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From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] POOLHALL JUNKIES / *** (R)
Date: 01 Mar 2003 16:51:03 GMT

POOLHALL JUNKIES / *** (R)

February 28, 2003

Johnny:    Gregory "Mars" Callahan
Joe:    Chazz Palminteri
Brad:    Rick Schroder
Nick:    Rod Steiger
Danny:    Michael Rosenbaum
Tara:    Alison Eastwood
Mike:    Christopher Walken

Gold Circle Films and Samuel Goldwyn Films present a film directed by Mars
Callahan. Written by Callahan and Chris Corso. Running time: 95 minutes.
Rated R (for language and some sexual content).

BY ROGER EBERT

One of the things I like best about "Poolhall Junkies" is its lack of grim
desperation. Its characters know that pool is a game and do not lead lives
in which every monent is a headbutt withe fate. Yes, there are fights,
weapons are drawn and old scores are settled, but the hero's most important
bet is made to help his girl get a job she wants, the two archrivals are
clearly destined to become friends and Christopher Walken gets to deliver
one of his famous monologues. He starts out, "Have you ever watched one of
those animal channels?" and we are grinning already.

This is a young man's film, humming with the fun of making it. It was
directed and co-written by Gregory "Mars" Callahan, who also plays the
leading role, Johnny Doyle, who was so good when he was a kid that "the cue
was part of his arm and the balls had eyes." He never wanted to grow up to
be a pool hustler. He wanted to join the pro tour. He's a good player, but
he's not one of those nuts whose eyeballs spin like pinwheels when he's
lining up a shot.

Johnny was more or less abandoned by his parents and adopted by Joe (Chazz
Palminteri), a manager of young pool talent. Joe likes taking his cut from
the kid's earnings, and Johnny grows up before he discovers that Joe
destroyed his invitation to join the pros. That leads to a scene in which
Joe breaks the kid's hand, but not his thumb, and then seeks more revenge by
taking a new protege named Brad (Rick Schroder) under his management. Joe
also involves Johnny's kid brother Danny (Michael Rosenbaum) in big trouble.

Johnny has a girlfriend named Tara (Alison Eastwood) who's in law school and
doesn't approve of pool hustling, so Johnny gets a job as a construction
carpenter, but the nails do not have eyes. Johnny and Tara are invited to a
party at the home of a rich lawyer, where they meet her Uncle Mike (Walken),
one of the few actors in movie history who always draws a quiet rustle of
pleasure from the audience the first time he appears on the screen.

And so on. The plot you are already generally familiar with. There will be
high-stakes games of pool with lives and fortunes, etc., hanging in the
balance. That goes with the territory. "Poolhall Junkies" is a pleasure not
because it rivets us with unbearable poolhall suspense but because it finds
a voluptuous enjoyment in the act of moviemaking. You get the sense that
"Mars" Callahan, who I have never met, woke during the night to hug himself
that he was getting to make this movie.

"Poolhall Junkies" has big moments of inspiration, like the Walken speech
and a couple of other monologues. It has movie-fan moments, as when Rod
Steiger, as the manager of a poolhall, gets to stick out his lower jaw and
lay it on the line (this was Steiger's final role). It has Callahan as a
serious kid with chiseled dark Irish features, who is cool like McQueen was
cool--no big thing, just born that way.

And then it has, well, this corny stuff that Callahan kept in the screenplay
because he's no doubt the kind of guy who doesn't like to walk into a bar
without a joke to tell. There's a lawyer joke ("What do you call it when you
have 10,000 lawyers buried up to their necks in the sand?"). And the oldest
trick bet in the book ("I'll bet you I can tell you where you got your
shoes"). And a barroom hustle recycled directly out of Steve Buscemi's
"Trees Lounge" ("I'll bet I can drink both of these pints faster than you
can drink both of those shots"). I mean, come on.

These little hustles set up bigger ones which are also the oldest gags in
the book, but the movie delivers on them and has fun while it's doing it.
Callahan plays the character of Johnny Doyle not to persuade you he's the
meanest mother in the city, but simply to demonstrate that it would not be
wise to bet large sums of money against him in the game of pool. There is an
innocence at work here that reminds me of young Sylvester Stallone, who gave
Rocky Balboa pet turtles named Cuff and Link.

Is this a great movie? Not at all. Is it more or less consistently
entertaining? Yes. Do Walken and Palminteri do things casually that most
actors could not do at all? Yes. Did I feel afterward as if I had been
dragged through the blood and grime of the mean streets? No, but I felt like
I had a good time at the movies.

Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

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From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] AMANDLA! / *** (PG-13)
Date: 01 Mar 2003 16:50:59 GMT

AMANDLA! / *** (PG-13)

February 28, 2003

Featuring: Hugh Masekela, Abdullah Ibrahim, Miriam Makeba and Vusi
Mahlasela.

Artisan Entertainment presents a documentary directed by Lee Hirsch. Running
time: 105 minutes. Rated PG-13 (for some images of violence and for
momentary language).

BY ROGER EBERT

'We'll catch the early staff boat and get there before the tourists arrive,"
A.M. Kathrada told my wife and me in Cape Town in November 2001. We were
going the next morning to visit Robben Island, where for 27 years Nelson
Mandela and others accused of treason, including Kathrada, were held by the
South African apartheid government. We were having dinner with Kathrada, who
is of Indian descent, and his friend Barbara Hogan, who won a place in
history as the first South African white woman convicted as a traitor.

In those days it was easy to become a traitor. "Amandla!," a new documentary
about the role of music in the overthrow of apartheid, begins with the
exhumation of the bones of Vuyisile Mini, who wrote a song named "Beware
Verwoerd!" ("The Black Man Is Coming!"), aimed at the chief architect of
South Africa's racist politics of separation. Mini was executed in 1964 and
buried in a pauper's grave.

Robben Island lies some 20 miles offshore from Cape Town, and the view back
toward the slopes of Table Mountain is breathtaking. When I was a student at
the University of Cape Town in 1965, friends pointed it out, a speck across
the sea, and whispered that Mandela was imprisoned there. It would be almost
25 years until he was released and asked by F.W. de Klerk, Verwoerd's last
white successor, to run for president. No one in 1965 or for many years
later believed there would be regime change in South Africa without a bloody
civil war, but there was, and Cranford's, my favorite used bookshop, can now
legally be owned by black South Africans; it still has a coffeepot and
crooked stairs to the crowded upstairs room.

Kathrada, now in his early 70s, is known by everyone on the staff boat. At
the Robben Island Store, where we buy our tickets, he introduces us to the
manager--a white man who used to be one of his guards and smuggled forbidden
letters ("and even the occasional visitor") on and off the island. On the
island, we walk under a crude arch that welcomes us in Afrikaans and
English, and enter the prison building, which is squat and unlovely, thick
with glossy lime paint. The office is not yet open and Kathrada cannot find
a key.

"First I am locked in, now I am locked out," he observes cheerfully.
Eventually the key is discovered and we arrive at the object of our visit,
the cell where Mandela lived. It is about long enough to lie down in. "For
the first seven years," Kathrada said, "we didn't have cots. You got used to
sleeping on the floor."

White political prisoners like Barbara Hogan were kept in a Pretoria prison.
There were not a lot of Indian prisoners, and Kathrada was jailed with
Mandela's African group.

"They issued us different uniforms," he observed dryly. "I was an Indian and
was issued with long pants. Mandela and the other Africans were given short
pants. They called them 'boys' and gave them boys' pants." A crude
nutritional chart hung on the wall, indicating that Indians were given a few
hundred calories more to eat every day because South African scientists had
somehow determined their minimal caloric requirements was a little greater
than those of blacks.

Weekdays, all of the men worked in a quarry, hammering rocks into gravel. No
work was permitted on Sunday in the devoutly religious Afrikaans society.
The prisoners were fed mostly whole grains, a few vegetables, a little
fruit, very little animal protein. "As a result of this diet and exercise,
plus all of the sunlight in the quarry," Kathrada smiled, "we were in good
health and most of us still are. The sun on the white rocks and the quarry
dust were bad for our eyes, however."

During the 1970s, the apartheid government clamped such a tight lid on
opposition that it seemed able to hold on forever. The uplifting film
"Amandla!" argues that South Africa's music of protest played a crucial role
in its eventual overthrow. Mandela's African National Congress was
nonviolent from its birth until the final years of apartheid, when after an
internal struggle one branch began to commit acts of bombing and sabotage
(murder and torture had always been weapons of the whites). Music was the
ANC's most dangerous weapon, and we see footage of streets lined with tens
of thousands of marchers, singing and dancing, expressing an unquenchable
spirit.

"We lost the country in the first place, to an extent, because before we
fight, we sing," Hugh Masekela, the great South African jazzman, tells the
filmmakers. "The Zulus would sing before they went into battle, so the
British and Boers knew where they were and when they were coming." There was
a song about Nelson Mandela that was sung at every rally, even though
mention of his name was banned, and toward the end of the film there is a
rally to welcome him after his release from prison, and he sings along. It
is one of those moments where words cannot do justice to the joy.

"Amandla!" (the Xhosa word means "power") was nine years in the making,
directed by Lee Hirsch, produced with Sherry Simpson. It combines archival
footage, news footage, reports from political exiles like Masekela and his
former wife Miriam Makeba, visits with famous local singers, an appearance
by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and a lot of music. The soundtrack CD could
become popular like "Buena Vista Social Club."

After the relatives of Vuyisile Mini disinter his bones, he is reburied in
blessed ground under a proper memorial, and then his family holds a party.
Among the songs they sing is "Beware Verwoerd!" It is not a nostalgia piece,
not a dusty, not yet. They sing it not so much in celebration as in triumph
and relief.

Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

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From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] ALL THE REAL GIRLS / **** (R)
Date: 01 Mar 2003 16:50:57 GMT

ALL THE REAL GIRLS / **** (R)

February 28, 2003

Paul:    Paul Schneider
Noel:    Zooey Deschanel
Elvira Fine:    Patricia Clarkson
Leland:    Benjamin Mouton
Bo:    Maurice Compte
Bust-Ass:    Danny McBride
Tip:    Shea Whigham

Sony Pictures Classics presents a film written and directed by David Gordon
Green. Running time: 108 minutes. Rated R (for language and some sexuality).

BY ROGER EBERT

We like to be in love because it allows us to feel idealistic about
ourselves. The other person ennobles, inspires, redeems. Our lover deserves
the most wonderful person alive, and that person is ourselves. Paul (Paul
Schneider), the hero of "All the Real Girls," has spent his young manhood
having sex with any girl who would have sex with him and some who were still
making up their minds, but when he meets Noel he doesnÆt want to rush
things. He wants to wait because this time is special.

Noel (Zooey Deschanel), who has spent the last several years in a girls'
boarding school, is crazy in love with him and is a virgin. She is 18, an
age when all the hormones in our bodies form ranks and hurl themselves
against the ramparts of our inhibitions. That they can discuss these matters
with romantic idealism does not entirely work as a substitute.

"All the Real Girls," David Gordon Green's second film, is too subtle and
perceptive, and knows too much about human nature, to treat their lack of
sexual synchronicity as if it supplies a plot. Another kind of movie would
be entirely about whether they have sex. But Green, who feels tenderly for
his vulnerable characters, cares less about sex than about feelings and wild
youthful idealism. He comes from North Carolina, the state where young
Thomas Wolfe once prowled the midnight campus, so in love with life that he
uttered wild goat cries at the moon.

Most movies about young love trivialize and cheapen it. Their cynical makers
have not felt true love in many years and mock it, perhaps out of jealousy.
They find something funny in a 20-year-old who still doesn't realize he is
doomed to grow up to be as jaded as they are. Green is 27, old enough to be
jaded, but he has the soul of a romantic poet. Wordsworth, after all, was 36
when he published The Rainbow comes and goes, And lovely is the Rose .

How many guys that age would have that kind of nerve today? Green knows
there are nights when lovers want simply to wrap their arms around each
other and celebrate their glorious destinies.

He centers these feelings on characters who live in the same kind of rusty,
overgrown Southern mill town he used for his great first film, "George
Washington" (2000). His characters grew up together. They look today on the
faces of their first contemporaries. Paul's best friend, Tip (Shea Whigham),
has been his best friend almost from birth. That he is Noel's brother is a
complication, since Tip knows all about Paul's other girls. And more than a
complication, because your best friend's sister embodies a history that
includes your entire puberty, and may be the first person you noticed had
turned into a girl.

Green likes to listen to his characters talk. They don't have much to do.
Some of them work at the few remaining mill jobs, and we learn some details
about their lives (an hourly sprinkler system washes the fibers out of the
air). They stand around and sit around and idly discuss the mysteries of
life, which often come down to whether someone did something, or what they
were thinking of when they did it, or if they are ever going to do it. I had
relatives who lived in towns like these, and I know that when you go to the
salad bar it includes butterscotch pudding.

Paul's single mom, Elvira (Patricia Clarkson), works as a clown at parties
and in the children's wards of hospitals. Some critics have mocked this
occupation, but let me tell you something: A small-town woman with a family
to feed can make better money with a Bozo wig and a putty nose than she can
working unpaid overtime at Wal-Mart. People will pay you nothing to clean
their houses, but they pay the going rate when their kids have birthdays.
The fact that Green knows this and a lot of people don't is an indicator of
his comfort with his characters.

Green's dialogue has a kind of unaffected, flat naturalism. ("You feel like
waffles or French toast?" "No, the places I go are usually not that fancy.")
That doesn't mean their speech is not poetic. His characters don't use big
words, but they express big ideas. Their words show a familiarity with hard
times, disappointment, wistfulness; they are familiar with all the concepts
on television but do not lead lives where they apply.

Two emotional upheavals strike at the narrative. One is inevitable: Tip is
enraged to learn that Paul and Noel are dating. The other is not inevitable,
and I will not even hint about it. There is a scene where it is discussed in
a bowling alley, using only body language, in long shot.

The thing about real love is, if you lose it, you can also lose your ability
to believe in it, and that hurts even more. Especially in a town where real
love may be the only world-class thing that ever happens.

Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

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From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] GERRY / *** (R)
Date: 01 Mar 2003 16:51:01 GMT

GERRY / *** (R)

February 28, 2003

Gerry:    Casey Affleck
Gerry:    Matt Damon

ThinkFilm presents a film directed by Gus Van Sant. Written and edited by
Casey Affleck, Matt Damon and Van Sant. Running time: 103 minutes. Rated R
(for language).

BY ROGER EBERT

Not long after Gus Van Sant got the bright idea of doing a shot-by-shot
remake of HitchcockÆs "Psycho" in color, I ran into him at the Calcutta Film
Festival and asked him why in the hell heÆd come up with that bright idea.
"So that no one else would have to," he replied serenely. With his new film,
"Gerry," he has removed another project from the future of the cinema and
stored it prudently in the past. He is like an adult removing dangerous toys
from the reach of reckless kids.

"Gerry" stars Casey Affleck and Matt Damon as two friends named Gerry who go
for a walk in the desert and get lost. There, I've gone and given away the
plot. They walk and walk and walk. For a while they talk, and then they walk
in silence, and then they stagger, and then they look like those New Yorker
cartoons of guys lost in the desert who reach out a desperate hand toward a
distant mirage of Jiffy Lube. It would have been too cruel for Van Sant to
add Walter Brennan on the sound- track, listenin' to the age-old story of
the shiftin', whisperin' sands.

A movie like this doesn't come along every day. I am glad I saw it. I saw it
at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival, where a fair number of people walked
out. I would say half. I was reminded of advice once given me by the veteran
Chicago movie exhibitor Oscar Brotman: "Roger, if nothing has happened by
the end of the first reel, nothing is going to happen." If I were to advise
you to see "Gerry," you might have a good case on your hands for a
class-action suit.

And yet, and yet--the movie is so gloriously bloody-minded, so perverse in
its obstinacy, that it rises to a kind of mad purity. The longer the movie
ran, the less I liked it and the more I admired it. The Gerrys are stuck out
there, and it looks like no plot device is going to come along and save
them. The horizon is barren for 360 degrees of flat wasteland. We have lost
most of the original eight hours of "Greed" (1925), Erich von Stroheim's
film that also ends with its heroes lost in Death Valley, but after seeing
"Gerry," I think we can call off the search for the missing footage.

The screenplay for "Gerry," by Affleck, Damon and van Sant, is not without
humor. Before they realize the enormity of their predicament, the two Gerrys
discuss this dumb contestant they saw on "Jeopardy," and Affleck expresses
frustration about a video game he has been playing (he conquered Thebes,
only to discover he needed 12 horses and had but 11).

One morning one of the characters finds himself standing on top of a tall
rock and is not sure how he got there, or whether he should risk breaking an
ankle by jumping down. If I ever get lost in Death Valley, it will be more
or less exactly like this.

After seeing the film at Sundance, as I reported at the time, I got in a
conversation with three women who said they thought it was "existential."

"Existential?" I asked.

"Like, we have to chose whether to live or die."

"They do not have a choice to make," I said. "They're lost and they can't
find their car. They have no water and no food."

"What I think," said one of the women, "is that it's like Samuel Beckett's
'Waiting for Godot,' except without the dialogue."

"It has dialogue," her friend said.

"But not serious dialogue."

"The dialogue in 'Godot' is not serious," I said. "At least, it is not
intended by the speakers to be serious."

"In 'Godot,' " the women said, "they wait and wait and Godot never comes. In
'Gerry,' they walk and walk and they never get anywhere."

"There you have it," I said.

I arrive at the end of this review having done my duty as a critic. I have
described the movie accurately and you have a good idea what you are in for
if you go to see it. Most of you will not. I cannot argue with you. Some of
you will--the brave and the curious. You embody the spirit of the man who
first wondered what it would taste like to eat an oyster.

Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

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From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] TILL HUMAN VOICES WAKE US / * 1/2 (R)
Date: 01 Mar 2003 16:51:04 GMT

TILL HUMAN VOICES WAKE US / * 1/2 (R)

February 28, 2003

Sam Franks:    Guy Pearce
Ruby :    Helena Bonham Carter
Young Sam:    Lindley Joyner
Silvy:    Brooke Harman
Paramount Classics presents a film written and directed by Michael Petroni.
Running time: 97 minutes. Rated R (for a scene of sexuality).

BY ROGER EBERT

"Till Human Voices Wake Us" could have been a poem by Edgar Allan Poe, a
short story by Stephen King or a "Twilight Zone" episode by Rod Serling. Poe
would have liked the part where the heroine drifts on her back down the
river under the starry skies. King would have the hero gasping when he finds
only his coat in the boat. And Serling would have informed us, "A man named
T.S. Eliot once hinted that you can drown in your sleep and not have the
nightmare until you wake up in the morning."

None of these artists would have, however, made this movie. That is because
film makes it literal, and the story is too slight to bear up under the
weight. "The Twilight Zone" could have done it as video, because it would
have represented 20 minutes of running time (instead of 97) and been
photographed in that stylized 1950s black-and-white television purity where
the exterior shot of every residential street seemed to leave room for a
mushroom cloud.

The movie tells a story which kept its key hidden for a long time in the
Australian version, which began with two young people in a rural district
and only switched over, much later, to a story about two adults (Guy Pearce
and Helena Bonham Carter). At least in Australia you thought for half an
hour or so that the whole story was about the teenagers (Lindley Joyner and
Brooke Harman). In the version shown in the rest of the world, the two
stories are intercut, which of course gives away the game, since Young Sam
Franks grows up to be Sam Franks, and therefore, according to the Principle
of the Unassigned Character, the mysterious girl he meets on the train must
therefore be ...

I am not giving anything away. This is the first movie I have seen where the
plot device is revealed by the fact of the first flashback. Young Sam has
journeyed on into adulthood with a heavy burden of guilt, which he hints at
in a lecture he gives on psychology. Freud will be of no help to him,
however. Maybe Jung would have some ideas, or Dionne Warwick.

The title comes from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," by Eliot, which
is the favorite poem of--well, I was about to say both women. It looks to me
like Silby, the young woman, is reading from the first edition, which would
have been possible in Australia in those days. So is the older woman, named
Ruby, at a time when the book was worth about $35,000. A book like that, you
take the paperback when you go swimming.

But I am being way too cynical about a film that after all only wants to be
sad and bittersweet, redemptive and healing. It doesn't really matter what
your literal interpretation is for what happens in that adult summer, since
there is a sense in which it doesn't really happen anyway, and the result
would be the same no matter what the explanation.

There must still be a kind of moony young adolescent girl for which this
film would be enormously appealing, if television has not already
exterminated the domestic example of that species. The last surviving
example in the wild was run over last week by a snowmobile in Yellowstone.

Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

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From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] CRADLE 2 THE GRAVE / ** (R)
Date: 01 Mar 2003 16:51:00 GMT

CRADLE 2 THE GRAVE / ** (R)

February 28, 2003

Su:    Jet Li
Fait:    DMX
Ling:    Mark Dacascos
Daria:    Gabrielle Union
Tommy:    Anthony Anderson
Sona:    Kelly Hu
Archie:    Tom Arnold

Warner Bros. Pictures presents a film directed by Andrzej Bartkowiak.
Written by John O'Brien and Channing Gibson. Running time: 100 minutes.
Rated R (for violence, language and some sexual content).

BY ROGER EBERT

The funniest scene in "Cradle 2 the Grave" comes over the end credits, as
supporting actors Tom Arnold and Anthony Anderson debate how the story
should be filmed. This scene, which feels ad-libbed, is smart and self-aware
in a way the movie never is. The film itself is on autopilot and overdrive
at the same time: It does nothing original, but does it very rapidly.

Jet Li and DMX are the stars, both ready for better scripts, playing enemies
who become buddies when it turns out they have a common antagonist. DMX
plays a character pronounced "fate" but spelled "Fait," which would give you
a neat pun you could use in French class, if the spelling of his name were
ever seen. Jet Li plays a boy named Su. After Fait and his accomplices break
into a Los Angeles diamond vault, their caper is interrupted by Su, who is
working for the Taiwanese police.

Bad guys end up with the diamonds and kidnap Fait's beloved little daughter,
in a plot which started out as a remake of Fritz Lang's "M" (1931). The
journey from "M" to "2" was downhill all the way. The result is a Joel
Silver nonstop action thriller, well-produced, slickly directed, sure to
please slackjaws who are not tired to death of this kind of material
recycled again and again and again.

It makes at least a sincere attempt to one-up previous
cop-crook-buddy-sex-chase-caper-martial arts thrillers. Jet Li doesn't
merely take on a lot of opponents at the same time, he gets in a fight with
all of the competitors in an illegal Extreme Fighting club. He doesn't
merely do stunts, but drops in free-fall from one high-rise balcony to the
next. Tom Arnold doesn't merely play a black-market arms dealer, he supplies
a tank. The black diamonds are not merely black diamonds, but are actually a
superweapon that would bring down the cost of Weapons of Mass Destruction
into the price range of a nice private jet. There is not merely a hood who
has special privileges in jail, but one with a private cell where the prison
guards melt butter for his fresh lobster while he waits impatiently. There
is not merely a chase, but one involving an All-Terrain Vehicle, which is
driven up the stairs of a store and then jumps from one rooftop to another
more or less for the hell of it. And the girl is not merely sexy, but
Gabrielle Union.

I can see that this movie fills a need. I have stopped feeling the need. The
problem with action movies is how quickly state-of-the-art becomes
off-the-shelf. We yearn for wit and intelligence, and a movie like "Shanghai
Knights" looks sophisticated by comparison.

"Cradle 2 the Grave" will, however, be a box office hit, I imagine, and that
will be demographically interesting because it demonstrates that a savvy
producer like Silver now believes a white star is completely unnecessary in
a mega-budget action picture. At one point, there were only white stars.
Then they got to have black buddies. Then they got to have Asian buddies.
Then "Rush Hour" proved that black and Asian buddies could haul in the mass
audience. Long ago a movie like this used a black character for comic
relief. Then an Asian character. Now the white character is the comic
relief. May the circle be unbroken.

Not only is Gabrielle Union the female lead, but Kelly Hu is the second
female lead, slapping the kid around and engaging in a catfight with Union.
Lots of mild sex in the movie, although an opening scene assumes a security
guard is a very slow study. First Gabrielle Union goes in to flirt with him
so he won't look at the TV security monitors. When he turns out to be gay,
she sends in the second team, Anthony Anderson, to flirt with him. When two
people try to pick you up in 10 minutes and you're a security guard on duty,
do you suspect anything?

It's a common complaint that the cops are never around during sensational
movie chase scenes and shoot-outs. Dozens of squad cars turn up twice in
"Cradle 2 the Grave," however--once when they're told a robbery is in
progress, and again at the end, when a battle involving guns, rockets,
explosives and a tank blowing a helicopter out of the sky inspires an alert
response after only 20 minutes.

Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

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From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] THE STONERAFT / *** (Not rated)
Date: 07 Mar 2003 15:15:38 GMT

THE STONERAFT / *** (Not rated)

March 7, 2003

Joana:    Ana Padrao
Jose:     Gabino Diego
Maria:    Iciar Bollain
Joaquim: Diogo Infante
Pharmacist:    Federico Luppi

Holland Film presents a film directed by George Sluizer. Written by Yvette
Biro. Based on the novel by Jose Saramago. No MPAA rating (unobjectionable
for teens and adults). Running time: 117 minutes. In Spanish with English
subtitles. Screening Saturday 8 p.m. and March 13 at 8:15 p.m. at the Gene
Siskel Film Center as part of the European Film Festival.

BY ROGER EBERT

Certain unexpected shots send an uneasy shudder through the audience. In
"Close Encounters" there was the pickup truck waiting at the train crossing
when two headlights appeared in the rear window and then, inexplicably,
began to rise vertically. In George Sluizer's new film "The Stoneraft," a
dog trots doggily through a country field, and then for no reason leaps
across a patch of ground, and continues on his doggy way. A second later, a
crack opens up in the ground right where he jumped. How did the dog know?

The film is a low-key disaster picture, made about characters who are
inward, thoughtful, talkative. It's about the Iberian peninsula breaking
loose from Europe and sending Spain and Portugal very quickly out into the
Atlantic toward a collision with the Azores.

Like all disaster movies, it follows the larger story through several
smaller ones. There are five of them, drawn together finally by the dog.
Jose (Gabino Diego) discovers that he is being followed everywhere by a
flock of birds. Joana (Ana Padrao) uses a stick to idly trace a line in the
earth, and finds she cannot erase the line. Jose (Gabino Diego) picks up a
heavy stone and heaves it into the sea, only to watch amazed as it skips
over the waves like a pebble. Maria (Iciar Bollain) starts to unravel a
knitted blue sock that has gone wrong, and discovers that her task is never
done: "No matter how long I work, there is still more wool." An older man
named Pedro (Federico Luppi) can feel the earth trembling even if no one
else can.

These people end up in an increasingly crowded Citroen 2CV, driving toward
the collision coast as crowds flee in the opposite direction. Eventually the
car breaks down and they switch to a horse cart. Some villages are being
looted by mobs; in others, people dance in the streets, for tomorrow they
may die.

Television covers the fallout. Britain reasserts its claim to Gibraltar.
Americans arrive to try to close the widening rift with cables and
earth-moving machinery. Governments resign. No one has an explanation,
although many believe the film's five heroes may have had something to do
with it.

Sluizer is the same director who made "The Vanishing" (1993), one of the
best thrillers ever made, about a man whose wife disappears at a highway
rest stop. He later remade it in a Hollywood version that vulgarized his own
material. This time, he has reversed the process, taking the tacky American
disaster movie and translating it into a quieter and more elegant European
version.

It's amusing how few special effects he gets away with. Two entire nations
break off from Europe and set sail, and he covers it with a trench in the
ground, a flock of birds, a ball of blue wool and a trained dog. The effect
is uncanny and haunting, and I was reminded a little of "On the Beach"
(1959), in which the nuclear destruction of the Northern Hemisphere is
observed from Australia via low-tech short-wave broadcasts and hearsay
reports.

The movie is meant partly as satire; after years of reports about nations
breaking away from the EU, here are two that literally do. There's some
social observation: Why does the public assume the man followed by birds
represents the cause, not the solution? Much of the story is told at the
pace of a leisurely day in the country, as the five characters and the dog
muse about the curious turn of events. Is it possible that the small actions
of these people could have set into motion the partitioning of
subcontinents? After all, doesn't chaos theory teach us that the beating of
a butterfly's wings in Asia could theoretically begin a chain of events
leading to a hurricane in ... the Azores, wasn't it?

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From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] TEARS OF THE SUN / *** (R)
Date: 07 Mar 2003 15:15:21 GMT

TEARS OF THE SUN / *** (R)

March 7, 2003

A. K. Waters:    Bruce Willis
Dr. Lena Hendricks:    Monica Bellucci
Atkins:    Cole Hauser
Lake:    Johnny Messner
Idriss Sadique:    Malick Bowens
Ellis Pettigrew:     Eamonn Walker

Sony Pictures presents a film directed by Antoine Fuqua. Written by Patrick
Cirillo and Alex Lasker. Running time: 121 minutes. Rated R (for strong war
violence, some brutality and language).

BY ROGER EBERT

"Tears of the Sun" is a film constructed out of rain, cinematography and the
face of bruce willis. These materials are sufficient to build a film almost
as good as if there had been a better screenplay. In a case like this, the
editor often deserves the credit, for concealing what is not there with the
power of what remains.

The movie tells the story of a Navy Seals unit that is dropped into a
Nigerian civil war zone to airlift four U.S. nationals to safety. They all
work at the same mission hospital. The priest and two nuns refuse to leave.
The doctor, widow of an American, is also hostile at first ("Get those guns
out of my operating room!"), but then she agrees to be saved if she can also
bring her patients. She cannot. There is no room on the helicopters for them
and finally Lieut. Waters (Bruce Willis) wrestles her aboard.

But then he surprises himself. As the chopper circles back over the scene,
they see areas already set afire by arriving rebel troops. He cannot quite
meet the eyes of the woman, Dr. Lena Hendricks (Monica Bellucci). "Let's
turn it around," Willis says. They land, gather about 20 patients who are
well enough to walk, and call for the helicopters to return.

But he has disobeyed direct orders, his superior will not risk the choppers,
and they will all have to walk through the jungle to Cameroon to be rescued.
Later, when it is clear Willis' decision has placed his men and mission in
jeopardy, one of his men asks, "Why'd you turn it around?" He replies: "When
I figure that out, I'll let you know." And later: "It's been so long since
I've done a good thing--the right thing."

There are some actors who couldn't say that dialogue without risking
laughter from the audience. Willis is not one of them. His face smeared with
camouflage and glistening with rain, his features as shadowed as Marlon
Brando's in "Apocalypse Now," he seems like a dark violent spirit sent to
rescue them from one hell, only to lead them into another. If we could fully
understand how he does what he does, we would know a great deal about why
some actors can carry a role that would destroy others. Casting directors
must spend a lot of time thinking about this.

The story is very simple, really. Willis and his men must lead the doctor
and her patients through the jungle to safety. Rebel troops pursue them.
It's a question of who can walk faster or hide better; that's why it's
annoying that Dr. Hendricks is constantly telling Waters, "My people have to
rest!" Presumably (a) her African patients from this district have some
experience at walking long distances through the jungle, and (b) she knows
they are being chased by certain death, and can do the math.

Until it descends into mindless routine action in the climactic scenes,
"Tears of the Sun" is essentially an impressionistic nightmare, directed by
Antoine Fuqua, the director who emerged with the Denzel Washington cop
picture "Training Day." His cinematographers, Mauro Fiore and Keith Solomon,
create a visual world of black-green saturated wetness, often at night, in
which characters swim in and out of view as the face of Willis remains their
implacable focus point. There are few words; Willis scarcely has 100 in the
first hour. It's all about the conflict between a trained professional
soldier and his feelings. There is a subtext of attraction between the
soldier and the woman doctor (who goes through the entire film without
thinking to button the top of her blouse), but it is wisely left as a
subtext.

This film, in this way, from beginning to end, might have really amounted to
something. I intuit "input" from producers, studio executives, story
consultants and the like, who found it their duty to dumb it down by
cobbling together a conventional action climax. The last half hour of "Tears
of the Sun," with its routine gun battles, explosions, machine-gun bursts,
is made from off-the-shelf elements. If we can see this sort of close combat
done well in a film that is really about it, like Mel Gibson's "We Were
Soldiers," why do we have to see it done merely competently, in a movie that
is not really about it?

Where the screenplay originally intended to go, I cannot say, but it's my
guess that at an earlier stage it was more thoughtful and sad, more
accepting of the hopelessness of the situation in Africa, where "civil war"
has become the polite term for genocide. The movie knows a lot about Africa,
lets us see that, then has to pretend it doesn't.

Willis, for example, has a scene in the movie where, as a woman approaches a
river, he emerges suddenly from beneath the water to grab her, silence her,
and tell her he will not hurt her. This scene is laughable, but effective,
Laughable, because (a) hiding under the water and breathing through a reed,
how can the character know the woman will approach the river at precisely
that point? and (b) since he will have to spend the entire mission in the
same clothes, is it wise to soak all of his gear when staying dry is an
alternative?

Yet his face, so fearsome in camouflage, provides him with a sensational
entrance and the movie with a sharp shudder of surprise. There is a way in
which movies like "Tears of the Sun" can be enjoyed for their very texture.
For the few words Willis uses, and the way he uses them. For the
intelligence of the woman doctor, whose agenda is not the same as his. For
the camaraderie of the Navy Seal unit, which follows its leader even when he
follows his conscience instead of orders. For the way the editor, Conrad
Buff, creates a minimalist mood in setup scenes of terse understatement; he
doesn't hurry, he doesn't linger. If only the filmmakers had been allowed to
follow the movie where it wanted to go--into some existential heart of
darkness, I suspect--instead of detouring into the suburbs of safe Hollywood
convention.

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From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] BRINGING DOWN THE HOUSE / ** (PG-13)
Date: 07 Mar 2003 15:15:19 GMT

BRINGING DOWN THE HOUSE / ** (PG-13)

March 7, 2003

Peter Sanderson:    Steve Martin
Charlene Morton:    Queen Latifah
Howie Rosenthal:    Eugene Levy
Mrs. Arness:    Joan Plowright
Kate:    Jean Smart
Sarah Sanderson:    Kimberly J. Brown
Georgey Sanderson:    Angus T. Jones

Touchstone Pictures presents a film directed by Adam Shankman. Written by
Jason Filardi. Running time: 105 minutes. Rated PG-13 (for language, sexual
humor and drug material).

BY ROGER EBERT

I confess I expected Steve Martin and Queen Latifah to fall in love in
"Bringing Down the House." That they avoid it violates all the laws of
economical screenplay construction, since they are constantly thrown
together, they go from hate to affection, and they get drunk together one
night and tear up the living room together, which in movies of this kind is
usually the closer.

But, no, all they fall into is Newfound Respect, which, in a world of
high-performance star vehicles, is the mini-van. Eugene Levy is brought off
the bench to console the Queen, and Martin ends up back with his divorced
wife (Jean Smart), who exists only so that he can go back to her. These two
couples had better never double date, because under the table Queen and
Steve are going to have their socks up each other's pants.

Why, I asked myself, is their mutual sexual attraction disguised as
roughhouse, when they are the stars and movie convention demands that they
get it on? There isn't a shred of chemistry between Latifah and Levy (who
likes the Queen's wildness and is infatuated with her cleavage, which is
understandable but shallow--his infatuation, not her cleavage). I think it's
because the movie, co-produced by Latifah, was Making a Point, which is that
the Rich White Lawyer had better learn to Accept this Bitch on Her Own Terms
instead of Merely Caving in to Her Sex Appeal. This may be a point worth
making, but not in a comedy.

I use the word "bitch" after some hesitation, to make a point: The movie is
all about different ethnic styles of speech. It uses the B-word constantly
(along, of course, with lots of "hos"), and I argue that since the MPAA
rates the "language" PG-13, I can use it in a review. You kids under 13 who
are reading this better be getting parental guidance from a POS.

Emergency definition: POS (n., slang). Abbreviation used in teenage chat
rooms, warning person at other end: "Parent over shoulder!"

Martin plays Peter Sanderson, a high-powered lawyer with a trophy ex-wife,
who lives in a posh Los Angeles neighborhood and speaks with meticulous
precision he elevates to a kind of verbal constipation. Queen Latifah plays
Charlene Morton, who he meets in an Internet chat room, where she is
LawyerGirl.

They both misrepresent their appearances--well, all right, she's guiltier
than he is--and when they meet he's appalled to find, not a blond legal
bimbo, but a trash-talking black ex-con who wants him to handle her case.
Charlene can talk like a perfect middle-class lady, as she demonstrates, but
the movie's point of pride is that she shouldn't have to. Peter can also
talk like a black street dude, sort of. Maybe he learned it from his kids'
rap records.

The movie's conceit is that Peter keeps throwing Charlene out and she keeps
coming back, because she's determined to prove her legal innocence. She
breaks into his house, throws wild parties, embarrasses him at his club, and
so on, until a magic night when she gets him drinking and dancing, plants
his hands squarely on what Russ Meyer used to rhapsodically refer to as
garbanzos, and breaks down his inhibitions. At this point--what? Wild
nuzzling, rapturous caresses, shredded knickers, wild goat cries in the
night? Peter takes her case, that's what, while Eugene Levy crawls out of
his eyebrows and joins the tag-team.

This is all wrong. It violates the immortal Stewart/Reagan principle: Steve
Martin for Latifah, Eugene Levy for best friend. A comedy is not allowed to
end with the couples incorrectly paired. It goes against the deeply
traditional requirements of the audience. Here is a movie that ignores the
Model Airplane Rule: First, make sure you have taken all of the pieces out
of the box, then line them up in the order in which they will be needed.
"Bringing Down the House" is glued together with one of the wings treated
like a piece of tail.

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From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] THE SAFETY OF OBJECTS / ** (R)
Date: 07 Mar 2003 15:15:26 GMT

THE SAFETY OF OBJECTS / ** (R)

March 7, 2003

Esther Gold: Glenn Close
Jim Train:    Dermot Mulroney
Julie Gold:    Jessica Campbell
Annette Jennings:    Patricia Clarkson
Paul Gold:    Joshua Jackson
Susan Train:    Moira Kelly
Howard Gold:    Robert Klein
Randy:    Timothy Olyphant

IFC Films presents a film written and directed by Rose Troche. Based on the
book by A.M. Homes. Running time: 121 minutes. Rated R (for sexual content
and language).

BY ROGER EBERT

Side by side on a shady suburban street, in houses like temples to domestic
gods, three families marinate in misery. They know one another, but what
they don't realize is how their lives are secretly entangled. We're intended
to pity them, although their troubles are so densely plotted they skirt the
edge of irony; this is a literate soap opera in which beautiful people have
expensive problems and we wouldn't mind letting them inherit some
undistinguished problems of our own.

To be sure, one of the characters has a problem we don't envy. That would be
Paul Gold (Joshua Jackson), a bright and handsome teenager who has been in a
coma since an accident. Before that he'd been having an affair with the
woman next door, Annette Jennings (Patricia Clarkson), so there were
consolations in his brief conscious existence.

Now his mother Esther (Glenn Close), watches over him, reads to him, talks
to him, trusts he will return to consciousness. His father Howard (Robert
Klein) doesn't participate in this process, having written off his heir as a
bad investment, but listen to how Esther talks to Howard: "You never even
put your eyes on him. How do you think that makes him feel?" The dialogue
gets a laugh from the heartless audience, but is it intended as funny,
thoughtless, ironic, tender, or what? The movie doesn't give us much help in
answering that question

In a different kind of movie, we would be deeply touched by the mother's
bedside vigil. In a very different kind of movie, like Pedro Almodovar's
"Talk to Her," which is about two men at the bedsides of the two comatose
women they love, we would key in to the weird-sad tone that somehow rises
above irony into a kind of sincere melodramatic excess. But here--well, we
know the Glenn Close character is sincere, but we can't tell what the film
thinks about her, and we suspect it may be feeling a little more superior to
her than it has a right to.

Written and directed by Rose Troche, based on stories by A. M. Homes, "The
Safety of Objects" hammers more nails into the undead corpse of the suburban
dream. Movies about the Dread Suburbs are so frightening that we wonder why
everyone doesn't flee them, like the crowds in the foreground of Japanese
monster movies.

"The Safety of Objects" travels its emotional wastelands in a bittersweet,
elegiac mood. We meet a lawyer named Jim Train (Dermot Mulroney), who is
passed over for partnership at his law firm, walks out in a rage, and lacks
the nerve to tell his wife Susan (Moira Kelly). Neither one of them knows
their young son Jake (Alex House) is conducting an affair--yes, an actual
courtship--with a Barbie doll.

Next door is Annette, the Clarkson character, who, if she is really going to
spend the rest of her life picking up stray men for quick sex, should
develop more of a flair. She comes across as desperate, although there's a
nice scene where she calls the bluff of a jerk who succeeds in picking her
up--and is left with the task of explaining why, if he really expected to
bring someone home, his house is such a pigpen. Annette is pathetic about
men: She forgives her ex-husband anything, even when he skips his alimony
payments, and lets her son get away with calling her a loser because she
can't send him to summer camp.

Let's see who else lives on the street. Helen (Mary Kay Place) makes an
unmistakable pitch to a handyman, who gets the message, rejects it, but
politely thanks her for the offer. What comes across is that all of these
people are desperately unhappy, are finding no human consolation or contact
at home, are fleeing to the arms of strangers, dolls or the comatose, and
place their trust, if the title is to be believed, in the safety of objects.
I don't think that means objects will protect them. I think it means they
can't hurt them.

Strewn here somewhere are the elements of an effective version of this
story--an "Ice Storm" or "American Beauty," even a "My New Gun." But
Troche's tone is so relentlessly, depressingly monotonous that the
characters seem trapped in a narrow emotional range. They live out their
miserable lives in one lachrymose sequence after another, and for us there
is no relief. "The Safety of Objects" is like a hike through the swamp of
despond, with ennui sticking to our shoes.

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From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM / *** 1/2 (PG-13)
Date: 15 Mar 2003 19:14:27 GMT

BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM / *** 1/2 (PG-13)

March 12, 2003

Jesminder:    Parminder K. Nagra
Juliette:    Keira Knightley
Joe:    Jonathan Rhys-Meyers
Mr. Bhamra:    Anupam Kher
Mrs. Bhamra:    Shaheen Khan
Pinky:    Archie Panjabi
Mel:    Shaznay Lewis
Alan:    Frank Harper
Paula: Juliet Stevenson

Fox Searchlight presents a film directed by Gurinder Chadha. Written by
Chadha, Paul Mayeda Berges and Guljit Bindra. Running time: 112 minutes.
Rated PG-13 (for language and sexual content).

BY ROGER EBERT

I saw more important films at Sundance 2003, but none more purely enjoyable
than "Bend It Like Beckham," which is just about perfect as a teenage
coming-of-age comedy. It stars a young actress of luminous appeal, it
involves sports, romance and of course her older sister's wedding, and it
has two misinformed soccer moms--one who doesn't know a thing about the game
and another who doesn't even know her daughter plays it.

The movie, set in London, tells the story of Jesminder Bjamra, known as
"Jess," who comes from a traditional Indian family. Her parents are Sikhs
who fled from Uganda to England, where her dad works at Heathrow airport.
They live in the middle-class suburb of Hounslow, under the flight path of
arriving jets, where her mother believes that Jess has two great duties in
life: to learn to prepare a complete Indian meal, and to marry a nice Indian
boy, in exactly that order.

Jess plays soccer with boys in the park. In her family's living room is a
large portrait of a Sikh spiritual leader, but above Jess's bed is her own
inspiration--the British soccer superstar David Beckham, better known to
some as Posh Spice's husband. To Beckham's portrait she confides her
innermost dream, which is to play for England. Of course a girl cannot hope
to be a soccer star, and an Indian girl should not play soccer at all, since
in her mother's mind the game consists of "displaying your bare legs to
complete strangers."

Jess is seen in the park one day by Juliette (Keira Knightley), who plays
for the Hounslow Harriers, a woman's team, and is recruited to join them.
The coach is a young Irishman named Joe (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), and it is
love at second or third sight--complicated, because Joe cannot date his
players, and Juliette has a crush on him, too.

But all of these elements make the film sound routine, and what makes it
special is the bubbling energy of the cast and the warm joy with which
Gurinder Chadha, the director and co-writer, tells her story. I am the first
to admit that Gurinder Chadha is not a name on everybody's lips, but this is
her third film and I can promise you she has an unfailing instinct for human
comedy that makes you feel good and laugh out loud.

Her previous film was the wonderful "What's Cooking," about four American
ethnic families (African American, Latino, Jewish and Vietnamese) all
preparing a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, while their younger generations
are connected in unsuspected ways. There is an emerging genre of comedies
about second- and third-generation young people breaking loose from
traditional parents ("My Big Fat Greek Wedding" is the most spectacular
example), and I've seen these rite-of-entry comedies by directors with
Filipino, Indian, Chinese, Mexican, Iranian and Korean backgrounds, and even
one, "Mississippi Masala," where Denzel Washington and Sarita Choudhury
played two such characters whose stories meet.

"Bend It Like Beckham," which adds a British flavor to its London Metroland
masala, is good not because it is blindingly original but because it is
flawless in executing what is, after all, a dependable formula. The parents
must be strict and traditional, but also loving and funny, and Mr. and Mrs.
Bhamra (Anupam Kher and Shaheen Khan) are classic examples of the type. So
is Juliette's mother, Paula (the wry, funny British star Juliet Stevenson),
who tries to talk her tomboy daughter into Wonderbras, and spends most of
the movie fearing that a girl who doesn't want to wear one must be a
lesbian. ("There's a reason why Sporty Spice is the only one without a
boyfriend.") The editing by Justin Krish gets laughs all on its own with the
precision that it uses to cut to reaction shots as the parents absorb one
surprise after another.

Jess, played by Parminder K. Nagra, is a physically exuberant girl whose
love of soccer crosses over into a love of life. She runs onto the field as
if simply at play, she does cartwheels after scoring goals, and although she
deceives her parents about her soccer dreams, she loves them and understands
their point of view. Her father, who played cricket in Uganda but was
discriminated against by the local London club, still bears deep wounds, but
"things are different now," Jess tells him, and there is the obligatory
scene where he sneaks into the crowd at a match to see for himself.

Can there be an Indian comedy without a wedding? "Monsoon Wedding" is the
great example, and here, too, we get the loving preparation of food, the
exuberant explosion of music, and the backstage drama. All ethnic comedies
feature scenes that make you want to leave the theater and immediately start
eating, and "Bend It Like Beckham" may inspire some of its fans to make
Indian friends simply so they can be invited over for dinner.

The movie's values run deep. It understands that for Jess' generation soccer
is not about displaying bare legs (Jess has another reason to be shy about
that), but it also understands the hopes and ambitions of parents--and,
crucially, so does Jess, who handles the tentative romance with her coach in
a way that combines tenderness with common sense. A closing scene at the
airport, which in a lesser movie would have simply hammered out a happy
ending, shows her tact and love.

Like all good movies, "Bend It Like Beckham" crosses over to wide audiences.
It's being promoted in the magazines and on the cable channels that teenage
girls follow, but recently we showed it on our Ebert & Roeper Film
Festival at Sea, to an audience that ranged in age from 7 to 81, with a
50ish median, and it was a huge success. For that matter, the hip Sundance
audience, dressed in black and clutching cell phones and cappuccinos, loved
it, too. And why not, since its characters and sensibility are so abundantly
lovable.

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From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] IRREVERSIBLE / *** (Not rated)
Date: 15 Mar 2003 19:14:18 GMT

IRREVERSIBLE / *** (Not rated)

March 14, 2003

Alex:     Monica Bellucci
Marcus:     Vincent Cassel
Pierre:     Albert Dupontel
Philippe    : Philippe Nahon
Le Tenia:     Jo Prestia
Stephane:     Stephane Drouot
Mourad:     Mourad Khima

Lions Gate Films presents a film written and directed by Gaspar Noe. Running
time: 99 minutes. No MPAA rating (extreme and disturbing violence, scenes of
rape, sexual encounters). In French with English subtitles.

BY ROGER EBERT

"Irreversible" is a movie so violent and cruel that most people will find it
unwatchable.

The camera looks on unflinchingly as a woman is raped and beaten for several
long, unrelenting minutes, and as a man has his face pounded in with a fire
extinguisher, in an attack that continues until after he is apparently dead.
That the movie has a serious purpose is to its credit but makes it no more
bearable. Some of the critics at the screening walked out, but I stayed,
sometimes closing my eyes, and now I will try to tell you why I think the
writer and director, Gaspar Noe, made the film in this way.

First, above all, and crucially, the story is told backward. Two other films
have famously used that chronology: Harold Pinter's "Betrayal," the story of
a love affair that ends (begins) in treachery, and Christopher Nolan's
"Memento" (2000), which begins with the solution to a murder and tracks
backward to its origin. Of "Betrayal," I wrote that a sad love story would
be even more tragic if you could see into the future, so that even this
joyous moment, this kiss, was in the shadow of eventual despair.

Now consider "Irreversible." If it were told in chronological order, we
would meet a couple very much in love: Alex (Monica Bellucci) and Marcus
(Vincent Cassel). In a movie that is frank and free about nudity and sex, we
see them relaxed and playful in bed, having sex and sharing time. Bellucci
and Cassel were married in real life at the time the film was made and are
at ease with each other.

Then we would see them at a party, Alex wearing a dress that makes little
mystery of her perfect breasts. We would see a man hitting on her. We would
hear it asked how a man could let his lover go out in public dressed like
that: Does he like to watch as men grow interested? We would meet Marcus'
best friend, Pierre (Albert Dupontel), who himself was once a lover of Alex.

Then we would follow Alex as she walks alone into a subway tunnel, on a
quick errand that turns tragic when she is accosted by Le Tenia (Jo
Prestia), a pimp who brutally and mercilessly rapes and beats her for what
seems like an eternity, in a stationary-camera shot that goes on and on and
never cuts away.

And then we would follow Marcus and Pierre in a search for La Tenia, which
leads to an S-M club named the Rectum, where La Tenia is finally discovered
and beaten brutally, again in a shot that continues mercilessly, this time
with a hand-held camera that seems to participate in the beating.

As I said, for most people, unwatchable. Now consider what happens if you
reverse the chronology, so that the film begins with shots of La Tenia being
removed from the night club and tracks back through time to the warm and
playful romance of the bedroom scenes. There are several ways in which this
technique produces a fundamentally different film:

1. The film doesn't build up to violence and sex as its payoff, as
pornography would. It begins with its two violent scenes, showing us the
very worst immediately and then tracking back into lives that are about to
be forever altered.

2. It creates a different kind of interest in those earlier scenes, which
are foreshadowed for us but not for the characters. When Alex and Marcus
caress and talk, we realize what a slender thread all happiness depends on.
To know the future would not be a blessing but a curse. Life would be
unlivable without the innocence of our ignorance. áá

3. Revenge precedes violation. The rapist is savagely punished before he
commits his crime. At the same time, and this is significant, Marcus is the
violent monster of the opening scenes, and La Tenia is a victim whose crime
has not yet been seen (although we already know Alex has been assaulted).

4. The party scenes, and the revealing dress, are seen in hindsight as a
risk that should not have been taken. Instead of making Alex look sexy and
attractive, they make her look vulnerable and in danger. While it is true
that a woman should be able to dress as she pleases, it is not always wise.

5. We know by the time we see Alex at the party, and earlier in bed, that
she is not simply a sex object or a romantic partner, but a fierce woman who
fights the rapist for every second of the rape. Who uses every tactic at her
command to stop him. Who loses but does not surrender. It makes her
sweetness and warmth much richer when we realize what darker weathers she
harbors. This woman is not simply a sensuous being, as women so often simply
are in the movies, but a fighter with a fierce survival instinct.

The fact is, the reverse chronology makes "Irreversible" a film that
structurally argues against rape and violence, while ordinary chronology
would lead us down a seductive narrative path toward a shocking,
exploitative payoff. By placing the ugliness at the beginning, Gaspar Noe
forces us to think seriously about the sexual violence involved. The movie
does not end with rape as its climax and send us out of the theater as if
something had been communicated. It starts with it, and asks us to sit there
for another hour and process our thoughts. It is therefore moral - at a
structural level.

As I said twice and will repeat again, most people will not want to see the
film at all. It is so violent, it shows such cruelty, that it is a test most
people will not want to endure. But it is unflinchingly honest about the
crime of rape. It does not exploit. It does not pander. It has been said
that no matter what it pretends, pornography argues for what it shows.
"Irreversible" is not pornography.

Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

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From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] AGENT CODY BANKS / **1/2 (PG)
Date: 15 Mar 2003 19:14:17 GMT

AGENT CODY BANKS / **1/2 (PG)

March 14, 2003

Cody Banks:    Frankie Muniz
Natalie Connors:    Hilary Duff
Ronica Miles:     Angie Harmon
Mrs. Banks:    Cynthia Stevenson
Dr. Connors:    Martin Donovan

MGM presents a film directed by Harald Zwart. Written by Zack Stentz, Ashley
Edward Miller, Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski. Based on a story by
Jeffrey Jurgensen. Running time: 95 minutes. Rated PG (for action violence,
mild language and some sensual content). Opening today at local theaters.

BY ROGER EBERT

Imagine James Bond as a suburban American 15-year-old, and you have "Agent
Cody Banks," a high-speed, high-tech kiddie thriller that's kinda cute but
sorta relentless. Frankie Muniz stars as Cody, whose martial arts skills,
skateboarding, ceiling-walking and extreme snowboarding are all the more
remarkable when you consider that he goes into action before the CIA has
time to give him much more than what, in the Bond pictures, is the Q routine
with the neat gizmos.

Frankie lives with his parents (Cynthia Stevenson and Daniel Roebuck), who
mean well but are so inattentive they don't notice their son has become a
spy with international missions.

His CIA handler (Angie Harmon, low-cut and sexy) wants him to befriend a
classmate named Natalie Connors (Hilary Duff, from "Lizzie McGuire").
Frankie is, alas, so tongue-tied around girls that his grade-school brother
can boast, "Cody's almost 16 and I've had twice as many dates as he has."

Cody fights back ("Sitting in a treehouse doesn't count"), but the kid is
serene ("It does when you're playing doctor").

Natalie attends the ultra-exclusive William Donovan Prep School, no doubt
named for the famous World War II spy "Wild Bill" Donovan, and Frankie
transfers there, uses his karate skills to silence hecklers and ends up on a
mission to liberate Natalie's father, Dr. Connors (Martin Donovan), from the
clutches of the evil masterminds Brinkman and Molay (Ian McShane and Arnold
Vosloo), who want to (we know this part by heart) Attain World Domination by
using the doctor's inventions--microscopic Nanobots that can eat through
anything.

The movie imitates its Bond origins with a lot of neat toys. Cody is given a
BMW skateboard that has unsuspected versatility, and a jet-powered
snowboard, and a sports car, and X-ray glasses (Hello, Angie Harmon!) and a
watch that will send electricity through your enemies, although I think (I'm
not sure about this) you should not be wearing it yourself at the time.

The set design includes the scientist's laboratory in underground World
Domination Headquarters--which includes, as students of Ebert's Bigger
Little Movie Glossary will not be surprised to learn, commodious and
well-lighted overhead air ducts so that Cody can position himself in comfort
directly above all important conversations. There are also CIA regional
headquarters, with a conference table that looks designed by Captain Nemo in
a nightmare. We learn that the CIA runs summer camps to train kids to become
junior spies, although why Harmon, who seems to be playing Young Mrs.
Robinson, is their handler is hard to explain--maybe she's there for the
dads, in the movie and in the audience.

The movie will be compared with the two "Spy Kids" pictures, and looks more
expensive and high-tech but isn't as much fun. It has a lot of skill and
energy, but its wit is more predictable and less delightful. It's a
well-made movie, to be sure, and will probably entertain its target
audience, but its target audience is probably not reading this review, and
you (for whatever reason) are. The difference is, I could look you in the
eye and recommend you go see the "Spy Kids" movies, but this one, if you're
not a kid, I don't think so.

Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

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From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] THE HUNTED / ***1/2 (R)
Date: 15 Mar 2003 19:14:23 GMT

THE HUNTED / ***1/2 (R)

March 14, 2003

L.T. Bonham:    Tommy Lee Jones
Aaron Hallam:    Benicio Del Toro
Abby Durrell:    Connie Nielsen
Loretta Kravitz:    Jenna Boyd
Irene Kravitz:    Leslie Stefanson
Crumley:    Robert Blanche

Paramount Pictures presents a film directed by William Friedkin. Written by
David Griffiths, Peter Griffiths and Art Monterastelli. Running time: 94
minutes. Rated R (for strong bloody violence and some language).

BY ROGER EBERT

"The Hunted" is a pure and rather inspired example of the one-on-one chase
movie. Like "The Fugitive," which also starred Tommy Lee Jones, it's about
one man pursuing another more or less nonstop for the entire film. Walking
in, I thought I knew what to expect, but i didn't anticipate how William
Friedkin would jolt me with the immediate urgency of the action. This is not
an arm's-length chase picture, but a close physical duel between its two
main characters.

Jones plays L.T. Bonham, a civilian employee of the U.S. Army who trains
elite forces to stalk, track, hunt and kill. His men learn how to make
weapons out of shards of rock, and forge knives from scrap metal. In a
sequence proving we haven't seen everything yet, they learn how to kill an
enemy by the numbers--leg artery, heart, neck, lung. That Jones can make
this training seem real goes without saying; he has an understated,
minimalist acting style that implies he's been teaching the class for a long
time.

One of his students is Aaron Hallam (Benicio Del Toro), who fought in Kosovo
in 1999 and had experiences there that warped him ("his battle stress has
gone so deep it is part of his personality"). Back home in Oregon, offended
by hunters using telescopic sights, he claims four victims--"those hunters
were filleted like deer." Bonham recognizes the style and goes into the
woods after him ("If I'm not back in two days, that will mean I'm dead").

Hallam's stress syndrome has made him into a radical defender of animal
rights; he talks about chickens on assembly lines, and asks one cop how he'd
feel if a higher life form were harvesting mankind. Of course, in killing
the hunters, he has promoted himself to that superior lifeform, but this is
not a movie about debate points. It is a chase.

No modern director is more identified with chases that Friedkin, whose "The
French Connection" and "To Live and Die in L.A." set the standard. Here the
whole movie is a chase, sometimes at a crawl, as when Hallam drives a stolen
car directly into a traffic jam. What makes the movie fresh is that it
doesn't stand back and regard its pursuit as an exercise, but stays very
close to the characters and focuses on the actual physical reality of their
experience.

Consider an early hand-to-hand combat between Bonham and Hallam. We've seen
so many fancy high-tech computer-assisted fight scenes in recent movies that
we assume the fighters can fly. They live in a world of gravity-free
speed-up. Not so Friedkin's characters. Their fight is gravity-based. Their
arms and legs are heavy. Their blows land solidly, with pain on both sides.
They gasp and grunt with effort. They can be awkward and desperate. They
both know the techniques of hand-to-hand combat, but in real life, it isn't
scripted, and you know what? It isn't so easy. We are involved in the
immediate, exhausting, draining physical work of fighting.

The chase sequences--through Oregon forests and city streets, on highways
and bridges--are also reality-oriented. The cinematography, by the great
Caleb Deschanel ("The Right Stuff") buries itself in the reality of the
locations. The forests are wet and green, muddy and detailed. The leaves are
not scenery but right in front of our faces, to be brushed aside. Running,
hiding, stalking, the two men get dirty and tired and gasp for breath. We
feel their physical effort; this isn't one of those movies where shirts are
dry again in the next scene, and the hero has the breath for long speeches.

"The Hunted" requires its skilled actors. Ordinary action stars would not
do. The screenplay, by David Griffiths, Peter Griffiths and Art
Monterastelli, has a kind of minimalist clarity, in which nobody talks too
much and everything depends on tone. Notice scenes where Del Toro is
interrogated by other law officials. He doesn't give us the usual hostile,
aggressive cliches, but seems to be trying to explain himself from a place
so deep he can't make it real to outsiders. This man doesn't kill out of
rage but out of sorrow.

There are moments when Friedkin lays it on a little thick. The early how-to
sequence, where Bonham's trainees learn how to make weapons from scratch,
implies there will be a later sequence where they need to. Fair enough. But
would Hallam, in the heat of a chase, have the time to build a fire from
shavings, heat an iron rod, and hammer it into a knife? Even if Bonham
cooperates by meanwhile pausing to chip his own flint weapon? Maybe not, or
maybe the two hunters are ritualistically agreeing to face each other using
only these tools of their trade. The resulting knife fight, which benefits
from the earlier knife training sequence, is physical action of a high
order.

There are other characters in the movie, other relationships. A woman with a
child, who Hallam visits (she likes him but is a little afraid). A woman who
is an FBI field officer. Various cops. They add background and atmosphere,
but "The Hunted" is about two hard-working men who are good at their jobs,
although only one can be the best.

Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

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From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] WILLARD / **1/2 (PG-13)
Date: 15 Mar 2003 19:14:25 GMT

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

March 14, 2003

Willard Stiles:    Crispin Glover
Henrietta Stiles:    Jackie Burroughs
Frank Martin:    R. Lee Ermey
Cathryn:    Laura Elena Harring
Detective Boxer:    David Parker

New Line Cinema presents a film written and directed by Glen Morgan. Running
time: 95 minutes. Rated PG-13 (for terror/violence, some sexual content and
language).

BY ROGER EBERT

You never know what a rat is going to do next, which is one of the big
problems with rats. In "Willard," you mostly do know what the rats are going
to do next, which is a big problem with the film. That's because Willard is
able to marshal his rats into disciplined groups that scurry off on missions
on his behalf; he is the Dr. Dolittle of pest control.

"Willard" is a remake of the 1971 film, which was a surprise hit at the box
office. My explanation at the time: People had been waiting a long time to
see Ernest Borgnine eaten by rats and weren't about to miss the opportunity.
The new film looks better, moves faster and is more artistic than the
original, but it doesn't work as a horror film--and since it is a horror
film, that's fatal. It has attitude and a look, but the rats aren't scary.

Consider an early scene where Willard (Crispin Glover) goes down in the
cellar after his mother complains of rat infestation. The fuse box blows and
he's down to a flashlight, and this should be a formula for a scary scene
(remember Ellen Burstyn in the attic with a flashlight in "The Exorcist").
But the scene isn't frightening--ever. The blowing of the fuse is scarier
than anything else that happens in the basement.

The plot is essentially a remake of the earlier "Willard," but with elements
suggesting it is a sequel. A portrait that hangs in the family home, for
example, shows Bruce Davison as Willard's father--and Davison, of course,
was the original Willard. So hold on. If that Willard was this Willard's
father, then that means that this Willard's mother (Jackie Burroughs) was
that Willard's wife and has become a shrew just like her mother-in-law, and
young Willard still works for an evil man named Mr. Martin (R. Lee Ermey),
which was the Borgnine character's name, so he must be Martin Jr. In the new
movie, Willard's mom complains about rats in the cellar and Mr. Martin
insults Willard and threatens his job, and the sins of the parents are
visited on the sequel.

The best thing in the movie is Crispin Glover's performance. He affects
dark, sunken eyes, and a slight stoop, and is very pale, and has one of
those haircuts that shouts out: Look how gothic and miserable I am. There is
real wit in the performance. And wit, too, in R. Lee Ermey's performance as
the boss, which draws heavily on Ermey's real-life experience as a drill
sergeant.

The human actors are OK, but the rodent actors (some real, some special
effects) are like a prop that turns up on demand and behaves (or misbehaves)
flawlessly. A few of the rats pop out: Socrates, Willard's choice for
leader, and Ben, who is Ben's choice for leader. Ben is a very big rat
(played, according to ominous information I found on the Web, "by an animal
that is not a rat").

Laura Elena Harring, the brunet sex bomb from "Mulholland Drive," turns up
as a worker in Willard's office who worries about him and even comes to his
home to see if he's all right. My theory about why she likes him: He is the
only man in a 100-mile radius who has never tried to pick her up. Willard is
too morose and inward and Anthony Perkinsy. If they'd reinvented the movie
as a character study, not so much about the rats as about Willard, they
might have come up with something. Here the rats simply sweep across the
screen in an animated tide, and instead of thinking, Eek! Rats!, we're
thinking about how it was done. That's not what you're supposed to be
thinking about during a horror movie.

Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

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From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] SPIDER / *** (R)
Date: 15 Mar 2003 19:14:22 GMT

SPIDER / *** (R)

March 14, 2003

Dennis 'Spider' Cleg:    Ralph Fiennes
Mrs. Cleg:    Miranda Richardson
Bill Cleg:    Gabriel Byrne
Mrs. Wilkinson:    Lynn Redgrave
Boy Spider:    Bradley Hall
Terrence:    John Neville
Freddy:    Gary Reineke
John:    Philip Craig
Gladys:    Sara Stockbridge

Sony Pictures Classics presents a film directed by David Cronenberg. Written
by Patrick McGrath, based on his novel. Running time: 98 minutes. Rated R
(for sexuality, brief violence and language).

BY ROGER EBERT

He looked like a man cut away from the stake, when the fire has
overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them ...

So Ahab is described in Moby Dick. The description matches Dennis Cleg, the
subject (I hesitate to say "hero") of David Cronenberg's "Spider." Played by
Ralph Fiennes, he is a man eaten away by a lifetime of inner torment; there
is not one ounce on his frame that is not needed to support his suffering.
Fiennes, so jolly as J. Lo's boyfriend in "Maid in Manhattan," looks here
like a refugee from the slums of hell.

We see him as the last man off a train to London, muttering to himself,
picking up stray bits from the sidewalk, staring out through blank,
uncomprehending eyes. He finds a boarding house in a cheerless district and
is shown to a barren room by the gruff landlady (Lynn Redgrave). In the
lounge, he meets an old man who explains kindly that the house has a
"curious character, but one grows used to it after a few years."

This is a halfway house, we learn, and Spider has just been released from a
mental institution. In the morning, the landlady bursts into his room
without knocking--just like a mother, we think, and, indeed, later he will
confuse her with his stepmother. For that matter, his mother, his stepmother
and an alternate version of the landlady are all played by the same actress
(Miranda Richardson); we are meant to understand that her looming presence
fills every part of his mind that is reserved for women.

The movie is based on an early novel by Patrick McGrath. It enters into the
subjective mind of "Spider" Cleg so completely that it's impossible to be
sure what is real and what is not. We see everything through Spider's eyes,
and he is not a reliable witness. He hardly seems aware of the present, so
traumatized is he by the past. Whether they are trustworthy or not, his
childhood memories are the landscape in which he wanders.

In flashbacks, we meet his father, Bill Cleg (Gabriel Byrne), and mother
(Richardson). Then we see his father making a rendezvous in a garden shed
with Yvonne (also Richardson), a tramp from the pub. The mother discovers
them there, is murdered with a spade and buried right then and there in the
garden, with the little boy witnessing everything. Yvonne moves in, and at
one point tells young Dennis, "Yes, it's true he murdered your mother. Try
and think of me as your mother now."

Why are the two characters played by the same actress? Is this an artistic
decision, or a clue to Spider's mental state? We cannot tell for sure,
because there is almost nothing in his life that Spider knows for sure. He
is adrift in fear. Fiennes plays the character as a man who wants to take
back every step, reconsider every word, question every decision.

There is a younger version of the character, Spider as a boy, played by
Bradley Hall. He is solemn and wide-eyed, is beaten with a belt at one
point, has a childhood that functions as an open wound. We understand that
this boy is the most important inhabitant of the older Spider's gaunt and
wasted body.

The movie is well made and acted, but it lacks dimension because it
essentially has only one character, and he lacks dimension. We watch him and
perhaps care for him, but we cannot identify with him because he is no
longer capable of change and decision. He has long since stopped trying to
tell apart his layers of memory, nightmare, experience and fantasy.

He is lost and adrift. He wanders through memories, lost and sad, and we
wander after him, knowing, somehow, that Spider is not going to get
better--and that if he does, that would simply mean the loss of his paranoid
fantasies, which would leave him with nothing. Sometimes people hold onto
illnesses because they are defined by them, given distinction, made real.
There seems to be no sense in which Spider could engage the world on terms
that would make him any happier.

There are three considerable artists at work here: Cronenberg, Fiennes and
Richardson. They are at the service of a novelist who often writes of
grotesque and melancholy characters; he is Britain's modern master of the
gothic. His Spider Cleg lives in a closed system, like one of those sealed
glass globes where little plants and tiny marine organisms trade their
energy back and forth indefinitely. In Spider's globe, he feeds on his pain
and it feeds in him. We feel that this exchange will go on and on, whether
we watch or not. The details of the film and of the performances are
meticulously realized; there is a reward in seeing artists working so well.
But the story has no entry or exit, and is cold, sad and hopeless.
Afterward, I feel more admiration than gratitude.

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From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] RIVERS & TIDES: ANDY GOLDSWORTHY WORKING WITH TIME / ***1/2 (Not rated)
Date: 15 Mar 2003 19:14:20 GMT

RIVERS & TIDES: ANDY GOLDSWORTHY WORKING WITH TIME / ***1/2 (Not rated)

March 14, 2003

Roxie Releasing presents a documentary directed by Thomas Riedel-sheimer.
Running time: 90 minutes. No MPAA rating (no objectionable content).

BY ROGER EBERT

Have you ever watched--no, better, have you ever been a young child intent
on building something out of the materials at hand in the woods, or by a
stream, or at the beach? Have you seen the happiness of an adult joining
kids and slowly slipping out of adulthood and into the absorbing process of
this ... and now ... and over here ... and build this up ... and it should
go like this?

The artist Andy Goldsworthy lives in that world of making things. They have
no names, they are Things. He brings order to leaves or twigs or icicles and
then surrenders them to the process of nature. He will kneel for hours by
the oceanside, creating a cairn of stones that balances precariously, the
weight on the top holding the sides in place, and then the tide will come in
and wash away the sand beneath, and the cairn will collapse, as it must, as
it should.

"The very thing that brought the thing to be is the thing that will cause
its death," Goldsworthy explains, as his elegant, spiraled constructions
once again become random piles of stones on the beach. As with Andy's
stones, so with our lives.

"Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time" is a documentary that
opened in San Francisco in mid-2002 and just kept running, moving from one
theater to another, finding its audience not so much through word of mouth
as through hand on elbow, as friends steered friends into the theater,
telling them that this was a movie they had to see. I started getting
e-mails about it months ago. Had I seen it? I hadn't even heard of it.

It is a film about a man wholly absorbed in the moment. He wanders woods and
riverbanks, finding materials and playing with them, fitting them together,
piling them up, weaving them, creating beautiful arrangements that he
photographs before they return to chaos. He knows that you can warm the end
of an icicle just enough to make it start to melt, and then hold it against
another icicle, and it will stick. With that knowledge, he makes an ice
sculpture, and then it melts in the sun and is over.

Some of his constructions are of magical beauty, as if left behind by beings
who disappeared before the dawn. He finds a way to arrange twigs in a kind
of web. He makes a spiral of rocks that fans out from a small base and then
closes in again, a weight on top holding it together. This is not easy, and
he gives us pointers: "Top control can be the death of a work."

Often Andy will be ... almost there ... right on the edge ... holding his
breath as one last piece goes into place ... and then the whole construction
will collapse, and he will look deflated, defeated, for a moment ("Damn!"),
and then start again: "When I build something, I often take it to the very
edge of its collapse, and that's a very beautiful balance."

His art needs no explanation. We go into modern art galleries and find work
we cannot comprehend as art. We see Damien Hurst's sheep, cut down the
middle and embedded in plastic, and we cannot understand how it won the
Turner Prize (forgetting that no one thought Turner was making art, either).
We suppose that Concepts and Statements are involved.

But with Andy Goldsworthy, not one word of explanation is necessary, because
every single one of us has made something like his art. We have piled stones
or made architectural constructions out of sand, or played Pick-Up Stix, and
we know exactly what he is trying to do--and why. Yes, why, because his art
takes him into that Zone where time drops away and we forget our left-brain
concerns and are utterly absorbed by whether this ... could go like this ...
without the whole thing falling apart.

The documentary, directed, photographed and edited by Thomas Riedelsheimer,
a German filmmaker, goes home with Goldsworthy to Penpont, Scotland, where
we see him spending some time with his wife and kids. It follows him to a
museum in the South of France, and to an old stone wall in Canada that he
wants to rebuild in his own way. It visits with him old stone markers high
in mountains, built by early travelers to mark the path.

And it offers extraordinary beauty. We watch as he smashes stones to release
their cyan content and uses that bright-red dye to make spectacular patterns
in the currents and whirlpools of streams. We see a long rope of linked
leaves, bright green, uncoil as it floats downstream. Before, we saw only
the surface of the water, but now the movement of the leaves reveals its
current and structure. What a happy man. Watching this movie is like
daydreaming.

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From: "DVD Movie Central" <[e-mail]>
Subject: [MV] Win Three Colors/Star Wars Petition
Date: 21 Mar 2003 05:20:18 -0500

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Greetings, friends!

Our new contest is up and running today, and we've got a good one for =
you this time...two lucky winners will take home Miramax's excellent new =
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Just go to www.dvdmoviecentral.com and click on "Feel Lucky?" on the =
above nav bar for details and to get your entries in.

And while you're there, for those of you who are disappointed in George =
Lucas' decision NOT to release the original Star Wars Trilogy to DVD in =
their original form (ONLY the enhanced special editions), take a moment =
to scroll down and find the Star Wars petition button on the left side.  =
Take a moment to sign it...it's quick and easy and secure.  DMC gets =
nothing in return for this, of course...just a public service to DVD =
fans.

Stay safe, and thanks for reading DMC!

Mike J
DVD Movie Central
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in.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=3DArial size=3D2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=3DArial size=3D2>And while you're there, for those of =
you who are=20
disappointed in George Lucas' decision NOT to release the original Star =
Wars=20
Trilogy to DVD in their original form (ONLY the enhanced special =
editions), take=20
a moment to scroll down and find the Star Wars petition button on the =
left=20
side.  Take a moment to sign it...it's quick and easy and=20
secure.  DMC gets nothing in return for this, of course...just a =
public=20
service to DVD fans.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=3DArial size=3D2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=3DArial size=3D2>Stay safe, and thanks for reading =
DMC!</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=3DArial size=3D2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=3DArial size=3D2>Mike J</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=3DArial size=3D2>DVD Movie Central</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=3DArial size=3D2><A=20
href=3D"http://www.dvdmoviecentral.com">www.dvdmoviecentral.com</A>=20
</DIV></FONT></BODY></HTML>

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From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] VIEW FROM THE TOP / *** (PG-13)
Date: 22 Mar 2003 02:55:08 GMT

VIEW FROM THE TOP / *** (PG-13)

March 21, 2003

Donna:Gwyneth Paltrow
Ted:    Mark Ruffalo
Christine: Christina Applegate
John Whitney: Mike Myers
Sally:Candice Bergen
Sherry: Kelly Preston
Co-pilot Steve:Rob Lowe

Miramax Films presents a film directed by Bruno Barreto. Written by Eric
Wald. Running time: 87 minutes. Rated PG-13 (for language/sexual
references).

BY ROGER EBERT

"View from the Top" stars Gwyneth Paltrow in a sweet and sort of innocent
story about a small-town girl who knows life holds more for her, and how a
job as a flight attendant becomes her escape route. Along the way she meets
friends who help her and friends who double-cross her, a guy who dumps her,
and a guy she dumps. And she finds love. What more do you want from a movie?

I confess I expected something else. Flight attendants have been asking me
for weeks about this movie, which they are in a lather to see. It may be
closer to their real lives than they expect. I anticipated an updated
version of Coffee, Tea or Me? but what I got instead was Donna the Flight
Attendant. The movie reminded me of career books I read in the seventh grade
with titles like Bob Durham, Boy Radio Announcer. It's a little more
sophisticated, of course, but it has the same good heart, and a teenager
thinking of a career in the air might really enjoy it.

So did I, in an uncomplicated way. Paltrow is lovable in the right roles,
and here she's joined by two others who are sunny on the screen: Candice
Bergen, as the best-selling flight attendant who becomes her mentor, and
Mark Ruffalo (from "You Can Count on Me") as the law student who wants to
marry her. The movie knows a secret; most careers do not involve clawing
your way to the top, but depend on the kindness of the strangers you meet
along the way, who help you just because they feel like it.

We meet Donna (Paltrow) as the daughter of a much-married former exotic
dancer from Silver Springs, Nev. She seems doomed to life working at the
mall until she sees a TV interview with the best-selling Bergen, whose book
inspires Donna to train as a flight attendant. Her first stop is a
puddle-jumper named Sierra Airlines, which flies mostly to and from Fresno,
but then she enrolls in training at Royalty Airlines, where the instructor
(Mike Myers) is bitter because his crossed eye kept him from flying. Myers
finds a delicate balance between lampoon and poignancy--and that's some
balance.

Ruffalo plays the sometime law student who comes into her life in Nevada and
then again in Cleveland, where she's assigned not to Royalty's transatlantic
routes but to the discount Royalty Express. Her first flight is comic (she
runs down the aisle screaming "We're gonna crash!") and then we follow her
through intrigues and romantic episodes that lead to a lonely Christmas in
Paris when she decides life still has to offer more than this.

The movie, directed by Bruno Barreto and written by Eric Wald, is surprising
for what it doesn't contain: No scenes involving mile-high clubs, lecherous
businessmen or randy pilots, but the sincere story of a woman who finds her
career is almost but not quite enough. Adult audiences may be underwhelmed.
Not younger teenage girls, who will be completely fascinated.

Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

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From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] DREAMCATCHER / *1/2 (R)
Date: 22 Mar 2003 02:55:05 GMT

DREAMCATCHER / *1/2 (R)

March 21, 2003

Col. Abraham Kurtz: Morgan Freeman
Dr. Henry Devlin: Thomas Jane
Beaver:     Jason Lee
Jonesy:     Damian Lewis
Capt. Owen Underhill:    Tom Sizemore
Pete Moore:    Timothy Olyphant
Douglas "Duddits" Cavell:    Donnie     Wahlberg

Warner Bros. Pictures presents a film directed by Lawrence Kasdan. Written
by William Goldman and Kasdan. Based on the novel by Stephen King. Running
time: 134 minutes. Rated R (for violence, gore and language).

BY ROGER EBERT

"Dreamcatcher" begins as the intriguing story of friends who share a
telepathic gift, and ends as a monster movie of stunning awfulness. What
went wrong? How could director Lawrence Kasdan and writer William Goldman be
responsible for a film that goes so awesomely wrong? How could even Morgan
Freeman, an actor all but impervious to bad material, be brought down by the
awfulness? Goldman, who has written insightfully about the screenwriters'
trade, may get a long, sad book out of this one.

The movie is based on a novel by Stephen King, unread by me, apparently much
altered for the screen version, especially in the appalling closing
sequences. I have just finished the audiobook of King's From a Buick 8, was
a fan of his Hearts in Atlantis, and like the way his heart tugs him away
from horror ingredients and into the human element in his stories.

Here the story begins so promisingly that I hoped, or assumed, it would
continue on the same track: Childhood friends, united in a form of telepathy
by a mentally retarded kid they protect, grow up to share psychic gifts and
to deal with the consequences. The problem of really being telepathic is a
favorite science-fiction theme; if you could read minds, would you be undone
by the despair and anguish being broadcast all around you? This is
unfortunately not the problem explored by "Dreamcatcher."

The movie does have a visualization of the memory process that is brilliant
filmmaking; after the character Gary "Jonesy" Jones (Damian Lewis) has his
mind occupied by an alien intelligence, he is able to survive hidden within
it by concealing his presence inside a vast Memory Warehouse, visualized by
Kasdan as an infinitely unfolding series of rooms containing Jonesy's
memories. This idea is like a smaller, personal version of Jorge Luis
Borges' "Library of Babel," the imaginary library which contains all
possible editions of all possible books. I can imagine many scenes set in
the Warehouse--it's such a good idea it could support an entire movie--but
the film proceeds relentlessly to abandon this earlier inspirations in its
quest for the barfable.

But let me back up. We meet at the outset childhood friends: Henry Devlin,
Joe (Beaver) Clarendon, Jonesy Jones and Pete Moore. They happen upon
Douglas "Duddits" Cavell, a retarded boy being bullied by older kids, and
they defend him with wit and imagination. He's grateful, and in some way he
serves as a nexus for all of them to form a precognitive and psychic
network. It isn't high-level or controllable, but it's there.

Then we meet them as adults, played by (in order) Thomas Jane, Jason Lee,
Lewis and Timothy Olyphant (Duddits is now Donnie Wahlberg). When Jonesy has
an accident of startling suddenness, that serves as the catalyst for a trip
to the woods, where the hunters turn into the hunted as alien beings attack.

It would be well not to linger on plot details, since if you are going to
see the movie, you will want them to be surprises. Let me just say that the
aliens, who look like a cross between the creature in "Alien" and the things
that crawled out of the drains in that David Cronenberg movie, exhibit the
same problem I often have with such beings: How can an alien that consists
primarily of teeth and an appetite, that apparently has no limbs, tools or
language, travel to Earth in the first place? Are they little clone
creatures for a superior race? Perhaps; an alien nicknamed Mr. Gray turns
up, who looks and behaves quite differently, for a while.

For these aliens, space travel is a prologue for trips taking them where few
have gone before; they explode from the business end of the intestinal
track, through that orifice we would be least willing to lend them for their
activities. The movie, perhaps as a result, has as many farts as the worst
teenage comedy--which is to say, too many farts for a movie that keeps
insisting, with mounting implausibility, that it is intended to be good.
These creatures are given a name by the characters that translates into a
family newspaper as Crap Weasels.

When Morgan Freeman turns up belatedly in a movie, that is usually a good
sign, because no matter what has gone before, he is likely to import more
wit and interest. Not this time. He plays Col. Abraham Kurtz, hard-line
military man dedicated to doing what the military always does in alien
movies, which is to blast the aliens to pieces and ask questions later. This
is infinitely less interesting than a scene in King's Buick 8 where a
curious state trooper dissects a bat-like thing that seems to have popped
through a portal from another world. King's description of the autopsy of
weird alien organs is scarier than all the gnashings and disembowelments in
"Dreamcatcher."

When the filmmakers are capable of the first half of "Dreamcatcher," what
came over them in the second half? What inspired their descent into the
absurd? On the evidence here, we can say what we already knew: Lawrence
Kasdan is a wonderful director of personal dramas ("Grand Canyon," "The
Accidental Tourist," "Mumford"). When it comes to Crap Weasels, his heart
just doesn't seem to be in it.

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From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] BOAT TRIP / 1/2* (R)
Date: 22 Mar 2003 02:55:04 GMT

BOAT TRIP / 1/2* (R)

March 21, 2003

Jerry:    Cuba Gooding Jr.
Nick:        Horatio Sanz
Felicia:        Vivica A. Fox
Gabriela:        Roselyn Sanchez
Hector:        Maurice Godin
Sonja:        Lin Shaye
Inga:    Victoria Silvstedt
Malcolm:    Richard Roundtree

Artisan Entertainment presents a film directed by Mort Nathan. Written by
Nathan and William Bigelow. Running time: 95 minutes. Rated R (for strong
sexual content, language and some drug material).

BY ROGER EBERT

"Boat Trip" arrives preceded by publicity saying many homosexuals have been
outraged by the film. Now that it's in theaters, everybody else has a chance
to join them. Not that the film is outrageous. That would be asking too
much. It is dim-witted, unfunny, too shallow to be offensive, and way too
conventional to use all of those people standing around in the background
wearing leather and chains and waiting hopefully for their cues. This is a
movie made for nobody, about nothing.

The premise: Jerry (Cuba Gooding Jr.) is depressed after being dumped by his
girl (Vivica A. Fox). His best buddy Nick (Horatio Sanz) cheers him up:
They'll take a cruise together. Nick has heard that the ships are jammed
with lonely women. But they offend a travel agent, who books them on a
cruise of gay men, ho ho.

Well, it could be funny. Different characters in a different story with more
wit and insight might have done the trick. But "Boat Trip" requires its
heroes to be so unobservant that it takes them hours to even figure out it's
a gay cruise. And then they go into heterosexual panic mode, until the
profoundly conventional screenplay supplies the only possible outcome: The
sidekick discovers that he's gay, and the hero discovers a sexy woman on
board and falls in love with her.

Her name is Gabriela (Roselyn Sanchez), and despite the fact that she's the
choreographer on a gay cruise, she knows so little about gay men that she
falls for Jerry's strategy: He will pretend to be gay, so that he can get
close to her and then dramatically unveil his identity, or something. Uh,
huh. Even Hector, the cross-dressing queen in the next stateroom, knows a
straight when he sees one: "You want to convince people you are gay, and you
don't know the words to 'I Will Survive'?"

The gays protesting the movie say it deals in stereotypes. So it does, but
then again, so does the annual gay parade, and so do many gay nightclubs,
where role-playing is part of the scene. Yes, there are transvestites and
leather guys and muscle boys on the cruise, but there are also more
conventional types, like Nick's poker-playing buddies. The one ray of wit in
the entire film is provided by Roger Moore, as a homosexual man who calmly
wanders through the plot dispensing sanity, as when, at the bar, he listens
to the music and sighs, "Why do they always play Liza?"

One of the movie's problems is a disconnect between various levels of
reality. Some of the scenes play as if they are intended to be realistic.
Then Jerry or Nick go into hysterics of overacting. Then Jerry attempts to
signal a helicopter to rescue him, and shoots it down with a flare gun. Then
it turns out to be carrying the Swedish Sun-Tanning Team, on its way to the
Hawaiian Tropics finals. Then Jerry asks Gabriela to describe her oral sex
technique, which she does so with the accuracy and detail of a porn film,
and then Jerry--but that pathetic moment you will have to witness for
yourself. Or maybe you will not.

Note: The credit cookies weren't very funny, either, but at least they kept
me in the theater long enough to notice the credits for the film's Greek
Support Team.

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From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] NOWHERE IN AFRICA / **** (Not rated)
Date: 22 Mar 2003 02:55:07 GMT

NOWHERE IN AFRICA / **** (Not rated)

March 21, 2003

Jettel Redlich:    Juliane Kohler
Walter Redlich:    Merab Ninidze
Young Regina:    Lea Kurka
Susskind:    Matthias Habich
Owuor:    Sidede Onyulo
Teenage Regina:    Karoline Eckertz

Zeitgeist Films presents a film written and directed by Caroline Link. Based
on the novel by Stefanie Zweig. Running time: 138 minutes. No MPAA rating.
In German with English subtitles.

BY ROGER EBERT

It is so rare to find a film where you become quickly, simply absorbed in
the story. You want to know what happens next. Caroline Link's "Nowhere in
Africa" is a film like that, telling the story of a German Jewish family who
escapes from the Nazis by going to live and work on a farm in rural Kenya.
It's a hard-scrabble farm in a dry region, and the father, who used to be a
lawyer, is paid a pittance to be the manager. At first, his wife hates it.
Their daughter, who is 5 when she arrives, takes to Africa with an immediate
and instinctive love.

We see the mother and daughter, Jettel and Regina Redlich (Juliane Kohler
and Lea Kurka), in their comfortable world in Frankfurt. The mother likes
clothes, luxury, elegance. Her husband, Walter (Merab Ninidze), reading the
ominous signs of the rise of Nazism, has gone ahead to East Africa and now
writes asking them to join him--"and please bring a refrigerator, which we
will really need, and not our china or anything like that." What Jettel
brings is a ballroom gown, which will be spectacularly unnecessary.

The marriage is a troubled one. Jettel thinks herself in a godforsaken place
and Walter, who works hard but is not a natural farmer, has little sympathy
with her. Their sex life fades: "You only let me under your shirt when I'm a
lawyer," he tells her once when his advance is turned away. But little
Regina loves every moment of every day. She makes friends with the African
children her age, with that uncomplicated acceptance that children have, and
seems to learn their language overnight. She picks up their lore and
stories, and is at home in the bush.

Jettel, meanwhile, has a rocky start with Owuor (Sidede Onyulo), the farm
cook. He is a tall, proud, competent man from the regional tribe, the Masai,
who soon loves Regina like his own daughter. Jettel makes the mistake of
treating him like a servant when he sees himself as a professional. He never
compromises local custom regarding cooks. Asked to help dig a well, he
explains, "I'm a cook. Cooks don't dig in the ground." And for that matter,
"Men don't carry water."

They are outsiders here in three ways: as white people, as Germans and as
Jews. The first presents the least difficulty because the tribal people on
the land are friendly and helpful. Their status as Germans creates an ironic
situation when war is declared and they are rounded up by the British
colonial authorities as enemy aliens; this is absurd, since they are
refugees from the enemy, but before the mistake can be corrected, they are
transported to Nairobi and interred--ironically, in a luxury hotel that has
been pressed into service. As high tea is served to them, a British officer
asks the hotel manager if the prisoners need to be treated so well. "These
are our standards and we are not willing to compromise," the manager replies
proudly.

To the Africans, they are not Jews, Germans or aliens, but simply white
farmers; the rise of anti-colonialism is still in the future in this
district. Regina, so young when she left Europe, therefore hasn't tasted
anti-Semitism until her parents send her into town to a boarding school. Now
a pretty teenager (played by Karoline Eckertz), she is surprised to hear the
headmaster say, "The Jews will stand outside the classroom as we recite the
Lord's Prayer."

As time passes and the beauty and complexity of the land becomes clear to
Jettel, she begins slowly to feel more at home. Her husband is vindicated in
moving his family to Africa; letters arrive with sad news of family members
deported to death camps. But he always considers Africa a temporary haven,
and his attention is focused on a return to Europe. Each member of the
Redlich family has a separate arc: The mother grows to like Africa as the
father likes it less, and their daughter loves it always.

The story is told through the eyes of the daughter (Eckertz is the
narrator); Link's screenplay is based on a best-selling German novel by
Stefanie Zweig, who treats such matters as Jettel's brief affair with a
British officer as it might have been perceived, and interpreted, by the
daughter. Link's style permits the narrative to flow as it might in memory,
and although there are dramatic high points (such as a fire and a plague of
locusts), they are not interruptions but part of the rhythm of African life,
and are joined by the sacrifice of a lamb (for rain) and an all-night ritual
ceremony that the young girl will never forget.

Link's film, which won five German Film Awards, including best film, has now
been nominated for an Academy Award as best foreign language film, and comes
after another extraordinary film, her 1996 "Beyond Silence," also an Oscar
nominee. That one was also about the daughter of a troubled marriage; the
heroine was the hearing child of a deaf couple. I respond strongly to Link's
interest in good stories and vivid, well-defined characters; this film is
less message than memory, depending on the strength of the material to make
all of the points. We feel as if we have lived it.

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