From: owner-movies-digest@lists.xmission.com (movies-digest) To: movies-digest@lists.xmission.com Subject: movies-digest V2 #389 Reply-To: movies-digest Sender: owner-movies-digest@lists.xmission.com Errors-To: owner-movies-digest@lists.xmission.com Precedence: bulk movies-digest Saturday, November 2 2002 Volume 02 : Number 389 [MV] WASABI / *1/2 (R) [MV] feardotcom / ** (R) [MV] SECRET BALLOT / *** (G) [MV] WHITE OLEANDER / **1/2 (PG-13) [MV] WARM WATER UNDER A RED BRIDGE / *** (Not rated) [MV] I'M GOING HOME (JE RENTRE A LA MAISON) / *** (Not Rated) [MV] BALLISTIC: ECKS VS. SEVER / 1/2* (R) [MV] THE TUXEDO / *1/2 (PG-13) [MV] INVINCIBLE / **** (PG-13) [MV] APOLLO 13: THE IMAX EXPERIENCE / **** (PG) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 02 Nov 2002 07:24:44 GMT From: gregorys@xmission.com Subject: [MV] WASABI / *1/2 (R) WASABI / *1/2 (R) October 18, 2002 Hubert Fiorentini: Jean Reno Yumi Yoshimido: Ryoko Hirosue Momo: Michel Muller Sofia: Carole Bouquet Jean-Baptiste 1: Ludovic Berthillot Jean-Baptiste 2: Yan Epstein Van Eyck: Michel Scourneau The Squale: Christian Sinniger TriStar Pictures presents a film directed by Gerard Krawczyk. Written by Luc Besson. Running time: 94 minutes. Rated R (for some violence). In French and Japanese with English subtitles. BY ROGER EBERT Jean Reno has the weary eyes and unshaven mug of a French Peter Falk, and some of the same sardonic humor, too. He sighs and smokes and slouches his way through thrillers where he sadly kills those who would kill him, and balefully regards women who want to make intimate demands on his time. In good movies ("The Crimson Rivers") and bad ("Rollerball"), in the ambitious (Antonioni's "Beyond the Clouds") and the avaricious ("Godzilla"), in comedies ("Just Visiting") and thrillers ("Ronin"), he shares with Robert Mitchum the unmistakable quality of having seen it all. "Wasabi" is not his worst movie, and is far from his best. It is a thriller trapped inside a pop comedy set in Japan, and gives Reno a chirpy young co-star who bounces around him like a puppy on visiting day at the drunk tank. She plays his daughter, and he's supposed to like her, but sometimes he looks like he hopes she will turn into an aspirin. The movie begins in Paris, where Reno plays Hubert Fiorentini, a Dirty Harry type who doesn't merely beat up suspects, but beats up people on the chance that he may suspect them later. During a raid on a nightclub, he makes the mistake of socking the police chief's son so hard the lad flies down a flight of stairs and ends up in a full-body cast. Hubert is ordered to take a vacation. He shrugs, and thinks to look up an old girlfriend (Carole Bouquet), but then his life takes a dramatic turn. He learns of the death in Japan of a woman he loved years earlier. Arriving for her funeral, he finds that she has left him a mysterious key, a daughter he knew nothing about, and $200 million stashed in the bank. The daughter is named Yumi (Ryoko Hirosue). She is 19, has red hair, chooses her wardrobe colors from the Pokemon palate, and bounces crazily through scenes as if life is a music video and they're filming her right now. The plot involves Yumi's plan to hire the Yakuza (Japanese Mafia) to get revenge for her mother's death. If there is piece of fatherly advice that Hubert the veteran cop could have shared with her, it is that no one related to $200 million should do the least thing to attract the attention of the Yakuza. The plot then unfolds in bewildering alternation between pop comedy and action violence, with Hubert dancing in a video arcade one moment and blasting the bad guys the next. There is no artistic purpose for this movie. It is product. Luc Besson, who wrote and produced it, has another movie out right now ("The Transporter") and indeed has written, produced or announced 16 other movies since this one was made in far-ago 2001. Reno does what he can in a thankless situation, the film ricochets from humor to violence and back again, and Ryoko Hirosue makes us wonder if she is always like that. If she is, I owe an apology to the Powerpuff Girls. I didn't know they were based on real life. Copyright © Chicago Sun-Times Inc. [ To leave the movies mailing list, send the message "unsubscribe ] [ movies" (without the quotes) to majordomo@xmission.com ] ------------------------------ Date: 02 Nov 2002 07:25:29 GMT From: gregorys@xmission.com Subject: [MV] feardotcom / ** (R) feardotcom / ** (R) August 30, 2002 Mike Reilly: Stephen Dorff Jerry Houston: Natascha McElhone Alistair Pratt: Stephen Rea Warner Bros. presents a film directed by William Malone. Written by Josephine Coyle. Based on a story by Moshe Diamant. Running time: 98 minutes. Rated R (for violence including grisly images of torture, nudity and language). BY ROGER EBERT Strange, how good "feardotcom" is, and how bad. The screenplay is a mess, and yet the visuals are so creative this is one of the rare bad films you might actually want to see. The plot is a bewildering jumble of half-baked ideas, from which we gather just enough of a glimmer about the story to understand how it is shot through with contradictions and paradoxes. And yet I watched in admiration as a self-contained nightmareformed with the visuals. Not many movies know how to do that. I'll get to the plot later, or maybe never. Let me talk about what I liked. The film takes place in a city where it always rains and is nearly always night, where even people with good jobs live in apartments that look hammered together after an air raid. Computers and the Internet exist here, and indeed telephones, televisions and all the other props of the present day, but windows are broken, walls are punctured, lights flicker, streets are deserted, and from time to time a dramatic thunderstorm threatens to sweep everything away. This is like "Dark City" after a hurricane. It is the kind of city where a man can walk down into a subway and be the only person there, except for a little girl bouncing her ball against the third rail. Or .. is the man really alone? Is that his fantasy? Whether it is or not, he gets slammed by the next train, and the cops are startled by the expression on his face. It looks, they agree, as if he has just seen something terrifying. Apparently something even worse than the train. And he is bleeding from the eyes. The film's premise is that a Web site exists that channels negative energy into the mind of the beholder, who self-destructs within 48 hours, a victim of his or her deepest fear. Our first glimpse of this Web site suggests nothing more than a reasonably well-designed horror site, with shock-wave images of dark doorways, screaming lips, rows of knives and so forth. The movie wisely doesn't attempt to develop the site much more than that, relying on the reactions of the victims to imply what other terrors it contains. And it does something else, fairly subtly: It expands the site to encompass the entire movie, so that by the end all of the characters are essentially inside the fatal Web experience, and we are, too. The last 20 minutes are, I might as well say it, brilliant. Not in terms of what happens, but in terms of how it happens, and how it looks as it happens. The movie has tended toward the monochromatic all along, but now it abandons all pretense of admitting the color spectrum, and slides into the kind of tinting used in silent films: Browns alternate with blues, mostly. The images play like homage to the best Grand Guignol traditions, to "Nosferatu" and some of the James Whale and Jacques Tourneur pictures, and the best moments of the Hammer horror films. Squirming victims are displayed on the Internet by the sadistic killer, who prepares to autopsy them while still alive; subscribers to the site, whose crime is that they want to watch, are addressed by name and are soon paying dearly for their voyeurism. The movie is extremely violent; it avoided the NC-17 rating and earned an R, I understand, after multiple trims and appeals, and even now it is one of the most graphic horror films I've seen. (The classification is "for violence including grisly images of torture, nudity and language," the ratings board explains, but you'll be disappointed if you hope to see grisly images of language). Stephen Dorff and Natascha McElhone star, as a cop and a public health inspector, and Stephen Rea, who was so unexpectedly deceived in "The Crying Game," plays the host of the Web site and the torturer. The movie keeps trying to make some kind of connection between Rea and the ghostly little girl, who was his first victim, but if the site is her revenge, why is he running it? And how can what happens to him in the end not have happened before? Never mind. Disregard the logic of the plot. Don't even go there. Don't think to ask how the Internet can channel thoughts and commands into the minds of its users. Disregard the dialogue (sample: "We will provide a lesson that reducing relationships to an anonymous electronic impulse is a perversion"). This is a movie that cannot be taken seriously on the narrative level. But look at it. Just look at it. Wear some of those Bose sound-defeating earphones into the theater, or turn off the sound when you watch the DVD. If the final 20 minutes had been produced by a German impressionist in the 1920s, we'd be calling it a masterpiece. All credit to director William Malone, cinematographer Christian Sebaldt, production designer Jerome Latour and art directors Regime Freise and Markus Wollersheim. Now. Do I recommend the film? Not for the majority of filmgoers, who will listen to the dialogue, and will expect a plot, and will be angered by the film's sins against logic (I do not even mention credibility). But if you have read this far because you are intrigued, because you can understand the kind of paradox I am describing, then you might very well enjoy "feardotcom." I give the total movie two stars, but there are some four-star elements that deserve a better movie. You have to know how to look for them, but they're there. Copyright © Chicago Sun-Times Inc. [ To leave the movies mailing list, send the message "unsubscribe ] [ movies" (without the quotes) to majordomo@xmission.com ] ------------------------------ Date: 02 Nov 2002 07:25:30 GMT From: gregorys@xmission.com Subject: [MV] SECRET BALLOT / *** (G) SECRET BALLOT / *** (G) August 30, 2002 Woman: Nassim Abdi Soldier: Cyrus Ab Local people: Youssef Habashi, Farrokh Shojaii , Gholbahar Janghali Sony Pictures Classics presents a film written and directed by Babak Payami. Running time: 105 minutes. Rated G. In Farsi with English subtitles. BY ROGER EBERT 'Secret Ballot" is a quixotic new Iranian comedy about a female election agent who is sent to a remote island to collect ballots in a national election. Because we never find out who or what is being elected, there has been much puzzlement among critics about what the election symbolizes. I believe the message is in the messenger: The agent is a woman. "It's election day, don't you know?" the woman tells a bored soldier assigned to drive her around. "There's a letter. You have to guard the ballots." The soldier studies the letter. "It says an agent will come, not a woman." "I'm in charge here, mister. I have orders. You must obey or I'll see to it you remain a soldier forever." Strong words in a culture where the rights of women are limited. I was reminded of "In the Heat of the Night," in which the whole point is that the Sidney Poitier character insists on being treated with respect. This movie could be titled "They Call Me MISS Election Agent." The plot is secondary to the fact of the character's gender, and in Iran this movie must play with a subtext we can only guess. But what else is going on? Is the movie intended to show us (a) that democracy exists in Iran, (b) that it is struggling to be born, or (c) that most people find it irrelevant to their daily lives? There's a little of all three during the long day the soldier and the woman (both unnamed) spend together. Some citizens, asked to choose two of 10 names on the ballot, complain they've never heard of any of them. A fierce old lady shuts her door to the team, but later sends them food, and her courier observes, "Granny Baghoo has her own government here." A man in charge of a solar energy station expresses his opinion with admirable clarity: "I know no one but God almighty, who makes the sun come up. If I vote for anyone, it must be God." If the woman is the Poitier character, the soldier is like the sheriff played by Rod Steiger. He starts out strongly disapproving of a female agent, but during the course of the day begins to find her persuasive, intriguing and sympathetic. By the end of the day, when he casts his ballot, it is for her, and we're reminded of the sheriff's little smile as Mister Tibbs gets back on the train. The director, Babak Payami, has a visual style that is sometimes astonishing, sometimes frustrating, sometimes both. The first shot is of a plane dropping a box by parachute over a dry, empty plain. The camera pans with exquisite subtlety to reveal ... a bed? Can it be a bed, in the middle of this wilderness? We see that it is. In this hot climate, they sleep outdoors. As the soldier drives the agent around the island, events do not build so much as accumulate. Mourners in a cemetery tell her women are not allowed inside. Symbol quandary: (a) The fading patriarchy is buried there, or (b) women cannot even die as equals? In the middle of a deserted, unpopulated plain, the soldier brings the Jeep to a halt before a red traffic light. Symbol quandary: (1) Outmoded laws must be ignored, or (b) in a democracy the law must be respected everywhere? As the woman continues her discouraging attempt to involve indifferent islanders in the vote, we are reminded of Dr. Johnson's famous observation in the 18th century, when women were as much without rights in England as they are today in the Middle East. After hearing a woman deliver a sermon, he told Mr. Boswell: "It is not done well, but one is surprised to find it done at all." Watching the movie, I reflected on a persistent subgenre of Iranian cinema, in which characters drive or walk endlessly through enigmatic landscapes, holding conversations of debatable meaning. Abbas Kiarostami's "The Taste of Cherry" (1997), a Cannes winner much prized by many critics, not by me, follows that pattern. "Secret Ballot" brings to it much more interest and life. Perhaps the lack of cities, names, relationships and plots provides a certain immunity: A film cannot be criticized for being about what it does not contain. Copyright © Chicago Sun-Times Inc. [ To leave the movies mailing list, send the message "unsubscribe ] [ movies" (without the quotes) to majordomo@xmission.com ] ------------------------------ Date: 02 Nov 2002 07:24:56 GMT From: gregorys@xmission.com Subject: [MV] WHITE OLEANDER / **1/2 (PG-13) WHITE OLEANDER / **1/2 (PG-13) October 11, 2002 Astrid Magnussen: Alison Lohman Starr: Robin Wright Penn Ingrid Magnussen: Michelle Pfeiffer Claire Richards: Renee Zellweger Rena Grushenka: Svetlana Efremova Warner Bros. Pictures presents a film directed by Peter Kosminsky. Written by Mary Agnes Donoghue. Based on the novel by Janet Fitch. Running time: 110 minutes. Rated PG-13 (for mature thematic elements concerning dysfunctional relationships, drug content, language, sexuality and violence). Opening today at local theaters. BY ROGER EBERT "White Oleander" tells a sad story of crime and foster homes, and makes it look like the movie version. The film takes the materials of human tragedy and dresses them in lovely costumes, Southern California locations and star power. Almost makes it look like fun. The movie's poster shows four women's faces side by side, all blindingly blond: Alison Lohman, Michelle Pfeiffer, Robin Wright Penn and Renee Zellweger. We suspect there could be another, parallel story of the same events, in which the characters look unhinged and desperate and brunet. The story is determined to be colorful and melodramatic, like a soap opera where the characters suffer in ways that look intriguing. When you are a teenage girl and your mother is jailed for murder and you are shipped to a series of foster homes, isn't it a little unlikely that each home would play like an entertaining episode of a miniseries? First you get a sexy foster mom who was "an alcoholic, a cokehead and dancing topless--and then I was saved by Jesus," although she still dresses like an off-duty stripper. Then you get an actress who lives in a sun-drenched beach house in Malibu and becomes her best friend. Then you get a Russian capitalist who dresses like a gypsy, uses her foster kids as dumpster-divers, and runs a stall at the Venice Beach flea market. Aren't there any foster mothers who are old, tired, a little mean and doing it for the money? The performances are often touching and deserve a better screenplay. I don't hold the beauty of the actresses against them, but I wish the movie had not been so pleased with the way the sunlight comes streaming through their long blond hair and falls on their flawless skin and little white summer dresses. The movie is narrated by Astrid Magnussen, played by Lohman in several different years and weathers of her life. It's an awesome performance but would benefit from depth and darkness that the movie shies away from. (The movie is all too appropriately rated PG-13; I suspect full justice cannot be done to this material short of an R.) Astrid is the daughter of Ingrid (Pfeiffer), an artist and free spirit who sits on the roof so the desert winds can find her. "No one had ever seen anyone more beautiful than my mother," Astrid tells us, but there are ominous hints that Ingrid is not an ideal mother, as when she skips Parents Night because "what can they tell me about you that I don't already know?" Ingrid doesn't date. Doesn't need men. Then makes the mistake of letting Barry (Billy Connolly) into her life (although so fleeting is his role he is barely allowed into the movie). She kills him, observing to her daughter, "He made love to me and then said I had to leave because he had a date." When you hardly know someone and that's how he treats you, he's not worth serving 35 years to life. Astrid then moves on to the series of foster homes, each one so colorful it could be like the adventure of a Dickens character; the Russian is unmistakably a descendent of Fagin, and surely only in a Hollywood fantasy could any of these women qualify as foster mothers. Starr, the former stripper, seems less like a person than a caricature, although the director, Peter Kosminsky, has a good eye for detail and shows how her family takes a jaundiced view of her born-again grandstanding. What happens to bring this foster experience to an end I will not reveal, except to say that I didn't for a moment believe it; it involves behavior of a sort the movie seems obligated to supply but never refers to again. Astrid's best foster experience is with Claire (Zellweger), whose performance is the most convincing in the movie. She plays a onetime horror star, married to a director who is usually absent, and we believe the scenes she has with Astrid because they come from need and honesty. They also inspire the best scenes between Astrid and her mother; Pfeiffer finds just the right note between jealousy and perception when, on visiting day at the prison, she observes, "You dress like her now." Later she tells her daughter, "I'd like to meet her." "Why?" "Because you don't want me to." And later: "How can you stand to live with poor Claire? I would rather see you in the worst kind of foster home than to live with that woman." The scenes involving Claire most clearly inspire Astrid's developing ideas about her mother. The third foster experience, with Svetlana Efremova playing the Russian jumble-sale woman, offers a glimpse of the economy's underbelly but is too choppy and perfunctory to engage us: It feels like it was filmed to add color and then chopped to reduce the running time. Its only influence on Astrid is to change her wardrobe and hair color, in what feels more like a stunt than a character development. Pfeiffer's role is the most difficult in the movie because she has to compress her revelations and emotions into the brief visits of her increasingly dubious daughter. Astrid, who once idealized her mother, now blames her for the loss of happiness with Claire. But even the movie's big emotional payoff at the end loses something because, after all, Ingrid did murder Barry, and so what is presented as a sacrifice on behalf of her daughter could also be described as simply doing the right thing. "White Oleander" is based on a novel by Janet Fitch, recommended by Oprah's Book Club, unread by me. I gather it includes still more colorful foster home episodes. Amy Aquino plays Miss Martinez, the social worker who drives Astrid from one foster adventure to the next. She feels like this movie's version of Michael Anthony, the man who introduced each episode of "The Millionaire." You can imagine her on the TV series, shipping the heroine to a different foster home every week. Copyright © Chicago Sun-Times Inc. [ To leave the movies mailing list, send the message "unsubscribe ] [ movies" (without the quotes) to majordomo@xmission.com ] ------------------------------ Date: 02 Nov 2002 07:25:08 GMT From: gregorys@xmission.com Subject: [MV] WARM WATER UNDER A RED BRIDGE / *** (Not rated) WARM WATER UNDER A RED BRIDGE / *** (Not rated) September 27, 2002 Yosuke Sasano: Koji Yakusho Saeko Aizawa: Misa Shimizu Mitsu Aizawa: Mitsuko Baisho Gen: Manasaku Fuwa Taro: Kazuo Kitamura Cowboy Pictures presents a film directed by Shohei Imamura. Written by Motofumi Tomikawa, Daisuke Tengan and Imamura. Based on a book by Yo Henmi. Running time: 119 minutes. No MPAA rating (intended for mature audiences). In Japanese with English subtitles. Opening today at the Music Box. BY ROGER EBERT "Warm Water Under a Red Bridge" has modern automobiles and supermarkets, telephones and pepper cheese imported from Europe, but it resonates like an ancient Japanese myth. Imagine a traveler in search of treasure, who finds a woman with special needs that only he can fulfill, and who repays him by ending his misery. Shohei Imamura, one of the greatest Japanese directors, tells this story with the energy and delight of a fairy tale, but we in the West are not likely to see it so naively, because unlike the Japanese, we are touchy on the subject of bodily fluids. In Japan, natural functions are accepted calmly as a part of life, and there is a celebrated children's book about farts. No doubt a Japanese audience would view "Warm Water" entirely differently than a North American one--because, you see, the heroine has a condition that causes water to build up in her body, and it can be released only by sexual intercourse. Water arrives in puddles and rivulets, in sprays and splashes. "Don't worry," Saeko (Misa Shimizu) cheerfully tells Yosuke, the hero. "It's not urine." It is instead--well, what? The water of life? Of growth and renewal? Is she a water goddess? When it runs down the steps of her house and into the river, fish grow large and numerous. And it seems to have a similar effect on Yosuke (Koji Yakusho, from "Shall We Dance?" and "The Eel"). From a pallid, hopeless wanderer in the early scenes, he grows into a bold lover and a brave ocean fisherman. As the film opens, Yosuke is broke and jobless, fielding incessant cell phone calls from his nagging wife, who wants an update on his job searches. In despair, he hunkers down next to the river with an old philosopher named Taro (Kazuo Kitamura), who tells him a story. Long ago, he says, right after the war, he was stealing to get the money to eat, and he took a gold Buddha from a temple. He left it in an upstairs room of a house next to a red bridge, where he assumes it remains to this day. Yosuke takes a train to the town named by the old man, finds the bridge, finds the house, and follows Saeko from it into a supermarket where he sees her shoplift some cheese while standing in a puddle. From the puddle he retrieves her earring (a dolphin, of course) and returns it to her, and she asks if he'd like some cheese and then forthrightly tells him, "You saw me steal the cheese. Then you saw the puddle of water." All true. She explains her problem. The water builds up and must be "vented," often by doing "something wicked" like shoplifting. It is, she adds, building up right now--and soon they are having intercourse to the delight of the fish in the river below. This story is unthinkable in a Hollywood movie, but there is something about the matter-of-fact way Saeko explains her problem, and the surprised but not stunned way that Yosuke hears her, that takes the edge off. If women are a source of life, and if water is where life began, then--well, whatever. It is important to note that the sex in the movie is not erotic or titillating in any way--it's more like a therapeutic process--and that the movie is not sex-minded but more delighted with the novelty of Saeko's problem. Only in a nation where bodily functions are discussed in a matter-of-fact way, where nude public bathing is no big deal, where shame about human plumbing has not been ritualized, could this movie play in the way Imamura intended. But seeing it as a Westerner is an enlightening, even liberating, experience. Imamura, now 76, is also the director of the masterpieces "The Insect Woman" (1963), about a woman whose only priority is her own comfort and survival; "Ballad of Narayama" (1982), the heartbreaking story of a village where the old are left on the side of a mountain to die, and "Black Rain" (1989), not the Michael Douglas thriller, but a harrowing human story about the days and months after the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. At his age, he seems freed from convention, and in "Warm Water," for example, he cuts loose from this world to include a dream in which Saeko floats like a embryo in a cosmic cloud. There is also an effortless fusion of old and new. The notion of a man leaving his nagging wife and home and finding succor from a goddess is from ancient myth, and the fact that he would then turn to wrest his living from the sea is not unheard of. But throwing his cell phone overboard, now that's a modern touch. Copyright © Chicago Sun-Times Inc. [ To leave the movies mailing list, send the message "unsubscribe ] [ movies" (without the quotes) to majordomo@xmission.com ] ------------------------------ Date: 02 Nov 2002 07:25:22 GMT From: gregorys@xmission.com Subject: [MV] I'M GOING HOME (JE RENTRE A LA MAISON) / *** (Not Rated) I'M GOING HOME (JE RENTRE A LA MAISON) / *** (Not Rated) September 13, 2002 Gilbert Valence: Michel Piccoli Marguerite: Catherine Deneuve The Director: John Malkovich Serge: Jean Koeltgen Milestone Films presents a film written and directed by Manoel de Oliveira. Running time: 90 minutes. In French and English with English subtitles. No MPAA rating (contains no offensive material). Opening today at the Music Box Theatre. BY ROGER EBERT There are a few movies where you can palpably sense the presence of the director behind the camera, and "I'm Going Home" is one of them. The movie is about an old actor who has lost many of those he loves but continues to work. The actor is played by France's great Michel Piccoli, who at 77 has appeared in 200 movies since 1945. And the director, whose breathing we can almost hear in our ear, is Manoel de Oliveira of Portugal, who is 94 and directed his first film in 1931. When we first see the actor, named Gilbert Valence, he is onstage in a production of Ionesco's "Exit the King," and the film lingers on speeches in which the old man rails against his mortality and defines the unending memorials which he fancies will keep his name alive. After the play, he learns of a tragic accident that has robbed him of wife, daughter and son-in-law. "Some time later," we see him living with his young grandson and the nanny. Gilbert's offstage life is one of routine, and it is here, in a touch both subtle and glancing, that de Oliveira makes his most poignant observation about how we die but life heedlessly goes on without us. Gilbert takes his coffee every morning in the same Paris cafe, sitting in the same chair at the same table and always reading the same morning paper, Liberation. As he gets up to go, another man enters, sits at the same table, and unfolds his copy of Le Figaro. This happens day after day. One morning, the other man arrives early and takes another table. But when Gilbert frees his regular table, he gets up with alacrity to claim it--only to be headed off by a stranger who sits down first. These little scenes had a surprising impact on me. I often think of myself as a ghost at places I have visited: There is "my" cafe and "my" table, and when I return to a city there is a satisfaction in occupying them again, because it proves my own continuity. Of course those cafes also "belong" to others I will never know, and someday I will never return to them, and someday neither will the others, and someday the cafe will not be there. Yet daily ritual encourages us to believe that because things have been the same for a long time, they will always be the same. The old actor sees a handsome pair of shoes in a store window and buys them. For a man past a certain age, to buy new shoes is an act of faith. (One is reminded of the Irish story about the shoe clerk who assured an old man, "These will see you out.") We see the shoes in closeup as Gilbert talks with his agent, a venal man who hints that a young actress might like to meet him. After all, the agent says, when Pablo Casals was in his 80s, he married a teenage student. "But I am nowhere near my 80s," Gilbert snaps. "And I am not Casals." What eventually happens to these shoes is a reminder that we can make plans but we cannot count on them. There are tender little scenes in which the old man and his grandson play with battery-powered trucks and enjoy each other's company, and fraught scenes in which the agent tries to get the actor to take a tawdry TV show. And a scene from a production of "The Tempest," in which Gilbert gives Prospero's speech beginning "Our revels now are ended .." How the film plays out you will have to see for yourself. Few films seem so wise and knowing about the fact of age and the approach of the end. And at his great age, de Oliveira dispenses with the silliness of plot mechanics and tells his story in a simple, unadorned fashion, as episodes and observations, trusting us to understand. In the final scene, as Gilbert leaves a cafe without drinking the wine he has ordered, the camera lingers to watch another man walk in and order a beer. Life goes on. You might think that "I'm Going Home," about an artist at the end of his career, is de Oliveira's own farewell, but no: He made a new film in 2002, named "The Uncertainty Principle," and it played at Cannes in May. Some directors burn out early, others flower late. Luis Bunuel began a remarkable series of 12 great films beginning when he was 61. De Oliveira has made 13 films since 1990. There is a time when going to the cafe is a habit, but if you go long enough it becomes a triumph. Copyright © Chicago Sun-Times Inc. [ To leave the movies mailing list, send the message "unsubscribe ] [ movies" (without the quotes) to majordomo@xmission.com ] ------------------------------ Date: 02 Nov 2002 07:25:11 GMT From: gregorys@xmission.com Subject: [MV] BALLISTIC: ECKS VS. SEVER / 1/2* (R) BALLISTIC: ECKS VS. SEVER / 1/2* (R) September 20, 2002 Jeremiah Ecks: Antonio Banderas Sever: Lucy Liu Gant/Clark: Gregg Henry Vinn/Rayne: Talisa Soto Zane: Roger R. Cross Ross: Ray Park Warner Bros. Pictures presents a film directed by Kaos. Written by Alan McElroy. Running time: 91 minutes. Rated R (for strong violence). BY ROGER EBERT There is nothing wrong with the title "Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever" that renaming it "Ballistic" would not have solved. Strange that they would choose such an ungainly title when, in fact, the movie is not about Ecks versus Sever but about Ecks and Sever working together against a common enemy--although Ecks, Sever and the audience take a long time to figure that out. The movie is a chaotic mess, overloaded with special effects and explosions, light on continuity, sanity and coherence. So short is its memory span that although Sever kills, I dunno, maybe 40 Vancouver police officers in an opening battle, by the end, when someone says, "She's a killer," Ecks replies, "She's a mother." The movie stars Lucy Liu as Sever, a former agent for the Defense Intelligence Agency, which according to www.dia.mil/ is a branch of the United States Government. Antonio Banderas is Ecks, a former ace FBI agent who is coaxed back into service. Sever has lost her child in an attack and Ecks believes he has lost his wife, so they have something in common, you see, even though ... But I'll not reveal that plot secret, and will discuss the curious fact that both of these U.S. agencies wage what amounts to warfare in Vancouver, which is actually in a nation named Canada, which has agencies and bureaus of its own and takes a dim view of machineguns, rocket launchers, plastic explosives and the other weapons the American agents and their enemies use to litter the streets of the city with the dead. Both Sever and Ecks, once they discover this, have the same enemy in common: Gant (Gregg Henry), a DIA agent who is married to Talisa Sota and raising her child, although Sever kidnaps the child, who is in fact ... but never mind, I want to discuss Gant's secret weapon. He has obtained a miniaturized robot so small it can float in the bloodstream and cause strokes and heart attacks. At one point in the movie, a man who will remain nameless is injected with one of these devices by a dart gun, and it kills him. All very well, but consider for a moment the problem of cost overruns in these times of economic uncertainty. A miniaturized assassination robot small enough to slip through the bloodstream would cost how much? Millions? And it is delivered by dart? How's this for an idea: use a poison dart, and spend the surplus on school lunches. "Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever" is an ungainly mess, submerged in mayhem, occasionally surfacing for cliches. When the FBI goes looking for Ecks, for example, they find him sitting morosely on a bar stool, drinking and smoking. That is of course always where sad former agents are found, but the strange thing is, after years of drinking, he is still in great shape, has all his karate moves, and goes directly into violent action without even a tiny tremor of the DTs. The movie ends in a stock movie location I thought had been retired: A Steam and Flame Factory, where the combatants stalk each other on catwalks and from behind steel pillars, while the otherwise deserted factory supplies vast quantities of flame and steam. Vancouver itself, for that matter, is mostly deserted, and no wonder, if word has gotten around that two U.S. agencies and a freelance killer are holding war games. "Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever" was directed by Wych Kaosayananda of Thailand, whose pseudonym, you may not be surprised to learn, is Kaos. Copyright © Chicago Sun-Times Inc. [ To leave the movies mailing list, send the message "unsubscribe ] [ movies" (without the quotes) to majordomo@xmission.com ] ------------------------------ Date: 02 Nov 2002 07:25:07 GMT From: gregorys@xmission.com Subject: [MV] THE TUXEDO / *1/2 (PG-13) THE TUXEDO / *1/2 (PG-13) September 27, 2002 Jimmy Tong: Jackie Chan Del Blaine: Jennifer Love Hewitt Clark Devlin: Jason Isaacs Banning: Ritchie Coster Steena: Debi Mazar DreamWorks Pictures presents a film directed by Kevin Donovan. Written by Michael J. Wilson and Michael Leeson. Running time: 99 minutes. Rated PG-13 (for action violence, sexual content and language). BY ROGER EBERT There is an ancient tradition in action movies that the first scene is a self-contained shocker with no relevance to the rest of the plot. James Bond parachutes from a mountainside, Clint Eastwood disarms a robber, etc. Jackie Chan's "The Tuxedo" opens with a deer urinating in a mountain stream. The deer, the urine and the stream have nothing to do with the rest of the film. The movie's plot does involve water. The bad guy wants to add an ingredient to the world's water supply that will cause victims to dehydrate and die. To save themselves, they will have to buy the villain's pure water. Since his opening gambit is to sabotage, I repeat, the world's water supply, he will dehydrate everyone except those already drinking only bottled water, and so will inherit a planet of health nuts, which is just as well, since all the fish and animals and birds will dehydrate, too, and everyone will have to live on PowerBars. I have been waiting for a dehydrating villain for some time. My wife is of the opinion that I do not drink enough water. She believes the proper amount is a minimum of eight glasses a day. She often regards me balefully and says, "You're not getting enough water." In hot climates her concern escalates. In Hawaii last summer she had the grandchildren so worked up they ran into the bedroom every morning to see if Grandpa Roger had turned to dust. The movie's villain, whose name is Banning (Ritchie Coster), has a novel scheme for distributing the formula, or virus, or secret ingredient, or whatever it is, that will make water into a dehydrating agent. He plans to use water striders, those insects that can skate across the surface of a pond. In his secret laboratory he keeps his ultimate weapon, a powerful water strider queen. Do water striders have queens, like bees and ants do? For an authoritative answer I turned to Dr. May Berenbaum, head of the Department of Entomology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and founder of the Insect Fear Film Festival, held every year at the Great University. She writes: "Water striders are true bugs (i.e., insects with piercing/sucking mouthparts) that run or skate on the surface of bodies of water, feeding on the insects that fall onto the water surface. There are about 500 species of gerrids in the world and, as far as I know, not a single one of those 500 species is eusocial (i.e., has a complex social structure with reproductive division of labor and cooperative brood care). I don't even know of an example of maternal care in the whole group. In short, the answer to your question is an emphatic 'no!' I can't wait to see this film. It definitely sounds like a candidate for a future Insect Fear Film Festival!" More crushing evidence: Dr. Bruce P. Smith, expert entomologist at Ithaca College, writes me, "There is no known species of water striders that has queens. The most closely related insects that do are some colonial aphid speciies, and the most familiar (and much more distant rleatives) are the ants, bees, wasps and termites." He adds helpfully, "One mammal does have queens: the naked mole rats of Africa." Revealing himself as a student of insect films, he continues, "If my memory is correct, 'Arachnophobia' has a king spider, but no queen--totally absurd!" So there you have it. Professors Smith and Berenbaum have spoken. The evil Banning has spent untold millions on his secret plans for world domination, and thinks he possesses a water strider queen when he only has a lucky regular water strider living the life of Riley. But back to "The Tuxedo." Jackie Chan plays a taxi driver named Jimmy Tong, who is hired by Debi Mazar to be the chauffeur for Clark Devlin (Jason Isaacs), a multimillionaire secret agent whose $2 million tuxedo turns him into a fighting machine (also a dancer, kung-fu expert, etc). After Devlin is injured by a skateboard bomb, Jackie puts on the suit and soon partners with agent Del Blaine (Jennifer Love Hewitt), who realizes he has a strange accent for a man named Clark Devlin, but nevertheless joins him in battle against Banning. The movie is silly beyond comprehension, and even if it weren't silly, it would still be beyond comprehension. It does have its moments, as when the tuxedo inadvertently cold-cocks James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, and Jackie Chan has to go onstage in place of the Hardest Working Man in Show Business. He's very funny as James Brown, although not as funny as James Brown is. There's something engaging about Jackie Chan. Even in a bad movie, I like him, because what you see is so obviously what you get. This time he goes light on the stunts, at least the stunts he obviously does himself, so that during the closing credits, there are lots of flubbed lines and times when the actors break out laughing, but none of those spellbinding shots in which he misses the bridge, falls off the scaffold, etc. And some of the shots are computer-generated, which is kind of cheating isn't it, with Jackie Chan? Luckily, special effects are not frowned upon at the Insect Fear Film Festival. Copyright © Chicago Sun-Times Inc. [ To leave the movies mailing list, send the message "unsubscribe ] [ movies" (without the quotes) to majordomo@xmission.com ] ------------------------------ Date: 02 Nov 2002 07:24:58 GMT From: gregorys@xmission.com Subject: [MV] INVINCIBLE / **** (PG-13) INVINCIBLE / **** (PG-13) October 4, 2002 Hanussen: Tim Roth Zishe: Jouko Ahola Marta Farra: Anna Gourari Master of Ceremonies: Max Raabe Benjamin: Jacob Wein Landwehr: Gustav Peter Wohler Fine Line Features presents a film written and directed by Werner Herzog. Running time: 135 minutes. Rated PG-13 (for some sexual content and thematic elements). Opening today at Water Tower. MOVIES BY ROGER EBERT Werner Herzog's "Invincible" tells the astonishing story of a Jewish strongman in Nazi Germany, a man who in his simple goodness believes he can be the "new Samson" and protect his people. He is a blacksmith in Poland in 1932 when discovered by a talent scout, and soon becomes the headliner in the Palace of the Occult, in Berlin, which is run by the sinister Hanussen (Tim Roth), a man who dreams of becoming Minister of the Occult in a Nazi government. The strongman, named Zishe Breitbart, is played by a Finnish athlete named Jouko Ahola, twice winner of the title World's Strongest Man. Much of the movie's uncanny appeal comes from the contrast between Ahola's performance, which is entirely without guile, and Roth's performance, which drips with mannered malevolence. Standing between them is the young woman Marta (Anna Gourari), who is under Hanussen's psychological power, and who the strongman loves. "Invincible" is based, Herzog says, on the true story of Breitbart, whose great strength contradicted the Nazi myth of Aryan superiority. I can imagine a dozen ways in which this story could be told badly, but Herzog has fashioned it into a film of uncommon fascination, in which we often have no idea at all what could possibly happen next. There are countless movies about preludes to the Holocaust, but I can't think of one this innocent, direct and unblinking. In the face of gathering evil, Zishe trusts in human nature, is proud of his heritage, and believes strength and goodness (which he confuses) will triumph. The movie has the power of a great silent film, unafraid of grand gestures and moral absolutes. Its casting of the major characters is crucial, and instinctively correct. Tim Roth is a sinister charlatan, posing as a man with real psychic powers, using trickery and showmanship as he jockeys for position within the emerging Nazi majority. There is a scene where he hypnotizes Marta, and as he stares boldly into the camera I wondered, for a moment, if it was possible to hypnotize a movie audience that way. Late in the film there is a scene where his secrets are revealed, and he makes a speech of chilling, absolute cynicism. Another actor in another movie might have simply gnashed his teeth, but Roth and Herzog take the revelations as an opportunity to show us the self-hatred beneath the deception. As for Jouko Ahola, this untrained actor, who seems by nature to be good-hearted and uncomplicated, may never act again, but he has found the one perfect role, as Maria Falconetti did in "The Passion of Joan of Arc." He embodies the simple strongman. The camera can look as closely as it wants and never find anything false. A naive man from a backward town, not especially devout, he gets into a fight when Polish customers in a restaurant insult him and his little brother as Jews. A little later, entering a circus contest, he watches as the strongman lifts a boulder--and then puts an end to the contest by, lifting the strongman and the boulder. The talent scout takes him to see his first movie. Soon he is in Berlin, where Hanussen sizes him up and says, "We will Aryanize you. A Jew should never be as strong as you." Zishe is outfitted with a blond wig and Nordic helmet, and presented as "Siegfried." He becomes a great favor of Nazi brownshirts in the audience, as Hanussen prattles about "the strength of the body against the dark powers of the occult." But Zishe's mind works away at the situation until finally he has his solution, tears off the helmet and wig, and identities himself as a Jew. Here as throughout the film Herzog avoids the obvious next scene. Is Hanussen outraged? To a degree. But then he reports: "There's a line three blocks long outside! It's the Jews. They all want to see the new Samson." And then, at a time when Hitler was on the rise but the full measure of Jewish persecution was not yet in view, the Palace of the Occult turns into a dangerous pit where audience members are potentially at one another's throats. This is the first feature in 10 years from Herzog, one of the great visionaries among directors. He strains to break the bonds of film structure in order to surprise us in unexpected ways. His best films unashamedly yearn to lift us into the mythical and the mystical. "Our civilization is starving for new images," he once told me, and in "Invincible" there is an image of a bleak, rocky seashore where the sharp stones are littered with thousands or millions of bright red crabs, all mindlessly scrabbling away on their crabby missions. I think this scene may represent the emerging Nazi hordes, but of course there can be no literal translation. Perhaps Herzog wants to illustrate the implacable Darwinian struggle from which man can rise with good heart and purpose. The strongman in "Invincible" is lovable, and so deeply moving, precisely because he is not a cog in a plot, has no plan, is involved in no machinations, but is simply proud of his parents, proud to be a Jew, in love with the girl, and convinced that God has made him strong for a reason. He may be wrong in his optimism, but his greatest strength is that he will never understand that. The Roth character is equally single-minded, but without hope or purpose--a conniver and manipulator. Watching "Invincible" was a singular experience for me, because it reminded me of the fundamental power that the cinema had for us when we were children. The film exercises the power that fable has for the believing. Herzog has gotten outside the constraints and conventions of ordinary narrative, and addresses us where our credulity keeps its secrets. Copyright © Chicago Sun-Times Inc. [ To leave the movies mailing list, send the message "unsubscribe ] [ movies" (without the quotes) to majordomo@xmission.com ] ------------------------------ Date: 02 Nov 2002 07:25:09 GMT From: gregorys@xmission.com Subject: [MV] APOLLO 13: THE IMAX EXPERIENCE / **** (PG) APOLLO 13: THE IMAX EXPERIENCE / **** (PG) September 20, 2002 Jim Lovell: Tom Hanks Fred Haise: Bill Paxton Jack Swigert: Kevin Bacon Ken Mattingly: Gary Sinise Gene Kranz: Ed Harris Marilyn Lovell: Kathleen Quinlin Universal Pictures presents a film directed by Ron Howard. Written by William Broyles Jr. and Al Reinert. Based on the book Lost Moon by Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger. Running time: 135 minutes. Rated PG.(intense situations). Opening today at Navy Pier IMAX. BY ROGER EBERT At a time when screens and theaters grow smaller and movie palaces are a thing of the past, the new practice of re-releasing films in the IMAX format is a thrilling step in the opposite direction. Ron Howard's "Apollo 13," which opens today at the IMAX theater at Navy Pier, looks bold and crisp on the big screen, and the sound has never sounded better--perhaps couldn't have ever sounded better, because IMAX uses some 70 speakers. Although it takes place largely in outer space, "Apollo 13" isn't the kind of adventure saga that needs the bigger screen so its effects play better. "Star Wars," which is headed for IMAX theaters, fits that definition. "Apollo 13" is a thrilling drama that plays mostly within enclosed spaces: The space capsule, mission control and the homes of those waiting in suspense on Earth. The film re-creates the saga of the Apollo 13 mission, which was aborted after an onboard explosion crippled the craft on its way to the moon. In a desperate exercise of improvisation, crew members and the ground support staff figure out how to return the craft safely to Earth, cannibalize life-support from both the mother capsule and the lunar landing module, and navigate into a terrifyingly narrow angle between too steep (the craft would burn up in the atmosphere) and too shallow (it would skip off and fly forever into space). Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton and Kevin Bacon play astronauts Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert, respectively. On Earth, the key roles are by Gary Sinise, as the left-behind astronaut Ken Mattingly, who uses a flight simulator to help improvise a solution; Ed Harris, who is cool-headed flight director Gene Kranz, and Kathleen Quinlan, as Lovell's wife, Marilyn, who tries to explain to their children that "something broke on Daddy's spaceship." The movie has been trimmed by about 20 minutes for the IMAX release. Filmed in widescreen, it has been cropped from the sides to fit the IMAX format. Neither change bothered me. Although I am an opponent of pan-and-scan in general, I understand when it is used to maximize a different projection format. The detail and impact of the IMAX screen essentially creates a new way of looking at the film. Copyright © Chicago Sun-Times Inc. [ To leave the movies mailing list, send the message "unsubscribe ] [ movies" (without the quotes) to majordomo@xmission.com ] ------------------------------ End of movies-digest V2 #389 **************************** [ To quit the movies-digest mailing list (big mistake), send the message ] [ "unsubscribe movies-digest" (without the quotes) to majordomo@xmission.com ]