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| Writing About Movies... |
Writing about movies just because they open on theaters on a certain date is the “job” part of being a critic for a daily or weekly newspaper or monthly magazine. Writing for your own website requires considerably more internal motivation, as my neglect of this website has taught me. So now, along with new releases, this corner of the website will deal with movies from any year and any country so long as they have some inherent interest for me. These are not DVD reviews. Some of the movies might be out on DVD, some might not be. If I’m sent new DVDs to review, I’ll continue to do so under the DVD banner on the site. But – to invoke a metaphor – the movies written about here will simply represent the catch taken from a net thrown blindly in the ocean of cinema.
• Japanese filmmaker Eiichi Kudo
Japanese filmmaker Eiichi Kudo (1929-2000) spent most of his career making samurai films at the Toei Company at a moment when the studio specialized in mid-budget features aimed at middle-class audiences. If there was ever a formula for critical obscurity, that was it, since the circumstances guaranteed that Kudo’s movies were neither highbrow or lowbrow enough to be fashionable.
• Because of the Cats (1973) Dir.: Fons Rademakers
Historically, movies about home invaders and the families they terrorize are rare, but hardly unheard-of. William Wyler’s The Desperate Hours (1955) was a big hit in its time and was a reliable part of Bogie retrospectives. The ongoing confrontation between family head Fredric March and gang boss Humphrey Bogart set a structural template that survived in one way or another all the way through Larry Cohen’s Bone. Or the Ted Demme 1994 comedy The Ref, for that matter.
• To Be Twenty (Avere vent’anni) (1978) - Brucia, ragazzo, brucia (1969) - Dir.: Fernando Di Leo
The Italian filmmaker Fernando Di Leo (1932-2003) has enjoyed posthumous resurgence in popularity, largely due to the crime thrillers he made during the 1970s. These hardboiled, violent, but strangely introspective movies have had the good fortune of falling into line with 21 st-century notions of what makes for a proper action outing, especially the misogynist notion that women don’t belong on-screen unless they’re naked or firing a gun (or both).
• The Last Frontier (1955) - Dir.: Anthony Mann
Chuka (1967) - Dir.: Gordon Douglas
The dark side of the legend of George Armstrong Custer has been brought to the screen at least as often as its more adulatory aspect, although in the former Custer himself usually appears under another name. John Ford’s Fort Apache (1948) is, if not the template, than the apogee of this approach, with Henry Fonda playing the brave-but-foolish Lt. Col. Owen Thursday who leads his men into a pointless and foreseeable massacre.
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| Film Reviews... |
• INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL
There’s this very nice scene in Steven Spielberg’s latest Indiana Jones slog where the aging, tired-looking and paunchy titular adventurer enter a combination prison-insane asylum looking for some info.
• The Incredible Hulk
 The Incredible Hulk shares The Big Idea that underlay the popular Marvel comic book. That is that scientist Bruce Banner, a strong identification figure for the comic’s young, mostly male readers, is seething with rage against authority figures who don’t understand him and don’t let him do what he needs to do. In particular, he resents Gen. Thaddeus Ross, his military boss and stern – and obvious – father figure (Marvel comics obsessively produced problematic “fathers,” which often led to the counter-balancing creation of alarmingly maternal girlfriends; Marvel was truly the House of Oedipus).
• Iron Man
 Years from now, when your great-grandchildren ask you how in the name of god so many American voters could have chosen George W. Bush to be the president (even in the stolen 2000 election, he still received tens of millions of votes) and supported the invasion of Iraq, don’t bother trying to explain the conversion story that was supposed to locate this self-indulgent rich-boy on a higher spiritual plane than the rest of us. Just show them Iron Man, the 2008 power trip that reruns Bush’s self-created myth in popular culture terms.
• Eastern Promises
 Don't make an occupation out of your preoccupations. That's a lesson to be drawn from David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises, the disappointing, if not wholly unexpected, successor to the masterful A History of Violence. It was foreseeable because over his career, Cronenberg has often let his fascination with the power of spontaneous (or at least sudden) mutation in human beings overwhelm character, story and structure. This isn't a new phenomenon; it stretches all the way back to 1979's The Brood which despite its horror elements and occasions of suspense was almost a term paper.
Even the bravura, brutal sequences in Eastern Promises have their visceral strengths undermined by a schematic conception that insists on - rather than demonstrates - the human capacity for radical, simultaneously physical and psychological change. The movie is so disjointed that the drama of ramification that so illuminated A History of Violence (and Shivers, Scanners, The Fly, inter alia) dies aborning..
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• George Romero’s Land of the Dead
 George Romero’s zombies have come a long way since we got a first ghastly look at them in 1968’s Night of the Living Dead. Literally, of course, they’ve only made it from rural western Pennsylvania to Pittsburgh – though that’s not so bad for creatures who drift about randomly and slowly, hoping to run into human meat on the hoof.
But in Land of the Dead, the fourth installment of Romero’s ongoing epic of the living and the dead, the walking corpses form the beginning of an actual social group. Under the growling, howling direction of a dead gas station attendant (Eugene Baker), a group of zombies begin to make their organized way from the suburbs to the city. Most of the countryside has been ceded by the surviving living to the dead, but many cities – including Pittsburgh (Toronto doing a lot of subbing for same) – have barricaded themselves with electrified fences and army units. more
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• Batman Begins
 The first four modern-era Batman movies were such cacophonous lumberers that it’s tempting – very tempting – to over praise the fifth in the series, Batman Begins. Because it’s a prequel that concentrates on the mental formation of the young Bruce Wayne, there’s a critical urge to celebrate its concentration on character. Because it deals directly with the issue of superhero/supervillain-inspired fear, there’s a similar instinct to praise its “meta” qualities. And, finally, because the action is swift and compact rather than grandiose, one might reflexively use on of those trite phrases (“in your face,” for example) to describe it.
The simple fact is, though, that Batman Begins is a well-made, good movie, which should be enough. After all, summertime (Hollywood’s summertime, which begins in May) has, over the past decade, become a junkyard of crashing failures, of would-be “entertainments” that use that appellation to excuse the absence of any detectable filmmaking skills (vide Kicking and Screaming or Cinderella Man). Batman Begins is that rare achievement, a movie that achieves its modest goals through extraordinary means. more
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• Mysterious Skin
 Mysterious Skin is a risk-taking film that dares to wed shock and tenderness in a saga of pedophilia and its aftereffects. That it is gentleness that finally emerges as its chief affect is due to the carefully non-sensationalized, but meticulously honest direction of Gregg Araki, who adapted Scott Heim’s novel.
With Mysterious Skin, Araki achieves a synthesis between the generous spirit of his first two micro-budgeted, halting features (Three Bewildered People in the Night and The Long Weekend O’ Despair) with the expertise of his hyped-up journeyman efforts (The Doom Generation, Totally F***ed Up). The new film suggests that any human act is worthy of sympathetic treatment as long as its done with some hint of vulnerability or generosity. At the same time, it lets exploitation masquerading under the guise of those two virtues stand exposed as betrayals of a particularly loathsome kind. more
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• Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith
 If he’s proven nothing else with his six Star Wars movies, writer-producer-director-uberlord George Lucas has demonstrated that he is one of the most persnickety filmmakers of all time. With the three most recent of the movies (prequels to the first three, as if you didn’t know), Lucas has nailed down every loose plot point from the first three with the finality of a mortician hammering shut a coffin. To keep the movies up to date technically, he has revised the effects in the first three not once, but twice.
It’s an irony of no little humor that all this artistic control has been lavished on an enterprise that proclaims that our destinies are written in the stars. Clearly, Lucas has left little to the stars – either the universe’s or Hollywood’s. Looking at it that way, the six films begin to look like the expression of Lucas’s neurotic fear that individual ambition and initiative aren’t sufficient to a successful navigation of life’s rapids, that the Fates can upset even the most precisely laid plans. more
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• The Interpreter
 When veteran director Sydney Pollack got permission to shoot his political thriller The Interpreter in the United Nations Building, he did just position his cameras in the place, but actually took possession of it. It’s not that he got the deed or anything like that. Rather, Pollack and cinematographer Darius Khondji endowed the entryway, General Assembly hall, and warren of translator officers with the requisite emotional feelings need to transform them into dramatic settings.
This is no small thing in an era when, say, movies shot in New York City by hot young directors might as well have been shot in Toronto for all the atmosphere they create. And Pollack and Khondji’s accomplishment keeps The Interpreter running when its human assets threaten to sabotage it. more
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• Palindromes
 In the past, Todd Solondz has gone to town with characters who desperately crave happiness but who start from such a deficit that maybe the best they can hope for is a kind of equilibrium between depression (or worse) and, well, if not happiness, than anti-depression (or anti-worse). The work that seemed to hit home hardest was 1995’s Welcome to the Dollhouse, the story of a young misfit (brilliantly embodied by Heather Matarazzo) who suffered from familial indifference and junior-high-school cruelty. The character, Dawn Wiener, was in extremis as far as social isolation went, but people are so convinced that they were isolated when they were Dawn’s age, that it was easy to identify with her.
In Happiness, Solondz moved on to a wider range of characters and difficulties which deliberately eschewed, in all but one case, the identification process. The film’s conclusions weren’t much different from Welcome’s, but the variations on the tune were as – how to put it? – just as cacophonously melodious. more
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• Sin City
 Contemporary graphic novels and traditional comic books form a rough analogy to second-generation immigrants and their parents: Ostentatious spending replaces enforced frugality, as does an impulse to pump up the social status of modest origins. This sort of social climbing is not only a dubious activity to start with but an exemplary substitution of fashion for style. The appropriation of comic book forms by filmmakers stretches out the analogy to include the third generation’s embrace of its grandparents’ ethnic roots – except of course, those roots have not only been radically retailored to fit the new “owners,” but represent a self-defeating quest for an illusory authenticity.
Welcome, then, to Sin City, the adaptation of Frank Miller’s graphic novel, directed by Robert Rodriguez and Miller himself. Based on what the movie looks like, I’d say Miller’s work is heavily indebted to Will Eisner’s The Spirit graphically and the most hardboiled crime of crime novels, perhaps those of James Hadley Chase, for character and sadism. It’s a black, white and gray world, full of large, looming buildings, limbed woods, clawing shadows and massed compositions. It’s always night and light is a matter of sudden shafts which emerge to illuminate an act of violence. Flamboyantly, the movie introduces bits and pieces of color, usually scarlet to vivify splashes of blood, but also yellow for the occasionally blonde and blue or green for eyes. more
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• Nowhere Man
 In The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade called the title statuette everyone was trying to grab “the dingus.” As if Freudians needed another clue as to what the hardboiled detective was trying to win back from femme fatale Bridget Shaugnessy and prevent from falling into the hands of the obviously homosexual cabal of Gutman, Cairo, and Wilmer.
Making such a sub(?)text into the upfront plot of a movie might sound a bit too bold, even self-defeating. But we live in a post-Bobbit world and, on the evidence of his movie, Nowhere Man, writer-director Tim McCann turns out to have the wit, filmmaking skill, and sheer effrontery necessary to take up such a dare successfully. more
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• Ballad of Jack & Rose
 Rebecca Miller’s The Ballad of Jack & Rose would deserve notice for its setting if for nothing else, though its typical of Miller’s frustrating reluctance to commit herself fully to a rewarding realism that we’re not exactly sure what that setting is.
The so-far underpopulated island where the action occurs is “somewhere off the east coast,” a hint that is so general as to be practically useless in pinpointing a socially or geographically recognizable location. The explanation for this lack of specificity, I imagine, must be that the writer-director wants the characters as individuals to take precedence over the influence of social environment, an argument I personally find naïve. On the other hand, it may simply be that Miller couldn’t find, after scouring the eastern seaboard, an offshore location that provided the combination of population and realty that fit her dramatic vision – which to my mind argues for an alteration of vision. But it’s her movie, not mine, and the fact that this vagueness of location stuck in my mind like a sharp stone in a shoe shouldn’t undermine the rare achievements of a good film. more
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• Oldboy
 Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy’s seething concoction of sexuality, violence, and cinematic ingenuity doesn’t lead to quite exactly to the climactic explosion one expects – at least given its unceasing uproar till then. But then, South Korea’s own modern history of turmoil and dislocation hasn’t led to revolution, either. Although not overtly a political film, Oldboy is about the distortions of personality that occur under modern, ruling-class formations. It’s an angry work, and only avoids bitterness by balancing its hopes on the thinnest of imaginable remedies. With it, Park has fashioned one of the most important movies to emerge from South Korea, one of world cinema’s current hot spots. True, thanks to its harshness, it’s not a film likely to be “liked” by a lot of people, but it demands to be grappled with.
Immediately following a short, confusing scene during which a wild-haired man dangles another from the edge of a high-rise, the movie’s principle narrative opens in a Seoul police station, where businessman Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik, who is rivetingly ferocious), is making a drunken nuisance of himself. Dae-su had been on his way home from work with a birthday gift -- angel wings -- for his 3-year-old daughter, but whatever respectability that errand may bespeak is undone by his obnoxious behavior, which even turns off the various ruffians forced to share a bench with him. Only the timely appearance of his friend, Joo Hwan, rescues Dae-su from a night in the pokey. more
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• Head On
 The dissipated hero is a sadly rare bird these days, kept alive largely by the Kaurismäki brother and then only in its male manifestation. That alone is a reason to welcome writer-director Fatih Akin’s Head On (Gegen die Wand) to American theaters, after it won first prize at the 2004 Berlin Film Festival.
Shot in Akin’s native Hamburg (where he was born to Turkish parents), Head On follows the collision between 40-year-old Cahit (Birol Ünel), a drunken ex-punk rocker, and Sibel (Sibel Kekilli), a pretty 21-year-old. Both are of Turkish descent, but seem to have precious little else in common. Aside from drawing as few sober breaths as he can possibly manage, Cahit, who picks up empties in a nightclub for a living, has forgotten most Turkish he ever knew and keeps his social circle limited to one friend and one casual lover. Sibel, on a the other hand, comes from a strict, tight knit Turkish family – so naturally, she wants to marry Cahit as soon as she meets him. more
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• The Life Aquatic
 Wes Anderson’s films are so gentle – even when their heroes are undergoing mental and spiritual agonies – that it seems counterintuitive to call them obsessive. Perhaps a better term might be insistent, or even politely insistent, given the atmosphere of self-effacement that settles over them.
So maybe it’s less important that Anderson’s films dwell almost maniacally on the problematic relationships between fathers or father-figures and sons (or, in one case, daughter) than that they do so with self-conscious bashfulness. Even when the larger-than-life characters (Gene Hackman’s Royal Tennenbaum in The Royal Tennenbaums or, in the new The Life Aquatic, Bill Murray’s Steve Zissou) find themselves momentarily boastful over a vaunted achievement, they immediately thereafter find themselves excusing some slip up inextricably bound up with the glory. more
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• The Aviator
 Is Martin Scorsese a modern-day Victor Fleming? The suspicion that the self-conscious and signature-driven director of The Color of Money and Raging Bull is most profitably compared to the echt studio craftsman hardens into a near certainty given the evidence of The Aviator, a gorgeous vacuum. Technique in search of subject, muscularity minus athleticism; these and other hallmarks of a stylist cast artistically adrift flatten an almost hysterically overworked movie.
Fleming directed his first feature in 1919, but was especially gifted with unusually vivid masculine fare he made for MGM during the 1930s. Unfortunately, he got sucked into the “prestige picture” machine following The Wizard of Oz in 1939. David O. Selznick, the independent producer who rode roughshod over his directors, hired him as one of the directors of Gone With the Wind immediately following Oz, and the experience seems to have crushed Fleming’s energy. Dreary and literal-minded efforts followed back at MGM (including a soulless Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) before Fleming died after directing a horrible Joan of Arc in 1948. more
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• Million Dollar Baby
 For some years now, Clint Eastwood has been making movies with emotionally and artistically radical mood shifts that are so extreme that they border on the avant-garde. In some of these films – notably A Perfect World – the shift is jarring and occurs in a single scene meant to permanently redraw our perception of the protagonist. In others (Heartbreak Ridge or True Crime), the alterations of mood are more sinuous and draw attention less to the nature of the character than to the absurdity of circumstances.
The boxing saga Million Dollar Baby does both. The story of a curmudgeonly and impecunious old trainer and gym owner who reluctantly takes on an insistent, not-so-young woman as a protégé, the movie’s mood flows from laconic comedy to earnest uplift before plunging into melodrama and tragedy. Then, as a prologue to the climax, the main character must make an instinctive decision that might or might not plunge a knife into the heart of his own – and our – sense of himself. more
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• The Incredibles
 There’s nothing like artistic self-confidence when it comes to inspiring a genuine desire for collaboration. That’s actual self-confidence, not its shady cousin, conceit, which forswears collegiality out of a paltry need for self-validation.
John Lasseter and his crewmates at Pixar Animation Studios, following an unbroken string of artistic and commercial successes, are clearly luxuriating in levelheaded self-assurance. Exhibit one is The Incredibles another computer-animated comic triumph from the outfit that, aside from technical similarities, differs in almost every important respect from earlier Pixar features. more
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• Sideways
 With so much of Hollywood’s output drowning in a cesspool of its own construction (I can’t remember a period when so many American films haven’t even been worth commenting upon), it is no fun to report on the failure of “Sideways,” the latest from writer-director Alexander Payne and his writing partner Jim Taylor. One can only hope that this dispiriting letdown is only a bump on the road following such gems as 2002’s About Schmidt and 1999’s Election.
As they did with Schmidt, Payne and Taylor have shaped their newest film as a road movie, although with another twist of the nuptial sundial. Whereas Warren Schmidt (Jack Nicholson), was largely involved in motoring to his daughter’s wedding following the death of his own wife, the two main characters of Sideways are exploiting the last days of one’s bachelorhood. more
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• Collateral
 Tom Cruise’s performances click best when the slick performer plays guys who are trying to get away with something, guys who work their cool; vide The Color of Money and Jerry Maguire, in which he played hustlers, or Risky Business and The Firm, where he played neophytes trying to bluff their way out of trouble. His difficulties come when he goes for for the big emotional play and over-emotes, a problem that goes back as far as Born on the Fourth of July, but which lately has run rampant through Eyes Wide Shut, Magnolia (which was a potentially good hustler part), Vanilla Sky and, in extremis, The Last Samurai. The guy just doesn’t do sincerity well unless it’s tied into a shame reflex.
Happily, the issue doesn’t arise in Collateral, the new crime drama from Michael “Macho” Mann, in which Cruise plays an out-of-town hitman who drafts an L.A. cab driver as his personal chauffeur for a night of assassination. Like all of Mann’s movies, it’s a brawny, stylistic insistent – to the point of nagging – effort that demands to be taken seriously. Way, way, way seriously. But perhaps sensing his material was a little extreme (the screenplay is credited to Stuart Beattie), or inspired by the presence of funny man Jamie Foxx as the luckless taxi driver, or whatever, Mann has allowed some humor to seep into his usual mélange of tension, bleakness, and existential angst. As you might expect from someone who hasn’t exactly been a barrel of laughs in the past, Mann’s stabs at yocks are occasionally dubious. They are welcome all the same. more
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• The Manchurian Candidate
 It takes director Jonathan Demme maybe ten minutes of The Manchurian Candidate to get to a close-up of his hero, Major Ben Marco, U.S. Army, using a lens so shallow that it reminds you of looking through an apartment door peephole. Of course, the point of distorting the handsome features of Denzel Washington, who plays Marco is to let us know that something psychotronically wrong is afoot, a point that’s reinforced when Demme uses the same lens on a former platoon mate of Marco’s, who has just accosted him with tales of a strange dream he’s been having over and over again.
Thus we are confronted once again with the pile-driver technique of Demme, who once boasted one of the most sensitive touches in American cinema and whose documentaries still manifest an subtlety and patience. Since Silence of the Lambs, though, Demme has favored an all-out-assault approach in the totality of his work. For The Manchurian Candidate is not only a series of thriller hammer-blows – often, to be sure, cunningly applied – but it’s a work of (calculated?) political naiveté. more
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• The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi
 In the credits for The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi, his remake of the 1962 period yakuza film, The Tale of Zatoichi, Takehsi Kitano (who stars and directs) bills himself under his comic nom de theatre, Beat Takeshi. Long before he directed masterpieces like Hana-bi, Takeshi was one of the Two Beats, so-called manzai comedians whose act (so I’ve read) was something like a Three Stooges with two Moes, only Moe is played by Redd Foxx. From there, as Beat, Takeshi went on to become a huge Japanese TV star, (again, so I’ve read) partly based on comedy shows at least partly distinguished by their cruelty, sexual frankness, and crudity (not that there’s anything wrong with that).
Takeshi’s Zatoichi isn’t anything like what his TV shows sound like, but it is a casual burlesque of the original film, which spawned a series that produced two or three films annually for about ten years. Whereas the originals mixed swordplay and sentiment, Takehsi adorns his action with broad slapstick. Indeed, in the very first scene, one of Zatoichi’s enemies draws his sword, only to severely wound one of the comrades standing next to him, who in turn reacts with a buffoonish gag response. It’s a pretty clear signal that nothing that follows has to be taken seriously. more
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• The Terminal
 There are two great chroniclers of isolation among contemporary Hollywood filmmakers, Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis, and it’s characteristic that in their latest works – both starring Tom Hanks – Spielberg locates that isolation right in the middle of a busy, crowded airport terminal, while Zemeckis (in Cast Away), picks out a lonely island.
Zemeckis has always seen isolation as a matter of social standing and status and has found physical borders to be effective delineators – even when those borders are at first as abstruse as time (the Back to the Future films). For Spielberg, though, isolation is a function of anxiety, initially, and sometimes, solely, individual. If that individual is lucky, he finds a group that can share and dissipate that anxiety, which is what happens in his latest film, The Terminal. more
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• The Five Obstructions
 Even those of us who admire many of Lars von Trier’s films, are undaunted by his vaunted anti-Americanism (indeed, find it more advertised than present), and enjoy his Dogme dogmatism for the artistic lark that it is, can occasionally be exasperated by his woeful self-indulgence and a moral obtuseness of Brobdingnagian proportions.
The Five Obstructions is a case study of Von Trier’s serious shortcomings, a self-constructed autopsy made in collaboration with fellow Dane Jørgen Leth. According to the notes provided with the film, Leth is a “revered cultural figure” in Denmark, a producer, novelist, poet and television commentator. OK. What he certainly is is the director of a 17-minute film shot in 1967 called The Perfect Human. more
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• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
 Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban isn’t just the best of the Harry Potter movies so far; it’s the first of the three to be a movie in its entirety or, perhaps better put, a whole movie. This is no doubt due to the efforts of director Alfonso Cuarón (The Little Princess, Y Tu Mama También), whose facility as a filmmaker far outstrips those of Christopher Columbus, who helmed the first two Potters.
But Cuaron has gone one giant step further than mere competence. He’s discovered a path through the thicket of creatures, demons and spells upon. This Harry has an emotional tuning fork, if we may switch metaphors, twin tines embodied by a newly adolescent Harry (well-played yet again by Daniel Radcliffe) and by a new character, Professor Lupin, acted with customary yet singular fluency by the wonderful David Thewlis. more
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• The Day After Tomorrow
 With The Day After Tomorrow, director Roland Emmerich’s generously subsidized odyssey to discover the tropospherically-high boredom threshold of the movie-going public has reached a level that would cause the eyes of Scheherazade herself to droop from two doors down.
The German-born Emmerich – who may be his country’s revenge on America for bottled soda and the ensuing tooth decay – once again displays the same fumble-fingered story-telling abilities that made Independence Day and Godzilla such seat squirmers. What makes his incompetence so awe-inspiring this time out is that the plot can be summarized in three words: It gets cold. True, it gets so cold at times that some people freeze to death in just a few seconds, but the frozen corpses never amount to much more than effective metaphors for the movie as a whole. more
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• Kill Bill Vol. 2
 That Kill Bill Vol. 2 is volumes better than Vol. 1 is beyond question. But why it is makes for such a better picture a more puzzling proposition. Certainly Quentin Tarantino has crammed a film course’s worth of references into the action (there’s even an irritating “homework” aspect to it; if you don’t wait around for the closing credits, for example, you won’t notice that one of the characters is christened a double-D Budd, and so hence is a reference to director Budd Boetticher). And there are moments in nearly every sequence when you begin to pay more attention to that itchy butt rather than to onscreen action hanging on past its prime.
No question, though, about this film’s emotional superiority, its overall alacrity, and a ferocity that is, finally, as visceral as it is calculated. Whereas the first outing’s sea of blood and walls of pain tended to dissipate in gaudy show, the somewhat reduced level of violence in Vol. 2 benefits from a much keener appreciation of human consequence. more
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• "Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring" & 3 others by Kim Ki-duk
 The Korean feature Spring, Summer, Fall Winter… and Spring manages to slip into U.S. theaters posing as a politely spiritual portrait of one monk’s progress from boyhood to maturity, with pit stops at rebellious adolescence and contrite adulthood.
This fair-enough description makes director Kim Ki-duk’s ninth feature sound like one of those pre-packaged allegories so beloved by viewers who value metaphor above concrete action. more
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• The Passion of the Christ
 I think I figured out what Pope John Paul II really said about Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. Reports from the film’s most ardent supporters continue to insist that the pontiff exclaimed, “It is as it was” after seeing Gibson’s cinematic depiction of 12 hours of Good Friday. These words are supposedly an endorsement that the film is factual (yeah, and Braveheart was, too). But I think there was a problem translating an idiomatic phrase the pope must have used. To my mind, His Holiness, in an effort to remain politely noncommittal, must have said some version of “It is what it is.”
Seriously, folks, Mel Gibson rides his mile-wide sado-masochistic streak into the heart of the Passion story and, with The Passion of the Christ, emerges with a propagandistic, comic-strip version of the death of Jesus Christ. more
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• The Dreamers
 Bernardo Bertolucci’s films rest on the iron triangle of family, sex and politics. One of these columns may, in any given movie, be stronger than the other, but all three are ever present. So if one appears to be absent, viewers should be mindful to let their eyes drift to the edges of the frame where, sooner or later, Bertolucci will show us a door, a window through which the missing element will cast its shadow.
During The Dreamers, we never have long to wait. Set in Paris during the political upheavals of 1968, the action starts at the La Cinematheque Française just after its founder and head, Henri Langlois, has been sacked by Gaullist minister of culture, and old (former) leftist, Andre Malraux. The Cinematheque had already become a Mecca for young cinema lovers from all over Europe, while Americans where just beginning to make the pilgramage. Additionally, Langlois was already something of a national hero thanks to the way he had hidden scores of French films from the Nazis during the Occupation. His firing caused an immediate stir, then large demonstrations which provoked a violent overreaction by the French police. more
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• Crimson Gold
 A filmmaker who can open his movie like gangbusters – literally like, Gangbusters, the old radio show whose opening machine-gun trill spawned the expression – has, if we can mix metaphors and weapons, unsheathed a double-edged sword. Take Crimson Gold (Talaye sorkh), the newest feature from 39-year-old Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi.
A camera planted somewhere in the back of a dark shop watches in an unbroken, long take as a husky-looking robber lounges through a jewelry heist that is going slowly, crazily, self-destructively awry. As his frantic partner outside in the street pleads with him to grab the loot and run, the man inside, with what is clearly deranged dispassion, murders the off-screen shopkeeper and then, all of a sudden, shoots himself in the head. The combination of stylistic and dramatic daring combine in Panahi’s gambit of planting the camera, not on a tripod, but in human hands, so that it makes slight movements to follow the action. This is the action of a filmmaker who scorns the opposition of objective and subjective, but instead affirms a sympathy that equates the camera with the bobbing, turning, twisting head of the supremely concerned, but helpless, observer. more
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• Stuck On You
 Stories of brothers who go their separate ways are older than the parable of the Prodigal Son, yet still current. Go to any middle-sized town and you’ll find siblings split over the desirability of staying close to one’s roots and the ambition of hitting the big city and, hopefully, the big time.
That, rather than an accident of physiology, is the underlying premise of Peter and Bobby Farrelly’s Stuck on You. Of course, the brothers get an awful lot of laughs out of the specific circumstance of their heroes, another pair of brothers named Bob (Matt Damon) and Walt (Greg Kinnear) Tenor. The two are conjoined twins, fated to travel – or not to travel – only when they agree on a destination. more
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• The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
 The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King has much to recommend it as the conclusion of a trilogy. The comprehensiveness of director Peter Jackson’s multi-film conception is sometimes brilliantly evident in not just this single outing’s diminuendos and crescendos of action, but in the way its extended burst of energy complements the currents of suspense in The Fellowship of the Ring and the harried staccatos of anxiety in The Two Towers.
These are major achievements. The Matrix trilogy failed on exactly these points, with a pretentious opening succeeded by the drowning-not-waving tread of Matrix Reloaded and the panicked serial-style bang-bang of Matrix Revolutions. But you don’t need an utter failure for comparison. In pure cinematic terms, Jackson easily outstrips George Lucas’s and Steven Spielberg’s efforts at trilogies. more
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• The Missing
 Ron Howard’s The Missing is a throwback to the days of the bloated Western, an era that began no later than 1958 with The Big Country and dribbled on through the 1960s (The Sons of Katie Elder) and into the 1970s (Cahill – United States Marshall).
Bloats weren’t the only Westerns made at the time, thank heavens. Howard Hawks (El Dorado) and John Ford (The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance) were still filming masterpieces, while Sergio Leone was ferrying Clint Eastwood through the spaghetti wilderness. But the bloats dominated the commercial field and their influence was everywhere; The Wild Bunch comes just this close to being a bloat but for Sam Peckinpah’s despondency. more
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• Elephant
 With Elephant, Gus Van Sant returns to the unabashedly personal expression of his first and third films, Mala Noche (1985) and My Own Private Idaho (1991), fashioning a morbidly romantic erotic reverie around his fascination with teenage boys.
Van Sant’s pre-opening statements and the movie’s apparent premise notwithstanding, the film is not about the Columbine High School shooting deaths, at least not beyond a nominal point and certainly not in any empathetic, or even sympathetic, way. True, Van Sant shot Elephant in a Portland, Oregon suburban area high school that features the same general style of blandly modern school architecture that fits the Columbine type. He imposes subtitled dates on the action that correspond with the actual dates of the killings. He gives names to the characters that match up with real people, or at least with the two adolescent killers. He copies the actual course of two school days, in general terms, and the exact routes and individual murders committed by the two boys, in specific terms. more
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• Mystic River
 With Mystic River, Clint Eastwood continues one of the most fascinating of all American directorial careers and certainly the most significant of contemporary times. Because that career has met with so much commercial success, he has been able to extend it far beyond the age boundaries of most American filmmakers, quite a break for film lovers since beginning with Unforgiven he entered into his richest period.
Mystic River is based on a novel by Dennis Lehane, but structurally and thematically it falls right into a familiar pattern. Eastwood’s gift is that he can return to this pattern again and again without repeating himself. Each treatment is a significant variation and extension, his more structured filmmaking approach bearing a strong similarity to jazz improvisation. more
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• Kill Bill Vol.1
 The central fact of any film by Quentin Tarantino is that it’s the work of an amateur. That’s not a knock, simply a fact. Although the word 'amateur' itself has fallen into disrepute in a society which overvalues professionalism, it’s derived from the Latin word for love and, at its highest level, refers to a person who undertakes an endeavor passionately, if not vocationally.
A particularly gifted amateur, Tarantino does make things difficult for himself by marring some of his work with the scars of movie buffdom. A movie buff is the nightmare version of a movie lover, a collector of names, titles and trivia who lacks critical discrimination and, for example, engages in conversation largely to ambush others with a display of superior knowledge of that trivia. As buffs sometimes will do, Tarantino gets a little sly about his sources. For example, there was no reason for him to pretend that Reservoir Dogs (1992) wasn’t based on Ringo Lam’s City on Fire (1987). His film was enough of his own work – a grossly overrated one, to be sure, though OK – to stand on its own. But he outsmarted himself, the obvious similarities opening him to unjust charges of copy-catism made, ironically, largely by buffs. more
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• Bubba Ho-Tep
 Don Coscarelli’s Bubba Ho-Tep is nominally a horror comedy about an aged Elvis Presley, alive in an East Texas nursing home, who, with the help of an equally elderly old man who claims to be JFK (despite his black skin), tangles with a soul-sucking mummy who stalks the night wearing a cowboy hat and boots.
But silly fun though it may be – and when it comes to laughs, it’s a blast – this strange movie operates on a myriad of mind-blowing levels. Far from a simple send-up of pop culture, it carefully avoids mere camp humor and ordinary parodies of Elvisania and horror conventions. Instead, it uses its gently bizarre sense of humor to plumb questions of identity, both as experienced personally by characters in the movie and then by members of the audience as participants in an on-going drama of popular culture. At the same time, and with equal sensitivity, it insists on treating the process of aging in a remarkably serious, if frequently hilarious, way. It can merge the laughs and poignancy because Coscarelli, (who besides directing, wrote the screenplay based on an award-winning short story by Joe R. Lansdale) knows that dismay over seeing life reduced to basic bodily functions goes hand-in-hand with sorrow over life’s missed chances. more
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• School of Rock
 Pray to high heaven that Jack Black never falls into the hands of a personal trainer, because right now the performer is the U.S.’s prime embodiment of the light-footed funny fat man. True, Black is more plump than obese, nearly a shadow of Jackie Gleason or Zero Mostel. But he plays up his jelly belly with true panache, deploying a seemingly endless array of walks, prances, leaps and jumps that simultaneously emphasize his mass and defy it.
Black exceeds Gleason and matches Mostel when it comes to facial manipulation. Blessed with eyebrows that could reproduce hieroglyphics, the actor-musician gets much more out of them (or his rubbery mouth) than the torrents of laughs that can drown an audience in mirth. As did Mostel, Black possesses a mad stare that drills through whatever he’s looking at, whether friend or foe (or audience). He’s a man possessed, even if what possesses him is ultimately his own idea of himself. His body flies through the air, changes rhythms, bursts into song, or crouches in stillness because it can hardly contain a huge spirit bursting to fill a world that doesn’t recognize its greatness. more
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• Friday Night (Vendredi Soir)
 Because she shoots on the streets and in the apartments of Paris or on the plains and deserts of Africa, Claire Denis is sometimes thought of as 'capturing' images with her camera. Or, if not operating on that level of realism, of at least as functioning in a contemporary milieu within an aura of 'normalcy.'
But Denis’s camera doesn’t capture anything. It creates all, for Denis is the truest descendent of Josef von Sternberg and Jean Cocteau working today. Her films – never more so than her latest, Friday Night (Vendredi Soir) – translate light, color, shade, hue, tone and sound directly into emotion. These works are total artifice in pursuit of total truth. Even the pure motion of the plot is motivated as much by action as by the scourge of psychology. In what can only be a deliberate reference, Denis invokes Cocteau’s Orphée, the modern version of the Orpheus myth in which the poet listens to his muse over his car radio. The heroine of Friday night, a young woman stuck in a traffic jam, hears a traffic reporter on her car radio encouraging motorists to offer pedestrians a ride. The woman gives a lift to the first man she sees, a man who becomes her lover for the night. more
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• Marooned In Iraq
 So, there’s these three guys, an old man and his two middle-aged sons, see. The geezer had three wives, but he wants to search for the first; one of the sons has six wives and has an eye out for a seventh; and the second, well, he’s never had any and who knows what he’s looking for.
If Bahman Ghobadi’s new film, Marooned in Iraq, starts off sounding like an elaborate joke, that’s the point. Moving forward from the grindingly harsh reportage of his first feature, A Time for Drunken Horses, the Kurdish filmmaker – and for now, we do mean the Kurdish filmmaker – has decided to look at life through the all-seeing, but forgiving lens of comedy. more
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• Russian Ark
 Writer-director Alexander (née Aleksandr) Sokurov — a perennial presence at major film festivals with such recent work as Taurus (2000), Moloch (1999) and, earlier and much more satisfactorily, Mother and Son (1996) — is on the whole more respected than beloved. Before attending film school, the now-51-year-old country boy – turned – St. Petersburger got his university degree in history, and has looked there for his subject matter ever since. Only it's not just history, to hear his admirers tell it: On Sokurov's own official Web site, one Russian critic describes the filmmaker's subject as "man and his fate" — surely a daunting ambition for anyone's lifework, and one that has led to accusations of grandiosity. more
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• Spider
 Very nearly from the start of his career, and certainly from the time of Scanners, David Cronenberg has pondered the tortured protagonists of his films with a unique – and peculiar – mixture of subjectivity and detachment.
This makes the novelist Patrick McGrath a particularly intriguing partner for the filmmaker. Virtually the creator of the neo-Gothic movement, McGrath’s tales of terror are as gruesomely comic as they are, well, gruesome. Comedy, of course, requires detachment, but McGrath’s sympathetic identification with his protagonist/victims is beyond question. more
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• Adaptation
 One destroys, the other doesn't well, let’s hold on a minute. It’s oversimplifying to say that within the partnership of director Spike Jonze and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, that Jonze handles all the destruction and Kaufman all the creation. But in the yin/yang of artistic production, it’s Jonze’s enthusiasm for mayhem that counteracts Kaufman’s queasiness in the face of the necessary wrecking ball. more
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