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movies-digest          Friday, March 7 2003          Volume 02 : Number 399



[MV] INTACTO / **1/2 (R)
[MV] OLD SCHOOL / * (R)
[MV] TILL HUMAN VOICES WAKE US / * 1/2 (R)
[MV] POOLHALL JUNKIES / *** (R)
[MV] AMANDLA! / *** (PG-13)
[MV] ALL THE REAL GIRLS / **** (R)
[MV] CRADLE 2 THE GRAVE / ** (R)
[MV] GERRY / *** (R)
[MV] THE STONERAFT / *** (Not rated)
[MV] THE SAFETY OF OBJECTS / ** (R)
[MV] TEARS OF THE SUN / *** (R)

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

Date: 22 Feb 2003 02:17:18 GMT
From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] INTACTO / **1/2 (R)

INTACTO / **1/2 (R)

February 21, 2003

Sam:    Max von Sydow
Tomas:    Leonardo Sbaraglia
Federico:    Eusebio Poncela
Sara:    Monica Lopez
Alejandro:    Antonio Dechent

Lions Gate Films presents a film directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo.
Written by Fresnadillo and Andres M. Koppel. Running time: 108 minutes.
Rated R (for language, some violence and brief nudity). In English and
Spanish with English subtitles.

BY ROGER EBERT

The Spanish film "Intacto," like the recent Sundance entry "The Cooler,"
believes that luck is a commodity that can be given and received, won or
lost, or traded away. Most people have ordinary luck, some have unusually
good or bad luck, and then there is a character like Tomas (Leonardo
Sbaraglia), who is the only survivor of an airplane crash, beating the odds
of 237 million to 1. (I am not the statistician here, only the reporter.)

The movie involves a man named Sam (Max von Sydow), who survived the
Holocaust and now operates a remote casino at which rich people bet against
his luck, usually unsuccessfully. So unshakable is his confidence that he
will remove one bullet from a chamber holding six and then bet that he will
not die. That he is alive to be a character in the movie speaks for itself.

Von Sydow, who in "The Seventh Seal" played a game of chess with Death,
believes that he will lose his luck if the wrong person looks on his face at
the wrong time, or takes his photograph. To guard himself, he must often sit
in a closed room with a hood over his face. We wonder, but he does not tell
us, if he thinks this is a high price to pay for good fortune. He has a
young man named Federico (Eusebio Poncela) as his confederate; Federico also
has good luck, and searches for others who have his gift. When Sam steals
his luck, he goes searching for a protege of his own and finds Tomas.

The single-mindedness of these men assumes that winning at gambling is the
most important thing in the world. Certainly there are gamblers who think
so. Another of the Sundance entries, "Owning Mahowny," starred Philip
Seymour Hoffman as a Toronto bank clerk who steals millions in order to fund
his weekend getaways to Atlantic City and Las Vegas. He has a winning streak
at roulette that in its intensity of focus has a kind of awesome power. In
"The Cooler," William H. Macy plays a man whose luck is so bad that he is
employed by a casino to merely rub up against someone in a winning streak;
then his luck changes.

The two North American films are pretty straightforward in telling their
stories. "The Cooler" involves an element of fantasy, but it involves the
story, not the visual approach. "Intacto," directed by the talented young
Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, is wilder visually, using the fractured narrative
and attention-deficit camera style that can be effective or not, but often
betrays a lack of confidence on the simple story level.

The story involves another more human element, centered on Sara (Monica
Lopez), a cop who is chasing Tomas while grieving a tragic loss of her own.
Will his luck protect him? What happens when it's luck vs. luck?

I admired "Intacto" more than I liked it, for its ingenious construction and
the way it keeps a certain chilly distance between its story and the dangers
of popular entertainment. It's a Hollywood premise, rotated into the world
of the art film through mannerism and oblique storytelling. The same ideas
could be remade into a straightforward entertainment, and perhaps they
already have been.

There's a fashion right now among new writers and directors to create
stories of labyrinthine complexity, so that watching them is like solving a
puzzle. I still haven't seen Alejandro Amenabar's "Open Your Eyes," which a
lot of people admire, but when I saw Cameron Crowe's American remake,
"Vanilla Sky," I knew as I walked out of the theater that I would need to
see it again. I did, and got a different kind of overview and liked the
film. I liked it the first time, too, but through instinct, not
understanding.

When you solve a film like this, have you learned anything you wouldn't have
learned in a straight narrative, or have you simply had to pay some dues to
arrive at the same place? Depends. "Pulp Fiction," which jump-started the
trend, depends crucially on its structure for its effect. "Intacto," which
is not as complex as the other films I've mentioned, may be adding the layer
of style just for fun. That is permitted, but somewhere within that style
there may be a hell of a thriller winking at us.

Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

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

Date: 22 Feb 2003 02:17:33 GMT
From: [e-mail]
Subject: [MV] OLD SCHOOL / * (R)

OLD SCHOOL / * (R)

February 21, 2003

Mitch:    Luke Wilson
Frank:    Will Ferrell
Beanie:    Vince Vaughn
Nicole:    Ellen Pompeo
Pritchard:    Jeremy Piven
Mark:    Craig Kilborn
Heidi:    Juliette Lewis
Lara:    Leah Remini
DreamWorks Pictures presents a film directed by Todd Phillips. Written by
Phillips, Scot Armstrong and Court Crandall. Running time: 91 minutes. Rated
R (for strong sexual content, nudity and language).

BY ROGER EBERT

Luke Wilson, Will Ferrell and Vince Vaughn clock in at an average age of 34,
which is a little old to be a frat boy. It is not their age but their
longevity, however, that I question. In "Old School," where they occupy a
series of off-campus party houses, they follow lifestyles more appropriate
for the college students in "Flatliners." Anyone struck in the jugular by an
animal-disabling tranquilizer dart and then rolling into a swimming pool is
not likely to have to face the kinds of questions about retirement
confronting the hero of "About Schmidt."

There is a type of older student who never seems to leave the campus. Some
are actually graduate students, some are "finishing their thesis," others
are gaining job experience (i.e., are bartenders or drug dealers). I
graduated from Illinois, returned 10 years later, and found my old friend
Mike still at his usual table in the Illini Union, drinking the bottomless
cup of coffee and working the crossword puzzle.

Wilson, Ferrell and Vaughn do not play this type of student. They are not
really students at all, in fact. Wilson plays a businessman who returns home
early to discover that his fiancee (Juliette Lewis) is hosting an orgy.
Ferrell is engaged to be married and Vaughn is married. They stumble into
founding their own fraternity after discovering by accident that you can get
a lot of action if you throw nude wrestling matches in K-Y jelly.

"Old School" wants to be "National Lampoon's Animal House," but then don't
they all. It assumes that the modern college campus is a hotbed, or is it a
sinkpit, of moral squalor, exhibitionism, promiscuity, kinky sex and rampant
rampantness. Perhaps it is.

I have also heard, on the other hand, that the politically correct modern
male undergraduate, terrified of sexual harassment charges, must have a
notarized statement in hand giving him permission to even think about
getting to first base and a judge's order authorizing him to advance to
second. (All women in movies set on such campuses are issued at birth with a
blanket license to kick groins.)

Unsure of myself, I avoid altogether the question of "Old School's" veracity
and move on to its humor, which is easier to master because there is so
little of it. This is not a funny movie, although it has a few good scenes
and some nice work by Ferrell as an apparently compulsive nudist.

It follows the same old story about a bunch of fun-loving guys who only want
to throw orgies and meet chicks, and a young fogy dean (Jeremy Piven) who
wants to spoil their fun. One of the cute co-eds is played by Ellen Pompeo,
who was so absolutely wonderful in "Moonlight Mile." She should not be
discouraged by this sophomore effort. Even Meryl Streep had to make a second
movie after "Julia." Oh, and I just found the title right here: "The Deer
Hunter."

The movie has been slapped together by director Todd Phillips, who careens
from scene to scene without it occurring to him that humor benefits from
characterization, context and continuity. Otherwise, all you have is a lot
of people acting goofy. The movie was screened before an "invited audience"
in a Michigan Avenue theater, where two small groups of audience members
laughed loudly at almost everything, and just about everybody else waited
politely until it was over and they could leave. Critics are sometimes
required to see comedies at such screenings because we can appreciate them
better when we see them with a general audience, and to be sure, I learn a
lot that way.

Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

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

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

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

February 28, 2003

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

BY ROGER EBERT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

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

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

POOLHALL JUNKIES / *** (R)

February 28, 2003

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

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

BY ROGER EBERT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright ⌐ Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

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

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

AMANDLA! / *** (PG-13)

February 28, 2003

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

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

BY ROGER EBERT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

February 28, 2003

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

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

BY ROGER EBERT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CRADLE 2 THE GRAVE / ** (R)

February 28, 2003

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

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

BY ROGER EBERT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GERRY / *** (R)

February 28, 2003

Gerry:    Casey Affleck
Gerry:    Matt Damon

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

BY ROGER EBERT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Existential?" I asked.

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

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

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

"It has dialogue," her friend said.

"But not serious dialogue."

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

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

"There you have it," I said.

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

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

THE STONERAFT / *** (Not rated)

March 7, 2003

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

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

BY ROGER EBERT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE SAFETY OF OBJECTS / ** (R)

March 7, 2003

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

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

BY ROGER EBERT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TEARS OF THE SUN / *** (R)

March 7, 2003

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

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

BY ROGER EBERT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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