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movies-digest        Saturday, November 2 2002        Volume 02 : Number 389



[MV] WASABI / *1/2 (R)
[MV] feardotcom / ** (R)
[MV] SECRET BALLOT / *** (G)
[MV] WHITE OLEANDER / **1/2 (PG-13)
[MV] WARM WATER UNDER A RED BRIDGE / *** (Not rated)
[MV] I'M GOING HOME (JE RENTRE A LA MAISON) / *** (Not Rated)
[MV] BALLISTIC: ECKS VS. SEVER / 1/2* (R)
[MV] THE TUXEDO / *1/2 (PG-13)
[MV] INVINCIBLE / **** (PG-13)
[MV] APOLLO 13: THE IMAX EXPERIENCE / **** (PG)

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

Date: 02 Nov 2002 07:24:44 GMT
From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] WASABI / *1/2 (R)

WASABI / *1/2 (R)

October 18, 2002

Hubert Fiorentini: Jean Reno
Yumi Yoshimido: Ryoko Hirosue
Momo: Michel Muller
Sofia: Carole Bouquet
Jean-Baptiste 1: Ludovic Berthillot
Jean-Baptiste 2: Yan Epstein
Van Eyck: Michel Scourneau
The Squale: Christian Sinniger
TriStar Pictures presents a film directed by Gerard Krawczyk. Written by Luc
Besson. Running time: 94 minutes. Rated R (for some violence). In French and
Japanese with English subtitles.

BY ROGER EBERT

Jean Reno has the weary eyes and unshaven mug of a French Peter Falk, and
some of the same sardonic humor, too. He sighs and smokes and slouches his
way through thrillers where he sadly kills those who would kill him, and
balefully regards women who want to make intimate demands on his time. In
good movies ("The Crimson Rivers") and bad ("Rollerball"), in the ambitious
(Antonioni's "Beyond the Clouds") and the avaricious ("Godzilla"), in
comedies ("Just Visiting") and thrillers ("Ronin"), he shares with Robert
Mitchum the unmistakable quality of having seen it all.

"Wasabi" is not his worst movie, and is far from his best. It is a thriller
trapped inside a pop comedy set in Japan, and gives Reno a chirpy young
co-star who bounces around him like a puppy on visiting day at the drunk
tank. She plays his daughter, and he's supposed to like her, but sometimes
he looks like he hopes she will turn into an aspirin.

The movie begins in Paris, where Reno plays Hubert Fiorentini, a Dirty Harry
type who doesn't merely beat up suspects, but beats up people on the chance
that he may suspect them later. During a raid on a nightclub, he makes the
mistake of socking the police chief's son so hard the lad flies down a
flight of stairs and ends up in a full-body cast. Hubert is ordered to take
a vacation.

He shrugs, and thinks to look up an old girlfriend (Carole Bouquet), but
then his life takes a dramatic turn. He learns of the death in Japan of a
woman he loved years earlier. Arriving for her funeral, he finds that she
has left him a mysterious key, a daughter he knew nothing about, and $200
million stashed in the bank.

The daughter is named Yumi (Ryoko Hirosue). She is 19, has red hair, chooses
her wardrobe colors from the Pokemon palate, and bounces crazily through
scenes as if life is a music video and they're filming her right now.

The plot involves Yumi's plan to hire the Yakuza (Japanese Mafia) to get
revenge for her mother's death. If there is piece of fatherly advice that
Hubert the veteran cop could have shared with her, it is that no one related
to $200 million should do the least thing to attract the attention of the
Yakuza. The plot then unfolds in bewildering alternation between pop comedy
and action violence, with Hubert dancing in a video arcade one moment and
blasting the bad guys the next.

There is no artistic purpose for this movie. It is product. Luc Besson, who
wrote and produced it, has another movie out right now ("The Transporter")
and indeed has written, produced or announced 16 other movies since this one
was made in far-ago 2001. Reno does what he can in a thankless situation,
the film ricochets from humor to violence and back again, and Ryoko Hirosue
makes us wonder if she is always like that. If she is, I owe an apology to
the Powerpuff Girls. I didn't know they were based on real life.

Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

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

Date: 02 Nov 2002 07:25:29 GMT
From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] feardotcom / ** (R)

feardotcom / ** (R)

August 30, 2002

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

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

BY ROGER EBERT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

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

Date: 02 Nov 2002 07:25:30 GMT
From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] SECRET BALLOT / *** (G)

SECRET BALLOT / *** (G)

August 30, 2002

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

BY ROGER EBERT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

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

Date: 02 Nov 2002 07:24:56 GMT
From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] WHITE OLEANDER / **1/2 (PG-13)

WHITE OLEANDER / **1/2 (PG-13)

October 11, 2002

Astrid Magnussen: Alison Lohman
Starr: Robin Wright Penn
Ingrid Magnussen: Michelle Pfeiffer
Claire Richards: Renee Zellweger
Rena Grushenka: Svetlana Efremova
Warner Bros. Pictures presents a film directed by Peter Kosminsky. Written
by Mary Agnes Donoghue. Based on the novel by Janet Fitch. Running time: 110
minutes. Rated PG-13 (for mature thematic elements concerning dysfunctional
relationships, drug content, language, sexuality and violence). Opening
today at local theaters.

BY ROGER EBERT

"White Oleander" tells a sad story of crime and foster homes, and makes it
look like the movie version. The film takes the materials of human tragedy
and dresses them in lovely costumes, Southern California locations and star
power. Almost makes it look like fun. The movie's poster shows four women's
faces side by side, all blindingly blond: Alison Lohman, Michelle Pfeiffer,
Robin Wright Penn and Renee Zellweger. We suspect there could be another,
parallel story of the same events, in which the characters look unhinged and
desperate and brunet.

The story is determined to be colorful and melodramatic, like a soap opera
where the characters suffer in ways that look intriguing. When you are a
teenage girl and your mother is jailed for murder and you are shipped to a
series of foster homes, isn't it a little unlikely that each home would play
like an entertaining episode of a miniseries? First you get a sexy foster
mom who was "an alcoholic, a cokehead and dancing topless--and then I was
saved by Jesus," although she still dresses like an off-duty stripper. Then
you get an actress who lives in a sun-drenched beach house in Malibu and
becomes her best friend. Then you get a Russian capitalist who dresses like
a gypsy, uses her foster kids as dumpster-divers, and runs a stall at the
Venice Beach flea market. Aren't there any foster mothers who are old,
tired, a little mean and doing it for the money?

The performances are often touching and deserve a better screenplay. I don't
hold the beauty of the actresses against them, but I wish the movie had not
been so pleased with the way the sunlight comes streaming through their long
blond hair and falls on their flawless skin and little white summer dresses.

The movie is narrated by Astrid Magnussen, played by Lohman in several
different years and weathers of her life. It's an awesome performance but
would benefit from depth and darkness that the movie shies away from. (The
movie is all too appropriately rated PG-13; I suspect full justice cannot be
done to this material short of an R.) Astrid is the daughter of Ingrid
(Pfeiffer), an artist and free spirit who sits on the roof so the desert
winds can find her. "No one had ever seen anyone more beautiful than my
mother," Astrid tells us, but there are ominous hints that Ingrid is not an
ideal mother, as when she skips Parents Night because "what can they tell me
about you that I don't already know?"

Ingrid doesn't date. Doesn't need men. Then makes the mistake of letting
Barry (Billy Connolly) into her life (although so fleeting is his role he is
barely allowed into the movie). She kills him, observing to her daughter,
"He made love to me and then said I had to leave because he had a date."
When you hardly know someone and that's how he treats you, he's not worth
serving 35 years to life.

Astrid then moves on to the series of foster homes, each one so colorful it
could be like the adventure of a Dickens character; the Russian is
unmistakably a descendent of Fagin, and surely only in a Hollywood fantasy
could any of these women qualify as foster mothers. Starr, the former
stripper, seems less like a person than a caricature, although the director,
Peter Kosminsky, has a good eye for detail and shows how her family takes a
jaundiced view of her born-again grandstanding. What happens to bring this
foster experience to an end I will not reveal, except to say that I didn't
for a moment believe it; it involves behavior of a sort the movie seems
obligated to supply but never refers to again.

Astrid's best foster experience is with Claire (Zellweger), whose
performance is the most convincing in the movie. She plays a onetime horror
star, married to a director who is usually absent, and we believe the scenes
she has with Astrid because they come from need and honesty.

They also inspire the best scenes between Astrid and her mother; Pfeiffer
finds just the right note between jealousy and perception when, on visiting
day at the prison, she observes, "You dress like her now." Later she tells
her daughter, "I'd like to meet her." "Why?" "Because you don't want me to."
And later: "How can you stand to live with poor Claire? I would rather see
you in the worst kind of foster home than to live with that woman." The
scenes involving Claire most clearly inspire Astrid's developing ideas about
her mother.

The third foster experience, with Svetlana Efremova playing the Russian
jumble-sale woman, offers a glimpse of the economy's underbelly but is too
choppy and perfunctory to engage us: It feels like it was filmed to add
color and then chopped to reduce the running time. Its only influence on
Astrid is to change her wardrobe and hair color, in what feels more like a
stunt than a character development.

Pfeiffer's role is the most difficult in the movie because she has to
compress her revelations and emotions into the brief visits of her
increasingly dubious daughter. Astrid, who once idealized her mother, now
blames her for the loss of happiness with Claire. But even the movie's big
emotional payoff at the end loses something because, after all, Ingrid did
murder Barry, and so what is presented as a sacrifice on behalf of her
daughter could also be described as simply doing the right thing.

"White Oleander" is based on a novel by Janet Fitch, recommended by Oprah's
Book Club, unread by me. I gather it includes still more colorful foster
home episodes. Amy Aquino plays Miss Martinez, the social worker who drives
Astrid from one foster adventure to the next. She feels like this movie's
version of Michael Anthony, the man who introduced each episode of "The
Millionaire." You can imagine her on the TV series, shipping the heroine to
a different foster home every week.

Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

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Date: 02 Nov 2002 07:25:08 GMT
From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] WARM WATER UNDER A RED BRIDGE / *** (Not rated)

WARM WATER UNDER A RED BRIDGE / *** (Not rated)

September 27, 2002

Yosuke Sasano: Koji Yakusho
Saeko Aizawa: Misa Shimizu
Mitsu Aizawa: Mitsuko Baisho
Gen: Manasaku Fuwa
Taro: Kazuo Kitamura
Cowboy Pictures presents a film directed by Shohei Imamura. Written by
Motofumi Tomikawa, Daisuke Tengan and Imamura. Based on a book by Yo Henmi.
Running time: 119 minutes. No MPAA rating (intended for mature audiences).
In Japanese with English subtitles. Opening today at the Music Box.

BY ROGER EBERT

"Warm Water Under a Red Bridge" has modern automobiles and supermarkets,
telephones and pepper cheese imported from Europe, but it resonates like an
ancient Japanese myth. Imagine a traveler in search of treasure, who finds a
woman with special needs that only he can fulfill, and who repays him by
ending his misery.

Shohei Imamura, one of the greatest Japanese directors, tells this story
with the energy and delight of a fairy tale, but we in the West are not
likely to see it so naively, because unlike the Japanese, we are touchy on
the subject of bodily fluids. In Japan, natural functions are accepted
calmly as a part of life, and there is a celebrated children's book about
farts. No doubt a Japanese audience would view "Warm Water" entirely
differently than a North American one--because, you see, the heroine has a
condition that causes water to build up in her body, and it can be released
only by sexual intercourse.

Water arrives in puddles and rivulets, in sprays and splashes. "Don't
worry," Saeko (Misa Shimizu) cheerfully tells Yosuke, the hero. "It's not
urine." It is instead--well, what? The water of life? Of growth and renewal?
Is she a water goddess? When it runs down the steps of her house and into
the river, fish grow large and numerous. And it seems to have a similar
effect on Yosuke (Koji Yakusho, from "Shall We Dance?" and "The Eel"). From
a pallid, hopeless wanderer in the early scenes, he grows into a bold lover
and a brave ocean fisherman.

As the film opens, Yosuke is broke and jobless, fielding incessant cell
phone calls from his nagging wife, who wants an update on his job searches.
In despair, he hunkers down next to the river with an old philosopher named
Taro (Kazuo Kitamura), who tells him a story. Long ago, he says, right after
the war, he was stealing to get the money to eat, and he took a gold Buddha
from a temple. He left it in an upstairs room of a house next to a red
bridge, where he assumes it remains to this day.

Yosuke takes a train to the town named by the old man, finds the bridge,
finds the house, and follows Saeko from it into a supermarket where he sees
her shoplift some cheese while standing in a puddle. From the puddle he
retrieves her earring (a dolphin, of course) and returns it to her, and she
asks if he'd like some cheese and then forthrightly tells him, "You saw me
steal the cheese. Then you saw the puddle of water."

All true. She explains her problem. The water builds up and must be
"vented," often by doing "something wicked" like shoplifting. It is, she
adds, building up right now--and soon they are having intercourse to the
delight of the fish in the river below.

This story is unthinkable in a Hollywood movie, but there is something about
the matter-of-fact way Saeko explains her problem, and the surprised but not
stunned way that Yosuke hears her, that takes the edge off. If women are a
source of life, and if water is where life began, then--well, whatever. It
is important to note that the sex in the movie is not erotic or titillating
in any way--it's more like a therapeutic process--and that the movie is not
sex-minded but more delighted with the novelty of Saeko's problem. Only in a
nation where bodily functions are discussed in a matter-of-fact way, where
nude public bathing is no big deal, where shame about human plumbing has not
been ritualized, could this movie play in the way Imamura intended. But
seeing it as a Westerner is an enlightening, even liberating, experience.

Imamura, now 76, is also the director of the masterpieces "The Insect Woman"
(1963), about a woman whose only priority is her own comfort and survival;
"Ballad of Narayama" (1982), the heartbreaking story of a village where the
old are left on the side of a mountain to die, and "Black Rain" (1989), not
the Michael Douglas thriller, but a harrowing human story about the days and
months after the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

At his age, he seems freed from convention, and in "Warm Water," for
example, he cuts loose from this world to include a dream in which Saeko
floats like a embryo in a cosmic cloud. There is also an effortless fusion
of old and new. The notion of a man leaving his nagging wife and home and
finding succor from a goddess is from ancient myth, and the fact that he
would then turn to wrest his living from the sea is not unheard of. But
throwing his cell phone overboard, now that's a modern touch.

Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

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

Date: 02 Nov 2002 07:25:22 GMT
From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] I'M GOING HOME (JE RENTRE A LA MAISON) / *** (Not Rated)

I'M GOING HOME (JE RENTRE A LA MAISON) / *** (Not Rated)

September 13, 2002

Gilbert Valence: Michel Piccoli
Marguerite: Catherine Deneuve
The Director: John Malkovich
Serge: Jean Koeltgen
Milestone Films presents a film written and directed by Manoel de Oliveira.
Running time: 90 minutes. In French and English with English subtitles. No
MPAA rating (contains no offensive material). Opening today at the Music Box
Theatre.

BY ROGER EBERT

There are a few movies where you can palpably sense the presence of the
director behind the camera, and "I'm Going Home" is one of them. The movie
is about an old actor who has lost many of those he loves but continues to
work. The actor is played by France's great Michel Piccoli, who at 77 has
appeared in 200 movies since 1945. And the director, whose breathing we can
almost hear in our ear, is Manoel de Oliveira of Portugal, who is 94 and
directed his first film in 1931.

When we first see the actor, named Gilbert Valence, he is onstage in a
production of Ionesco's "Exit the King," and the film lingers on speeches in
which the old man rails against his mortality and defines the unending
memorials which he fancies will keep his name alive. After the play, he
learns of a tragic accident that has robbed him of wife, daughter and
son-in-law. "Some time later," we see him living with his young grandson and
the nanny.

Gilbert's offstage life is one of routine, and it is here, in a touch both
subtle and glancing, that de Oliveira makes his most poignant observation
about how we die but life heedlessly goes on without us. Gilbert takes his
coffee every morning in the same Paris cafe, sitting in the same chair at
the same table and always reading the same morning paper, Liberation. As he
gets up to go, another man enters, sits at the same table, and unfolds his
copy of Le Figaro. This happens day after day.

One morning, the other man arrives early and takes another table. But when
Gilbert frees his regular table, he gets up with alacrity to claim it--only
to be headed off by a stranger who sits down first. These little scenes had
a surprising impact on me. I often think of myself as a ghost at places I
have visited: There is "my" cafe and "my" table, and when I return to a city
there is a satisfaction in occupying them again, because it proves my own
continuity. Of course those cafes also "belong" to others I will never know,
and someday I will never return to them, and someday neither will the
others, and someday the cafe will not be there. Yet daily ritual encourages
us to believe that because things have been the same for a long time, they
will always be the same.

The old actor sees a handsome pair of shoes in a store window and buys them.
For a man past a certain age, to buy new shoes is an act of faith. (One is
reminded of the Irish story about the shoe clerk who assured an old man,
"These will see you out.") We see the shoes in closeup as Gilbert talks with
his agent, a venal man who hints that a young actress might like to meet
him. After all, the agent says, when Pablo Casals was in his 80s, he married
a teenage student. "But I am nowhere near my 80s," Gilbert snaps. "And I am
not Casals."

What eventually happens to these shoes is a reminder that we can make plans
but we cannot count on them. There are tender little scenes in which the old
man and his grandson play with battery-powered trucks and enjoy each other's
company, and fraught scenes in which the agent tries to get the actor to
take a tawdry TV show. And a scene from a production of "The Tempest," in
which Gilbert gives Prospero's speech beginning "Our revels now are ended
.."

How the film plays out you will have to see for yourself. Few films seem so
wise and knowing about the fact of age and the approach of the end. And at
his great age, de Oliveira dispenses with the silliness of plot mechanics
and tells his story in a simple, unadorned fashion, as episodes and
observations, trusting us to understand.

In the final scene, as Gilbert leaves a cafe without drinking the wine he
has ordered, the camera lingers to watch another man walk in and order a
beer. Life goes on. You might think that "I'm Going Home," about an artist
at the end of his career, is de Oliveira's own farewell, but no: He made a
new film in 2002, named "The Uncertainty Principle," and it played at Cannes
in May. Some directors burn out early, others flower late. Luis Bunuel began
a remarkable series of 12 great films beginning when he was 61. De Oliveira
has made 13 films since 1990. There is a time when going to the cafe is a
habit, but if you go long enough it becomes a triumph.

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Date: 02 Nov 2002 07:25:11 GMT
From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] BALLISTIC: ECKS VS. SEVER / 1/2* (R)

BALLISTIC: ECKS VS. SEVER / 1/2* (R)

September 20, 2002

Jeremiah Ecks: Antonio     Banderas
Sever: Lucy Liu
Gant/Clark: Gregg Henry
Vinn/Rayne: Talisa Soto
Zane: Roger R. Cross
Ross: Ray Park
Warner Bros. Pictures presents a film directed by Kaos. Written by Alan
McElroy. Running time: 91 minutes. Rated R (for strong violence).

BY ROGER EBERT

There is nothing wrong with the title "Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever" that
renaming it "Ballistic" would not have solved. Strange that they would
choose such an ungainly title when, in fact, the movie is not about Ecks
versus Sever but about Ecks and Sever working together against a common
enemy--although Ecks, Sever and the audience take a long time to figure that
out.

The movie is a chaotic mess, overloaded with special effects and explosions,
light on continuity, sanity and coherence. So short is its memory span that
although Sever kills, I dunno, maybe 40 Vancouver police officers in an
opening battle, by the end, when someone says, "She's a killer," Ecks
replies, "She's a mother."

The movie stars Lucy Liu as Sever, a former agent for the Defense
Intelligence Agency, which according to www.dia.mil/ is a branch of the
United States Government. Antonio Banderas is Ecks, a former ace FBI agent
who is coaxed back into service. Sever has lost her child in an attack and
Ecks believes he has lost his wife, so they have something in common, you
see, even though ...

But I'll not reveal that plot secret, and will discuss the curious fact that
both of these U.S. agencies wage what amounts to warfare in Vancouver, which
is actually in a nation named Canada, which has agencies and bureaus of its
own and takes a dim view of machineguns, rocket launchers, plastic
explosives and the other weapons the American agents and their enemies use
to litter the streets of the city with the dead.

Both Sever and Ecks, once they discover this, have the same enemy in common:
Gant (Gregg Henry), a DIA agent who is married to Talisa Sota and raising
her child, although Sever kidnaps the child, who is in fact ... but never
mind, I want to discuss Gant's secret weapon. He has obtained a miniaturized
robot so small it can float in the bloodstream and cause strokes and heart
attacks.

At one point in the movie, a man who will remain nameless is injected with
one of these devices by a dart gun, and it kills him. All very well, but
consider for a moment the problem of cost overruns in these times of
economic uncertainty. A miniaturized assassination robot small enough to
slip through the bloodstream would cost how much? Millions? And it is
delivered by dart? How's this for an idea: use a poison dart, and spend the
surplus on school lunches.

"Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever" is an ungainly mess, submerged in mayhem,
occasionally surfacing for cliches. When the FBI goes looking for Ecks, for
example, they find him sitting morosely on a bar stool, drinking and
smoking. That is of course always where sad former agents are found, but the
strange thing is, after years of drinking, he is still in great shape, has
all his karate moves, and goes directly into violent action without even a
tiny tremor of the DTs.

The movie ends in a stock movie location I thought had been retired: A Steam
and Flame Factory, where the combatants stalk each other on catwalks and
from behind steel pillars, while the otherwise deserted factory supplies
vast quantities of flame and steam.

Vancouver itself, for that matter, is mostly deserted, and no wonder, if
word has gotten around that two U.S. agencies and a freelance killer are
holding war games. "Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever" was directed by Wych
Kaosayananda of Thailand, whose pseudonym, you may not be surprised to
learn, is Kaos.

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Date: 02 Nov 2002 07:25:07 GMT
From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] THE TUXEDO / *1/2 (PG-13)

THE TUXEDO / *1/2 (PG-13)

September 27, 2002

Jimmy Tong: Jackie Chan
Del Blaine: Jennifer Love     Hewitt
Clark Devlin: Jason Isaacs
Banning: Ritchie Coster
Steena: Debi Mazar
DreamWorks Pictures presents a film directed by Kevin Donovan. Written by
Michael J. Wilson and Michael Leeson. Running time: 99 minutes. Rated PG-13
(for action violence, sexual content and language).

BY ROGER EBERT

There is an ancient tradition in action movies that the first scene is a
self-contained shocker with no relevance to the rest of the plot. James Bond
parachutes from a mountainside, Clint Eastwood disarms a robber, etc. Jackie
Chan's "The Tuxedo" opens with a deer urinating in a mountain stream. The
deer, the urine and the stream have nothing to do with the rest of the film.

The movie's plot does involve water. The bad guy wants to add an ingredient
to the world's water supply that will cause victims to dehydrate and die. To
save themselves, they will have to buy the villain's pure water. Since his
opening gambit is to sabotage, I repeat, the world's water supply, he will
dehydrate everyone except those already drinking only bottled water, and so
will inherit a planet of health nuts, which is just as well, since all the
fish and animals and birds will dehydrate, too, and everyone will have to
live on PowerBars.

I have been waiting for a dehydrating villain for some time. My wife is of
the opinion that I do not drink enough water. She believes the proper amount
is a minimum of eight glasses a day. She often regards me balefully and
says, "You're not getting enough water." In hot climates her concern
escalates. In Hawaii last summer she had the grandchildren so worked up they
ran into the bedroom every morning to see if Grandpa Roger had turned to
dust.

The movie's villain, whose name is Banning (Ritchie Coster), has a novel
scheme for distributing the formula, or virus, or secret ingredient, or
whatever it is, that will make water into a dehydrating agent. He plans to
use water striders, those insects that can skate across the surface of a
pond. In his secret laboratory he keeps his ultimate weapon, a powerful
water strider queen.

Do water striders have queens, like bees and ants do? For an authoritative
answer I turned to Dr. May Berenbaum, head of the Department of Entomology
at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and founder of the Insect
Fear Film Festival, held every year at the Great University.

She writes: "Water striders are true bugs (i.e., insects with
piercing/sucking mouthparts) that run or skate on the surface of bodies of
water, feeding on the insects that fall onto the water surface. There are
about 500 species of gerrids in the world and, as far as I know, not a
single one of those 500 species is eusocial (i.e., has a complex social
structure with reproductive division of labor and cooperative brood care). I
don't even know of an example of maternal care in the whole group. In short,
the answer to your question is an emphatic 'no!' I can't wait to see this
film. It definitely sounds like a candidate for a future Insect Fear Film
Festival!"

More crushing evidence: Dr. Bruce P. Smith, expert entomologist at Ithaca
College, writes me, "There is no known species of water striders that has
queens. The most closely related insects that do are some colonial aphid
speciies, and the most familiar (and much more distant rleatives) are the
ants, bees, wasps and termites." He adds helpfully, "One mammal does have
queens: the naked mole rats of Africa." Revealing himself as a student of
insect films, he continues, "If my memory is correct, 'Arachnophobia' has a
king spider, but no queen--totally absurd!"

So there you have it. Professors Smith and Berenbaum have spoken. The evil
Banning has spent untold millions on his secret plans for world domination,
and thinks he possesses a water strider queen when he only has a lucky
regular water strider living the life of Riley.

But back to "The Tuxedo." Jackie Chan plays a taxi driver named Jimmy Tong,
who is hired by Debi Mazar to be the chauffeur for Clark Devlin (Jason
Isaacs), a multimillionaire secret agent whose $2 million tuxedo turns him
into a fighting machine (also a dancer, kung-fu expert, etc). After Devlin
is injured by a skateboard bomb, Jackie puts on the suit and soon partners
with agent Del Blaine (Jennifer Love Hewitt), who realizes he has a strange
accent for a man named Clark Devlin, but nevertheless joins him in battle
against Banning.

The movie is silly beyond comprehension, and even if it weren't silly, it
would still be beyond comprehension. It does have its moments, as when the
tuxedo inadvertently cold-cocks James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, and
Jackie Chan has to go onstage in place of the Hardest Working Man in Show
Business. He's very funny as James Brown, although not as funny as James
Brown is.

There's something engaging about Jackie Chan. Even in a bad movie, I like
him, because what you see is so obviously what you get. This time he goes
light on the stunts, at least the stunts he obviously does himself, so that
during the closing credits, there are lots of flubbed lines and times when
the actors break out laughing, but none of those spellbinding shots in which
he misses the bridge, falls off the scaffold, etc. And some of the shots are
computer-generated, which is kind of cheating isn't it, with Jackie Chan?
Luckily, special effects are not frowned upon at the Insect Fear Film
Festival.

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Date: 02 Nov 2002 07:24:58 GMT
From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] INVINCIBLE / **** (PG-13)

INVINCIBLE / **** (PG-13)

October 4, 2002

Hanussen: Tim Roth
Zishe: Jouko Ahola
Marta Farra: Anna Gourari
Master of Ceremonies: Max     Raabe
Benjamin: Jacob Wein
Landwehr: Gustav Peter     Wohler
Fine Line Features presents a film written and directed by Werner Herzog.
Running time: 135 minutes. Rated PG-13 (for some sexual content and thematic
elements). Opening today at Water Tower.

MOVIES BY ROGER EBERT

Werner Herzog's "Invincible" tells the astonishing story of a Jewish
strongman in Nazi Germany, a man who in his simple goodness believes he can
be the "new Samson" and protect his people. He is a blacksmith in Poland in
1932 when discovered by a talent scout, and soon becomes the headliner in
the Palace of the Occult, in Berlin, which is run by the sinister Hanussen
(Tim Roth), a man who dreams of becoming Minister of the Occult in a Nazi
government.

The strongman, named Zishe Breitbart, is played by a Finnish athlete named
Jouko Ahola, twice winner of the title World's Strongest Man. Much of the
movie's uncanny appeal comes from the contrast between Ahola's performance,
which is entirely without guile, and Roth's performance, which drips with
mannered malevolence. Standing between them is the young woman Marta (Anna
Gourari), who is under Hanussen's psychological power, and who the strongman
loves.

"Invincible" is based, Herzog says, on the true story of Breitbart, whose
great strength contradicted the Nazi myth of Aryan superiority. I can
imagine a dozen ways in which this story could be told badly, but Herzog has
fashioned it into a film of uncommon fascination, in which we often have no
idea at all what could possibly happen next. There are countless movies
about preludes to the Holocaust, but I can't think of one this innocent,
direct and unblinking. In the face of gathering evil, Zishe trusts in human
nature, is proud of his heritage, and believes strength and goodness (which
he confuses) will triumph.

The movie has the power of a great silent film, unafraid of grand gestures
and moral absolutes. Its casting of the major characters is crucial, and
instinctively correct. Tim Roth is a sinister charlatan, posing as a man
with real psychic powers, using trickery and showmanship as he jockeys for
position within the emerging Nazi majority. There is a scene where he
hypnotizes Marta, and as he stares boldly into the camera I wondered, for a
moment, if it was possible to hypnotize a movie audience that way. Late in
the film there is a scene where his secrets are revealed, and he makes a
speech of chilling, absolute cynicism. Another actor in another movie might
have simply gnashed his teeth, but Roth and Herzog take the revelations as
an opportunity to show us the self-hatred beneath the deception.

As for Jouko Ahola, this untrained actor, who seems by nature to be
good-hearted and uncomplicated, may never act again, but he has found the
one perfect role, as Maria Falconetti did in "The Passion of Joan of Arc."
He embodies the simple strongman. The camera can look as closely as it wants
and never find anything false. A naive man from a backward town, not
especially devout, he gets into a fight when Polish customers in a
restaurant insult him and his little brother as Jews. A little later,
entering a circus contest, he watches as the strongman lifts a boulder--and
then puts an end to the contest by, lifting the strongman and the boulder.

The talent scout takes him to see his first movie. Soon he is in Berlin,
where Hanussen sizes him up and says, "We will Aryanize you. A Jew should
never be as strong as you." Zishe is outfitted with a blond wig and Nordic
helmet, and presented as "Siegfried." He becomes a great favor of Nazi
brownshirts in the audience, as Hanussen prattles about "the strength of the
body against the dark powers of the occult." But Zishe's mind works away at
the situation until finally he has his solution, tears off the helmet and
wig, and identities himself as a Jew.

Here as throughout the film Herzog avoids the obvious next scene. Is
Hanussen outraged? To a degree. But then he reports: "There's a line three
blocks long outside! It's the Jews. They all want to see the new Samson."
And then, at a time when Hitler was on the rise but the full measure of
Jewish persecution was not yet in view, the Palace of the Occult turns into
a dangerous pit where audience members are potentially at one another's
throats.

This is the first feature in 10 years from Herzog, one of the great
visionaries among directors. He strains to break the bonds of film structure
in order to surprise us in unexpected ways. His best films unashamedly yearn
to lift us into the mythical and the mystical. "Our civilization is starving
for new images," he once told me, and in "Invincible" there is an image of a
bleak, rocky seashore where the sharp stones are littered with thousands or
millions of bright red crabs, all mindlessly scrabbling away on their crabby
missions. I think this scene may represent the emerging Nazi hordes, but of
course there can be no literal translation. Perhaps Herzog wants to
illustrate the implacable Darwinian struggle from which man can rise with
good heart and purpose.

The strongman in "Invincible" is lovable, and so deeply moving, precisely
because he is not a cog in a plot, has no plan, is involved in no
machinations, but is simply proud of his parents, proud to be a Jew, in love
with the girl, and convinced that God has made him strong for a reason. He
may be wrong in his optimism, but his greatest strength is that he will
never understand that. The Roth character is equally single-minded, but
without hope or purpose--a conniver and manipulator.

Watching "Invincible" was a singular experience for me, because it reminded
me of the fundamental power that the cinema had for us when we were
children. The film exercises the power that fable has for the believing.
Herzog has gotten outside the constraints and conventions of ordinary
narrative, and addresses us where our credulity keeps its secrets.

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Date: 02 Nov 2002 07:25:09 GMT
From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] APOLLO 13: THE IMAX EXPERIENCE / **** (PG)

APOLLO 13: THE IMAX EXPERIENCE / **** (PG)

September 20, 2002

Jim Lovell: Tom Hanks
Fred Haise: Bill Paxton
Jack Swigert: Kevin Bacon
Ken Mattingly: Gary Sinise
Gene Kranz: Ed Harris
Marilyn Lovell: Kathleen Quinlin
Universal Pictures presents a film directed by Ron Howard. Written by
William Broyles Jr. and Al Reinert. Based on the book Lost Moon by Jim
Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger. Running time: 135 minutes. Rated PG.(intense
situations). Opening today at Navy Pier IMAX.

BY ROGER EBERT

At a time when screens and theaters grow smaller and movie palaces are a
thing of the past, the new practice of re-releasing films in the IMAX format
is a thrilling step in the opposite direction. Ron Howard's "Apollo 13,"
which opens today at the IMAX theater at Navy Pier, looks bold and crisp on
the big screen, and the sound has never sounded better--perhaps couldn't
have ever sounded better, because IMAX uses some 70 speakers.

Although it takes place largely in outer space, "Apollo 13" isn't the kind
of adventure saga that needs the bigger screen so its effects play better.
"Star Wars," which is headed for IMAX theaters, fits that definition.
"Apollo 13" is a thrilling drama that plays mostly within enclosed spaces:
The space capsule, mission control and the homes of those waiting in
suspense on Earth.

The film re-creates the saga of the Apollo 13 mission, which was aborted
after an onboard explosion crippled the craft on its way to the moon. In a
desperate exercise of improvisation, crew members and the ground support
staff figure out how to return the craft safely to Earth, cannibalize
life-support from both the mother capsule and the lunar landing module, and
navigate into a terrifyingly narrow angle between too steep (the craft would
burn up in the atmosphere) and too shallow (it would skip off and fly
forever into space).

Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton and Kevin Bacon play astronauts Jim Lovell, Fred
Haise and Jack Swigert, respectively. On Earth, the key roles are by Gary
Sinise, as the left-behind astronaut Ken Mattingly, who uses a flight
simulator to help improvise a solution; Ed Harris, who is cool-headed flight
director Gene Kranz, and Kathleen Quinlan, as Lovell's wife, Marilyn, who
tries to explain to their children that "something broke on Daddy's
spaceship."

The movie has been trimmed by about 20 minutes for the IMAX release. Filmed
in widescreen, it has been cropped from the sides to fit the IMAX format.
Neither change bothered me. Although I am an opponent of pan-and-scan in
general, I understand when it is used to maximize a different projection
format. The detail and impact of the IMAX screen essentially creates a new
way of looking at the film.

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