ftp.xmission.com/2014.06.ftp.xmission.com.tar/ftp.xmission.com/pub/lists/movies/archive/movies.200208

Internet Message Format | 2002-08-29 | 197KB

From: Gene Ehrich <[e-mail]>
Subject: [MV] Celebrity Real Names
Date: 01 Aug 2002 20:05:58 -0400

I have a list of Celebrity Real Names on my web site you may enjoy looking
through.

http://www.voicenet.com/~generic/celeb.html


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From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] MY WIFE IS AN ACTRESS / **1/2 (R)
Date: 06 Aug 2002 18:03:21 GMT

MY WIFE IS AN ACTRESS / **1/2 (R)

August 2, 2002

Charlotte: Charlotte Gainsbourg
Yvan: Yvan Attal
John: Terence Stamp
Nathalie: Noemie Lvovsky
Vincent: Laurent Bateau
David, the film director: Keith     Allen
David's assistant: Jo McInnes
Geraldine: Ludivine Sagnier
Sony Pictures Classics presents a film written and directed by Yvan Attal.
Running time: 93 minutes. Rated R (for language and nudity/sexuality). In
French with English subtitles.

BY ROGER EBERT

The thing about movie love scenes is that they are acting and they are not
acting, both at the same time. Two actors play "characters" who kiss or
caress or thrash about. They are only "acting." When the director shouts,
"cut!" they disengage and wander off to their trailers to finish the
crossword puzzle. That at least is the idea they give in interviews.

But consider. Most movie actors are attractive. They come wrapped in a
mystique. Everyone is curious about them, including their co-stars. When the
director says, "action!" and they find themselves in bed, there is the
presence and warmth of the other person, the press of bosom or thigh, the
pressure of a hand, the softness of lips. Does something happen that is not
precisely covered by the definition of acting?

If it does not, then the actors are not humans and should not be playing
them. If we in the audience sometimes feel a stirring of more than artistic
interest in some of the people we see on the screen, should actors, whose
experience is so much more immediate, be any different? The fact that they
are not different provides the subtext for half of the articles in the
supermarket tabloids.

Consider all that, and I will tell you a story. I interviewed Robert Mitchum
many times. He co-starred with Marilyn Monroe. I never asked him anything as
banal as "What was it like to kiss Marilyn Monroe?" but of course there is
no woman in the history of the movies who would inspire a greater desire to
ask that question. Once, though, as I was Q&A-ing Mitchum at the
Virginia Film Festival, somebody in the audience asked him about Marilyn.

"I loved her," he said. "I had known her since she was about 15 or 16 years
old. My partner on the line at the Lockheed plant in Long Beach was her
first husband. That's when I first met her. And I knew her all the way
through. And she was a lovely girl--very, very shy. She had what is now
recognized as agoraphobia. She was terrified of going out among people. At
that time, they just thought she was being difficult. But she had that
psychological, psychic fear of appearing among people. That's why when she
appeared in public, she always burlesqued herself. She appeared as you would
hope that she would appear. She was a very sweet, loving and
loyal--unfortunately, loyal--girl. Loyal to people who used her, and a lot
who misused her."

So there you have it. Not what it was like to kiss her, but what it was like
to know her. In one paragraph, probably as much truth as can be said about
Monroe.

An answer like that is beyond the new movie "My Wife Is an Actress." This is
a French seriocomedy written, directed by and starring Yvan Attal, who plays
a Paris sportswriter whose wife is a famous actress. She is played by
Charlotte Gainsbourg, who in real life is Attal's wife. No doubt if he were
to write a serious novel about his marriage, Attal would have some truths to
share, but his film feels like an arm's-length job, a comedy that
deliberately avoids deep waters.

Yvan is a jealous man. He is driven to it by an unrelenting barrage of
questions from members of the public, some of whom assume as a matter of
course that Charlotte really does sleep with her co-stars. He smashes one
guy in the nose, but that doesn't help, and when Charlotte goes to London to
work with a big star (Terence Stamp), Yvan all but pushes her into his arms,
to prove his point.

Stamp, who is very good in a thankless role, plays a man so wearied by life
and wear and tear that he sleeps with women more or less as a convenience.
He seduces to be obliging. There is a funny moment when he propositions a
woman and soberly accepts her refusal as one more interesting development,
nodding thoughtfully to himself.

If the movie were all comedy, it might work better. But it has an ambition
to say something about its subjects, but not a willingness. It circles the
possibility of mental and spiritual infidelity like a cat wondering if a
mouse might still be alive. Watching it, I felt it would be fascinating to
see a movie that was really, truthfully, fearlessly about this subject.

Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

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From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] FULL FRONTAL / * 1/2 (R)
Date: 06 Aug 2002 18:03:16 GMT

FULL FRONTAL / * 1/2 (R)

August 2, 2002

Nicholas/Calvin: Blair Underwood
Catherine/Francesca: Julia Roberts
Carl: David Hyde Pierce
Lee: Catherine Keener
Linda: Mary McCormack
Lucy: Erika Alexander
Brian: Rainn Wilson
Bill/Gus: David Duchovny
Miramax Films presents a film directed by Steven Soderbergh. Written by
Coleman Hough. Running time: 101 minutes. Rated R (for language and some
sexual content).

BY ROGER EBERT

Every once in a while, perhaps as an exercise in humility, Steven Soderbergh
makes a truly inexplicable film. There was the Cannes "secret screening" of
his "Schizopolis" in 1996, which had audiences filing out with sad,
thoughtful faces, and now here is "Full Frontal," a film so amateurish that
only the professionalism of some of the actors makes it watchable.

This is the sort of work we expect from a film school student with his first
digital camera, not from the gifted director of "Traffic" and "Out of
Sight." Soderbergh directs at far below his usual level, and his
cinematography is also wretched; known as one of the few directors who
shoots some of his own films, he is usually a skilled craftsman, but here,
using a digital camera and available light, he produces only a demonstration
of his inability to handle the style. Many shots consist of indistinct dark
blobs in front of blinding backlighting.

The plot involves a film within a film, on top of a documentary about some
of the people in the outside film. The idea apparently is to provide a view
of a day in the life of the Los Angeles entertainment industry and its
satellites. The movie within the movie stars Julia Roberts as a journalist
interviewing Blair Underwood; shots that are supposed to be this movie are
filmed in lush 35mm, and only serve to make us yearn for the format as we
see the other scenes in digital.

The doc is not quite, or entirely, a doc; there are voice-overs describing
and analyzing some of the characters, but other scenes play as dramatic
fiction, and there's no use trying to unsort it all because Soderbergh
hasn't made it sortable. If this movie is a satire of the sorts of
incomprehensible, earnest "personal" films that would-be directors hand out
on cassettes at film festivals, then I understand it. It's the kind of film
where you need the director telling you what he meant to do and what went
wrong and how the actors screwed up and how there was no money for retakes,
etc.

The other characters include Catherine Keener and David Hyde Pierce as Lee
and Carl, an unhappily married couple. She leaves him a goodbye note in the
morning, then goes off to work as a personnel director, spending the day in
a series of bizarre humiliations of employees (forcing them, for example, to
stand on a chair while she throws an inflated world globe at them). In these
scenes, she is clearly deranged, and yet there is a "serious" lunch with her
sister Linda (Mary McCormack), a masseuse who has never met Mr. Right.

Linda does, however, meet Gus (David Duchovny), a producer who is having a
birthday party in a big hotel, hires her for a massage, and then offers her
$500 to "release his tension." She needs the money because she is flying off
the next day to see a guy she met on the Internet. She thinks he's 22, but
in fact he's about 40, and is not an artist as he says, but a director whose
new play features Hitler as a guy who, he tells Eva Braun, has "so many
responsibilities I can't think of a relationship right now."

Meanwhile, Carl is fired at work ("He said I have confused my personality
quirks with standards") and returns home to find his beloved dog has
overdosed on hash brownies, after which he has a heart-to-heart with the
veterinarian's assistant. All of these scenes feel like improvs that have
been imperfectly joined, with no through-line. The scenes that work (notably
McCormack's) are perhaps a tribute to the professionalism of the actor, not
the director. Among the false alarms are little details like this: A love
note that Underwood's character thinks came from Roberts' character is
written on the same kind of red stationary as Keener's note to her husband.
Is there a connection? Short answer: no.

One day earlier, I saw "Sex & Lucia," also shot on digital, also
involving a story within a story, with double roles for some of the
characters. With it, too, I was annoyed by the digital photography (both
films have more contrast between shadow and bright sunlight than their
equipment seems able to handle). "Sex & Lucia" was even more confusing
when it came to who was who ("Full Frontal" is fairly easy to figure out).
But at least "Sex & Lucia" was made by a director who had a good idea of
what he wanted to accomplish, and established a tone that gave the material
weight and emotional resonance. There is a scene in "Full Frontal" where a
character comes to a tragic end while masturbating. That could symbolize the
method and fate of this film.

Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

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From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] MARTIN LAWRENCE LIVE: RUNTELDAT / *** (R)
Date: 06 Aug 2002 18:03:18 GMT

MARTIN LAWRENCE LIVE: RUNTELDAT / *** (R)

August 2, 2002

Paramount Pictures presents a live performance by Martin Lawrence. Directed
by David Raynr. Written by Martin Lawrence. Running time: 100 minutes. Rated
R (for strong, crude, sexual dialogue and pervasive language).

BY ROGER EBERT

There is no bodily fluid, secretion, emission, odor, ejaculate, orifice,
protuberance, function or malfunction that Martin Lawrence overlooks in
"Martin Lawrence Live: Runteldat." The word "runteldat" is short for "run
and tell that," but Lawrence doesn't abbreviate much else, spelling out his
insights into the human physiognomy in detail that would impress a
gynecologist. If it proves nothing else, this movie establishes that it is
impossible for a film to get the NC-17 rating from the MPAA for language
alone. This takes the trophy for dirty talk, and I've seen the docs by
Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy and Andrew Dice Clay.

Pryor and Murphy are genteel humanists in comparison to Lawrence. Clay is a
contender. He doesn't rise to quite the same standard of medical detail, but
he has the same rage, and the same tendency to reduce the female gender to
its orifices and functions. When Lawrence reveals that he was married but is
now divorced because "it didn't work out," we think, "no kidding!" His
attitude toward women is that of a man who has purchased a cooperative
household device that works perfectly until the day it astonishes him by
giving birth.

The film is nevertheless funny, if you can get beyond the language or
somehow learn to relate to it as the rhythm and not the lyrics. (If you
can't, don't go. This movie is as verbally offensive as Lawrence can make
it, and he gives it his best shot.) It is funny because Lawrence is a gifted
performer with superb timing and an ability to mimic many characters and
suggest attitudes and postures with lightning-quick invention. There's
something almost musical in the way his riffs build, turn back on
themselves, improvise detours, find the way again, and deliver.

Curious, but the humor is almost all generated by the style. Buddy Hackett
once demonstrated to me how you can do Catskills-style humor with irrelevant
words and it's still funny because the timing and delivery instruct the
audience to laugh. Lawrence raises that technique to an art form. If you
read the script of this concert film, I doubt if you'd laugh much, because
the content itself is not intrinsically funny. There are no jokes here that
you can take home and use on your friends. You have to be there. It's all in
the energy and timing of the delivery, in the way Lawrence projects
astonishment, resentment, anger, relief, incredulity and delight.

The film opens with a montage devoted to his well-publicized troubles,
including an arrest for disturbing the peace and a collapse from heat
exhaustion that put him into a coma. There are segments from news programs
reporting on these difficulties--not real programs, curiously, but footage
shot for this movie. The he launches into a tired attack on "the media," as
if somehow it created his problems by reporting them. He also discusses
those problems, not in the confessional style of Richard Pryor, but almost
as if he was a bystander. He moves on to berate critics, which is unwise,
because the average audience correctly decodes attacks on critics as meaning
the performer got bad reviews. (No performer has ever attacked a critic for
a good review.)

This opening segment is shaky, as Lawrence finds his footing and gets a feel
for the audience. Then he's off and running, for nearly 90 minutes, in what
can only be described as a triumph of performance over the intrinsic nature
of the material. His description of childbirth, for example, makes it sound
simultaneously like a wonderful miracle, and like a depraved secret that
women hide from men. His descriptions of sexual activities, in all
imaginable variations, depend heavily on what can go wrong in terms of
timing, cleanliness, technique, equipment and unforeseen developments. Sex
for Lawrence seems like the kind of adventure for which you should wear
protective gear.

You wonder how long Lawrence can keep this up, and at the end you conclude
he could keep it up forever. I would summarize more of it, except that a lot
of his riffs are about events and activities that cannot tactfully be
described in print. I urge you to stay for the closing credits, not because
there are hilarious outtakes, but because there is one of the most
astonishing credits I can imagine: A thanks to the Daughters of the American
Revolution for the use of their Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. This
is the same hall once denied because of racism to Marian Anderson, who then
sang instead, at the invitation of Eleanor Roosevelt, from the steps of the
Lincoln Memorial. Now Martin Lawrence records a concert film there.
RuntelDAT!

Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

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From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] THE MASTER OF DISGUISE / *(PG)
Date: 06 Aug 2002 18:03:26 GMT

THE MASTER OF DISGUISE / *(PG)

August 2, 2002

Pistachio: Dana Carvey
Jennifer: Jennifer Esposito
Grandfather: Harold Gould
Frabbrizio: James Brolin
Bowman: Brent Spiner
Revolution Studios presents a film directed by Perry Andelin Blake. Written
by Dana Carvey and Harris Goldberg. Running time: 80 minutes. Rated PG (for
mild language and some crude humor).

By ROGER EBERT

"The Master of Disguise" pants and wheezes and hurls itself exhausted across
the finish line after barely 65 minutes of movie, and then follows it with
15 minutes of end credits in an attempt to clock in as a feature film. We
get outtakes, deleted scenes, flubbed lines and all the other versions of
the Credit Cookie, which was once a cute idea but is getting to be a bore.

The credits go on and on and on. The movie is like a party guest who thinks
he is funny and is wrong. The end credits are like the same guest taking too
long to leave. At one point they at last mercifully seemed to be over, and
the projectionist even closed the curtains, but no: There was Dana Carvey,
still visible against the red velvet, asking us what we were still doing in
the theater. That is a dangerous question to ask after a movie like "The
Master of Disguise."

The movie is a desperate miscalculation. It gives poor Dana Carvey nothing
to do that is really funny, and then expects us to laugh because he acts so
goofy all the time. But acting funny is not funny. Acting in a situation
that's funny--that's funny.

The plot: Carvey plays an Italian waiter named Pistachio Disguisey, who is
unfamiliar with the First Law of Funny Names, which is that funny names in
movies are rarely funny. Pistachio comes from a long line of masters of
disguise. His father, Frabbrizio (James Brolin), having capped his career by
successfully impersonating Bo Derek, retires and opens a New York
restaurant. He doesn't tell his son about the family trade, but then, when
he's kidnapped by his old enemy Bowman (Brent Spiner), Pistachio is told the
family secret by his grandfather (Harold Gould).

Grandfather also gives him a crash course in disguise-craft after locating
Frabbrizio's hidden workshop in the attic (a Disguisey's workshop, we learn,
is known as a nest). There is now a scene representative of much of the
movie, in which Pistachio puts on an inflatable suit, and it suddenly
balloons so that he flies around the room and knocks over granddad. That
scene may seem funny to kids. Real, real little, little kids.

Carvey of course is himself a skilled impersonator, and during the film we
see him as a human turtle, Al Pacino from "Scarface," Robert Shaw from
"Jaws," a man in a cherry suit, a man with a cow pie for a face, George W.
Bush, and many other guises. In some cases the disguises are handled by
using a double and then employing digital technology to make it appear as if
the double's face is a latex mask that can be removed. In other cases, such
as Bush, he simply impersonates him.

The plot helpfully supplies Pistachio with a girl named Jennifer (Jennifer
Esposito) who becomes his sidekick in the search for Frabbrizio, and they
visit a great many colorful locations. One of them is a secret headquarters
where Bowman keeps his priceless trove of treasures, including the lunar
landing module, which is used for one of those fight scenes where the hero
dangles by one hand. The movie's director, Perry Andelin Blake, has been a
production designer on 14 movies, including most of Adam Sandler's, and, to
be sure, "The Master of Disguise" has an excellent production design. It is
less successful at disguising itself as a comedy.

Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

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From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] SIGNS / **** (PG-13)
Date: 06 Aug 2002 18:03:23 GMT

SIGNS / **** (PG-13)

August 2, 2002

Father Graham Hess: Mel Gibson
Merrill Hess: Joaquin Phoenix
Morgan Hess: Rory Culkin
Bo Hess: Abigail Breslin
Officer Caroline Paski: Cherry Jones
Colleen Hess: Patricia Kalember
Radio Host: Jose L. Rodriguez
Buena Vista Pictures presents a film written and directed by M. Night
Shyamalan. Running time: 120 minutes. Rated PG-13 (for some frightening
moments).

BY ROGER EBERT

M. Night Shyamalan's "Signs" is the work of a born filmmaker, able to summon
apprehension out of thin air. When it is over, we think not how little has
been decided, but how much has been experienced. Here is a movie in which
the plot is the rhythm section, not the melody. A movie that stays free of
labored explanations and a forced climax, and is about fear in the wind, in
the trees, in a dog's bark, in a little girl's reluctance to drink the
water. In signs.

The posters show crop circles, those huge geometric shapes in fields of corn
and wheat, which were seen all over the world in the 1970s. Their origin was
explained in 1991 when several hoaxers came forward and demonstrated how
they made them; it was not difficult, they said. Like many supernatural
events, however, crop circles live on after their unmasking, and most people
today have forgotten, or never knew, that they were explained. "Signs" uses
them to evoke the possibility that ... well, the possibility of anything.

The genius of the film, you see, is that it isn't really about crop circles,
or the possibility that aliens created them as navigational aids. I will not
even say whether aliens appear in the movie, because whether they do or not
is beside the point. The purpose of the film is to evoke pure emotion
through the use of skilled acting and direction, and particularly through
the soundtrack. It is not just what we hear that is frightening. It is the
way Shyamalan has us listening intensely when there is nothing to be heard.
I cannot think of a movie where silence is scarier, and inaction is more
disturbing.

Mel Gibson stars as Father Graham Hess, who lives on a farm in Bucks County,
Pa. We discover he is a priest only belatedly, when someone calls him
"Father." "It's not 'Father' anymore," he says. Since he has two children,
it takes us a beat to compute that he must be Episcopalian. Not that it
matters, because he has lost his faith. The reason for that is revealed
midway in the film, a personal tragedy I will not reveal.

Hess lives on the farm with his brother Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix) and his
children Morgan and Bo (Rory Culkin and Abigail Breslin). There is an
old-fashioned farmhouse and barn, and wide cornfields, and from the very
first shot there seems to be something ... out there, or up there, or in
there. Hess lives with anxiety gnawing at him. The wind sounds strange. Dogs
bark at nothing. There is something wrong. The crop circles do not explain
the feelings so much as add to them. He catches a glimpse of something in a
corn field. Something wrong.

The movie uses TV news broadcasts to report on events around the world, but
they're not the handy CNN capsules that supply just what the plot requires.
The voices of the anchors reveal confusion and fear. A video taken at a
birthday party shows a glimpse of the most alarming thing. "The history of
the world's future is on TV right now," Morgan says.

In a time when Hollywood mistakes volume for action, Shyamalan makes quiet
films. In a time when incessant action is a style, he persuades us to play
close attention to the smallest nuances. In "The Sixth Sense" (1999) he made
a ghost story that until the very end seemed only to be a personal
drama--although there was something there, some buried hint, that made us
feel all was not as it seemed. In "Unbreakable" (2000) he created a
psychological duel between two men, and it was convincing even though we
later discovered its surprising underlying nature, and all was redefined.

In "Signs," he does what Hitchcock said he liked to do, and plays the
audience like a piano. There is as little plot as possible, and as much time
and depth for the characters as he can create, all surrounded by ominous
dread. The possibility of aliens is the catalyst for fear, but this family
needs none, because it has already suffered a great blow.

Instead of flashy special effects, Shyamalan creates his world out of
everyday objects. A baby monitor that picks up inexplicable sounds. Bo's
habit of leaving unfinished glasses of water everywhere. Morgan's bright
idea that caps made out of aluminum foil will protect their brains from
alien waves. Hess' use of a shiny kitchen knife, not as a weapon, but as a
mirror. The worst attack in the film is Morgan's asthma attack, and his
father tries to talk him through it, in a scene that sets the entire movie
aside and is only about itself.

At the end of the film, I had to smile, recognizing how Shyamalan has
essentially ditched a payoff. He knows, as we all sense, that payoffs have
grown boring. The mechanical resolution of a movie's problems is something
we sit through at the end, but it's the setup and the buildup that keep our
attention. "Signs" is all buildup. It's still building when it's over.

Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

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From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] THE COUNTRY BEARS / ** (G)
Date: 06 Aug 2002 18:03:44 GMT

THE COUNTRY BEARS / ** (G)

July 26, 2002

Reed Thimple:    Christopher Walken
Mr. Barrington: Stephen Tobolowsky
Mrs. Barrington: Meagen Fay
And the voices of:
Beary Barrington: Haley Joel Osment
Officer Cheets, Ted Bedderhead: Diedrich Bader
Tennessee:    Julianne Buescher
Trixie St. Claire: Candy Ford
Fred Bedderhead: Brad Garrett
Walt Disney Pictures presents a film directed by Peter Hastings. Written by
Mark Perez. Running time: 88 minutes. Rated G.

BY ROGER EBERT

The formidable technical skills in "The Country Bears" must not be allowed
to distract from the film's terminal inanity. Here is a story about a young
music fan who persuades his favorite band to reunite after 10 years for a
concert--and the fan and the band members are all bears. Why they are bears,
I do not know. Do they know they are bears? Not necessarily. Do any of the
humans mention that they are bears? Only in passing. Are there real bears in
the woods who would maul and eat their victims, or are all bears benign in
this world?

These are not questions one is expected to pose about a movie based on a
stage show at Disney World. We simply have to accept that some of the
characters in the movie are people and others are bears, and get on with it.
If Stuart Little's family can have a 2-inch mouse as a son, then why not
musical bears? We must celebrate diversity.

The movie stars Beary Barrington (voice by Haley Joel Osment), whose human
parents treat him as one of the family. Then his brother breaks the news
that he was adopted after being found by a park ranger, and little Beary
runs away from home. His goal: Visit legendary Country Bear Hall, the Grand
Ole Opry of singing bears, and pay tribute to the band he idolizes.

Alas, the band has broken up, its members have scattered, and now even
Country Bear Hall itself faces the wrecker's ball, thanks to the evil banker
Reed Thimple (Christopher Walken). Since the hall is an elegant wooden
structure, it is a little hard to understand why Thimple wants to replace it
with a vacant lot, but there you have it. Little Beary then begins to meet
the members of the Country Bears, and to persuade them, in a series of
adventures, to reunite and stage a benefit concert to save the hall.

One of the movie's running gags is that recording stars appear as
themselves, talking about the Bears. We see Willie Nelson, Bonnie Raitt,
Elton John, Queen Latifah and others, all talking about the band's influence
on them, none mentioning that they are bears. Is the music good enough to
influence Willie and the Queen? Don't make me laugh.

It's hard to figure who the movie is intended for. In shape and purpose,
it's like a G-rated version of "This Is Spinal Tap," but will its wee target
audience understand the joke? Anyone old enough to be interested in the
music is unlikely to be interested in the bears--at least, interested in the
movie's routine and wheezy plot. True, the movie does a good job of
integrating the bears into the action, with animatronics by Jim Henson's
Creature Shop and no doubt various CGI effects, not to mention the strong
possibility that in some shots we are basically watching actors in bear
suits. It's done well, yes, but why?

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From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] FULL FRONTAL / * 1/2 (R)
Date: 06 Aug 2002 18:15:06 GMT

FULL FRONTAL / * 1/2 (R)

August 2, 2002

Nicholas/Calvin: Blair Underwood
Catherine/Francesca: Julia Roberts
Carl: David Hyde Pierce
Lee: Catherine Keener
Linda: Mary McCormack
Lucy: Erika Alexander
Brian: Rainn Wilson
Bill/Gus: David Duchovny
Miramax Films presents a film directed by Steven Soderbergh. Written by
Coleman Hough. Running time: 101 minutes. Rated R (for language and some
sexual content).

BY ROGER EBERT

Every once in a while, perhaps as an exercise in humility, Steven Soderbergh
makes a truly inexplicable film. There was the Cannes "secret screening" of
his "Schizopolis" in 1996, which had audiences filing out with sad,
thoughtful faces, and now here is "Full Frontal," a film so amateurish that
only the professionalism of some of the actors makes it watchable.

This is the sort of work we expect from a film school student with his first
digital camera, not from the gifted director of "Traffic" and "Out of
Sight." Soderbergh directs at far below his usual level, and his
cinematography is also wretched; known as one of the few directors who
shoots some of his own films, he is usually a skilled craftsman, but here,
using a digital camera and available light, he produces only a demonstration
of his inability to handle the style. Many shots consist of indistinct dark
blobs in front of blinding backlighting.

The plot involves a film within a film, on top of a documentary about some
of the people in the outside film. The idea apparently is to provide a view
of a day in the life of the Los Angeles entertainment industry and its
satellites. The movie within the movie stars Julia Roberts as a journalist
interviewing Blair Underwood; shots that are supposed to be this movie are
filmed in lush 35mm, and only serve to make us yearn for the format as we
see the other scenes in digital.

The doc is not quite, or entirely, a doc; there are voice-overs describing
and analyzing some of the characters, but other scenes play as dramatic
fiction, and there's no use trying to unsort it all because Soderbergh
hasn't made it sortable. If this movie is a satire of the sorts of
incomprehensible, earnest "personal" films that would-be directors hand out
on cassettes at film festivals, then I understand it. It's the kind of film
where you need the director telling you what he meant to do and what went
wrong and how the actors screwed up and how there was no money for retakes,
etc.

The other characters include Catherine Keener and David Hyde Pierce as Lee
and Carl, an unhappily married couple. She leaves him a goodbye note in the
morning, then goes off to work as a personnel director, spending the day in
a series of bizarre humiliations of employees (forcing them, for example, to
stand on a chair while she throws an inflated world globe at them). In these
scenes, she is clearly deranged, and yet there is a "serious" lunch with her
sister Linda (Mary McCormack), a masseuse who has never met Mr. Right.

Linda does, however, meet Gus (David Duchovny), a producer who is having a
birthday party in a big hotel, hires her for a massage, and then offers her
$500 to "release his tension." She needs the money because she is flying off
the next day to see a guy she met on the Internet. She thinks he's 22, but
in fact he's about 40, and is not an artist as he says, but a director whose
new play features Hitler as a guy who, he tells Eva Braun, has "so many
responsibilities I can't think of a relationship right now."

Meanwhile, Carl is fired at work ("He said I have confused my personality
quirks with standards") and returns home to find his beloved dog has
overdosed on hash brownies, after which he has a heart-to-heart with the
veterinarian's assistant. All of these scenes feel like improvs that have
been imperfectly joined, with no through-line. The scenes that work (notably
McCormack's) are perhaps a tribute to the professionalism of the actor, not
the director. Among the false alarms are little details like this: A love
note that Underwood's character thinks came from Roberts' character is
written on the same kind of red stationary as Keener's note to her husband.
Is there a connection? Short answer: no.

One day earlier, I saw "Sex & Lucia," also shot on digital, also
involving a story within a story, with double roles for some of the
characters. With it, too, I was annoyed by the digital photography (both
films have more contrast between shadow and bright sunlight than their
equipment seems able to handle). "Sex & Lucia" was even more confusing
when it came to who was who ("Full Frontal" is fairly easy to figure out).
But at least "Sex & Lucia" was made by a director who had a good idea of
what he wanted to accomplish, and established a tone that gave the material
weight and emotional resonance. There is a scene in "Full Frontal" where a
character comes to a tragic end while masturbating. That could symbolize the
method and fate of this film.

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From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] MARTIN LAWRENCE LIVE: RUNTELDAT / *** (R)
Date: 06 Aug 2002 18:15:11 GMT

MARTIN LAWRENCE LIVE: RUNTELDAT / *** (R)

August 2, 2002

Paramount Pictures presents a live performance by Martin Lawrence. Directed
by David Raynr. Written by Martin Lawrence. Running time: 100 minutes. Rated
R (for strong, crude, sexual dialogue and pervasive language).

BY ROGER EBERT

There is no bodily fluid, secretion, emission, odor, ejaculate, orifice,
protuberance, function or malfunction that Martin Lawrence overlooks in
"Martin Lawrence Live: Runteldat." The word "runteldat" is short for "run
and tell that," but Lawrence doesn't abbreviate much else, spelling out his
insights into the human physiognomy in detail that would impress a
gynecologist. If it proves nothing else, this movie establishes that it is
impossible for a film to get the NC-17 rating from the MPAA for language
alone. This takes the trophy for dirty talk, and I've seen the docs by
Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy and Andrew Dice Clay.

Pryor and Murphy are genteel humanists in comparison to Lawrence. Clay is a
contender. He doesn't rise to quite the same standard of medical detail, but
he has the same rage, and the same tendency to reduce the female gender to
its orifices and functions. When Lawrence reveals that he was married but is
now divorced because "it didn't work out," we think, "no kidding!" His
attitude toward women is that of a man who has purchased a cooperative
household device that works perfectly until the day it astonishes him by
giving birth.

The film is nevertheless funny, if you can get beyond the language or
somehow learn to relate to it as the rhythm and not the lyrics. (If you
can't, don't go. This movie is as verbally offensive as Lawrence can make
it, and he gives it his best shot.) It is funny because Lawrence is a gifted
performer with superb timing and an ability to mimic many characters and
suggest attitudes and postures with lightning-quick invention. There's
something almost musical in the way his riffs build, turn back on
themselves, improvise detours, find the way again, and deliver.

Curious, but the humor is almost all generated by the style. Buddy Hackett
once demonstrated to me how you can do Catskills-style humor with irrelevant
words and it's still funny because the timing and delivery instruct the
audience to laugh. Lawrence raises that technique to an art form. If you
read the script of this concert film, I doubt if you'd laugh much, because
the content itself is not intrinsically funny. There are no jokes here that
you can take home and use on your friends. You have to be there. It's all in
the energy and timing of the delivery, in the way Lawrence projects
astonishment, resentment, anger, relief, incredulity and delight.

The film opens with a montage devoted to his well-publicized troubles,
including an arrest for disturbing the peace and a collapse from heat
exhaustion that put him into a coma. There are segments from news programs
reporting on these difficulties--not real programs, curiously, but footage
shot for this movie. The he launches into a tired attack on "the media," as
if somehow it created his problems by reporting them. He also discusses
those problems, not in the confessional style of Richard Pryor, but almost
as if he was a bystander. He moves on to berate critics, which is unwise,
because the average audience correctly decodes attacks on critics as meaning
the performer got bad reviews. (No performer has ever attacked a critic for
a good review.)

This opening segment is shaky, as Lawrence finds his footing and gets a feel
for the audience. Then he's off and running, for nearly 90 minutes, in what
can only be described as a triumph of performance over the intrinsic nature
of the material. His description of childbirth, for example, makes it sound
simultaneously like a wonderful miracle, and like a depraved secret that
women hide from men. His descriptions of sexual activities, in all
imaginable variations, depend heavily on what can go wrong in terms of
timing, cleanliness, technique, equipment and unforeseen developments. Sex
for Lawrence seems like the kind of adventure for which you should wear
protective gear.

You wonder how long Lawrence can keep this up, and at the end you conclude
he could keep it up forever. I would summarize more of it, except that a lot
of his riffs are about events and activities that cannot tactfully be
described in print. I urge you to stay for the closing credits, not because
there are hilarious outtakes, but because there is one of the most
astonishing credits I can imagine: A thanks to the Daughters of the American
Revolution for the use of their Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. This
is the same hall once denied because of racism to Marian Anderson, who then
sang instead, at the invitation of Eleanor Roosevelt, from the steps of the
Lincoln Memorial. Now Martin Lawrence records a concert film there.
RuntelDAT!

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From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] MY WIFE IS AN ACTRESS / **1/2 (R)
Date: 06 Aug 2002 18:15:16 GMT

MY WIFE IS AN ACTRESS / **1/2 (R)

August 2, 2002

Charlotte: Charlotte Gainsbourg
Yvan: Yvan Attal
John: Terence Stamp
Nathalie: Noemie Lvovsky
Vincent: Laurent Bateau
David, the film director: Keith     Allen
David's assistant: Jo McInnes
Geraldine: Ludivine Sagnier
Sony Pictures Classics presents a film written and directed by Yvan Attal.
Running time: 93 minutes. Rated R (for language and nudity/sexuality). In
French with English subtitles.

BY ROGER EBERT

The thing about movie love scenes is that they are acting and they are not
acting, both at the same time. Two actors play "characters" who kiss or
caress or thrash about. They are only "acting." When the director shouts,
"cut!" they disengage and wander off to their trailers to finish the
crossword puzzle. That at least is the idea they give in interviews.

But consider. Most movie actors are attractive. They come wrapped in a
mystique. Everyone is curious about them, including their co-stars. When the
director says, "action!" and they find themselves in bed, there is the
presence and warmth of the other person, the press of bosom or thigh, the
pressure of a hand, the softness of lips. Does something happen that is not
precisely covered by the definition of acting?

If it does not, then the actors are not humans and should not be playing
them. If we in the audience sometimes feel a stirring of more than artistic
interest in some of the people we see on the screen, should actors, whose
experience is so much more immediate, be any different? The fact that they
are not different provides the subtext for half of the articles in the
supermarket tabloids.

Consider all that, and I will tell you a story. I interviewed Robert Mitchum
many times. He co-starred with Marilyn Monroe. I never asked him anything as
banal as "What was it like to kiss Marilyn Monroe?" but of course there is
no woman in the history of the movies who would inspire a greater desire to
ask that question. Once, though, as I was Q&A-ing Mitchum at the
Virginia Film Festival, somebody in the audience asked him about Marilyn.

"I loved her," he said. "I had known her since she was about 15 or 16 years
old. My partner on the line at the Lockheed plant in Long Beach was her
first husband. That's when I first met her. And I knew her all the way
through. And she was a lovely girl--very, very shy. She had what is now
recognized as agoraphobia. She was terrified of going out among people. At
that time, they just thought she was being difficult. But she had that
psychological, psychic fear of appearing among people. That's why when she
appeared in public, she always burlesqued herself. She appeared as you would
hope that she would appear. She was a very sweet, loving and
loyal--unfortunately, loyal--girl. Loyal to people who used her, and a lot
who misused her."

So there you have it. Not what it was like to kiss her, but what it was like
to know her. In one paragraph, probably as much truth as can be said about
Monroe.

An answer like that is beyond the new movie "My Wife Is an Actress." This is
a French seriocomedy written, directed by and starring Yvan Attal, who plays
a Paris sportswriter whose wife is a famous actress. She is played by
Charlotte Gainsbourg, who in real life is Attal's wife. No doubt if he were
to write a serious novel about his marriage, Attal would have some truths to
share, but his film feels like an arm's-length job, a comedy that
deliberately avoids deep waters.

Yvan is a jealous man. He is driven to it by an unrelenting barrage of
questions from members of the public, some of whom assume as a matter of
course that Charlotte really does sleep with her co-stars. He smashes one
guy in the nose, but that doesn't help, and when Charlotte goes to London to
work with a big star (Terence Stamp), Yvan all but pushes her into his arms,
to prove his point.

Stamp, who is very good in a thankless role, plays a man so wearied by life
and wear and tear that he sleeps with women more or less as a convenience.
He seduces to be obliging. There is a funny moment when he propositions a
woman and soberly accepts her refusal as one more interesting development,
nodding thoughtfully to himself.

If the movie were all comedy, it might work better. But it has an ambition
to say something about its subjects, but not a willingness. It circles the
possibility of mental and spiritual infidelity like a cat wondering if a
mouse might still be alive. Watching it, I felt it would be fascinating to
see a movie that was really, truthfully, fearlessly about this subject.

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From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] SIGNS / **** (PG-13)
Date: 06 Aug 2002 18:15:18 GMT

SIGNS / **** (PG-13)

August 2, 2002

Father Graham Hess: Mel Gibson
Merrill Hess: Joaquin Phoenix
Morgan Hess: Rory Culkin
Bo Hess: Abigail Breslin
Officer Caroline Paski: Cherry Jones
Colleen Hess: Patricia Kalember
Radio Host: Jose L. Rodriguez
Buena Vista Pictures presents a film written and directed by M. Night
Shyamalan. Running time: 120 minutes. Rated PG-13 (for some frightening
moments).

BY ROGER EBERT

M. Night Shyamalan's "Signs" is the work of a born filmmaker, able to summon
apprehension out of thin air. When it is over, we think not how little has
been decided, but how much has been experienced. Here is a movie in which
the plot is the rhythm section, not the melody. A movie that stays free of
labored explanations and a forced climax, and is about fear in the wind, in
the trees, in a dog's bark, in a little girl's reluctance to drink the
water. In signs.

The posters show crop circles, those huge geometric shapes in fields of corn
and wheat, which were seen all over the world in the 1970s. Their origin was
explained in 1991 when several hoaxers came forward and demonstrated how
they made them; it was not difficult, they said. Like many supernatural
events, however, crop circles live on after their unmasking, and most people
today have forgotten, or never knew, that they were explained. "Signs" uses
them to evoke the possibility that ... well, the possibility of anything.

The genius of the film, you see, is that it isn't really about crop circles,
or the possibility that aliens created them as navigational aids. I will not
even say whether aliens appear in the movie, because whether they do or not
is beside the point. The purpose of the film is to evoke pure emotion
through the use of skilled acting and direction, and particularly through
the soundtrack. It is not just what we hear that is frightening. It is the
way Shyamalan has us listening intensely when there is nothing to be heard.
I cannot think of a movie where silence is scarier, and inaction is more
disturbing.

Mel Gibson stars as Father Graham Hess, who lives on a farm in Bucks County,
Pa. We discover he is a priest only belatedly, when someone calls him
"Father." "It's not 'Father' anymore," he says. Since he has two children,
it takes us a beat to compute that he must be Episcopalian. Not that it
matters, because he has lost his faith. The reason for that is revealed
midway in the film, a personal tragedy I will not reveal.

Hess lives on the farm with his brother Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix) and his
children Morgan and Bo (Rory Culkin and Abigail Breslin). There is an
old-fashioned farmhouse and barn, and wide cornfields, and from the very
first shot there seems to be something ... out there, or up there, or in
there. Hess lives with anxiety gnawing at him. The wind sounds strange. Dogs
bark at nothing. There is something wrong. The crop circles do not explain
the feelings so much as add to them. He catches a glimpse of something in a
corn field. Something wrong.

The movie uses TV news broadcasts to report on events around the world, but
they're not the handy CNN capsules that supply just what the plot requires.
The voices of the anchors reveal confusion and fear. A video taken at a
birthday party shows a glimpse of the most alarming thing. "The history of
the world's future is on TV right now," Morgan says.

In a time when Hollywood mistakes volume for action, Shyamalan makes quiet
films. In a time when incessant action is a style, he persuades us to play
close attention to the smallest nuances. In "The Sixth Sense" (1999) he made
a ghost story that until the very end seemed only to be a personal
drama--although there was something there, some buried hint, that made us
feel all was not as it seemed. In "Unbreakable" (2000) he created a
psychological duel between two men, and it was convincing even though we
later discovered its surprising underlying nature, and all was redefined.

In "Signs," he does what Hitchcock said he liked to do, and plays the
audience like a piano. There is as little plot as possible, and as much time
and depth for the characters as he can create, all surrounded by ominous
dread. The possibility of aliens is the catalyst for fear, but this family
needs none, because it has already suffered a great blow.

Instead of flashy special effects, Shyamalan creates his world out of
everyday objects. A baby monitor that picks up inexplicable sounds. Bo's
habit of leaving unfinished glasses of water everywhere. Morgan's bright
idea that caps made out of aluminum foil will protect their brains from
alien waves. Hess' use of a shiny kitchen knife, not as a weapon, but as a
mirror. The worst attack in the film is Morgan's asthma attack, and his
father tries to talk him through it, in a scene that sets the entire movie
aside and is only about itself.

At the end of the film, I had to smile, recognizing how Shyamalan has
essentially ditched a payoff. He knows, as we all sense, that payoffs have
grown boring. The mechanical resolution of a movie's problems is something
we sit through at the end, but it's the setup and the buildup that keep our
attention. "Signs" is all buildup. It's still building when it's over.

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Subject: [MV] THE MASTER OF DISGUISE / *(PG)
Date: 06 Aug 2002 18:15:21 GMT

THE MASTER OF DISGUISE / *(PG)

August 2, 2002

Pistachio: Dana Carvey
Jennifer: Jennifer Esposito
Grandfather: Harold Gould
Frabbrizio: James Brolin
Bowman: Brent Spiner
Revolution Studios presents a film directed by Perry Andelin Blake. Written
by Dana Carvey and Harris Goldberg. Running time: 80 minutes. Rated PG (for
mild language and some crude humor).

By ROGER EBERT

"The Master of Disguise" pants and wheezes and hurls itself exhausted across
the finish line after barely 65 minutes of movie, and then follows it with
15 minutes of end credits in an attempt to clock in as a feature film. We
get outtakes, deleted scenes, flubbed lines and all the other versions of
the Credit Cookie, which was once a cute idea but is getting to be a bore.

The credits go on and on and on. The movie is like a party guest who thinks
he is funny and is wrong. The end credits are like the same guest taking too
long to leave. At one point they at last mercifully seemed to be over, and
the projectionist even closed the curtains, but no: There was Dana Carvey,
still visible against the red velvet, asking us what we were still doing in
the theater. That is a dangerous question to ask after a movie like "The
Master of Disguise."

The movie is a desperate miscalculation. It gives poor Dana Carvey nothing
to do that is really funny, and then expects us to laugh because he acts so
goofy all the time. But acting funny is not funny. Acting in a situation
that's funny--that's funny.

The plot: Carvey plays an Italian waiter named Pistachio Disguisey, who is
unfamiliar with the First Law of Funny Names, which is that funny names in
movies are rarely funny. Pistachio comes from a long line of masters of
disguise. His father, Frabbrizio (James Brolin), having capped his career by
successfully impersonating Bo Derek, retires and opens a New York
restaurant. He doesn't tell his son about the family trade, but then, when
he's kidnapped by his old enemy Bowman (Brent Spiner), Pistachio is told the
family secret by his grandfather (Harold Gould).

Grandfather also gives him a crash course in disguise-craft after locating
Frabbrizio's hidden workshop in the attic (a Disguisey's workshop, we learn,
is known as a nest). There is now a scene representative of much of the
movie, in which Pistachio puts on an inflatable suit, and it suddenly
balloons so that he flies around the room and knocks over granddad. That
scene may seem funny to kids. Real, real little, little kids.

Carvey of course is himself a skilled impersonator, and during the film we
see him as a human turtle, Al Pacino from "Scarface," Robert Shaw from
"Jaws," a man in a cherry suit, a man with a cow pie for a face, George W.
Bush, and many other guises. In some cases the disguises are handled by
using a double and then employing digital technology to make it appear as if
the double's face is a latex mask that can be removed. In other cases, such
as Bush, he simply impersonates him.

The plot helpfully supplies Pistachio with a girl named Jennifer (Jennifer
Esposito) who becomes his sidekick in the search for Frabbrizio, and they
visit a great many colorful locations. One of them is a secret headquarters
where Bowman keeps his priceless trove of treasures, including the lunar
landing module, which is used for one of those fight scenes where the hero
dangles by one hand. The movie's director, Perry Andelin Blake, has been a
production designer on 14 movies, including most of Adam Sandler's, and, to
be sure, "The Master of Disguise" has an excellent production design. It is
less successful at disguising itself as a comedy.

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From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] THE COUNTRY BEARS / ** (G)
Date: 06 Aug 2002 18:15:23 GMT

THE COUNTRY BEARS / ** (G)

July 26, 2002

Reed Thimple:    Christopher Walken
Mr. Barrington: Stephen Tobolowsky
Mrs. Barrington: Meagen Fay
And the voices of:
Beary Barrington: Haley Joel Osment
Officer Cheets, Ted Bedderhead: Diedrich Bader
Tennessee:    Julianne Buescher
Trixie St. Claire: Candy Ford
Fred Bedderhead: Brad Garrett
Walt Disney Pictures presents a film directed by Peter Hastings. Written by
Mark Perez. Running time: 88 minutes. Rated G.

BY ROGER EBERT

The formidable technical skills in "The Country Bears" must not be allowed
to distract from the film's terminal inanity. Here is a story about a young
music fan who persuades his favorite band to reunite after 10 years for a
concert--and the fan and the band members are all bears. Why they are bears,
I do not know. Do they know they are bears? Not necessarily. Do any of the
humans mention that they are bears? Only in passing. Are there real bears in
the woods who would maul and eat their victims, or are all bears benign in
this world?

These are not questions one is expected to pose about a movie based on a
stage show at Disney World. We simply have to accept that some of the
characters in the movie are people and others are bears, and get on with it.
If Stuart Little's family can have a 2-inch mouse as a son, then why not
musical bears? We must celebrate diversity.

The movie stars Beary Barrington (voice by Haley Joel Osment), whose human
parents treat him as one of the family. Then his brother breaks the news
that he was adopted after being found by a park ranger, and little Beary
runs away from home. His goal: Visit legendary Country Bear Hall, the Grand
Ole Opry of singing bears, and pay tribute to the band he idolizes.

Alas, the band has broken up, its members have scattered, and now even
Country Bear Hall itself faces the wrecker's ball, thanks to the evil banker
Reed Thimple (Christopher Walken). Since the hall is an elegant wooden
structure, it is a little hard to understand why Thimple wants to replace it
with a vacant lot, but there you have it. Little Beary then begins to meet
the members of the Country Bears, and to persuade them, in a series of
adventures, to reunite and stage a benefit concert to save the hall.

One of the movie's running gags is that recording stars appear as
themselves, talking about the Bears. We see Willie Nelson, Bonnie Raitt,
Elton John, Queen Latifah and others, all talking about the band's influence
on them, none mentioning that they are bears. Is the music good enough to
influence Willie and the Queen? Don't make me laugh.

It's hard to figure who the movie is intended for. In shape and purpose,
it's like a G-rated version of "This Is Spinal Tap," but will its wee target
audience understand the joke? Anyone old enough to be interested in the
music is unlikely to be interested in the bears--at least, interested in the
movie's routine and wheezy plot. True, the movie does a good job of
integrating the bears into the action, with animatronics by Jim Henson's
Creature Shop and no doubt various CGI effects, not to mention the strong
possibility that in some shots we are basically watching actors in bear
suits. It's done well, yes, but why?

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Subject: [MV] POSSESSION / ***1/2 (PG-13)
Date: 16 Aug 2002 16:20:06 GMT

POSSESSION / ***1/2 (PG-13)

August 16, 2002

Maud Bailey: Gwyneth Paltrow
Roland Michell: Aaron Eckhart
Randolph Henry Ash: Jeremy Northam
Christabel LaMotte: Jennifer Ehle
Blanche Glover: Lena Headey
Focus Features and Warner Bros. Pictures present a film directed by Neil
LaBute. Written by David Henry Hwang, Laura Jones and LaBute. Based on the
novel by A.S. Byatt. Running time: 102 minutes. Rated PG-13 (for sexuality
and some thematic elements).

BY ROGER EBERT

A visiting American scholar is paging through an old volume at the British
Museum when he comes upon a letter stuffed between the pages--a love letter,
it would appear, from Queen Victoria's poet laureate, addressed to a woman
not his wife. The poet has been held up for more than a century as a model
of marital fidelity. The letter is dynamite. The scholar slips the letter
out of the book and into his portfolio, and is soon displaying it, with all
the pride and uncertainly of a new father, to a British woman who knows (or
thought she knew) everything about the poet.

The American, named Roland Michell (Aaron Eckhart), is professionally
ambitious but has a block against personal intimacy. The British expert,
named Maud Bailey (Gwyneth Paltrow), is suspicious of love, suspicious of
men, suspicious of theories that overturn a century of knowledge about her
speciality. Together, warily, edgily, they begin to track down the
possibility that the happily married Randolph Henry Ash did indeed have an
affair with the 19th century feminist and lesbian Christabel LaMotte. Two
modern people with high walls of privacy are therefore investigating two
Victorians who in theory never even met.

This setup from A.S. Byatt's 1990 Booker Prize-winning novel would seem like
the last premise in the world to attract director Neil LaBute, whose "In the
Company of Men" and "Your Friends & Neighbors" were about hard-edged
modern sexual warfare. But look again at the romantic fantasies in his
overlooked "Nurse Betty" (2000), about a housewife in love with a soap opera
character and a killer in love with a photograph of the housewife, and you
will see the same premise: Love, fueled by imagination, tries to leap
impossible divides.

The film, written by David Henry Hwang, Laura Jones and LaBute, uses a
flashback structure to move between the current investigation and the
long-ago relationship. Jeremy Northam plays Ash, an upright public figure,
and Jennifer Ehle is Christabel, a pre-Raphaelite beauty who lives with the
darkly sensuous Blanche Glover (Lena Headey). The nature of their
relationship is one of the incidental fascinations of the movie: At a time
before lesbianism was widely acknowledged, female couples were commonly
accepted and the possibility of a sexual connection didn't necessarily
occur. Blanche is the dominant and possessive one, and Christabel is perhaps
not even essentially lesbian, but simply besotted with friendship. When she
and Ash make contact, it is Blanche, not Ash's unbending wife, who is the
angered spouse.

In the way it moves between two couples in two periods, "Possession" is like
Karel Reisz's "The French Lieutenant's Woman" (1981). That film, with a
screenplay by Harold Pinter, added a modern couple that didn't exist in the
John Fowles novel, and had both couples played by Meryl Streep and Jeremy
Irons. The notion of two romances on parallel trajectories is common to both
films, and intriguing because there seem to be insurmountable barriers in
both periods.

Ash and Christabel are separated by Victorian morality, his marriage and her
relationship. The moderns, Maud and Roland, seem opposed to any idea of
romance; she has her own agenda, and he is reticent to a fault. "You have
nothing to fear from me," he tells her early on, because he avoids
relationships. Later, when they find themselves tentatively in each other's
arms, he pulls back: "We shouldn't be doing this; it's dangerous."

This might be convincing if Roland and Maud looked like our conventional
idea of literary scholars: Mike White, perhaps, paired with Lili Taylor.
That they are both so exceptionally attractive is distracting; Paltrow is
able to project a certain ethereal bookishness, but a contemporary man with
Eckhart's pumped-up physique and adamant indifference to Paltrow would be
read by many observers as gay. That he is not--that his reticence is a quirk
rather than a choice--is a screenplay glitch we have to forgive.

We do, because the movie is not a serious examination of scholarship or
poetry, but a brainy romance. In a world where most movie romances consist
of hormonal triggers and plumbing procedures, it's sexy to observe two
couples who think and debate their connections, who quote poetry to each
other, who consciously try to enhance their relationships by seeking
metaphors and symbols they can attach to. Romance defined by the body will
decay with the flesh, but romance conceived as a grand idea--ah, now that
can still fascinate people a century later.

LaBute is a director who loves the spoken word. No surprise that between
movies he writes and directs plays. I suspect he would be incapable of
making a movie about people who had nothing interesting to say to one
another. What he finds sexy is not the simple physical fact of two people,
but the scenario they write around themselves; look at the way the deaf
woman in "In the Company of Men" so completely defeats both men by
discovering their ideas of themselves and turning those ideas against them.
By the end of the movie, with the egos of both men in shards at her feet,
the woman seems more desirable than we could have imagined possible.

What happens in "Possession" is not the same, but it is similar enough to
explain LaBute's interest in the story. He likes people who think themselves
into and out of love, and finds the truly passionate (like Blanche) to be
the most dangerous. He likes romances that exist out of sight, denied,
speculated about, suspected, fought against. Any two people can fall into
each other's arms and find that they enjoy the feeling. But to fall into
someone else's mind--now that can be dangerous.

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From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] BLUE CRUSH / *** (PG-13)
Date: 16 Aug 2002 16:20:02 GMT

BLUE CRUSH / *** (PG-13)

August 16, 2002

Anne Marie: Kate Bosworth
Eden: Michelle Rodriguez
Matt Tollman: Matthew Davis
Lena: Sanoe Lake
Penny: Mika Boorem
Kala: Kala Alexander
Drew: Chris Taloa
Universal Pictures presents a film directed by John Stockwell. Written by
Stockwell and Lizzy Weiss. Story by Weiss. Based on a magazine article by
Susan Orlean. Running time: 104 minutes. Rated PG-13 (for sexual content,
teen partying, language and a fight).

BY ROGER EBERT

"Blue Crush" knows something most surfing movies don't acknowledge--that
many non-pro surfers endure blue-collar jobs as a way to support their
surfing, which is the only time they feel really alive. Surfers in the
movies have traditionally been golden boys and girls who ride the waves to
Beach Boys songs--and live, apparently, on air. In "Blue Crush," we meet
three Hawaiian surfers who work as hotel maids, live in a grotty rental, and
are raising the kid sister of one of them. Despite this near-poverty, they
look great; there is nothing like a tan and a bikini to overcome class
distinctions.

The women are Anne Marie (Kate Bosworth), Eden (Michelle Rodriguez) and Lena
(Sanoe Lake). Anne Marie was a contender three years earlier in a major
surfing competition on Oahu but nearly drowned. Now she's edging back into
competition, encouraged by the others, who seem to take Anne Marie's career
more seriously than she does. Life for the women includes surfing at dawn,
working hard as a three-maid team at a local luxury resort, and surfing at
dusk. Since her mother bailed out, Anne Marie has been raising Penny (Mika
Booren), who attends a local school but is not always delivered quite on
time.

The movie, based on Susan Orlean's magazine article "Surf Girls of Maui,"
resembles the Nik Cohn journalism that inspired "Saturday Night Fever." Both
stories are about working-class kids escaping into the freedom and glamor of
their obsessions. We hear fascination in their voices when they stop at a
gas station and see, at another pump, famous professional women surfers who
are in Hawaii for a big tournament. While it is true that Anne Marie might
be able to make money as a member of a pro surfing team, it is also true, as
it was of Tony Manero in "Saturday Night Fever," that other things distract
her, especially romance. She is not single-mindedly focused on her career.

The movie's surfing scenes are well-photographed, and yet we've seen
versions of them in many other movies, going all the way back to the
lodestone, Bruce Brown's "The Endless Summer" (1966). What we haven't seen,
what has the delight of life, are the scenes in the hotel, where the three
maids deal with the aftermath of a messy party held by pro football players
and try on expensive bathing suits in the room of a rich woman.

Anne Marie has a fierce working woman's pride, and at one point gets herself
fired by daring to march out onto the beach and demonstrate to a huge
football lineman the correct procedure for wrapping a used condom in a
Kleenex. She also has a working woman's realism, as when she advises the
others not to resign in sympathy, because they have rent payments to meet.

The date for the big competition is approaching, and Anne Marie is focused
on it when the run-in with the football players (who are not bad guys)
changes everything. The quarterback Matt Tollman (Matthew Davis) asks her
out, and although she talks about non-fraternization policies, she accepts,
and finds herself falling for him. Here is the crucial question: Is this a
vacation romance or does it really mean something? Matt seems nice,
attentive and genuine, but is it an act? The movie is realistic here, too:
Anne Marie would not mind a vacation romance, but she wants to know that's
what it is--she doesn't want to risk her heart needlessly.

Eden is tougher and more cynical than her friend, and we remember Michelle
Rodriguez's performance as an amateur boxer in "Girlfight" (2000). She's
alarmed when her friend starts spending too much time with the quarterback
and not enough time preparing for the impending competition ("Some guy
thinks you look good in a bikini and you forget all about the contest.").
And then of course the movie ends with the big showdown, with waves of
awesome strength and feats of great surfing, with all the necessary dangers
and setbacks. Even here, it doesn't settle for what we thought was the
predictable outcome.

"Blue Crush" was directed by John Stockwell, who made "Crazy/Beautiful"
(2001), the movie where Kirsten Dunst plays the wild daughter of a
congressman and her boyfriend is a responsible young Mexican-American. Here
again we get the footloose Anglo and the Latino looking out for her, but in
an unexpected context. Looking at the posters for "Blue Crush," which show
Bosworth, Rodriguez and Lake posing with bikinis and surfboards, I expected
another mindless surfing movie. "Blue Crush" is anything but.

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From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] 24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE / **** (R)
Date: 16 Aug 2002 16:20:00 GMT

24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE / **** (R)

August 16, 2002

Tony Wilson: Steve Coogan
Roger Ames: Keith Allen
Ryan Letts: Rob Brydon
Saville: Enzo Cilenti
Derek Ryde: Ron Cook
Bez: Chris Coghill
United Artists presents a film directed by Michael Winterbottom. Written by
Frank Cottrell Boyce. Running time: 117 minutes. Rated R (for strong
language, drug use and sexuality).

BY ROGER EBERT

"24 Hour Party People," which tells the story of the Manchester music scene
from the first Sex Pistols concert until the last bankruptcy, shines with a
kind of inspired madness. It is based on fact, but Americans who don't know
the facts will have no trouble identifying with the sublime posturing of its
hero, a television personality named Tony Wilson, who takes himself
seriously in a way that is utterly impossible to take seriously.

Wilson, a real man, is played by Steve Coogan, who plays a Wilsonoid TV
personality on British TV. That sort of through-the-looking-glass mixing of
reality and fancy makes the movie somehow more true than a factual
documentary would have been. Wilson is a lanky man with the face of a
sincere beagle, a flop of hair over his right eyebrow, and an ability to
read banal TV copy as if it has earth-shaking profundity. He's usually the
only man in the room wearing a suit and tie, but he looks like he put them
on without reading the instructions. He is so heartfelt about his lunacies
that we understand, somehow, that his mind deals with contradictions by
embracing them.

As the film opens, Wilson is attending the first, legendary Sex Pistols
concert in Manchester, England. Here and elsewhere, director Michael
Winterbottom subtly blends real newsreel footage with fictional characters
so they all fit convincingly into the same shot. Wilson is transfixed by the
Pistols as they sing "Anarchy in the U.K." and sneer at British tradition.
He tells the camera that everyone in the audience will leave the room
transformed and inspired, and then the camera pans to show a total of 42
people, two or three of them half-heartedly dancing in the aisles.

Wilson features the Pistols and other bands on his Manchester TV show.
Because of a ban by London TV, his show becomes the only venue for punk
rock. Turns out he was right about the Pistols. They let loose something
that changed rock music. And they did it in the only way that Wilson could
respect, by thoroughly screwing up everything they did, and ending in
bankruptcy and failure, followed by Sid Vicious' spectacular murder-suicide
flameout. The Sex Pistols became successful because they failed; if they had
succeeded, they would have sold out, or become diluted or commercial. I saw
Johnny Rotten a few years ago at Sundance, still failing, and it made me
feel proud of him.

Tony Wilson, who preaches "anarchism" not as a political position but as an
emotional state, knows he has seen the future. He joins with two partners to
form a Factory Records, which would become one of the most important and
least financially successful recording companies in history, and joyously
signs the contract in his blood (while declaring "we will have no
contracts"). His bands include Joy Division (renamed New Order after the
suicide of its lead singer) and Happy Mondays. His company opens a rave
club, the Hacienda, which goes broke because the customers ignore the cash
bars and spend all their money on Ecstasy.

Wilson hardly cares. When the club closes, he addresses the final night's
crowd: "Before you leave, I ask you to invade the offices and loot them."
When he meets with investors who want to buy Factory Records, they are
startled to learn he has nothing to sell--no contracts, no back catalog,
nothing. "We are not really a company," he explains helpfully. "We are an
experiment in human nature. I protected myself from the dilemma of selling
out by having nothing to sell."

This is a lovable character, all the more so because his conversation uses
the offhand goofy non-sequiturs of real speech, instead of being channeled
into a narrow lane of movie dialogue. The writer, Frank Cottrell Boyce,
gives Wilson a distinctive voice we come to love. "I went to Cambridge
University!" he tells one of his broadcast bosses. "I'm a serious
journalist, living in one of the most important times in human history."
Yes, but the next day he's interviewing a midget elephant trainer. He
explains how the invention of broccoli funded the James Bond movies (there
is a shred of truth there, actually). He quotes Plutarch and William Blake,
he says one of his singers is a poet equal to Yeats, he looks at empty
concert halls and observes hopefully that there were only 12 people at the
Last Supper (13, actually, counting the talent). And he is courageous in the
face of daunting setbacks, pushing on optimistically into higher realms of
failure.

The movie works so well because it evokes genuine, not manufactured,
nostalgia. It records a time when the inmates ran the asylum, when music
lovers got away with murder. It loves its characters. It understands what
the Sex Pistols started, and what the 1990s destroyed. And it gets a certain
tone right. It kids itself. At one point, Wilson looks straight at the
camera and tells us that a scene is missing, "but it will probably be on the
DVD."

As the screenwriter of an ill-fated Sex Pistols movie, I met Rotten,
Vicious, Paul Cook, Steve Jones and their infamous manager, Malcolm McLaren,
and brushed the fringe of their world. I could see there was no plan, no
strategy, no philosophy, just an attitude. If a book on the Sex Pistols had
an upraised middle finger on the cover, it wouldn't need any words inside.
And yet Tony Wilson goes to see the Pistols and sees before him a delirious
opportunity to--to what? Well, obviously, to live in one of the most
important times in human history, and to make your mark on it by going down
in glorious flames.

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From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] SEX WITH STRANGERS / ** (Not rated)
Date: 16 Aug 2002 16:20:07 GMT

SEX WITH STRANGERS / ** (Not rated)

August 16, 2002

View Films presents a documentary directed by Joe and Harry Gantz. Running
time: 105 minutes. No MPAA rating (intended for adults). Opening today at
the Esquire Theatre.

BY ROGER EBERT

The most intriguing element of "Sex with Strangers" involves not the sex,
but the strangers. Here are people who do not allow the use of their last
names, yet they cheerfully have sex in front of the camera--and even
willingly participate in scenes that make them look cruel, twisted, reckless
and perhaps deranged. We know from the Springer show that shame is no
barrier when it comes to collecting your 15 minutes of fame. But these
people act like this, we realize, even when the cameras aren't on. They live
this way.

The movie has been produced and directed by Joe and Harry Gantz, who do the
"Taxicab Confessions" program for HBO. They follow two couples and a sad
threesome through their adventures in the swinging lifestyle, in a
documentary that strongly suggests the screwing they're getting isn't worth
the screwing they're getting. Even assuming they have an insatiable appetite
for sex with strangers, how do they develop an appetite for trolling through
the roadside bars of the nation, picking up the kinds of people who can be
picked up there? Groucho Marx wouldn't belong to any club that would have
him as a member. The stars of this film might be wise not to sleep with
anyone who would sleep with them.

We meet James and Theresa, Shannon and Gerard, and Calvin and Sara and
Julie. James and Theresa have it all figured out. They even have their own
business cards. They cruise the back roads of the nation, pulling up to bars
in their motor home, meeting new friends inside and inviting them out to the
Winnebago for a swap meet. Shannon and Gerard are more complicated: She
seems deeply neurotic about the lifestyle, he wants to swing without her,
they have a child who they try to insulate from mommy and daddy's
ever-changing new friends, and there's even a scene where they chat about
their lifestyle with her mother, getting points for "openness" when they
should be penalized for inflicting their secrets upon the poor woman.

Now as for Calvin. He uses the rhetoric of the lifestyle primarily, we
suspect, as a way to justify sleeping with both Sara and Julie, neither one
of whom is particularly enthusiastic about his hobby. He wants it all but
isn't a good sport when Sara and Julie slip off without the middleman.
Although mate-swappers would have you believe that they are open and willing
participants in their lifestyle, the evidence on screen suggests that men
are a good deal more keen about the practice than women, perhaps because
there is an intrinsic imbalance in the pleasures to be had from quickie
anonymous sex.

When I first saw the movie, I had fundamental questions about how much of it
could be trusted. On "Ebert & Roeper," I said: "There's a scene where
James and Theresa are in a club and they meet another couple, and they ask
the other couple, 'Do you want to swing?' And the other couple says, 'Sure.'
And they say, 'Oh, we have our motor home right outside.' And so they go
outside, the two couples and the camera. And I'm wondering: Let's say I
wanted to be a swinger and I've just met two people who are going to take me
into their motor home. Am I going to wonder about the fact that this happens
to be videotaped while it's happening? When I saw scenes like that, I
thought, this has all been rehearsed. It's a setup."

After the show played, I got an e-mail from Joe Gantz, who assured me that
all of the scenes in the movie do indeed reflect reality. One key to their
footage is that they always have two cameras running all the time, to supply
cutaways and reaction shots. Another is that, by definition, they only show
couples who agreed to be photographed. If a hypothetical couple got to the
motor home and balked at the cameras, they wouldn't be in the movie.

That leads me back to where I began--to curiosity about the mind-set of the
people in the film. By openly swapping mates, they have already abandoned
conventional notions of privacy and modesty. Perhaps it is only a small
additional step to do it on camera. But I didn't find much fascination in
the swinging. What they're doing is a matter of plumbing arrangements and
mind games, of no erotic or sensuous charge. But that they are doing it is
thought-provoking. What damage had to be done to their self-esteem, and how,
to lead them to this point?

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From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] THE GOOD GIRL / ***1/2 (R)
Date: 16 Aug 2002 16:20:09 GMT

THE GOOD GIRL / ***1/2 (R)

August 16, 2002

Justine: Jennifer Aniston
Holden: Jake Gyllenhaal
Phil: John C. Reilly
Bubba: Tim Blake Nelson
Cheryl: Zooey Deschanel
Corny: Mike White
Fox Searchlight Pictures presents a film directed by Miguel Arteta. Written
by Mike White. Running time: 93 minutes. Rated R (for sexuality, some
language and drug content). Opening today at Landmark Century.

BY ROGER EBERT

After languishing in a series of overlooked movies that ranged from the
entertaining ("Office Space") to the disposable ("Picture Perfect"),
Jennifer Aniston has at last decisively broken with her "Friends" image in
an independent film of satiric fire and emotional turmoil. It will no longer
be possible to consider her in the same way. In "The Good Girl," she plays
Justine, a desperately bored clerk at Retail Rodeo, a sub-Kmart where the
customers are such sleepwalkers they don't even notice when the "Attention,
Shoppers!" announcements are larded with insults and nonsense.

Recent headlines tell of a lawsuit against Wal-Mart for forcing its
employees to work unpaid overtime. Retail Rodeo is by contrast relatively
benign. Management is particularly flexible with Justine's co-worker Cheryl
(Zooey Deschanel), who, after getting carried away once too often on the
P.A. system, is reassigned to Women's Makeovers, where she improvises
dubious advice. A new makeup style is called "Cirque du Face," she tells one
customer. "It's all the rage with the Frenchies."

Justine, who is 30ish, is married to a house painter named Phil (John C.
Reilly), who is attached vertically to the living room sofa and horizontally
to his best friend, Bubba (Tim Blake Nelson). Phil and Bubba paint houses
during the day and are couch potatoes at night, smoking weed and peering at
the television. After a day of drudgery, Justine comes home to stoned
indifference. No wonder she's intrigued by Holden (Jake Gyllenhaal), the new
check-out kid, who's reading The Catcher in the Rye and tells her its hero
is a victim of the world's hypocrisy.

Quite a coincidence, that a kid named Holden would be reading a book about a
character named Holden. When they become better friends, Holden invites
Justine to his house, where his mother calls him "Tom." In the safety of his
room, he explains: "Tom is my slave name." Soon Justine and Tom, who is a
college dropout with a drinking problem, are having sex everywhere they can:
in the car, in his room, in the stockroom at Retail Rodeo, and in a fleabag
motel, where, unluckily, Bubba sees them.

For Bubba, this is an ideal opening for emotional blackmail. He has long
explained that he is single because he despairs of ever finding a wife as
"perfect" as Justine. Now he demands sex with her, so his life will be
complete. Otherwise, he will tell Phil about her affair. In a decision that
Jennifer Aniston would never make but Justine might (this is a crucial
distinction), she deals with this demand and with another crisis, when she
discovers she is pregnant. She also finds out what she should have
suspected, that Bubba would never tell Phil about her secrets, because he
adores Phil too much and, as Phil's wife, she is protected by his immunity.

"The Good Girl" has been directed by Miguel Arteta and written by Mike
White, who plays the Retail Rodeo's security guard. They also collaborated
on "Chuck and Buck," and on the basis of these two strange movies with their
skewed perspectives, they are talents with huge promise. They know how much
satire and exaggeration is enough but not too much, so that in a
subterranean way their movies work on serious levels while seeming to be
comedies.

Certainly the last big scene between Aniston and Reilly is an unexpected
payoff, delivering an emotional punch while at the same time we can only
admire Aniston's strategy involving the father of her child. She says it's
Phil's, and that claim cannot be disproved on the basis of Phil's
information; having confessed to cheating, she allows him to suspect someone
who could not have a black-haired child; therefore, the father is the
dark-haired Phil. Right? Right.

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From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] ME WITHOUT YOU / ***1/2 (R)
Date: 16 Aug 2002 16:20:04 GMT

ME WITHOUT YOU / ***1/2 (R)

August 16, 2002

Marina: Anna Friel
Holly: Michelle Williams
Nat: Oliver Milburn
Daniel: Kyle MacLachlan
Linda: Trudie Styler
Isabel: Marianne Denicourt
IDP Films presents a film directed by Sandra Goldbacher. Written by
Goldbacher and Laurence Coriat. Running time: 107 minutes. Rated R (for
language, sexual content and drug use).

BY ROGER EBERT

Marina and Holly's childhood friendship evolves into a toxic relationship
when they grow up, but they still remain close because even when they're
hurting each other, there's no one else they'd rather hurt. Ever had a
friend like that? Although Marina is more neurotic and Holly is more the
victim, maybe it's because they like it that way. If Holly knew the whole
story of how Marina betrays her, she'd be devastated--but then, of course,
she doesn't.

"Me Without You" has a bracing truth that's refreshing after the phoniness
of female-bonding pictures like "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood." It
doesn't mindlessly celebrate female friendship, but looks at it with a level
gaze. If Holly and Marina remain friends despite everything--well, maybe it
would be a shame to throw away all that history.

Sandra Goldbacher's film begins in London in 1974 and continues for another
20 years, paying close attention to changing fashions in clothing, music and
makeup, while not making too big a point of it. We meet Holly (Michelle
Williams of "Dawson's Creek") and Marina (Anna Friel) as adolescents who
seal their friendship by placing treasures in a box and hiding it (there is
a law requiring all female friends to perform this ritual in the movies). We
meet their parents. Marina has a mother who fancies herself a sexpot and is
a little drunk all day long, and a father who is, understandably, distant.
Holly comes from a Jewish family that is warm but not especially supportive;
she learns from her mother that she is more clever than pretty, and is not
clever enough to figure out that she's pretty, too.

Marina has a brother named Nat (Oliver Milburn) who Holly has always been in
love with. He is a decent sort and likes Holly, too, and one night during
their hippie party phase he makes love to her, but this is not on Marina's
agenda and she destroys a crucial letter that could have changed everything.

Another rivalry over a male takes place at college, when both women fall for
a handsome dweeb American lecturer named Daniel (Kyle MacLachlan). And here
the movie does something that few female-bonding pictures have the nerve to
do, and introduces a fully formed, fascinating male. In a superbly modulated
performance by MacLachlan, Daniel comes across as a man who can easily be
tempted but not easily secured. He's willing to be seduced but is frightened
of commitment; his posture is always that of the male prepared to back away
and apologize at the slightest offense. He has a highly developed line in
chit-chat, quoting all the best poets, and Holly is deceived by him while
the more cynical Marina strip-mines him and moves on.

What's fascinating about the Daniel character is that he illustrates how men
are not always the villains in unfaithful relationships, but sometimes
simply the pawns of female agendas. Daniel gives both women what they want,
and they want it more than he wants to give it. So although he appears to be
a two-timer, he's more of a two-time loser. Rare, to see a character
portrayed in this depth instead of simply being used as a plot ploy.

Michelle Williams is the surprise. I am not a student of "Dawson's Creek,"
but I know she uses an American accent on it, and here, like Renee Zellweger
in "Bridget Jones's Diary," she crosses the Atlantic, produces a perfectly
convincing British accent, and is cuddly and smart both at once. Anna Friel,
as Marina, has a tricky role because she is only ostensibly the sexy,
world-wise woman, and in fact is closer to her insecure mother. What eats at
her is that in the long run Holly is more appealing to men, and it has
nothing to do with hair or necklines.

The movie isn't entirely free of cliches (the secret treasure box, dredged
up from a pond after decades, of course is still intact). But the
screenplay, by Goldbacher and Laurence Coriat, plays as if the authors have
based it on their observations of life, not of movies. There is ultimately a
species of happy ending, although you realize it represents maturity and
weariness more than victory. The struggles of the teens and 20s are so
fraught, so passionate, so seemingly desperate, that when you grow older and
learn balance and perspective, there's a bittersweet sense of loss. In years
to come, Marina and Holly may reflect that they were never happier than when
they were making each other miserable.

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From: Mel Eperthener <[e-mail]>
Subject: [MV] Our Own Oz Breaks The News
Date: 10 Aug 2002 23:07:58 -0400

I don't know if this list has just been very very quiet of late, or if
Yahoo just keeps screwing up.  Most likely, it is Yahoo:-)  (I keep getting
messages that Yahoo mail keeps bouncing.  Funny, all the SPAM seems to get
thru, especially that coming from Yahoo)

I don't know if this has been discussed here, or if he is still on the list
here (or if anyone even remembers him), but Oz of Hollywoodbitchslap is
making quite a name for himself.  The following is shamelessly stolen from
Erik the Movieman, who shamelessly stole it from IMDb (who were reporting
on events concerning friends of Erik, so I guess he has more right to
"borrow" than I do:-) ).  Anyway, this can also be found at
http://us.imdb.com , the best site for movie information, in toto.

Oz, care to step forward and take our accolades??  The funny thing is, I
recently attended an industry event for Universal, where they were
seriously hyping both movies mentioned below, Blue Crush (sorry, but I had
trouble believing that a 50-odd-year-old studio PR man would be THAT
excited about a surfing movie that reminded me of Point Break, which I will
admit, with shame, I somewhat enjoyed when I finally saw it YEARS after
vowing that it looked like the worst movie ever, and I would never EVER
ever watch it) and Red Dragon (both the first and fourth Hannibal Lecter
movie, strangely).

So, without further ado:

Website Claims Phony Fan Is a Studio Shill
An editorial writer for an Internet movie fan site claimed Wednesday that he
has traced the IP address of a person who planted a rave review of the
upcoming movie Blue Crush, starring Kate Bosworth, on its message board to
Universal Pictures' registered corporate site, MCI.com. (As we reported
previously, the same review was posted on other movie fan sites.) The
HollywoodBitchSlap.com writer, who goes by the nom de plume "OZ" ("We're not
giving out our personal details.") claimed: "We've got them caught
red-handed, and not once, but twice!" (A similar message, he said, was posted
for the upcoming Red Dragon.) After Sony publicists admitted last year that
they had invented a critic named David Manning to praise the studio's movies
in its ads and had used studio employees in testimonial commercials,
Universal publicity chief Terry Curtin told the Washington Post, "I don't
condone either of those practices, nor have I done either of those
practices." However, the HollywoodBitchSlap writer asked, "What's the
difference between paying your staff to pretend to be film fans on websites
across the country and paying them to pretend to be happy customers in a TV
commercial?" Curtin was not available for comment at our deadline.



--Mel Eperthener
president, Gowanna Multi-media Pty, Inc  http://www.webz.com/gowanna
mailto:[e-mail]                  mailto:[e-mail]

West Coast Video            Gowanna MultiMedia Pty
4614 Liberty Avenue        PO Box 95184
Pittsburgh, PA 15224        Pittsburgh, PA 15223
[phone]
TOLL FREE     COMING SOON!!!!!
____________________________________________
 Look, I think we've all got something we can bring to this
discussion.  But I think from now on the thing you should bring is silence.
______________________________________________


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From: Wade Snider <[e-mail]>
Subject: RE: [MV] Our Own Oz Breaks The News
Date: 16 Aug 2002 15:10:40 -0500

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this format, some or all of this message may not be legible.

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Way to go Oz - Stick it to those assmunching morons

> -----Original Message-----
> From:    Mel Eperthener [SMTP:[e-mail]]
> Sent:    Saturday, August 10, 2002 10:08 PM
> To:    [e-mail]
> Subject:    [MV] Our Own Oz Breaks The News
>
> I don't know if this list has just been very very quiet of late, or if
> Yahoo just keeps screwing up.  Most likely, it is Yahoo:-)  (I keep
> getting
> messages that Yahoo mail keeps bouncing.  Funny, all the SPAM seems to get
> thru, especially that coming from Yahoo)
>
> I don't know if this has been discussed here, or if he is still on the
> list
> here (or if anyone even remembers him), but Oz of Hollywoodbitchslap is
> making quite a name for himself.  The following is shamelessly stolen from
> Erik the Movieman, who shamelessly stole it from IMDb (who were reporting
> on events concerning friends of Erik, so I guess he has more right to
> "borrow" than I do:-) ).  Anyway, this can also be found at
> http://us.imdb.com , the best site for movie information, in toto.
>
> Oz, care to step forward and take our accolades??  The funny thing is, I
> recently attended an industry event for Universal, where they were
> seriously hyping both movies mentioned below, Blue Crush (sorry, but I had
> trouble believing that a 50-odd-year-old studio PR man would be THAT
> excited about a surfing movie that reminded me of Point Break, which I
> will
> admit, with shame, I somewhat enjoyed when I finally saw it YEARS after
> vowing that it looked like the worst movie ever, and I would never EVER
> ever watch it) and Red Dragon (both the first and fourth Hannibal Lecter
> movie, strangely).
>
> So, without further ado:
>
> Website Claims Phony Fan Is a Studio Shill
> An editorial writer for an Internet movie fan site claimed Wednesday that
> he
> has traced the IP address of a person who planted a rave review of the
> upcoming movie Blue Crush, starring Kate Bosworth, on its message board to
>
> Universal Pictures' registered corporate site, MCI.com. (As we reported
> previously, the same review was posted on other movie fan sites.) The
> HollywoodBitchSlap.com writer, who goes by the nom de plume "OZ" ("We're
> not
> giving out our personal details.") claimed: "We've got them caught
> red-handed, and not once, but twice!" (A similar message, he said, was
> posted
> for the upcoming Red Dragon.) After Sony publicists admitted last year
> that
> they had invented a critic named David Manning to praise the studio's
> movies
> in its ads and had used studio employees in testimonial commercials,
> Universal publicity chief Terry Curtin told the Washington Post, "I don't
> condone either of those practices, nor have I done either of those
> practices." However, the HollywoodBitchSlap writer asked, "What's the
> difference between paying your staff to pretend to be film fans on
> websites
> across the country and paying them to pretend to be happy customers in a
> TV
> commercial?" Curtin was not available for comment at our deadline.
>
>
>
> --Mel Eperthener
> president, Gowanna Multi-media Pty, Inc  http://www.webz.com/gowanna
> mailto:[e-mail]
> mailto:[e-mail]
>
> West Coast Video            Gowanna MultiMedia Pty
> 4614 Liberty Avenue        PO Box 95184
> Pittsburgh, PA 15224        Pittsburgh, PA 15223
> [phone]
> TOLL FREE     COMING SOON!!!!!
> ____________________________________________
>  Look, I think we've all got something we can bring to this
> discussion.  But I think from now on the thing you should bring is
> silence.
> ______________________________________________
>
>
> [ To leave the movies mailing list, send the message "unsubscribe ]
> [ movies" (without the quotes) to [e-mail]          ]

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<META HTTP-EQUIV=3D"Content-Type" CONTENT=3D"text/html; =
charset=3Dus-ascii">
<META NAME=3D"Generator" CONTENT=3D"MS Exchange Server version =
5.5.2653.12">
<TITLE>RE: [MV] Our Own Oz Breaks The News</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>

<P><FONT COLOR=3D"#0000FF" SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial">Way to go Oz - Stick =
it to those assmunching morons</FONT>
</P>
<UL>
<P><FONT SIZE=3D1 FACE=3D"Arial">-----Original Message-----</FONT>
<BR><B><FONT SIZE=3D1 FACE=3D"Arial">From:  </FONT></B> <FONT =
SIZE=3D1 FACE=3D"Arial">Mel Eperthener [SMTP:[e-mail]]</FONT>
<BR><B><FONT SIZE=3D1 FACE=3D"Arial">Sent:  </FONT></B> <FONT =
SIZE=3D1 FACE=3D"Arial">Saturday, August 10, 2002 10:08 PM</FONT>
<BR><B><FONT SIZE=3D1 =
FACE=3D"Arial">To:    </FONT></B> <FONT SIZE=3D1 =
FACE=3D"Arial">[e-mail]</FONT>
<BR><B><FONT SIZE=3D1 =
FACE=3D"Arial">Subject:       </FONT>=
</B> <FONT SIZE=3D1 FACE=3D"Arial">[MV] Our Own Oz Breaks The =
News</FONT>
</P>

<P><FONT SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial">I don't know if this list has just =
been very very quiet of late, or if</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial">Yahoo just keeps screwing up.  =
Most likely, it is Yahoo:-)  (I keep getting</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial">messages that Yahoo mail keeps =
bouncing.  Funny, all the SPAM seems to get</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial">thru, especially that coming from =
Yahoo)</FONT>
</P>

<P><FONT SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial">I don't know if this has been =
discussed here, or if he is still on the list</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial">here (or if anyone even remembers =
him), but Oz of Hollywoodbitchslap is</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial">making quite a name for =
himself.  The following is shamelessly stolen from</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial">Erik the Movieman, who shamelessly =
stole it from IMDb (who were reporting</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial">on events concerning friends of Erik, =
so I guess he has more right to</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial">"borrow" than I do:-) =
).  Anyway, this can also be found at</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial"><A HREF=3D"http://us.imdb.com" =
TARGET=3D"_blank">http://us.imdb.com</A> , the best site for movie =
information, in toto.</FONT>
</P>

<P><FONT SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial">Oz, care to step forward and take our =
accolades??  The funny thing is, I</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial">recently attended an industry event =
for Universal, where they were</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial">seriously hyping both movies =
mentioned below, Blue Crush (sorry, but I had</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial">trouble believing that a =
50-odd-year-old studio PR man would be THAT</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial">excited about a surfing movie that =
reminded me of Point Break, which I will</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial">admit, with shame, I somewhat enjoyed =
when I finally saw it YEARS after</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial">vowing that it looked like the worst =
movie ever, and I would never EVER</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial">ever watch it) and Red Dragon (both =
the first and fourth Hannibal Lecter</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial">movie, strangely).  </FONT>
</P>

<P><FONT SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial">So, without further ado:</FONT>
</P>

<P><FONT SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial">Website Claims Phony Fan Is a Studio =
Shill</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial">An editorial writer for an Internet =
movie fan site claimed Wednesday that he </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial">has traced the IP address of a person =
who planted a rave review of the </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial">upcoming movie Blue Crush, starring =
Kate Bosworth, on its message board to </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial">Universal Pictures' registered =
corporate site, MCI.com. (As we reported </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial">previously, the same review was =
posted on other movie fan sites.) The </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial">HollywoodBitchSlap.com writer, who =
goes by the nom de plume "OZ" ("We're not </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial">giving out our personal =
details.") claimed: "We've got them caught </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial">red-handed, and not once, but =
twice!" (A similar message, he said, was posted </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial">for the upcoming Red Dragon.) After =
Sony publicists admitted last year that </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial">they had invented a critic named =
David Manning to praise the studio's movies </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial">in its ads and had used studio =
employees in testimonial commercials, </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial">Universal publicity chief Terry =
Curtin told the Washington Post, "I don't </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial">condone either of those practices, =
nor have I done either of those </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial">practices." However, the =
HollywoodBitchSlap writer asked, "What's the </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial">difference between paying your staff =
to pretend to be film fans on websites </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial">across the country and paying them to =
pretend to be happy customers in a TV </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial">commercial?" Curtin was not =
available for comment at our deadline. </FONT>
</P>
<BR>
<BR>

<P><FONT SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial">--Mel Eperthener</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial">president, Gowanna Multi-media Pty, =
Inc  <A HREF=3D"http://www.webz.com/gowanna" =
TARGET=3D"_blank">http://www.webz.com/gowanna</A>    =
; </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial"><A =
HREF=3D"mailto:[e-mail]">mailto:[e-mail]</A> &n=
bsp;           &n=
bsp;    <A =
HREF=3D"mailto:[e-mail]">mailto:gowanna@australiamail.c=
om</A></FONT>
</P>

<P><FONT SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial">West Coast =
Video        =
        =
        Gowanna MultiMedia =
Pty</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial">4614 Liberty =
Avenue     =
        PO Box 95184</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial">Pittsburgh, PA =
15224            =
Pittsburgh, PA 15223</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial">(412) =
682-3900          &nbs=
p;           &nbs=
p;           </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial">TOLL FREE     =
COMING SOON!!!!!</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=3D2 =
FACE=3D"Arial">____________________________________________</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial"> Look, I think we've all got =
something we can bring to this</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial">discussion.  But I think from =
now on the thing you should bring is silence.</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=3D2 =
FACE=3D"Arial">______________________________________________</FONT>
</P>
<BR>

<P><FONT SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial">[ To leave the movies mailing list, =
send the message "unsubscribe ]</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial">[ movies" (without the quotes) =
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From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] POSSESSION / ***1/2 (PG-13)
Date: 20 Aug 2002 16:19:47 GMT

POSSESSION / ***1/2 (PG-13)

August 16, 2002

Maud Bailey: Gwyneth Paltrow
Roland Michell: Aaron Eckhart
Randolph Henry Ash: Jeremy Northam
Christabel LaMotte: Jennifer Ehle
Blanche Glover: Lena Headey
Focus Features and Warner Bros. Pictures present a film directed by Neil
LaBute. Written by David Henry Hwang, Laura Jones and LaBute. Based on the
novel by A.S. Byatt. Running time: 102 minutes. Rated PG-13 (for sexuality
and some thematic elements).

BY ROGER EBERT

A visiting American scholar is paging through an old volume at the British
Museum when he comes upon a letter stuffed between the pages--a love letter,
it would appear, from Queen Victoria's poet laureate, addressed to a woman
not his wife. The poet has been held up for more than a century as a model
of marital fidelity. The letter is dynamite. The scholar slips the letter
out of the book and into his portfolio, and is soon displaying it, with all
the pride and uncertainly of a new father, to a British woman who knows (or
thought she knew) everything about the poet.

The American, named Roland Michell (Aaron Eckhart), is professionally
ambitious but has a block against personal intimacy. The British expert,
named Maud Bailey (Gwyneth Paltrow), is suspicious of love, suspicious of
men, suspicious of theories that overturn a century of knowledge about her
speciality. Together, warily, edgily, they begin to track down the
possibility that the happily married Randolph Henry Ash did indeed have an
affair with the 19th century feminist and lesbian Christabel LaMotte. Two
modern people with high walls of privacy are therefore investigating two
Victorians who in theory never even met.

This setup from A.S. Byatt's 1990 Booker Prize-winning novel would seem like
the last premise in the world to attract director Neil LaBute, whose "In the
Company of Men" and "Your Friends & Neighbors" were about hard-edged
modern sexual warfare. But look again at the romantic fantasies in his
overlooked "Nurse Betty" (2000), about a housewife in love with a soap opera
character and a killer in love with a photograph of the housewife, and you
will see the same premise: Love, fueled by imagination, tries to leap
impossible divides.

The film, written by David Henry Hwang, Laura Jones and LaBute, uses a
flashback structure to move between the current investigation and the
long-ago relationship. Jeremy Northam plays Ash, an upright public figure,
and Jennifer Ehle is Christabel, a pre-Raphaelite beauty who lives with the
darkly sensuous Blanche Glover (Lena Headey). The nature of their
relationship is one of the incidental fascinations of the movie: At a time
before lesbianism was widely acknowledged, female couples were commonly
accepted and the possibility of a sexual connection didn't necessarily
occur. Blanche is the dominant and possessive one, and Christabel is perhaps
not even essentially lesbian, but simply besotted with friendship. When she
and Ash make contact, it is Blanche, not Ash's unbending wife, who is the
angered spouse.

In the way it moves between two couples in two periods, "Possession" is like
Karel Reisz's "The French Lieutenant's Woman" (1981). That film, with a
screenplay by Harold Pinter, added a modern couple that didn't exist in the
John Fowles novel, and had both couples played by Meryl Streep and Jeremy
Irons. The notion of two romances on parallel trajectories is common to both
films, and intriguing because there seem to be insurmountable barriers in
both periods.

Ash and Christabel are separated by Victorian morality, his marriage and her
relationship. The moderns, Maud and Roland, seem opposed to any idea of
romance; she has her own agenda, and he is reticent to a fault. "You have
nothing to fear from me," he tells her early on, because he avoids
relationships. Later, when they find themselves tentatively in each other's
arms, he pulls back: "We shouldn't be doing this; it's dangerous."

This might be convincing if Roland and Maud looked like our conventional
idea of literary scholars: Mike White, perhaps, paired with Lili Taylor.
That they are both so exceptionally attractive is distracting; Paltrow is
able to project a certain ethereal bookishness, but a contemporary man with
Eckhart's pumped-up physique and adamant indifference to Paltrow would be
read by many observers as gay. That he is not--that his reticence is a quirk
rather than a choice--is a screenplay glitch we have to forgive.

We do, because the movie is not a serious examination of scholarship or
poetry, but a brainy romance. In a world where most movie romances consist
of hormonal triggers and plumbing procedures, it's sexy to observe two
couples who think and debate their connections, who quote poetry to each
other, who consciously try to enhance their relationships by seeking
metaphors and symbols they can attach to. Romance defined by the body will
decay with the flesh, but romance conceived as a grand idea--ah, now that
can still fascinate people a century later.

LaBute is a director who loves the spoken word. No surprise that between
movies he writes and directs plays. I suspect he would be incapable of
making a movie about people who had nothing interesting to say to one
another. What he finds sexy is not the simple physical fact of two people,
but the scenario they write around themselves; look at the way the deaf
woman in "In the Company of Men" so completely defeats both men by
discovering their ideas of themselves and turning those ideas against them.
By the end of the movie, with the egos of both men in shards at her feet,
the woman seems more desirable than we could have imagined possible.

What happens in "Possession" is not the same, but it is similar enough to
explain LaBute's interest in the story. He likes people who think themselves
into and out of love, and finds the truly passionate (like Blanche) to be
the most dangerous. He likes romances that exist out of sight, denied,
speculated about, suspected, fought against. Any two people can fall into
each other's arms and find that they enjoy the feeling. But to fall into
someone else's mind--now that can be dangerous.

Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

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From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] BLUE CRUSH / *** (PG-13)
Date: 20 Aug 2002 16:19:44 GMT

BLUE CRUSH / *** (PG-13)

August 16, 2002

Anne Marie: Kate Bosworth
Eden: Michelle Rodriguez
Matt Tollman: Matthew Davis
Lena: Sanoe Lake
Penny: Mika Boorem
Kala: Kala Alexander
Drew: Chris Taloa
Universal Pictures presents a film directed by John Stockwell. Written by
Stockwell and Lizzy Weiss. Story by Weiss. Based on a magazine article by
Susan Orlean. Running time: 104 minutes. Rated PG-13 (for sexual content,
teen partying, language and a fight).

BY ROGER EBERT

"Blue Crush" knows something most surfing movies don't acknowledge--that
many non-pro surfers endure blue-collar jobs as a way to support their
surfing, which is the only time they feel really alive. Surfers in the
movies have traditionally been golden boys and girls who ride the waves to
Beach Boys songs--and live, apparently, on air. In "Blue Crush," we meet
three Hawaiian surfers who work as hotel maids, live in a grotty rental, and
are raising the kid sister of one of them. Despite this near-poverty, they
look great; there is nothing like a tan and a bikini to overcome class
distinctions.

The women are Anne Marie (Kate Bosworth), Eden (Michelle Rodriguez) and Lena
(Sanoe Lake). Anne Marie was a contender three years earlier in a major
surfing competition on Oahu but nearly drowned. Now she's edging back into
competition, encouraged by the others, who seem to take Anne Marie's career
more seriously than she does. Life for the women includes surfing at dawn,
working hard as a three-maid team at a local luxury resort, and surfing at
dusk. Since her mother bailed out, Anne Marie has been raising Penny (Mika
Booren), who attends a local school but is not always delivered quite on
time.

The movie, based on Susan Orlean's magazine article "Surf Girls of Maui,"
resembles the Nik Cohn journalism that inspired "Saturday Night Fever." Both
stories are about working-class kids escaping into the freedom and glamor of
their obsessions. We hear fascination in their voices when they stop at a
gas station and see, at another pump, famous professional women surfers who
are in Hawaii for a big tournament. While it is true that Anne Marie might
be able to make money as a member of a pro surfing team, it is also true, as
it was of Tony Manero in "Saturday Night Fever," that other things distract
her, especially romance. She is not single-mindedly focused on her career.

The movie's surfing scenes are well-photographed, and yet we've seen
versions of them in many other movies, going all the way back to the
lodestone, Bruce Brown's "The Endless Summer" (1966). What we haven't seen,
what has the delight of life, are the scenes in the hotel, where the three
maids deal with the aftermath of a messy party held by pro football players
and try on expensive bathing suits in the room of a rich woman.

Anne Marie has a fierce working woman's pride, and at one point gets herself
fired by daring to march out onto the beach and demonstrate to a huge
football lineman the correct procedure for wrapping a used condom in a
Kleenex. She also has a working woman's realism, as when she advises the
others not to resign in sympathy, because they have rent payments to meet.

The date for the big competition is approaching, and Anne Marie is focused
on it when the run-in with the football players (who are not bad guys)
changes everything. The quarterback Matt Tollman (Matthew Davis) asks her
out, and although she talks about non-fraternization policies, she accepts,
and finds herself falling for him. Here is the crucial question: Is this a
vacation romance or does it really mean something? Matt seems nice,
attentive and genuine, but is it an act? The movie is realistic here, too:
Anne Marie would not mind a vacation romance, but she wants to know that's
what it is--she doesn't want to risk her heart needlessly.

Eden is tougher and more cynical than her friend, and we remember Michelle
Rodriguez's performance as an amateur boxer in "Girlfight" (2000). She's
alarmed when her friend starts spending too much time with the quarterback
and not enough time preparing for the impending competition ("Some guy
thinks you look good in a bikini and you forget all about the contest.").
And then of course the movie ends with the big showdown, with waves of
awesome strength and feats of great surfing, with all the necessary dangers
and setbacks. Even here, it doesn't settle for what we thought was the
predictable outcome.

"Blue Crush" was directed by John Stockwell, who made "Crazy/Beautiful"
(2001), the movie where Kirsten Dunst plays the wild daughter of a
congressman and her boyfriend is a responsible young Mexican-American. Here
again we get the footloose Anglo and the Latino looking out for her, but in
an unexpected context. Looking at the posters for "Blue Crush," which show
Bosworth, Rodriguez and Lake posing with bikinis and surfboards, I expected
another mindless surfing movie. "Blue Crush" is anything but.

Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

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-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] ME WITHOUT YOU / ***1/2 (R)
Date: 20 Aug 2002 16:19:46 GMT

ME WITHOUT YOU / ***1/2 (R)

August 16, 2002

Marina: Anna Friel
Holly: Michelle Williams
Nat: Oliver Milburn
Daniel: Kyle MacLachlan
Linda: Trudie Styler
Isabel: Marianne Denicourt
IDP Films presents a film directed by Sandra Goldbacher. Written by
Goldbacher and Laurence Coriat. Running time: 107 minutes. Rated R (for
language, sexual content and drug use).

BY ROGER EBERT

Marina and Holly's childhood friendship evolves into a toxic relationship
when they grow up, but they still remain close because even when they're
hurting each other, there's no one else they'd rather hurt. Ever had a
friend like that? Although Marina is more neurotic and Holly is more the
victim, maybe it's because they like it that way. If Holly knew the whole
story of how Marina betrays her, she'd be devastated--but then, of course,
she doesn't.

"Me Without You" has a bracing truth that's refreshing after the phoniness
of female-bonding pictures like "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood." It
doesn't mindlessly celebrate female friendship, but looks at it with a level
gaze. If Holly and Marina remain friends despite everything--well, maybe it
would be a shame to throw away all that history.

Sandra Goldbacher's film begins in London in 1974 and continues for another
20 years, paying close attention to changing fashions in clothing, music and
makeup, while not making too big a point of it. We meet Holly (Michelle
Williams of "Dawson's Creek") and Marina (Anna Friel) as adolescents who
seal their friendship by placing treasures in a box and hiding it (there is
a law requiring all female friends to perform this ritual in the movies). We
meet their parents. Marina has a mother who fancies herself a sexpot and is
a little drunk all day long, and a father who is, understandably, distant.
Holly comes from a Jewish family that is warm but not especially supportive;
she learns from her mother that she is more clever than pretty, and is not
clever enough to figure out that she's pretty, too.

Marina has a brother named Nat (Oliver Milburn) who Holly has always been in
love with. He is a decent sort and likes Holly, too, and one night during
their hippie party phase he makes love to her, but this is not on Marina's
agenda and she destroys a crucial letter that could have changed everything.

Another rivalry over a male takes place at college, when both women fall for
a handsome dweeb American lecturer named Daniel (Kyle MacLachlan). And here
the movie does something that few female-bonding pictures have the nerve to
do, and introduces a fully formed, fascinating male. In a superbly modulated
performance by MacLachlan, Daniel comes across as a man who can easily be
tempted but not easily secured. He's willing to be seduced but is frightened
of commitment; his posture is always that of the male prepared to back away
and apologize at the slightest offense. He has a highly developed line in
chit-chat, quoting all the best poets, and Holly is deceived by him while
the more cynical Marina strip-mines him and moves on.

What's fascinating about the Daniel character is that he illustrates how men
are not always the villains in unfaithful relationships, but sometimes
simply the pawns of female agendas. Daniel gives both women what they want,
and they want it more than he wants to give it. So although he appears to be
a two-timer, he's more of a two-time loser. Rare, to see a character
portrayed in this depth instead of simply being used as a plot ploy.

Michelle Williams is the surprise. I am not a student of "Dawson's Creek,"
but I know she uses an American accent on it, and here, like Renee Zellweger
in "Bridget Jones's Diary," she crosses the Atlantic, produces a perfectly
convincing British accent, and is cuddly and smart both at once. Anna Friel,
as Marina, has a tricky role because she is only ostensibly the sexy,
world-wise woman, and in fact is closer to her insecure mother. What eats at
her is that in the long run Holly is more appealing to men, and it has
nothing to do with hair or necklines.

The movie isn't entirely free of cliches (the secret treasure box, dredged
up from a pond after decades, of course is still intact). But the
screenplay, by Goldbacher and Laurence Coriat, plays as if the authors have
based it on their observations of life, not of movies. There is ultimately a
species of happy ending, although you realize it represents maturity and
weariness more than victory. The struggles of the teens and 20s are so
fraught, so passionate, so seemingly desperate, that when you grow older and
learn balance and perspective, there's a bittersweet sense of loss. In years
to come, Marina and Holly may reflect that they were never happier than when
they were making each other miserable.

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Subject: [MV] 24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE / **** (R)
Date: 20 Aug 2002 16:19:43 GMT

24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE / **** (R)

August 16, 2002

Tony Wilson: Steve Coogan
Roger Ames: Keith Allen
Ryan Letts: Rob Brydon
Saville: Enzo Cilenti
Derek Ryde: Ron Cook
Bez: Chris Coghill
United Artists presents a film directed by Michael Winterbottom. Written by
Frank Cottrell Boyce. Running time: 117 minutes. Rated R (for strong
language, drug use and sexuality).

BY ROGER EBERT

"24 Hour Party People," which tells the story of the Manchester music scene
from the first Sex Pistols concert until the last bankruptcy, shines with a
kind of inspired madness. It is based on fact, but Americans who don't know
the facts will have no trouble identifying with the sublime posturing of its
hero, a television personality named Tony Wilson, who takes himself
seriously in a way that is utterly impossible to take seriously.

Wilson, a real man, is played by Steve Coogan, who plays a Wilsonoid TV
personality on British TV. That sort of through-the-looking-glass mixing of
reality and fancy makes the movie somehow more true than a factual
documentary would have been. Wilson is a lanky man with the face of a
sincere beagle, a flop of hair over his right eyebrow, and an ability to
read banal TV copy as if it has earth-shaking profundity. He's usually the
only man in the room wearing a suit and tie, but he looks like he put them
on without reading the instructions. He is so heartfelt about his lunacies
that we understand, somehow, that his mind deals with contradictions by
embracing them.

As the film opens, Wilson is attending the first, legendary Sex Pistols
concert in Manchester, England. Here and elsewhere, director Michael
Winterbottom subtly blends real newsreel footage with fictional characters
so they all fit convincingly into the same shot. Wilson is transfixed by the
Pistols as they sing "Anarchy in the U.K." and sneer at British tradition.
He tells the camera that everyone in the audience will leave the room
transformed and inspired, and then the camera pans to show a total of 42
people, two or three of them half-heartedly dancing in the aisles.

Wilson features the Pistols and other bands on his Manchester TV show.
Because of a ban by London TV, his show becomes the only venue for punk
rock. Turns out he was right about the Pistols. They let loose something
that changed rock music. And they did it in the only way that Wilson could
respect, by thoroughly screwing up everything they did, and ending in
bankruptcy and failure, followed by Sid Vicious' spectacular murder-suicide
flameout. The Sex Pistols became successful because they failed; if they had
succeeded, they would have sold out, or become diluted or commercial. I saw
Johnny Rotten a few years ago at Sundance, still failing, and it made me
feel proud of him.

Tony Wilson, who preaches "anarchism" not as a political position but as an
emotional state, knows he has seen the future. He joins with two partners to
form a Factory Records, which would become one of the most important and
least financially successful recording companies in history, and joyously
signs the contract in his blood (while declaring "we will have no
contracts"). His bands include Joy Division (renamed New Order after the
suicide of its lead singer) and Happy Mondays. His company opens a rave
club, the Hacienda, which goes broke because the customers ignore the cash
bars and spend all their money on Ecstasy.

Wilson hardly cares. When the club closes, he addresses the final night's
crowd: "Before you leave, I ask you to invade the offices and loot them."
When he meets with investors who want to buy Factory Records, they are
startled to learn he has nothing to sell--no contracts, no back catalog,
nothing. "We are not really a company," he explains helpfully. "We are an
experiment in human nature. I protected myself from the dilemma of selling
out by having nothing to sell."

This is a lovable character, all the more so because his conversation uses
the offhand goofy non-sequiturs of real speech, instead of being channeled
into a narrow lane of movie dialogue. The writer, Frank Cottrell Boyce,
gives Wilson a distinctive voice we come to love. "I went to Cambridge
University!" he tells one of his broadcast bosses. "I'm a serious
journalist, living in one of the most important times in human history."
Yes, but the next day he's interviewing a midget elephant trainer. He
explains how the invention of broccoli funded the James Bond movies (there
is a shred of truth there, actually). He quotes Plutarch and William Blake,
he says one of his singers is a poet equal to Yeats, he looks at empty
concert halls and observes hopefully that there were only 12 people at the
Last Supper (13, actually, counting the talent). And he is courageous in the
face of daunting setbacks, pushing on optimistically into higher realms of
failure.

The movie works so well because it evokes genuine, not manufactured,
nostalgia. It records a time when the inmates ran the asylum, when music
lovers got away with murder. It loves its characters. It understands what
the Sex Pistols started, and what the 1990s destroyed. And it gets a certain
tone right. It kids itself. At one point, Wilson looks straight at the
camera and tells us that a scene is missing, "but it will probably be on the
DVD."

As the screenwriter of an ill-fated Sex Pistols movie, I met Rotten,
Vicious, Paul Cook, Steve Jones and their infamous manager, Malcolm McLaren,
and brushed the fringe of their world. I could see there was no plan, no
strategy, no philosophy, just an attitude. If a book on the Sex Pistols had
an upraised middle finger on the cover, it wouldn't need any words inside.
And yet Tony Wilson goes to see the Pistols and sees before him a delirious
opportunity to--to what? Well, obviously, to live in one of the most
important times in human history, and to make your mark on it by going down
in glorious flames.

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From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] SEX WITH STRANGERS / ** (Not rated)
Date: 20 Aug 2002 16:19:50 GMT

SEX WITH STRANGERS / ** (Not rated)

August 16, 2002

View Films presents a documentary directed by Joe and Harry Gantz. Running
time: 105 minutes. No MPAA rating (intended for adults). Opening today at
the Esquire Theatre.

BY ROGER EBERT

The most intriguing element of "Sex with Strangers" involves not the sex,
but the strangers. Here are people who do not allow the use of their last
names, yet they cheerfully have sex in front of the camera--and even
willingly participate in scenes that make them look cruel, twisted, reckless
and perhaps deranged. We know from the Springer show that shame is no
barrier when it comes to collecting your 15 minutes of fame. But these
people act like this, we realize, even when the cameras aren't on. They live
this way.

The movie has been produced and directed by Joe and Harry Gantz, who do the
"Taxicab Confessions" program for HBO. They follow two couples and a sad
threesome through their adventures in the swinging lifestyle, in a
documentary that strongly suggests the screwing they're getting isn't worth
the screwing they're getting. Even assuming they have an insatiable appetite
for sex with strangers, how do they develop an appetite for trolling through
the roadside bars of the nation, picking up the kinds of people who can be
picked up there? Groucho Marx wouldn't belong to any club that would have
him as a member. The stars of this film might be wise not to sleep with
anyone who would sleep with them.

We meet James and Theresa, Shannon and Gerard, and Calvin and Sara and
Julie. James and Theresa have it all figured out. They even have their own
business cards. They cruise the back roads of the nation, pulling up to bars
in their motor home, meeting new friends inside and inviting them out to the
Winnebago for a swap meet. Shannon and Gerard are more complicated: She
seems deeply neurotic about the lifestyle, he wants to swing without her,
they have a child who they try to insulate from mommy and daddy's
ever-changing new friends, and there's even a scene where they chat about
their lifestyle with her mother, getting points for "openness" when they
should be penalized for inflicting their secrets upon the poor woman.

Now as for Calvin. He uses the rhetoric of the lifestyle primarily, we
suspect, as a way to justify sleeping with both Sara and Julie, neither one
of whom is particularly enthusiastic about his hobby. He wants it all but
isn't a good sport when Sara and Julie slip off without the middleman.
Although mate-swappers would have you believe that they are open and willing
participants in their lifestyle, the evidence on screen suggests that men
are a good deal more keen about the practice than women, perhaps because
there is an intrinsic imbalance in the pleasures to be had from quickie
anonymous sex.

When I first saw the movie, I had fundamental questions about how much of it
could be trusted. On "Ebert & Roeper," I said: "There's a scene where
James and Theresa are in a club and they meet another couple, and they ask
the other couple, 'Do you want to swing?' And the other couple says, 'Sure.'
And they say, 'Oh, we have our motor home right outside.' And so they go
outside, the two couples and the camera. And I'm wondering: Let's say I
wanted to be a swinger and I've just met two people who are going to take me
into their motor home. Am I going to wonder about the fact that this happens
to be videotaped while it's happening? When I saw scenes like that, I
thought, this has all been rehearsed. It's a setup."

After the show played, I got an e-mail from Joe Gantz, who assured me that
all of the scenes in the movie do indeed reflect reality. One key to their
footage is that they always have two cameras running all the time, to supply
cutaways and reaction shots. Another is that, by definition, they only show
couples who agreed to be photographed. If a hypothetical couple got to the
motor home and balked at the cameras, they wouldn't be in the movie.

That leads me back to where I began--to curiosity about the mind-set of the
people in the film. By openly swapping mates, they have already abandoned
conventional notions of privacy and modesty. Perhaps it is only a small
additional step to do it on camera. But I didn't find much fascination in
the swinging. What they're doing is a matter of plumbing arrangements and
mind games, of no erotic or sensuous charge. But that they are doing it is
thought-provoking. What damage had to be done to their self-esteem, and how,
to lead them to this point?

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From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] THE GOOD GIRL / ***1/2 (R)
Date: 20 Aug 2002 16:19:51 GMT

THE GOOD GIRL / ***1/2 (R)

August 16, 2002

Justine: Jennifer Aniston
Holden: Jake Gyllenhaal
Phil: John C. Reilly
Bubba: Tim Blake Nelson
Cheryl: Zooey Deschanel
Corny: Mike White
Fox Searchlight Pictures presents a film directed by Miguel Arteta. Written
by Mike White. Running time: 93 minutes. Rated R (for sexuality, some
language and drug content). Opening today at Landmark Century.

BY ROGER EBERT

After languishing in a series of overlooked movies that ranged from the
entertaining ("Office Space") to the disposable ("Picture Perfect"),
Jennifer Aniston has at last decisively broken with her "Friends" image in
an independent film of satiric fire and emotional turmoil. It will no longer
be possible to consider her in the same way. In "The Good Girl," she plays
Justine, a desperately bored clerk at Retail Rodeo, a sub-Kmart where the
customers are such sleepwalkers they don't even notice when the "Attention,
Shoppers!" announcements are larded with insults and nonsense.

Recent headlines tell of a lawsuit against Wal-Mart for forcing its
employees to work unpaid overtime. Retail Rodeo is by contrast relatively
benign. Management is particularly flexible with Justine's co-worker Cheryl
(Zooey Deschanel), who, after getting carried away once too often on the
P.A. system, is reassigned to Women's Makeovers, where she improvises
dubious advice. A new makeup style is called "Cirque du Face," she tells one
customer. "It's all the rage with the Frenchies."

Justine, who is 30ish, is married to a house painter named Phil (John C.
Reilly), who is attached vertically to the living room sofa and horizontally
to his best friend, Bubba (Tim Blake Nelson). Phil and Bubba paint houses
during the day and are couch potatoes at night, smoking weed and peering at
the television. After a day of drudgery, Justine comes home to stoned
indifference. No wonder she's intrigued by Holden (Jake Gyllenhaal), the new
check-out kid, who's reading The Catcher in the Rye and tells her its hero
is a victim of the world's hypocrisy.

Quite a coincidence, that a kid named Holden would be reading a book about a
character named Holden. When they become better friends, Holden invites
Justine to his house, where his mother calls him "Tom." In the safety of his
room, he explains: "Tom is my slave name." Soon Justine and Tom, who is a
college dropout with a drinking problem, are having sex everywhere they can:
in the car, in his room, in the stockroom at Retail Rodeo, and in a fleabag
motel, where, unluckily, Bubba sees them.

For Bubba, this is an ideal opening for emotional blackmail. He has long
explained that he is single because he despairs of ever finding a wife as
"perfect" as Justine. Now he demands sex with her, so his life will be
complete. Otherwise, he will tell Phil about her affair. In a decision that
Jennifer Aniston would never make but Justine might (this is a crucial
distinction), she deals with this demand and with another crisis, when she
discovers she is pregnant. She also finds out what she should have
suspected, that Bubba would never tell Phil about her secrets, because he
adores Phil too much and, as Phil's wife, she is protected by his immunity.

"The Good Girl" has been directed by Miguel Arteta and written by Mike
White, who plays the Retail Rodeo's security guard. They also collaborated
on "Chuck and Buck," and on the basis of these two strange movies with their
skewed perspectives, they are talents with huge promise. They know how much
satire and exaggeration is enough but not too much, so that in a
subterranean way their movies work on serious levels while seeming to be
comedies.

Certainly the last big scene between Aniston and Reilly is an unexpected
payoff, delivering an emotional punch while at the same time we can only
admire Aniston's strategy involving the father of her child. She says it's
Phil's, and that claim cannot be disproved on the basis of Phil's
information; having confessed to cheating, she allows him to suspect someone
who could not have a black-haired child; therefore, the father is the
dark-haired Phil. Right? Right.

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Subject: [MV] SIMONE / ** (PG-13)
Date: 23 Aug 2002 14:54:22 GMT

SIMONE / ** (PG-13)

August 23, 2002

Viktor Taransky: Al Pacino
Elaine: Catherine Keener
Lainey Taransky: Evan Rachel     Wood
Simone: Rachel Roberts
Hank Aleno: Elias Koteas
New Line Cinema presents a film written and directed by Andrew Niccol.
Running time: 117 minutes. Rated PG-13 (for some sensuality).

BY ROGER EBERT

"Simone" tells the story of a director at the end of his rope, who inherits
a mad inventor's computer program that allows him to create an actress out
of thin air. She becomes a big star and the center of a media firestorm, and
he's trapped: The more audiences admire her, the less he can reveal she is
entirely his work. The movie sets this dilemma within a cynical comedy about
modern Hollywood; it's fitfully funny but never really takes off. Out of the
corners of our eyes we glimpse the missed opportunities for some real
satirical digging.

Al Pacino plays the director, Viktor Taransky, once brilliant, recently the
author of a string of flops. Only his young daughter Lainey (Evan Rachel
Wood) still believes in him--a little. His ex-wife, Elaine (Catherine
Keener), the head of the studio, has lost all hope for his career and pulls
the plug on his latest project when the temperamental star (Winona Ryder)
blows up.

Into the life of this desperate man comes another one, Hank Aleno (Elias
Koteas), who has devised a computer program that creates "synthespians."
Viktor isn't interested--but then, when the wizard leaves him the program in
his will, he starts noodling around with the software and the beautiful,
talented and (above all) cooperative Simone is the result. She needs, Viktor
exults, no hairdresser, makeup, driver, car, trailer, stand-in or stunt
woman--no, not even for the fall from the plane. She is always on time,
never complains, says the words just as they're written and has no problem
with nudity.

Viktor creates Simone's performance on a computer that stands all alone in
the middle of an otherwise empty sound stage. The other actors in the movie
are told Simone will be added to their scenes electronically. The premiere
of the first movie is a huge success, and of course paparazzi from the
supermarket tabloids stalk Viktor in hopes of photographing Simone. No luck.

The movie was written, produced and directed by Andrew Niccol, who wrote
"The Truman Show" and wrote and directed "Gattaca," both films about the
interface between science and personality. "Simone" is not in that league.
He wants to edge it in the direction of a Hollywood comedy, but the satire
is not sharp enough and the characters, including the ex-wife, are too
routine.

And there's a bigger problem: Simone always remains ... just Simone. The
computer image always looks as if it's about to come to life and never does.
One can imagine software bugs that recklessly import other online
personalities into Simone: Matt Drudge, for example, or Harry Knowles, or
Danni Ashe. One can imagine Simone suddenly being possessed by Lara Croft,
Tomb Raider, and breaking up a serious dramatic scene with video-game
violence. One can imagine ... well, almost anything except that she remains
a well-behaved program. When Simone "appears" on a chat show, for example,
it's kind of funny that she sticks to well-worn subjects like dolphins and
smoking, but why not go the extra mile and put her on the Howard Stern show?

Pacino, that splendid actor, does what he can to bring Viktor to life. But
the screenplay's too narrow and prevents him from taking the character
beyond a certain point. Most of the big events are handled with sitcom
simplicity, and the hungry gossip reporters are presented as they always
are, a howling pack with no wit or originality. Even Keener, as the studio
head, simply plays an ex-wife who is a studio head: There's no twist,
nothing unexpected.

The problem, I think, is that in aiming for too wide an audience, Niccol has
made too shallow a picture. "The Truman Show" and "Gattaca" pushed their
premises; "Simone" settles for the predictable. The story elements echo the
sad experience of the team assembled to make "Final Fantasy," the summer of
2001 sci-fi movie that failed at the box office. That movie was made up
entirely of "real" characters generated by computers, including Aki Ross,
the heroine, who, all things considered, is a more intriguing woman than
Simone (whose appearance is provided by the actress Rachel Roberts). The
"Final Fantasy" team labored four years and achieved everything they dreamed
of, and were rejected by the public. Much more interesting than a director
who has unimaginable success fall into his lap.

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From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] MERCI POUR LE CHOCOLAT / *** (Not rated)
Date: 23 Aug 2002 14:54:19 GMT

MERCI POUR LE CHOCOLAT / *** (Not rated)

August 23, 2002

Mika Muller-Polonski: Isabelle Huppert
Andre Polonski: Jacques Dutronc
Jeanne Pollet: Anna Mouglalis
Guillaume Polonski: Rodolphe Pauly
First Run Features presents a film directed by Claude Chabrol. Written by
Caroline Eliacheff and Chabrol, based on the novel The Chocolate Cobweb by
Charlotte Armstrong. Running time: 99 minutes. No MPAA rating. In French
with English subtitles. Opening today at the Music Box.

BY ROGER EBERT

Isabelle Huppert has the best poker face since Buster Keaton. She faces the
camera with detached regard, inviting us to imagine what she is thinking.
Since so often the thoughts of her characters run toward crime, revenge,
betrayal, lust and sadism, it is just as well she can seem so passive; an
actress who tried to portray these inner emotions would inevitably go
hurtling over the top and into the next movie.

Consider "Merci Pour le Chocolat," her new film, directed by her longtime
admirer Claude Chabrol. There is hardly any suspense about what she's up to.
The title, and the fact that it is a thriller, inspire us to regard the
movie's frequent cups of hot chocolate with as much suspicion as the
arsenic-laced coffee in Hitchcock's "Notorious." Even if an early scene
hadn't warned us that the chocolate contains a date-rape drug, we'd be wary
just because of the dispassionate way Huppert serves it. She doesn't seem
like a hostess so much as a clinician.

Huppert plays Mika Muller-Polonski, the first and third wife of the famous
pianist Andre Polonski (tired-eyed Jacques Dutronc). They were married "for
a few minutes" many years ago. After their divorce, he remarried, had a son
named Guillaume, and then lost his wife in a car crash. She apparently dozed
off while they were all visiting ... Mika.

The movie opens with the remarriage of Mika and Jacques, 18 years after
their first ceremony. The spectators look less than ecstatic. The new family
moves into Mika's vast, gloomy gothic mansion in Lausanne, paid for with the
profits from her family's chocolate company. One of the rituals is hot
chocolate at bedtime, personally prepared by Mika ("In this house, I serve
the chocolate").

An unexpected development: An attractive young piano student, Jeanne Pollet
(Anna Mouglalis), finds a clipping in her mother's papers reporting that on
the day of her birth, she was briefly switched with Guillaume. Using this as
a pretext, she calls on the Polonski family, not because she thinks she is
Andre's daughter but because she wants, she says, piano lessons. Her arrival
causes Guillaume to recede into more of a funk than usual, Mika to greet her
with the outward show of friendliness, and Andre to devote himself with
unseemly enthusiasm to her piano lessons.

Curious, isn't it, that Jeanne is a piano virtuoso, and Guillaume has a tin
ear? Thought-provoking, too, that Guillaume is not Mika's son, but the son
of her husband's second wife, who died so tragically during that visit to
.. Mika's. And interesting that Andre has taken such an interest in Jeanne.
And Mika keeps serving the hot chocolate.

There is no mystery about what Mika is doing with the hot chocolate. The
mysteries are: to whom, and why. The motives may differ. She may, indeed,
simply be amusing herself. Huppert's bland expression masks her motives to
such a degree that even when she does smile or frown, we suspect the honesty
of the expression: What is she really thinking?

Claude Chabrol is a master of domestic suspense, and he has used Huppert
before as a cold-blooded killer, notably in "Violette Noziere" (1978). What
is fascinating is how little Huppert has seemed to change in the intervening
years. She has worked ceaselessly, usually in good pictures, often with good
directors. Filmmakers seem drawn to her because of her mysterious
detachment; while many actors seek out the secrets of their characters,
Huppert keeps such secrets as she may have discovered, and invites us to
figure them out for ourselves.

The appeal of "Merci Pour le Chocolat" is not in the somewhat creaky old
poisoning plot, not in the hints of suppressed family secrets, not in the
suspense about what will happen next--but in the enigma within which Huppert
conceals her characters While all those around her plot, scheme, hope and
fear, she simply looks on, and pours the chocolate. What is she thinking?
What does she want? Who is she? Her appeal in film after film is maddening,
perverse and seductive.

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Subject: [MV] ONE HOUR PHOTO / ***1/2 (R)
Date: 23 Aug 2002 14:54:20 GMT

ONE HOUR PHOTO / ***1/2 (R)

August 23, 2002

Sy Parrish: Robin Williams
Nina Yorkin: Connie Nielsen
Will Yorkin: Michael Vartan
Bill Owens: Gary Cole
Jake Yorkin: Dylan Smith
Det. Van Der Zee: Eriq LaSalle
Maya Burson: Erin Daniels
Fox Searchlight Pictures presents a film written and directed by Mark
Romanek. Running time: 98 minutes. Rated R (for sexual content and
language).

BY ROGER EBERT

"One Hour Photo" tells the story of Seymour "Sy" Parrish, who works behind
the photo counter of one of those vast suburban retail barns. He has a
bland, anonymous face, and a cheerful voice that almost conceals his
desperation and loneliness. He takes your film, develops it, and has your
photos ready in an hour. Sometimes he even gives you 5-by-7s when all you
ordered were 4-by-6s. His favorite customers are the Yorkins--Nina, Will and
cute young Jake. They've been steady customers for six years. When they
bring in their film, he makes an extra set of prints--for himself.

Sy follows an unvarying routine. There is a diner where he eats, alone,
methodically. He is an "ideal employee." He has no friends, a co-worker
observes. But the Yorkins serve him as a surrogate family, and he is their
self-appointed Uncle Sy. Only occasionally does the world get a glimpse of
the volcanic side of his personality, as when he gets into an argument with
Larry, the photo machine repairman.

The Yorkins know him by name, and are a little amused by his devotion. There
is an edge of need to his moments with them. If they were to decide to
abandon film and get one of those new digital cameras, a prudent instinct
might lead them to keep this news from Sy.

Robin Williams plays Sy, another of his open-faced, smiling madmen, like the
killer in "Insomnia." He does this so well you don't have the slightest
difficulty accepting him in the role. The first time we see Sy behind his
counter, neat, smiling, with a few extra pounds from the diner routine, we
buy him. He belongs there. He's native to retail.

The Yorkin family is at first depicted as ideal: models for an ad for their
suburban lifestyle. Nina Yorkin (Connie Nielsen), pretty and fresh-scrubbed,
has a cheery public persona. Will (Michael Vartan) is your regular clean-cut
guy. Young Jake (Dylan Smith) is cute as a picture. Mark Romanek, who wrote
and directed the film, is sneaky in the way he so subtly introduces
discordant elements into his perfect picture. A tone of voice, a
half-glimpsed book cover, a mistaken order, a casual aside ... they don't
mean much by themselves, but they add up to an ominous cloud, gathering over
the photo counter.

Much of the film's atmosphere forms through the cinematography, by Jeff
Cronenweth. His interiors at "Savmart" are white and bright, almost
aggressive. You can hear the fluorescent lights humming. Through choices
involving set design and lens choices, the One Hour Photo counter somehow
seems an unnatural distance from the other areas of the store, as if the
store shuns it, or it has withdrawn into itself. Customers approach it
across an exposed expanse of emptiness, with Sy smiling at the end of the
trail.

A man who works in a one-hour photo operation might seem to be relatively
powerless. Certainly Sy's boss thinks so. But in an era when naked baby
pictures can be interpreted as child abuse, the man with access to your
photos can cause you a lot of trouble. What would happen, for example, if
Will Yorkin is having an affair, and his mistress brings in photos to be
developed, and Uncle Sy "mistakenly" hands them to Nina Yorkin?

The movie at first seems soundly grounded in everyday reality, in the
routine of a predictable job. When Romanek departs from reality, he does it
subtly, sneakily, so that we believe what we see until he pulls the plug.
There is one moment I will not describe (in order not to ruin it) when Sy
commits a kind of social trespass that has the audience stirring with quiet
surprise: Surprise, because until they see the scene they don't realize that
his innocent, everyday act can be a shocking transgression in the wrong
context.

Watching the film, I thought of Michael Powell's great 1960 British thriller
"Peeping Tom," which was about a photographer who killed his victims with a
stiletto concealed in his camera. Sy uses a psychological stiletto, but he's
the same kind of character, the sort of man you don't much notice, who
blends in, accepted, overlooked, left alone so that his rich secret life can
flower. There is a moment in "Peeping Tom" when a shot suddenly reveals the
full depth of the character's depravity. In "One Hour Photo," a shot with a
similar purpose requires only a lot of innocent family snapshots, displayed
in a way that is profoundly creepy.

The movie has also been compared to "American Beauty," another film where
resentment, loneliness and lust fester beneath the surface of suburban
affluence. The difference, I think, is that the needs of the Kevin Spacey
character in "American Beauty," while frowned upon and even illegal, fall
generally within the range of emotions we understand. Sy Parrish is outside
that range. He was born with parts missing, and has assembled the remainder
into a person who has borrowed from the inside to make the outside look OK.

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From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] LITTLE SECRETS / *** (PG)
Date: 23 Aug 2002 14:54:17 GMT

LITTLE SECRETS / *** (PG)

August 23, 2002

Emily: Evan Rachel Wood
Philip: Michael Angarano
David: David Gallagher
Pauline: Vivica A. Fox
Caroline: Jan Gardner
IDP Pictures presents a film directed by Blair Treu. Written by Jessica
Bardones. Running time: 107 minutes. Rated PG.(for thematic elements).

BY ROGER EBERT

The biggest surprise in "Little Secrets" is that Ozzie and Harriet don't
live next door. The movie takes place in an improbably perfect suburban
neighborhood where all the kids wear cute sportswear and have the kinds of
harmless problems that seem to exist only so that they can be harmless
problems. Then of course there are some Big Problems which are rendered
harmless, too. This is a very reassuring film.

The heroine of the movie, Emily (Evan Rachel Wood) is a budding young
violinist who as a sideline runs a Little Secrets stand in her back yard,
where kids can tell her their secrets at 50 cents apiece. The secrets are
then written on scraps of paper and locked in a chest.

The theological and psychological origins of her practice would be
fascinating to research. The neighborhood kids sure take it seriously. When
she's a few minutes late in opening her stand, there's a line of impatient
kids clamoring to unburden themselves. The 50-cent price tag doesn't
discourage them; these are not kids who remember the days when a quarter
used to buy something.

But what kinds of kids are they, exactly? Consider Philip and David. Philip
tells David, "Her name is Emily. Like Emily ..." "... Dickinson?" says
David. "And Emily Bronte," says Philip. Heartened as I am to know that the
grade school kids in this movie are on first-name terms with these authors,
I am nevertheless doubtful that Dickinson and Bronte will ring many bells in
the audience.

Vivica A. Fox is the only widely known star in the film, playing a violin
teacher who is wise and philosophical. Much suspense centers around Emily's
audition for the local symphony orchestra (every suburb should have one).
The problems of the kids range from a girl who hides kittens in her room to
a boy who is digging a hole to China. Larger issues, including adoption, are
eventually introduced.

I am rating this movie at three stars because it contains absolutely nothing
to object to. That in itself may be objectionable, but you will have to
decide for yourself. The film is upbeat, wholesome, chirpy, positive, sunny,
cheerful, optimistic and squeaky-clean. It bears so little resemblance to
the more complicated worlds of many members of its target audience (girls 4
to 11) that it may work as pure escapism. That it has been rated not G but
PG (for "thematic elements") is another of the arcane mysteries created by
the flywheels of the MPAA. There is not a parent on earth who would believe
this film requires "parental guidance."

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Subject: [MV] 24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE / **** (R)
Date: 23 Aug 2002 14:54:26 GMT

24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE / **** (R)

August 16, 2002

Tony Wilson: Steve Coogan
Roger Ames: Keith Allen
Ryan Letts: Rob Brydon
Saville: Enzo Cilenti
Derek Ryde: Ron Cook
Bez: Chris Coghill
United Artists presents a film directed by Michael Winterbottom. Written by
Frank Cottrell Boyce. Running time: 117 minutes. Rated R (for strong
language, drug use and sexuality).

BY ROGER EBERT

"24 Hour Party People," which tells the story of the Manchester music scene
from the first Sex Pistols concert until the last bankruptcy, shines with a
kind of inspired madness. It is based on fact, but Americans who don't know
the facts will have no trouble identifying with the sublime posturing of its
hero, a television personality named Tony Wilson, who takes himself
seriously in a way that is utterly impossible to take seriously.

Wilson, a real man, is played by Steve Coogan, who plays a Wilsonoid TV
personality on British TV. That sort of through-the-looking-glass mixing of
reality and fancy makes the movie somehow more true than a factual
documentary would have been. Wilson is a lanky man with the face of a
sincere beagle, a flop of hair over his right eyebrow, and an ability to
read banal TV copy as if it has earth-shaking profundity. He's usually the
only man in the room wearing a suit and tie, but he looks like he put them
on without reading the instructions. He is so heartfelt about his lunacies
that we understand, somehow, that his mind deals with contradictions by
embracing them.

As the film opens, Wilson is attending the first, legendary Sex Pistols
concert in Manchester, England. Here and elsewhere, director Michael
Winterbottom subtly blends real newsreel footage with fictional characters
so they all fit convincingly into the same shot. Wilson is transfixed by the
Pistols as they sing "Anarchy in the U.K." and sneer at British tradition.
He tells the camera that everyone in the audience will leave the room
transformed and inspired, and then the camera pans to show a total of 42
people, two or three of them half-heartedly dancing in the aisles.

Wilson features the Pistols and other bands on his Manchester TV show.
Because of a ban by London TV, his show becomes the only venue for punk
rock. Turns out he was right about the Pistols. They let loose something
that changed rock music. And they did it in the only way that Wilson could
respect, by thoroughly screwing up everything they did, and ending in
bankruptcy and failure, followed by Sid Vicious' spectacular murder-suicide
flameout. The Sex Pistols became successful because they failed; if they had
succeeded, they would have sold out, or become diluted or commercial. I saw
Johnny Rotten a few years ago at Sundance, still failing, and it made me
feel proud of him.

Tony Wilson, who preaches "anarchism" not as a political position but as an
emotional state, knows he has seen the future. He joins with two partners to
form a Factory Records, which would become one of the most important and
least financially successful recording companies in history, and joyously
signs the contract in his blood (while declaring "we will have no
contracts"). His bands include Joy Division (renamed New Order after the
suicide of its lead singer) and Happy Mondays. His company opens a rave
club, the Hacienda, which goes broke because the customers ignore the cash
bars and spend all their money on Ecstasy.

Wilson hardly cares. When the club closes, he addresses the final night's
crowd: "Before you leave, I ask you to invade the offices and loot them."
When he meets with investors who want to buy Factory Records, they are
startled to learn he has nothing to sell--no contracts, no back catalog,
nothing. "We are not really a company," he explains helpfully. "We are an
experiment in human nature. I protected myself from the dilemma of selling
out by having nothing to sell."

This is a lovable character, all the more so because his conversation uses
the offhand goofy non-sequiturs of real speech, instead of being channeled
into a narrow lane of movie dialogue. The writer, Frank Cottrell Boyce,
gives Wilson a distinctive voice we come to love. "I went to Cambridge
University!" he tells one of his broadcast bosses. "I'm a serious
journalist, living in one of the most important times in human history."
Yes, but the next day he's interviewing a midget elephant trainer. He
explains how the invention of broccoli funded the James Bond movies (there
is a shred of truth there, actually). He quotes Plutarch and William Blake,
he says one of his singers is a poet equal to Yeats, he looks at empty
concert halls and observes hopefully that there were only 12 people at the
Last Supper (13, actually, counting the talent). And he is courageous in the
face of daunting setbacks, pushing on optimistically into higher realms of
failure.

The movie works so well because it evokes genuine, not manufactured,
nostalgia. It records a time when the inmates ran the asylum, when music
lovers got away with murder. It loves its characters. It understands what
the Sex Pistols started, and what the 1990s destroyed. And it gets a certain
tone right. It kids itself. At one point, Wilson looks straight at the
camera and tells us that a scene is missing, "but it will probably be on the
DVD."

As the screenwriter of an ill-fated Sex Pistols movie, I met Rotten,
Vicious, Paul Cook, Steve Jones and their infamous manager, Malcolm McLaren,
and brushed the fringe of their world. I could see there was no plan, no
strategy, no philosophy, just an attitude. If a book on the Sex Pistols had
an upraised middle finger on the cover, it wouldn't need any words inside.
And yet Tony Wilson goes to see the Pistols and sees before him a delirious
opportunity to--to what? Well, obviously, to live in one of the most
important times in human history, and to make your mark on it by going down
in glorious flames.

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From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] UNDISPUTED / *** (R)
Date: 23 Aug 2002 14:54:24 GMT

UNDISPUTED / *** (R)

August 23, 2002

Monroe Hutchen: Wesley Snipes
James "Iceman" Chambers: Ving Rhames
Emmanuel "Mendy" Ripstein: Peter Falk
James Kroycek: Fisher Stevens
Prison Guard: Michael Rooker
Dick Lipscomb: Denis Arndt
Miramax Films presents a film directed by Walter Hill. Written by Hill and
David Giler. Running time: 96 minutes. Rated R (for strong language).

BY ROGER EBERT

Walter Hill's "Undisputed" is like a 1940s Warner Bros. B picture, and I
mean that as a compliment. With efficiency and laconic skill, it sets up the
situation, peoples it with clearly drawn characters, and heads for a
showdown. There is a kind of pleasure to be had from its directness, from
its lack of gimmicks, from its classical form. And just like in the Warners
pictures, there is also the pleasure of supporting performances from
character actors who come onstage, sing an aria, and leave.

The movie stars Ving Rhames as "Iceman" Chambers, heavyweight champion of
the world, recently convicted of rape in a plot obviously inspired by Mike
Tyson's misadventures. He's sentenced to the maximum-security Sweetwater
Prison in the Mohave Desert, which has an active boxing program. The
Sweetwater champion is Monroe Hutchen (Wesley Snipes), and a showdown
between the two men is inevitable.

First, though, Iceman has to challenge the leader of the most powerful gang
behind bars, and spend some times in solitary as punishment. If he hadn't
done that, he explains, he'd be dead. And Monroe has to hear stories about
how he's not the undisputed champion any longer.

Also resident in this prison is Emmanuel (Mendy) Ripstein (Peter Falk), an
aging Mafioso who still wields enormous clout inside and beyond the prison
walls. He even has his own personal assistant. Ripstein is a fight fan. He
agrees with the prevailing opinion that there must be a bout to settle the
prison championship, and arranged odds with his Vegas contacts. There will
even be a payoff for the two fighters, and Snipes is adamant in negotiating
a bigger percentage for himself. The Iceman seems more concerned with
survival, and Rhames has a direct, unaffected way with his dialogue that is
quietly convincing.

The Falk character is a piece of work. He's like a distillation of Falkness.
He squints, he talks out of the side of his mouth, he has a tough-guy
accent, he has a way of implying authority. And then he has his aria. This
is an unbroken monologue that goes for a minute or two (maybe longer--I was
laughing too hard to count), and it is variations on the two themes of the
F-word and his wife's bad advice. It touches on the competing charms of
California and Florida, comments on state and federal legal details, and
rises to a kind of musical grandeur. The screenplay is by Hill, the
director, and David Giler, who worked together on the "Alien" pictures, but
whether they or Falk wrote this monologue is hard to say; it seems to rise
from another dimension.

Michael Rooker ("Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer") has an important role
as the prison guard who coordinates the boxing matches, protected by the
benign detachment of the warden. He sets a date for the match, and then the
two boxers go into more or less routine training sessions, leading up to the
big fight, which is held inside a steel cage. The fight scenes are
well-choreographed and convincing, and Snipes and Rhames are completely
plausible as boxers.

Walter Hill has devoted his career to men's action pictures. He pitted
Charles Bronson and James Coburn against each other in his first picture,
"Hard Times" (1985), and reinvented the cop buddy movie with Nick Nolte and
Eddie Murphy in "48 HRS." One day I met the soundmen on "Hard Times" and
watched them pounding a leather sofa with Ping-Pong paddles to create the
sounds of blows landing; "Undisputed" evokes the same cheerful spirit.

Some critics of the movie complain that there is no hero, since the Iceman
has been convicted of rape and Monroe of murder. That is more of a strength
than a weakness, depriving us of an obvious favorite and creating a fight
which it is plausible to expect either boxer could win. Of course Monroe is
the underdog, which counts for something, but when you think how obviously
the deck is stacked in most boxing movies, this one has a right to call
itself suspenseful. On the other hand, with mob involvement, the fight could
be fixed. Falk, as Ripstein, has a lovely scene where he expresses himself
on that possibility.

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From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] THE LAST KISS (L'ULTIMO BACIO)/ **
Date: 30 Aug 2002 16:21:26 GMT

THE LAST KISS (L'ULTIMO BACIO)/ **

August 30, 2002

Carlo: Stefano Accorsi
Giulia: Giovanna Mezzogiorno
Anna: Stefania Sandrelli
Francesca: Martina Stella
Alberto: Marco Cocci
Marco: Pierfrancesco Favino
Paolo: Claudio Santamaria
Think Films presents a film written and directed by Gabriele Muccino.
Running time: 114 minutes. In Italian with English subtitles. Rated R (for
language, sexuality and some drug use). Opening today at Landmark Century.

BY ROGER EBERT

"The Last Kiss" is a comedy, I guess, about male panic at the spectre of
adult responsibility. If you're a guy and want to figure out what side of
the question you're on, take this test. You're a young single man. Your
girlfriend announces at a family dinner that she is pregnant. You (a) accept
the joys and responsibilities of fatherhood; (b) climb up into a treehouse
at a wedding to begin a passionate affair with an 18-year-old; (c) join
three buddies in discussing their plan to buy a van and trek across Africa.

Carlo (Stefano Accorsi), the hero of the film, is torn between (b) and (c).
Marriage looms like a trap to him, and he complains to Francesca (Martina
Stella), the 18-year-old, that he fears "the passion is going" from his
life. When his girlfriend Giulia (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) takes him along to
look at a house they could buy, he complains that buying a house seems so
"final." Not encouraging words for a pregnant fiancee to hear. "If I catch
him cheating, I'll kill him," she says, in the ancient tradition of Italian
movie comedy.

But the movie isn't all comedy, and has fugitive ambitions, I fear, to say
something significant about romance and even life. Consider some of Carlo's
friends. Paolo (Claudio Santamaria) is expected to take over his father's
clothing store, has no interest in retail, but is wracked with guilt because
his father is dying and this is his last wish. Marco (Pierfrancesco Favino)
is a serial lover. Adriano (Giorgio Pasotti) is depressed because his
girlfriend has lost all interest in sex after giving birth. Their 30s and
indeed their 40s are breathing hot on the necks of these friends, who cling
to golden memories of adolescence.

There is also the case of Anna (Stefania Sandrelli), Carlo's mother, who is
married to a detached and indifferent psychiatrist, and seeks out a former
lover with hopes of, who knows, maybe now taking the path not chosen. The
lover is delighted to see her for a chat over lunch, but reveals that he has
recently married and is the proud father of a one-year-old. How cruelly age
discriminates against women (at least those prepared to consider it
discrimination and not freedom).

"The Last Kiss" specializes in dramatic exits and entrances. Anna bursts
into her husband's office when he is deep in consultation with a patient,
who seems alarmed that his own house is so clearly not in order. Carlo
awakens with dread after a night spent imprudently, and flees. Giulia makes
a dramatic appearance at a death bed after discovering Carlo lied to her.
And so on.

The problem is that the movie has no idea of it is serious or not. It
combines heartfelt self-analysis with scenes like the one where Carlo is
taken by his teenage squeeze to her friend's birthday, and tries to party
with the kids. This is either funny or sad, not both, but the movie doesn't
know which.

The message behind all of this is difficult to nail down. Mars and Venus?
Adults who haven't grown up? The last fling syndrome? Doing what you want
instead of doing what you must? I have just finished Without Stopping, the
autobiography of the novelist and composer Paul Bowles, who as nearly as I
can tell always did exactly what he wanted, and was married to Jane Bowles,
who did the same. The answer, obviously, is not to choose between marriage
and the van trip through Africa, but to dump the buddies and find a wife who
wants to come along.

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From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] SECRET BALLOT / *** (G)
Date: 30 Aug 2002 16:21:25 GMT

SECRET BALLOT / *** (G)

August 30, 2002

Woman: Nassim Abdi
Soldier: Cyrus Ab
Local people: Youssef Habashi, Farrokh Shojaii , Gholbahar Janghali
Sony Pictures Classics presents a film written and directed by Babak Payami.
Running time: 105 minutes. Rated G. In Farsi with English subtitles.

BY ROGER EBERT

'Secret Ballot" is a quixotic new Iranian comedy about a female election
agent who is sent to a remote island to collect ballots in a national
election. Because we never find out who or what is being elected, there has
been much puzzlement among critics about what the election symbolizes. I
believe the message is in the messenger: The agent is a woman.

"It's election day, don't you know?" the woman tells a bored soldier
assigned to drive her around. "There's a letter. You have to guard the
ballots."

The soldier studies the letter. "It says an agent will come, not a woman."

"I'm in charge here, mister. I have orders. You must obey or I'll see to it
you remain a soldier forever."

Strong words in a culture where the rights of women are limited. I was
reminded of "In the Heat of the Night," in which the whole point is that the
Sidney Poitier character insists on being treated with respect. This movie
could be titled "They Call Me MISS Election Agent." The plot is secondary to
the fact of the character's gender, and in Iran this movie must play with a
subtext we can only guess.

But what else is going on? Is the movie intended to show us (a) that
democracy exists in Iran, (b) that it is struggling to be born, or (c) that
most people find it irrelevant to their daily lives? There's a little of all
three during the long day the soldier and the woman (both unnamed) spend
together. Some citizens, asked to choose two of 10 names on the ballot,
complain they've never heard of any of them. A fierce old lady shuts her
door to the team, but later sends them food, and her courier observes,
"Granny Baghoo has her own government here." A man in charge of a solar
energy station expresses his opinion with admirable clarity: "I know no one
but God almighty, who makes the sun come up. If I vote for anyone, it must
be God."

If the woman is the Poitier character, the soldier is like the sheriff
played by Rod Steiger. He starts out strongly disapproving of a female
agent, but during the course of the day begins to find her persuasive,
intriguing and sympathetic. By the end of the day, when he casts his ballot,
it is for her, and we're reminded of the sheriff's little smile as Mister
Tibbs gets back on the train.

The director, Babak Payami, has a visual style that is sometimes
astonishing, sometimes frustrating, sometimes both. The first shot is of a
plane dropping a box by parachute over a dry, empty plain. The camera pans
with exquisite subtlety to reveal ... a bed? Can it be a bed, in the middle
of this wilderness? We see that it is. In this hot climate, they sleep
outdoors.

As the soldier drives the agent around the island, events do not build so
much as accumulate. Mourners in a cemetery tell her women are not allowed
inside. Symbol quandary: (a) The fading patriarchy is buried there, or (b)
women cannot even die as equals? In the middle of a deserted, unpopulated
plain, the soldier brings the Jeep to a halt before a red traffic light.
Symbol quandary: (1) Outmoded laws must be ignored, or (b) in a democracy
the law must be respected everywhere?

As the woman continues her discouraging attempt to involve indifferent
islanders in the vote, we are reminded of Dr. Johnson's famous observation
in the 18th century, when women were as much without rights in England as
they are today in the Middle East. After hearing a woman deliver a sermon,
he told Mr. Boswell: "It is not done well, but one is surprised to find it
done at all."

Watching the movie, I reflected on a persistent subgenre of Iranian cinema,
in which characters drive or walk endlessly through enigmatic landscapes,
holding conversations of debatable meaning. Abbas Kiarostami's "The Taste of
Cherry" (1997), a Cannes winner much prized by many critics, not by me,
follows that pattern. "Secret Ballot" brings to it much more interest and
life. Perhaps the lack of cities, names, relationships and plots provides a
certain immunity: A film cannot be criticized for being about what it does
not contain.

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From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] LITTLE SECRETS / *** (PG)
Date: 30 Aug 2002 16:21:28 GMT

LITTLE SECRETS / *** (PG)

August 23, 2002

Emily: Evan Rachel Wood
Philip: Michael Angarano
David: David Gallagher
Pauline: Vivica A. Fox
Caroline: Jan Gardner
IDP Pictures presents a film directed by Blair Treu. Written by Jessica
Bardones. Running time: 107 minutes. Rated PG.(for thematic elements).

BY ROGER EBERT

The biggest surprise in "Little Secrets" is that Ozzie and Harriet don't
live next door. The movie takes place in an improbably perfect suburban
neighborhood where all the kids wear cute sportswear and have the kinds of
harmless problems that seem to exist only so that they can be harmless
problems. Then of course there are some Big Problems which are rendered
harmless, too. This is a very reassuring film.

The heroine of the movie, Emily (Evan Rachel Wood) is a budding young
violinist who as a sideline runs a Little Secrets stand in her back yard,
where kids can tell her their secrets at 50 cents apiece. The secrets are
then written on scraps of paper and locked in a chest.

The theological and psychological origins of her practice would be
fascinating to research. The neighborhood kids sure take it seriously. When
she's a few minutes late in opening her stand, there's a line of impatient
kids clamoring to unburden themselves. The 50-cent price tag doesn't
discourage them; these are not kids who remember the days when a quarter
used to buy something.

But what kinds of kids are they, exactly? Consider Philip and David. Philip
tells David, "Her name is Emily. Like Emily ..." "... Dickinson?" says
David. "And Emily Bronte," says Philip. Heartened as I am to know that the
grade school kids in this movie are on first-name terms with these authors,
I am nevertheless doubtful that Dickinson and Bronte will ring many bells in
the audience.

Vivica A. Fox is the only widely known star in the film, playing a violin
teacher who is wise and philosophical. Much suspense centers around Emily's
audition for the local symphony orchestra (every suburb should have one).
The problems of the kids range from a girl who hides kittens in her room to
a boy who is digging a hole to China. Larger issues, including adoption, are
eventually introduced.

I am rating this movie at three stars because it contains absolutely nothing
to object to. That in itself may be objectionable, but you will have to
decide for yourself. The film is upbeat, wholesome, chirpy, positive, sunny,
cheerful, optimistic and squeaky-clean. It bears so little resemblance to
the more complicated worlds of many members of its target audience (girls 4
to 11) that it may work as pure escapism. That it has been rated not G but
PG (for "thematic elements") is another of the arcane mysteries created by
the flywheels of the MPAA. There is not a parent on earth who would believe
this film requires "parental guidance."

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From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] ONE HOUR PHOTO / ***1/2 (R)
Date: 30 Aug 2002 16:21:31 GMT

ONE HOUR PHOTO / ***1/2 (R)

August 23, 2002

Sy Parrish: Robin Williams
Nina Yorkin: Connie Nielsen
Will Yorkin: Michael Vartan
Bill Owens: Gary Cole
Jake Yorkin: Dylan Smith
Det. Van Der Zee: Eriq LaSalle
Maya Burson: Erin Daniels
Fox Searchlight Pictures presents a film written and directed by Mark
Romanek. Running time: 98 minutes. Rated R (for sexual content and
language).

BY ROGER EBERT

"One Hour Photo" tells the story of Seymour "Sy" Parrish, who works behind
the photo counter of one of those vast suburban retail barns. He has a
bland, anonymous face, and a cheerful voice that almost conceals his
desperation and loneliness. He takes your film, develops it, and has your
photos ready in an hour. Sometimes he even gives you 5-by-7s when all you
ordered were 4-by-6s. His favorite customers are the Yorkins--Nina, Will and
cute young Jake. They've been steady customers for six years. When they
bring in their film, he makes an extra set of prints--for himself.

Sy follows an unvarying routine. There is a diner where he eats, alone,
methodically. He is an "ideal employee." He has no friends, a co-worker
observes. But the Yorkins serve him as a surrogate family, and he is their
self-appointed Uncle Sy. Only occasionally does the world get a glimpse of
the volcanic side of his personality, as when he gets into an argument with
Larry, the photo machine repairman.

The Yorkins know him by name, and are a little amused by his devotion. There
is an edge of need to his moments with them. If they were to decide to
abandon film and get one of those new digital cameras, a prudent instinct
might lead them to keep this news from Sy.

Robin Williams plays Sy, another of his open-faced, smiling madmen, like the
killer in "Insomnia." He does this so well you don't have the slightest
difficulty accepting him in the role. The first time we see Sy behind his
counter, neat, smiling, with a few extra pounds from the diner routine, we
buy him. He belongs there. He's native to retail.

The Yorkin family is at first depicted as ideal: models for an ad for their
suburban lifestyle. Nina Yorkin (Connie Nielsen), pretty and fresh-scrubbed,
has a cheery public persona. Will (Michael Vartan) is your regular clean-cut
guy. Young Jake (Dylan Smith) is cute as a picture. Mark Romanek, who wrote
and directed the film, is sneaky in the way he so subtly introduces
discordant elements into his perfect picture. A tone of voice, a
half-glimpsed book cover, a mistaken order, a casual aside ... they don't
mean much by themselves, but they add up to an ominous cloud, gathering over
the photo counter.

Much of the film's atmosphere forms through the cinematography, by Jeff
Cronenweth. His interiors at "Savmart" are white and bright, almost
aggressive. You can hear the fluorescent lights humming. Through choices
involving set design and lens choices, the One Hour Photo counter somehow
seems an unnatural distance from the other areas of the store, as if the
store shuns it, or it has withdrawn into itself. Customers approach it
across an exposed expanse of emptiness, with Sy smiling at the end of the
trail.

A man who works in a one-hour photo operation might seem to be relatively
powerless. Certainly Sy's boss thinks so. But in an era when naked baby
pictures can be interpreted as child abuse, the man with access to your
photos can cause you a lot of trouble. What would happen, for example, if
Will Yorkin is having an affair, and his mistress brings in photos to be
developed, and Uncle Sy "mistakenly" hands them to Nina Yorkin?

The movie at first seems soundly grounded in everyday reality, in the
routine of a predictable job. When Romanek departs from reality, he does it
subtly, sneakily, so that we believe what we see until he pulls the plug.
There is one moment I will not describe (in order not to ruin it) when Sy
commits a kind of social trespass that has the audience stirring with quiet
surprise: Surprise, because until they see the scene they don't realize that
his innocent, everyday act can be a shocking transgression in the wrong
context.

Watching the film, I thought of Michael Powell's great 1960 British thriller
"Peeping Tom," which was about a photographer who killed his victims with a
stiletto concealed in his camera. Sy uses a psychological stiletto, but he's
the same kind of character, the sort of man you don't much notice, who
blends in, accepted, overlooked, left alone so that his rich secret life can
flower. There is a moment in "Peeping Tom" when a shot suddenly reveals the
full depth of the character's depravity. In "One Hour Photo," a shot with a
similar purpose requires only a lot of innocent family snapshots, displayed
in a way that is profoundly creepy.

The movie has also been compared to "American Beauty," another film where
resentment, loneliness and lust fester beneath the surface of suburban
affluence. The difference, I think, is that the needs of the Kevin Spacey
character in "American Beauty," while frowned upon and even illegal, fall
generally within the range of emotions we understand. Sy Parrish is outside
that range. He was born with parts missing, and has assembled the remainder
into a person who has borrowed from the inside to make the outside look OK.

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From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] MERCI POUR LE CHOCOLAT / *** (Not rated)
Date: 30 Aug 2002 16:21:29 GMT

MERCI POUR LE CHOCOLAT / *** (Not rated)

August 23, 2002

Mika Muller-Polonski: Isabelle Huppert
Andre Polonski: Jacques Dutronc
Jeanne Pollet: Anna Mouglalis
Guillaume Polonski: Rodolphe Pauly
First Run Features presents a film directed by Claude Chabrol. Written by
Caroline Eliacheff and Chabrol, based on the novel The Chocolate Cobweb by
Charlotte Armstrong. Running time: 99 minutes. No MPAA rating. In French
with English subtitles. Opening today at the Music Box.

BY ROGER EBERT

Isabelle Huppert has the best poker face since Buster Keaton. She faces the
camera with detached regard, inviting us to imagine what she is thinking.
Since so often the thoughts of her characters run toward crime, revenge,
betrayal, lust and sadism, it is just as well she can seem so passive; an
actress who tried to portray these inner emotions would inevitably go
hurtling over the top and into the next movie.

Consider "Merci Pour le Chocolat," her new film, directed by her longtime
admirer Claude Chabrol. There is hardly any suspense about what she's up to.
The title, and the fact that it is a thriller, inspire us to regard the
movie's frequent cups of hot chocolate with as much suspicion as the
arsenic-laced coffee in Hitchcock's "Notorious." Even if an early scene
hadn't warned us that the chocolate contains a date-rape drug, we'd be wary
just because of the dispassionate way Huppert serves it. She doesn't seem
like a hostess so much as a clinician.

Huppert plays Mika Muller-Polonski, the first and third wife of the famous
pianist Andre Polonski (tired-eyed Jacques Dutronc). They were married "for
a few minutes" many years ago. After their divorce, he remarried, had a son
named Guillaume, and then lost his wife in a car crash. She apparently dozed
off while they were all visiting ... Mika.

The movie opens with the remarriage of Mika and Jacques, 18 years after
their first ceremony. The spectators look less than ecstatic. The new family
moves into Mika's vast, gloomy gothic mansion in Lausanne, paid for with the
profits from her family's chocolate company. One of the rituals is hot
chocolate at bedtime, personally prepared by Mika ("In this house, I serve
the chocolate").

An unexpected development: An attractive young piano student, Jeanne Pollet
(Anna Mouglalis), finds a clipping in her mother's papers reporting that on
the day of her birth, she was briefly switched with Guillaume. Using this as
a pretext, she calls on the Polonski family, not because she thinks she is
Andre's daughter but because she wants, she says, piano lessons. Her arrival
causes Guillaume to recede into more of a funk than usual, Mika to greet her
with the outward show of friendliness, and Andre to devote himself with
unseemly enthusiasm to her piano lessons.

Curious, isn't it, that Jeanne is a piano virtuoso, and Guillaume has a tin
ear? Thought-provoking, too, that Guillaume is not Mika's son, but the son
of her husband's second wife, who died so tragically during that visit to
.. Mika's. And interesting that Andre has taken such an interest in Jeanne.
And Mika keeps serving the hot chocolate.

There is no mystery about what Mika is doing with the hot chocolate. The
mysteries are: to whom, and why. The motives may differ. She may, indeed,
simply be amusing herself. Huppert's bland expression masks her motives to
such a degree that even when she does smile or frown, we suspect the honesty
of the expression: What is she really thinking?

Claude Chabrol is a master of domestic suspense, and he has used Huppert
before as a cold-blooded killer, notably in "Violette Noziere" (1978). What
is fascinating is how little Huppert has seemed to change in the intervening
years. She has worked ceaselessly, usually in good pictures, often with good
directors. Filmmakers seem drawn to her because of her mysterious
detachment; while many actors seek out the secrets of their characters,
Huppert keeps such secrets as she may have discovered, and invites us to
figure them out for ourselves.

The appeal of "Merci Pour le Chocolat" is not in the somewhat creaky old
poisoning plot, not in the hints of suppressed family secrets, not in the
suspense about what will happen next--but in the enigma within which Huppert
conceals her characters While all those around her plot, scheme, hope and
fear, she simply looks on, and pours the chocolate. What is she thinking?
What does she want? Who is she? Her appeal in film after film is maddening,
perverse and seductive.

Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

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From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] feardotcom / ** (R)
Date: 30 Aug 2002 16:21:22 GMT

feardotcom / ** (R)

August 30, 2002

Mike Reilly: Stephen Dorff
Jerry Houston:      Natascha McElhone
Alistair Pratt:    Stephen Rea

Warner Bros. presents a film directed by William Malone. Written by
Josephine Coyle. Based on a story by Moshe Diamant. Running time: 98
minutes. Rated R (for violence including grisly images of torture, nudity
and language).

BY ROGER EBERT

Strange, how good "feardotcom" is, and how bad. The screenplay is a mess,
and yet the visuals are so creative this is one of the rare bad films you
might actually want to see. The plot is a bewildering jumble of half-baked
ideas, from which we gather just enough of a glimmer about the story to
understand how it is shot through with contradictions and paradoxes. And yet
I watched in admiration as a self-contained nightmareformed with the
visuals. Not many movies know how to do that.

I'll get to the plot later, or maybe never. Let me talk about what I liked.
The film takes place in a city where it always rains and is nearly always
night, where even people with good jobs live in apartments that look
hammered together after an air raid. Computers and the Internet exist here,
and indeed telephones, televisions and all the other props of the present
day, but windows are broken, walls are punctured, lights flicker, streets
are deserted, and from time to time a dramatic thunderstorm threatens to
sweep everything away. This is like "Dark City" after a hurricane. It is the
kind of city where a man can walk down into a subway and be the only person
there, except for a little girl bouncing her ball against the third rail. Or
.. is the man really alone? Is that his fantasy? Whether it is or not, he
gets slammed by the next train, and the cops are startled by the expression
on his face. It looks, they agree, as if he has just seen something
terrifying. Apparently something even worse than the train. And he is
bleeding from the eyes.

The film's premise is that a Web site exists that channels negative energy
into the mind of the beholder, who self-destructs within 48 hours, a victim
of his or her deepest fear. Our first glimpse of this Web site suggests
nothing more than a reasonably well-designed horror site, with shock-wave
images of dark doorways, screaming lips, rows of knives and so forth. The
movie wisely doesn't attempt to develop the site much more than that,
relying on the reactions of the victims to imply what other terrors it
contains. And it does something else, fairly subtly: It expands the site to
encompass the entire movie, so that by the end all of the characters are
essentially inside the fatal Web experience, and we are, too.

The last 20 minutes are, I might as well say it, brilliant. Not in terms of
what happens, but in terms of how it happens, and how it looks as it
happens. The movie has tended toward the monochromatic all along, but now it
abandons all pretense of admitting the color spectrum, and slides into the
kind of tinting used in silent films: Browns alternate with blues, mostly.

The images play like homage to the best Grand Guignol traditions, to
"Nosferatu" and some of the James Whale and Jacques Tourneur pictures, and
the best moments of the Hammer horror films. Squirming victims are displayed
on the Internet by the sadistic killer, who prepares to autopsy them while
still alive; subscribers to the site, whose crime is that they want to
watch, are addressed by name and are soon paying dearly for their voyeurism.

The movie is extremely violent; it avoided the NC-17 rating and earned an R,
I understand, after multiple trims and appeals, and even now it is one of
the most graphic horror films I've seen. (The classification is "for
violence including grisly images of torture, nudity and language," the
ratings board explains, but you'll be disappointed if you hope to see grisly
images of language).

Stephen Dorff and Natascha McElhone star, as a cop and a public health
inspector, and Stephen Rea, who was so unexpectedly deceived in "The Crying
Game," plays the host of the Web site and the torturer. The movie keeps
trying to make some kind of connection between Rea and the ghostly little
girl, who was his first victim, but if the site is her revenge, why is he
running it? And how can what happens to him in the end not have happened
before? Never mind. Disregard the logic of the plot. Don't even go there.
Don't think to ask how the Internet can channel thoughts and commands into
the minds of its users. Disregard the dialogue (sample: "We will provide a
lesson that reducing relationships to an anonymous electronic impulse is a
perversion").

This is a movie that cannot be taken seriously on the narrative level. But
look at it. Just look at it. Wear some of those Bose sound-defeating
earphones into the theater, or turn off the sound when you watch the DVD. If
the final 20 minutes had been produced by a German impressionist in the
1920s, we'd be calling it a masterpiece. All credit to director William
Malone, cinematographer Christian Sebaldt, production designer Jerome Latour
and art directors Regime Freise and Markus Wollersheim.

Now. Do I recommend the film? Not for the majority of filmgoers, who will
listen to the dialogue, and will expect a plot, and will be angered by the
film's sins against logic (I do not even mention credibility). But if you
have read this far because you are intrigued, because you can understand the
kind of paradox I am describing, then you might very well enjoy
"feardotcom." I give the total movie two stars, but there are some four-star
elements that deserve a better movie. You have to know how to look for them,
but they're there.

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