Films Shown in 2007
CURSE OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER - Rated R - 114 minutes - Scope
Over the course of his two decades as a major international director, Zhang Yimou has proven himself uncannily adept at juggling a range of classical Chinese film genres, from intense period dramas like Raise the Red Lantern and Ju Dou to contemporary social comedies like The Story of Qiu Ju and Happy Times to dazzling period martial arts spectaculars like Hero and House of Flying Daggers. More recently, however, he's begun blending those sensibilities in even more enthralling new ways and with results both tantalizing and titillating. After hearkening back to his minimalist roots earlier in the year with the deeply touching and austerely funny Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles, Zhang delivers the mother of all 180-degree turnarounds with Curse of the Golden Flower, an opulent spectacle of almost Shakespearean gravitas and eye-popping cinematic virtuosity. Set during the 10th-century Tang Dynasty, the film at first unfolds like a chamber piece, narrowly concerned with the palatial intrigue surrounding the family of the cruel, calculating Emperor (Chow Yun Fat), namely his scheming Empress (Gong Li), their two sons, Prince Jai (Jay Chou) and Prince Yu (Qin Junjie), and the Emperor's eldest son by a previous wife, the Crown Prince Wan (Liu Ye). As always, power and succession are the key concerns here, complicated by the usual array of illicit affairs, crosses and double-crosses, dark family secrets, elaborate schemes and counter-schemes. But, as the stakes increase with each new and life-altering revelation, Zhang further ups the ante by throwing open yet another set of palace doors, augmenting the film's scale and stirring the pot with even more unanticipated revelations. Everyone, it seems, has both a secret and a plan, and the way in which they intertwine and unfold is nothing short of genius. Based on the play Thunderstorm by famed novelist/playwright Yu Cao, a case could be made that Curse of the Golden Flower isn't so much Shakespearean as it is Macbethean, trafficking in the very same themes and employing many of the same devices as that most savage and primal of the Bard's great tragedies. To be sure, Zhang is no stranger to the labyrinths of tragedy - such machinations were already at the heart of Shanghai Triad and Raise the Red Lantern - but his execution here belongs solidly in the Hero and House of Flying Daggers camp, style lavishly painted across every corner of the screen with passionate, reckless abandon. What begins small soon grows to fittingly imperial proportions, a gloriously volcanic eruption of silk, armor, blood and poison that seems certain, at the very least, to earn the film a handsome suite of Oscar nominations for its technical achievements. What production designer Huo Tingxiao, costume designer Yee Chung Man and cinematographer Zhao Xiaoding have created is far more than just a dazzling feast for the senses - it is, in a very real way, an evocation of the characters' innermost dreams and fears, their blackened souls and most extravagant ambitions so forcefully realized that it almost seems to transcend reality. It is no minor detail, either, that this represents Zhang's first teaming with Gong Li, his one-time partner in life and art, in over a decade. The two were inseparable between 1987 and 1995, during which they collaborated on Zhang's first seven films (as well as acting together in 1989's A Terracotta Warrior), soaring to fame as the Chinese industry's most illustrious celebrity couple. It was in 1995 that both the collaboration and the relationship finally ended, creating no small amount of sorrow among their mutual fans. That sorrow can now be put away for good as the collaboration has been reinstated with all of its historic magic and magnificence firmly intact. - BY Wade Major, Boxoffice Magazine
THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND - Rated R - 123 minutes - Scope
Forest Whitaker's performance as Idi Amin is so good it's scary. Of course the barbaric Ugandan dictator was scary, but this performance picks up on so many layers of intriguing complexity in the man while never overstepping boundaries into any semblance of standard madman portrayal. There's no sign of theatrical tricks, no indulgence in disguise, no holding back from full commitment in achieving this flawless match-up of acting skill and role. It's compelling, seductive, terrifying. A clever meld of fact and fiction, intelligent, witty and ruthlessly honest to the misguidance and misery at the heart of the story, Peter Morgan and Jeremy Brock's script for "The Last King of Scotland," based on a novel by Giles Foden, takes a young Scottish doctor, dashed through with a serious itch to escape the confines of home, and hurtles him into an African political disaster, which undermines his ethics and threatens his life. James McAvoy exposes all the doctor's rawness of mind, heart and spirit as he's gradually seduced into the role of personal confidant to Amin, who's at once large, overripe, fascinating, unpredictable, brazen, fundamentally cruel, filled with childish glee and glossily evil. Shooting mainly on African locations, director Kevin Macdonald picks up on both eye-catching and hidden truths of time and place with the natural skill of the documentary filmmaker he has been while allowing the characters, whether true or fabricated, equal presence and power. The horror of Amin's self-imposed rule lurks through all the moods and moments of the story but is finally unleashed fully onscreen at exactly the right time to reveal its truly monstrous impact. Even those with less screen time than Whitaker and McAvoy are given their rightful space and fill it fully. Kelly Washington, as one of Amin's beautiful wives who turns to the doctor for the comfort of love; Gillian Anderson, as a fellow medic's wife with a firm grasp of the limited potential for charity and hope in Amin's Uganda; and Simon McBurney, as a seedy British official with an expedient view of the folly of any and everyman's imperialism, are all strikingly on cue. Their performances, just like the two lead roles, the script and the direction, are invested with understanding of the ongoing mistakes of history, the issues manifested in this weird duet between the African tyrant and Dr. Garrigan. Review by Bridget Byrne; Boxoffice Magazine
VOLVER - Rated R - 120 minutes - Scope
There is no director alive more connected to the hearts, minds and mysteries of women than Spain's Pedro Almodovar. With a string of masterworks stretching from Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown to All About My Mother and Talk to Her, Almodovar is a filmmaker worth following anywhere. In Volver ("return"), a movie that leaps off the screen to take its place in your dreams, the writer-director tells a ghost story that manages to include lust, incest, rape and murder. You'll laugh, too -- wildly, helplessly -- because to Almodovar, laughter is life. The opening scene is set in La Mancha (Almodovar's birthplace), at a cemetery where Raimunda (Penelope Cruz) and her sister Sole (Lola Duenas) fight the wind to clean the gravestones of their parents, who died in bed in a fire. Or did they? Almodovar keeps his movie as intimate as a whisper that makes us lean in to uncover its dark secrets. For starters, the sisters have an aunt (Chus Lampreave) who claims their mom, Irene (the miraculous Carmen Maura reunited with Almodovar after seventeen years), has returned from the dead to take care of her. No one doubts it, especially Sole, who passes off Irene as a Russian and puts her to work in the illegal beauty salon she runs in her apartment. When Raimunda is around, ghost mom hides under a bed, coming out to help only when Raimunda's teen daughter Paula (Yohana Cobo) claims to have stabbed Raimunda's husband, Paco (Antonio de la Torre), when he tried to rape her. That's when Raimunda hides the body in a freezer in a restaurant, where she serves food to a visiting film crew. Throw in neighbor Augustina (Blanca Portillo), who's dying of cancer but not before she adds a new twist. Got that? No matter. Plot is merely Almodovar's way into the souls of his women. With the help of six extraordinary actresses, who shared the acting prize at Cannes, Almodovar crafts one of the year's best films. Cruz, never more voluptuous (think Sophia Loren in Two Women) or vulnerable, is a force of nature fully deserving her Oscar buzz. She's that good. Volver is Almodovar's passionate tribute to the community of women -- living and dead -- who nurtured him. Through the transformative power of his art -- carried on the wings of Alberto Iglesias' exhilarating score -- we feel their presence. You do not want to miss this one. PETER TRAVERS, ROLLINGSTONE.COM
PAINTED VEIL - Rated PG-13 - 124 minutes - Scope
The Painted Veil, based on the novel by W. Somerset Maugham, takes viewers on a journey into early 20th century rural China, where a cholera epidemic becomes the backdrop for shifts and growing pains in a fractured marriage. Due in large part to effective acting and a well developed screenplay, the movie provides a twofold source of satisfaction. In addition to developing real, believable characters, The Painted Veil provides an extended glimpse of what China was like during the 1920s. The movie achieves a rare balance for an historical fiction: making use of the backdrop without allowing it to overwhelm the characters and their story. The Painted Veil is a multifaceted motion picture, but the relationship between the protagonists remains the focal point. The film opens in 1925, with husband and wife Walter and Kitty Fane (Edward Norton and Naomi Watts) in the midst of an arduous journey from Shanghai to a rural village. Walter is a doctor and is making the trip to help fight a deadly outbreak of cholera. His wife is with him reluctantly. Theirs has never been a happy marriage - Walter is not given to displays of affection and is wedded to his work - but her affair with another Englishman, Charlie Townsend (Liev Schreiber), nearly ended it. When he learned of Kitty's infidelity, Walter gave her an ultimatum: accompany him or endure the scandal that would result when he sued her for divorce on the grounds of adultery. Her decision to go left her alone and lonely in a foreign land sharing a house with a husband who will barely acknowledge her. The Painted Veil is a story of maturation and forgiveness. Both Walter and Kitty share blame for the disastrous state of their marriage but, with the forces that destroyed it removed, they learn to reconnect. Kitty grows up by working with orphans at a local convent and Walter sheds some of his arrogance when he learns that the "Superior British" attitude will not allow him to achieve what he needs to do in order to stop the epidemic. One could view The Painted Veil as an atypical love story. It's about married people who never should have been joined finding common ground. There's also a more global theme: that of the resentment that can fester when an outsider with good intentions comes into a foreign country and displays an arrogant certainty that he understands what's right. Walter comes to the town with the best intentions, but his methods are deemed unacceptable when he violates the religious beliefs of the natives. Walter only makes headway once he has learned to work with the people not seemingly against them. On the surface, this is a common theme in movies set in the British Colonial era, but director John Curran has commented that he sees it relevant to today's world events. The performances are excellent. Naomi Watts, fresh from playing King Kong's girlfriend, and Edward Norton share screen time. When the film begins, Watts' Kitty is a self-centered flapper; by the time it ends, she has become more serious and learned responsibility. For Norton's Walter, the challenge is to become more warm and flexible. Watts and Norton achieve the shifts in ways that are consistently credible. Support is provided by Liev Schrieber as Kitty's lover, Toby Jones (Capote in Infamous) as a neighboring Brit in the rural village, and Diana Rigg as the convent's Mother Superior. The cinematography by Stuart Dryburgh is spectacular. The filmmakers decided on the extraordinary measure of obtaining all the permits to film in China rather than using another country as a stand-in. This becomes the first American-funded movie in countless years to go on location in the ountry and the authenticity is welcome. Visually, The Painted Veil is stunning and this enhances its emotional content. The release date indicates possible Oscar aspirations. The film is good enough it some areas to warrant consideration. It's too cerebral for multiplex audiences but should find a home in art houses where viewers are more open to stories in which thoughtful character arcs trump traditional action. A lot takes place during The Painted Veil's two-hour running length, but most of what happens occurs within the hearts and minds of the leads. By James Berardinelli; reelviews.net
THE HISTORY BOYS - Rated R - 109 minutes - Flat
IN A RECENT book review for the New York Times Michael Kinsley decried the intellectual dishonesty that's rotting American politics and gave as his closing example a story from the 2000 presidential election. Before election day George Bush's people, afraid their man might win the popular vote but lose the electoral college, began crafting an argument that the college was undemocratic, that electors for Al Gore should switch their allegiance and endorse the popular will. When Bush lost the popular vote but retained a chance to win the electoral college, his team did an about-face and defended the college as an example of the Founding Fathers' genius. "Of all the things Bush did and said during the 2000 election crisis, this having-it-both-ways is the most corrupt," wrote Kinsley. "But no one seems to care, because so much of our politics is like that." The hypocritical willingness to argue a point either way lies at the heart of The History Boys, an excellent British drama adapted by Alan Bennett (The Madness of King George) from his celebrated play. The movie takes place in 1983 at a boys' boarding school in Yorkshire, where the grasping headmaster (Clive Merrison) is delighted to learn that eight young history scholars in the sixth form (equivalent to high school seniors) have scored exceptionally well on their A-Level exams (equivalent to the SATs) and may distinguish the school by getting into Oxford or Cambridge. Unwilling to leave anything to chance, he hires a young Oxford graduate to drill his prize pupils for their college entrance exams. Mr. Irwin (Stephen Campbell Moore), a slick rhetorician, has mastered the sort of intellectual smoke and mirrors that impresses bored university dons. But as the school year progresses he finds himself in conflict with the boys' portly, retirement-age English teacher, Mr. Hector (Richard Griffiths). Hector has been assigned to teach the boys General Studies, a "waste of time" that he heartily endorses. His unstructured class is less like school than an evening at the pub: when the boys aren't listening to him recite poetry, they're acting out scenes from old movies for him to identify, or singing Rodgers and Hart songs at the piano, or conversing with him in French as they act out a visit to a brothel. Hector endorses A.E. Housman's line that "all knowledge is precious whether or not it serves the slightest human use." More to the point, Hector understands that knowledge can have uses later in life that we might not anticipate. When one of the boys complains that most poetry is about things that haven't happened to them yet, Hector replies, "It will. And then you will have the antidote ready! Grief. Happiness. Even when you're dying. We're making your deathbeds here, boys." Irwin isn't much interested in preparing the boys for grief, happiness, or their deathbeds. He wants to get them past their college examiners, and for him knowledge is something to be exploited for short-term gain. He teaches the boys how to spice up an essay with fun facts, how to turn a question inside out, how to keep the dons amused by arguing that Great Britain caused World War I or that Stalin wasn't really so bad. He offends Hector by referring to poetry quotations as "gobbets" the boys can deploy in their writing. Above all he urges them not to get caught up in their beliefs. When one student insists that something's the truth Irwin snaps, "What's truth got to do with it? What's truth got to do with anything?" The headmaster, eager to give Irwin more time with his academic stars, arranges to have him teach the General Studies course with Hector, but the two men's styles clash horribly, leaving the students unsure whether to be thoughtful or smart. The conflict between Hector and Irwin strikes a chord here because it loosely parallels the debate over standardized testing as mandated by the federal No Child Left Behind Act. With federal funding contingent on test scores, among other benchmarks, many faculty argue that instead of teaching their subjects, they're spending their class time on test-taking strategies, which are of no long-term value to the students. In a sense the teachers are being tested more than the children, whose educational needs are being sacrificed for institutional needs. In The History Boys the headmaster appreciates what Hector's trying to do and understands that he gets results, but they're "unpredictable and unquantifiable, and in the current educational climate that is of no use." As an administrator he's much better off with someone like Irwin, who can teach to the test. Eventually the film begins to circle a more abstract question: whether knowledge, whose limits become apparent to anyone pursuing it vigorously, is really superior to belief, which may be impervious to pesky facts. When Irwin asks the boys whether the Holocaust can or should be taught in school, Hector argues that the subject is beyond deliberation, so far removed from human understanding that any glib exercise in addressing it this way or that insults the victims. The sole realm of human experience that embraces the unknowable is spirituality, which may be the reason Bennett opens the movie with a scene of Scripps, the only boy who's openly religious, attending morning mass. Yet no public school teacher in the U.S. can take much comfort from the idea that knowledge has its limits now that spirituality has been wiped from the curriculum.The movie version of The History Boys closely follows the play, but for some reason Bennett has toned down Irwin's cynicism and deleted a narrative frame, set five years after the main action, that spells out the more sinister implications of his teaching. By then Irwin is confined to a wheelchair, but he's also a TV personality who hosts historical programs. Commenting on the toilet arrangements of a 12th-century monastery and tourists' disproportionate interest in them, he declares, "God is dead. Shit lives." In the play's opening scene he's shown coaching a group of British MPs on how to sell a new crime bill that will limit the right to trial by jury and eliminate the presumption of innocence. Just as he did with the boys, Irwin urges them to turn the popular argument on its head, to redefine freedom as the ability to walk the streets safely: "Paradox works well and mists up the windows, which is handy. `The loss of liberty is the price we pay for freedom' type thing. School. That's all it is." His lesson has been learned all too well. By J.R. Jones; chicagoreader.com
NO END IN SIGHT - Not Rated - 102 minutes - Flat
So far, some of the best documentaries about the war in Iraq - "Gunner Palace," "The War Tapes" and "Iraq in Fragments," for example - have concentrated less on politics, policy or military strategy than on individual, in-the-moment experiences. As if to balance a climate of argument thick with generalization and position-taking, these films push debate aside in order to bring home the sensory details of daily life for American soldiers and Iraqi civilians. "No End in Sight," Charles Ferguson's exacting, enraging new film, may signal a shift in emphasis, a move away from the immediacy of cinéma vérité toward overt political argument and historical analysis. Not that these have been scarce over the past few years, as an ever- growing shelf of books can testify. Among Mr. Ferguson's interview subjects are the authors of some of those books - notably Nir Rosen ("In the Belly of the Green Bird"), James Fallows ("Blind Into Baghdad") and George Packer ("The Assassins' Gate") - and his film in effect offers a summary of some of their conclusions. Mr. Ferguson, a former Brookings Institution scholar with a doctorate in political science, presents familiar material with impressive concision and impact, offering a clear, temperate and devastating account of high-level arrogance and incompetence. If failure, as the saying goes, is an orphan, then "No End in Sight" can be thought of as a brief in a paternity suit, offering an emphatic, well- supported answer to a question that has already begun to be mooted on television talk shows and in journals of opinion: Who lost Iraq? On Mr. Ferguson's short list are Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and L. Paul Bremer III. None of them agreed to be interviewed for the film. Perhaps they will watch it. The film's title evokes the apparent interminability of this war more than four years after President Bush declared that "major combat operations" were over, and it twice shows Mr. Rumsfeld telling journalists, "I don't do quagmires." But Mr. Ferguson's focus turns out to be fairly narrow. He does not dwell on the period between Sept. 11, 2001, and the beginning of the invasion that overthrew Saddam Hussein, nor does he spend a lot of time chronicling the violence that has so far taken the lives of more than 3,000 American soldiers and marines and tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of Iraqis. Instead, most of the movie deals with a period of a few months in the spring and summer of 2003, when a series of decisions were made that did much to determine the terrible course of subsequent events. It is important to note that Mr. Ferguson's principal interlocutors were not, at the time, critics of the Bush administration's policies in Iraq but rather people who had, often at considerable professional cost and personal risk, committed themselves to fulfilling those policies. They include Barbara Bodine, a diplomat with long experience in the Middle East; Paul Eaton, an Army major general; Seth Moulton, a lieutenant in the Marine Corps; and Jay Garner, the retired lieutenant general who served as head of the Organization of Recovery and Humanitarian Assistance in Iraq. That agency, set up to rebuild and stabilize Iraq after the invasion, soon gave way to the Coalition Provisional Authority, directed by Mr. Bremer, who took over in May 2003. Already, according to the eyewitnesses interviewed in "No End in Sight," terrible mistakes had been made. Looting and other early manifestations of disorder were more likely to be met with Rumsfeldian aphorisms - "Stuff happens"; freedom is "untidy" - than with appropriate tactical responses. And then, once the provisional authority assumed control, orders came down to purge the bureaucracy and the civil service of all members of the Baath Party and to dismantle the Iraqi military. As Mr. Eaton and Mr. Garner tell it, the last policy was especially disastrous and was arrived at and carried out precipitously and without discussion. They, Ms. Bodine, and others - including Richard L. Armitage and Lawrence Wilkerson of the State Department - describe from the inside what has become, to the rest of us, a recognizable pattern. The knowledge and expertise of military, diplomatic and technical professionals was overridden by the ideological certainty of political loyalists. Republican Party operatives, including recent college graduates with little or no relevant experience, were put in charge of delicate and complicated administrative areas. Those who did not demonstrate lock-step fidelity to the White House line were ignored or pushed aside. It might be argued that since Mr. Bremer, Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Wolfowitz declined to appear in the film, Mr. Ferguson was able to present only one side of the story. But the accumulated professional standing of the people he did interview, and their calm, detailed insistence on the facts, makes such an objection implausible. So too does the corroboration of the journalists who watched the story unfold and, perhaps most of all, the sense that anyone but the hardiest Bush loyalist will feel of having seen versions of this story before. That feeling does not make "No End in Sight" dull or easy to watch. Quite the contrary. It's a sober, revelatory and absolutely vital film.
Review by A. O. SCOTT, nytimes.com
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IN THE SHADOW OF THE MOON - Rated PG - 109 minutes - Scope
We think of the Apollo voyages to the moon more in terms of the achievement than the ordeal. On the night of July 20, 1969, we looked up at the sky and realized that men, who had been gazing at the moon since before they were men, had somehow managed to venture there and were walking on its surface.
Yes, but consider the journey. Three men were packed like sardines in a tiny space capsule ("Spam in a can," the Gemini astronauts called themselves) and sent on a 480,000-mile round trip in a vessel whose electrical wiring was so questionable, it had already burned three of them alive on a test pad. The capsule sat atop a rocket that had a way of blowing up. They had no way of knowing where, on the moon, they would land, if they got there. Compared to them, Evel Knievel was a Sunday driver.
Yes, but they took their chances, and they made it. Six of the seven Apollo missions landed on the moon, and the saga of Apollo 13 was a masterpiece of ingenuity in the face of catastrophe. Now here is a spellbinding documentary interviewing many of the surviving astronauts, older men now, about their memories of the adventure. One who is prominently missing is Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, who says he was first only by chance, and gets too much attention. Gene Siskel sat next to him on an airplane once, and thought to himself, "Here is a man who is very weary of being asked what it was like to walk on the moon." So they talked about other things.
Of the others, every one is still sharp and lively and youthful in mind, even often in body. I attended the Conference on World Affairs in Boulder, Colo., several times with Rusty Schweickart, and noticed that he tended to be on panels that were about everything but space exploration. Yet here, in front of the cameras, they open up in a heartfelt way. The most stunning moment reveals how desperately they wanted to be part of the missions: Gus Grissom, one of the three astronauts killed in the launch-pad fire, doubted the safety of the wiring in the 100-percent oxygen atmosphere of the capsule but didn't dare complain because he might be booted out of the program for a negative attitude.
When you were on the moon, they remember, you could blank out the Earth by holding up your thumb in front of your face. Yet they were struck by how large the planet was, and how thin and fragile its atmosphere, floating in an infinite void and preserving this extraordinary thing, life. And below, we were poisoning it as fast as we could.
The interviews with the astronauts are intercut with footage that is new, in great part, and looks better than it has any right to do. A researcher for this production spent years screening NASA footage that was still, in many cases, in its original film cans and had never been seen. The film was cleaned up and restored, the color refreshed, and the result is beautiful and moving. The Apollo missions were, after all, the most momentous steps ever taken by mankind; our species, like all living things, was evolved to live and endure on the planet of its origin. Random life spores may have traveled from world to world by chance, but this was the first time any living thing looked up and said, "I'm going there." These astronauts are still alive, but as long as mankind survives, their journeys will be seen as the turning point -- to what, it is still to be seen.
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DARJEELING LIMITED - Rated R - 91 minutes -
Flat
Three brothers in crisis meet in India and in desperation,
in "The Darjeeling Limited," a movie that meanders so persuasively it gets
us meandering right along. It's the new film by Wes Anderson, who after "Rushmore"
and "The Royal Tenenbaums" made "The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou." Of that
peculiar film I wrote: "My rational mind informs me that this movie doesn't
work. Yet I hear a subversive whisper: Since it does so many other things,
does it have to work, too? Can't it just exist? 'Terminal whimsy,' I called
it on the TV show. Yes, but isn't that better than no whimsy at all?" After
a struggle with my inner whisper, I rated the movie at 2½ stars, which means,
"not quite." I quote myself so early in this review because I feel about the
same way about "The Darjeeling Limited," with the proviso that this is a better
film, warmer, more engaging, funnier and very surrounded by India, that nation
of perplexing charm. The brothers, who have not been much in contact, have
a reunion after one is almost killed in a motorcycle crash, and they take
a journey on a train so wonderful I fear it does not really exist. (It is
the fancy of the art director.) The reunion is convened by Francis (Owen Wilson),
whose head bandages make him look like an outtake from "The Mummy." Having
nearly died (possibly intentionally), he now embraces life and wants to Really
Get to Know his younger brothers. They are Peter (Adrien Brody), poised to
divorce a wife he doesn't love when she announces she is pregnant, and Jack
(Jason Schwartzman), who dials all the way home to eavesdrop on his former
girlfriend's answering machine. "I want us to become brothers again," Francis
vows, "and to become Enlightened." They travel with a mountain of Louis Vuitton
luggage, which means the movie will no doubt play this year's Louis Vuitton
Hawaii International Film Festival, opening Oct. 18. Francis has an assistant,
Brendan (Wally Wolodarsky), whose office is next to the luggage in the baggage
car, from which he issues forth a daily itinerary from the computer and printer
he has brought along. The document is encased in plastic, with the laminating
machine he has also brought along. Insisting on this schedule is typical of
Francis; he expects without question that his brothers will comply. Francis
is the compulsive type, which is why his younger brothers find it hard to
be in the same room with him. They got enough of that from their mother. He
announces that their train journey of reconciliation will be enriched by visits
to all the principal holy places along the way. They are also enriched by
their careless purchase of obscure medications that contain little magical
mystery tours of their own. One of the film's attractions is its Indian context;
Anderson and his co-writers Schwartzman and Roman Coppola made a trip through
India while they were writing the screenplay. It avoids obvious temptations
to exoticism by surprising us; the stewardess on the train, for example, speaks
standard English and seems American. This is Rita (Amara Karan); she comes
round offering them a sweet lime drink, which is Indian enough, but later
when Jack sticks his head out a train window, he sees her head sticking out,
too, as she puffs on a cigarette. Soon they are in each other's arms, not
very Indian of her. Anderson uses India not in a touristy way, but as a backdrop
that is very, very there. Consider a lengthy scene where the three brothers
share a table in the diner with an Indian man who is a stranger. Observe the
performance of the stranger. As an Indian traveling in first class, he undoubtedly
speaks English, but they do not exchange a word. He reads his paper. The brothers
talk urgently and openly about intimacies and differences. He does not "react"
in any obvious way. His unperturbed presence is a reaction in itself. There
is a concealed level of performance: They probably know he can understand
them, and he probably knows they know this. There he sits, a passive witness
to their lives. It is impossible to imagine this role played any better. He
raises the level of the scene to another dimension. The casting of the three
brothers is also a good fit. Their personalities jostle one another in a family
sort of way; they're replaying old tapes. Then they have unplanned adventures
as a result of the obscure medications, and end up off the train and in the
"real" India with all of that luggage. But Anderson doesn't have them discover
one another, which would be a cliche; instead, they burrow more deeply inside
their essential natures. Then Francis springs a surprise: Their journey will
end with a meeting with their mother (Anjelica Huston), who for some years
has been a nun in an Indian religious order. Her appearance and behavior is
our catalyst for understanding the brothers. I said the movie meanders. It
will therefore inspire reviews complaining that it doesn't fly straight as
an arrow at its target. But it doesn't have a target, either. Why do we have
to be the cops and enforce a narrow range of movie requirements? Anderson
is like Dave Brubeck, who I'm listening to right now. He knows every note
of the original song, but the fun and genius come in the way he noodles around.
And in his movie's cast, especially with Owen Wilson, Anderson takes advantage
of champion noodlers. Review by Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times
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DEEP WATER - Rated PG - 93 minutes
- Flat
Of the nine seafaring souls who, in 1968, left Britain to compete in a nonstop
solo sail around the world, Donald Crowhurst was surely the least experienced,
the least prepared. A mild-mannered electronics engineer who lived with his
wife and children in the English countryside, Crowhurst appears in Louise
Osmond and Jerry Rothwell's fascinating documentary, Deep Water, as a man
out of his depth, so to speak. Crowhurst built a swift trimaran equipped with
the latest gadgets. It boasted a self-righting mechanism, in case his three-hulled
vessel flipped into stormy waters of the southern capes. But in the newsreel
footage that Osmond and Rothwell use so effectively, the 36-year-old amateur,
readying his ship in a port town months before the race, looks lost, baffled,
out of sorts. How can this man seriously think he can endure weeks upon weeks
alone on the ocean? Waves the size of office towers, relentless winds - he
can barely maneuver his dinghy past the mooring. (Note: I've been waiting
years to use that phrase in a review - "maneuver his dinghy past the mooring.")
Like Into the Wild, Sean Penn's mesmerizing, melancholy adaptation of Jon
Krakauer's book about a young American who wanders into the Alaskan outback
(it opens Sept. 28), Deep Water is a story about survival in the elements,
about man putting himself into extreme, and extremely stupid, situations.
Osmond and Rothwell interview Crowhurst's wife and son, and the publicity
agent who helped hype the big event. The widow of Bernard Moitessier, a Crowhurst
competitor (and a far more able-bodied seaman), talks about her husband's
single-minded obsession, his deep need to sail. And Moitessier himself, through
journal entries, reveals much about the mind of a man in a state of absolute
solitude - a tiny dot in a tiny boat bobbing in endless seas beneath endless
sky. What happens with Crowhurst - who kept his own journals, and filmed himself
aboard his vessel, the Teignmouth Electron - is what Deep Water is about.
It is about his eight fellow sailors, of course, and about the different ways
human beings respond to stress, to isolation, to challenge. At the risk of
giving too much away, I'll say this: The story of Donald Crowhurst is not
one of remarkable courage or remarkable endurance. But it is remarkable. Review
by Steven Rea, www.philly.com
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LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA - Rated R - 138 minutes - Scope
A man is destined to be a helpless, single-minded romantic for his entire life. The author of this exceptional fantasy character, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, ("One Hundred Years of Solitude") carries the notion to extremes, mining the concept for all the irony, comedy and tragedy it suggests. But, while the novel that's so rich in cultural and internal detail ensures its long life on the literary landscape, the adaptation to the visual realization of it as a generational saga by screenwriter Ronald Harwood ("The Pianist," ("Being Julia") and director Mike Newell ("Mona Lisa Smile," "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire") presents difficulties to those for whom romantic exaggeration might seem more ludicrous than endearing. Getting on the wavelength of the culture of the setting is a must. Florentino Ariza's destiny is sealed during his teenage years (Unax Ugalde) with his first look at beautiful Fermina Daza, the jewel of a house well above his modest station in life as a telegraph operator. Given to poetry and florid letter writing, his written songs to Fermina win her heart and she accepts his proposal to marry. His mother is overjoyed, but when her daddy Lorenzo (John Leguizamo) catches wind of it he's less than pleased with her choice. A widower, he has brought her to Cartagena in order to attract a suitably high and elegant marriage. He spirits her off for a year to effect her forgetfulness, a length of time that Florentino considers no problem at all. It's but a tick for a love that knows no time. Ah, but it's not for him alone to decide. When she does return, she doesn't contact him, a sign he ignores. But we pick up on her decision to please her father by detaching herself from a man with such humble prospects. Even her cold dismissal of Florentino's ardor for resuming their relationship doesn't diminish him, or his dedication to his vow. During an outbreak of cholera, Fermina takes ill, alarming father Lorenzo. When the super-confident, perfectly attired doctor declares that it's not the dread disease but a minor illness, the joy everyone feels is celebrated. At the same time, the eminent Doctor Juvenal Urbino (Benjamin Bratt) has been struck with another sort of illness, and it's not long before he formally asks for Fermina's hand in marriage, bringing great joy and fulfillment to Lorenzo's dream. Perhaps not so much for Fermina's, though she takes full advantage of the lavish life style he provides, beginning with an extended honeymoon on the continent. Florentino, now a young adult (Javier Bardem), recovers from disappointment, resolving to simply to wait a bit longer. He begins a series of conquests which, by the time he reaches his later years will number well over six hundred. He has become a seduction machine that seems to defy age -- not a bad way to divert one's mind from a forestalled consummation of one's only true love. Javier Bardem, adds yet another reason to regard him as one of the distinguished screen presences of the age. While not yet emerging from limited recognition, mostly from his master performances in films such as "The Sea Inside" and "The Dancer Upstairs," his appearances in two major films this year (this one and "No Country For Old Men") on opposite ends of the character spectrum may change all that and bring him the wide recognition his talent demands. It may take a nomination in this year's Academy Awards, and that isn't out of the question. On the soundtrack by Antonio Pinto ("Perfect Stranger," "Cronicas") I heard the most exquisitely stylized songs this year by the Latin sensation Shakira! Her songs, created for this film and well outside her standard repertoire, are the bolero, "Hay Amores" and the Incan, folkloric "Despedida" sung in a gutty, suggestive range with ornamental inflections -- an effect called melisma -- that would make it a show stopper were it not for its contribution to the atmosphere and sensuality on screen. Marquez' encouragement in bringing her aboard for the benefit of the story's carnal theme tells you something about his involvement with the production. Brava Shakira! However this satiric vision of love and romance in 19th century Cartagena, Colombia works for you, there's no doubt that all involved will take great pride in being associated with a film derived from a major work by a Nobel Prize winning author. Given to grand ironies (the title tells you that), humor over the local and universal human condition, and deliberate surrealism, Marquez should be read by anyone interested in great literary originality. The film, if it accomplishes nothing else, exposes his slyly powerful work to a potentially broad readership. The essence of the original is captured with enough fidelity to pay homage to it even if the magical mist between romantic obsession and hilarious satire that Marquez holds you in with the written word is missing. The movie is far too long, some of its exaggerations are laughable for the wrong reasons (especially to a modern Westernized audience?), and the attentions to ageing may play awkwardly for some -- but the idea that who we are and how we love are unaffected by the process of growing old -- as Florentino writes to Fermina in the last act of their lives -- is a theme that should resonate across cultural borders. Artfully couched in an envelope of surreal absurdity, its ironies are designed to question the contradictions and weaknesses of entrenched traditions. All reason enough to see and enjoy this significant piece of work. Jules Brenner, variagate.com
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INTO THE WILD - Rated R - 149 minutes - Scope
For those who have read Thoreau's Walden, there comes a time, maybe only lasting a few hours or a day, when the notion of living alone in a tiny cabin beside a pond and planting some beans seems strangely seductive. Certain young men, of which I was one, lecture patient girl friends about how such a life of purity and denial makes perfect sense. Christopher McCandless did not outgrow this phase. Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild, which I read with a fascinated dread, tells the story of a 20-year-old college graduate who cashes in his law school fund and, in the words of Mark Twain, lights out for the territory. He drives west until he can drive no farther, and then north into the Alaskan wilderness. He has a handful of books about survival and edible wild plants, and his model seems to be Jack London, although he should have devoted more attention to that author's "To Build a Fire." Sean Penn's spellbinding film adaptation of this book stays close to the source. We meet Christopher (Emile Hirsch) as an idealistic dreamer, in reaction against his proud parents (William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden) and his bewildered sister (Jena Malone). He had good grades at Emory; his future in law school was right there in his grasp. Why did he disappear from their lives, why was his car found abandoned, where was he, and why, why, why? He keeps journals in which he sees himself in the third person as a heroic loner, renouncing civilization, returning to the embrace of nature. In centuries past such men might have been saints, retreating to a cave or hidden hermitage, denying themselves all pleasures except subsistence. He sees himself not as homeless, but as a man freed from homes. In the book, Krakauer traces his movements through the memories of people he encounters on his journey. It was an impressive reporting achievement to track them down, and Penn's film affectionately embodies them in strong performances. These are people who take in the odd youth, feed him, shelter him, give him clothes, share their lives, mentor him and worry as he leaves to continue his quest, which seems to them, correctly, as doomed. By now McCandless has renamed himself Alexander Supertramp. He is validated by his lifestyle choice. He meets such people as Rainey and Jan (Brian Dieker and Catherine Keener), leftover hippies still happily rejecting society, and Wayne (Vince Vaughn), a hard-drinking, friendly farmer. The most touching contact he makes is with Ron (Hal Holbrook), an older man who sees him clearly and with apprehension, and begins to think of him as a wayward grandson. Christopher lectures this man, who has seen it all, on what he is missing and asks him to follow him up a steep hillside to see the next horizon. Ron tries, before he admits he is no longer in condition. And then McCandless disappears from the maps of memory, into unforgiving Alaska. Yes, it looks beautiful. It is all he dreamed of. He finds an abandoned bus where no bus should be and makes it his home. He tries hunting, not very successfully. He lives off the land, but the land is a zero-tolerance system. From his journals and other evidence, Penn reconstructs his final weeks. Emile Hirsch plays him in a hypnotic performance, turning skeletal, his eyes sinking into his skull while they still burn with zeal. It is great acting, and more than acting. This is a reflective, regretful, serious film about a young man swept away by his uncompromising choices. Two of the more truthful statements in recent culture are that we need a little help from our friends, and that sometimes we must depend on the kindness of strangers. If you don't know those two things and accept them, you will end up eventually in a bus of one kind or another. Sean Penn himself fiercely idealistic, uncompromising, a little less angry now, must have read the book and reflected that there, but for the grace of God, went he. The movie is so good partly because it means so much, I think, to its writer-director. It is a testament like the words that Christopher carved into planks in the wilderness. I grew up in Urbana three houses down from the Sanderson family -- Milton and Virginia and their boys Steve and Joe.
My close friend was Joe. His bedroom was filled with aquariums, terrariums, snakes, hamsters, spiders,
and butterfly and beetle collections. I envied him like crazy. After college he hit the road. He never
made a break from his parents, but they rarely knew where he was. Sometimes he came home and his mother
would have to sew $100 bills into the seams of his blue jeans. He disappeared in Nicaragua. His body was
later identified as a dead Sandinista freedom fighter. From a nice little house surrounded by evergreens
at the other end of Washington Street, he left to look for something he needed to find. I believe in Sean
Penn's Christopher McCandless. I grew up with him. By Roger Ebert, rogerebert.suntimes.com
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GONE BABY GONE - Rated R - 116 minutes - Flat
If, like me, you haven't been swept up by a crime drama for a long, long time, say hello and hallelujah to "Gone Baby Gone." I can't remember being so involved in a mystery and so satisfied by its final shot since seeing "Mystic River" four years ago. No surprise, then, that both films were adapted from novels by the great Boston writer Dennis Lehane. What is a bit unexpected is that the "Gone Baby Gone" script was the work of Ben Affleck, co-written with Aaron Stockard. I know that Affleck has a writing Oscar for the schmaltzy "Good Will Hunting." But really, who'd have thought that the almost-Mr. J-Lo could bounce back from laughingstock status with such a precise, tonally disciplined, unflinching and tough morality play as this? Did I also mention that "Gone Baby Gone" is Affleck's directing debut? Even as it draws you in as inexorably as quicksand, it's possible to acknowledge that this movie may not be perfect. Can people really be as misguided in their altruism or judgmentally severe as Affleck portrays them? Usually not, and that may be a barrier for some. But the fact that it grows increasingly compelling regardless of any faults indicates fine filmmaking all the way. I'd say that the best way to look at "Gone Baby Gone" is as a slightly heightened and metaphorical depiction of what our most passionate views of right and wrong could drive us to do. That may be a hard suggestion to follow, though, since one of Affleck's greatest directing coups is capturing the feel and flavor of downscale, working-class Boston with remarkable realism. Real folks from the Dorchester neighborhood are mixed in with virtuoso actors like Morgan Freeman and Ed Harris, and that results in outstanding verisimilitude. So much so that you understand exactly why Patrick Kenzie, played by Ben's younger brother Casey Affleck, tried to get away from the place by becoming a private detective. But along with his professional partner and lover, Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan), Patrick is hired to return to the streets of his youth in hopes that maybe he can find some clues in the kidnapping of 4-year-old Amanda McCready that a dedicated police department and slavering, sensationalizing media may have overlooked. Though resented by Capt. Jack Doyle (Freeman), who lost a child of his own, and sometimes weirded out by the sharp, intense and not quite trustworthy police detective Remy Bressant (Harris, in what may be his most riveting film role ever), Patrick and Angie quietly, if unorthodoxly, delve into the local underworld. They discover that Amanda's party-monster mom Helene (Amy Ryan) makes Britney Spears look like Donna Reed, that a drug deal gone bad may have had something to do with the girl's disappearance, and that there are more awful things that can happen to a little kid than you would ever want to know about. And then they learn some really bizarre stuff. And whatever they decide to do with this knowledge, the best possible outcome appears to be damnation. It bears repeating: That's the best-case scenario. Ben Affleck is so confident with the material that he can allow the first act of "Gone Baby Gone" to unfold almost entirely in low-key, just-the-facts-ma'am conversations (it's hypnotizing). Crazy behavior and tense situations are gradually, dexterously worked in, and all the more effective for the judicious approach. A key midpoint action sequence is a confusing mess, but the director makes no apologies for it and, as we later learn, it absolutely had to be presented that way. While it would have been nice if the very likable Monaghan had a bit more to do before her killer climactic scenes, Casey Affleck thoroughly reimagines the knight-errant gumshoe throughout "Gone Baby Gone." Kenzie's a passive-aggressive, cynical ex-altar boy type who doesn't even seem to realize his desperate need for a code he can believe in - until he's forced to confront it in the worst no-win way. With this and his "Assassination of Jesse James" Robert Ford portrayal, the younger Affleck proves that he's many times the actor his movie star brother ever was. Which would be a terrible thing to say about a genuinely good guy like Ben Affleck if we didn't want to encourage him, with all best wishes, to focus his efforts on the behind-the-scenes work he's obviously great at. Review by Bob Strauss, bob.strauss@dailynews.com
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BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU'RE DEAD - Rated R - 114 minutes - Scope
Sidney Lumet's "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead" is such a superb crime melodrama that I almost want to leave it at that. To just stop writing right now and advise you to go out and see it as soon as you can. I so much want to avoid revealing plot points that I don't even want to risk my usual strategy of oblique hints. You deserve to walk into this one cold. Yet that would prevent my praise, and there is so much to praise about this film. Let me try to word this carefully. The movie stars Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke as brothers -- yes, brothers, because although they may not look related, they always feel as if they share a long and fraught history. Hoffman plays Andy, a payroll executive who dresses well and always has every hair slicked into place, but has a bad drug habit and an urgent need to raise some cash. Hawke plays Hank, much lower on the financial totem pole, with his own reasons for needing money; he can't face his little girl and admit he can't afford to pay for her class outing to attend "The Lion King." Hank looks more like the druggie, but you never can tell. Andy suggests they solve their problems by robbing a jewelry store. And not just any jewelry store, but find out for yourself. He has it all mapped out as a victimless crime: They won't use guns, they'll hit early Saturday when the shopping mall doesn't have customers, the store's losses will be covered by insurance, and so on. Sounds good on paper, before everything goes wrong. And that's when the movie becomes intense and emotionally devastating. These two brothers are capable of feeling emotions rare in modern crime films: grief and remorse. They cave in with regret. And they still need money; Andy learns that when you are heartbroken it is bad enough, but even worse when your legs may be broken, too. Meanwhile, their dozy father (Albert Finney) starts looking into the case himself, and that leads to a conversation with one son that Eugene O'Neill couldn't have written any better. The movie fully establishes the families involved. Finney has been married forever to Rosemary Harris, and still loves her to pieces. Hoffman is married to Marisa Tomei, who just keeps on getting sexier as she grows older so very slowly. Hawke is divorced from Amy Ryan, who would happily see him in jail for non-payment of child support. Although the film opens with Hoffman and Tomei ecstatically making love in Rio (say what you will about the big guy, Hoffman looks to be an energetic and capable lover), their marriage is far from perfect. The Japanese name some of their artists Living Treasures. Sidney Lumet is one of ours. He has made more great pictures than most directors have made pictures, and found time to make some clunkers on the side. Here he takes a story that is, after all, pretty straightforward, and tells it in an ingenious style we might call narrative interruptus. The brilliant debut screenplay by Kelly Masterson takes us up to a certain point, then flashes back to before that point, then catches us up again, then doubles back, so that it meticulously reconstructs how spectacularly and inevitably this perfect crime went wrong. And it doesn't simply go wrong, it goes wrong with an aftermath we care about. This isn't a movie where the crime is only a plot, and dead bodies are only plot devices. Its story has deeply emotional consequences. That's why an actor with Albert Finney's depth is needed for an apparently supporting role. If he isn't there when he's needed, the whole film loses. As for Hoffman and Hawke, so seemingly different but such intelligent actors, they pull off that miracle that makes us stop thinking of anything we know about them, and start thinking only of Andy and Hank. This is a movie, I promise you, that grabs you and won't let you think of anything else. It's wonderful when a director like Lumet wins a Lifetime Achievement Oscar at 80, and three years later makes one of his greatest achievements. Review by Roger Ebert; rogerebert.suntimes.com
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ACROSS THE UNIVERSE - Rated PG13 - 134 minutes
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Here is a bold, beautiful, visually enchanting musical where we walk into the theater humming the songs. Julie Taymor's "Across the Universe" is an audacious marriage of cutting-edge visual techniques, heart-warming performances, 1960s history and the Beatles songbook. Sounds like a concept that might be behind its time, but I believe in yesterday. This isn't one of those druggy 1960s movies, although it has what the MPAA shyly calls "some" drug content. It's not grungy, although it has Joe Cocker in it. It's not political, which means it's political to its core. Most miraculous of all, it's not dated; the stories could be happening now, and in fact, they are. For a film that is almost wall to wall with music, it has a full-bodied plot. The characters, mostly named after Beatles songs, include Lucy (the angelic Evan Rachel Wood), who moves from middle America to New York; Jude (Jim Sturgess), a Liverpool ship welder who works his way to New York on a ship, and Lucy's brother, Max (Joe Anderson), a college student who has dropped out (I guess). They now all share a pad in Greenwich Village with their musician friends, the Hendrixian Jo-Jo (Martin Luther McCoy), the Joplinesque Sadie (Dana Fuchs) and the lovelorn Prudence (T.V. Carpio), who loves women but doesn't feel free to express her true feelings. Jude and Lucy fall in love, and they all go through a hippie period on Dr. Robert's Magic Bus, where the doctor (Bono) and his bus bear a striking resemblance to Ken Kesey's magical mystery tour. They also get guidance from Mr. Kite (Eddie Izzard), having been some days in preparation. But then things turn serious as Max goes off to Vietnam and the story gets swept up in the anti-war movement. Yet when I say "story," don't start thinking about a lot of dialogue and plotting. Almost everything happens as an illustration to a Beatles song. The arrangements are sometimes familiar, sometimes radically altered, and the voices are all new; the actors either sing or sync, and often they find a mood in a song that we never knew was there before. When Prudence sings "I Want to Hold Your Hand," for example, I realized how wrong I was to ever think that was a happy song. It's not happy if it's a hand you are never, never, never going to hold. The love that dare not express its name turns in sadness to song. Julie Taymor, famous as the director of "The Lion King" on Broadway, is a generously inventive choreographer, such as in a basic-training scene where all the drill sergeants look like G.I. Joe; a sequence where inductees in Jockey shorts carry the Statue of Liberty through a Vietnam field, and cross-cutting between dancing to Beatles clone bands at an American high school prom and in a Liverpool dive bar. There are underwater sequences which approach ballet, a stage performance that turns into musical warfare, strawberries that bleed, rooftop concerts and a montage combining crashing waves with the Detroit riots. But all I'm doing here is list-making. The beauty is in the execution. The experience of the movie is joyous. I don't even want to know about anybody who complains they aren't hearing "the real Beatles." Fred Astaire wasn't Cole Porter, either. These songs are now more than 40 years old, some of them, and are timeless, and hearing these unexpected talents singing them (yes, and Bono, Izzard and Cocker, too) only underlines their astonishing quality. You weren't alive in the 1960s? Or the '70s or '80s? You're like the guy on the IMDb message board who thought the band was named the "Beetles," and didn't even get it when people made Volkswagen jokes because he hadn't heard of VW Beetles, either. All is forgiven. Jay Leno has a Jaywalking spot for you. Just about anybody else is likely to enjoy "Across the Universe." I'm sure there were executives who thought it was suicidal to set a "Beatles musical" in the "Vietnam era." But this is a movie that fires its songs like flowers at the way we live now. It's the kind of movie you watch again, like listening to a favorite album. It was scheduled for the Toronto Film Festival but was previewed (as several Toronto films were) for critics in major cities. I was drowning in movies and deadlines, and this was the only one I went to see twice. Now do your homework and rent the DVD of "A Hard Day's Night" if you've never seen it. The thought that there are readers who would get this far in this review of this film and never have seen that film is unbearably sad. Cheer me up. Don't let me down (repeat three times). Roger Ebert, rogerebert.suntimes.com
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BABEL - Rated R - 143 minutes
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Babel represents director Alejando Gonzalez Iñárritu's conclusion to a stylistic and thematic trilogy begun in
Amores Perros and continued in 21 Grams. Of the three, Babel is arguably the most accessible. As with 21 Grams
(and to a lesser degree Amores Perros), this movie is constructed as a puzzle, with different pieces transpiring
during different times and in different places over a five-day span. However, this one is less complicated to
put together. (Think of it as the difference between assembling a 250-piece jigsaw and a 50-piece one.) The
temporaral discontinuities are not extreme, and there is clear background evidence of how each sequence
relates to those around it and fits into the global time-line. This allows story to take precedence over
structure. It's a compelling tale, one that delineates how small mistakes and lapses in judgment can have tragic consequences. It also illustrates how poorly we communicate in an ever shrinking world. In addition to those umbrella themes, the movie also has "smaller" messages for its individual segments. There are four of these. The first involves two children in a mountain village in Morocco. Their father has bought a gun to use to shoot predators hunting his sheep. The second segment features Americans Susan (Cate Blanchett) and Richard (Brad Pitt), who are on vacation in Morocco. The third segment focuses on Susan and Richard's two children (Elle Fanning and Nathan Gamble), who are under the care of an illegal immigrant, Amelia (Adriana Barraza). Finally, in faraway Japan, deaf-mute teenager Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi) is trying to cope in a world that offers little in the way of affection. Her mother committed suicide and her father (Kôji Yakusho) is a cold, distant figure. How these storylines connect with each other is left for the second half of the movie to reveal, although I can say it's nothing shocking or sensationalistic. One of the great strengths of Babel is Iñárritu's ability to cope with issues of global importance while still presenting vivid characters whose individual problems are no less vital and compelling. There are no villains here. Crimes are committed, but none are intentional. Small errors snowball to have unintended and unimaginable consequences. One man's decision to buy a gun to protect his flock leads to two small white children being stranded alone in the Southern California desert. This is only one of many strands that is woven into Babel's web. It brings to mind the so-called "Butterfly Effect." (A nimble attempt to provide an encapsulated explanation of Chaos Theory, the "Butterfly Effect" states that the flapping of the wings of a butterfly in Africa can indirectly cause a tornado to appear half a world away.) Perhaps the most poignant and personal story is that of Chieko. By occasionally showing her perspective (with an eerily silent soundtrack) and juxtaposing it with the strobe lights and thumping dance music of Tokyo's night scene, Iñárritu builds her segments into something deeply affecting. As good as all the performers are - and they include the likes of Brad Pitt, Cate Blachett, and Gael García Bernal - young Rinko Kikuchi steals the spotlight. Her work is heartbreaking and haunting. As much as we feel for the other characters in Babel and the tragedies that fate brings into their lives, Chieko is the one we want to cry for. Babel is a masterwork from a director whose each effort re-enforces his international reputation. This movie is as mature and potent a piece of cinema as 21 Grams, and a worthy conclusion to Iñárritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga's "trilogy." This is cathartic, thought-provoking, emotionally solid movie-making. It's the kind of cinema I hope to see whenever I sit down in a theater to view a drama. Whether viewed amidst a flood of pictures in the middle of a film festival or on its own in a local multiplex, Babel stands out from the crowd. Its complex
(yet not mystifying) storytelling, forceful character development, and superb cinematography make this
a candidate for one of 2006's best offerings. Review by James Berardinelli, reelviews.net
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FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION - Rated PG13 - 86 minutes
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"You know what they say about blind prostitutes," Chuck Porter (Fred
Willard), the cheesier and more obnoxious co-host of "Hollywood Now" says to his partner Cindy Martin (Jane Lynch). "You really have to hand it to them." FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION, the latest in the long string of mockumentary by director Christopher Guest (WAITING FOR GUFFMAN and BEST IN SHOW), reunites his usual cast, along with some new faces. While you may not laugh out loud very often, I'd be willing to bet that most viewers will be smiling almost non-stop. The script by Guest and his usual collaborator Eugene Levy is bright and wryly funny. The plot is about an obscure film in production that is somehow getting Oscar buzz. Sandy Lane (Ed Begley Jr.), the make-up guy, reports that he has read about it on the internet. Corey Taft (John Michael Higgins), the movie's indefatigable but daft P.R. man, needs a little clarification before he tries to find out about the possibility of an Oscar nomination for one of the movie's stars. "Quick question," he asks. "Internet -- that's the one with email. Right?" While the filming is in progress, producer Whitney Taylor Brown (Jennifer Coolidge) has to choose just the right poster for the movie. The favorite is a dopey one of the cast's faces in balloons held by the mother in the movie. Marilyn Hack (Catherine O'Hara) plays the mother, and she is the one who first finds herself in Oscar glow. Actually choosing just the right poster for the picture is hard for Whitney, since nothing in her background working in the diaper industry provides her with any help. A very ethnic tear-jerker, the film is titled HOME FOR PURIM. Set during World War II, the movie features a soldier home on leave and his sister who has brought her female partner home for the first time. In no time at all, however, the Oscar buzz starts spreading among the cast, which means the script has to be rewritten and the movie retitled HOME FOR THANKSGIVING so the studio can earn maximum leverage from the publicity. But with big-budget contenders like PRIDE OF PLYMOUTH ROCK also vying for Oscar noms, it's not certain what will happen. I doubt if FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION itself gets any Oscar buzz, but it's enjoyable nonetheless. And, probably a lot more so than many over-hyped Hollywood extravaganzas which are supposed to have Oscar buzz. FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION runs just 1:26 but feels even shorter still. It is rated PG-13 for "sexual references and brief language" and
would be acceptable for kids around 8 and up. Film review by Steve Rhodes, InternetReviews.com
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BOBBY - Rated R - 120 minutes
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Emilio Estevez directed this story of the assassination of U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy, on June 6th, 1968, which centers around 22 people who were at the Ambassador Hotel where he was killed. The cast is an impressive gathering of film actors including Anthony Hopkins, Demi Moore, Lindsay Lohan, Elijah Wood, Sharon Stone and William H. Macy, Ashton Kusher, Helena Hunt.
"Bobby" follows the lives of a handful of people who have nothing in common, except that they're staying in or working at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on the day of Robert F. Kennedy's assassination in 1968. Why such a structurally scattered movie should hang together at all is a mystery. That it does more than that, that it works brilliantly, is a miracle, or at the very least the product of unquantifiable causes: a pervasive mood, a unified intensity of feeling, a filmmaker's unspoken but undeniable understanding of the meaning of every moment.
Emilio Estevez wrote and directed the film, which is astonishing in itself. Talk about second acts in American life. With one film, Estevez has transformed himself from a middle-aged joke into a youthful auteur who has made something beautiful, something he can be proud of, one of the best films of 2006. Perhaps strong emotion guided him. Otherwise, it's difficult to imagine how he could have known that a narrative so diffuse could come together into a powerful whole.
But something else holds it together as well, a little-do-they-know factor, the same quality that has lent a wistful, macabre undertone to the pre-iceberg scenes of every Titanic movie ever made. Knowing that the characters are really in for it later but don't know it makes an audience watch the people onscreen with extra attention. Every second is about more than the characters think it is. We know the whole truth, while they know only a fraction, and we wait for them to come fully into the life-changing knowledge.
It's June 4, 1968, the day of the California presidential primary, the day after a deranged acolyte shot Andy Warhol and the day that Dodger pitcher Don Drysdale was going for his sixth consecutive shutout. A retired doorman (Anthony Hopkins) is hanging around the hotel lobby, hoping to lure someone into a game of chess ... while a Latino busboy (Freddy Rodriguez) laments that he has to work a double shift and can't go to the Dodgers game ... and a young woman (Lindsay Lohan) is getting ready to marry a friend (Elijah Wood) so he won't get sent to Vietnam.
There's also the hotel manager (William H. Macy), who is cheating on his hairdresser wife (Sharon Stone) with a switchboard operator (Heather Graham) ... and a kitchen manager (Christian Slater) who is being fired for not giving his workers time off to vote ... and, of course, there's the Kennedy campaign staff, based at the hotel, gearing up for a get-out-the-vote push and a hoped-for victory celebration. Movies with this kind of structure tend to be called "Altman-esque," and Estevez owes a debt to the late filmmaker who proved that such a movie could be done. But, to be frank, "Bobby" has more heart than any Altman film I've ever seen.
As a screenwriter, Estevez is drawn to two-person encounters and moments of unexpected intimacy and revelation. This means that, while no one dominates the film, every actor gets an indelible moment. Demi Moore plays a horrible drunken singing star who lashes into her husband (Estevez) when he tries to curb her drinking. As the head cook at the hotel, Laurence Fishburne has a pair of fine scenes, full of wisdom and fun. Lohan gets her best showcase to date, bringing sensitivity to her scenes with Wood. And Stone and Moore, in a memorable pairing, get into some woman-to-woman truth-telling during a hair appointment. Both actresses seem to relish playing women of their mothers' generation and both find little mannerisms, common to women in the '60s, which we don't see anymore.
Robert Kennedy, around whom the action swirls, is seen only from the back or through historical footage. That feels right. The ballroom of the Ambassador is reproduced with startling exactitude and matches perfectly with the TV news footage of Kennedy's last speech. It's during the speech that Estevez makes his one and only boneheaded play. He drowns out Kennedy's remarks with, of all songs, Simon and Garfunkel's "The Sound of Silence," which has nothing to do with Kennedy and everything to do with another movie. Estevez recovers in time, however, by returning to Kennedy, and he returns to Kennedy yet again at the film's conclusion, with a brilliant speech played in voiceover.
In every nation, there are moments when the train jumps the tracks, and something irrevocable and terrible takes place. We've come a long way since 1968, when it was still possible for a presidential candidate to be idealistic without sounding weak, and poetic without seeming effete. "Bobby" is a worthy tribute to a last great day of hope.
Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle Movie Critic
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THE QUEEN - Rated PG13 - 97 minutes
- Flat
The opening shots of Stephen Frears' "The Queen" simply show Helen Mirren's face as her character prepares for it to be seen. She is Queen Elizabeth II, and we know that at once. The resemblance is not merely physical, but embodies the very nature of the Elizabeth we have grown up with -- a private woman who takes her public role with great gravity.
Elizabeth is preparing to meet Tony Blair (Michael Sheen), the new Labor prime minister who has just been elected in a landslide. We see Blair preparing for the same meeting. His election was a fundamental upheaval of British political life after Thatcherism, and at that time, Britain stood on a threshold of uncertain but possibly tumultuous change.
Within months, the queen and Blair find themselves in a crisis that involves not politics but a personal tragedy that was completely unforeseen -- the death of Diana, princess of Wales, in a Paris car crash. "The Queen" tells the story of how her death with her boyfriend, the playboy department store heir Dodi Fayed, would threaten to shake the very monarchy itself.
Told in quiet scenes of proper behavior and guarded speech, "The Queen" is a spellbinding story of opposed passions -- of Elizabeth's icy resolve to keep the royal family separate and aloof from the death of the divorced Diana, who was legally no longer a royal, and of Blair's correct reading of the public mood, which demanded some sort of public expression of sympathy from the crown for "The People's Princess."
It was extraordinary, the grief that people felt after her death. I was reminded of the weeks after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Was it out of proportion to Diana's objective importance? She was a young woman almost cynically picked for her marriage, who provided the crown with its required heirs, who was a photogenic escort for Prince Charles, who found no love from her husband; it was no secret they both had affairs during their marriage. Once divorced, she made peculiar dating choices.
She died in a late-night crash while being pursued by paparazzi. Yet it was as if a saint had been taken from our midst. Yes, Diana devoted much time to doing good. Yes, I believe she was sincere. But doing good was part of her job description; she signed on for it. In death, she had the same impact as if a great national hero had died.
"The Queen" is told almost entirely in small scenes of personal conflict. It creates an uncanny sense that it knows what goes on backstage in the monarchy; in the movie, Queen Elizabeth, Prince Philip and the Queen Mother have settled into a sterile domesticity cocooned by servants and civil servants. It shows Tony and Cherie Blair (Helen McCrory) in their own bourgeois domestic environment. Both households, privately, are plain-spoken to the point of bluntness, and Cherie is more left wing than her husband, less instinctively awed by the monarchy, more inclined to dump the institution.
What Tony clearly sees is that the monarchy could be gravely harmed, if not toppled, by the Queen's insistence on sticking to protocol and not issuing a statement about Diana. The press demands that Elizabeth fly the flag at half-mast as a symbolic gesture at Buckingham Palace. Elizabeth stands firm. The palace will not acknowledge the death or sponsor the funeral.
"The Queen" comes down to the story of two strong women loyal to the doctrines of their beliefs about the monarchy, and a man who is much more pragmatic. The queen is correct, technically, in not lowering the flag to half-mast -- it is not a national flag, but her own, flown only when she is in residence. But Blair is correct that the flag has become a lightning rod for public opinion. The queen is correct, indeed, by tradition and history in all she says about the affair -- but she is sadly aloof from the national mood. Well, maybe queens should be.
Certainly that's what the Queen Mum thinks. Played by Sylvia Syms, she is shown at 90-plus years, still tart and sharp-witted. At the last minute, the palace needs a protocol plan for the funeral, and time is so short that the Queen Mum's own funeral plan has to be borrowed and modified. Syms has a priceless reaction where she learns that her honor guard, all servicemen, will be replaced by celebrities -- even, gasp, Elton John.
"The Queen" could have been told as a scandal sheet story of celebrity gossip. Instead, it becomes the hypnotic tale of two views of the same event -- a classic demonstration, in high drama, of how the Establishment has been undermined by publicity. I think it possible that Thatcher, if she still had been in office, might have supported the Queen. That would be impossible to the populist Blair.
Stephen Frears, the director, has made several wonderful films about conflicts and harmonies in the British class system ("My Beautiful Laundrette," "Dirty Pretty Things," "Prick Up Your Ears"), and "The Queen," of course, represents the ultimate contrast. No one is more upper class than the queen, and Tony Blair is profoundly middle class.
The screenplay is intense, focused, literate, observant. The dynamic between Elizabeth and Philip (James Cromwell), for example, is almost entirely defined by decades of what has not been said between them -- and what need not be said. There are extraordinary, tantalizing glimpses of the "real" Elizabeth driving her own Range Rover, leading her dogs, trekking her lands at Balmoral -- the kind of woman, indeed, who seems more like Camilla Parker-Bowles than Diana.
Mirren is the key to it all in a performance sure to be nominated for an Oscar. She finds a way, even in a "behind the scenes" docudrama, to suggest that part of her character will always be behind the scenes. What a masterful performance, built on suggestion, implication and understatement. Her queen in the end authorizes the inevitable state funeral, but it is a tribute to Mirren that we have lingering doubts about whether, objectively, it was the right thing. Technically, the queen was right to consider the divorced Diana no longer deserving (by her own choice) of a royal funeral. But in terms of modern celebrity worship, Elizabeth was wrong. This may or may not represent progress.
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TIDELAND - Rated R - 120 minutes
- Scope
For years, fans of visionary filmmaker Terry Gilliam have wished that he would get the chance to once again make a film entirely on his own terms that wasn't compromised by the financial pressures or studio interference that he has had to battle against throughout his career (most recently in the deeply-flawed-but-intriguing "The Brothers Grimm"). With "Tideland," he has given those people exactly that-the kind of small-scale, deeply personal film that most major directors talk about doing from time to time in interviews but never seem to get around to shooting-and to judge from the initial reactions, it appears to be too much for many of them. Since it premiered at last year's Toronto film festival, it has been called weird, depraved, disgusting and incomprehensible by virtually everyone who has written about it to date. I'll be the first to admit that yeah, it is weird, depraved, disgusting and incomprehensible. However, it is also smart, funny, touching, thoughtful, beautifully put together and a fascinating addition to the career of one of the most intriguing directors working today. Opening with a quote from "Alice in Wonderland" (a motif that will recur throughout), "Tideland" tells the story of Jeliza-Rose (Jodelle Ferland), an eight-year-old girl living in virtual seclusion with a pair of druggie parents-a burned-out rock star father (Jeff Bridges) and a Nancy Spungen-wannabe mother (Jennifer Tilly)-who rely on her to prepare their fixes of heroin. What save Jeliza-Rose from total despair-what has kept her going throughout an existence that makes "The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things" look like a Hilary Duff extravaganza-is her ability to retreat into the world of her vast imagination as a way of coping with the horrors around her. Her only friends, for example, are a quarter of doll heads that speak to her, have individual personalities and even come to life every once in a while. When Mom OD's and dies, Dad grabs Jeliza-Rose and flees to the isolated farmhouse where he spent his childhood, the kind of place where all you can see for miles and miles is miles and miles. Before long, Dad also succumbs to an overdose and Jeliza-Rose is left all alone in a rotted-out house with no food, no way of contacting the outside world, a corpse in the living room that is growing more and more putrid with each passing day and only her rapidly-growing imagination to keep her company. Eventually, a couple of other people enter her life-weirdo amateur taxidermist Dell (Janet McTeer) who seems to have know her father from a long time ago and her younger brother Dickens (Brendan Fletcher), a Downs Syndrome sufferer who also has a grand fantasy life (he is forever planning ways of destroying the "monster shark"-better known as an express train-that is the only thing that punctuates the silence) and who strikes up a friendship with Jeliza-Rose that may well make many viewers cringe as they discuss "silly kisses" that he used to receive from a relative. Over the years, Terry Gilliam has given us a gallery of characters who have used their dreams and fantasies as a way of coping with/escaping from the horrors of the real world and "Tideland" is perhaps his most overt exploration of that theme. With the possible exception of one scene set on a bus, everything that we see in the film is filtered through the eyes of someone who has seen and experienced things that most people go their entire lives trying to avoid and who uses her vivid imagination to process those experiences in a manner that she can understand. Since the someone in question is an eight-year-old girl, many critics and viewers have voiced strong objections to the film, especially in regards to the sexually-charged material involving the Dickens and Dell (whom she catches in a compromising position with a delivery boy). And yet, what makes it so discomforting to watch, I suspect, is the fact that Gilliam isn't playing it for lurid thrills. Instead, he treats these elements with a certain beguiling innocence-because Jeliza-Rose is too young to fully comprehend exactly what she is seeing and hearing, it becomes just another thing in her mind that she is somehow able to come to terms with in her own peculiar manner. One of the surprises of "Tideland," considering the squalid nature of the material and the low budget that Gilliam was obviously working with, is to discover just what a visual marvel it is. Cinematographer Nicola Percorini does an especially brilliant job of creating a look for the film that balances the fantastical elements with the note of grim reality that are forever creeping in. As for the special effects, the majority of them are done in a decidedly non-realistic manner that somehow feels appropriate for this kind of material-too much slickness would destroy the illusion that we are seeing things through a child's eye. The lone exception is the series of make-up effects used to illustrate the gradual decomposition of the father's body-this is portrayed in such a vivid and palpable manner that those with weaker constitutions are advised to skip the snack bar before watching the film. (Strange how the sight of such a thing can pack such a wallop while the orgy of flying body parts in "Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning" barely arouses any emotion at all.) Although "Tideland" is as visually striking as anything that Gilliam has done before, the most astonishing thing on display is the beautiful central performance that he has elicited from Jodelle Ferland (whom you might recall as the girl from "Silent Hill") as Jeliza-Rose. This is one of the most challenging roles I can recall for a young actress-Jeliza-Rose is on-screen for virtually the entire film and is placed smack-dab in the kind of scenes that many adult actresses wouldn't dream of playing-and she pulls it off in such a splendid and spontaneous manner that I would put her work here up against any other actress that I have seen so far this year. In comparison to her strong, simple and unaffected work, the performances from the other actors may seem to be overly hammy by comparison (especially McTeer and Bridges) but it is important to once again realize that they are not supposed to be portraying real people-they are fantasy characters in an exceedingly grim fairy tale and so act accordingly. As Gilliam himself admits in a prologue that has recently been added to prints of the film, many of you are not going to like "Tideland." Like all of his other films, it is uneven in some parts and so overstuffed with ideas and images designed to shake viewers up without offering them any easy outs that it may prove to be too much for some audiences. However, those up to the challenge are likely as not to come away from the film enthralled and moved. Part Lewis Carroll, part Alfred Hitchcock, part Andrew Wyeth, part Terrence Malick and all Terry Gilliam, it is a unique and personal vision that, like it or not, will stick in your mind for a long time after you see it. By Peter Sobczynski, efilmcritic.com
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