wealth and cheap status offered by Wonie (Carl Bradshaw), a hooded and sinister local ganglord whose gun-running scheme is decimating the community. When Capone rides back into town after a tour of duty in the provinces, vowing to clean up Dodge City, you don't have to be a film nerd to guess how this story will end.
Third World Cop was shot entirely on location, with Digital Video equipment, by an all-Jamaican cast and crew. But first-time feature director Chris Browne, a TV and music video veteran, gives the movie a solid, sure-footed gravity. The title may suggest a more pointed political critique than the movie ever delivers, but this isn't necessarily a bad thing. The characters are clearly organic to the richly textured inner city settings, but they are never seen as the helpless victims of social forces. Capone's proud motto as a cop---"We run tings, tings nuh run we"---is less a statement of fact than an article of faith.
WHERE THE MONEY IS
Doing something daring and naughty and getting away with it, and in the process making fools out of all the cautious "straight" people who want to cramp your style: very few us have are so elevated that the notion hasn't crossed our minds. The modest, personable caper picture Where the Money Is, calmly directed by Marek Kanievska (Less Than Zero), plugs into this universal fantasy very shrewdly. It is all about liberating your inner felon.
A comatose stroke victim (Paul Newman), who is escorted in chains from a prison hospital to a small town nursing home, turns out to be a legendary bank robber playing possum, pulling yet another fast one. Our fond memories of The Hustler and Butch Cassidy provide a surrogate backstory for the Newman character, and as the shrewd nurse-therapist who sees through the sham and convinces him to rejoin the living, Linda Fiorentino brings useful echoes of her award-winning black-widow performance in The Last Seduction. She makes it easy for us to believe that prim Nurse Carol has been surpressing her wild side and her alert intelligence for years, waiting for just the right catalyst to bring them surging to the surface. In effect she too has been playing possum, hibernating in her drab marriage to Wayne (Dermot Mulroney), a former high school hell raiser turned clock-punching stick-in-the-mud.
The cleverest element of the screenplay (by E. Max Frye, Topper Lilien, and Carroll Cartwright) is that the process isn't all one sided; Newman's sly-old Henry and Fiorentino's crafty Carol energize each other equally. When they begin pulling jobs together it is Carol who introduces role-playing con artristry to the repertoire, a crime-style that doesn't require brute force and that allows Henry to get back into the game in his sunset years. Interpreting a heist picture as a metaphor for bust-out personal liberation doesn't quite resolve our queasiness over its light-hearted amorality. But as retirement pursuits go, armed robbery beats the hell out of shuffleboard.
THE WHOLE NINE YARDS
Several of the chain-smoking mob bosses and smarmy amoral assassins in this frantic gangster farce (whacking made wacky?) are played by talented comic actors who seem to be having a fine time: Kevin Pollack as a Hungarian-American mobster with a slow-burn and a Bela Lugosi accent; Harland Williams as a seedy part-time contract killer who looks like a reject from a caught-on-tape TV special; and Rosanna Arquette as a French-Canadian goldigger with an accent as thick as refrigerated cream cheese.
The agitated performances are engaging, and this cluttered, frantic movie is often funny in spite of itself. But it also has a undercurrent of desperation. Whenever the pace threatens to flag Matthew Perry, as a frazzled nice-guy dentist, leaps backwards out his chair or hurls himself against a wall, like John Belushi flipping out behind the anchor desk.
Bruce Willis gives the movie's only real performance, as a legendary hitman on the run who moves into a big frumpy house in Perry's suburban neighborhood in Montreal, and drags the shlub tooth-doctor into a backstabbing gangland power struggle. Willis' Jimmy "The Tulip" Tedeski is a smoothly self-confident killer, a skilled professional who doesn't feel the need to flaunt his deadliness; he savors it as a delicious private joke. He seems to have wandered into this loony bin from the set of a cooler, edgier movie that was shooting somewhere nearby.
WIREY SPINDELL
Writer-director Eric Schaeffer (If Lucy Fell) supposedly based his new film on a 10-year-old autobiographical novel about teenaged addiction and precocious polymorphous sexuality. The mixture of self-pity, icky-intimate bedroom and bathroom confessions, and 12 step platitudes is nearly unbearable. Schaeffer plays the manic title character as an adult, a self-absorbed New Yorker nursing second thoughts about his pending marriage (to Callie Throne, from TV's Homicide) and flashing back over his substance-abusing, commitment-evading youth. A willowy hunk (Eric Mabius, up soon as the undead avenger in Crow: The Salvation) plays Wirey at college age, drinking and snorting and fixating upon classmate Samantha Buck, who looks like a Baywatch version of Julianne Moore.
To say that there a disjunction between the two phases of the role would be putting it mildly. There is no way this soulful, wounded wreck, a romantic young-artist clichZ˙, could have matured into the whiny dork hectically portrayed by Schaeffer, whose fluttering hand gestures and stop-start vocal rhythms wear out their welcome in 30 seconds flat. Male-pattern movies about the fear of commitment are a stunted sub-genre to begin with. This one is barely a smudge on the screen.
THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH
Against all odds, the respected British director Michael Apted (42 Up) has injected a grown-up sense of romance and danger into the embalmed format of the James Bond franchise. In lieu of the cartoonish evildoers of yore we get bad guys with complicated creepy compulsions and a mystery-story plot that actually keeps us guessing. And the soot-darkened oil fields of the crumbling Russian republics around the Caspian Sea provide an unusually rich backdrop for the obligatory chase sequences and fiery explosions. There are recognizable signs of life in this 19th Bond extravaganza, which is a refreshing novelty.
The current Bond, Pierce Brosnan, is not a definitive masculine icon like Sean Connery, and he was outclassed even as an action hero by the high-kicking kung fu star Michelle Yeoh in Tomorrow Never Dies. But he's a better actor than the Bond role deserves at this point, and the latest installment plays to his strengths. Bond has some nut and bolts detective work to slog through here---when he isn't dodging car-sized saw blades dangling from helicopters, or racing to prevent an explosive meltdown aboard a black-market Russian submarine. (Some things never change.) Brosnan's Bond is convincingly crafty, but he has blind spots, too, and to play upon them Apted has cast the long-stemmed French beauty Sophie Marceau. Her slinky Elektra, a swashbuckling femme fatale of an oil tycoon, is magnificent enough to sweep even the jaded 007 off his feet. Over on the dark side Robert Carlyle, an earnest charmer in The Full Monty, seems to relish playing a seething loon of a terrorist with a shaved scalp and a bullet embedded in his brain.
This wouldn't be a Bond picture, though, without at least a pinch of silliness. Playboy magazine used to do Bond parodies in it's Little Annie Fanny comic strip, and this time the moviemakers turned the tables on them: Denise Richards, stretching a helpless tank top to the breaking point, is Annie Fannie incarnate.