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movies-digest         Friday, October 25 2002         Volume 02 : Number 376



[MV] FORMULA 51 / * (R)
[MV] HEAVEN / *** (R)
[MV] IN PRAISE OF LOVE / * (Not rated)
[MV] AUTO FOCUS / **** (R)
[MV] COMEDIAN / ** (R)
[MV] NAQOYQATSI / *** (PG)
[MV] ALL THE QUEEN'S MEN / * (Not rated)
[MV] BLOODY SUNDAY / ***1/2 (R)
[MV] DAS EXPERIMENT / *** (Not rated)

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

Date: 18 Oct 2002 15:54:28 GMT
From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] FORMULA 51 / * (R)

FORMULA 51 / * (R)

October 18, 2002

Elmo McElroy: Samuel L. Jackson
Felix DeSouza: Robert Carlyle
Dakota Phillips: Emily Mortimer
The Lizard: Meat Loaf
Det. Virgil Kane: Sean Pertwee
Leopold Durant: Ricky Tomlinson
Iki: Rhys Ifans
Screen Gems presents a film directed by Ronny Yu. Written by Stel Pavlou.
Running time: 92 minutes. Rated R (for strong violence, language, drug
content and some sexuality).

BY ROGER EBERT

"Pulp Fiction" and "Trainspotting" were two of the most influential movies
of the last 10 years, but unfortunately their greatest influence has been on
ripoffs of each other--movies like "Formula 51," which is like a fourth-rate
"Pulp Fiction" with accents you can't understand. Here instead of the
descent into the filthiest toilet in Scotland we get a trip through the most
bilious intestinal tract in Liverpool; instead of a debate about Cheese
Royales we get a debate about the semantics of the word "bollocks"; the
F-word occupies 50 percent of all sentences, and in the opening scenes
Samuel L. Jackson wears another one of those Afro wigs.

Jackson plays Elmo McElroy, a reminder that only eight of the 74 movies with
characters named Elmo have been any good. In the prologue, he graduates from
college with a pharmaceutical degree, is busted for pot, loses his license,
and 30 years later is the world's most brilliant inventor of illegal drugs.

Now he has a product named "P.O.S. Formula 51," which he says is 51 times
stronger than crack, heroin, you name it. Instead of selling it to a
druglord named The Lizard (Meat Loaf), he stages a spectacular surprise for
Mr. Lizard and his friends, and flies to Liverpool, trailed by Dakota
Phillips (Emily Mortimer), a skilled hit woman hired by The Lizard to kill
him, or maybe keep him alive, depending on The Lizard's latest information.

In Liverpool we meet Felix DeSouza (Robert Carlyle), a reminder that only
six of the 200 movies with a character named Felix have been any good. (The
stats for "Dakota" are also discouraging, but this is a line of inquiry with
limited dividends.) Felix has been dispatched by the Liverpudlian drug king
Leopold Durant (Ricky Tomlinson), whose hemorrhoids require that a flunky
follow him around with an inner tube that makes whoopee-type whistles
whenever the screenplay requires.

The movie is not a comedy so much as a farce, grabbing desperately for funny
details wherever possible. The Jackson character, for example, wears a kilt
for most of the movie. My online correspondent Ian Waldron-Mantgani, a
critic who lives in Liverpool but doesn't give the home team a break, points
out that the movie closes with the words "No one ever found out why he wore
a kilt," and then explains why he wore the kilt. "You get the idea how much
thought went into this movie," Waldron-Mantgani writes, with admirable
restraint.

Many of the jokes involve Felix's fanatic support of the Liverpool football
club, and a final confrontation takes place in an executive box of the
stadium. Devices like this almost always play as a desperate attempt to
inject local color, especially when the movie shows almost nothing of the
game, so that Americans will not be baffled by what they call football.
There are lots of violent shoot-outs and explosions, a kinduva love affair
between Felix and Dakota, and an ending that crosses a red herring, a
McGuffin and a shaggy dog.

Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

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

Date: 18 Oct 2002 15:54:48 GMT
From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] HEAVEN / *** (R)

HEAVEN / *** (R)

October 18, 2002

Philippa: Cate Blanchett
Filippo: Giovanni Ribisi
Filippo's father: Remo Girone
Regina: Stefania Rocca
Miramax Films presents a film directed by Tom Tykwer. Written by Krzysztof
Kieslowski and Krzysztof Piesiewicz. Running time: 96 minutes. Rated R (for
a scene of sexuality). In English and Italian with English subtitles.

BY ROGER EBERT

There is a moment early in "Heaven" when the character played by Cate
Blanchett is told something she did not expect to hear. This news piles
grief upon unbearable grief, and she cries out in pain. She is a good woman
who is prepared to sacrifice her life against evil, but through a great
misfortune she has done evil herself.

Blanchett plays Philippa, a teacher of English in Turin, Italy. She has seen
drugs kill her husband and some of her students. Her complaints to the
police have been ignored. She knows the man behind the Turin drug traffic,
and one day she plants a bomb in his office. A cleaning lady removes it with
the trash and it explodes in an elevator, killing the cleaner plus a man and
his two children. Four innocent dead.

Philippa has lost her husband and her students, and stands ready to lose her
freedom. But the death of these four crushes her. We are reminded of
"Running on Empty," the 1988 Sidney Lumet film about anti-war radicals in
America who did not know there would be someone in the building they chose
to blow up. As she sits in police headquarters, undergoing a
cross-examination, unaware that one of the men in the room is himself
connected to the drug trade, she makes a conquest.

His name is Filippo (Giovanni Ribisi). He is a rookie cop, the son of a
veteran officer. When Philippa insists on testifying in her native tongue,
Filippo offers to act as her translator. This is after she heard the
horrifying news, and passed out, and grasped his hand as she came to, and he
fell in love with her.

After the 10 films of "The Decalogue" and the great trilogy "Blue," "White"
and "Red," the Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski and his writing partner,
Krzysztof Piesiewicz, began writing a new trilogy: "Heaven," "Purgatory" and
"Hell." Kieslowski died in 1996 before the project could be filmed. Many
good screenplays have died with their authors, but occasionally a director
will step forward to rescue a colleague's work, as Steven Spielberg did with
Stanley Kubrick's "A.I." and now as Tom Tykwer has done with "Heaven."

This is, and isn't, the sort of project Tykwer is identified with. It is
more thoughtful, proceeds more deliberately, than the mercurial haste of
"Run Lola Run" and "The Princess and the Warrior." At the same time, it has
a belief in fateful meetings that occur as a side effect of violence or
chance, as both of those films do. And it contains the same sort of defiant
romanticism, in which a courageous woman tries to alter her fate by sheer
will power.

Philippa and Filippo have almost identical names for a reason, and later
when they shave their heads and dress alike, it is because they share a
common lifeline. It is not a case of merger so much as of Filippo being
assumed into Philippa. She is older, stronger, braver, and he invests the
capital of his life in her account. He betrays his uniform to do whatever he
can to help her escape.

After she agrees to his brilliant plan, she tells him: "Do you know why I
said I agree? I don't want to escape punishment. I want to kill him."
Him--the man behind the drugs. Whether she gets her wish is not the point.
What she focuses on is her original plan; if she can finally carry it out,
she will have made amends, however inadequately, for the innocents who died.

Kieslowski was fascinated by moral paradoxes, by good leading to evil and
back again. In "The Decalogue," a child's brilliance at the computer leads
to a drowning. A woman wants to know if her husband will die, because if he
will not, she will have her lover's baby aborted. A wife breaks it off with
her lover--but her husband tarnishes her decision by spying on it. To do
good is sometimes to cause evil. We can make plans, but we can't count on
the consequences.

The ending of "Heaven" is disappointing. It becomes just what it should not
be, the story of an escape. I wonder if Kieslowski and Piesiewicz ended
their version this way, in a fable of innocence regained. The tough ending
would have had Philippa and Filippo paying for their crimes. It would not
have been an unhappy ending for them; they are fully prepared to take the
consequences, and that is what's most admirable about them.

Still, many lesser films--almost all commercial films these days, in
fact--contrive happy endings. This one is poetic in its sadness, and
Blanchett's performance confirms her power once again. She never goes for an
effect here, never protects herself, just plays the character straight ahead
as a woman forced by grief and rage into a rash action, and then living with
the consequences. We require theology to get to the bottom of the story: It
is wrong to commit an immoral act in order to bring about a good outcome. No
matter how beneficial the result, it is still a sin. This is a good movie
that could have been great if it had ended in a form of penance.

Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

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

Date: 18 Oct 2002 15:55:01 GMT
From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] IN PRAISE OF LOVE / * (Not rated)

IN PRAISE OF LOVE / * (Not rated)

October 18, 2002

Edgar: Bruno Putzulu
Elle: Cecile Camp
Grandfather: Jean Davy
Grandmother: Francoise Verny
Servant: Philippe Loyrette
Eglantine: Audrey Klebaner
Perceval: Jeremy Lippman
Manhattan Pictures Interna-tional presents a film written and directed by
Jean-Luc Godard. Running time: 98 minutes. No MPAA rating. In French with
English subtitles.

BY ROGER EBERT

What strange confusion besets Jean-Luc Godard? He stumbles through the
wreckage of this film like a baffled Lear, seeking to exercise power that is
no longer his. "In Praise of Love" plays like an attempt to reconstruct an
ideal film that might once have existed in his mind, but is there no more.

Yes, I praised the film in an article from the 2001 Cannes Film Festival,
but have now seen it again, and no longer agree with those words. Seeing
Godard's usual trademarks and preoccupations, I called it "a bittersweet
summation of one of the key careers in modern cinema," and so it is, but I
no longer think it is a successful one.

Godard was the colossus of the French New Wave. His films helped invent
modern cinema. They were bold, unconventional, convincing. To see
"Breathless," "My Life to Live" or "Weekend" is to be struck by a powerful
and original mind. In the late 1960s he entered his Maoist period, making a
group of films ("Wind from the East," "Vladimir and Rosa," "Pravda") that
were ideologically silly but still stylistically intriguing; those films (I
learn from Milos Stehlik of Facets Cinematheque, who has tried to find them)
have apparently been suppressed by their maker.

Then, after a near-fatal traffic accident, came the Godard who turned away
from the theatrical cinema and made impenetrable videos. In recent years
have come films both successful ("Hail, Mary") and not, and now a film like
"In Praise of Love," which in style and tone looks like he is trying to
return to his early films but has lost the way.

Perhaps at Cannes I was responding to memories of Godard's greatness. He has
always been fascinated with typography, with naming the sections of his
films and treating words like objects (he once had his Maoist heroes
barricade themselves behind a wall of Little Red Books). Here he repeatedly
uses intertitles, and while as a device it is good to see again, the actual
words, reflected on, have little connection to the scenes they separate.

He wants to remind us "In Praise of Love" is self-consciously a movie: He
uses not only the section titles, but offscreen interrogators, polemical
statements, narrative confusion, a split between the black and white of the
first half and the saturated video color of the second. What he lacks is a
port of entry for the viewer. Defenses of the film are tortured rhetorical
exercises in which critics assemble Godard's materials and try to paraphrase
them to make sense. Few ordinary audience members, however experienced, can
hope to emerge from this film with a coherent view of what Godard was
attempting.

If you agree with Noam Chomsky, you will have the feeling that you would
agree with this film if only you could understand it. Godard's
anti-Americanism is familiar by now, but has spun off into flywheel
territory. What are we to make of the long dialogue attempting to prove that
the United States of America is a country without a name? Yes, he is right
that there are both North and South Americas. Yes, Brazil has united states.
Yes, Mexico has states and is in North America. Therefore, we have no name.
This is the kind of tiresome language game schoolchildren play.

It is also painful to see him attack Hollywood as worthless and without
history, when (as Charles Taylor points out on Salon.com), Godard was one of
those who taught us about our film history; with his fellow New Wavers, he
resurrected film noir, named it, celebrated it, even gave its directors bit
parts in his films. Now that history (his as well as ours) has disappeared
from his mind.

His attacks on Steven Spielberg are painful and unfair. Some of the
fragments of his film involve a Spielberg company trying to buy the memories
of Holocaust survivors for a Hollywood film (it will star, we learn,
Juliette Binoche, who appeared in "Hail Mary" but has now apparently gone
over to the dark side). Elsewhere in the film he accuses Spielberg of having
made millions from "Schindler's List" while Mrs. Schindler lives in
Argentina in poverty. One muses: (1) Has Godard, having also used her, sent
her any money? (2) Has Godard or any other director living or dead done more
than Spielberg, with his Holocaust Project, to honor and preserve the
memories of the survivors? (3) Has Godard so lost the ability to go to the
movies that, having once loved the works of Samuel Fuller and Nicholas Ray,
he cannot view a Spielberg film except through a prism of anger?

Critics are often asked if they ever change their minds about a movie. I
hope we can grow and learn. I do not "review" films seen at festivals, but
"report" on them--because in the hothouse atmosphere of seeing three to five
films a day, most of them important, one cannot always step back and catch a
breath. At Cannes I saw the surface of "In Praise of Love," remembered
Godard's early work, and was cheered by the film. After a second viewing,
looking beneath the surface, I see so little there: It is all remembered
rote work, used to conceal old tricks, facile name-calling, the loss of
hope, and emptiness.

Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

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

Date: 25 Oct 2002 16:16:56 GMT
From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] AUTO FOCUS / **** (R)

AUTO FOCUS / **** (R)

October 25, 2002

Bob Crane: Greg Kinnear
John Carpenter: Willem Dafoe
Patricia Crane: Maria Bello
Anne Crane: Rita Wilson
Lenny: Ron Leibman
Feldman: Bruce Solomon
Sony Pictures Classics presents a film directed by Paul Schrader. Written by
Michael Gerbosi. Based on the book The Murder of Bob Crane by Robert
Graysmith. Running time: 107 minutes. Rated R (for strong sexuality, nudity,
language, some drug use and violence).

BY ROGER EBERT

Eddie Cantor once told Bob Crane, "likability is 90 percent of the battle."
It seems to be 100 percent of Bob Crane's battle; there is nothing there
except likability--no values, no self-awareness, no judgment, no
perspective, not even an instinct for survival. Just likability, and the
need to be liked in a sexual way every single day. Paul Schrader's "Auto
Focus," based on Crane's life, is a deep portrait of a shallow man, lonely
and empty, going through the motions of having a good time.

The broad outlines of Crane's rise and fall are well known. How he was a Los
Angeles DJ who became a TV star after being cast in the lead of "Hogan's
Heroes," a comedy set in a Nazi prison camp. How his career tanked after the
show left the air. How he toured on the dinner theater circuit, destroyed
two marriages, and was so addicted to sex that his life was scandalous even
by Hollywood standards. How he was found bludgeoned to death in 1978 in a
Scottsdale, Ariz., motel room.

Crane is survived by four children, including sons from his first and second
marriages who differ in an almost biblical way, the older appearing in this
movie, the younger threatening a lawsuit against it, yet running a Web site
retailing his father's sex life. So strange was Crane's view of his
behavior, so disconnected from reality, that I almost imagine he would have
seen nothing wrong with his second son's sales of photos and videotapes of
his father having sex. "It's healthy," Crane argues in defense of his
promiscuity, although we're not sure if he really thinks that, or really
thinks anything.

The movie is a hypnotic portrait of this sad, compulsive life. The director,
Paul Schrader, is no stranger to stories about men trapped in sexual
miscalculation; he wrote "Taxi Driver" and wrote and directed "American
Gigolo." He sees Crane as an empty vessel, filled first with fame and then
with desire. Because he was on TV, he finds that women want to sleep with
him, and seems to oblige them almost out of good manners. There is no lust
or passion in this film, only mechanical courtship followed by desultory
sex. You can catch the women looking at him and asking themselves if there
is anybody at home. Even his wives are puzzled.

Greg Kinnear gives a creepy, brilliant performance as a man lacking in all
insight. He has the likability part down pat. There is a scene in a
nightclub where Crane asks the bartender to turn the TV to a rerun of
"Hogan's Heroes." When a woman realizes that Hogan himself is in the room,
notice how impeccable Kinnear's timing and manner are, as he fakes false
modesty and pretends to be flattered by her attention. Crane was not a
complex man, but that should not blind us to the subtlety and complexity of
Kinnear's performance.

Willem Dafoe is the co-star, as John Carpenter, a tech-head in the days when
Hollywood was just learning that television could be taped and replayed by
devices in the consumer price range. Carpenter hangs around sets flattering
the stars, lending them the newest Sony gadgets, wiring their cars for
stereo and their dressing rooms for instant replays. He is the very
embodiment of Mephistopheles, offering Crane exactly what he wants to be
offered.

The turning point in Crane's life comes on a night when Carpenter invites
him to a strip club. Crane is proud of his drumming, and Carpenter suggests
that the star could "sit in" with the house band. Soon Crane is sitting in
at strip clubs every night of the week, returning late or not at all to his
first wife Anne (Rita Wilson). Sensing something is wrong, he meets a priest
one morning for breakfast, but is somehow not interested when the priest
suggests he could "sit in" with a parish musical group.

Dafoe plays Carpenter as ingratiating, complimentary, sly, seductive and
enigmatically needy. Despite their denials, is there something homosexual in
their relationship? The two men become constant companions, apart from a
little tiff when Crane examines a video and notices Carpenter's hand in the
wrong place. "It's an orgy!" Carpenter explains, and soon the men are on the
prowl again. The video equipment has a curious relevance to their sexual
activities; do they have sex for its own sake, or to record it for later
editing and viewing? From its earliest days, home video has had an intimate
buried relationship with sex. If Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson ever think to
ask themselves why they taped their wedding night, this movie might suggest
some answers.

The film is wall-to-wall with sex, but contains no eroticism. The women are
never really in focus. They drift in and out of range, as the two men hunt
through swinger's magazines, attend swapping parties, haunt strip clubs and
troll themselves like bait through bars. If there is a shadow on their
idyll, it is that Crane condescends to Carpenter, and does not understand
the other man's desperate need for recognition.

The film is pitch-perfect in its decor, music, clothes, cars, language and
values. It takes place during those heady years between the introduction of
the Pill and the specter of AIDS, when men shaped as adolescents by Playboy
in the 1950s now found some of their fantasies within reach. The movie
understands how celebrity can make women available--and how, for some men,
it is impossible to say no to an available woman. They are hard-wired, and
judgment has nothing to do with it. We can feel sorry for Bob Crane but in a
strange way, because he is so clueless, it is hard to blame him; we are
reminded of the old joke in which God tells Adam he has a brain and a penis,
but only enough blood to operate one of them at a time.

The movie's moral counterpoint is provided by Ron Leibman, as Lenny, Crane's
manager. He gets him the job on "Hogan's Heroes" and even, improbably, the
lead in a Disney film named "Superdad." But Crane is reckless in the way he
allows photographs and tapes of his sexual performances to float out of his
control. On the Disney set one day, Lenny visits to warn Crane about his
notorious behavior, but Crane can't hear him, can't listen. He drifts toward
his doom, unconscious, lost in a sexual fog.

Crane families in legal dispute over biopic

Bob Crane's two sons are on opposite sides in a legal dispute about the
biopic "Auto Focus." Robert David Crane, the son by the first marriage,
supports the movie, appears in it and is listed in the credits as "Bob Crane
Jr." Robert Scott Crane, from the second marriage, says it is filled with
inaccuracies, and has started a Web site to oppose it. The site somewhat
undermines its own position by offering for sale photographs and videos
taken by Crane of his sexual indiscretions.

"There is no such person as Bob Crane Jr.," says Lee Blackman, the Los
Angeles attorney representing the second wife, Patricia, and her son. "Both
sons had Robert as a first name, and different middle names. Bob Crane's own
middle name was Edward." In life, he told me, the older son is called Bobby,
and the younger, his client, is Scotty.

By taking money for his participation in the movie and billing himself Bob
Crane Jr., he said, Bobby has compromised himself. (In the movie, the older
son has a small role as a Christian TV interviewer.)

But what about his client Scotty's Web site, with the Crane sex tapes for
sale?

"He is trying to set the record straight. The Web site only came into
existence because of the film. For example, on Scotty's site you will find
the Scottsdale coroner's autopsy on Bob Crane, clearly indicating he never
had a penile implant, although the movie claims he did. You will see that
his movies were really just homemade comedies: He would edit the sex stuff
with cutaways to Jack Benny or Johnny Carson, and a musical soundtrack."

Other complaints by Blackman and his clients:

* "He was reconciled with Patricia, his second wife, at the time of his
death. The movie shows her drinking in the middle of the day, but she has an
allergic reaction to hard liquor."

* "DNA tests have proven Scotty is Bob Crane's son, despite implications in
the movie that he is not."

* "Bob Crane was not a dark monster. The night he was killed, he was editing
'Star Wars' for Scotty, to take out the violence."

* "He didn't meet John Carpenter [the Willem Dafoe character] until 1975.
The movie has him meeting him in 1965. It implies Bob needed Carpenter to
teach him all that technical stuff, but in fact Bob Crane was very
knowledgeable about home electronics, and was making home movies even in the
1950s."

"Legally," said Blackman, "you can defame the dead. This movie has massive
quantities of defamation. We're trying to work with the distributor, Sony,
to tweak the film in a couple of little places to make it more accurate.
When it's released, if it still contains actionable material, we'll
determine what to do."

Roger Ebert

Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

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

Date: 25 Oct 2002 16:16:59 GMT
From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] COMEDIAN / ** (R)

COMEDIAN / ** (R)

October 25, 2002

Featuring: Jerry Seinfeld, Orny Adams, Bill Cosby, Jay Leno, Chris Rock and
Garry Shandling
Miramax Films presents a documentary directed by Christian Charles. Running
time: 81 minutes. Rated R (for language).

BY ROGER EBERT

If it takes this much agony to be a stand-up comic, I don't think I could
survive a movie about a brain surgeon. "Comedian" follows Jerry Seinfeld and
other stand-ups as they appear onstage and then endlessly analyze, discuss,
rerun, regret, denounce, forgive and rewrite their material. To say they
sweat blood is to trivialize their suffering.

It looks to the audience as if stand-up comics walk out on a stage, are
funny, walk off, and spend the rest of the time hanging around the bar being
envied by wannabes. In fact, we discover, they agonize over "a minute,"
"five minutes," "10 minutes," on their way to nirvana: "I have an hour."
When Chris Rock tells Seinfeld that Bill Cosby does two hours and 20 minutes
without an intermission, and he does it twice in the same day, he becomes
very sad and thoughtful, like a karaoke star when Tony Bennett walks in.

Seinfeld can't believe his good fortune. He reached the top, with one of the
biggest hit TV shows of all time. And yet: "Here I am in Cleveland." After
retiring his old nightclub act with an HBO special, he starts from scratch
to devise a new act and take it on the road to comedy clubs, half of which
are called the Improv. He stands in front of the same brick walls, drinks
the same bottled water, handles the same microphones as kids on the way up.
Of course, he flies into town on a private jet that costs more than the
comedy club, but the movie doesn't rub this in.

Seinfeld is a great star, yet cannot coast. One night he gets stuck in the
middle of his act--he loses his train of thought--and stares baffled into
space. Blowing a single word can depress him. If it's still a battle for
Seinfeld, consider the case of Orny Adams, a rising comedian whom the film
uses as counterpoint. Adams shows Seinfeld a room full of boxes, drawers,
cabinets, file folders, stuffed with jokes. There are piles of material, and
yet he confides, "I feel like I sacrificed so much of my life. I'm 29 and I
have no job, no wife, no children." Seinfeld regards him as if wife,
children, home will all come in good time, but stand-up, now--stand-up is
life.

Orny Adams gets a gig on the David Letterman program, and we see him
backstage, vibrating with nervousness. The network guys have been over his
material and suggested some changes. Now he practices saying the word
"psoriasis." After the show, he makes a phone call to a friend to explain,
"I opened my first great network show with a joke I had never used before."
Well, not a completely new joke. He had to substitute the word "psoriasis"
for the word "lupus." But to a comedian who fine-tunes every syllable, that
made it a new joke and a fearsome challenge.

Seinfeld pays tribute to Robert Klein ("he was the guy we all looked up
to"). We listen to Klein remember when, after several appearances on "The
Tonight Show," he received the ultimate recognition: He was "called over by
Johnny." Seinfeld recalls that when he was 10 he memorized the comedy albums
of Bill Cosby. Now he visits Cosby backstage and expresses wonderment that
"a human life could last so long that I would be included in your life." Big
hug. Cosby is 65 and Seinfeld is 48, a 17-year-difference that is therefore
less amazing than that Shoshanna Lonstein's life could last so long that she
could meet Jerry when she was 18 and he was 39, but there you go.

"Comedian" was filmed over the course of a year by director Christian
Charles and producer Gary Streiner, who used two "store-bought" video
cameras and followed Seinfeld around. If that is all they did for a year,
then this was a waste of their time, since the footage, however interesting,
is the backstage variety that could easily be obtained in a week. There are
no deep revelations, no shocking moments of truth, and many, many
conversations in which Seinfeld and other comics discuss their acts with
discouragement and despair. The movie was produced by Seinfeld, and protects
him. The visuals tend toward the dim, the gray and the washed-out, and you
wish instead of spending a year with their store-boughts, they'd spent a
month and used the leftover to hire a cinematographer.

Why, you might wonder, would a man with untold millions in the bank go on a
tour of comedy clubs? What's in it for him if the people in Cleveland laugh?
Why, for that matter, does Jay Leno go to comedy clubs every single week,
even after having been called over by Johnny for the ultimate reward? Is it
because to walk out on the stage, to risk all, to depend on your nerve and
skill, and to possibly "die," is an addiction? Gamblers, they say, don't
want to win so much as they want to play. They like the action. They tend to
keep gambling until they have lost all their money. There may be a
connection between the two obsessions, although gamblers at least say they
are having fun, and stand-up comics, judging by this film, are miserable,
self-tortured beings, to whom success represents only a higher place to fall
from.

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Date: 25 Oct 2002 16:17:03 GMT
From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] NAQOYQATSI / *** (PG)

NAQOYQATSI / *** (PG)

October 25, 2002

Miramax Films presents a documentary written and directed by Godfrey Reggio.
Running time: 89 minutes. Rated PG.(for violent and disturbing images, and
for brief nudity). Opening today at the Biograph Theatre.

BY ROGER EBERT

'N aqoyqatsi" is the final film in Godfrey Reggio's "qatsi" trilogy, a
series of impressionistic documentaries contrasting the nobility of nature
with the despoliation of mankind. The titles come from the Hopi Indian
language. "Koyaanisqatsi" (1983) translated as "life out of balance."
"Powaqqatsi" (1988) means "life in transition." And now comes "Naqoyqatsi,"
or "war as a way of life."

Like the others, "Naqoyqatsi" consists of images (450 of them, Reggio said
at the Telluride premiere). We see quick streams of briefly glimpsed
symbols, abstractions, digital code, trademarks, newsreels, found images,
abandoned buildings and cityscapes, and snippets of TV and photography. An
early image shows the Tower of Babel; the implication is that the confusion
of spoken tongues has been made worse by the addition of visual and digital
languages.

"Koyaanisqatsi," with its dramatic fast-forward style of hurtling images,
made a considerable impact at the time. Clouds raced up mountainsides,
traffic flowed like streams of light through city streets. The technique was
immediately ripped off by TV commercials, so that the film's novelty is no
longer obvious. Now that he has arrived at the third part of his trilogy,
indeed, Reggio's method looks familiar, and that is partly the fault of his
own success. Here, he uses speedup less and relies more on quickly cut
montages. It's a version of the technique used in Chuck Workman's films on
the Oscarcast, the ones that marry countless shots from the movies; Reggio
doctors his images with distortion, overlays, tints and other kinds of
digital alteration.

The thinking behind these films is deep but not profound. They're
ritualistic grief at what man has done to the planet. "The logical flaw," as
I pointed out in my review of "Powaqqatsi," is that "Reggio's images of
beauty are always found in a world entirely without man--without even the
Hopi Indians. Reggio seems to think that man himself is some kind of virus
infecting the planet--that we would enjoy the earth more, in other words, if
we weren't here."

Although "Naqoyqatsi" has been some 10 years in the making, it takes on an
especially somber coloration after 9/11. Images of marching troops,
missiles, bomb explosions and human misery are intercut with trademarks (the
Enron trademark flashes past), politicians and huddled masses, and we
understand that war is now our way of life. But hasn't war always been a
fact of life for mankind? We are led to the uncomfortable conclusion that to
bring peace to the planet, we should leave it.

This line of reasoning may, however, be missing the point. In reviewing all
three Reggio films, I have assumed he was telling us something with his
images, and that I could understand it and analyze it. That overlooks what
may be the key element of the films, the sound tracks by composer Philip
Glass (this time joined by Yo-Yo Ma, who also contributes a solo). Can it be
that these films are, in the very best sense of the word, music videos? The
movie is not simply "scored" by Glass; his music is a vital component of
every frame, fully equal with the visuals, and you can watch these films
again and again, just as you can listen to a favorite album.

Perhaps the solution is to stop analyzing the images altogether and set
ourselves free from them. Just as it is a heresy to paraphrase classical
music by discovering "stories" or "messages," perhaps "Naqoyqatsi" and its
brothers need to be experienced as background to our own streams of
consciousness--nudges to set us thinking about the same concerns that Reggio
has. I have problems with "Naqoyqatsi" as a film, but as a music video it's
rather remarkable.

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Date: 25 Oct 2002 16:16:54 GMT
From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] ALL THE QUEEN'S MEN / * (Not rated)

ALL THE QUEEN'S MEN / * (Not rated)

October 25, 2002

Steven O'Rourke: Matt LeBlanc
Tony Parker: Eddie Izzard
Archie: James Cosmo
Romy: Nicolette Krebitz
Gen. Lansdorf: Udo Kier
Johnno: David Birkin
Col. Aitken: Edward Fox
Strand Releasing presents a film directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky. Written by
Digby Wolfe, Joseph Manduke and June Roberts. Running time: 105 minutes. In
German and English with English subtitles. No MPAA rating.

BY ROGER EBERT

"All the Queen's Men" is a perfectly good idea for a comedy, but it just
plain doesn't work. It's dead in the water. I can imagine it working well in
a different time, with a different cast, in black and white instead of
color--but I can't imagine it working like this.

The movie tells the story of the "Poof Platoon," a group of four Allied
soldiers parachuted into Berlin in drag to infiltrate the all-woman factory
where the Enigma machine is being manufactured. This story is said to be
based on fact. If it is, I am amazed that such promising material would
yield such pitiful results. To impersonate a woman and a German at the same
time would have been so difficult and dangerous that it's amazing how the
movie turns it into a goofy lark.

The film stars Matt LeBlanc from "Friends," who is criminally miscast as
Steven O'Rourke, a U.S. officer famous for never quite completing heroic
missions. He is teamed with a drag artist named Tony (Eddie Izzard), an
ancient major named Archie (James Cosmo) and a scholar named Johnno (David
Birkin). After brief lessons in hair, makeup, undergarments and espionage,
they're dropped into Berlin during an air raid and try to make contact with
a resistance leader.

This underground hero turns out to be the lovely and fragrant Romy
(Nicolette Krebitz), a librarian who for the convenience of the plot lives
in a loft under the roof of the library, so that (during one of many
unbelievable scenes) the spies are able to lift a skylight window in order
to eavesdrop on an interrogation.

The plot requires them to infiltrate the factory, steal an Enigma machine
and return to England with it. Anyone who has seen "Enigma," "U-571" or the
various TV documentaries about the Enigma machine will be aware that by the
time of this movie, the British already had possession of an Enigma machine,
but to follow that line of inquiry too far in this movie is not wise. The
movie has an answer to it, but it comes so late in the film that although it
makes sense technically, the damage has already been done.

The four misfit transvestites totter about Berlin looking like (very bad)
Andrews Sisters imitators, and O'Rourke falls in love with the librarian
Romy. How it becomes clear that he is not a woman is not nearly as
interesting as how anyone could possibly have thought he was a woman in the
first place. He plays a woman as if determined, in every scene, to signal to
the audience that he's absolutely straight and only kidding. His voice, with
its uncanny similarity to Sylvester Stallone's, doesn't help.

The action in the movie would be ludicrous anyway, but is even more peculiar
in a cross-dressing comedy. There's a long sequence in which Tony, the
Izzard character, does a marked-down Marlene Dietrich before a wildly
enthusiastic audience of Nazis. Surely they know he is, if not a spy, at
least a drag queen? I'm not so sure. I fear the movie makes it appear the
Nazis think he is a sexy woman, something that will come as surprise to
anyone who is familiar with Eddie Izzard, including Eddie Izzard.

Watching the movie, it occurred to me that Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon were
not any more convincing as women in "Some Like It Hot." And yet we bought
them in that comedy, and it remains a classic. Why did they work, while the
Queen's Men manifestly do not? Apart from the inescapable difference in
actual talent, could it have anything to do with the use of color?

Black and white is better suited to many kinds of comedy, because it
underlines the dialogue and movement while diminishing the importance of
fashions and eliminating the emotional content of various colors. Billy
Wilder fought for b&w on "Some Like It Hot" because he thought his drag
queens would never be accepted by the audience in color, and he was right.

The casting is also a problem. Matt LeBlanc does not belong in this movie in
any role other than, possibly, that of a Nazi who believes Eddie Izzard is a
woman. He is all wrong for the lead, with no lightness, no humor, no
sympathy for his fellow spies and no comic timing. I can imagine this movie
as a b&w British comedy, circa 1960, with Peter Sellers, Kenneth
Williams, et al., but at this time, with this cast, this movie is hopeless.

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Date: 25 Oct 2002 16:16:58 GMT
From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] BLOODY SUNDAY / ***1/2 (R)

BLOODY SUNDAY / ***1/2 (R)

October 25, 2002

Ivan Cooper: James Nesbitt
Maj. Gen. Ford: Tim Pigott-Smith
Brigadier MacLellan: Nicholas Farrell
Chief Supt. Lagan: Gerard McSorley
Frances: Kathy Kiera Clarke
Kevin McCorry: Allan Gildea
Eamonn McCann: Gerard Crossan
Paramount Classics presents a film written and directed by Paul Greengrass.
Based on the book by Don Mullan. Running time: 110 minutes. Rated R (for
violence and language). Opening today at Webster Place and Evanston CineArts
6.

BY ROGER EBERT

Both sides agree that on Jan. 30, 1972, a civil rights march in Derry,
Northern Ireland, ended with a confrontation between some of the marchers
and British army paratroopers. At the end of the day, 13 marchers were dead
and 14 in the hospital, one of whom later died. No British soldiers were
killed. An official inquiry declared that the soldiers had returned the fire
of armed marchers. Some of the soldiers involved were later decorated by the
crown.

Beyond this agreement, there is a disagreement so deep and bitter that 30
years later "Bloody Sunday" is still an open wound in the long, contested
history of the British in Northern Ireland. A new inquiry into the events of
the day was opened in 1998 and still continues today. Paul Greengrass' film
"Bloody Sunday," which shared the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival
this year, is made in the form of a documentary. It covers about 24 hours,
starting on Saturday evening, and its central character is Ivan Cooper
(James Nesbitt), a civil rights leader in Derry. He was a Protestant MP from
the nationalist Social Democratic Labour Party. Most of the 10,000 marchers
on that Sunday would be Catholic; that a Protestant led them, and stood
beside such firebrands as Bernadette Devlin, indicates the division in the
north between those who stood in solidarity with their co-religionists, and
those of all faiths who simply wanted the British out of Northern Ireland.

Cooper is played by Nesbitt as a thoroughly admirable man, optimistic,
tireless, who walks fearlessly through dangerous streets and has a good word
for everyone. He knows the day's march has been banned by the British
government but expects no trouble because it will be peaceful and
non-violent. As Cooper hands out leaflets in the streets, Greengrass
intercuts preparations by the British army, which from the top down is
determined to make a strong stand against "hooliganism." More than two dozen
British soldiers have been killed by the Provisional IRA in recent months,
and this is a chance to crack down.

Greengrass also establishes a few other characters, including a young man
who kisses his girlfriend goodbye and promises his mother no harm will come
to him--always ominous signs in a movie. And we meet the Derry police chief
(Gerard McSorley), who is alarmed by the fierce resolve of the soldiers and
asks, not unreasonably, if it wouldn't be wiser to simply permit the march,
since it is obviously going to proceed anyway. Greengrass re-creates events
with stunning reality. (When he shows a movie marquee advertising "Sunday
Bloody Sunday," it's a small glitch because it seems like a calculated shot
in a movie that feels like cinema verite.) He is aided by the presence of
thousands of extras, who volunteered to be in the movie (some of them
marched on Bloody Sunday and are in a way playing themselves). Northern
Ireland is still a tinderbox where this film could not possibly be made;
streets in a poor area of Dublin were used.

Cooper and the other leaders are on the bed of a truck which leads the
column of marchers, and from their vantage point we can see that when the
march turns right, away from the army's position, some hot-headed marchers
turn left and begin to throw rocks at the soldiers. In the army's HQ, where
Maj. Gen. Ford (Tim Pigott-Smith) is in charge, an order is given to respond
firmly. Communications are confused, orders are distorted as they pass down
the chain of command, and soon rubber bullets and gas grenades are replaced
by the snap of real bullets.

Greengrass shows marchers trying to restrain a few of their fellows who are
armed. His film is clear, however, in its belief that the British fired
first and in cold blood, and he shows one wounded marcher being executed
with a bullet in the back. One of the marchers is apparently inspired by
Gerald Donaghey, whose case became famous. After being wounded, he was
searched twice, once by doctors, and then taken to an army area where he
died. Soldiers then found nail bombs in his pockets that had been
"overlooked" in two previous searches. For Greengrass, this is part of a
desperate attempt by the army to plant evidence and justify a massacre. Of
course, there are two sides to the story of Bloody Sunday, although the
score (Army 14, Marchers 0) is significant. The Greengrass view reflects
both the theories and the anger of the anti-British factions, and the army's
smugness after being cleared in the original investigation was only
inflammatory. "Bloody Sunday" is one view of what happened that day, a very
effective one. And as an act of filmmaking, it is superb: A sense of
immediate and present reality permeates every scene.

The official Web site of the current inquiry into Bloody Sunday may be found
at www.bloody-sunday-inquiry.org.uk. To read Thomas Kinsella's famous poem
about the 1972 event, "Butcher's Dozen," go to
www.usm.maine.edu/~mcgrath/poems/butchrs.htm.

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Date: 25 Oct 2002 16:17:01 GMT
From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] DAS EXPERIMENT / *** (Not rated)

DAS EXPERIMENT / *** (Not rated)

October 25, 2002

Tarek Fahd, Number 77: Mortiz Bleibtreu
Berus: Justus von Dohnanyi
Steinhoff, Number 38: Christian Berkel
Schutte, Number 82: Oliver Stokowski
Joe, Number 69: Wotan Wilke Mohring
Number 53: Stephan Szasz
Number 40: Polat Dal
Number 21: Danny Richter
Number 15: Ralf Muller
Dora: Maren Eggert
Samuel Goldwyn Films presents a film directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel.
Written by Don Bohlinger, Christoph Darnstadt and Mario Giordano. Based on
the novel Black Box by Giordano. Running time: 114 minutes. No MPAA rating.
In German with English subtitles.

BY ROGER EBERT

Human behavior is determined to some degree by the uniforms we wear. An army
might march more easily in sweat pants, but it wouldn't have the same sense
of purpose. School uniforms enlist kids in the "student body." Catholic nuns
saw recruitment fall off when they modernized their habits. If you want to
figure out what someone thinks of himself, examine the uniform he is
wearing. Gene Siskel amused himself by looking at people on the street and
thinking: When they left home this morning, they thought they looked good in
that.

"Das Experiment," a new film from Germany, suggests that uniforms and the
roles they assign amplify underlying psychological tendencies. In the
experiment, 20 men are recruited to spend two weeks in a prison environment.
Eight are made into guards and given quasi-military uniforms. Twelve become
prisoners and wear nightshirts with numbers sewn on them. All 20 know they
are merely volunteers working for a $1,700 paycheck.

The movie is based on a novel, Black Box, by Mario Giordano. The novel was
probably inspired by the famous Stanford Prison Experiment of 1971, a
classic of role-playing. On that experiment's Web site, its director, Philip
G. Zimbardo, writes:

"How we went about testing these questions and what we found may astound
you. Our planned two-week investigation into the psychology of prison life
had to be ended prematurely after only six days because of what the
situation was doing to the college students who participated. In only a few
days, our guards became sadistic and our prisoners became depressed and
showed signs of extreme stress."

So there, I've given away the plot. Some critics of "Das Experiment"
question the fact that the guards become cruel so quickly, but the real-life
experiment bears that out. What is fascinating is how most of the members of
both groups tend to follow charismatic leaders. None of the other guards is
as sadistic as Berus (Justus von Dohnanyi) and none of the other prisoners
is as rebellious as Tarek Fahd (Mortiz Bleibtreu), who remembers, "My father
would say, 'Don't do this,' and I'd do it."

Perhaps uniforms turn us into packs, led by the top dog. There are a few
strays. One prisoner seems custom-made to be a victim, but another, a man
with military experience, holds back and tries to analyze the situation and
provide cool guidance. But he's more or less powerless because--well, the
guards are in charge. One of the guards has misgivings about what is
happening, but it takes a lot of nerve to defy the pack.

It would make perfect sense for the guards to say, "Look, we're all in this
together and we all want the $1,700 at the end of the two weeks. So let's
make it easy on ourselves." But at Stanford as in this movie (and in life),
that is not human nature. The outcome of the experiment is clear from the
setup. We would be astonished if the guards became humane.

What impressed me is how effective the movie was, even though the outcome is
a foregone conclusion. That's a tribute to the director, Oliver
Hirschbiegel, and the actors, who have been chosen with the same kind of
typecasting that perhaps occurs in life. The sadist looks mean. The rebel
looks like a trouble-maker. The military guy looks competent. The victim
looks submissive. We see them and read them. Is it the same in life?

By halfway through, I was surprised how involved I was, and I see that I
stopped taking notes at about that point--stopped thinking objectively and
began to identify. Of course I identified with the trouble-maker. But give
me a uniform and who knows what I would have done. The fact that the movie
is German inspires thoughts about the Holocaust: The Nazi command structure
needed only strong leaders at the top for Hitler to find, as one book called
them, willing executioners in the ranks. But is the syndrome limited to Nazi
Germany? This movie argues not.

Thinking of World War II, we're reminded not only of the Nazi uniforms,
which were fetishistic, but of the genial sloppiness of the average American
G.I., as unforgettably portrayed by the great Bill Mauldin. His Willie and
Joe, unshaven, their helmets askew, cigarettes dangling from their lips,
resented authority, but they won the war.

The Stanford Prison Experiment can be found on the Web at www.prisonexp.org.

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