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movies-digest         Friday, February 7 2003         Volume 02 : Number 397



[MV] MAX / ***1/2 (R)
[MV] SOLARIS (1972)
[MV] RUSSIAN ARK / **** (Not rated)
[MV] DELIVER US FROM EVA / **
[MV] FINAL DESTINATION 2 / *1/2 (R)
[MV] LOVE LIZA/ *** (R)
[MV] HOW TO LOSE A GUY IN 10 DAYS / *1/2
[MV] THE ISLE / *** (Not rated)
[MV] MORVERN CALLAR / ***1/2 (Not rated)
[MV] SHANGHAI KNIGHTS/ *** (PG-13)

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

Date: 24 Jan 2003 19:16:10 GMT
From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] MAX / ***1/2 (R)

MAX / ***1/2 (R)

January 24, 2003

Max Rothman:    John Cusack
Adolf Hitler:    Noah Taylor
Liselore Von Peltz:    Leelee Sobieski
Nina Rothman:    Molly Parker
Capt. Mayr:    Ulrich Thomsen
Max's father:    David Horovitch
Max's mother:    Janet Suzman
NCO:    Andras Stohl

Lions Gate Films presents a film written and directed by Menno Meyjes.
Running time: 108 minutes. Rated R (for language).

BY ROGER EBERT

"Und ... Der Fuhrer vas a better artist than Churchill!"

"The Producers"

The central mystery of Hitler, William Boyd writes in a recent Times
Literary Supplement, is: "How on earth could a dysfunctional, deranged,
down-and-out homeless person in pre-First World War Vienna become, 20 years
later, Chancellor of Germany?" A peculiar and intriguing film named "Max"
argues that he succeeded because he had such a burning need to be
recognized--and also, of course, because of luck, good for him, bad for us.
If Hitler had won fame as an artist, the century's history might have been
different. Pity about his art.

"Max" imagines a fictional scenario in which the young Adolf Hitler (Noah
Taylor) is befriended by a one-armed Jewish art dealer named Max Rothman
(John Cusack) in Munich in the years following World War I. Both served in
the German army and fought in the same battle, where Rothman lost his arm.
The dealer opens an avant-garde art gallery in a vast abandoned factory,
showcasing artists such as George Grosz and attracting important
collectors--and Hitler, clutching his portfolio of kitsch. Rothman takes
pity on this man and is friendly to him, moved by the pathos beneath his
bluster.

The film, written and directed by Menno Meyjes, who scripted "The Color
Purple," has been attacked because it attempts to "humanize" a monster. But
of course Hitler was human, and we must understand that before we can
understand anything else about him. To dehumanize him is to fall under the
spell which elevated him into the Fuhrer, a mythical being who transfixed
Germans and obscured the silly little man with the mustache. To ponder
Hitler's early years with the knowledge of his later ones is to understand
how life can play cosmic tricks with tragic results.

"Max" suggests that Hitler's real work of art was himself and the Nazi state
he first envisioned in fantasy terms; even as a young man we see him
doodling with swastikas and designing comic-book uniforms. Clothes make the
man, and to some extent Hitler's skill as a fashion designer made men into
Nazis. "I am the new avant garde and politics is the new art," he tells
Rothman, not inaccurately.

If Hitler is a mystery, what are we to make of Max Rothman? John Cusack
plays him as a man of empathy, who endures the tantrums of his artists and
feels pity for this bedraggled Hitler whom he first meets as a liquor
deliveryman. Rothman himself wanted to be an artist but has put that on hold
after losing his arm. He has returned to a comfortable bourgeois life in
Munich, with his doctor father-in-law, his secure wife, Nina (Molly Parker),
and his stimulating mistress, Liselore (Leelee Sobieski). When he's quizzed
about his friendship with the pathetic Hitler, his answers are simple: "He
came back from the war to nothing. He doesn't have any friends."

Yes, Hitler is anti-Semitic, and makes no secret of it. But in Germany in
those days, anti-Semitism was like the weather; you couldn't do anything
about it and you had to go out in it. Rothman takes Hitler's rantings with
weariness and sadness, and at one point tells Liselore, "I told him his
insane f------ ideas are holding him back as an artist."

There is never, even for a moment, a glimmer of evidence to suggest that
Hitler could have been a successful artist. His drawings look like the kind
of cartoon caricatures that bored boys create in their notebooks in the back
row of geometry class, playing with their protractors and dreaming of
supermen. Hitler instinctively fails to see the point of abstract art; at
one point he suggests that Rothman frame his diarrhea. We are reminded that,
in power, both the Nazis and the Soviets banned and burned abstract art.
Curious, that art which claimed to represent nothing nevertheless
represented so much to them. Perhaps art is a threat to totalitarianism when
it does not have a clear, censurable subject and is left to the musings of
the citizen.

As the title suggests, "Max" centers more on Rothman than on Hitler. Max is
a kind, dreamy, hopeful man, who we presume saw his share of the horrors of
that particularly nasty war and trusts that art is taking him in the right
direction. He is also smooth and sophisticated, a master of one-armed
cigarette technique, who moves seamlessly between his bourgeois home and the
cafes and dives of bohemian Munich. He is worldly in a way that Hitler is
not, and their differences are suggested when he says in exasperation to the
fierce failed artist, "Listen--do you want to meet some girls?"

Hitler's other patron is an army propagandist named Mayr (Ulrich Thomsen),
like Hitler an outcast in the German economic ruin. He is attached to a
small splinter party and thinks Hitler might make a good spokesman. What
Mayr sees in this hapless nonentity is hard to say, but he is quite right,
and soon Hitler is fascinating crowds in beer halls with his emerging Nazi
vision. (Mayr, I learn, is an actual historical figure, who later, for his
pains, was beheaded by Hitler.)

But what, we may ask, parroting Soviet realism, is the purpose of this
movie? What is its message? It is not abstract but presents us with two
central characters whose races have a rendezvous with destiny. I think the
key is in Rothman, who is a kind liberal humanist, who cares for the
unfortunate, who lives a life of the mind that blinds him to the ominous
rising tide of Nazism. Can a man like this, with values like this, survive
against a man like Hitler, who has no value except the will for power? It is
the duty of the enlightened state to assure that he can. Dissent protects
the body politic from the virus of totalitarianism.

Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

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

Date: 24 Jan 2003 19:16:25 GMT
From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] SOLARIS (1972)

SOLARIS (1972)

January 24, 2003

Kris Kelvin:    Donatas Banionis
Khari:    Natalya Bondarchuk
Dr. Snauth:    Juri Jarvet
Berton:    Vladislav Dvorzhetsky
Kelvin's father:    Nikolai Grinko
Dr. Sartorius:    Anatoli Solonitsyn

Kino International presents a film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. Written by
Tarkovsky and Fridrikh Gorenshtein, based on the novel by Stanislaw Lem. No
MPAA rating. Running time: 167 minutes. In Russian with English subtitles.
Opening today at the Music Box Theatre.

BY ROGER EBERT

"Solaris," Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 film that was recently remade by Steven
Soderbergh, will play in a newly restored 35mm print starting today at the
Music Box, 3733 N. Southport. I wrote about it last Sunday in the Great
Movies series. Excerpts:

I saw "Solaris" for the first time at the 1972 Chicago Film Festival. It was
my first experience of Tarkovsky, and at first I balked. It was long and
slow and the dialogue seemed deliberately dry. But then the overall shape of
the film floated into view, there were images of startling beauty, then
developments that questioned the fundamental being of the characters
themselves, and finally an ending which teasingly suggested that everything
in the film needed to be seen in a new light. There was so much to think
about afterward, and so much that remained in my memory.

"Solaris" is routinely called Tarkovsky's reply to Kubrick's "2001," and
indeed Tarkovsky could have seen the Kubrick film at the 1969 Moscow Film
Festival, but the film is based on a 1961 novel by the Polish science
fiction writer Stanislaw Lem. Both films involve human space journeys and
encounters with a transforming alien intelligence, which creates places
("2001") or people ("Solaris") from clues apparently obtained by reading
minds. But Kubrick's film is outward, charting man's next step in the
universe, while Tarkovsky's is inward, asking about the nature and reality
of the human personality.

"Solaris" begins with a long conversation between the psychologist Kelvin
(Donatas Banionis) and the cosmonaut Berton (Vladislav Dvorzhetsky) at the
country home of Kelvin's father. This home will be seen again at the end of
a film in a transformed context. Berton tells him about a Soviet space
station circling the planet Solaris, and of deaths and mysteries on board.
Eventually, Kelvin arrives at the station (his journey is not shown) and
finds one crew member dead and two more deeply disturbed by events on the
station.

The planet, we learn, is entirely covered by a sea, and when X-ray probes
were used to investigate it, the planet apparently replied with probes of
its own, entering the minds of the cosmonauts and making some of their
memories real. Within a day, Kelvin is presented with one of the Guests that
the planet can create: a duplicate of his late wife, Khari (Natalya
Bondarchuk), exact in every detail, but lacking her memories.

This Guest is not simply a physical manifestation, however. She has
intelligence, self-consciousness, memory and lack of memories. She does not
know that the original Khari committed suicide. She questions Kelvin, wants
to know more about herself, eventually grows despondent when she realizes
she cannot be who she appears to be. To some extent, her being is limited by
how much Kelvin knows about her, since Solaris cannot know more than Kelvin
does; this theme is made clearer in Soderbergh and George Clooney's 2002
remake of the film.

When we love someone, who do we love? That person, or our idea of that
person? Some years before virtual reality became a byword, Tarkovsky was
exploring its implications. Although other persons no doubt exist in
independent physical space, our entire relationship with them exists in our
minds. When we touch them, it is not the touch we experience, but our
consciousness of the touch. To some extent, then, the second Khari is as
"real" as the first, although different.

The relationship between Kelvin and the new Khari plays out against the
nature of reality on the space station. He glimpses other Guests. He views a
taped message from the dead cosmonaut, filled with information and warning.
Khari, it develops, cannot be killed, although that is tried, because she
can simply be replaced. Physical pain is meaningless to her, as we see when
she attempts to rip through a steel bulkhead door because she does not know
how to open it. Gentle feelings are accessible to her, as seen in a scene
that everybody agrees is the magic center of "Solaris," when the space
station enters a stage of zero gravity and Kelvin, Khari and lighted candles
float in the air.

The last sequence of the film, which I will not reveal, invites us to
reconsider the opening sequence, and to toy with the notion that there may
be more Guests in the film that we first thought. It is a crucial fact that
this final shot is seen by us, the viewers, and not by those on the space
station. "The arc of discovery is on the part of the audience, not the
characters," writes the critic N. Medlicott. That they may be trapped within
a box of consciousness that deceives them about reality is only appropriate,
since the film argues that we all are.

The complete article on Tarkovsky and "Solaris" is at
www.suntimes.com/ebert.

Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

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

Date: 07 Feb 2003 21:21:43 GMT
From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] RUSSIAN ARK / **** (Not rated)

RUSSIAN ARK / **** (Not rated)

January 31, 2003

The Marquis:    Sergey Dreiden
Catherine the Great:    Maria Kuznetsova
The Spy:    Leonid Mozgovoy
Himself:    Mikhail Piotrovsky
Orbeli:     David Giorgobiani
Alexander Chaban:     Boris Piotrovsky
Himself:    Lev Yeliseyev
Himself:    Oleg Khmelnitsky
Wellspring presents a film directed by Alexander Sokurov. Written by Anatoly
Nikiforov and Sokurov. Running time: 96 minutes. No MPAA rating
(unobjectionable for all).

BY ROGER EBERT

Every review of "Russian Ark" begins by discussing its method. The movie
consists of one unbroken shot lasting the entire length of the film, as a
camera glides through the Hermitage, the repository of Russian art and
history in St. Petersburg. The cinematographer Tillman Buttner, using a
Steadicam and high-def digital technology, joined with some 2,000 actors in
an tight-wire act in which every mark and cue had to be hit without fail;
there were two broken takes before the third time was the charm.

The subject of the film, which is written, directed and (in a sense) hosted
by Alexander Sokurov, is no less than three centuries of Russian history.
The camera doesn't merely take us on a guided tour of the art on the walls
and in the corridors, but witnesses many visitors who came to the Hermitage
over the years. Apart from anything else, this is one of the best-sustained
ideas I have ever seen on the screen. Sokurov reportedly rehearsed his
all-important camera move again and again with the cinematographer, the
actors and the invisible sound and lighting technicians, knowing that the
Hermitage would be given to him for only one precious day.

After a dark screen and the words "I open my eyes and I see nothing," the
camera's eye opens upon the Hermitage and we meet the Marquis (Sergey
Dreiden), a French nobleman who will wander through the art and the history
as we follow him. The voice we heard, which belongs to the never-seen
Sokurov, becomes a foil for the Marquis, who keeps up a running commentary.
What we see is the grand sweep of Russian history in the years before the
Revolution, and a glimpse of the grim times afterwards.

It matters little, I think, if we recognize all of the people we meet on
this journey; such figures as Catherine II and Peter the Great are
identified (Catherine, like many another museum visitor, is searching for
the loo), but some of the real people who play themselves, like Mikhail
Piotrovsky, the current director of the Hermitage, work primarily as types.
We overhear whispered conversations, see state functions, listen as
representatives of the Shah apologize to Nicholas I for the killing of
Russian diplomats, even see little flirtations.

And then, in a breathtaking opening-up, the camera enters a grand hall and
witnesses a formal state ball. Hundreds of dancers, elaborately costumed and
bejeweled, dance to the music of a symphony orchestra, and then the camera
somehow seems to float through the air to the orchestra's stage, and moves
among the musicians. An invisible ramp must have been moved into place below
the camera frame, for Buttner and his Steadicam to smoothly climb.

The film is a glorious experience to witness, not least because, knowing the
technique and understanding how much depends on every moment, we almost hold
our breath. How tragic if an actor had blown a cue or Buttner had stumbled
five minutes from the end! In a sense, the long, long single shot reminds me
of a scene in "Nostalgia," the 1982 film by Russia's Andrei Tarkovsky, in
which a man obsessively tries to cross and recross a littered and empty pool
while holding a candle which he does not want to go out: The point is not
the action itself, but its duration and continuity.

It will be enough for most viewers, as it was for me, to simply view
"Russian Ark" as an original and beautiful idea. But Stanley Kauffmann
raises an inarguable objection in his New Republic review, when he asks,
"What is there intrinsically in the film that would grip us if it had been
made--even excellently made--in the usual edited manner?" If it were not one
unbroken take, if we were not continuously mindful of its 96 minutes--what
then? "We sample a lot of scenes," he writes, "that in themselves have no
cumulation, no self-contained point ... Everything we see or hear engages us
only as part of a directorial tour de force."

This observation is true, and deserves an answer, and I think my reply would
be that "Russian Ark," as it stands, is enough. I found myself in a reverie
of thoughts and images, and sometimes, as my mind drifted to the barbarity
of Stalin and the tragic destiny of Russia, the scenes of dancing became
poignant and ironic. It is not simply what Sokurov shows about Russian
history, but what he does not show--doesn't need to show, because it shadows
all our thoughts of that country. Kauffmann is right that if the film had
been composed in the ordinary way out of separate shots, we would question
its purpose. But it is not, and the effect of the unbroken flow of images
(experimented with in the past by directors like Hitchcock and Max Ophuls)
is uncanny. If cinema is sometimes dreamlike, then every edit is an
awakening. "Russian Ark" spins a daydream made of centuries.

Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

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

Date: 07 Feb 2003 21:21:31 GMT
From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] DELIVER US FROM EVA / **

DELIVER US FROM EVA / **

February 7, 2003

Eva:    Gabrielle Union
Ray:    LL Cool J
Kareenah:    Essence Atkins
Tim Williams:    Mel Jackson
Jacqui:    Meagan Good
Cynda:    Yuri Brown

Focus Features presents a film directed by Gary Hardwick. Written by Gary
Hardwick, James Iver Mattson and B.E. Brauner. Running time: 105 minutes.
Rated R (for sex-related dialogue). Opening today at local theaters.

BY ROGER EBERT

"Deliver Us From Eva" is the other movie of the same weekend based on a
romantic bet. See my review of "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days" (in today's
WeekendPlus) for my general comments on this unhappy genre. It has the
advantage of being about one bet, not two, preserving at least one of the
protagonists as a person we can safely like. But it proceeds so deliberately
from one plot point to the next that we want to stand next to the camera,
holding up cards upon which we have lettered clues and suggestions.

The movie stars two tall and striking actors, Gabrielle Union and LL Cool J,
who have every reason to like each other anyway, even if Union's
brothers-in-law were not paying him $5,000 to take her out, make her fall in
love, and move with her to a town far, far away. They can't stand the woman.
Well, hardly can we.

Union plays Eva, oldest of the four Dandridge Sisters. After the untimely
death of their parents, Eva took upon the task of raising the girls, and has
never been able to stop giving the orders--no, not even now that they're
grown up. The sisters are Kareenah (Essence Atkins), who won't get pregnant,
on Eva's orders; Bethany (Robinne Lee), who Eva won't let live with her cop
boyfriend, and Jacqui (Meagan Good), who is married to a mailman who always
feels like there's postage due.

The Dandridge Sisters like their local fame and kind of enjoy being under
Eva's motherly thumb. The director, Gary Hardwick, often films them cresting
a hill, four abreast, hair and skirts flying, arms linked, while straggling
after them are their luckless men, left in the rear. Much of the action
centers on a beauty parlor, serving, like the title location in
"Barbershop," as the stage upon which daily soap operas are played out to
loud acclaim or criticism.

The Dandridge family logjam is broken, as we can easily foresee, when Eva
actually begins to fall for that big lug Ray (played by LL Cool J, who says
after this movie he is changing his name back to James Todd Smith, a victory
for punctuationists everywhere). He wins her over by admiring her spicy
beans, which are too hot for the wimps she usually dates. If the way to a
man's heart is through his stomach, the way to a woman's heart is through
adoring a recipe that only she thinks is edible.

But let's back up. The problem with their love affair, of course, is that
although Eva loves Ray and Ray loves Eva, Eva is certain to find out about
the bet, causing a scene of heartbreak and betrayal that would be moving if
I hadn't also seen it in "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days" and every other
movie in history where lovers begin with secret deception and arrive at the
truth.

Any two lovers with the slightest instinct for each other, with the most
perfunctory ability to see true romance glowing in the eyes of the beloved,
would not have the fight because they would not need the fight. They would
know their love was true. I live to see the following scene:

She: "You mean ... you only went out with me on a bet!?!"

He: "That's right, baby."

She: "Well, you won, you dumb lug. Now haul your lying ass over here and
make me forget it."

Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

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

Date: 07 Feb 2003 21:21:40 GMT
From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] FINAL DESTINATION 2 / *1/2 (R)

FINAL DESTINATION 2 / *1/2 (R)

January 31, 2003

Clear Rivers:    Ali Larter
Kimberly Corman:    A.J. Cook
Thomas Burke:     Michael Landes
Evan Lewis:    David Paetkau
Tim Carpenter:    James Kirk
Nora Carpenter:    Lynda Boyd
Kat:    Keegan Connor Tracy
Rory:    Jonathan Cherry
New Line Cinema presents a film directed by David R. Ellis. Written by J.
Mackye Gruber and Eric Bress. Running time: 100 minutes. Rated R (for strong
violence, gruesome accidents, language, drug content and some nudity).

BY ROGER EBERT

"Look, we drove a long way to get here, so if you know how to beat death,
we'd like to know."

So say pending victims to a morgue attendant in "Final Destination 2," which
takes a good idea from the first film and pounds it into the ground, not to
mention decapitating, electrocuting, skewering, blowing up, incinerating,
drowning and gassing it. Perhaps movies are like history, and repeat
themselves, first as tragedy, then as farce.

The earlier film involved a group of friends who got off an airplane after
one of them had a vivid precognition of disaster. The plane crashes on
takeoff. But then, one by one, most of the survivors die, as if fate has to
balance its books.

That movie depends on all the horror cliches of the Dead Teenager Movie
(formula: teenagers are alive at beginning, dead at end). But it is
well-made and thoughtful. As I wrote in my review: "The film in its own way
is biblical in its dilemma, although the students use the code word 'fate'
when what they are really talking about is God. In their own terms, in their
own way, using teenage vernacular, the students have existential
discussions."

That was then, this is now. Faithful to its genre, "Final Destination 2"
allows one of its original characters, Clear Rivers (Ali Larter) to survive,
so she can be a link to the earlier film. In the new film, Clear is called
upon by Kimberly Corman (A.J. Cook), a twentysomething who is driving three
friends in her SUV when she suddenly has a vision of a horrendous traffic
accident. Kimberly blocks the on-ramp, saving the drivers behind her when
logs roll off a timber truck, gas tanks explode, etc.

But is it the same old scenario? Are the people who she saved all doomed to
die? "There is a sort of force--an unseen malevolent presence around us
every day," a character muses. "I prefer to call it death."

The malevolent presence doesn't remain unseen for long. Soon bad things are
happening to good people, in a series of accidents that Rube Goldberg would
have considered implausible. In one ingenious sequence, we see a character
who almost trips over a lot of toys while carrying a big Macintosh iMac box.
In his house, he starts the microwave and lights a fire under a frying pan,
then drops his ring down the garbage disposal, then gets his hand trapped in
the disposal while the microwave explodes and the frying pan starts a fire,
then gets his hand loose, breaks a window that mysteriously slams shut,
climbs down a fire escape, falls to the ground and finally, when it seems he
is safe ... well, everything that could possibly go wrong does, except that
he didn't get a Windows machine.

Other characters die in equally improbable ways. One is ironically killed by
an air bag, another almost chokes in a dentist's chair, a third is severed
from his respirator, and so on, although strange things do happen in real
life. I came home from seeing this movie to read the story about the
teenager who was thrown 25 feet in the air after a car crash, only to save
himself by grabbing some telephone lines. If that had happened in "Final
Destination 2," his car would have exploded, blowing him off the lines with
a flying cow.

There is a kind of dumb level on which a movie like this works, once we
understand the premise. People will insist on dying oddly. Remember the
story of the woman whose husband left her, so she jumped out the window and
landed on him as he was leaving the building?

The thing about "FD2" is that the characters make the mistake of trying to
figure things out. Their reasoning? If you were meant to die, then you owe
death a life. But a new life can cancel out an old one. So if the woman in
the white van can safely deliver her baby, then that means that someone else
will be saved, or will have to die, I forget which. This is the kind of
bookkeeping that makes you wish Arthur Anderson were still around.

Note: The first "Final Destination" (2000) had characters named after famous
horror-film figures, including Browning, Horton, Lewton, Weine, Schreck,
Hitchcock and Chaney. The sequel has just two that I can identify: Corman
and Carpenter.

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

Date: 07 Feb 2003 21:21:34 GMT
From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] LOVE LIZA/ *** (R)

LOVE LIZA/ *** (R)

February 7, 2003

Wilson Joel:    Philip Seymour Hoffman
Mary Ann Bankhead:    Kathy Bates
Denny:    Jack Kehler
Maura Haas:    Sarah Koskoff
Tom Bailey:    Stephen Tobolowsky

Brenda:Erika Alexander

Sony Pictures Classics presents a film directed by Todd Louiso. Written by
Gordy Hoffman. Running time: 90 minutes. Rated R (for drug use, language and
brief nudity). Opening today at local theaters.

BY ROGER EBERT

Diane Lane, who worked on Philip Seymour Hoffman's second movie, remembers
that the cast almost tiptoed around him, he seemed so fragile. He's a bulky
man, substantial, and yet in many of his roles he seems ready to deflate
with a last exhausted sigh. It is a little startling to meet him in person
and discover he is outgoing, confident, humorous. On the other hand, who
knows him better than his brother Gordy, whose screenplay for "Love Liza"
creates a Hoffman role teetering on the brink of implosion.

Hoffman plays Wilson Joel, a tech-head whose wife has recently committed
suicide, although it takes us a while to figure that out. He presents a
facade of conviviality in the office, sometimes punctuated by outbursts of
laughter that go on too long, like choked grief. His home seems frozen in a
state of mid-unpacking, and he sleeps on the floor. Eventually he stops
going in to work altogether.

What he feels for his late wife is never usefully articulated. She left a
letter for him, but he has not opened it; her mother, played by Kathy Bates,
would like to know what it says, but what can she do to influence this man
whose psyche is in meltdown? Wilson gives the sense of never having really
grown up. One day he begins sniffing gasoline, a dangerous way to surround
himself with a blurred world. He doesn't even have grown-up vices like
drinks or drugs, but reverts to something he may have tried as a teenager.

The movie proceeds with a hypnotic relentlessness that hesitates between
horror and black comedy. Searching to explain all the gas he's buying, he
blurts out that he needs it for his model airplanes (this would have been a
teenager's alibi). A friendly co-worker thinks maybe this is an opening to
lure him back into life, and sends over a relative who is an enthusiast of
remote-controlled planes and boats. This sends Wilson careening into a
series of cover-ups; he has to buy a model airplane, he finds himself
attending remote control gatherings in which he has not the slightest
interest and finally, after a series of events that Jim Carrey could have
performed in another kind of movie, he finds himself inexplicably swimming
in a lake while angry little remote-controlled boats buzz like hornets
around him.

"Love Liza," directed by Todd Louiso, is not about a plot but about a
condition. The condition is familiar to students of some of Hoffman's other
characters, and comes to full flower in "Happiness" (1998), where he plays a
man who lives in solitary confinement with his desperate and antisocial
sexual fantasies. Sex hardly seems the issue with Wilson Joel, but he seems
incapable of any kind of normal socializing, other than a kind of fake
office camaraderie he might have copied from others. The mystery is not why
Liza killed herself, but why she married him.

The purpose of a movie like this is to inspire thoughts about human nature.
Most movies do not contain real people; they contain puppets who conform to
popular stereotypes and do entertaining things. In the recent and relatively
respectable thriller "The Recruit," for example, Colin Farrell doesn't play
a three-dimensional human, nor is he required to. He is a place-holder for a
role that has been played before and will be endlessly played again--the kid
who chooses a mentor in a dangerous spy game. He is pleasant, sexy, wary,
angry, baffled, ambitious and relieved, all on cue, but these emotions do
not proceed from his personality; they are generated by the requirements of
the plot. Leaving the movie, we may have learned something about CIA
spycraft (and a lot more about the manufacturers of thrillers), but there is
not one single thing we will have learned about being alive.

Al Pacino is the co-star of that movie, defined and motivated as narrowly as
Farrell is. In a new movie named "People I Know," he plays a breathing,
thinking human being, a New York press agent driven by drugs, drink, duty
and a persistent loyalty to his own political idealism. We learn something
about life from that performance. Pacino teaches us, as he is always capable
of doing in the right role.

Philip Seymour Hoffman is a teacher, too. You should see "Love Liza" in
anticipation of his new movie "Owning Mahowny," which I saw at Sundance this
year ("Love Liza" was at the 2002 festival, where it won the prize for best
screenplay). The Mahowny character is at right angles to Wilson, but seems
similarly blocked at an early stage of development. Observing how Mahowny,
an addicted gambler, relates to his long-suffering fiancee (Minnie Driver),
we can guess at the ordeal that Wilson put Liza through. He's not cruel or
angry or mean; he's simply not ... there. His eyes seek other horizons.

In an age when depression and Prozac are not unknown, when the popularity of
New Age goofiness reflects an urgent need for reassurance, Hoffman may be
playing characters much closer to the American norm than an action hero like
Farrell. We cannot all outsmart the CIA and win the girl, but many of us
know what it feels like to be stuck in doubt and confusion, and cornered by
our own evasions.

There is a kind of attentive concern that Hoffman brings to his characters,
as if he has been giving them private lessons, and now it is time for their
first public recital. Whether or not they are ready, it can be put off no
longer, and so here they are, trembling and blinking, wondering why everyone
else seems to know the music.

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Date: 07 Feb 2003 21:21:33 GMT
From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] HOW TO LOSE A GUY IN 10 DAYS / *1/2

HOW TO LOSE A GUY IN 10 DAYS / *1/2

February 7, 2003

Andie:    Kate Hudson Ben:    Matthew McConaughey Tony:    Adam Goldberg
Spears:    Michael Michele
Green:    Shalom Harlow
Lana Jong:    Bebe Neuwirth
Phillip Warren:    Robert Klein

Paramount Pictures presents a film directed by Donald Petrie. Written by
Kristen Buckley, Brian Regan and Burr Steers, based on the book by Michelle
Alexander and Jeannie Long. Rated PG-13. Running time: 112 minutes. Opening
at local theaters

BY ROGER EBERT

I am just about ready to write off movies in which people make bets about
whether they will, or will not, fall in love. The premise is fundamentally
unsound, since it subverts every love scene with a lying subtext. Characters
are nice when they want to be mean, or mean when they want to be nice. The
easiest thing at the movies is to sympathize with two people who are falling
in love. The hardest thing is to sympathize with two people who are denying
their feelings, misleading each other, and causing pain to a trusting heart.
This is comedy only by dictionary definition. In life, it is unpleasant, and
makes the audience sad.

Unless, of course, the characters are thoroughgoing rotters in the first
place, as in "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" (1988), in which Steve Martin and
Michael Caine make a $50,000 bet on who will be the first to con the rich
American played by Glenne Headley. They deserve their comeuppance, and we
enjoy it. "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days" is not, alas, pitched at that
modest level of sophistication, and provides us with two young people who
are like pawns in a sex game for the developmentally shortchanged.

He works at an ad agency. She works for a magazine that is Cosmopolitan,
spelled a different way. She pitches her editor on an article about how to
seduce a guy and then drive him away in 10 days. He pitches his boss on an
idea that involves him being able to get a woman to fall in love with him in
10 days. They don't even Meet Cute, but are shuffled together by a
treacherous conspirator.

Now of course they will fall in love. That goes without saying. They will
fall in love even though she deliberately creates scenes no man could abide,
such as nicknaming his penis Princess Sophia. She allows her disgusting
miniature dog to pee on his pool table. She even puts a plate of sandwiches
down on top of the pot in their poker game, something Nancy would be too
sophisticated to do to Sluggo.

He puts up with this mistreatment because he has his own bet to win, and
also because, doggone it, he has fallen in love with this vaporous fluffball
of narcissistic cluelessness. That leaves only one big scene for us to
anticipate, or dread: the inevitable moment when they both find out the
other made a bet. At a moment like that, a reasonably intelligent couple
would take a beat, start laughing, and head for the nearest hot-sheets
haven. But no. These characters descend from the moribund fictional ideas of
earlier decades, and must react in horror, run away in grief, prepare to
leave town, etc., while we in the audience make our own bets, about their
IQs.

Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson star. I neglected to mention that, maybe
because I was trying to place them in this review's version of the Witness
Protection Program. If I were taken off the movie beat and assigned to cover
the interior design of bowling alleys, I would have some idea of how they
must have felt as they made this film.

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Date: 07 Feb 2003 21:21:44 GMT
From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] THE ISLE / *** (Not rated)

THE ISLE / *** (Not rated)

January 31, 2003

Hee-Jin:    Jung Suh
Hyun-Shik:    Yoo-Suk Kim
Eun-A:    Sung-Hee Park
Mang-Chee:    Jae-Hyung Cho
Middle-aged man:    Hang-Sun Jang
Empire Pictures presents a film written and directed by Ki-Duk Kim. Running
time: 89 minutes. No MPAA rating (extreme sexual situations, adult themes,
violent behavior). In Korean with English subtitles.

BY ROGER EBERT

The audiences at Sundance are hardened and sophisticated, but when the South
Korean film "The Isle" played there in 2001, there were gasps and walk-outs.
People covered their eyes, peeked out, and slammed their palms back again. I
report that because I want you to know: This is the most gruesome and
quease-inducing film you are likely to have seen. You may not even want to
read the descriptions in this review. Yet it is also beautiful, angry and
sad, with a curious sick poetry, as if the Marquis de Sade had gone in for
pastel landscapes.

The film involves a lake where fishermen rent tiny cottages, each on its own
raft, and bob with the waves as they catch and cook their dinners. It is the
ultimate getaway. Once they have been delivered to their rafts by Hee-Jin, a
woman who lives in a shack on the bank and operates a motorboat, they depend
on her for all of their supplies, and for the return to shore. She also
sometimes brings them prostitutes, or services them herself.

Hee-Jin (Jung Suh) does not speak throughout the film, and is thought to be
a mute, until she utters one piercing scream. She is like the heroine of
"Woman of the Dunes," ruling a domain in which men, once lured, can be kept
captive. Most of the time she simply operates her business, ferrying the
fishermen back and forth to their floating retreats. The men treat Hee-Jin
and the prostitutes with brutality and contempt, even making them dive into
the water to get their payments; that these women are willing to work in
this way is a measure of their desperation.

Hee-Jin is indifferent to most of the men, but becomes interested in
Hyun-Shik (Yoo-Suk Kim). Because we share his nightmares, we know that he
was a policeman, killed his girlfriend, and has come to the floating hut to
hide and perhaps to die. Watching him one day, she sees that he is about to
commit suicide, and interrupts his chain of thought with sudden violence,
swimming under his raft and stabbing him through the slats of the floor.
They develop what on this lake passes for a relationship, but then he tries
suicide again (you might want to stop reading now) by swallowing a line
knotted with fishhooks and pulling it up again. This leads to a sex scene I
will not describe here, and later to an equally painful sequence involving
Hee-Jin's use of fishhooks.

It is not uncommon for South Korean films to involve sadomasochism, as
indeed do many films from Japan, where bondage is a common subject of
popular adult comic books. The material doesn't reflect common behavior in
those countries, but is intended to evoke extremes of violent emotion. It
also dramatizes hostility toward women, although in "The Isle" the tables
are turned. Between these two people who have nothing in common, one of them
mute, sex is a form of communication--and pain, this movie argues, is even
more sincere and complete.

Why would you want to see this film? Most people would not. I was recently
at a health resort where a movie was shown every night, and one of the
selections was Pedro Almodovar's "All About My Mother," which involves
transgendered characters. "Why," a woman asked me, "would they show a movie
with things I do not want to see?" She is not unusual. Most people choose
movies that provide exactly what they expect, and tell them things they
already know. Others are more curious. We are put on this planet only once,
and to limit ourselves to the familiar is a crime against our minds.

The way I read "The Isle," it is not about fishhooks and sex at all. It is a
cry of pain. The man on the raft, as we have seen in flashbacks, is violent
and cruel, and he killed his girlfriend because he was jealous. Of course
jealousy is the face of low self-esteem. The woman sells her body and dives
into the water for her payment. Her power is that she can leave these
hateful men stranded on their rafts. I believe that Hee-Jin comes to "like"
Hyun-Shik, although that is the wrong word. Maybe she feels possessive,
because she saved his life. His second attempt, with the fishhooks, reveals
the depth of his sad self-loathing. When she employs the fishhooks on
herself, what is she saying? That she understands? That she feels the same
way too? That even in agony we need someone to witness and share?

The film, as I said, is beautiful to look at. The little huts are each a
different color. The mist over the water diffuses the light. What a lovely
postcard this scene would make, if we did not know the economy it reflects,
and the suffering it conceals. Now there's a subject for meditation.

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Date: 07 Feb 2003 21:21:41 GMT
From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] MORVERN CALLAR / ***1/2 (Not rated)

MORVERN CALLAR / ***1/2 (Not rated)

January 31, 2003

Morvern Callar:    Samantha Morton
Lanna:    Kathleen McDermott
Boy in Room 1022:    Raife Patrick
    Burchell Dazzer:    Dan Cadan
Sheila Tequila:    Carolyn Calder

Cowboy Pictures presents a film directed by Lynne Ramsay. Written by Liana
Dognini and Ramsay. Based on a novel by Alan Warner. Running time: 97
minutes. No MPAA rating (intended for adults).

BY ROGER EBERT

In the opening scene of "Morvern Callar," a young woman awakens next to the
body of her boyfriend, who has committed suicide during the night. Lights
blink on their Christmas tree. His blood is all over the floor. His presents
for her are still wrapped and under the tree. On his computer he has left a
suicide note ("It just seemed like the right thing to do"), instructions on
how to withdraw money from his account, and the manuscript of a novel that
he wants her to submit to a list of publishers.

Morvern reads the note, opens the presents (she likes the leather jacket),
and walks out into the winter gloom of Glasgow. She stands for a long time
on a train platform, until a pay phone rings. She listens to the stranger on
the other end of the line and finally says, "I'm sure he'll be all right."
That night, she dresses sexy and meets her best friend, Lanna, for a night
at the pub that ends with drunken, confused sex with strangers. The
boyfriend's body remains on the floor.

Morvern is played by Samantha Morton, who like Isabelle Huppert has a face
that can convey enormous emotions without visibly changing. Because she
reveals so little, we are drawn into her, fascinated, trying to read her
thoughts. You may remember Morton as the musician's deaf-mute girlfriend in
Woody Allen's "Sweet and Lowdown," or as the pale, limp "pre-cog" in
Spielberg's "Minority Report." Here she is a working class girl, prisoner of
a thankless job in a supermarket, whose boyfriend is better educated and
more successful.

One of the mysteries of the early stages of "Morvern Callar" is Morvern's
behavior after finding the body. She cries, inwardly and privately, but such
is her aura that we don't know if she's crying for him, or for herself. He
left money for a funeral, but after several days, when she can ignore the
body no longer, she cuts it up and throws it away. There is a closeup of the
computer screen as she deletes his name on the title page of the novel and
types in her own. Is she heartless, crazy, or what?

I think the answer is right there in the film, but less visible to American
viewers because we are less class-conscious than the filmmakers (the
director, Lynne Ramsay, is the daughter of a bartender; Samantha Morton is a
survivor of foster homes).

Consider. Morvern lives in her boyfriend's fairly expensive and comfortable
Glasgow flat, but still works at the supermarket. If they were truly a
couple with a future and had been together for some time, isn't it
reasonable to expect that she would no longer be holding onto that job? My
guess is that their relationship began fairly recently, based on sex between
incompatibles and fueled by a lot of drinking, and that by killing himself
he has, from her point of view, shown how unimportant she was to him and how
lightly he took their relationship and his life. (When a young person who is
not dying or in unbearable crisis commits suicide, it is often an act of
selfish unforgivable egotism.)

By signing her name to his novel, Morvern is sending a message beyond the
grave: I will not clean up this mess and finish your life for you. She will
begin to live her own. Unfortunately, she has few resources. She lacks even
her friend Lanna's (Kathleen McDermott) gift for silly aimless hedonism.
After she actually sells the novel, she uses the publisher's check to buy
them both a package holiday in Spain, where Lanna is skilled at drinking,
partying and getting laid, but Morvern is a ghost at the feast, a silent,
inward person who looks not so much sad as disengaged.

Her style is passive aggressive. She withholds herself, is not quite
present. She sits at times alone and silent, and we feel she is not alone
with her thoughts, but only with her feelings. There is the sense that she
broods about hurt. We have little idea what her early life was like, but
when we learn that Samantha Morton never talks about her own foster
childhood, we are bold enough to wonder if the sense-memories she draws upon
for the performance have converted her early years into Morvern's.

The movie doesn't have a plot in the conventional sense, and could not
support one. People like Morvern Callar do not lead lives that lend
themselves to beginnings, middles and ends. She is on hold. Somehow, in some
way, she's stuck in neutral. The gray-brown tones of her life in Glasgow
reflect her emotional habitat, and the bright colors of Spain cause her to
wince in pain. She can only handle so much incoming experience at a time.
"Sorry, Morvern," her boyfriend wrote in that note. "Don't try to
understand." What a bloody condescending jerk. Yet she is not drifting
because of his death. She drifts anyway, and always has. What great wrong
has made her so damaged? We watch Samantha Morton so closely, with such
fascination, because she is able to embody a universe of wounded privacy.

This is Lynne Ramsay's second film, after "Ratcatcher" (1999). That one was
about a small boy living with the guilt of a terrible act. Her short films
include one in which two small girls, half-sisters, trying to understand the
wreckage of the marriages that created them. She has been signed to direct
the film of Alice Sebold's best-seller The Lovely Bones, narrated by the
ghostly voice of a young girl who has been raped and murdered. These stories
all seem to explore similar dread lifescapes. Why she knows it so well we
cannot guess, but she does.

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Date: 07 Feb 2003 21:21:36 GMT
From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] SHANGHAI KNIGHTS/ *** (PG-13)

SHANGHAI KNIGHTS/ *** (PG-13)

February 7, 2003

Chon Wang:    Jackie Chan
Roy O'Bannon:    Owen Wilson
Chon Lin:     Fann Wong Charlie:    Aaron Johnson
Artie Doyle:    Thomas Fisher
Rathbone:    Aidan Gillen
Wu Chan:    Donnie Yen Jack the Ripper:    Oliver Cotton

Touchstone Pictures and Spyglass Entertainment present a film directed by
David Dobkin. Written by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar. Running time: 107
minutes. Rated PG-13 (for action violence and sexual content). Opening today
at local theaters.

BY ROGER EBERT

"Shanghai Knights" has a nice mix of calculation and relaxed goofiness, and
in Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson, once again teams up two playful actors who
manifestly enjoy playing their ridiculous roles. The world of the action
comedy is fraught with failure, still more so the period-Western-kung fu
comedy, but here is a movie, like its predecessor "Shanghai Noon" (2000),
that bounds from one gag to another like an eager puppy.

The movie opens with the obligatory action prologue required in the
Screenwriter's Code: The Great Seal of China is stolen by sinister
intruders, and its guardian killed. The guardian of course is the father of
Chon Wang (Jackie Chan), who, as we join him after the titles, is sheriff of
Carson City, Nevada, and busy ticking off the names of the bad guys he has
apprehended. Hearing of the tragedy from his beautiful sister Chon Lin (Fann
Wong), Wang hurries to New York to join up with his old comrade in arms Roy
O'Bannon (Owen Wilson).

The movie's plot is entirely arbitrary. Nothing has to happen in Nevada, New
York or its ultimate location, London, although I suppose the setup does
need to be in China. Every new scene simply establishes the setting for
comedy, martial arts, or both. Because the comedy is fun in a broad, genial
way, and because Chan and his co-stars (including Fann Wong) are
martial-arts adepts, and because the director, David Dobkin, keeps the
picture filled with energy and goodwill, the movie is just the sort of
mindless entertainment we're ready for after all of December's distinguished
and significant Oscar finalists.

The plot moves to London because, I think, that's where the Great Seal and
the evil plotters are, and even more because it needs fresh locations to
distinguish the movie from its predecessor. The filmmakers click off
locations like Sheriff Chan checking off the bad guys: The House of Lords,
Buckingham Palace (fun with the poker-faced guards), Whitechapel and an
encounter with Jack the Ripper, Big Ben (homage to Harold Lloyd), Madame
Tussaud's. Charlie Chaplin and Arthur Conan Doyle make surprise appearances,
surprises I will not spoil.

For Jackie Chan, "Shanghai Knights" is a comeback after the dismal "The
Tuxedo" (2002), a movie that made the incalculable error of depriving him of
his martial-arts skills and making him the captive of a cybernetic suit.
Chan's character flip-flopped across the screen in computer-generated
action, which is exactly what we don't want in a Jackie Chan movie. The
whole point is that he does his own stunts, and the audience knows it.

They know it, among other reasons, because over the closing credits there
are always outtakes in which Chan and his co-stars miss cues, fall wrong,
get banged and bounced on assorted body parts, and break up laughing. The
outtakes are particularly good this time, even though I cannot help
suspecting (unfairly, maybe) that some of them are just as staged as the
rest of the movie.

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