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movies-digest        Saturday, November 2 2002        Volume 02 : Number 386



[MV] THE RING / ** (PG-13)
[MV] BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE / ***1/2 (R)
[MV] PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE / ***1/2 (R)
[MV] SKINS / *** (R)
[MV] JUST A KISS / * (R)
[MV] KNOCKAROUND GUYS / *** (R)
[MV] KWIK STOP / ***1/2 (Not rated)
[MV] BELOW / **1/2 (R)
[MV] SWEPT AWAY / * (R)
[MV] BROWN SUGAR / ***
[MV] SECRETARY / *** (R)

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

Date: 02 Nov 2002 07:24:43 GMT
From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] THE RING / ** (PG-13)

THE RING / ** (PG-13)

October 18, 2002

Rachel Keller:    Naomi Watts
Noah:    Martin Henderson
Richard Morgan:     Brian Cox
Aidan:    David Dorfman
Ruth:     Lindsay Frost
Katie:      Amber Tamblyn
DreamWorks presents a film directed by Gore Verbinski. Written by Ehren
Kruger. Based on the novel by Koji Suzuki. Running time: 115 minutes. Rated
PG-13 (for thematic elements, disturbing images, language and some drug
references).

BY ROGER EBERT

Rarely has a more serious effort produced a less serious result than in "The
Ring," the kind of dread dark horror film where you better hope nobody in
the audience snickers, because the film teeters right on the edge of the
ridiculous.

Enormous craft has been put into the movie, which looks just great, but the
story goes beyond contrivance into the dizzy realms of the absurd. And
although there is no way for everything to be explained (and many events
lack any possible explanation), the movie's ending explains and explains and
explains, until finally you'd rather just give it a pass than sit through
one more tedious flashback.

The story involves a video that brings certain death. You look at it, the
phone rings, and you find out you have seven days to live. A prologue shows
some teenage victims of the dread curse, and then newspaper reporter Rachel
Keller (Naomi Watts) gets on the case, helped by eerie drawings by her young
son, Aidan (David Dorfman).

The story has been recycled from a popular Japanese thriller by Hideo
Nakata, which was held off the market in this country to clear the field for
this remake. Alas, the same idea was ripped off in August by "feardotcom,"
also a bad movie, but more plain fun than "The Ring," and with a climax that
used brilliant visual effects while this one drags on endlessly.

I dare not reveal too much of the story but will say that the video does
indeed bring death in a week, something we are reminded of as Rachel tries
to solve the case while titles tick off the days. A single mom, she enlists
Aidan's father, a video geek named Noah (Martin Henderson) to analyze the
deadly tape. He tags along for the adventure, which inevitably leads to
their learning to care for one another, I guess, although the movie is not
big on relationships. Her investigation leads her to a remote cottage on an
island and to the weird, hostile man (Brian Cox) who lives there. And then
the explanations start to pile up.

This is Naomi Watts' first move since "Mulholland Drive" and I was going to
complain that we essentially learn nothing about her character except that
she's a newspaper reporter--but then I remembered that in "Mulholland Drive"
we essentially learned nothing except that she was a small-town girl in
Hollywood, and by the end of the movie we weren't even sure we had learned
that. "Mulholland Drive," however, evoked juicy emotions and dimensions that
"The Ring" is lacking, and involved us in a puzzle that was intriguing
instead of simply tedious.

There are a couple of moments when we think "The Ring" is going to end, and
it doesn't. One is that old reliable where the heroine, soaking wet and
saved from death, says "I want to go home," and the hero cushions her head
on his shoulder. But no, there's more. Another is when Aidan says, "You
didn't let her out, did you?" That would have been a nice ironic closer, but
the movie spells out the entire backstory in merciless detail, until when
we're finally walking out of the theater, we're almost ashamed to find
ourselves wondering, hey, who was that on the phone?

Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

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

Date: 02 Nov 2002 07:24:32 GMT
From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE / ***1/2 (R)

BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE / ***1/2 (R)

October 18, 2002

Featuring Michael Moore, George W. Bush, Dick Clark, Charlton Heston,
Marilyn Manson, John Nichols, Chris Rock and Matt Stone.
United Artists presents a film written and directed by Michael Moore.
Running time: 120 minutes. Rated R (for some violent images and language).

BY ROGER EBERT

McHugh and I were sitting in O'Rourke's one day when a guy we knew came in
for a drink. The guy pulled back his coat and we could see he had a handgun
in his belt. "Why are you carrying a gun?" McHugh asked. "Because I live in
a dangerous neighborhood," the guy said. "It would be safer if you moved,"
said McHugh.

Michael Moore's "Bowling for Colum-bine," a documentary that is both
hilarious and sorrowful, is like a two-hour version of that anecdote. We
live in a nation of millions of handguns, but that isn't really what bothers
Moore. What bothers him is that we so frequently shoot them at one another.
Canada has a similar ratio of guns to citizens, but a 10th of the shooting
deaths. What makes us kill so many times more fellow citizens than is the
case in other developed nations?

Moore, the jolly populist rabble-rouser, explains that he's a former
sharpshooting instructor and a lifelong member of the National Rifle
Association. No doubt this is true, but Moore has moved on from his early
fondness for guns. In "Bowling for Columbine," however, he is not so sure of
the answers as in the popular "Roger & Me," a film in which he knew who
the bad guys were, and why. Here he asks questions he can't answer, such as
why we as a nation seem so afraid, so in need of the reassurance of guns.
Noting that we treasure urban legends designed to make us fearful of
strangers, Moore notices how TV news focuses on local violence ("If it
bleeds, it leads") and says that while the murder rate is down 20 percent in
America, TV coverage of violent crime is up 600 percent. Despite paranoia
that has all but sidetracked the childhood custom of trick or treat, Moore
points out that in fact no razor blades have ever been found in Halloween
apples.

Moore's thoughtfulness doesn't inhibit the sensational set-pieces he devises
to illustrate his concern. He returns several times to Columbine High
School, at one point showing horrifying security-camera footage of the
massacre. And Columbine inspires one of the great confrontations in a career
devoted to radical grandstanding. Moore introduces us to two of the students
wounded at Colum-bine, both still with bullets in their bodies. He explains
that all of the Columbine bullets were freely sold to the teenage killers by
Kmart, at 17 cents apiece. And then he takes the two victims to Kmart
headquarters to return the bullets for a refund.

This is brilliant theater and would seem to be unanswerable for the hapless
Kmart public relations spokespeople, who fidget and evade in front of
Moore's merciless camera. But then, on Moore's third visit to headquarters,
he is told that Kmart will agree to completely phase out the sale of
ammunition. "We've won," says Moore, not believing it. "This has never
happened before." For once, he's at a loss for words.

The movie is a mosaic of Moore confrontations and supplementary footage. One
moment that cuts to the core is from a standup routine by Chris Rock, who
suggests that our problem could be solved by simply increasing the price of
bullets--taxing them like cigarettes. Instead of 17 cents apiece, why not
$5,000? "At that price," he speculates, "you'd have a lot fewer innocent
bystanders being shot."

Moore buys a Map to the Stars' Homes to find where Charlton Heston lives,
rings the bell on his gate, and is invited back for an interview. But Heston
clearly knows nothing of Moore's track record, and his answers to Moore's
questions are borderline pathetic. Heston recently announced he has symptoms
associated with Alzheimer's disease, but there is no indication in this
footage that he is senile; it's simply that he cannot explain why he, as a
man living behind a gate in a protected neighborhood, with security patrols,
who has never felt himself threatened, needs a loaded gun in the house.
Heston is equally unhelpful when asked if he thinks it was a good idea for
him to speak at an NRA rally in Denver 10 days after Columbine. He seems to
think it was all a matter of scheduling.

"Bowling for Columbine" thinks we have way too many guns, don't need them,
and are shooting each other at an unreasonable rate. Moore cannot single out
a villain to blame for this fact, because it seems to emerge from a national
desire to be armed. ("If you're not armed, you're not responsible," a member
of the Michigan militia tells him.) At one point, he visits a bank that is
giving away guns to people who open new accounts. He asks a banker if it
isn't a little dangerous to have all these guns in a bank. Not at all. The
bank, Moore learns, is a licensed gun dealership.

Note: The movie is rated R, so that the Columbine killers would have been
protected from the "violent images," mostly of themselves. The MPAA
continues its policy of banning teenagers from those films they most need to
see. What utopian world do the flywheels of the ratings board think they are
protecting?

Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

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

Date: 02 Nov 2002 07:24:40 GMT
From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE / ***1/2 (R)

PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE / ***1/2 (R)

October 18, 2002

Barry Egan: Adam Sandler
Lena Leonard: Emily Watson
Dean Trumbell: Philip Seymour Hoffman
Lance: Luis Guzman
Elizabeth: Mary Lynn Rajskub
Revolution Studios and New Line Cinema present a film written and directed
by Paul Thomas Anderson. Running time: 89 minutes. Rated R (for strong
language including a scene of sexual dialogue).

BY ROGER EBERT

There is a new Adam Sandler on view in "Punch-Drunk Love"--angry, sad,
desperate. In voice and mannerisms he is the same childlike, love-starved
Adam Sandler we've seen in a series of dim comedies, but this film, by
seeing him in a new light, encourages us to look again at those films. Given
a director and a screenplay that sees through the Sandler persona, that
understands it as the disguise of a suffering outsider, Sandler reveals
depths and tones we may have suspected but couldn't bring into focus.

The way to criticize a movie, Godard famously said, is to make another
movie. In that sense "Punch-Drunk Love" is film criticism. Paul Thomas
Anderson says he loves Sandler's comedies--they cheer him up on lonely
Saturday nights--but as the director of "Boogie Nights" and "Magnolia" he
must have been able to sense something missing in them, some unexpressed
need. The Sandler characters are almost oppressively nice, like needy
puppies, and yet they conceal a masked hostility to society, a
passive-aggressive need to go against the flow, a gift for offending others
while in the very process of being ingratiating.

In "Punch-Drunk Love," Sandler plays Barry Egan, an executive in a company
with a product line of novelty toiletries. Barry has seven sisters, who are
all on his case at every moment, and he desperately wishes they would stop
invading his privacy, ordering him around and putting him down. He tries at
a family gathering to be congenial and friendly, but we can see the tension
in his smiling lips and darting eyes, and suddenly he explodes, kicking out
the glass patio doors.

This is a pattern. He presents to the world a face of cheerful blandness,
and then erupts in terrifying displays of frustrated violence. He does not
even begin to understand himself. He seems always on guard, unsure,
obscurely threatened. His outbursts here help to explain the curiously
violent passages in his previous film, "Mr. Deeds," which was a remake of a
benign Frank Capra comedy. It's as if Sandler is Hannibal Lecter in a Jerry
Lewis body.

Most of Sandler's plots are based on predictable, production-line formulas,
and after "Punch-Drunk Love" I may begin seeing them as traps containing a
resentful captive. The quirky behavior may be a way of calling out for help.
In "Big Daddy," for example, the broad outlines are familiar, but not the
creepy way his character trains his adopted 5-year-old to be hostile. At one
point, ho, ho, they toss tree branches into the path of middle-aged in-line
skaters, causing some nasty falls. The hostility veiled as humor in the
typical Sandler comedy is revealed in "Punch-Drunk Love" as--hostility.

The film is exhilarating to watch because Sandler, liberated from the
constraints of formula, reveals unexpected depths as an actor. Watching this
film, you can imagine him in Dennis Hopper roles. He has darkness, obsession
and power. His world is hedged around with mystery and challenge. Consider
an opening scene, when he is at work hours before the others have arrived,
and sees a harmonium dumped in the street in front of his office. It is at
once the most innocent and ominous of objects; he runs from it and then
peeks around a corner to see if it is still there.

In the Paul Thomas Anderson universe, people meet through serendipity and
need, not because they are fulfilling their plot assignments. Barry meets
Lena Leonard (Emily Watson), a sweet executive with intently focused eyes,
who asks him to look after her broken-down car and later goes out on a
dinner date with him. They like each other right away. During the dinner he
gets up from his table, goes to the men's room and in a blind rage breaks
everything he can. "Your hand is bleeding," she gently observes, and after
they are thrown out of the restaurant, she carries on as if the evening is
still normal.

Barry is meanwhile enraged by an ongoing battle he is having with a Utah
phone-sex company. He called the number and was billed for the call, but he
was unable to talk easily with the woman at the other end, or even quite
conceive of what she wanted him to do. Then she pulled a scam using his
credit card number, and this leads to mutual threats and obscenities over
the phone, and to a visit from the porn company's "four blond brothers," who
want to intimidate him and extract cash.

Barry is frightened. He knows Lena is going on a business trip to Hawaii.
They definitely have chemistry. This would be an ideal time to get off the
mainland. He has discovered a loophole in a Healthy Choice promotion that
will allow him to earn countless American Airlines frequent flier miles at
very little cost. (This part of the story is based on fact.) It is typical
of an Anderson film that Barry, having hit on his mileage scheme, cannot use
his miles so quickly, and so simply buys a ticket to Honolulu and meets Lena
for a picture-postcard rendezvous on Waikiki Beach. Here and elsewhere,
Anderson bathes the screen in romantic colors and fills the soundtrack with
lush orchestrations.

I feel liberated in films where I have absolutely no idea what will happen
next. Lena and Barry are odd enough that anything could happen in their
relationship. A face-to-face meeting with the Utah porn king (Anderson
regular Philip Seymour Hoffman) and another meeting with the four blond
brothers are equally unpredictable. And always there is Barry's quick,
terrifying anger, a time bomb ticking away beneath every scene.

"Punch-Drunk Love" is above all a portrait of a personality type. Barry Egan
has been damaged, perhaps beyond repair, by what he sees as the depredations
of his domineering sisters. It drives him crazy when people nose into his
business. He cannot stand to be trifled with. His world is entered by
alarming omens and situations that baffle him. The character is vividly seen
and the film sympathizes with him in his extremity.

Paul Thomas Anderson has referred to "Punch-Drunk Love" as "an art house
Adam Sandler film." It may be the key to all of the Adam Sandler films, and
may liberate Sandler for a new direction in his work. He can't go on making
those moronic comedies forever, can he? Who would have guessed he had such
uncharted depths?

Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

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

Date: 02 Nov 2002 07:24:41 GMT
From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] SKINS / *** (R)

SKINS / *** (R)

October 18, 2002

Mogie Yellow Lodge: Graham Greene
Rudy Yellow Lodge: Eric Schweig
Verdell Weasel Tail: Gary Farmer
Teen Mogie: Nathaniel Arcand
First Look Pictures presents a film directed by Chris Eyre. Written by
Jennifer D. Lyne. Based on the novel by Adrian C. Louis. Running time: 87
minutes. Rated R (for language and violence).

BY ROGER EBERT

"Skins" tells the story of two brothers, both Sioux, one a cop, one an
alcoholic "whose mind got short-circuited in Vietnam." They live on the Pine
Ridge reservation, in the shadow of Mount Rushmore and not far from the site
of the massacre at Wounded Knee. America's founding fathers were carved, the
film informs us, into a mountain that was sacred to the Sioux, and that
knowledge sets up a final scene of uncommon power.

The movie is almost brutal in its depiction of life at Pine Ridge, where
alcoholism is nine times the national average and life expectancy 50
percent. Director Chris Eyre, whose previous film was the much-loved "Smoke
Signals" (1998), has turned from comedy to tragedy and is unblinking in his
portrait of a community where poverty and despair are daily realities.

Rudy Yellow Lodge (Eric Schweig), the policeman, is well-liked in a job that
combines law enforcement with social work. His brother Mogie (Graham Greene)
is the town drunk, but his tirades against society reveal the eloquence of a
mind that still knows how to see injustice. Mogie and his buddy Verdell
Weasel Tail (Gary Farmer) sit in the sun on the town's main street, drinking
and providing a running commentary that sometimes cuts too close to the
truth.

Flashbacks show that both brothers were abused as children, by an alcoholic
father. Mogie probably began life with more going for him, but Vietnam and
drinking have flattened him, and it's his kid brother who wears the uniform
and draws the paycheck. Those facts are established fairly early, and we
think we can foresee the movie's general direction, when Eyre surprises us
with a revelation about Rudy: He is a vigilante.

A man is beaten to death in an abandoned house. Rudy discovers the two
shiftless kids who did it, disguises himself, and breaks their legs with a
baseball bat. Angered by white-owned businesses across the reservation
border that make big profits selling booze to the Indians on the day the
welfare checks arrive, he torches one of the businesses--only to find he has
endangered his brother's life in the process. His protest, direct and angry,
is as impotent as every other form of expression seems to be.

When "Skins" premiered at Sundance last January, Eyre was criticized by some
for painting a negative portrait of his community. Justin Lin, whose "Better
Luck Tomorrow" showed affluent Asian-American teenagers succeeding at a life
of crime, was also attacked for not taking a more positive point of view.
Recently the wonderful comedy "Barbershop" has been criticized because one
character does a comic riff aimed at African-American icons.

In all three cases, the critics are dead wrong, because they would limit the
artists in their community to impotent feel-good messages instead of
applauding their freedom of expression. In all three cases, the critics are
also tone-deaf, because they cannot distinguish what the movies depict from
how they depict it. That is particularly true with some of the critics of
"Barbershop," who say they have not seen the film. If they did, the
audience's joyous laughter might help them understand the context of the
controversial dialogue, and the way in which it is answered.

"Skins" is a portrait of a community almost without resources to save
itself. We know from "Smoke Signals" that Eyre also sees another side to his
people, but the anger and stark reality he uses here are potent weapons. The
movie is not about a crime plot, not about whether Rudy gets caught, not
about how things work out. It is about regret. Graham Greene achieves the
difficult task of giving a touching performance even though his character is
usually drunk, and it is the regret he expresses, to his son and to his
brother, that carries the movie's burden of sadness. To see this movie is to
understand why the faces on Mount Rushmore are so painful and galling to the
first Americans. The movie's final image is haunting.

Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

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Date: 02 Nov 2002 07:24:38 GMT
From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] JUST A KISS / * (R)

JUST A KISS / * (R)

October 18, 2002

Dag: Ron Eldard
Halley: Kyra Sedgwick
Peter: Patrick Breen
Paula: Marisa Tomei
Rebecca: Marley Shelton
Andre: Taye Diggs
Paramount Classics presents a film directed by Fisher Stevens. Written by
Patrick Breen. Running time: 89 minutes. Rated R (for strong sexual images
and language).

BY ROGER EBERT

If only it were clever, "Just a Kiss" would be too clever by half.

Here is a movie that was apparently made by working its way through a list
of styles, so that we have poignancy jostling against farce, thoughtful
dialogue elbowed aside by one-liners, and a visual style that incorporates
rotoscope animation for no apparent reason except, maybe, that it looks
neat.

"Just a Kiss," directed by the actor Fisher Stevens, begins with a kiss
between two people who should not be kissing and ends after those people,
and their significant others, and assorted insignificant others, undergo
sexual and emotional misunderstandings, survive plane crashes, end up in the
hospital or comatose, etc., while occasionally appearing to be animated like
the characters in "Waking Life."

Now "Waking Life" was an accomplished movie, in which Richard Linklater took
live-action footage of his characters and passed it through a software
program that kept their basic appearances and movements while allowing
artists to overlay an animated layer. It worked. It does not work in "Just a
Kiss," and I'm about to explain why.

In "Waking Life," all of the characters are animated. That is what they are,
and how we accept them, and whatever reality they have is conveyed visually
through the animation. But in "Just a Kiss," the characters are photographed
realistically, so that when they suddenly undergo "rotomation," their
reality is violently displaced and our attention is jerked up to the surface
of the movie. They exist now, not as characters but as animated displays who
used to be characters and may be characters again.

I can imagine a way in which this could work, in a "Roger Rabbit"-type movie
that moves in and out of the cartoon dimension. But it doesn't work here
because it is manifestly and distractingly only a stunt. And the whole
movie, in various ways, has the same problem: It's all surface, without an
entry point into whatever lurks beneath. The characters, dialogue, personal
styles and adventures are all mannerisms. The actors are merely carriers of
the director's contrivances.

Consider, for example, a sequence in which one character on an airplane uses
his cell phone to tell another that he loves her. His phone emits lethal
transmissions which cause the plane to crash. Everyone in first class lives;
everyone in tourist class dies. I smile as I write the words. This would be
a good scene in "Airplane!" What is it doing here, in a movie where we are
possibly expected to care about the characters' romances and infidelities?
To admit farce into a drama is to admit that the drama is farce.

But is it a drama? I haven't a clue. The movie seems to reinvent itself from
moment to moment, darting between styles like a squirrel with too many nuts.
There is one performance that works, sort of, and it is by Marisa Tomei, as
a bartender whose psychic gifts allow her to find meaning in the rings left
by cold beers. She is a crazy homicidal maniac, but, hey, at least that
means that nothing she does is out of character.

As for the other actors, they know Stevens from the indie films they've made
together, and were good sports to volunteer for this project. Ron Eldard,
Kyra Sedgwick, Patrick Breen (who wrote the screenplay), Marley Shelton,
Taye Diggs, Sarita Choudhury and Bruno Amato do what they can with
characters who are reinvented from minute to minute. And Zoe Caldwell, as a
choreographer who is the mother of the Shelton character, has moments of
stunningly effective acting that are so isolated from the rest of the movie
that they appear like the result of channel-surfing.

Note: Eldard's character is named "Dag." On the Internet Movie Database, he
is listed as "Dag Hammerskjold," but on the movie's official site he is only
"named after Dag Hammerskjold." Maybe it's supposed to be ironic that this
Dag survives a plane crash. Whatever. Of course, the movie misspells
Hammarskjold's name, so maybe this character is descended from a person who
was constantly having to explain how he was the Dag Hammerskjold who spelled
his name with an "e."

Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

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Date: 02 Nov 2002 07:24:48 GMT
From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] KNOCKAROUND GUYS / *** (R)

KNOCKAROUND GUYS / *** (R)

October 11, 2002

Matty Demaret: Barry Pepper
Taylor Reese: Vin Diesel
Johnny Marbles: Seth Green
Chris Scarpa: Andrew Davoli
Benny Chains: Dennis Hopper
Teddy Deserve: John Malkovich
New Line Cinema presents a film written and directed by Brian Koppelman and
David Levien. Running time: 93 minutes. Rated R (for violence, language and
some drug use).

BY ROGER EBERT

When Matty Demaret is 12, he fails a test. His uncle gives him a gun and
asks him to shoot a squealer. Matty just can't do it. "That's all right,"
his uncle says. "You're just not cut out for it." Matty grows into a young
man determined to make a place for himself in the mob, and hangs around with
other young heirs to a shrinking empire. Their fathers sat around counting
money, but they're expected to work the noon and evening shifts at the
family restaurant.

Matty (Barry Pepper) wants a chance to prove himself. He begs his dad, Benny
Chains (Dennis Hopper), for a job and finally gets one--picking up some
money in Spokane. His friend Johnny Marbles (Seth Green) owns a private
plane, and Matty asks him to fly the money back east. In the small town of
Wibaux, Mont., Johnny Marbles gets rattled by cops in the airport, drops the
bag in a luggage zone and loses it. This is not good.

"Knockaround Guys" is inspired by the same impulse as "The Sopranos." It
considers gangsters in the modern age, beset by progress, unsure of their
roles, undermined by psychobabble. "Used to be there was a way to do things
and things got done," Matty's Uncle Teddy (John Malkovich) complains. "Now
everybody's feelings are involved."

The heart of the movie takes place in Wibaux, a town ruled by a tall,
taciturn, ominous sheriff, played by that unmistakable actor Tom Noonan.
Matty flies out to Montana with backup: his friends Taylor (Vin Diesel) and
Scarpa (Andrew Davoli). They stick out like sore thumbs in the little town.
"Looks like they're multiplying," the sheriff observes to his deputy. He
assumes they're involved with drugs, doesn't much care "as long as they move
on through," but is very interested in the possibility of money.

The movie crosses two formulas--Fish Out of Water and Coming of Age--fairly
effectively. Because it isn't wall-to-wall action but actually bothers to
develop its characters and take an interest in them, it was not at first
considered commercial by its distributor, New Line, and languished on the
shelf for two years until the growing stardom of Diesel ("XXX") and Pepper
("We Were Soldiers") made it marketable. It's more than that--it's
interesting in the way it shows these guys stuck between generations. And it
makes good use of Diesel, who as he develops into an action superstar may
not get roles this juicy for a while. He's a tough guy, yes, a street
fighter, but conflicted and with a kind of wise sadness about human nature.

The movie's basic question, I suppose, is whether the rising generation of
mobsters is so self-conscious it will never gain the confidence of its
ancestors. If it's true that the mob in the 1930s learned how to talk by
studying Warner Bros. crime pictures, it's equally true that "The Sopranos"
and all the other post-Scorsese "GoodFellas" stories bring in an element of
psychological complexity that only confuses an occupation that used to have
a brutal simplicity. "Knockaround Guys" opens with Matty being turned down
for a job because of his infamous last name. It ends with him not living up
to it. "To the regular people, we're nothing but goombas," Matty complains.
"But to our fathers, we're nothing but hound boys."

Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

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Date: 02 Nov 2002 07:24:49 GMT
From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] KWIK STOP / ***1/2 (Not rated)

KWIK STOP / ***1/2 (Not rated)

October 11, 2002

Mike: Michael Gilio
Didi: Lara Phillips
Emil: Rich Komenich
Ruthie: Karin Anglin
Clerk: Kris Wolff
Dr. Milk: Eric Curtis Johnson
Sunny: Sunny Seigel
A film written and directed by Michael Gilio. Running time: 110 minutes. No
MPAA rating (intended for mature audiences). Opening today at Facets
Cinematheque.

BY ROGER EBERT

"Kwik Stop" starts out with a shoplifter and a teenager who sees him
stealing. She threatens to turn him over to the cops, but actually all she
wants is to escape from her life in a Chicago suburb. He explains he's going
to Los Angeles to become a movie actor. "Take me with you," she says. "Can I
kiss you?" he says.

At this point, maybe 10 minutes into the story, we think we know more or
less where the movie is going: It'll be a road picture. We are dead wrong.
"Kwik Stop," which never quite gets out of town, blindsides us with
unexpected humor and sadness, and is one of the unsung treasures of recent
independent filmmaking. It's playing at Facets, 1517 W. Fullerton.

The movie is the work of Michael Gilio, who wrote it, directed it and stars
in it as Mike, the guy who thinks he could be a movie star. Gilio in fact is
already an established actor; he played opposite Sidney Poitier in the TV
movie "To Sir with Love 2," and has appeared in four other films, but this
movie proves he's not only an actor but has a genuine filmmaking talent. In
the way it is developed, and seen, and especially in the way it ends, "Kwik
Stop" shows an imagination that flies far beyond the conventions it seems to
begin with.

Mike is a complicated guy. He dreams of going to Los Angeles and breaking
into the movies, yes--but perhaps the dream is more important than actually
doing it. He's like a lot of people who are stuck in the planning stage and
like it there. Didi (Lara Phillips) has no plans, but she has urgent desires
and is prepared to act on them. We learn all we need to know about her home
life in a shot taken from the curb, that watches her go inside to get some
stuff and come back out again, unconcerned that she is leaving town, she
thinks, forever.

Neither one is dumb. They talk about Henry Miller and Harvey Keitel, two
names that suggest you have advanced beyond life's training wheels. Gilio
finds a motel for them with its own disco ball hanging from the ceiling, and
as its twinkle disguises the shabbiness they make and pledge love, and then
the next morning Mike is gone. If this couple is going to make it through
the entire film, we realize, they are going to have to do it without using
the usual cliches.

They meet again. Never mind how. Mike takes Didi to a diner for a meal,
where a waitress named Ruthie (Karin Anglin) greets them with a strangely
skewed attitude. Watch the way Gilio introduces mystery into the scene and
then resolves it, getting humor out of both the mystery and the solution.
The diner scene suggests strangeness deep in Mike's character: He doesn't
need to go to Los Angeles since he stars in his own drama, and doubles back
to be sure he hasn't lost his audience.

Mike and Didi try to burgle a house. Didi is whammed by a homeowner's
baseball bat and ends up imprisoned in the Midwest School for Girls. Mike
has a plan to spring her, which involves Ruthie making what is, under the
circumstances, a truly selfless gesture (she explains she doesn't want to
"waste the time I put into you").

Just as Mike never gets out of town, just as the plot doubles back to pick
up first Didi and then Ruthie, so Emil (Rich Komenich), the homeowner with
the baseball bat, also is not abandoned. "Kwik Stop" is the opposite of the
picaresque journey in which colorful characters are encountered and then
left behind. It gathers them all up and takes them along.

The movie contains genuine surprises, some delightful (like the plan to
spring Didi from the home) and others involving loneliness, loss and
desperation. I cannot say much more without revealing developments that are
unexpected and yet deeply satisfying. Poignancy comes into the movie from an
unexpected source. Depths are revealed where we did not think to find them.
The ending is like the last paragraph of a short story, redefining
everything that went before.

"Kwik Stop," made on a low budget, has all the money it needs to accomplish
everything it wants to do. It has the freedom of serious fiction, which is
not chained to a story arc but follows its characters where they insist on
going. Gilio, Phillips, Komenich and Anglin create that kind of bemused
realism we discover in films that are not about plot but about what these
dreamy people are going to do next. On a weekend when $400 million in slick
mainstream productions are opening, this is the movie to seek out.

Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

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Date: 02 Nov 2002 07:24:31 GMT
From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] BELOW / **1/2 (R)

BELOW / **1/2 (R)

October 18, 2002

Odell: Matt Davis
Brice: Bruce Greenwood
Claire: Olivia Williams
Loomis: Holt McCallany
Coors: Scott Foley
Weird Wally: Zach Galifianakis
Stumbo: Jason Flemyng
Dimension Films presents a film directed by David Twohy. Written by Twohy,
Lucas Sussman and Darren Aronofsky. Running time: 103 minutes. Rated R (for
language and some violence).

BY ROGER EBERT

Even before the woman is taken on board, the USS Tiger Shark is a submarine
in trouble. The captain has been lost overboard, or at least that's the
story, and tempers run high in the confined space. Then the sub rescues
three drifters in a life raft, one of them a woman, whose presence on board
is agreed by everyone to be bad luck on a sub, although her arrival does
result in the crew wearing cleaner underwear.

Now dangers increase. The sub is tracked by Germans, who drop depth bombs
and later come back to troll for it with giant grappling hooks. There is
fearful damage to the periscope and the control tower. An oil leak threatens
to betray the sub's position. Oxygen is running low, and hydrogen in the air
is a danger to the crew's safety and sanity. And perhaps there is a ghost on
board. The creepy sounds from outside the hull--of seaweed, whale songs and
bouncing depth bombs--increase apprehension.

Yes, a ghost. How else to explain why a record of Benny Goodman's "Sing,
Sing, Sing" seems to play itself at inopportune times--as when the Germans
are listening for the slightest sound from below? And when the late skipper
was a Goodman fan? Of course, there could be a saboteur on board, in
addition to, or perhaps instead of, the ghost.

"Below" is a movie where the story, like the sub, sometimes seems to be
running blind. In its best moments it can evoke fear, and it does a good job
of evoking the claustrophobic terror of a little World War II boat, but the
story line is so eager to supply frightening possibilities that sometimes we
feel jerked around. Isn't it possible for a submarine to be haunted without
turning it into a museum of horror film devices?

Of those devices, the most tiresome is the convention that surprises make
sounds. In most horror movies, including many less clever than "Below,"
there is a visual strategy in which a character is shown in relative closeup
(limiting our ability to see around him) and then startled by the unexpected
appearance of another character or other visual surprise. This moment is
invariably signaled on the soundtrack with a loud, alarming musical chord,
or perhaps by the sound of a knife being sharpened. But surprises don't make
sounds, and the cliche has become so tiresome that I submit a director might
be able to create a more frightening sequence by playing the unexpected
appearance in total silence.

There are a lot of surprise apparitions in "Below," and many times when we
expect them even when they don't arrive. Consider the effective sequence in
which four divers have to penetrate the ballast space between the inner and
outer hulls to search for the oil leak. Will they find a ghostly body, or
what?

The acting skipper of the ship is Brice (Bruce Greenwood). The absence of
the former skipper is a secret at first, and the explanations for his
disappearance are contradictory; even by the end of the movie, we are not
sure we have the correct story. Has he returned to haunt the boat? Oxygen
deprivation can encourage hallucinations.

The bad-luck woman on board, Claire (Olivia Williams), turns out to be a
nurse from a sunken hospital ship. Who sunk that ship with its big red
cross, and why? And what about the two survivors in the boat with her? What
are their stories? Although the arrival of a woman on board inspires some
heavy-handed scenes in which some men seem to be warming up for an assault,
that plot thread is quickly abandoned, and Claire begins to take a
surprisingly active role in the onboard discussions. Siding with her is
Odell (Matt Davis), maybe because he agrees, maybe because he likes her.
Brice's command of the ship may include decisions made with a hidden agenda.

The movie is skillfully made by David Twohy, whose "The Arrival" (1996) was
an uncommonly intelligent science fiction thriller about a hidden alien plot
against Earth. But his overpraised "Pitch Black" (2000), which launched Vin
Diesel, was weakened by the same faults as "Below." It had too many
obligatory startles, too many unclear possibilities and not enough
definition of the crucial players. But Twohy showed with "The Arrival" that
he is a gifted director. "Below" has ambitions to be better than average,
but doesn't pull itself together and insist on realizing them.

Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

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Date: 02 Nov 2002 07:24:51 GMT
From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] SWEPT AWAY / * (R)

SWEPT AWAY / * (R)

October 11, 2002

Amber: Madonna
Giuseppe: Adriano Giannini
Debi: Elizabeth Banks
Burly Captain: Patrizio Rispo
Marina: Jeanne Tripplehorn
Screen Gems presents a film written and directed by Guy Ritchie. Running
time: 98 minutes. Rated R (for language and some sexuality/nudity).

BY ROGER EBERT

"Swept Away" is a deserted island movie during which I desperately wished
the characters had chosen one movie to take along if they were stranded on a
deserted island, and were showing it to us instead of this one.

The movie is a relatively faithful remake of an incomparably superior 1974
movie with the lovely title, "Swept Away by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue
Sea of August." The new "Swept Away" knows the words but not the music. It
strands two unattractive characters, one bitchy, one moronic, on an island
where neither they, nor we, have anyone else to look at or listen to. It's
harder for them than it is for us, because they have to go through the
motions of an erotic attraction that seems to have become an impossibility
the moment the roles were cast.

Madonna stars as Amber, the spoiled rich wife of a patient and
long-suffering millionaire. They join two other couples in a cruise on a
private yacht from Greece to Italy. The other five passengers recede into
unwritten, even unthought-about roles, while Amber picks on Giuseppe
(Adriano Giannini), the bearded deckhand. She has decided he is stupid and
rude, and insults him mercilessly. So it was in the earlier film, but in
this version Amber carries her behavior beyond all reason, until even the
rudest and bitchiest rich woman imaginable would have called it a day.

Amber orders Giuseppe to take her out in the dinghy. He demurs: It looks
like a storm. She insists. They run out of gas and begin to drift. She
insults him some more, and when he succeeds after great effort in catching a
fish for them to eat, she throws it overboard. Later she succeeds in putting
a hole in the dinghy during a struggle for the flare gun. They drift at sea
until they wash up on a deserted island, where the tables are turned and now
it is Giuseppe who has the upper hand. Her husband's wealth is now no longer
a factor, but his survival skills are priceless.

All of this is similar to the 1974 movie, even the business of the fish
thrown overboard. What is utterly missing is any juice or life in the
characters. Giancarlo Giannini and Mariangela Melato became stars on the
basis of the original "Swept Away," which was written and directed by Lina
Wertmuller, one of the most successful Italian directors of the 1970s. She
was a leftist but not a feminist, and aroused some controversy with a story
where it turned out the rich woman liked being ordered around and slapped a
little--liked it so much she encouraged the sailor to experiment with
practices he could not even pronounce.

This new "Swept Away" is more sentimental, I'm afraid, and the two castaways
fall into a more conventional form of love. I didn't believe it for a
moment. They have nothing in common, but worse still, neither one has any
conversation. They don't say a single interesting thing. That they have sex
because they are stranded on the island I can believe. That they are not
sleeping in separate caves by the time they are rescued I do not.

The problem with the Madonna character is that she starts out so hateful
that she can never really turn it around. We dislike her intensely and
thoroughly, and when she gets to the island we don't believe she had learned
a lesson, or turned nice--we believe she is behaving with this man as she
does with all men, in the way best designed to get her what she wants. As
for the sailor, does he really love her, as he says in that demeaning and
pitiful speech toward the end of the film? What is there to love? They
shared some interesting times together, but their minds never met.

The ending is particularly unsatisfactory, depending as it does on contrived
irony that avoids all of the emotional issues on the table. If I have come
this far with these two drips, and sailed with them, and been shipwrecked
with them, and listened to their tiresome conversations, I demand that they
arrive at some conclusion more rewarding than a misunderstanding based upon
a misdelivered letter. This story was about something when Wertmuller
directed it, but now it's not about anything at all. It's lost the politics
and the social observation and become just another situation romance about a
couple of saps stuck in an inarticulate screenplay.

Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

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Date: 02 Nov 2002 07:24:47 GMT
From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] BROWN SUGAR / ***

BROWN SUGAR / ***

October 11, 2002

Dre: Taye Diggs
Sidney: Sanaa Lathan
Reese: Nicole Ari Parker
Kelby Dawson: Boris Kodjoe
Chris V: Mos Def
Francine: Queen Latifah
Fox Searchlight Pictures presents a film directed by Rick Famuyiwa. Written
by Michael Elliot and Famuyiwa. Running time: 109 minutes. Rated PG-13 (for
sexual content and language).

BY ROGER EBERT

She is the editor of an important music magazine. He produces hip-hop for a
major label. They've been best friends since childhood, but never more than
that, although they came close a few times. Now, as both approach 30, Dre
(Taye Diggs) feels his career has lost its way. And Sidney (Sanaa Lathan) is
working so hard she doesn't have time for romance: "You're turning into a
Terry McMillan character," her girlfriend Fran-cine warns her.

"Brown Sugar," which charts romantic passages in these lives, is a romantic
comedy, yes, but one with characters who think and talk about their goals,
and are working on hard decisions. For both Sidney and Dre, hip-hop music
symbolizes a kind of perfect adolescent innocence, a purity they're trying
to return to as more cynical adults.

The first question Sidney asks an interview subject is always, "How did you
fall in love with hip-hop?" For her, it was July 18, 1984, when she
discovered for the first time a form that combined music, rhythm,
performance and poetry. Dre, her best buddy even then, grew up to become an
important hip-hop producer, working for a label that compromised its
standards as it became more successful. Now he's faced with the prospect of
producing "Rin and Tin," one white, one black, who bill themselves as "The
Hip-Hop Dalmatians."

Dre gets engaged to the beautiful Reese (Nicole Ari Parker). Sidney can't
believe he'll marry her, but can't admit she loves him--although she comes
close on the night before their wedding. Francine (Queen Latifah) lectures
her to declare her love: "You'll get the buddy and the booty!" When Dre
quits his job rather than work with the Dalmatians, he turns instinctively
to Sidney for advice, and Reese begins to understand that she's sharing his
heart.

Sidney, meanwhile, interviews the hunky athlete Kelby Dawson (Boris Kodjoe),
and soon they're engaged. Is this the real thing, or a rebound? Dre still
needs her for encouragement, as he pursues a hip-hop taxi driver named Chris
V (Mos Def), who he believes has potential to return the form to its roots.
And Chris, articulate in his music but lacking confidence in his life,
doesn't have the nerve to ask out Francine.

"Brown Sugar," advertised as a hip-hop comedy, is more like a slice of black
professional life (there's not even an entire hip-hop song in the whole
movie). Directed and co-written by Rick Famuyiwa, the movie returns to a
world similar to his "The Wood" (1999), but the characters are deeper and
more complex.

Consider Reese, the Nicole Ari Parker character. In a less thoughtful movie,
she'd be the shallow, bitchy life-wrecker. Here, she is blameless and
basically reasonable: mad at Dre for quitting his job without talking it
over with her, jealous of Sidney because she (correctly) suspects Sidney and
Dre have always been in love but lied to themselves about it. That feeling
comes to a head at a gym where both women work out, in a sparring match that
gets a little too sincere.

There's a scene in "Brown Sugar" I never thought I'd see in a movie, where
after Reese and Dre have a "final" fight, and in a more conventional film
she would disappear forever from the screenplay, but here she returns to
suggest counseling and says they need to work harder at their marriage. How
many movie romances are that thoughtful about their characters?

"Brown Sugar" may be pitching itself to the wrong audience. The ads promise:
"The Rhythm ... the Beat ... the Love ... and You Don't Stop!" But it's not
a musical and although it's sometimes a comedy, it's observant about its
people. Francine is onto something. They're all Terry McMillan characters.

Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

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Date: 02 Nov 2002 07:25:04 GMT
From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] SECRETARY / *** (R)

SECRETARY / *** (R)

September 27, 2002

Mr. Grey: James Spader
Lee Holloway: Maggie Gyllenhaal
Peter: Jeremy Davies
Joan Holloway: Lesley Ann Warren
Burt Holloway: Stephen McHattie
Dr. Twardon: Patrick Bauchau
Lions Gate Films presents a film directed by Steven Shainberg. Written by
Erin Cressida Wilson. Based on the story by Mary Gaitskill. Running time:
104 minutes. Rated R (for strong sexuality, some nudity, depiction of
behavioral disorders and language). Opening today at Evanston CineArts 6,
Esquire, Pipers Alley and Landmark Renaissance.

BY ROGER EBERT

"Secretary" approaches the tricky subject of sadomasochism with a stealthy
tread, avoiding the dangers of making it either too offensive, or too funny.
Because S/M involves postures that are absorbing for the participants but
absurd to the onlooker, we tend to giggle at the wrong times. Here is a film
where we giggle at the right times. The director, Steven Shainberg, has
succeeded by focusing intently on his characters, making them quirky
individuals rather than figures of fun.

The movie, to begin with, is well cast. There may be better actors than
James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal, but for this material, I cannot think
who they are. About Spader there always seems to be some unarticulated
secret hovering, and Gyllenhaal avoids numerous opportunities to make her
character seem pathetic, and makes her seem plucky instead--intent on
establishing herself and making herself necessary.

Spader plays Mr. Grey, a lawyer whose office looks like the result of
intense conversations with an interior designer who has seen too many
Michael Douglas movies. Mr. Grey has such bad luck with secretaries that he
has an illuminated help-wanted sign out front he can light up, like the
"Vacancy" sign at a motel. Gyllenhaal plays Lee Holloway, who has the
illness of self-mutilation and comes from a neurotic family. Released from
treatment, Lee takes typing classes, goes looking for work and has an
interview with Mr. Grey. Something unspoken passes between them and they
know they are thinking about the same thing.

Lee is submissive. Spader is dominant and obsessive (he has a fetish for
lining up red markers in his desk drawer). He demands perfection, she falls
short of the mark, he punishes her, and this becomes a workable
relationship. When he loses interest for a time and stops correcting her
mistakes, she grows disconsolate; when he sharply calls her back into her
office, she is delighted.

The movie does not argue that S/M is good for you, but has a more complex
dynamic. By absorbing so much of Mr. Grey's time and attention, Lee, who has
abysmal self-esteem, feels that attention is being paid to her. Mr. Grey
notices her. He thinks about her. He devises new games for them. He never
threatens serious hurt or harm, but instead tends toward role-playing and
ritual. What they discover is that, in the long run, S/M is more fun (and
less trouble) for the "M" than for the "S." "We can't go on like this 24
hours a day," Mr. Grey complains at one point. Lee doesn't see why not.

Jeremy Davies plays Peter, the other key role, sincere to the point of being
inarticulate, who for a time dates Lee. Mr. Grey looks on jealously as they
do their laundry together, and is faced with the possibility that he might
lose his agreeable secretary. That would be the final straw, since we sense
that Mr. Grey is in much worse shape than Lee was ever in. His
obsessive-compulsive behavior is driving him nuts, not to mention his
clients. Stories about S/M often have an ironic happy ending, but this one,
based on a short story by Mary Gaitskill, seems sincere enough: They've
found a relationships that works. For them.

The movie's humor comes through the close observation of behavior. It allows
us to understand what has happened without specifying it. The lawyer and
secretary have subtle little signals by which they step out of their roles
and sort of wink, so they both know that they both know what they're doing.
Their behavior, which is intended to signify hostility, eventually grows
into a deeper recognition of each other's natures and needs. That of course
leads to affection, which can be tricky, but not for them, because both
suspect there is no one else they're ever likely to meet who will understand
them quite so completely.

Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

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