interplanetary cosmic bullspit

The crime of george mCgovern

2011-09-12T07:56:00.001-07:00

Tonight, there’s going to be a Republican presidential debate. It’s the middle of September of the previous year, and there’s been something like six of these things already. People tune out, are bored, and generally become more cynical as somehow presidential politics becomes more and more a kabuki dance nobody really cares about and is becoming more and more poisonous. I blame George McGovern. After all, it was his idea.

In 1968, or so the story goes, Hubert Humphrey won the nomination without winning a single primary. That isn’t exactly true, as two “favorite son” candidates who had endorsed Hubert won the Florida and Ohio primaries. However, the myth that Robert Kennedy, who had only won four primaries (three of which were small, Midwestern states), had won far more and was the rightful nominee, was widespread, and the DNC, which felt that the primary system needed reforming.

Now during the first two thirds of the 20^th century, primaries didn’t count for much. Parties were parties back then. The local Democratic and Republican parties were clubs. You had to join, there were activities to go to, and every year or so, there would be a state convention, which would be something like Comic-Con or the National Hardware show rather than a major deliberative body.

These were designed to be fun, social events, and as people who went to these things were more in the know than the general public, they would nominate candidates in an informed basis.

Going to the quadrennial national convention was a bit different. More people would want to go to these things than could actually be accommodated, so they would have elections, or in some cases the local leadership would pick and choose who they wanted to go with them.

However, there were also primaries, where the people could run for delegate slots without being personally humiliated at a local meeting. Also on the ballot, were presidential straw polls, which nobody really cared all that much about, but gained publicity for the national candidates, sort of like the one in Iowa last month, which showed that while Michelle Bachmann wouldn’t necessarily win the nomination, Tim Pawlenty COULDN’T.

But back to the 1960s, were the RFK myth was weighing down upon the DNC. The powers that be appointed a commission on primary reform headed by South Dakota Senator George McGovern. McGovern had decided to take over the Kennedy delegates as a symbolic gesture in 1968, and had some clout. So, in order to aggrandize himself, and make the party more politically correct, he pretty much destroyed the internal organization of the Democratic party, before turning the commission over to Representative Donald M. Fraser of Minnesota, and began his own campaign for president.

McGovern’s system worked like this: There would be a steeplechase of primaries, which would take candidates a lot of time to organize by themselves. McGovern declared his candidacy in January of 1971, a full year and more before the first primary in New Hampshire. The only other candidate that was doing this, and he already had an organization in place, was George Wallace of Alabama, who swept the south on a third-party ticket. Had he not been shot, it’s quite possible that Wallace would have won, however, as we know, McGovern did, with only 23% of the vote.

The 1976 primaries were even more confusing, Jimmy Carter gamed the system by moving to Iowa, and even though he came in second to Uncommitted, he managed to get enough publicity out of it to sweep a whole bunch of states before the voters started getting buyers’ remorse, and Frank Church and Jerry Brown began to beat him. The Republicans were forced into the new system, but their rules were far more restrictive, with lots of states doing winner take all, and thus a candidate was able to steamroll his way to the nomination after losing Iowa or New Hampshire.

The system didn’t work very well, with presidential candidates replacing local political bosses, and the social milieu of local politics began to deteriorate.

Extremists began to take over the Republican Party, and Democratic moderates, with the exception of Bill Clinton, didn’t know how to deal with that, the primary became longer, vapid and more chaotic. By 1988 the American people were SICK of presidential politics. But we still had to elect presidents every four years, and here we are today, with something like the fifth formal presidential debate four months before the first formal vote in the nominating system. Everybody’s bored stiff already.

George McGovern’s got a lot to answer for…..

Coffee vs. Tequila

2011-06-14T07:02:00.000-07:00

UNESCO; the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization; is having the annual meeting of it’s World Heritage committee this week, and, as always there will be a heated private debate to decided which tourist traps will be designated “World Heritage Sites.”

These “inscriptions” have been called the “Oscars of the Environment,” mainly because a good number of the nearly one thousand sites are natural wonders, such as Ayer’s Rock in Australia and The Grand Canyon in Arizona. The Committee also designates important architectural and archeological sites, such as Stonehenge in Great Britain and the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor.

These are more controversial; for example, the Gibraltar defenses, carved out of the famous rock in the 18^th century and submitted in 1996, were never “inscribed” primarily because of Spanish opposition. Spain has considered the British occupation an open sore for over 300 years, and the designation would be a slap in the face, and so, it remains on the tentative list for the time.

Size isn’t a consideration, these things range from a single small building, in the case of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, to a huge swath of land in subarctic Alaska and the Yukon comprising three large mountain ranges.

Then there are just some that are inexplicable. Take Tequila for example: Now the noxious beverage has it’s fans, I know, but do the blue Agave fields from which the ingredients are grown and the distilleries in the area really deserve the designation they got five years ago?

NO! Now this little travesty has spawned other attempts to “sanctify” one of their country’s major products. Colombia’s attempting to designate its Coffee plantations this year, and so is Jamaica. Now whether or not Jamaica or Colombia grows better coffee than the other is neither here nor there, but France has never had the gall to submit the vineyards of Bordeaux or Champagne for World Heritage Status, and Kazakstan hasn’t tried to get it for the fruit forest in the Zailijskei Alatau mountains (where apples and walnuts, among other things, evolved).

If coffee does indeed get two World Heritage designations, what then? Germany recently tried to get an ethereal “List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity” listing for the 1516 Beer Purity Law, and while French cooking and the Tango have made the list, I don’t think a law that was repealed ages ago belongs. Maybe an ancient brewery, like the one in Budweis, Czech Republic, might do.

While Colombian coffee or Tequila might be intangible cultural treasures, the places where their ingredients are grown aren’t really worthy.

Libya before the war: part one

2011-06-09T06:40:00.001-07:00

Sometime last October I got an email from a company I've never heard of called Bestway Tours. I had met them at a trade fair and had complained that the Libyan government was discriminating against American tourists since we had reestablished relations in 2003.

Well, after seven years, the State Department had finally gotten the then supreme leader Colonel Mommar Gaddafi to issue visas to American tourists and Bestway was going to be one of the first to send a group over there... Would I like to go?

Of course I would! One thing on my bucket list was to circumnavigate the Mediterranean, and you can't do that without going through Libya. Besides, the lure of the forbidden called to me. This trip was going to be really expensive, but dammit, it might be my only chance. Looking back, it very well might have been for a long time to come.

So I took it.

From the start, there were problems. First there was the visa. On a number of occasions in previous years, Libya had announced that they were going to start issuing visas and then reneged at the last minute. It was even more troubling when I was told that we wouldn't know whether or not we would get them until three days before we were due to take off. This spooked quite a few of the group. The large number of people who originally expressed interest began to drop out. I didn't know how many until I got there.

I got the visa over the Internet. It wasn't like those you usually get from other countries that was pasted or stamped on your passport. No, it was a large document in closely spaced Arabic (they provided a translation), that I had to show again and again to various airline people to prove I actually was going to get into the country legally.

After a stopover that was just short enough that I couldn't get out of the airport, I finally got to the Libyan capital of Tripoli. I flattered myself into thinking I was going to be the first American tourist to get in after seven years. Nope. Two people were ahead of me on line. I got through customs with little trouble, and met my guide, an elderly gentleman named Mohammed. Then I found out how big my tour group was.

There was me and this other guy. That was it. Of the 15 people who were going to go, 13 chickened out. Fortunately, they didn't charge me extra for the single supplement.

So there were four of us: Me, Mohammed, the other guy, Bobby, and our driver. It was going to be a surreal experience.

Libya has had a surprisingly large tourist industry. Once you're there it's not hard to see why. The southern coast of the Mediterranean was the nicest place in the Roman world, and the Greeks and Phoenicians before them had done a humongous amount of building before the great tsunami of 365 AD turned everything to rubble.

Then the Vandals came, then the Byzantines took it, and finally, the Arabs. The tribal Berbers gave up on civilization, and no one really cared about the ruins enough to use them as a quarry. So you have some of the best-preserved Roman cities there in Libya. Gadaffi's sons had decided that luxury tourism can be profitable and gives the country a good image. So except for Americans, rich archeology fans were welcomed with open arms. Ports were built nearby so that cruise ships could dock and dump lots of money on the Gaddafi family, which would trickle down to the locals.

Bobby and I would take the standard, authorized tour of the archeological sites, most of which were approved by UNESCO as official World Heritage Properties. Who knew that the timing would be so perfect?

Notes on the Newark Piece summit

2011-06-09T06:38:00.000-07:00

The Newark Peace Education Summit was a three-day conference focusing on peacemaking practices from around the world. It featured three Nobel Peace Prize winners, and was, for the most part a total failure.

Now there's a reason for that, there was really no agreed definition of what peace was. Is it a mere lack of war, is it spiritual enlightenment, or personal or domestic tranquility? Is it a separated part of a lemon meringue pie? The only thing that was agreed upon is that it was not the last of these, and as such it was an amorphous discussion of conflict resolution that for the most part had nothing to do with anything, especially personal relationships.

This would have been one of those touchy-feely things that would have gone completely unnoticed by the outside world had not a certain Lhamo Dondrub, also known as the Dalai Lama, been the main attraction. He is the de facto Buddhist Pope, and as such gets lots and lots of attention. He also get's Secret Service protection, which made the entrance to the New Jersey Performing Arts Center and the hotel across the street a pain in the ass.

But there we are, a mega celebrity, and a bunch of lefties, new agers and local politicians trying to sell their wares to an audience who was more then willing to buy. This included two other Nobel Peace Laureates, Jody Williams and Shirin Ebadi, the former of which was actually entertaining and may have actually deserved the thing, and the latter, a humorless ideologue (and former junior member of the Shah's regime) who was given it to give the Iranian regime a black eye.

There were Six panel discussions, four of which were presided over by the Dali Lama (did you know that he was on the CIA payroll for years?), and for the most part they had little to do with what they were advertised about. The first was about "inner peace" and although I missed much of it, what I did see had absolutely nothing to do with personal tranquility. Rabbi Michael Lerner spent an inordinate amount of time promoting a massive wealth transfer to the third world, and Dennis Kuchinich's sick joke of a constitutional amendment, H.Res.156, which would force all businesses to become nonprofit charities. This got applause.

The second panel was even worse. This was supposed to be about "peace in the home" and while one or two of the panelists had a tiny bit to say about the subject, most did not. For the vast majority, who ran NGOs and charities that had to do with halfway houses for prisoners and the homeless. The Dalai Lama said he had no idea what to say because he had no experience! It was worse than useless! Yeesh!

Dr. James R Doty MD practices neurosurgery in Mountain View, California and Stanford, California. He has the unique distinction of being the only graduate of Tulane University Medical School who never managed to get his bachelor's degree first. While googling his name shows that he's a genuine surgeon, much of what he said about his biography didn't make much sense (getting into medical school without a degree, giving his vast fortune away just after he went broke, etc.), he led a major "workshop" on "peace through compassion," which frankly was total BS. I don't remember most of it, because he was so smooth and charming. Another workshop was about interfaith dialogue, but no one sad anything germain to the topic.

The next two grand panels, on education, and within communities, were more germane to what was supposed to be discussed, although like the term "peace" they acted as if they had no idea what the term meant, after all, going around saying "the whole world is a community" really just doesn't cut it. Peace in schools is actually easy to talk about, as tweens and teenagers are for the most part barbarians and conflict is part of the general experience. They didn't give any decent answers to that question either.
The panel on World Peace the next day (the DL had left and the security was gone) was a bash the US session, which showed that they could solve nothing. I didn't attend ecology panel, so I cannot comment.

The main thing I learned is that winning the Nobel Peace Prize doesn't give you moral authority, it just means that you are annoying to tyrants. That might be enough.

Philadelphis

2010-11-23T06:16:00.001-08:00

In the spring of 1799, the city of Philadelphia, PA was bureaucrat heaven. The State, Local and Federal governments were for the most part sharing the same space, and the their constituent parts were lodged in every nook and cranny of downtown Philly. Politicians from every conceivable level were walking the streets and 18^th century lobbyists were waiting behind every corner waiting to pounce.

But then, almost suddenly, the city was abandoned. First the Pennsylvania government decided they needed more space and they moved to Lancaster in the middle of the summer. Then, in 1800, the Feds moved to Washington, and Philadelphia was left with only its local pols, and a pressing need with some other industry to fuel its economy.

That the city did, but the few blocks around Chestnut street continued to hold the remains of what was at one time the center of the American universe.

It was here at the old State House, on the first floor, that the Second Continental Congress, decided to declare themselves a thing called the United States of America in 1776. Then ten years later, the same Congress, now located in New York, endorsed the creation of a heretofore-illegal convention to replace the ramshackle constitution that had been in effect since 1781, and suggested holding it in the empty lower floor of the Pennsylvania State House.

But in 1801 no one really cared all that much about historic preservation, and the place became a warehouse, then an art school, then Charles Wilson Peale’s museum, which was meant to be Philly’s answer to P. T. Barnum’s in New York.

Peale’s Museum was thrown out when it was decided the building was too venerable, and became a more dignified public space, before being turned into a shrine in 1876.

Today, while it’s been restored to it’s 1787 glory; one cannot help but be a bit sad that the top floor, which is where the rangers give their talks, couldn’t have been redone to be a restoration of Peale’s museum. An ancient freak show would be a perfect antidote to the solemnity of the assembly hall on the ground floor.

While independence Hall itself, and Congress Hall next door, which was where the first few Congresses under the constitution met, are well done museums, much of which surrounds it is not.

The shrine to the Liberty Bell is downright vulgar, and a number of private museums in the immediate area, most notably the Museum of Liberty, are total rip-offs. The National Constitution Center is hideously expensive, and when I was there, the place was full of advertisements for an exhibit that had already closed.

On the other hand, the visitor’s center has a couple of nice movie theaters and a couple of decent exhibits, and the Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson impersonators are relatively entertaining.

One thing that they’re currently doing is rebuilding the mansion that was where the Presidential residence was. When I was a kid, the site was a public toilet. I thought then as now that the President living in a toilet was hilarious.

Independence Park is a UNESCO Would Heritage site, and deservedly so. The two seminal events that happened here are is why it’s essential.

The Vatican

2010-11-23T06:14:00.001-08:00

One of the coolest things that a tourist can do is to see an entire foreign country…All of it…From one end of the other.

This is activity that can literally take a lifetime in some cases, and for most of us, that’s just too damn long. So how to choose?

Size matters. It has to be small, real small. So the best place is to start in Rome. The record books state that the City of Rome is home to three countries: Italy, of which it is the capitol, The State of Vatican City, and the embassy of The Sovereign Military Order of St. John of Jerusalem of Rhodes and of Malta,

The Knights of Malta’s embassy at Via dei Condotti 68, has official extraterritoriality, which means that, it’s the territory, not of Italy, but of the Knights, which don’t have a country back home like Belize or Monaco and thus, the small palace and it’s courtyard are the whole shebang. They don’t let tourists in, and there’s nothing to actually see except a couple of trees and boring office space.

So that’s why the Vatican’s a must. It’s an official country, and at 0.2 square miles, much of which is dedicated to one of the best museums in the world, is doable, and thanks to the internet, now more than ever.

It used to be that getting a ticket to the garden tour, where you get to hike all the way to the helicopter pad on the western end of the country and back, was impossible. You had to send a fax to some monsignor somewhere, and wait a few weeks, and if the pope decided to take a jog or something, it could be cancelled. Then you’d be stuck.

But today, it’s different. Go to http://www.rome-museum.com/vatican-gardens-booking-step-1.php, apply, then pay the 35€ when they reply, and when the time comes, go. It’s worth the trouble.

The first thing you notice when you get off at the Ottaviano metro station is that the reason the Vatican still exists is that it’s surrounded by a very high and thick wall. Across the street are literally hundreds of souvenir shops, at least on the side close to St. Peter’s basilica, and these sell religious articles and pope stuff, and it’s best to ignore these for now. So look for the huge line and find where it begins. You don’t need to wait because you’ve already got a ticket. You enter the museum entrance and go through customs, which resembles airport security. You will then notices the first of many official souvenir shops, which dot the museum. After presenting you’re ticket to the people at the guided tour they give you a little radio receiver. That way the guide doesn’t have to yell and disturb the priests who hang out in the gardens to shirk their hard spiritual labors.

What’s there is almost unexpected. Aside from the formal gardens, there’s areas of lush subtropical splendor palm trees and banana bushes with parrots screeching from here and there. There’s Pope Pius IV’s pleasure dome, which dates from the early 16^th century, which is a sight to behold, a small temple to the Madonna and John Paul II’s jubilee bell from ten years ago.

The priests and Swiss guards don’t like tourists mucking up their private park, and after about two hours of hiking, we’re sent back to the grounds of the museum and relieved of our radios. The tour covers about 75% of the country, and the rest is the museum and the office buildings. While the offices are of no real interest to anybody who doesn’t have business there, the museums are.

The Popes didn’t live in the Vatican until 1870. That’s because they controlled all of central Italy until then, and would only use it as glorified panic room when the Romans would revolt, or the Saracens or Germans for French would invade or something like that, and since these things would happen far more frequently than one might assume, what is now the museum was a rather large palace.

This palace now contains literally centuries of plunder and collections, Rome being almost three thousand years old and all, every time someone found a sculpture, his holiness would get first dibs on it, and if he was generous would actually pay for it.

The amount of ancient Roman sculpture on display is mind boggling there are tens of thousands of busts of anyone and everyone between emperors and slaves, some of which are rather famous, such as Laocoön and his Sons by Agesander, Athenodoros, and Polydorus, and the iconic image of the Emperor Augustus.

But the Sistine Chapel beckons, and while the art is spectacular, the place is as crowded as a subway car during rush hour, and the conservators keep the room dark, and it’s difficult to take it in.

Then once you’re finished with that, there’s the long trek back to the exit, and on the way, there’s dozens of official souvenir stands selling Michaelangelo reproductions and Pope stuff. There’s also a pizzaria, which isn’t bad.

Then you have to leave the country, return to Italy, and follow the walls to St. Peter’s basilica, which is a trip in itself. There’s the huge works of art, and at least three dead popes in glass cases (John XXIII, Clement XI, and Pius X) and a souvenir shops in the treasury area and near the statue of Constantine. The huge church is in fact built over a graveyard, and you can see that too, but aside from the graves of the two John Pauls, it’s difficult to find any of the more interesting ones.

The area around the entrance to the basilica has a dozen or so official Tchotchke places, so it qualifies as a tourist trap. It is essential.

Fisherman's wharf, San Francisco

2010-11-23T06:13:00.000-08:00

It is said that San Franciscans hate Fisherman’s wharf. To some extent that’s probably true. The reason is simple. Too many tourists! San Franciscans HATE tourists, those who aren’t in the tourist/hospitality industry at least. It reminds them that the hospitality/ tourist industry is in fact the largest in the city and that it’s possible that the city’s best days are behind it. Granted, gentrification has improved much of the burg, but be that as it may, whether the locals like it or not, Fisherman’s wharf is an essential tourist trap.

If it wasn’t so, then how do you explain the fact that it has three (count’em THREE) National parks, decent food, a sizable percentage of the world’s sea lions, good fishing, and really good views of the bay. What more do you want? A cheesy shopping mall? They got that too.

The reason most San Franciscans rarely go there (or admit that they do) is the main reason it’s essential. It’s too famous. This is why most people don’t go to their area’s famous attractions. It’s also arrogance. After all, the area stinks with tourists, and unless they work there, the locals are better than that, thumbing their noses at us fat visitors who come to see the city by the bay. This is just something you have to see…

Starting with the National Parks…

The three NP’s, Alcatraz, San Francisco Maritime, and Golden Gate/Miller Field aren’t exactly in the Wharf, they frame it, Alcatraz, on Pier 33, is the eastern boarder of the area, the other two on the west. As far as Alcatraz goes, trip is definitely worth it, however you just can’t walk up to the ticket kiosk and get on the next boat. Everything’s booked up for at least a day in advance, so go to the website first: http://www.alcatrazcruises.com/website/pyt-transportation.aspx and get a reservation. The whole thing takes about a day, which means that Fisherman’s Wharf is a two-day operation.

If you forgot to make a reservation for Alcatraz, then find out when the first available boat is and head west to Pier 39, which is where the carousel, aquarium and the notorious hoard of sea lions are. This is the little bit of Disneyland that the shishi San Franciscans so love to hate. Unless you’re looking for high culture or a quiet bucolic setting (in which case what the hell are you doing in San Francisco?), this is the best spot for people watching (Union Square is a close second). The prices for souvenir tchotchies are high, but not THAT high, and the street performers are for the most part entertaining. This is San Francisco the theme park, and as such is pretty successful.

West of Pier 39 is the Wharf proper, bordered by the bay to the north and North Point St. to the south, and Hyde St., where the cable cars and Maritime National Park are, to the west Here you will find a huge number of souvenir stands and seafood restaurants, just what a tourist wants and a local doesn’t. After all, except for the occasional patriotic tee shirt and baseball caps during the season, who really goes around with stuff festooned with one’s hometown’s logo on it?

But behind the all the kitsch, you will discover that Fisherman’s Wharf is a real wharf with real fisherman. Go ahead, have an expensive bowl of chowder or crab cakes. It’s part of the experience. Finally, there are the two national parks. Maritime has an interesting museum and for a small fee you get to see some interesting old ships. Then there’s a place to rest and look at the bay, which is owned by the US government and is absolutely free. Further to the west, you’ll see a cliff. That’s the Fort Mason Unit of the Golden Gate National Parks, and is technically part of the Marina district.

Fisherman’s Wharf is an essential tourist trap….and why do you think they call them that?

New Orleans

2010-11-23T06:12:00.000-08:00

Sometime back in the early ‘90s, some congresscritter got it into his head that the Department of the Interior should promote music.

A few years earlier, in 1987, Congress passed one of those symbolic resolutions, somewhat akin to “National Turnip Day,” declaring “Jazz is hereby designated as a rare and valuable national American treasure to which we should devote our attention, support, and resources to make sure it is preserved, understood and promulgated.” This was harmless enough in itself, but how exactly does it go from there to one of the more misbegotten parks in the National Park System?

Well, in 1993, Rep. William Jefferson (D-LA), the guy who would eventually wind up in jail for having all that cash in his freezer, introduced H.R.3408, a classic piece of pork designating something in New Orleans to be a National Park celebrating the history of Jazz. It had no boundaries, no land, no nothing. Just funding for some rangers based in the offices of Jean Lefitte National Park trying to promote what the city of New Orleans was doing very nicely on it’s own.

Today, it has a few very modest venues around the French quarter and is getting some more, but that’s why not why it’s essential. The reason it’s essential is that Jazz National Historic Park, and its sibling Jean Lefitte, cover the entire French Quarter of New Orleans.

So get this: The two Hustler Clubs on Bourbon Street, of which I’ve only seen the outside of, are inside a National Park, so’s the rest of Bourbon Street, and if there ever was a tourist trap, it’s Bourbon street.

The French Quarter, unlike, say Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, is a source of pride for New Orleanians, and while the place is as touristy as Hell, the locals not only admit to frequenting the place, they can outnumber the tourists on occasion, and the area of Bourbon St. between Canal and St. Phillip, is Disneyland for Drunks.

The drinks are extremely expensive, although you can take them outside and go to another bar for a refill, paying $16 for a shot is a little much. But if you do it right, you can manage to hear some pretty good music, which is what the National Park is all about. While it’s not always Marti Gras, they try to keep up the pretense.

One block south of Bourbon is Royal, which is full of art galleries and restaurants, all three levels of government, Federal, State, and Local, have strict laws regarding the preservation of buildings, and as the Quarter was one of the few areas that were totally unscathed by Katrina, and unlike the Ninth ward, the powers that be want this area to continue to thrive, and it does.

Most people in the Quarter don’t know that they’re simultaneously in two National Parks. Tour Guides Association of Greater New Orleans, Inc., who’s membership doesn’t appreciate the Federal Government taking over their jobs, has an agreement limiting the NPS to one fifteen minute tour a day. With tourism the areas largest industry, that makes sense.

The architecture is beautiful, the people are mostly friendly, and while everything is damn expensive, but you just HAVE to see it.

Washington's Mall.

2010-11-23T06:10:00.000-08:00

Washington, DC is a company town all right. It has one industry, the government, and everything derives from that. People go there to see the government and said government’s tributes to itself, nothing else. Sure there are restaurants and museums. Sure there are three major universities, and some pretty nice parks, but aside from the Universities, all are either run by the government or by private interests to maintain it.

A bar frequented by bureaucrats and journalists helps maintain the government as much as the official office buildings. While it would be wrong to say the entire District of Columbia is a tourist trap, few would want to go see the SouthEast Quadrant, the area called the National Mall most certainly is. In an earlier installment of this series, someone complained that The Statue of Liberty was a “tourist attraction” not a ”tourist trap”. Well, consider this:

Take a look at the Lincoln memorial. Walk up those famous stairs and when you are on the same level as the base of the statue, go right. There you will find a souvenir shop. That’s right, built right into the edifice.

Remember Jesus tried to start a riot about something like that.

It wasn’t always like that. A century ago, the mall had only one major memorial, that to George Washington, and a much smaller Smithsonian institution. Today, we’ve got something for every war we ever fought, and then some. The Mall is beginning to run out of room, what with the Dwight Eisenhower and Martin Luther King memorials due to begin construction soon and at least a dozen others in the works.

Most of the ones that are already there aren’t the least bit objectionable, but do they each deserve a souvenir stand? No. The problem is that special interests have gotten a hold of them and for the most part made them worse. Look at the Vietnam memorial for example:

Maya Lin’s original design was perfect. It was simple, stark, and moving. It honored those who served and died in the war, but not the war itself. It was totally complete and did it’s job perfectly As such it stood as is for a number of years, and then a veteran’s group demanded to be included, and two groups of sculptures were added cluttering up the space. Not to disrespect those brave people who served and demanded to be honored there, but they pretty much ruined the serenity and the artistic unity of the space. It looks a bit cluttered, and the souvenir shed nearby doesn’t help all that much either.

Another example is the Franklin Roosevelt Memorial, which has FDR depicted in a way that would have horrified him. Pride is considered a deadly sin for a reason.

With the John Stewart rally less than a week away, going all the way to DC without strolling around and seeing some of these monuments would be a tragedy.

There are too many memorials to see than can be done in a day, but most are essential. Most also have souvenir stands. This makes them tourist traps.

Summing up the Trip

2010-03-21T13:32:00.001-07:00

The trip is over. The killer jet lag, three days of 14-18 hours of sleep a night, has abated at last. I've ticked another country off the list and am getting ready for a cross-country jaunt from San Francisco to Boston by bus.
But before I do that, there are a few loose ends to tie up.

For one thing, Iran ain't Persia. Persia is a nation with a thousands-year-old history that's fully capable of integrating itself into the modern world. It's got the technology to do it; it's full of intelligent people with a zest for life and a love of culture. It's a nation that wants to be a friend of ours and that should be.

Iran is a corrupt, terrorist state that enjoys hurting people. Look what it's done to Iraq and Lebanon. The theocracy has managed to have a toothless toy democracy as a loincloth to cover its privates.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the puppet president of Iran, has announced that he's going to address the UN, and that's his right. He's an annoying buffoon, but we can't and shouldn't stop him. The question is not what we're going to have to do about HIM, but what we're going to have to do with his master, über-fürer Ali Khamenei, who had appointed himself to the job and threatens to remain there for life (He's been there almost twenty years). He's part of the group of thugs in antique clothing that defrauded Persia when the people demanded democracy and overthrew a tyrant.

We can't get rid of him, of course. In 1953, the CIA sent Teddy Roosevelt's grandson Kim with a suitcase full of cash to get rid of a semi-democratically elected prime minister, and he did, but only because the powers that be in Iran, including that prime minister being deposed permitted it. Mohammed Reza Shah fled in 1979 because Jimmy Carter refused to support him, and that caused all the trouble.

The Russians and the Brits have really good relations with Iran. The Russians helped install Reza Khan and the Brits got rid of him. Eisenhower sent Kim Roosevelt to Tehran as a favor to Winston Churchill. Stalin occupied much of Northern Iran during the 1940s, but they have very good relations with the Iranian government. The Soviets were the main backers of Israel during its first five years of existence.

So why is it just US who's picked out as the Great Satan? Diversion, mostly. If they refuse to talk to us, and go around shooting missiles and enriching uranium, they can go around saying..."Those bastard Americans are picking on us for no reason!" and all the problems like inflation, energy and the environment (to be fair, they've been pretty good on that) and feel like a righteous victim. But the Persians, Azeris, Kurds, Jews and others know what the real deal is. Unfortunately, the Mullahs haven’t agreed to go, and unlike the Shah, don’t care if a Jimmy Carter is going to withhold his support or nor.

Iran’s like Burma in that way. Myanmar goes under the wrong name as well.

Well, that’s it for now. I hoped you liked the series.. Now it’s back to important
things, like the cover of this week’s New Yorker…

Iran and the global community, my experiences.

2008-07-15T07:39:00.000-07:00

I've collected coins since I was a kid. I've been all over the world, and the loose change has gotten so heavy my bookshelf needs reinforcement. There are lots of coins that are worth nothing. I've got a Turkish million Lira piece, an Italian one lira coin, and a few other weird things, but one thing I think is completely unique is the souvenir set I got in Shiraz. What makes it unique is one particular coin, a one-ryal piece that is worth one 9000th of a dollar. It was dated this year, and it's thus the most worthless coin ever minted by anyone. Sure there are plenty of coins that are worth less than nothing, but they were all minted before catastrophic inflation rendered them so (I've seen people with wheelbarrows filled with money, it's not pretty). But this was different. This was made AFTER it was worthless.

Having a national currency worth "less than nothing" is embarrassing. So the Persians invented the Thumm. Sure it's not worth all that much, but it's still respectable in a way. Inflation is beginning to ravage the Thumm the way it ravaged the Ryal. Land is up, food is up, fuel is up, and it's not just because of western sanctions, either. Our friend Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s power may be mostly fictional, but he has some control over the economy, and he's been doing a really bad job of it, and it was this in mind that on the last full day of my trip, I left Persia and entered Iran.

The village of Natanz is not one of those places that it's necessary to visit. It's a tiny place in the middle of nowhere where the locals wear colorful traditional clothes, have red adobe houses (iron-rich soil) and sell the few tourists that go there CDs featuring their picturesque lives. The nine of us (seven tourists, the bus driver and the guide) had the same lunch as always (I hope to eat chicken kebab again, but not any time soon) and after getting back on the bus, someone mentioned the nuclear facility.

The guide shrugged. "It's about twenty miles from here, on the other side of the mountains."
"Do you think we'll sit it?" someone said.
"I don't know."

We saw it, all right.

The damn thing was right on the highway. We first began to notice some antiaircraft batteries, and then more, then we saw a modest smokestack and finally the nuke plant itself. There was military everywhere, and a number of signs warning us not to take pictures.

"Someone stopped a bus here and confiscated all the cameras.,” the guide warned. A couple of my compatriots managed to surreptitiously snapped a few pictures.Talk of wars and rumors of wars pervaded the bus. We were home free, or so we thought. As we approached the holy city of Qom on of the group announced that his bladder was about to burst. So we stopped at the mosque right next to the toll booth.

It was about a hundred degrees outside, but everyone got out of the air conditioning and headed to make waste. Normally, this is something that shouldn't be mentioned, for obvious reasons, but on the way back, something happened. A cop got on the bus and and told the driver that someone had passed a brand new law the day before and that he needed an assistant driver in order to be allowed to make it back to Tehran.

Now the reason for the new law was actually pretty reasonable. A bus driver fell asleep a few days before and got into an accident (I'd been in a similer accident in Zimbabwe some years back). the law was fine, but it seems that they hadn't bothered to tell anyone until they had started issuing tickets.

So we hung around for over an hour while the guide and driver tried desperately to find another driver. They couldn't find one, and the cops said that they'd let us go with a warning, but they lied. A trap was set, and about two miles north of the toll gate, the bus was stopped and the driver arrested.

After another half hour of quiet panic, the two returned with some semi-bad news. We were going to be aboe to make it to the hotel, and from there the airport, but the driver had his license revoked, and was issued a temporary one good only until midnight. As the owner of the bus who still had a huge loan to pay off, he faced bankruptcy. This with a wife and two kids to support.

We found out a bit later that the new law wasn't supposed to actually go into effect until later in the week, and that the driver could appeal and would probably get his license back. The cops in Qom were just having some fun with some drivers. That, my friends, is Iran.

When we arrived at last in Tehran, there was a blackout. The manager blamed sanctions. They didn't get the lights back on in our rooms until well after I had gone to sleep.

Tomorrow, I'll sum up.

Isfahan and the art of Painting

2008-07-15T07:36:00.000-07:00

From the West, Persian is difficult to invade, it has only been successfully done twice (Alexander the Great and the Ummayad caliphs a millennium later). From the east it was a different story, Mongols, Turks, Tajiks (who were the only actual Iranians to rule Iran until modern times) and Pashduns, would regularly invade, raping and pilliging and burning everything to the ground again and again until there was nothing left except crumbling adobe houses and that amazing national underground plumbing system.

The only group of foreigners to have the remotest claim tp "nativeness" were the The Samanids (819–999), who were the first in centuries to use Farsi as an official language in centuries and they hired the poet Ferdowsi to write the Persian national epic, "Shahnama: The Epic of the KIngs" which has been the core of Persian education ever since. They may have been forced to become Muslims, but Ins'shallah, they weren't going to give up their language like the Berbers or Syrians.

It's the poets who have kept the Persian people alive. Ferdowsi, Haifez, Omar Kayyam, and Rumi, all of whom lived at the end of the first millennium AD or beginning of the second, are treasured by citizens of the Islamic Republic far more than modern Brits do Keats or Shelly. Only William Shakespeare has such prestige.

In the city of Shiraz, people would go to the tomb of the poet Haifez in the evening and recite 800 year old poetry, before saluting the master with a Coke® (US trade with Iran is greater now than at any time since the Shah's fall). Could you imagine that with at the grave of Robert Frost? I don't think so.

In Isfahan, hundreds of miles to the north (eight hours by bus, and it feels it), people go under the pol-e Khadu bridge and sing tales from Ferdowsi (dig that crazy echo!) while later in the evening when it's actually cool, bring some of the family's more worn rugs and have a picnic on the banks of the Zayande river, where if it's possible to avoid notice by the morality police (which, from what I can tell, is the national sport), one can snuggle up with one's honey. The river at this time is filled with paddleboats. There is poetry is the vision.

The Mongols and Turks who ruled Persia for most of the second Millennium AD began to stop tearing down palaces of previous dynasties around the time of Henry VIII of England, and as these are primarily secular buildings, one can see a tradition of figurative fresco which looks like something out of Japan. However, the people in charge of restoration have done a horrible job in some places. In fact, except for a very few mosques, there's very little architecture that seems to be older than the 16th century, and what there is, is mostly adobe that doesn't look all that impressive from the outside. That is except for caravansaries, which are a cross between castles and hotels designed to protect merchants on the silk road.

It's at this point that a kind of weariness begins to creep in. We could feel the end of the trip creeping up on us, and not a moment too soon....

Persia, Chapter four: Persepolis

2008-07-12T06:10:00.000-07:00

According to Islamic lore, in the year 610 of the Christian Era, a certain Abu l-Qasim Muhammad ibn ‘Abd Allāh al-Hashimi al-Qurashi was ordered by the Archangel Jabril to read out loud from a book that didn't yet exist. Prior to that, the world was in the "age of ignorance" and what was produced didn't matter all that much.

For the next 1,189 years, most of what was built by the hands of man prior to that was either ignored or destroyed. True, the works of certain Greek and Jewish philosophers were preserved and studied. Euclid and Galen were very useful, after all, but what was left of the great library at Alexandria was burned to the ground (although some Moslems blame that on Christians) and much of everything else was left to rot. then the Turks and Mongols came raping and pillaging their way west...and then in 1799 Napolean Bonaparte came to Egypt to restock the Louvre museum. The "Age of Ignorance" is what brings many tourists to the Middle East, and that doesn't sit well with everyone living there.

Persepolis is the jewel of Persia and the number one tourist attraction in all of Iran. Going all the way to Iran and not seeing it for yourself is a minor crime, and innumerable Achaemenid sculptures on the reconstructed walls are breathtaking. There are also the rock cut tombs of Achaemenids Artaxerxes 2nd and 3rd, one of whom was the husband of Queen Esther. (we'll never be sure which it was).

Going from the parking lot to the ruins, you pass the ticket office, a souvenier shopping center, and a theater showing a filmed introduction to the site, which is, sadly, only in Farsi. Then you pass through teh various gates, which are decorated in motifs from various parts of the Achaemenid Empire. Babylonian sphinxes, Griffins from Central Asia, bulls and horses, and lines and line of people carved in bas relief on walls showing every nation in the then known world bringing gifts to the Shah. Imagine a mural in the national headquarters of the IRS showing happy people waiting on line holding cash and checks....you get the idea. They also show Ahura Mazda fighting his nemisis Arhiman, and Darius, Xerxes, and various Artaxerxeses worshiping AM. There is also a little museum there which is actually a reconstructed palace, which shows all sorts of small goodies

Now why would anyone want to wipe this Unesco World Heritage site off the face of the Earth? Well, on the one hand Alexander the Great, who burned the place down in around 330 BC, had an excuse, he and his men were completely blotto and didn't know what they were doing. But what about that Mullah thousands of years later?

From what I was told, and the two sources could be wrong, the guy and his followers wanted to erase any traces of Mohammed Reza Shah, who had fled the country earlier in the year. The Shah had decided to mark the 2500th anniversary of Cyrus the Great with a huge party at Persepolis, and forgetting that the soiree had actually made a substantial profit in subsequent tourist revenue in the following two years, the mullahs, armed with bulldozers and pickaxes headed to the site to cleanse it of preislamic foulness.

The locals from the surrounding villages and the city of Shiraz met them with greater numbers and almost lynched them. Persepolis was saved!..and so were the many bas-reliefs made in the area by Sassanian Shahs from the first half of the First millennium CE, Some of which were defaced by Moslems in the age of the Abbisd Caliphs. For that you cannot blame the current regime.

A few days later, on our way from Shiraz to Istfahan, we stopped at the tomb of Cyrus in Parsagad. there were some bas reliefs of a guy in a fish suit and a few other minor things, the city Cyrus built there was mostly made of wood, and that all rotted away ages ago. But the tomb itself was made of stone, and because the locals claimed that it was the tomb of Solomon's mother, it had survived the vandals. I noticed that someone had left a bouquet of flowers on the stairs leading up to the entrance in tribute.

At lunch afterwards, we debated whether or not it was a statement against the current regime or just a loving tribute to a great man.

Persia, chapter three: Yazd.

2008-07-12T06:08:00.000-07:00

When we were finished looking at the Qajar and Pahlavi palaces, we headed for the "domestic" airport and boarded an Iran Air 737 and headed south to the city of Yazd. Yazd is an old city, named after the Sassanian shah Yazdegerd I (c. 400 CE) and is allegedly one of the oldest cities in the world. It's here that most of the remaining Zoroastrians live, living relics of the Lost World, that Achaemenid empire that stretched from the Danube to the Indus and was the bane of the Greeks.(It is said that the reason Tehran didn't get the '84 Olympics is that they wanted to cancel the Marathon, as it brought back painful memories of the Persian loss there 2400 years ago).

We were to consider the heritage of this relict people, but first we were to consider something more important, and a much more impressive feat than conquering the world. it's the Iranian pride and joy: a great network of qanats, or underground canals, which bring water from the mountains to wherever it is needed. for thousands of years, people have been building and maintaining these things, allowing cities to flourish in the desert and do things like grow rice in arid wastelands. The first museum we went to, and it wasn't a particularly good one, was dedicated to the brave men who risked their lives to mine water (the minors would wear a modified burial shroud in case they didn't make it back.) The next one we saw was dedicated to something almost as important, air conditioning...

Before the invention of electronics in the late 19th century, air conditioning was a difficult nut to crack, and how they did it was with what is called a wind tower. The tower was designed to channel the winds through a chamber filled with wet leaves and from there into the living area of the house, where it would be nice and cool, or at least in theory, and if you were rich. The poor had to just take a siesta in the heat or the public access atechamber to the local qanat. (If you were rich, you'd be able to build your house over it and have private access to all the water you wanted). The towers resembled ancient greek temples.

But the highlight of the segment, aside from the rug shop, were the two Zoroastrian Fire temples. There are about 40 thousand Zoroastrians left in Iran, and as a persecuted minority have gone from the vast majority of a world empire to a mere 22 thousand hangers on. Yazd has two fire temples (named after the fire which is kept burning eternally as a "statue" of the god Ohrmazd. One contains the Sassanid's official flame, which has been allegedly burning since before the Prophet Mohammed was born, and a derelict one next to the banned "towers of Silence" where the dead used to be fed to the vultures until the 1970s. We climbed up one and looked at the view.

The one that's still functioning is as much an official tourist trap as anything else. There's the eternal flame, a cheezy picture of Zoroaster, and a small park. How Ohrmazd is actually worshipped at the temple is a bit of a mystery. I asked and they weren't all that forthcoming, all they wanted to do was sell postcards.

There wasn't any room to do very much inside, although it's possible that it's all done outside on th front lawn. I guess it doesn't really matter. What does is that all of the Zoroastrians I've met have the religous symbol around their necks. and soon I'd seen them all over the place. As there are so few Zoroastrians left, it might be Muslims making a political statement...more on that later.

Persia, Chapter two: Tehran

2008-07-12T06:07:00.000-07:00

A quarter millennium ago, Tehran was a large village of around fifteen thousand people. All that changed in 1798, when Aqa Muhammad, the first Qajar [pronounced: Ka-JAR] Shah, moved the capitol there from Shiraz several hundred miles to the south. The reason that he didn't like Shraz, which, as we shall see, is a pretty nice place, is actually quite understandable. Years before, the Afsharid Shah Rukh had cut his balls off, and then the Zand hereditary Prime Minister Karim Khan had him locked up in a dungeon for years. Who wouldn't have wanted a new start?

Since the Qajars moved in, Tehran has changed long beyond recognition. The village has become a city, and the city a megalopolis. The city grew like wildfire under the Qajar and Palhavi Shahs, then even more under the Islamic republic.

Driving in from the airport, which is over an hour away from the city, one can see the sprawl. Even at four thirty in the morning, the traffic is heavy, and there are almost no traffic lights. We are two people short. United Airlines has fucked up yet again, but that's par for the course. Getting up after three hours sleep, we have breakfast introduce ourselves to each other ['Hi, I'm a famous actress, don't you remember me in..." Holy shit! I do—cool] and go get on the bus to see the officially authorized sites, which means palaces and museums.

One must always remember that Iran was always also Persia, and the small national archeological museum, where we see relics Persepolis and a few pots and pans, plus statues of long dead pagan princes. Interesting stuff, then we head out to the Qajar palaces, which are in the old part of town.

The Qajars, who ruled from 1795 to 1925, are the fount of all Persia/Iran's troubles. They had heard stories of the great wealth and beauty of the European west, and later on, Shah Nasir Al-Din actually went there and was thunderstruck with the pomp and circumstance of European courts. So he raised taxes to crippling levels, even among muslims, and later started selling off the country's natural resources in order to build more splendiforous palaces and plant more formal gardens and parks.

These people weren't as dumb as they seemed. They weren't babies being bamboozled out of inheritance. They were thrilled with the income that the future BP was sending them for the oil that was drilled and refined at the company's expense.

The result was a bit on the kitchy side. The paintings on the walls look like a cross between Russian Icons and the tops of old cigar boxes. They also used lots of broken glass.

The Pahlavis, Riza Khan and his son, THE Shah, abandoned these and built more modern digs. These are much nicer to the modern eye, although that autographed photo of Adolph Hitler prominently displayed in the foyer near the Shah's office is a bit disconcerting. Outside, of course there's a park, with lots of people hanging out in the shade, and it's here that I first heard the first dissenting declaration by the local citizenry, "I want the SHAH BACK!" said an old woman.

Palace museums aside, everything is up to date in Tehran. McDonalds is nowhere to be seen, but Nokia is, and a trip to a typical shopping mall shows that underneath the officially required outerwear, women like sexy. There's lots of heavy makeup and evidence of nose-jobs. I also noticed people wearing necklaces with the zoroastrian Ormizad symbol on it.

Shi'a Moslems are more laid back on some things than Sunnis, especially in the arts, where the human form is not taboo as it is in some Arab countries (Iran is NOT Arab). Art is heroic, both poetry and pictures are treasured even more than in the west.

After three days, two of which were partly dedicated to recovering from jet-lag, we went to the "domestic" airport and boarded a plane to our next destination, Shriaz.

My trip to Persia part one: Introduction

2008-07-12T06:04:00.000-07:00

Few countries are as historically important as Persia. Not Iran, Persia. True, the area was to some extent called "Aryan" or "iran" on and off for millenia for the last two and a half thousand years, it's been Persia, and that's what most of the people consider themselves, Persian. They speak Farsi (Persian), not Irani, but that's a discussion for later. For now, let's discuss why anyone in their right mind would travel half way around the world and back and spend a quarter-year's salary (minimum wage) to go there for two weeks.

Before the 9/11 attacks, there was a company called "Now Voyager" which specialized in what were then called "courier flights." Back in those days, it was cheaper for a company to buy a plane ticket and use the luggage space than to just ship the packages. So they would sell the seat to some poor fool who just needed a change of underwear and a small napsack that fit in the overhead bin for up to 90% off, and viola! You could spend a week in Hong Kong, or London, Paris or Rome, for almost no money. Then there were other ways to get across the atlantic cheap, and for a thousand bucks, you could go clear around the world...and I did.

I became an invenerate tourist, and still am. It gets me mad when someone says "I"m not a tourist, I'm a traveller, as if something was crass about the idea of seeing someplace for the first time with one's eyes and mouth open in wonderment. Tourism is an honorable activity, going back thousands of years. Hell, the Crusades were fought to protect tourists for crying out loud. Allah himself, through the prophet Mohammed (allegedly) demanded that his followers go to Mecca to see the sights there at least once in their lives.

God himself, you can't get a better endorsement than that!

Some countries are harder to get to than others. Take Cuba for example. It's illegal under most circumstances, and I went there under a special license just before the Bush administration decided to suspend them. Other places have "State department advisories" against them, but that doesn't mean that you're not allowed to go there, however there are some countries that just won't let you in. Libya for example refuses to issue visas, and even when they do, they don't always honor them. That's a very hard nut to crack, and I'll do it some day.

Global Exchange is a lefty group promoting things like "fair trade" and Hugo Chavez. One of the things they do is tours of places who's governments hate our guts, or have a leftist bent, Venuzuela, for example. Propaganda tourism. (the late Spalding Grey did a brilliant description of this in his Monster in a Box)They're pretty much the only people who've managed to get regular tours of NORTH Korea, and one of the few who organize jaunts to Iran, although one of their "delegations" was too loud in her advocacy, and they got banned for a year. So poor people bitching is not on the agenda for this trip, which is fine and dandy with me. The main problem was the expense and that you had to be accepted.

I obviously WAS accepted, and after about six weeks of waiting, the Iranian interest section gave the okay. The visa was expensive, and because it took so long we had to pay the special overnight fee as well (the Iranians took three days anyway), and there were lots and lots of dos and don'ts, especially when it came to dress. The Chador and all that. Global Exchange spend a lot of time and money getting off the blacklist, and they didn't want to get back one, which is completely understandable.

Even with the isolation of luxury hotels and a bus tour, we seven tourists managed to make contact with quite a few ordinary Persians, as well as Azeris, Turkomen and indogenes. (I also got two small rugs, it's friggen' PERSIA for crying out loud). My knowledge of the people is cursory at best, but it's far better than what we get out of the media. I'm not going to talk about the dynamics of the group or anything like that because that's mostly irrelevant (Mexican lawyers, college sophomore marxists and minor movie stars) just what I saw and read about while I was there.

I love Persia and hate Iran, by the time I"m finished, I hope you know why.

Autumn leaves

2007-11-06T09:33:00.001-08:00

Autumn has come to New York at last. For a reason that is as yet unknown, the City’s trees change color far later than the surrounding areas. Generally, while leaves in Vermont or South ’Jersey turn all sorts of colors, here in Manhattan they generally just turn yellow then brown before falling off and mucking up the sidewalk.

I’ve always felt cheated by this, for this time of year is the Plant kingdom’s chance to party, and the riot of color can be truly breathtaking. The damn problem is that one has to get all the way to the outer suburbs to even get a really good view. But there’s really no choice in the matter. All we get to look forward to is the decorative cabbage around the end of December.

If done right, leaf watching can be as a rewarding experience as amateur astronomy, except the travel expenses are greater. They start turning in Hudson Bay near the Arctic in the middle of August and end during Christmas time in mid-Florida. Peak color is a difficult proposition to predict due to global warming, but if you manage to hit it just right, the rewards are amazing.
Nature’s artists: Autumn leaves in New York

By eric lurio

The reason this happens is that trees have feelings. Not feelings as we know them, but they can sense changes in temperature and the like, and when the water in the ground or the air reaches a certain temperature for a certain length of time, then they know it’s time to stop drinking the sunlight and get ready for bed. How they figure this out will probably remain a mystery for decades to come.

Each tree is an individual, and they start pulling the chloroplasts, that’s how they feed themselves, out of their leaves at different rates depending on whether they’re lazy or hungry or their roots are too dry. Light and shade have their effect too, sometimes a tree would pull the chloroplasts out of just the areas of the leaves that are shaded by other trees and leave the rest green for a bit longer to drink more sun while it lasts. That requires some really detailed control, which is pretty amazing for something that doesn’t have the semblance of a brain or nervous system!

Color depends on the species and how individual trees are feeling at any given moment. Evergreens, obviously don’t shed their leaves at any particular time, and when they do, they just gulp the green stuff and sugar down quickly into their trunks and let the things turn quickly brown while new needles grow in to replace them. Ginkgoes, those bizarre living fossils descended from the ancestors of Pine clan, turn yellow from the edges inward, and for the most part just abandon the chlorophyll in the leaves when they fall to the ground. Oaks generally turn lighter, but the star of the show is the sugar maple.

Maple trees produce prodigious amounts of sugar, which, if the tree decides to leave it there after it drinks up it’s chlorophyll first turns the leaves bright red. Empty leaves are yellow, thanks to a pigment called from xanthophyll so as the tree drinks up the sugar the leaves turn lighter and lighter shades of orange (some species have carotene, which makes carrots orange in their leave, too). Sometimes a single Maple will be a rainbow of color, going through two thirds of the spectrum. Sumac Ivy acts this way too, and White Ash turns purple, which is kind of perverse but adds to the effect.

Unfortunately, the only places the Native New Yorker can see get a good look are in Central, Inwood and Prospect Parks and the best views are limited, timewise. But now seems to be the time, so go for it.

testing one two three

2007-11-05T06:25:00.001-08:00

havent been here for a while.

Document Dump number three: The War

2007-09-16T19:20:00.000-07:00

Redacted
Magnolia Pictures, 90mins, R

Written and Directed
by Brian De Palma

Brian De Palma hates the American military. No not just the American military, everyone IN the American military. Here he's done something few filmmakers have been brave enough to do win wartime, making a film in which the country in which his is living in depicted in the harshest and ugliest terms imaginable. The message of this film is very simple: America, you're a bunch of Nazis!

Had this been almost any other country De Palma would be in jail for something. God Bless the USA.

What De Palma has done is what is called a “mockumentary” a fictional film done in a documentary style, and is very loosely based on what might be an actual rape of an Iraqi girl sometime in 2006.

Starting with the HD video diary of PFC Angel Salazar (Izzy Diaz) [he wants to get into film school], we're introduced, to his platoon, Corporal Gabe Blix (Kel O'Neill), who spends his time reading John O'Hara's "Appointment in Samarra"; a guy named Lawyer McCoy (Rob Devaney), who has a conscience [GASP!]; and racist a couple of morons: B.B. Rush (Daniel Stewart Sherman) and Reno Flake (Patrick Carroll). Their leader, Master Sgt. James Sweet (Ty Jones), is the only thing keeping them in line, Us Yankee scum being barbarians and all. Their mission is to guard the check points, which means that they have to shoot lots of innocent people. [Did you know that in the last 24 months 2,000 Iraqis were killed at checkpoints and only 60 proven to be insurgents?]

So between the shenanigans on Salazar's tape, and a pseudo-Franch documentary with utilizing an inappropriate rendition of Handel's "Sarabande", we are blasted with the full propaganda message again and again. Our boys blast away at a car containing a pregnant woman and her brother, and when word gets out, they go and arrest some of the relations. Not only that Rush and Flake decide to go and rape one of the women in the house.

Things get from bad to worse for our boys from there, and as the racist stereotypes they are, get what's coming to them. The film ends with photos of the carnage in Iraq, just to get the point across that the viewer is guilty of supporting a fascist regime.

Who, on a Friday evening or Saturday afternoon would, in his or her right mind, go and see this thing? On the one hand, De Palma is a consummate professional. It's clear he knows what he's doing, but the acting is only mediocre, and the documentary style plays against the film, which really doesn't have much of a plot and characters we don't give a flying fuck about.

Rendition
New Line Cinema, 121mins, R

Directed by
Gavin Hood

Okay, as to the title: Rendition refers to 'extraordinary rendition' -- a term which means that suspected terrorists in the US can be kidnapped and sent to prisons abroad to be questioned and detained without those pesky fifth amendment rights. In other words, director Gavin Hood and writer Kelley Sane have decided to make a propaganda film about how Evil Americans are. Hooray for Hollywood.

The film is in two parts, done in such a way as to mislead the audience as to what is exactly going on. The film begins with an assassination attempt on a certain Mr. Abasi Falwal(Igal Naor), in which a terrorist blows up everyone in a city square in an unnamed North African country, including the boss of a certain CIA agent named Douglas Freeman(Jake Gyllenhaal), who witnesses it all.

The Agency suspects a certain gentleman, and that fellow has been allegedly making calls to an Egyptian engineer with a green card named Anwar El-Ibrahimi(Omar Metwally), and kidnaps him just before he gets to passport control in Washington. When he refuses to give the right answers to the local spook(J.K. Simmons), assistant director Corrinne Whitman(Meryl Streep) orders that he be taken to a professional, Abasi Fawal.

Meanwhile, Anwar's wife Isabella(Reese Witherspoon) is wondering where her husband is, especially since it can be proven he was actually on the plane when it took off and he disappeared in mid-flight. Fortunately, she has friends in high places, an old boyfriend named Alan Smith(Peter Sarsgaard) is working for lilly-livered liberal Sen. Hawkins(Alan Arkin), and they agree to investigate.

At the same time we get to look at Abasi's home life, as his daughter Fatima (Zineb Oukach) has a romance with Khalid (Moa Khouas), who just happens to be the brother of a genuine, card-carrying terrorist with a martyr video and everything.

As Douglas watches as Abasi gives Anwar the third degree, waterboarding and everything, it's obvious that somehow the phone number was wrong and our hero is as innocent as the day is long.

It might have been more interesting if there were more intrigue, not just going through the motions of a propaganda exercise. This is to some extent pro-terrorist, and the ending and penultimate scenes are a cheat. The acting is good, but not great, which is what is needed for such an inferior script. Yeah, Hood is a great director, and deserved his Oscar for “Tsotsi,” but this shows why a script is so very important. This is not something that's important enough or entertaining enough to take the time out to blow real money on. Don't bother.

post toronto docurment dump part one

2007-09-16T19:13:00.000-07:00

Cassandra's Dream
The Weinstein Company, 108mins, PG-13

Written and Directed
by Woody Allen

In the fifth year of his exile in Europe, Woody Allen has decided to give up on comedy. He's not in this particular film, and one can tell why. This is a “Greek Tragedy” in which not a single joke is cracked, and things go from bad to good to worse. He's tried murder before, but he's not Alfred Hitchcock, and while the genius of his direction is there, the writing isn't. He's been tired for years, and if it were not for the casting director, he would be in real trouble.

Terry(Colin Farrell) and Ian Blaine(Ewan McGregor) are brothers, Ian works for his parents(John Benfield and Clare Higgins) in their restaurant and doesn't like it at all, while Terry is an auto mechanic with a major gambling problem. On a rare winning streak, Terry manages to get enough money to pay off a sailboat named “Cassandra's Dream” and that gives them a place to relive their youth, and for Ian to romance women, especially the lovely Angela Stark(Hayley Atwell), an actress with an eye for bigger things.

Lurking in the background is the guy's Uncle Howard(Tom Wilkinson), a fabulously wealthy plastic surgeon and philanthropist, and the apple of his sister's eye. It just so happens that he's going to be in town when Terry has just blown £90 thousand on poker and needs a loan forthwith, and Ian has a business deal pending, so Uncle Howard agrees with one condition, a certain Martin Burns(Phil Davis) is going to testify before a commission, and possibly get Howard thrown in jail for a very long time, and thus Burns should be gotten rid of as soon as possible.

What follows is success and tragedy. Allen manages to get some excellent performances, especially McGregor and Farrell, who give one of the best performances of their careers, and a lovely little supporting role by Sally Hawkins as Terry's live-in girlfriend Kate, but he skips any semblance of dark humor, as he used to great effect in earlier films. Unless you're a “completeist” this isn't worth bothering with.

I'm Not There
The Weinstein Company, 135mins, R

Written and Directed
by Todd Haynes

They called Bob Dylan the “chameleon of rock and roll” during much of his career, when he changed his style from folk to hard rock to something else, changing his religion and all. So it when Todd Haynes came to him with an idea to do a fictionalized biopic with half a dozen or so people playing him at various phases of his life, Dylan agreed. This is, believe it or not, an authorized version.

It's not exactly Bob Dylan, of course, it's a slew of people named
Jack/Pastor John(Christian Bale), Jude(Cate Blanchett), Woody (Marcus Carl Franklin), Billy(Richard Gere), Robbie(Heath Ledger) and Arthur(Ben Whishaw), all of whom manage to have some sort of relation to a part of Dylan's personality and career.

Going back and forth in time, from when Woody, who's a black child riding the rails in 1959, to Billy, who's living in a Western fantasyland in a timeless present, Haynes tries to mine what Dylan is supposed to be at various times in his life, and to some extent succeeds. I say to SOME extent, because this is an uneven film, and the parts with Christian Bale and Heath Leger barely are touched and the part where Ben Whishaw is married to a version of Dylan's wife Sarah named Claire(Charlotte Gainsbourg) seems like it comes from another movie. However, the main focus is Woody Guthrie the Black kid, and Cate Blanchette as the electrified Dylan.

The Blanchett segments take up the greatest part of the film, when s/he's hanging out with the Beatles [the best gag in the film] and sparring with Edie Sedgewick clone Coco Rivington(Michelle Williams), poet Allen Ginsberg(David Cross), and a British journalist(Bruce Greenwood), who's out to expose Jude for what he really is. Not Andy Warhol with real hair, but something more sinister. This really brings together time and place, Still there's a disconnect, especially with Charlotte Ganesbourg's segment, where the Dylan clone barely shows up, and the Richard Gere one, which has nothing to do with anything and is clearly annoying.

Clearly Kate Blanchette's going to get all sorts of nominations for her brilliant performance here, and it's worth the price of admission, although one might leave shaking one's head perplexed, and I guess that's what Dylan himself would want.

No Country for Old Men
Miramax Films, 122mins, R

Written and Directed by
Ethan Coen and Joel Coen

The last time the Coen brothers made a movie it was a version of Homer's “Odyssey,” this time it's a shaggy dog story of a different sort, a cartoonish chase across Texas by a bunch of slightly loopy people trying to get a suitcase full of money. Just up their alley.

The film begins with an unnamed sheriff's deputy(Zach Hopkins) arresting a mysterious stranger, who we later find out is named
Anton Chigurh(Javier Bardem) who is carrying a tank of compressed air. Once they get to the jail, Anton shows us what the tank is for, and we cut to a certain Llewelyn Moss(Josh Brolin) hunting in the desert, when he comes across the tattered remains of what would have made one hell of a cinematic shootout. Apparently, it was over drugs, and there's the aforementioned unattended suitcase full of money, which he takes, and an extra dying of thirst. Taking pity on the fellow, he tells his wife Carla Jean Moss(Kelly MacDonald) he's going to do something really stupid [it's called 'idiot plotting'], which is to return to the scene of the crime and give the extra some water. But of course, there's Anton and a some extras waiting for him. So begins the chase.

Fortunately for Anton, the money has a radio transmitter in it, and he goes around blowing people's brains in with his compressed air device while Llewellen heads off into the sunset in a failed attempt to get away. Meanwhile, the people who own the drugs and the money(Stephen Root and some extras) hire a man called Wells(Woody Harrelson), to find Llewellen before Anton could get him while Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) and his remaining deputy Wendell(Garret Dillahunt) try to figure out what's going on.

We think that the introduction of a whole bunch of what appears to be crucial characters would lead somewhere, but it doesn't. There are lots of red herrings that appear out of nowhere and return from whence they came, both confusing and infuriating the audience. The ending, while from the novel, makes things even worse. As was said, this is a shaggy dog story, and the punch line is just as vapid.

The acting is fine, the Coens always manage to get the top of the profession to get into their films, and the dialogue is punchy, especially when it seems that the film is actually going somewhere.

If you're a fan of the brothers, by all means, go for it, but this is not the best way to blow an afternoon.

Yet More from Toronto

2007-09-14T09:33:00.000-07:00

Elizabeth: The Golden Age
Focus Features, 115mins, PG-13

Written and Directed
by Shekhar Kapur

Here we go again. The Tudors are back. It’s the same old thing plowing the same old ground, generally with the same old people. Now I’m not saying that Elizabeth the First wasn’t a major historical figure, or that her life wasn’t dramatic, but when there’s the fifth or sixth film or TV series in as many years or more, it begins to get a bit much. Since 2005, there has been two miniseries; “The Virgin Queen” and “Elizabeth I” both of which plow pretty much the same ground as this one, and going back in time, there are between 25 and 30 films on the subject of the so-called “virgin queen.”

One can see making a film on a certain subject once every five or ten years, but we’ve been having Tudor overkill, what with these and the Henry VIII miniseries on Showtime® and they keep on going over the exact same ground.

The Spanish King Philip II (Jordi Molla) is extremely mad at English Queen Elizabeth I’s (Cate Blanchett) being an Anglican instead of a Catholic and keeping the former Mary, Queen of Scots (Samantha Morton) prisoner in a castle, so he sends the Spanish Armada. Meanwhile, spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham (Geoffrey Rush) is doing his best to frame Mary for treason, while that dashing explorer Sir Walter Raleigh (Clive Owen) woos both the Queen and her lady-in-waiting Bess Throkmorton(Abbie Cornish). I don’t know if the Raleigh romance has been done much before, but it seems that like it does. HM’s jealous of Sir So-and-so’s playing around with some bimbo lady-in-waiting as the ships from Spain spread preemptive terror before they inevitably sink.

The film, unlike the first one from 1998, is an epic instead of a slasher film. Kapour spends a lot of money on fancy costumes and sheer spectacle as pretty nothing much happens. While Blanchett has a grand old time, and Owen does his best Errol Flynn impression, no one else has all that much to do, especially Morton, who just sits there looking pissed off.

The buildup of suspense as the Armada approaches is disingenuous, as pretty much anyone who’s interested in a film like this knows how it’s going to come out. We KNOW how it’s going to end, so why waste the money? Her great speech could have been done without the shenanigans. They say one way to damn a film is to praise the sets. Let it be done. The sets are magnificent, the acting is rather good, but the script sucks. Wait until it comes to cable.

Lars and the Real Girl
MGM Pictures, 106mins, TBA

Directed by
Craig Gillespie

Lars Lindstrom(Ryan Gosling) is a shy, sensitive soul, who has a bit of a screw loose. He lives somewhere in either the northern Midwest or central Canada in a bungalow just outside the home of his brother Gus(Paul Schneider) and sister-in-law Karin(Emily Mortimer). He’s not violent or really dysfunctional or anything like that, he holds down a job and all, but he has difficulty relating to people and hates being touched.

Everyone in town, wants to fix him up, but that’s not what he wants, well he does, but not exactly that way. When the coworker in the cubicle next to his (Max McCabe) comes upon a website [readoll.com—quite genuine], and shows it to our hero, something strange happens. A large box arrives at Lars’ door and he suddenly announces that he has a new girlfriend named Bianca, whom he wants Gus and Karen to host in the spare bedroom. She's a wheelchair-bound Brazilian-Danish nun on sabbatical to experience the world. The pair are thrilled until they discover she’s plastic.

Poor Bianca has some health problems, so Lars and his family take her to see Dagmar(Patricia Clarkson), the local GP, who also has a degree in psychology. Her advice, play along. Soon, the whole town is into it, and Bianca is having more of a social life than Lars is, and our hero is forced into going on a date with coworker Margo(Kelli Garner). Screenwriter Nancy Oliver has come up with something really strange and wonderful. A film about mental illness where no one gets hurt and everyone is actually rather nice.

This is a story of recovery and growth, not a gross-out comedy like many a filmmaker would do nowadays. The acting is top notch, especially Gosling and Schneider, who could have easily been depicted as one-dimensional cartoons instead of real people. It’s refreshing and extremely likeable. This is one of those films which is worth going full price.

Sleuth
Sony Classics, 88mins, R

Directed by
Kenneth Branagh

Back in 1972, Anthony Shaffer adapted his play “Sleuth” to the silver screen, directed by the great Joseph Mankiewicz, and starring the greater Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine. This is a classic film of it’s kind, was made by most of the same people who created the stage play, and stands the test of time. So why does this have to be remade? Surely, Harold Pinter, who’s a great writer in his own right, doesn’t need to piss on someone else’s work, and while Kenneth Branagh has had trouble getting a distributor of late for his previous couple of films, remaking a classic surely won’t help his reputation. So why do it at all?

Okay, as we know from the original flick, an actor named Milo Tindle(Jude Law) goes to the home of fabulously rich mystery writer
Andrew Wyke(Michael Caine), to demand that the latter divorce his wife so the former can marry her. This leads to all sorts of fun and games with that with Pinter rewriting all that wonderful dialogue that Shaffer originally wrote back in the day. Okay, while some tweaking is needed, in order to update a timeless work, Pinter does something completely unforgivable. He tacks on a completely new final act.

Now one can say,” But it’s HAROLD PINTER!!!! He’s a giant of the theater!” and that would be true, but, even though all sorts of things can be done with the staging and such, the text is generally held sacred, and a book isn’t a play, and this isn’t James Bond, where only the title makes it on screen, or a project where the first version was so bad that the original material cries out for a better adaptation. No. This is a movie that really has no right to be made, sort of like a remake of “Casablanca,” which by the way, came out in 1983.

As to the film itself, the acting is perfectly fine. Jude Law gives one of the best performances of his career, and Michael Caine, who was in the first version, has a wonderful time doing the other part. The thing is by no means bad. Everyone does a professional job from beginning to end, but this is still nowhere near as good as the first version. Rent that, or wait until this comes out on cable.

Jimmy Carter: Man From Plains
Sony Classics, 125min TBA

A documentary Directed
by Jonathan Demme

When I was 19, I went all the way from Washington, DC, where I was attending college, to Westchester County, New York in order to cast my very first vote in an election. I voted for Jimmy Carter and I’ve regretted it ever since. Jimmy Carter has been a force for evil in the world and his getting the Nobel Peace Prize was a travesty of justice.

Sure, he’s done SOME good during his extremely long ex-presidency, building all those homes for example, but for the most part, he’s spent his life coddling dictators and scolding democrats, making sure that American interests are fought at every step of the way. His victims number in the millions.

Late last year, he spewed out an anti-Semitic piece of rubbish called “Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid” and then went on a book tour. He got famed director Jonathan Demme to follow him while he flew around the country signing books and fighting the perfidious Jews, who generally were insulted by his bogus and bigoted meanderings.

This is a puff piece, a promotional video for the book. The Jews are generally depicted as a bunch of whining, ultra-sensitive losers, who loudly protest whenever their evil Zionist masters give the order. This goes from Alan Dershowitz to some jerk on the phone.

This is of course SAINT Jimmy, who carries his own bags and takes commercial airlines [okay, so he flies first class—he IS a former President, after all], and is polite to one and all, especially those who fawn on the autograph line.

Meanwhile, Israel and the “occupied” territories are depicted as Hell on Earth, using years-old footage juxtaposed with footage from the book tour in order to show that nothing has changed and that Gaza is still occupied by the perfidious Jews who won’t let the terrorists free access to Israel proper. The SHAME!

This is a promotional film. It was always supposed to be a promotional film, and while it may have a place showing at the Carter Presidential Library and Museum, it has no place getting money at the local bijou. Demme should be ashamed of himself.

Toronto reviews day something or other

2007-09-14T04:47:00.000-07:00

The Brave One
Warner Bros. Pictures, 122mins, R

Directed by
Neil Jordan

Where have you gone Charles Bronson? I remember “Death Wish I” which was a hell of a good movie, followed by a couple more, which weren't. But that was years ago, and with the series completely forgotten by those younger than middle age, I guess father/son team of Roderick and Bruce A. Taylor, (with script doctor Cynthia Mort to correct mistakes in gender-related plotting) figured that it was about time for a disguised remake.

So the Bronson character isn't a pacifistic businessman this time, but a radio personality named Erica Bain(Jodie Foster), who goes around New York city with a microphone making aural portraits of various neighborhoods for her NPR-sh show. She's engaged to a nice guy named David Kirmani(Naveen Andrews) and they have a large apartment and a cute doggie. In fact, Erica is cute and mousy, that one's almost impatient for the bad guys to show up and ruin this lovely life they have. They do, in a Central Park tunnel at night, and David is killed while Erica is almost so. But she recovers damaged, gets herself a gun, and becomes a stranger to herself, a vigilante, who finds violence everywhere and does something about it. But there's someone on the case, a certain Det. Sean Mercer (Terrence Howard), who's surprisingly sympathetic. He's a fan of the show.

The film is rescued from mediocrity by the performances of Foster and Howard, Foster in particular, who acts the living daylights out of what's mostly a two dimensional cartoon. Her character isn't really real, but Foster manages to push out an extra dimension out of her while she blows people away, something Bronson couldn't actually do all those years ago, but didn't have to.

Not a great action movie by any means, but worth a bargain matinee.

Across the Universe
Columbia Pictures, 133mins, PG-13

Written and Directed
by Julie Taymor

You can't say that Julie Taymor lack's guts. She's done some really brave things in her career, the Broadway version of “The Lion King”, A film version of Shakespeare's worst play, some amazingly creative stage-work that has never been recorded properly, and now this, a noble failure of epic proportions.

This is not a horrible film. Well, parts are horrible, but for the most part it's not. The problem is that it careens between genius and gross incompetence with a breathtaking rapidity going from the ridiculous to the sublime and back with panache that is both glorious and heartbreaking. If you look “uneven” in the dictionary, you may very well see this film's poster.

The film does not begin promisingly. The film begins in the early '60s, where Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood) and Jude (Jim Sturgess) sing to their loves [at this point not each other], early Beatles' songs on sets placed on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Lucy's beau (Spencer Liff) goes off to war while Jude goes forth in search of his lost father(Robert Clohessy), finding him at Princeton University, where our hero meets Lucy's irresponsible brother Max(Joe Anderson), who after taking him up north to meet the family, drops out and goes with Max to Greenwich Villiage, where they shack up with Sadie(Dana Fuchs), Jo-Jo(Martin Luther McCoy) and Prudence(T.V. Carpio) where they start an urban commune of sorts.

From here Lucy joins the bunch, Max goes to Vietnam, and everyone gets stoned, and yadda yadda yadda. There's not much character development, and the songs aren't exactly relevant, in fact many seem to be shoehorned in. Eddie Izzard as Mr. Kite is absolutely horrible, while Joe Cocker in multiple parts singing “Come Together” is fantastic. It seems that Taymor and writers Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais don't have a clue as to what the Beatles and the '60s in general were about, and this subtracts to the whole experience. On many a review, mostly in jest, I have suggested that some films might be more fun to see while stoned, but this seems to be the mother of all those. This may get a slew of both Oscars and Razzie nominations. More's the pity. The performances are generally good, but the effect is a complete waste.

King of California
Millennium Films, 93mins, PG-13

Written and Directed
by Mike Cahill

Miranda(Evan Rachel Wood) is a sixteen year old working at McDonald's. She's been abandoned by her mother years before and her father's in a mental institution, and she's seem to have fallen through the cracks in the system. That's the way she likes it. Then her tidy little world is turned upside down when Charlie(Michael Douglas), that's her dad, comes home and begins to take over her life. He has a treasure map, and in order to make tons of money and restart his relationship with his daughter, he's going to go for it. Miranda, as expected, isn't too thrilled, but decides to go along.

The treasure map leads them to, of all things, a local Costco, where Miranda is delegated to infiltrate.

This is a platonic love story between father and daughter, and as such it works. The reason is that Wood and Douglas have such good chemistry together and the latter has such a good time chewing the scenery. It's really to his taste, and as a lunatic, he brings true joy to the proceedings, which makes the whole silly mess actually somewhat believable. There's talk about Douglas getting another Oscar nomination for this, and it's quite possible, although had it been in a better movie, it might have been a slam dunk.

Meanwhile, it's a harmless bit of fluff that'll be a fine addition to the Netflix cue or on pay-per-view sometime down the road.

Eastern Promises
Focus Features, 100mins, R

Directed by
David Cronenberg

Anna (Naomi Watts) is a midwife working in your average London hospital, when a badly bleeding woman named Tatiana(Sarah-Jeanne Labrosse), who leaves behind a baby and a diary before expiring. Her uncle Yuri (Donald Sumpter), reads Russian but doesn't really want to get involved, but his sister [and Anna's mother] Helen (Sinéad Cusack), convinces him to translate the diary, which holds within it a business card for a restaurant owned by a guy named Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), who is using the place as a cover for his real job, head of the Russian mob.

The diary, of which Anna gives Semyon a copy, implicates him in all sorts of awful stuff, which leads him to dispatch his psychotic son
Kirill (Vincent Cassel) and smarmy chauffeur/clean up guy Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen), to take care of the situation. From here things begin to get complicated. For not everyone is what they seem, and romance, albeit rather twisted, plus internal mafia politics begins to take center stage as layer upon layer of intrigue begins unfold in Steve Knight's nuanced script.

The partnership between David Cronenberg and Viggo Mortensen is beginning to progress, and although it was brilliant in their previous collaboration, “A History of Violence,” this is something which straddles the line between very, very good and truly great.

While Anna is nominally the main character, it's the relationship between Nickolai, Kirill and Semyon which is the actual focus of the film and the ins and outs of the Russian mob in at the end of it's first generation since the fall of the Communist party, the culture and the human element is thoroughly explored in a particularly graphic way. After all it is David Cronenberg. This is one of those films, which is going to be deservedly showered with award nominations. Definitely worth full price.

In the Valley of Elah
Warner Independent Pictures, 119mins, R

Written and Directed
by Paul Haggis

Always beware the term “based on a true story. I don't know how close to the actual events this film is, but I guess it doesn't really matter. This is an attack on the Bush administration, and the fact that something like this actually happened only adds to it's believability. However, this doesn't make this as good a thriller as it's supposed to be. It's a procedural drama like “Law and Order” or “CSI”.

Hank Deerfield (Tommy Lee Jones) is a retired Military policeman, who lost a son in an accident years before. He has another son(Jonathan Tucker, who's seen only in flashbacks) who's just come back from Iraq. He and his wife Joan(Susan Sarandon) are looking forward to seeing him again when he gets a call from the base telling him the son is AOL. Hank decides to go and investigate himself.

Det. Emily Sanders(Charlize Theron) is a single mother living with a young son(Devin Brochu), whom she conceived with her boss Chief Buchwald(Josh Brolin), which is something everyone at the police station knows about and holds against her. But that begins to change when a gristly murder is discovered on what turns out to be Army property, which makes it the jurisdiction of Lt. Kirklander(Jason Patric), who may or may not be trying to cover up the acts of to of the victim's buddies(Wes Chatham and Jake McLaughlin). The victim, of course, turns out to be Hank's son.

With the investigation on the one side, and a bunch of videos from the war on the other, this is an exercise in agitprop, political propaganda in the form of theater, and as such, it works. Paul Haggis gets good performances out of his entire cast, and while the ending is entirely predictable, there's still quite a bit of suspense. This is definitely worth a bargain matinee.

Toronto day five.

2007-09-08T05:02:00.000-07:00

HELP ME EROS

Written and Directed
by Lee Kang-Sheng

Ah Jei(Lee Kang-Sheng), a young, penniless stock broker, is desperate. All he has left in life is his palatial, apartment, his indoor marijuana forest, and lots of women to have sex with. One of these is Shin (Ivy Yi), who sells betel nuts on the sidewalk dressed as a lingerie model or hooker. Apparently, Taipei betel stores resemble open-air strip joints. Which is the only cool factoid in this movie, which is for the most part both bizarre and boring. Most people would be more than happy with that situation except for the being penniless part. But being broke is a major thing for Ah Jei and feeling really depressed about the fact that he's going to lose his fabulous lifestyle,

So he calls the suicide hotline, where he's given to Chyi (Jane Liao) who's a bit on the zoftic side and has a pleasant telephone manner. Ah Jei falls in love immediately, and sets about stalking her, thinking that she looks like the supermodel-esque betel nut salespeople who we see in clothing that barely exists.

Chyi's husband(Dennis Nieh) likes to cook all sorts of weird dishes, and she's forced to bathe with eels, who are hanging out in the bathtub while waiting for the next fancy dinner (PeTA will love that) aside from this an a whole lot of gratuitous simulated sex, nothing much happens. Three's no character development at all, and as to the sex, there's not enough.

The whole thing's a tremendous waste of time, and it's probably not going to get a theatrical release in the “States anytime soon.

ENCARNACION

Written and Directed
by Anahi Berneri

It's an old story, hick chick goes to the big city. She becomes famous, then he goes home to no acclaim whatsoever because everyone thinks she's too big for her britches.

Aging B-list actress Encarnacion “Erni” Levier (Silvia Pérez) is getting by. Sure she's no longer Ms. Firecracker sex goddess, but she's still doing TV and commercials and getting in the gossip columns. When her niece
Ana (Martina Juncadella) sends her an invitation to her quincenera [a Hispanic bat mitzvah equivelent], she decides to pay the folks back home a visit.

Ana is thrilled, of course, and so is the guy who runs the hotel she's staying at(Luciano Cáceres). However, her sister and in-laws stick up their noses. This is a painful tale of rejection, which has a bit of genuine humor here and there, but is mostly a sad bit of business indeed. However, it will probably get the remake rights sold as a vehical for some ageing starlet who's glory days are past and needs a bit of a career boost.

WINGS OF A DREAM

Written and Directed
by Golan Rabbani

Bangladesh is one of those contries that seems cursed. Each year half the country gets inundated by floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, you name it. It's prominently depicted on commercials for missionary “adoption” programs, and is generally at the bottom of every list of prosperous countries outside of Africa. So of course, one would find filmmakers promoting the notion of money being the root of all evil, and this is about as blatant as you can possibly get.

Fazlu (Mahmuduzzaman Babu) hawks tiger balm with the help of young son Ratan (Ratan). They do okay, but not great in their land of intense poverty. One day, they get enough to get Ratan a new pair of used pants. This makes everyone in the family very happy.
But since the pants are used, Mom (Prachy) has to wash them. So she goes to the well, and empties out the pockets only to discover some strange banknotes denominated in the hundreds of thousands. There's a Black general on them, Zaire [Nowadays, the “democratic” republic of the Congo]. To be exact, which tells the foreign viewer that these things are completely worthless, but they of course don't know that.

So Dad goes to his old pal Siraj (Fazlur Rahman Babu), a local mucky-muck, who, for a slice of the proceeds, agrees to help our protagonist find out how much the bills are worth and where to have them changed into Bangladeshi rupees. The prospect of immense wealth soon begins to take it's toll on Fazlu and his family, as Siraj's gold-digging sister-in-law Rehana (Shamima Islam Tusti) starts doing her thing and Fazlu begins to fall in love, starting the local tongues wagging.

The film is reminiscent of many a tale going back to Mark Twain's “The Million Pound Note” and before, and with one or two exceptions concentrates on a gentle humor that's not all that common in south Asian cinema. It probably won't see an American release.

MY WINNIPEG (SP)

A documentary
by Guy Maddin

Winnipeg, Manatoba is one of those cities which has very little to recommend it, and Guy Maddin's very personal portrait of his hometown doesn't help the cause of tourism there. It is a poetic meditation - a docu-fantasia, if you will of what it was and what it is. A piece of twisted nostalgia which is both weird and unsettling, a place which has seen better days, but can't really remember when.

Madden, who's previous films have been off-the-wall explorations of defunct genres, is still adverse to color film, although he does use a clip of it or two in his otherwise black-and-white clip show. The new footage is of a person playing himself trying to escape from the town and failing, while reminiscing about multi-level swimming pools and disbanded hocky teams. There are some strange and silly reenactments of conversations between him, his siblings and their mother, but for the most part, the whole thing is rather parochial. The film was produced by the Canadian Documentary channel and is most unlikely to be seen outside Canada, which is just as well.

Chop Shop

Written and Directed
by Ramin Bahrani

HD video has revolutionized the movie business. With only an inexpensive camera, one can make a film on absolutely no budget which has the look and feel of a major Hollywood product, which is perfect for budding auteur Ramin Bahrani, who's “Man Push Cart” won great acclaim and made almost nothing at the box office. So another zero-budget feature might make the festival circuit and after that lead to a REAL movie.

Willet's Point, Queens, right near Shea stadium, where the Mets play, is a vast wasteland filled with garbage and auto repair shops. One can see why it interested Baharani, the place looks as exotic as India. Here 12-year-old Alej (Alejandro Polanco), an orphan of sorts who hustles his way through life in order to support himself and his sister Isamar (Isamar Gonzales), who also has to do a lot of things she's not proud of. They aren't homeless though, they live in a tiny apartment in Rob's (Rob Sowulski) garage, where Alej works grabbing customers. Isamar generally works selling food in a lunch wagon, while in the evenings, she has more lucrative and less savory ways of making money.

The main conflict in the film is between the siblings and the American dream. They want to get themselves their very own lunch wagon, which Alej's friend Carlos' (Carlos Zapata) uncle wants to sell them. The quest for money leads our hero to do some things he shouldn't.

This film was done, as was said before, on a zero budget and with ameture thespians. The two leads do a reletiveily decent job at it, and the script is more than adequate for something this intimate and exotic. It's worth a place on the netflix cue, but not full price, mainly because it looks like it's made for TV, and thus is better on the small screen.

BLIND

Written and Directed
by Tamar van den Dop

Marie (Halina Reijn) a young albino woman struggling with her looks is hired to read books to a blind man named Ruben (Joren Seldenslachts), who's mother(Katelijne Verbeke) is very rich and is himself a violent brat. It's Marie's job to tame him. As she has low self esteem, she takes the job because she considers herself a monster and he can't see her. Thus begins an overly literary love story that's both glorious and horrible at the same time.

The glorious part is the acting. Both Reijn and Seldenslachts give bravura performances, especially after the plot twist and Marie's fleeing the mansion. But the film is itself maudlin and rather unbelievable. This is an above mediocre film, just above the “gilded turd” category. Don't expect it to play around the local arthouse anytime soon.

Toronto: stuff you're going to actually see.

2007-09-04T17:17:00.000-07:00

Galas and stuff:

Michael Clayton
Warner Bros. Pictures, 120mins, R

Written and Directed
by Tony Gilroy

The people who brought you “Erin Brockovich” have returned with another anti-corporate melodrama, this time it's entirely fictional, which means that it can get a bit nastier in it's storytelling.

Michael Clayton (George Clooney) is what might be called a glorified janitor. He cleans up the messes that the major law firm of Kenner, Bach & Ledeen can't exactly litigate above board. For this, managing partner Marty Bach (Sydney Pollack) is eternally grateful.

One of the messes our hero has to clean up was made by master litigator Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson), who disrobed in front of everybody at a deposition and scared the heck out of everyone, and so Michael is called in, but this doesn't happen until later, although we hear much of Arthur's rant. However, we do see our hero's car blow up in the first ten minutes, which is when everything goes into flashback…

The problem with Arthur is that he's been working defense on a case in which the evil U/North corporation allegedly poisoned a whole bunch of innocent people with it's pesticide sprays. Arthur knows that the charges are true and so does U/North chief council
Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton), who knows that her career is on the line and Arthur has to be stopped.

Now this is compelling enough. The parts about our hero's other problems are to some extent killing time. Sure the kid who plays his son is cute, and the part about his being 80 grand in debt is certainly intriguing, but they detract from the main thrust of the story, which is really worthwhile in and of itself. Clooney gives a splendid performance, but it's Wilkinson who's the real star of the show. It's one of those performances which has “Oscar” written all over it, and there's no doubt that he's going to get at least a best supporting actor nom. His performance is sooo good it's worth the price of the movies in and of itself. Thus you should go see it.

The Jane Austen Book Club
Sony Classics, 105mins, PG-13

Written and directed
by Robin Swicord

How to be literary without being literary? Well, that's the mission of many a chick flick, and as this is one of those, why not focus on the inventor of the genre? Jane Austen is just below Shakespeare in the pantheon of British writers and has been in print longer than any woman in the history of the world, so using her oeuvre as a scaffolding on which to construct a slight romance seems like a good idea.

Jocelyn (Maria Bello) and Sylvia (Amy Brenneman) have been friends for, like, ever, and when we meet them, the latter and her husband Daniel (Jimmy Smits) are attending the funeral of one of Jocelyn's dogs. While laughing about the thing at dinner afterwards, Dan tells Sylvia for a divorce. He's in love with someone else. Syl is, naturally devastated, and in response, Jocelyn and her old pal Bernadette (Kathy Baker) decide to distract her by starting up a book club, where they'll discuss the works of the divine JA.

So, with three members already accounted for, plus Sylvia's lesibian daughter Allegra (Maggie Grace) [this is the '00z, remember, we have to have at least one lesbian in one movie], who's recovering from a parachuting accident, they need two more members to lead the discussion on the two other novels [Austen's snarky “History of England” doesn't count], a mousy French teacher named Prudie (Emily Blunt) and an SF fan named Grigg (Hugh Dancy), who is single and straight, and recruited.

So we go through six months where everyone gets their consciousness raised through the good graces of JA and, with some expected bumps on the road, everyone lives happily ever after. It's cute, and almost too saccharin for words, but that's almost, and as such is quite tolerable. This is something that a guy can bring his honey on a date to, and that way she'll be grateful.

The Assassination of Jesse James
by the Coward Robert Ford
Warner Bros. Pictures, 160mins, R

Written and Directed
by Andrew Dominik

Bob Ford shot Jesse James in the back in the spring of 1882 and instead of being thanked for getting rid of Missouri's worst terrorist, he has been saddled with a reputation as a coward and a turncoat. The murder of the murderer has been forever the stuff of legend, and auteur Andrew Dominik has decided to dissect said legend in the only way it deserves, in a three hour epic that doesn't actually seem that long.

It's the waning days of the Garfield administration, and Frank(Sam Shepard) and Jesse James(Brad Pitt) are preparing to do one last robbery before calling it quits after 14 years. They've brought along the membership of their usual gang who aren't already in jail, Ed Miller(Garret Dillahunt), the James' cousin Wood Hite(Jeremy Renner), Dick Liddil(Paul) and Charley Ford(Sam Rockwell), who brings his hero-worshiping baby brother Bob(Casey Affleck) along, much to Frank's disgust and Jesse's chagrin.

This is the story of hero-worship gone wrong. The great man not only has feet of clay, but is a sociopathic monster to boot. As an epic, the film goes forward on a leisurely pace, letting us get to know the characters in a way that we expect only in TV series.

This is Pitt's best role since “12 Monkeys” He manages to chew the scenery with a panache he doesn't always manage to have, and his chemistry with Affleck is an interesting one. The supporting cast is excellent, with Renner and Schneider giving surprisingly strong performances. Rockwell is great as comic relief, but it's Affleck's movie, and here he far surpasses anything his brother Ben has ever done. This is the year's epic western and one wonders why it took so long to get out of the cutting room. See it.

Run, Fat Boy, Run
Picturehouse, 95mins, PG-13

Directed by
David Schwimmer

Okay, first the bad news. The “Fat Boy” in the title is actually thin. Not anorexic, mind you, but Simon Pegg looks fit during the entire film. It's an insult to fat boys everywhere. Then there's Michael Ian Black's script, which is actually rather predictable. Our hero Dennis (Mr. Pegg) leaves extremely pregnant fiancée Libby (Thandie Newton) at the alter, and his life goes downhill from there. Fair enough.

He's now a security guard at a clothing store, and is still in love with Libby and their son Jake(), and of course, she's in love with someone else. That someone else is a rich stockbroker named Whit(Hank Azaria), who is perfect in every way so just has to be the villain. The usual competition starts out, and it's clear that our hero is going to have a time of it, but as this is a comedy, he has to win right? But how to do it.

Now marathon running is popular nowadays, and even London has one. So when Whit announces that he's going to paricipate, Dennis decides to get in the game as well, and so he's stuck. His friend Gordon(Dylan Moran) has money on him, and his landlady Maya (India de Beaufort) says that if he doesn't do it, she's going to throw him out on his ear. So her father, Mr. Ghoshdashtidar (Harish Patel), and Gordon start coaching, and there follows a number of minor laughs before the slightly surprising, but inevitable ending.

This is not Pegg's best work, or any of the cast's, but it's a harmless enough comedy, and as such works as a pleasant bit of fluff. Worth a bargain matinee.

toronto: foreign language crapola.

2007-09-04T17:07:00.000-07:00

CONTRE TOUTE ESPÉRANCE

Written and Directed
by Bernard Émond

A woman is covered in blood and refuses to speak to the police inspector. There may have been a murder. So who dunnit?

International capitalism and globalization, of course! The woman, Réjeanne (Guylaine Tremblay) is a switchboard operator, and she and her truck driver husband, Gilles (Guy Jodoin), buy a beautiful house somewhere in the Montreal suburbs, and are about to live happily ever after when Giles has a stroke. They try their best to make ends meet, but the evil, heartless capitalists sell the company to another one, leaving Réjeanne and Gilles in a bit of a bind. Then he has another stroke.

We go back and forth in time between the inspector investigating and the sad decline and fall of our couple while we wait for her to do something really violent, which is why the film is so disappointing. There's little drama milked out of what is very fertile material. The thing plods along, and while Jodion does a serviceable job as a stroke victim, Tremblay and the rest of the cast just walk around in a daze, and that's when Tremblay isn't supposed to be doing that.

Emond just can't get the script to rise above the level of mediocrity, even though there's an actually interesting idea there. Oh, well.

CORROBOREE, (96', Australia)

Written and Directed
by Ben Hackworth

A dying theatre director hires a young man named Conor (Conor O'Hanlon) to visit him in a meditation retreat and perform scenes from the director's life. Why he does this is a mystery. But this is an obtuse art film, and auteur Hackworth isn't here to entertain but mystify us with his astounding intelligence and insight. He's clearly over our heads.

Now, Conor must visit different rooms over the weekend and in these rooms, and with five actresses who portray key women in the
director's life, live it, so when they actually encounter each other, Conor won't have to fake “compassion” for the old man. Hey, as long as the kid gets paid, why not? The conceit lets Hackworth film what has to be some of the worst acting ever put on film, or at least on film that made it to a major film festival. The women are far better than Conor, but that doesn't make them anything above mediocre.

The ending is out of left field, but it makes as much sense as the rest of the movie, which is none whatsoever. Exactly what is the great message here might never be known, but one thing is for sure, it's not even worth a look when it comes out on cable, assuming it ever does.

FOUR WOMEN

Written and Directed by
Adoor Gopalakrishnan

Apparently, somewhere in Bollywood, auteur managed to snag Nandita Das for her latest bomb. I'm sure that Ms. Das will survive.

This film is, in a word, horrible. Based on a quartet of short stories that, if the film is a guide, must all be less than a page long. The episodes are about half an hour long each, and they seem padded. Nothing happens at all through most of them (I walked out during the third one, so I can't tell if the last was any good) and the second one especially, where a groom spends half the episode eating food while everyone else looks on. Why waste the time and expense to film this?

The acting is horrible. India has a huge film industry, and there are plenty of excellent thespians running around. None of the people in the 2_ episodes I saw could emote. This was zombie city here, everyone sleepwalking through their lines, except for one guy in the second episode, and that was for about ten seconds. That doesn't help.

The chances of this actually getting a theatrical release in the United States is slim to none, so don't worry about this.

BUDDHA COLLAPSED OUT OF SHAME

Directed by
Hana Makhmalbaf

Amidst the wreckage beneath the fallen historical statues of the Buddha blown up by the Taliban, a six-year-old Afghan girl named Baktay (Nikbakht Noruz) goes on a quest to get to school. She's convinced by her neighbor Abbas(Abbas Alijome) to go abandon her little brother, who's she's been watching for an absent mother, and procure school supplies.

No one really seems to care. This is Afghanistan, where nothing has been right since before the mother was born. The kids are all feral, and gangs of pretweens terrorize everyone else pretending to be the Taliban. It's clear to see what happens when a country is bombed back into the stone age. This is more sad than cute, and very exotic, although it's not all that interesting, but that's what makes Iranian cinema so endearing. This is about as far as they can go and not end up in the poky or in exile.

It's whimsical and has cute children, which are allegorical. However, as Freud famously said: Sometimes a “cigar is just a cigar.”

toronto again!

2007-09-04T17:01:00.000-07:00

This is the eighth year I've attended the festival, and everything is routine, except of course for the bedbugs, and even then I've had them before once up here, so without further adoo, here's the first batch of reviews:

My Kid Could Paint That
Sony Classics, 82mins, TBA

A Documentary by
Amir Bar-Lev

There's a story I heard about a famous abstract artist who sold a piece to the Museum of Modern Art in New York somewhere between a half and a quarter century ago: It seems that years after he sold the thing, he was visiting the museum and noticed the work. He complained the thing was hanging upside down. One of my earliest memories was of my mother taking us to the selfsame museum and commenting that one of the pieces hanging looked exactly like the thing I had brought home from kindergarten some weeks before. How's that for a segue?

Abstract art has always to some extent been a fraud. It's more about marketing than anything else, or at least since about 1950. The famous “white on White” where someone with a puts up a blank canvas and everyone ooo's and ahh's isn't over by any means. There's just an alternative by people with real talent at painting and drawing. Sometimes it appears that this stuff is sooo bad that it might have been done by a slightly challenged child, someone like little Marla Olmstead.

Marla was two when her father began exhibiting her work at a local coffee shop. The stuff seemed so good that gallery owner and artist
Anthony Brunelli, offered to have a formal show at his gallery in mid-2004. This caught the attention of the editors of the local paper and they sent journalist Elizabeth Cohen to have a look. She wrote a piece, which was picked up by the wire services and then all hell broke loose. Little Marla was getting up to twenty five grand for her work, and everybody who was anybody wanted one.

Now Mark and Laura Olmstead were, and are rather protective of their kids, and Mom seems very wary of the term “prodigy”, something that the documentarian demonstrates by briefly showing old footage of little children playing violins and such in front of rapt audiences. But while everyone in the world seemed to agree that Marla was adorable, whether or not she was actually painting those so-called masterpieces was another question, and here, we get into problems. Was Mark Olmstead perpetrating a hoax on the artistic intelligentsia by painting the works himself and signing it with his daughter's name?

No less than Charlie Rose tries to debunk little Marla and does a pretty good job at it. The film switches gears as the Olmsteads and their entourage go on the defensive, and while there's a happy ending of sorts, it's still kind of fishy.

The film is really fun to watch and makes you wonder, which is what a good doc is supposed to do.

OBSCENE

A documentary by
Neil Ortenberg and
Daniel O'Connor

Have you ever wondered why there are R-rated movies? Well, once upon a time, the definition of smut was a lot broader than it is today. What would now be considered PG-13 would be pornographic, you know the song: “in olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking…”
Well that was the way it was as late as the 1950s and '60s, and then a hero arose to change it all. His name is Barney Rosset, and around 1948 he bought a tiny, failing publishing house called Grove Press and with it changed the world. I think for the better, but not everyone agrees with me on that account.

Rosset fought titanic battles in court so he could put out some of the most forbidden works of the explosive post-war decades, including Lady Chatterley's Lover, Tropic of Cancer and Naked Lunch, all of which are considered today to be classics. The documentarians interview Rossit and a bunch of literati from both past and present, to tell the story of the rise and fall of one of the unsung heroes of free speech, because, after all, the term “banned in Boston” actually was true. Along the way, Rossit and his magazine, the Evergreen Review, introduced the wider world to underground comics and Allen Ginsburg, Waiting for Godot and I am Curious (Yellow). America is a different place because of Rossit.

This is one riveting documentary, and it should be seen by pretty much anyone who's the least bit interested in American history.

NIGHT

Written and Directed by
Lawrence Johnston

Night is dark. I bet you didn't know that, right? Oh you did. Well, then I've spoiled the movie for you. That IS after all the great revelation of this turkey. Every filmfest needs a stinker and that's why they invited this.

Award winning director Lawrence Johnston should be ashamed of himself and so should composer Cezary Skubiszewski, while the cinematography is okay and the score isn't horrible, the film is. It starts well, with an explosion of sorts, reminding one of “Koyaniskiatsi”, but then the narration starts and the film begins to lose it's way. As was said before, the main revelation is that night, unlike the day, is generally dark and most people actually don't work at their professions, but go out to the local pub or the movies, or even-¬GASP!-go to sleep! Who knew?

The thing starts getting old in the first fifteen minutes and gets lamer and lamer, with the possible exception of some pictures of the moon. The same pictures of people walking around Sydney and Melbourne is boring, and near the hour mark becomes well nigh impossible. Even the part where someone describes a murder she witnessed is tedious as can be, and well, why would anyone want to see this thing? That's the real mystery. Stay far away.

A JIHAD FOR LOVE

A Documentary
by Parvez Sharma

Yes, folks, there are homosexuals in the Moslem world, and they don't have pleasant lives, that is unless they live in India or Pakistan. If you happen to play for that team, this may be interesting in a kind of “National Geographic” kind of way, but for the most part, there is no there there. We know that most religious fanatics aren't particularly gay friendly, but that's not any real news. The same thing happens in the Christian world, and the reactions and situations are surprisingly the same, and this despite the fact that the Christian world is currently the far more tolerant of the two.

So we follow a gay imam in South Africa, some lovers escaping Iran in turkey, some Algerians in France, and some Lesibians doing research on exactly what the Koran has to say about THEM (apparently nothing).

It's all very nice, but there's not actually anything to write home about. Don't bother.

the cruise, part three: Venice

2007-08-19T12:47:00.000-07:00

Among the weirdest cities in the World, Venice, Italy must rank among the top five. I don’t mean this in a BAD way actually, but the place is completely so unlike anyplace else in the world that it cannot be called anything else.

Other cities have canals. You’ve got Amsterdam and Stockholm, both of which are strewn with canals close to the water’s edge, but they have streets, and trams and other forms of mass transportation, which make those towns seem relatively normal. Also, while they have museums, they are not, of themselves museums. Venice, having lost its independence and its livelihood over two centuries ago, is.

The “serene republic” lasted a thousand years and a century before being actually invaded for the first time by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1797. The reason for this was because of its intense weirdness. It’s a bunch of islands in the middle of a lagoon, connected by a series of bridges. Here, it developed a unique culture and set for the to build an empire which ruled over the islands of what are now Croatia and Greece, trading with the Byzantine and later, various Moslem empires in the east to become the cultural portal of the western world during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Even as new trade routes made Venice less lucrative, the serene Republic continued to thrive, attracting artists and architects, poets and visionaries. But that’s all gone now…

When the French finally destroyed the old Republic, they destroyed its reason for being, stole it’s art, and chiseled out many of it’s ancient symbols from the walls. When the Napoleonic wars were over in 1815, it was decided to give the city to the Austrians, After a couple of decades of poverty and the revenge of it’s ancient enemies, the Venetians decided to make the place over into a tourist trap.

Which is what it has been ever since.

If you get off in either the Point de Roma, where there’s a bus station an a few cars, or the train station on the next island over, you will notice a change once you get to the Vaperetto, or waterbus, station. With a few exceptions, All the buildings are really old. Not that they actually all are, but the weirdness of the place much be preserved. The Medieval and Renaissance architectural designs are faithfully recreated on the facades of many a new Palazzo. Tourism is all that the city has left, and the glory of this ancient Disneyland must be preserved. When the great bell tower, which is right in the middle of St. Mark’s square mysteriously and suddenly disintegrated 998 years after it was built, it was replaced by an exact replica (well, not exactly exact, there’s an elevator now) and with a few exceptions like the train station, this dictum of architectural ultraconservatism has been scrupulously followed.

Which brings us to the Gardens of the Biennale, where the Biennial art fair has been taking place every other year since 1895 as a way, naturally, to attract tourists. As a park on the eastern edge of town, the various countries that have participated over the years have been allowed to set up permanent pavilions where hundred of temporary exhibitions take place. This goes for the off years as well, why waste valuable space, right? But the big show is in odd years.

The Gardens aren’t the only place for exhibits, there’s a place called the Arsenal, where they have some too, and finally, on the Lido, which is a large island nearby with some pretty nice beaches, is where the film festival takes place every August and September. More on that later…

The Biennale’s theme for this year is; “Think With Your Senses, Feel with Your Mind.” Which is another way of saying “This is all bullshit! Give us your eight euros and deal with it.” Granted, not all of the works shown this year’s suck. There are some excellent works to seen, particularly Austria’s Herbert Brandl, who’s an abstract expressionist, or Svetlana Ostopovici, who’s more realistic, then there’s lots of other stuff both interesting and “interesting.” Then there’s lots of what I like to call “con art” in which some talent-less jerks with sharp tongues con certain curators into putting the most godawful crap up, from anti-Semitic graffiti to give-away posters by California artist Felix Gonzalez Torrez, one of which symbolizes the end of art by having a black rectangular frame of nothing.

Much of the work shown is heavily influenced by advertising and comics, which is where, after all most of the money for creativity is coming for nowadays, but for the most part, there’s nothing really new here, just inarticulate recycling of concepts that have been floating around for the better part of half a century. Granted, I didn’t have the time to give everything more than a cursory look. The Biennale, like the city that surrounds it, requires far more than the day or two most people give it.

Due to the big show, the Biennale’s film department has been rather tardy with the printing of the posters and programs for their big film festival, which is supposed to start in only two weeks. The oldest of Europe’s many film festivals, Venice’s dates back to 1935, and, with the natural break for World War II, had been giving out it’s prestigious “Golden Lion” awards ever since. Taking place on the Lido, where there are fewer architectural restrictions and an actual beach for beautiful women to parade around in their bikinis. This year, as in most, there’s an eclectic selection of Hollywood, Independent, and European government sponsored films which are going to start generating buzz for various awards like the Oscars and the Golden Globes.

If you only have a day or two, just go to St. Mark’s square and hang out for a while, and go left towards the Rialto bridge in the direction of the train station. Then head west along the Grand canal, stopping at various churches to look at the art, which, as every good agnostic or atheist knows, is the only saving grace the Catholic church has ever had. You will also notice that there are no streets, just sidewalks and canals, and a very strange and beautiful landscape.

The Cruise, part two: Dubrovnick

2007-08-19T12:46:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time there was a land called Yugoslavia. It was full of enchanted forests and beautiful scenery and was ruled by an enlightend despot named Joseph Broz Tito. It was nominally Communist, but they didn’t really care all that much about ideology, except, perhaps for keeping Tito in power for as long as he kept breathing. He kept the peace and the Soviets out, and sometime around 1950, his regime decided that tourism was something that should be encouraged for it’s own sake, and right there on the coast was a little walled town surrounded by beautiful hills and an azure sea. The place was Dubrovnick, and is as cute a resort town as you’ll find in these parts, and developed a reputation as the coolest place in the Eastern bloc.

Tito died in 1980, and Yugoslavia was kept together by fear of Soviet invasion. Then in 1989, the Soviets let it out that they weren’t going to do that sort of thing anymore and all of a sudden the Eastern bloc had fallen apart, and so had Yugoslavia. The central government tried to keep the country together by force, there’s a big sign on the walls of Dubrovnick showing exactly where Yugoslav bombs hit. (It wasn’t just Serbia then). The whole thing would get a whole lot uglier to the north in Bosnia, but the Serbs pretty much gave up on Croatia in general and Dubrovnick in particular, leaving a bizarre-but-delightful mixture of medieval Europe and the Caribbean on this small peninsula near the southeastern tip of the Croatian coast.

With Communism long gone, the locals have gotten into tourism big time. Outside the walled village, to call it a city would be a little much, there are dozens of resort hotels up and down the peninsula catering to anywhere from movie stars to backpackers, getting oneself into one of the ritzier resorts would be a challenge, but as I only had a few hours, I would have to concentrate on the old town, which after all is the main attraction.

Dubrovnick’s secondary attraction is its size. The whole town is tiny, with the possible exception of the main square, and with the streets on the northern side little more than sidewalks, or in some cases, stairways, there’s an intimate, claustrophobic feel to everything, there are churches everywhere, baroque things full of centuries-old paintings, and little room for more than a few dozen worshipers at a time. There’s also a synagogue, but mostly what there are, are museums, restaurants and internet cafes. I’ve never seen so many of those things in a single place before. Computers everywhere! Very strange indeed. The prices for food and drink aren’t all that bad either. There are lots of places which offer really good seafood, or so I’m told, and the place I did go to had excellent fried squid. The people working the multitudinous cafes are rather nice about letting one sit there for extened periods of time, assuming of course you buy a drink or two, and this is a wonderful town to practice the art of people watching. There is also an secret entrance in one of the seaward walls to a beach, this has an excellent view of the harbor.

I’m not really sure if you can stay in the old town, but there’s a really good, if always crowded mass transit system, so getting to a hotel is easy. Dubrovnick is undoubtedly just as nice a resort as you can find anywhere else in the Adriatic.

The Cruise, part one

2007-08-19T12:45:00.000-07:00

“You don’t look a gift horse in the mouth” so they say, and actually the opposite is true. Generally gift horses come with strings attached, like being forced to buy what it is that you’re supposed to be getting for free, or worse. That’s what happens 98 times out of a hundred and one lives for the other two.

I was supposed to go to Greenland, and had a bunch of actual venues line up and everything, but at the last minute they fired the PR guy and disavowed any knowledge of my existence. I was ticked off about it when I was checking my spam filter and found something that seemed to be legitimate, RSVP, the largest Gay travel agency, sent me an email inviting me to join their cruise of the Mediterranean, I told them I wasn’t Gay, in fact just the opposite, but if they were going to pay for the whole thing, I would put any biases I had aside and go along. It turns out that they weren’t. I knew it.

I would have to pay for the airfare myself, but that wasn’t all that bad. I was able to get a really cheap ticket. But in the meantime, there was what seemed to be long gaps in communication. There were eight rooms reserved for press, and I got one. Two weeks with a thousand gays, If they could take me, I could take them. No problem.

Now the people at RSVP had told a little fib when they sent me my free ticket. They said that for my connivance, they had a discount bus transfer from either the airport at or downtown Rome for eighty-four bucks. This is undoubtedly true about the cost of a ticket, but discount? No way in hell. The cost of a train to the cruise ship port of Civitaveccia is only FOUR euros, about five and a half bucks, per person, and there’s a free shuttle bus from just below the station to the docks half a mile away. I’m not sure if it was RSVP or Holland America who told the whopper, but it doesn’t help matters, as to Citivaveccia itself, this is a small town with an incredible beach. Apparently, it’s one of the very few places in the Mediterranean with decent surfing. I didn’t really see all that much of the town itself, but it had a slightly moldy look, which is typical for tropical climes. Once I got on the ship, and it IS a ship, things changed quite a bit.

The Westerdam is one of the bigger ships in the Holland America fleet, ten stories high, it is, as the cliché goes, a floating luxury hotel. I’ve never been actually been on it’s like before. Oh, sure, I’ve been on ships before, but usually in steerage or sleeping on deck.
Getting there is supposed to be half the fun on these things, and the people at RSVP have managed to get the standard entertainment for the crowd they’re catering to. Gay men looking to get laid, mostly, and the stops on land along the way are mostly extras. As one passenger described it: “It’s not as tacky some other cruises I’ve been on.”

I was invited to the media party the first night, and someone slammed me as soon as she heard my name. It seems that she had invited me to a free dinner at an extremely fancy schmancy restaurant in Manhattan on the dime of the Brazilian government, and I told our hostess that I was primarily there for the free meal. It seems that a person was nearly fired because I was honest and upfront with people I was doing business with. Next time I’ll say I’m the financial correspondent for Life Magazine. But the people at RSVP knew I was straight and they were okay with that. There are very few of us on board outside of the crew. After a few days aboard, I’m very comfortable with my sexual preference as none of the guys on board is the least bit sexy, in fact far uglier than I am, and most of the lesbians are pretty old. But the problem with cruising on a tub as big as the Westerdam is that there’s not actually enough time to see all that much unless you fork out a sixty to a hundred bucks on a tour. There are cheaper alternatives to be sure, but at 75¢ a minute, using the internet for anything except briefly checking for emergency emails.

What is being offered is basically summer camp for grownups, with an emphasis, in this case on “ethnic heritage and culture,” I.e. leather bar recreations and bad disco, with halfway decent singers and drag acts.

But the reason I came on this thing was to see the ports of call, most of which have changed a great deal since I last visited them, some of which was back in the ‘80s.

The cruise was for the most part a circumnavigation of Italy, one of those countries that has a little too much history for it’s own good. Three thousand years of food, art and architecture, where one can get some of the best meals in the world for under a hundred bucks. It used to be twenty, but I’ll get to that later.

The first stop on any major tour of Italy is Rome, the Eternal city. Rome has more art per square inch than any other place in the world. This was once the sole property of the Catholic church, and before that was the capitol of the Classical world for about five hundred years. It’s unbelievable what one can see there, this greatest of archeological sites in the world. Unfortunately is expensive as all hell.

Not necessarily for the Romans, for the Romans know where the supermarkets are. The street vendors selling water and juice and the like charge through the nose, up to four bucks for a coke, something you can get in a supermarket for a quarter of the price.

The eternal city is the tourist town to end all tourist towns, and it knows it. There’s too much too see and too much to do, and all that money to take from the unsuspecting. I heard someone tell of a thief throwing a baby at a guy and robbing him as he caught it. I myself have seen similar acts of villainy with my own eyes. But if one’s careful, one can take in some truly amazing sights, The Coliseum at night or St. Peter’s basilica at anytime are breathtaking.

But I had about a day and a half, I wasn’t here for Rome, but for a cruise, and it was off to Civitaveccia on that five-dollar train, free shuttle bus, and expensive drinks.

Our first stop is Naples, which was once the capitol of it’s very own kingdom, something the locals aren’t too thrilled remembering, as the graffiti on the bases of two equestrian statues of a couple of them, across the way from the Royal palace, will attest. In fact graffiti, most of which is of either the “Joanie Loves Chachi” or “Fuck the Government” variety, is on pretty much everything there, but here it’s more specific to the monuments. After a hundred and fifty years, people still hold a grudge.

But the reason that most of tourists go visit is for something else, something much older, the notorious Mt. Vesuvius and the two towns buried by it back when years had only two digits. Most of the best stuff from the excavations are supposed to be at the Archeological museum, some of the best frescoes left to us from the Roman era, but they’re all in storage in the museum’s basement. They claim they’ll be back up next spring.

I would like to go on about Naples, but unfortunately, I didn’t actually have enough time there, which is one of the major problems with the cruise. There isn’t enough time at any of the ports of call. On the one hand you don’t have to pack and unpack all the time, but getting into port at ten in the morning and having to be back at, say, FOUR in the afternoon just doesn’t leave for much time to see more than a couple of things before you go back. Sure, Places like Dubrovnick, Croatia CAN be seen in a day, or you can inspect St. Mark’s Square in Venice in the better part of the afternoon, but what about Malta or Corfu, which have some really nice beaches and incredible scenery? The fort, the archeological museum, which is unusually half closed because of needed repairs, an expensive lunch (Americans make better pizza than the Italians), and a brief hunt for cheesy souvenirs.

For the rest of the time you’re trapped on the boat. Between Venice and Valletta, Malta, there was a day at sea. The problem was that the entertainment was rather tacky, the pool overcrowded, several hundred gay men looking like a flock of walrus, (I know that sounds homophobic, but there were a few lesbians there too, who also looked like walrus, as did I) didn’t make going for a swim all that appetizing. The gym was overcrowded too and most of the immunities were NOT included in the price, and that included the spa, which cost over a hundred dollars, hell, it cost almost a hundred and fifty bucks to just check my email every day! It’s expensive and boring, especially if you drink, or gamble, which is where the cruise line makes a good deal of its income.

This is not to say that seeing Europe by boat isn’t a bad idea, Far from it. There are plenty of overnight ferries where you can see spectacular sunsets over the glistening Mediterranean, and smaller cruise lines actually dock for longer than a few hours in any one place, so you can actually get to see and do more. If one wants to stay on a ship, there are plenty of “cruises to nowhere,” and going all the way to Europe to be on one seems like a waste of time and money.

San Diego

2007-08-19T12:43:00.000-07:00

It goes without saying that comicon isn a comic con. As in Comic Book Convention, It was never supposed to have become the monster it has become. Back in the old days, and that means Clinton’s first term as president and before, nobody thought about movies all that much. Oh, sure there was Trek and “Wars and all that stuff, but most of the people were geeking out on Superman, the Fantastic Four and Fritz the Cat, not to mention that goumet imported stuff from France and Japan. It was a convention, people would come to hang out and dress up in silly costumes, and oh, yeah, buy stuff.

I would say that it’s all changed, but for the most part it hasn’t. It’s just that the movie companies discovered that San Diego was the biggest one of these things close to Hollywood, and that meant that it didn’t cost that much money to promote their stuff as it might at the ones in Chicago or Atlanta. Plus, despite the fact that San Diego is generally run by conservative Republicans, they LIKE comic book fans. The Big Apple Anime festival was murdered by the Republicans for the 2004 Convention in New York, something the Republicans tried to do to the San Diego con eight years before. The Mayor refused to go along, and Comicon, now Comicon INTERNAIONAL, is now one of the biggest events of the year.

The evolution of sequential arts since it’s nadir in the early 1960s has, on the one hand, from a medium primarily for children or the partially illiterate to a major form of self-expression and storytelling has been rather phenomenal. The rise of the “graphic novel” i.e. a square-backed comic suitable for hoity-toity bookstores and the New York Times Book Review, is one of the major trends in popular culture, and is something that the US has been lagging behind in much of the World.

However, be that as it may, the reason that Comicon has been in the news recently is movies and TV. Paramount, Warner Bros, and all the major Hollywood studios except Fox, gave presentations showcasing the latest in expensive and fantastic entertainment. Mostly this stuff is either based on comic books or fantasy novels, Stuff like Indiana Jones and the long-awaited adaptation of “Watchmen” which came out in the middle ‘80s. (Yeah, I know that Indie wasn’t a comic book character until after the first movie came out, but so what?). Comicon is now the place to be.

So when they sent me a letter offering me free entry, I went. There was a probem, however. Most of the places were full up, and had been for the entire year. I had to book two youth hostels and a hotel, and that was before the big day for the con, that is Saturday, even took place. Which is just as well, The place is busting at the seems and they literally didn’t have enough room to fit in any more people in San Diego’s convention center that day.

As in most conventions, San Diego’s is divided into three parts: The parties, the panels and the huckster room. I’m not sure that I went to the first, but I’m completely sure that I went to the other two.

The reason why I’m not sure about the parties, after all one should remember at least part of that thing, is that the big party I attended wasn’t exactly part of the con. In fact it was over three thousand miles away in the Hamptons, where a rich dude named Ivan Wilzig was having a party in order to celebrate his being chosen to participate in the second season of the game show “Who Wants to be a Superhero?” The guy is the son of a big time banker and lives in a genuine faux castle, and he hired a small fleet of buses to ferry a bunch of us nonplussed writers and others to come see the first episode on a giant screen he set up in his back yard.

There was booze and nubile young ladies wandering aimlessly around the back yard, adding to the absolute beautiful scenery that one can only see in Eastern Long Island. “Come! We must save the Sun!” our host said as he led us to the roof. That was a hell of a sunset, which was just about over when we got to the top. Then we went back downstairs where we feasted on orderves. (You can have a nutritious and filling meal on those things) until the sky was dark enough to see the TV show, then the thing went on until midnight, when we went on the bus for home. There was a panel for the show at Comicon.

I heard that most of the major movie studios had receptions. I wasn’t invited to any this time out. I actually didn’t have the time even if I had, although because of the other two parts of the Con.

The main hall, or the “huckster room” is the grandest in the world. Everyone who’s anyone is going to be there, from some of the more venerable comic shops to a number of historically important illustrators. The main attraction are the freebies, which are given out with wild abandon in order publicize films coming out in the next year or two.

Finally, there are the panels, and while most are arcane, a few are making real news, like the return of “Michael” to the cast of “Lost” or the guy playing “Sklyer” from “Heroes” getting cast as the young Spock on the next “Star Trek” movie. The main hall can seat five thousand or more, and the place in generally filled. (you have to be careful with a crowd that big, the guy moderating the New Line panel was justly booed when he insulted the audience). They also had a whole bunch of screenings, mostly of small SF flicks but a few major films like “Stardust” and “Shoot’em’up”, which is one of the most gratuitous films of the year.

With the exception of the hotel hopping, which ended up in a lawsuit (it was settled out of court in my favor), the whole thing was a rather decent experience. Truth justice and the American way were definitely served.

More from Tribeca, part something...

2007-05-15T11:43:00.000-07:00

I spent some time in Bermuda, which I'll talk about later, but here is the penultimate batch from Tribeca...kind of late, Sorry:

Descent

Written and Directed
by Talia Lugacy

Revenge fantasies are nothing new. There are lots of them throughout the history of literature and cinema. What's different about this one is that it's a chick flick. It's quite simple that Talia Lugacy is one of those feminists that hates men and wants to get her rocks off by degrading a few here and there. This is a movie, it's supposed to be fun, even though it isn't.

Maya (Rosario Dawson) is the perfect woman. She's a college student who's so wonderful, she is almost a TA as a sophomore. Also, the fact that she's black is a plus. Perfect to make her victimhood nobler than it might otherwise be. She meets Jared (Chad Faust) at a party. He's all charm and caring, and she initially resists, but there's that charm again, and with the title we know that it can't be a positive development.

He shows his true colors, and she, now broken, turns into a slut who is saved by the local bartender's(Marcus Patrick) personal cult. Cut to the next semester….

Adrian is now the focus of the picture and is taking the class where Maya is now a TA. She's running the final exam and he of course, is cheating. This leads to her brutal revenge, which is extremely graphic.

That's it. What's supposed to be somehow a deep psychological drama is in fact just a wind-up toy going through the motions. The acting isn't all that great, although Faust makes the most of what he's given. Yes the great betrayal is a bit of a shock, but the foreshadowing is such that something like that happening is expected. This is a feel nothing movie that's just repellent. A complete waste of money, don't bother.

The Grand

Written and Directed
by Zak Penn

It's quite obvious that Zak Penn is tiring of superhero movies. Otherwise he wouldn't have decided to do a mockumentery on of all things, poker. Now Poker as a spectator sport has become rather popular [why I don't know, it's worse than golf] and this isn't the first poker movie to come out in recent months. So with pop culture going in that direction, this sort of thing is to be expected. This film is all about the expected.

This is primarily about One Eyed Jack Faro(Woody Harrelson), a permanent resident of a rehab center who's heard that his grandfather's casino is going to be bought by the evil billionaire Steve Lavisch (Michael McKean) if our hero doesn't pay off his megabucks debt within a few days and the only way this is possible is to get into the eponymous poker tournament and win it. He gets in and then the film changes direction slightly to start having profiles on the other players in the tourney.
Lainie(Cheryl Hines) and Larry Schwartzman(David Cross), who are twins, trained by their father(Gabe Kaplan) to be ultra competitive, Deuce Fairbanks(Dennis Farina), a gangster of the old school, The German (Werner Herzog), a nazi of the old school, Mike Werbe (Michael Karnow), who's borderline autistic, and last and least, Andy Andrews (Richard Kind), who likes to play on the internet, and so, following this far-from-merry band the story of the Grand goes on.

Quite simply, the mockumentary has played itself out. Sure this has some good points, but for the most part the jokes fall flat. Ray Romano, as Lainie's husband, is just grating, as is Gabe Kaplin, who at one time was considered a genius. I guess it's Matt Bierman's writing which fails.

This is probably going to come and go faster than an inside straight.

The Killing of John Lennon

Written and Directed
by Andrew Piddington

The revelation here is that Mark David Chapman was married. We always knew that he was a nutcase, and there's nothing here that's much of a revelation. Although, this film documents a major event in popular culture, it's lacking something very important. Suspense. Yeah, we know the Titanic sinks, but it's what happens the characters around that which is interesting. This is an attempt at understanding, to make sense of the murder of John Lennon, but it fails. With all the words that Chapman wrote over the years, he's still primarily opaque.

The film starts when Chapman(Jonas Bell) was a security guard in Honolulu. He and his wife Gloria(Mie Omori) seem to be having a decent life together. True, his mom (Krisha Fairchild) is a bit of an airhead, and his job isn't particularly glamorous, there doesn't seem to be anything especially wrong with it. Then he gets religion.

The religion in this case is Holden Caufieldism. He falls in love with the “Catcher in the Rye” and his grip on reality begins to disintegrate, he goes on and on about this and that in the book, driving his poor wife to distraction. Then he falls in hate with John Lennon.

What's scary here is that his criticisms of Lennon are actually somewhat logical, although his solution is not. We know that there is madness here, but there doesn't seem to be anything but pure logic behind each and every action. This is a madness the audience is sucked into. He doesn't seem like a nice guy, but where he's coming from is rather clear and concise.

The film goes on too long. I'm not sure that keeping the film going well after the crime is a good thing. It feels like a denouement and as such it goes on and on and on. Okay, we know why he did it, enough already!

This is an uneven film, Well done technically, but missing something, and that unknown something ruins it.

Illegal Aliens

Directed by
David Giancola

I don't usually review direct-to-video movies, but there was a reason to make an exception for this one. Anna Nicole Smith had just died and was being treated as a martyr. Although she wasn't an actress by any means, she was one of those celebrities who were notorious rather than famous, and pretty much everyone had forgotten why she became famous in the first place. So when I received a press release for it a few months back I was intrigued.

The DVD screener had the film and the trailer, so I took a look at the trailer and it looked as bad as I feared. Then the publicist called me up and asked what I thought. It sucked, I said and I probably wasn't going to review it because he was nice to me in sending it and I didn't want to give him bad publicity. He said that I should review it anyway, “but give it some respect.”

Okay, here it is. I respect the producer because he had the cajones to get all that money out of unsuspecting people to finance this piece of garbage and thus is a far, far better salesman than I ever can hope to be. Having seen the film in its entirety, I cannot comply with the publicist's request. This is pure unadulterated crap.

Cameron (Lenise Sorén), Drew (Gladys Jimenez), and Lucy (Anna Nicole Smith) are the eponymous superheroes from another planet, who fight to protect Earth from baddies from other planets, but their day job is as stuntwomen in Hollywood.

In this case, it's Rex (Joanie Laurer) who goes around shooting people for no reason and wants to blow up the Earth. She has a good reason too. So the IAs go off to save the day yet again. Yadda, yadda, yadda. This has all the looks of a failed TV pilot, and probably was at some point.

This is a sloppy film. Yes sloppy. It appears as if the first draft of the script was written while the writers were drunk, and the second pass was just to correct typos and spelling errors. The editing is slapdash. Anna complains to the director about a dumb line and breaks out of the story, which is something everyone does at the end. The acting isn't actually inept, it's just not very good, and Ms. Smith is just as “fine” as everyone else. That's sad, as some of the people appear to have talent, despite their working so hard to hide it. Why do they DO this?

This is what “Grindhouse” films were all about. Crap. Tarentino take note.

Tribeca Reviews: The Eighth Batch

2007-05-05T14:00:00.000-07:00

Charlie Bartlett

Directed by
Jon Poll

This has all the makings of a Disney Channel TV series except for one small thing. It's about the high school drug dealer. Charlie Bartlett(Anton Yelchin) is too good to be true. He's one of those lovable rogues that everyone roots for even though he probably deserves everything he's going to get...nah!

Gustin Nash's script begins with the obvious, Charlie is getting expelled again for selling phony drivers licenses. So, with no posh private school willing to take him, his mom(Hope Davis) is forced to send him to the local public school. Of course wearing his old school uniform gets him beaten up by the school bully(Tyler Hilton), who soon becomes his partner in crime, but there's the delightful Susan Gardner(Kat Dennings), who's sole fault is that her father(Robert Downey, Jr.) is the school's principal. So, with the family's shrink more than happy to over-prescribe various drugs like riddlin, and soon our hero has become the most popular kid in the entire school. Then something happens and Charlie is in big trouble once again. Can he get out of it this time?

This is basically your standard high school comedy. Not that his is a bad thing, of course. One the one hand, Yelchin is chewing the scenery a little too much, and that makes the film a tad too cute. On the other hand, the supporting cast, most notably Downing as the principal and Mark Rendall as the kid who something bad happens to, are uniformly good, and despite the boilerplate feel, this knocks it out of the park. The sad fact is that the film's rated “R” and there are going to be a lot of kids sneaking in from what is probably more wholesome entertainment. In other words, the intended audience isn't supposed to see this. But they will. Which in this case is fine.

Vitus

Written and Directed
by Fredi M. Murer

It's tough being a genius. Six-year-old Vitus(Fabrizio Borsani) knows this better than anybody. He's a piano prodigy who's years ahead of all the other kids his age. His parents aren't much help,

Dad(Urs Jucker) is an inventor who's actually quite successful and mom (Julika Jenkins) is big in other business, and at first leaves him at kindergarden where he's bored to tears, and then with a 15-year-old babysitter Isabel (Kristina Lykowa), who introduces him to certain things that he's too young for. The only person who understands him is his grandfather (Bruno Ganz), but he's living out in the country. So Vitus rebels…cut to six years later.

Vitus(Teo Gheorghiu) has grown arrogant and somewhat mean. Things aren't going particularly well for him in general, so he takes some drastic steps, a surprise that knocks the audience for a loop and turns out to be a brilliant subterfuge that only Grandpa is privy too. He then goes into high finance. This is a perfect tale of adolescent rebellion without too much angst.

The film is much better than it sounds. The script is thoughtful and the acting is excellent. These are real people. The pace is slow, but not to slow and while the film is on the long side, it doesn't feel it.

This is the perfect film to introduce the kids to subtitles.

This Is England

Written and Directed
by Shane Meadows

1982 was a pivotal year in British history. The Argentine fascists had decided that Maggie Thatcher was too weak to respond to an overt invasion of the Falkland Islands, and there was a short and bloody war that overthrew the military government and kept Thatcher in power for another eight years.

Eleven-year-old Shaun(Thomas Turgoose) and his mum(Jo Hartley) are victims of that war. The father of the family had been killed and they're in mourning. Other kids in the school comfort Shaun by insulting his memory and picking fights. It's this kind of thing that can inspire hooliganism in a kid, and that's exactly what happens.

The hooligans are skinheads, a neo-fascist gang of tricksters led by the surprisingly jovial Woody(Joseph Gilgun) and his girlfriend Lol(Vicky McClure). They are violent and destructive, but they're not racist, for one of the gang is a Jamaican named Milky(Andrew Shim).
There's also a female child molester named Smell (Rosamund Hanson), with whom Shaun has a bit of a romance. What's really strange is that Mum is actually okay with all this. Then everything takes a turn for the worse when Woody's old pal Combo(Stephen Graham) shows up after having gotten out of prison.

Now Combo is overtly racist and introduces Shaun to the wonderful world of hate, driving Woody out, and making things very difficult for all involved, even though Shaun does feel appreciated.

This is basically a historical artifact and a meditation on the nature of evil. Somewhere between Woody and Combo is a line that shouldn't be crossed, and a price must be paid for crossing it. Things get bloody. The acting is fine, Gilgun and Graham are excellent as Shaun's two mentors and Turgoose manages to hold his own among the grownups. Definitely worth a trip to an arthouse.

My Best Friend

Written and Directed
by Patrice Leconte

Francois (Daniel Auteuil) is an antiques dealer who is all business and nothing else. His business is losing money and his partner Catherine(Julie Gayet) is worried, but he doesn't seem to be.

He first shows up at a funeral for a former client solely to talk to the widow about some furniture. His wife has left him and his daughter
Louise(Julie Durand) can barely stand the sight of him. Catherine says at a dinner that he doesn't have any friends, and Francois angrily replies that he does, and wagers his new ancient Greek vase to prove it. She gives him to the end of the month. Enter Bruno (Dany Boon), the know-it-all taxi driver.

Fortuitously picking our hero up a number of times, Bruno is at first annoying, but soon Francois decides that this is the person to give him “nice guy” lessons to he could win the bet and possibly fill a gap in his life, and there develops an interesting dynamic between the two. Auteur Leconte has managed to get a lot of psychological insight into a light comedy, or rather what might be termed a “platonic romance.” Bruno and Auteuil have a genuine chemistry together and the former is excellent, especially at the penultimate sequence, which is actually riveting.

This is one of the better films to come out of France this summer.

Tribeca Reviews: The Seventh Batch

2007-05-05T10:03:00.000-07:00

The Air I Breathe (U.S.A.) - World Premiere

written and directed
by Jieho Lee

Based on a Chinese proverb, these four overlapping stories dramatize the four emotional cornerstones of life: happiness, pleasure, sorrow and love, or so says the blurb, but these actually two narratives, which are shoehorned into each other at the end, and not too well either. It took five years for Jieho Lee and Bob DeRosa to get this film on film, and it doesn't seem like all that time and effort was worth it.

The film starts rather promisingly. Titled Happiness, it's about an investment counselor(Forest Whitaker) who hears about a fixed race and decides to go to an illegal OTB parlor and bets a huge amount he doesn't have on the horse, which unexpectedly loses. Here he meets the main character of the film, a crime boss named Fingers(Andy Garcia), who explains how he got the nickname and gives him a couple of weeks to get the money he owes. A bank robbery is staged and it all ends badly, but our hero achieves the title of his segment.

The second segment, entitled Pleasure, is about Fingers' assistant (Brendan Fraser), who we see briefly in the first segment and has the gift of prophecy. Fingers assigns him to look after his nephew(Emile Hirsch), and for some reason he loses his gift, and somehow this gives him the title emotion. So far, so good, but then the thing begins to fall apart.

In part three: Sorrow, Trista, a pop star (Sarah Michelle Gellar) discovers to her horror that her manager has gambled away all her money and that she's now his slave. Falling in love with Brenden Frasier…the whole thing starts to lose steam, and this isn't Geller's fault, it's purely that of the writers, because the characters are flat. The fourth segment, Love involves a doctor (Kevin Bacon) who needs Trista because she has an extremely rare mutant blood type. It's grasping at straws, and gets more pathetic by the minute, and the ending is just plain bad.

There's no mystery as to why this took so long, what the mystery is is how it managed to make it onto the screen at all. Don't bother.

Suburban Girl, (U.S.A) - World Premiere.

Written and Directed
by Marc Klein

Michelle Bank's bestselling book, “The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing,” was a series of short stories chronicling the adventures of one Brett Eisenberg, an ambitious young book editor, on her way to fame, fortune and a good lay. There was no doubt that it would be turned into a movie eventually, and if it's a hit, a sequel or TV series. “Daughter of Sex and the City!” Hey, why not?

The two stories that made it two the movie were “My Old Man” and “The Worst Thing A Suburban Girl Could Imagine,” which are about love and much older men: one platonic and one not so.

With her first book stuck on the back shelves of some local bookstores,
Brett(Sarah Michelle Gellar) and her best buddy Chloe (Maggie Grace) plan to ambush high-powered publisher Archie Knox(Alec Baldwin) and use his influence to pressure the managers. It's love at first site, and Geller and Baldwin become a latter day Tracy and Hepburn. In the meantime, Brett has to deal with dumping her dopey boyfriend Jed (Chris Carmack) and the discovery that her new boss, the notorious Faye Faulkner (Vanessa Branch), who hates her, also schtupped Archie.

The film runs on chemistry, if it were not for Baldwin and Geller having it, this whole thing would be a lot less entertaining. The whole thing about her father is rather predictable, as is the relationship with Archie. But Geller has a great time chewing the scenery and Baldwin's recent real marital troubles provide quite a bit of inappropriate laughter.

This film is nothing special, however, it's well done and for a chick flick does what it's supposed to. This is something that the gals should see by themselves and leave the guys to see stuff blowing up elsewhere in the multiplex.

The Hairy Tooth Fairy (Argentina/Spain)

Directed by
Juan Pablo Buscarini

It’s nice to see a children’s film in which the auteur has given a little though as to the construction of a fantasy world. In this case, it’s a world where at least SOME grownups aren’t entirely clueless.

Lucía(Delfina Varni) is a first grader living somewhere in the British Empire with her parents: Dad(Fabián Mazzei) is an unemployed chef and real estate broker mom(Ana María Orozco), and aside from Dad’s job problem, everything is going nicely. Now in Wherever this is, when a kid loses a baby tooth, it’s not picked up by the Tooth Fairy™, but a famous mouse named Perez (voice of Fran Perea). What Perez is supposed to with the teeth is anyone’s guess.

Which is what makes this tale for tots rather nifty. It seems that Perez has a recycling factory, where the teeth are turned into pearls, and then taken by boat to a mysterious jeweler named Morientes(Joe Rígoli), who purchases them and makes a very tidy profit. This is a metaphor about globalization, so the dastardly plot is extremely capitalistic. Perez is going to be kidnapped, and his Number Two, Fugaz (voice is Mariano Chiesa) is going to enslave the workers [selling them off as lobotomized toys], and completely mechanize the factory, while Morientes’ nephew Pipo (Diego Gentile), as the outside man, will take the enterprise global.

So it’s up to Lucia and her genius cousin Ramiro(Nicolás Torcanowsky) to save the day and the enterprise for the benefit of little kids everywhere. Also, Dad winds up getting a job, which is nice.

While much of Enrique Cortés’ script is mostly boilerplate, it’s still kind of fun, and the perfect melding of CGI character animation and makes suspension of disbelief rather easy. If you’ve got kids, it might be worth a rental, however I doubt it would readily available anytime soon.

Tribeca Reviews: the sixth batch

2007-05-05T10:00:00.000-07:00

Nanking

a documentary directed by
Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman

World War II began well before Hitler invaded Poland in 1939. In fact, it began in 1931, when the Japanese invaded Manchuria. Between then and the bombing of Nagasaki 14 years later, the “War in the Pacific” would contract and expand in ferocity and scope wildly, causing not a few historians to question whether or not Japan even was part of the great conflaguration prior to December 7th, 1941.

Make no mistake, it most certainly was.

In 1937, Japan decided to take over the rest of China, and in November and December of that year, perpetrated what was forever called “The Rape of Nanking.” The reason it was called that was because that's what the Japanese troops did to most of the women who hadn't fled beforehand. The Japanese have always said that it wasn't nearly as bad as everyone says, and every now and again, it's good to remind the World as to what really happens.

There are no reconstructions here with the exceptions of actors(Jürgen Prochnow, Woody Harrelson, Mariel Hemmingway, Michelle Krusiec, Hugo Armstrong and some others) dressed up in period costumes and reading the diaries of the westerners who heroically protected tens of thousands in what was officially called “Safety Zone for the Chinese refugees”. What was amazing was that they got the the Japanese soldiers to respect them and it. Also, that the Nazi diplomats living there did so much to help the victims of this atrocity. That was a revelation.

The dramatic readings seamlessly blend with interviews with aged survivors and the newsreel footage to create an exiting and heartbreaking picture of one of the greatest horrors of the entire Second World War. There are no holds barred, and nor should there be. This is well worth paying full price for.

Scott Walker - 30th Century Man (U.S.A./U.K.) - New York Premiere.

A Documentary Directed
by Stephen Kijak

What makes a legend? Mystery. Once upon a time there was a rock trio called the Walker Brothers, [nobody in the band was named Walker, by the way] and they had a number of hits during the mid to late 1960s. Then they broke up, and the band's star, Scott Walker, originally named Scott Engle, went solo. At first he did the usual bubblegum stuff, and then, as was the fashion back then, he added some more experimental works, plus covering more esoteric writers like Jaques Brell.

He went so far that he fell off the edge, lost whatever popularity he had and became a recluse, producing three albums in twenty years. Weird stuff that is almost unlistenable. But still, he was extremely influential, as the likes of David Bowie, Brian Eno and Jarvis Cocker eloquently attest.

The fact that Walker was the Justin Timberlake of his time means that there's a lot of archival footage of him to fill out the early part of his career and the Howard Hughes-like transformation from pretty boy to insane genius. It's sort of like the Brian Wilson story except that Wilson never actually left the pop music's collective consciousness, Walker seems to have been wiped out of rock's narrative except for maybe “The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore” and a few other hits.

However, he had a tiny fanbase, and Stephen Kijak was able to mine it to the max. Also, Walker came out of hiding to do his first album in ages and let Kajak to film the entire process.

The whole thing is a fascinating look at the phenomenon of the tortured genius, and what happens when an artist gets too far ahead of his/her audience. This is much better than the album.

The Workshop (U.K.) - World Premiere.

Written and Directed
by Jamie Morgan

Somewhere in Northern California, self-help guru Paul Lowe is laughing his way to the bank. This dirty old man has been promoting his New Age philosophy in expensive workshops he holds in his estate for years. For anywhere from a week (1200 bucks) to eight days (add an extra 150) one can go there and get one's mojo fixed.

Jamie Morgan is photographer and music video director who heard about the program and decided to fly half way around the World for what would be a weeks' worth of nudist psychoanalysis and personal growth through adultery. No wonder it's for mature audiences only!

We don't actually see all that much of Lowe. Yeah, he talks a bit about his philosophy and the like, but the focus is on Morgan and his fellow “campers” and how they react to what is going on. What's interesting is that pretty much everyone who gets any face time is NOT American.

This follows a select few Brits and a German who are encouraged to explore their sexuality, because, as Lowe clearly states, monogamy is an artificial construct, which stultifies consciousness. This, of course leads to lots of nudity, some stalking, and a broken marriage or two.

The campers are portrayed as rather nice people. One would expect that, after all, there are lawsuits to consider, but no one is perfect and it seems that there has been some psychic progress on the way to the orgies, the first of which isn't shown.

Morgan has actually made a nice promotional piece for Lowe's program, it's not great, it's not for everybody, but it gives a fair look at what it's all about.

SHAME, (Pakistan, USA) .- New York Premiere.

A documentary directed
by Mohammed Naqviln

In a really perverse way, getting raped was the best thing that ever happened to Mukhtaran Mai. Now bear with me. What happened to her was quite horrible, and it shouldn't happen to anyone, but had it not been for that, a vast amount of good wouldn't have been done. Allah does indeed work in mysterious ways.

In 2002, Mukhtaran was living in a remote Pakistani village. She was unmarried and her family was poor. Then her brother allegedly did something to a neighbor's daughter that wasn't very nice. The other girl's family was enraged, and the local religious authority ordered that both he and Mukhtaran be publicly gang raped to atone for it. Instead of killing herself, as she was expected to do, she complained to a local mullah, who took her to the cops many miles away. The local media heard about this, and then the national and international media got their hands on it and it became an international cause. Islam worldwide was heartily embarrassed as was the Pakistani government. Her rapists were arrested and Mukhtaran Mai was given a chance to improve her lot and that of the entire district.

Mohammed NaqviIn, being Pakistani, has been able to follow the case more closely than most foreign documentarians could and has put together a detailed and stirring tale of female empowerment where that sort of thing is supposed to be illegal. She's an international role model and has done nothing to make anyone regret it.

Meanwhile, in the world of international politics...

2007-05-03T06:58:00.001-07:00

Looking through the international news this morning, I noticed that there was a general election in the Bahamas yesterday. I was shocked.

Why? Because there was no news about the campaign in any news website anywhere on the net. There's stuff about Bush, Sarkozy and Royal, Blair and Omert, there were elections in Nigeria too, and while that recievd far less coverage than it should have, it HAD coverage in the major newspapers and magazines.

The Bahamas? NOTHING. Well, actually the AP had a small article, which is how I found out about it, but since the Bahamas are a small country, no one gave a darn.

Former Prime Minister Hubert Ingraham's Free National Movement won 23 seats in the 41-seat legislature, ousting incumbent Perry Christie's Progressive Liberal Party, which claimed the other 18, according to the government-owned Broadcasting Corporation of the Bahamas.

The issues were finances, tourism (which is the country's major industry) and Anna Nicole Smith's allegedly fucking her way to a residency visa.

While the PLP had a more leftist program, the FNM accused it of being corrupt and incompent. The Anna Nicole imbroglio was apparently the straw that broke the camel's back on this account. Real estate was another big issue. Apparently foreigners have been buying it up for retirement homes.

Which is the big problem with Bahamian politics. Outside of tourism and oil transhipments [there's a huge refinery and storage area near Freeport], there's really no industry there. The soil is bad, fresh water is scarce, the population is generally poor, and outside of Grand Bahama [Freeport] and New Providence [Nassau] islands, the population is rather sparse.

Then you've got all those Hatians and Cubans trying to escape their homelands and trying to settle.

So outside of commercials promoting tourism, the Bahamas will fade out of the American conciousness again.

Tribeca Reviews: the fifth batch

2007-05-03T06:54:00.000-07:00

The two superduper galas have taken place, they open tomarrow.

Spider-Man 3

Written and directed
by Sam Raimi

Superhero movies are always to some extent absurd. This doesn’t make them bad, per se, It’s just that there are different goals for shoot for and heavy psychological drama isn’t one of them, that’s where this thing fails. A film like this should be intelligent enough not to be a total joke, and concentrate on the animated action sequences. After all, this is a live-action cartoon, and one-note characters are perfectly acceptable.

Yeah, I know, Spider-Man’s angst was one of the comic’s selling points, I read it as a kid just like everyone else. However, the attempt to take it to a more adult level just doesn’t work all that well. Not that it’s BAD, however…

Okay, Peter(Tobey Maguire) and Mary Jane’s(Kirsten Dunst) relationship is beginning to mature a bit, but Petey’s with Harry Osborn(James Franco) is not. In the first big action scene, Harry gratuitously attacks Pete on the way back from MJ’s opening night musical debut, and that’s really good. It’s fast paced and violent, giving Harry a slight case of amnesia and making everyone friends again. So far so good.

Everybody who’s supposed to be back is. Aunt May(Rosemary Harris) and J. Jonah Jameson(J.K. Simmons) return entirely intact, and it gives a homey feeling to it all. Even the introduction of the secondary villain, Flint Marko/Sandman (Thomas Haden Church) is done well. However, it’s the primary villain, Eddie Brock/Venom (Topher Grace), and the romantic polygon over MJ and Gwen Stacy (Bryce Dallas Howard), which make the whole thing stumble a bit.

Back in the early days of the original comic book, Spider-Man was a cross between “Superman” and “Archie.” Sure, Spidy would fight the likes of Doc Ock and the Kingpin, but when he was in “Clark Kent mode” it was as a slightly geeky Archie Andrews with MJ and Gwen being the equivalent of Betty and Veronica, and Harry taking the Jughead part. As far as it went, it was pure genius, but then Pete went to college and the whole thing began to go down hill. This is kind of what’s happening here as well.

Then comes Venom. Venom was introduced into the comic book by a dues-ex-machina in a Marvel-wide plot arc, and the original black suit wasn’t that popular on Spidy so it got a book of it’s own. The introduction of the suit in the movie is the best they could do, I guess, but the whole thing is kind of lame, and it nearly ruins the film in the middle, when Peter starts acting like John Travolta in “Saturday Night Fever” The musical sequence there stops the film dead in it’s tracks, and it almost doesn’t manage to regain it’s momentum. The final deneument is also lame, especially after the nifty final battle between the bad guys and Spidey.

It’s a huge budget Hollywood comic book blockbuster, you’re going to see it anyway, and I’m not going to try to stop you. So go.

Lucky You

Directed by
Curtis Hanson

Morons can be very intelligent people. Curtis Hanson, who wrote and directed one of the great movies of all time [LA Confidential], has decided to explore this phenomenon in what might be his weakest film in years.

Huck Cheever (Eric Bana) and Billie Offer (Drew Barrymore) are both very intelligent morons. He is a professional gambler and she a lounge singer. He burns though money like there’s no tomarrow, and she’s got lousy taste in men and knows it.

They meet cute, Huck “saves” Billie from a guy at a party, and despite the fact that her sister Suzanne(Debra Messing) knows our hero very well, she goes with him anyway. They have cute conversation and after they screw, he steals her money. She gets mad, but not that mad. Then Huck tries to get the ten grand to get into the World Series of Poker. He has an offer from a big shot gambler(Charles Martin Smith) in exchange for a 60/40 split [in the other guy’s favor], but he doesn’t want to be beholden to anyone, especially his hated father L.C.(Robert Duvall), who is also a gambler, but relents and then blows it all. Moron. He knows that he should have paid the entry fee immediately, but no. Then there’s a really stupid scene where our hero tries to get the money via a weird bet with another gambler(Horatio Sanz). Billie is back, and how they part is moralistic tripe.

The problem with this film is the writing. The whole thing is based on idiot plotting. Yeah, the acting is good, [Bana’s the weakest of the bunch, and Duval and Barrymore do their shticks with the professionalism that we’ve come to expect] but the characters aren’t well drawn, Hanson’s usually sharp dialogue is rather blunted here, and the world of the film seems emotionless and remote.

This is all the more disappointing because Hansen’s films of the past decade, and this includes “In Her Shoes”, have been wildly entertaining. But mediocre Hanson is better than good almost anyone else…no it isn’t. Bargain matinee or cable material only. Darn! I was sooooooo looking forward to this one…

Tribeca Reviews: the fourth batch

2007-05-01T05:49:00.000-07:00

The Suger Curtain

A documentary directed
by Camila Guzman Urzœa

Camila Guzman Urzœa's father was talented, rich and socialist. Thus when the government of Chile was overthrown in 1973, he and his family were welcomed to live in Cuba as privileged refugees. Thus, little Camilia had a very good life in the so-called “worker's paradise.”

Now a filmmaker living in Paris, she's gone back to look up old friends and see how they turned out. I was expecting pure propaganda, but happily I was wrong. It appears that she “gets it.”

Camila goes on a tour of Havana, looking for old friends, all of whom were from the new privileged class and fondly remembered the days of their childhood, where they went to Camp once a week and during summer, and the Soviet Union paid for pretty much everything they needed as far as school supplies and Communist Summer camp went. Since communist indoctrinations is actually rather kid-friendly, the “PIONEERS” was a blast [at least for the “cooler” among them], but then that mean Mr. Gorbachev screwed everything up by causing the entire Communist World to collapse and without all that gracious funding, the fun ended.

The so-called “special period” was all about Castro hanging on to power, and the people be damned. All Camilla's friends have relations that have emigrated, and the fact that the Cuban government helped pay for this depressing film is pretty amazing, considering the indirect criticism of the government and the acknowledgement that the whole communist “paradise” was one huge Potemkin village, a façade with no insides, which collapsed almost immediately and is only surviving on western tourism and handouts from Venezuela.

Having been to Cuba (legally), I can personally testify that the island is lovely, the people nice, and that once Castro goes to the great below there's a chance that everything could be just fine in the future. In the meantime, this is a lovely portrait of a benevolent despotcy.

Vivere, (Germany) – World Premiere.

Written and Directed
by Angelina Maccarone

On Christmas Eve, Antoinetta Conchiglia (Kim Schnitzer), a teenager if there ever was one, runs away from home. Her dad (Aykut Kayacik) sends sister Franceska(Esther Zimmering) to find her. Knowing that Antoinetta has gone to Rotterdam with her rocker boyfriend Snickers(Egbert Jan Weeber), she heads off in the family’s taxicab to find her.

On the way, Franceska finds a car that has crashed into a dumpster, and that the driver, Gerlinde (Hannelore Elsner), is still alive, so our heroine takes her to the hospital, but Gerlinde doesn’t WANT to spend Christmas in the hospital, and goes back to the cab to hitch a ride all the way to Holland, where she disappears. In the meantime, Franceska locates where her sister is supposed to be and starts up something with the proprietor of the club(Tygo Gernandt), where Antoinetta is finally found…in bed with Girlinde! We then rewind for chapter two, to follow Girlinde to the same point, then Franceska.

This film is extremely gay. Gerlinde is a lesbian from waay back, and it seems that Franceska might be switch-hitting as well. Granted Antonetta has a hereto thing for Snickers, but men seem to be the last thing on auteur Angelina Maccarone’s mind and seems very unhappy to even let them on the screen as more than extras. This is especially true of the three men who have more than a line or two, who are rather boorish and unwelcome, this is especially true of Dad and the club owner, the latter of whom just seems to be there to be smarmy.

All in all, this is a rather boring and pretentious film, full of an adolescent angst that pervades everything, even Gerlinde’s relationship with her lover. This will probably never be seen again on this side of the Atlantic, which is probably a good thing.

West 32nd, (U.S.A.) – World Premiere.

Written and Directed
by Michael Kang

The title of the film refers to a rather obscure fact: for two blocks between seventh and fifth avenue, the signs on 32nd street are mostly in Korean. This is where they do business, as most of the community lives in the outlying boroughs. Like most people outside or even IN the tribe, John Kim (John Cho), an ambitious young lawyer, knows very little about this. That is until he hears about a 14-year-old kid indicted for murder in a mob hit there, which is a perfect case to do pro bono as a way to drum up paying business from the community.

So he goes to Queens to interview the suspect’s sister Lila (Grace Park) and mother(Ja Won Kim), who seem to imply that this is a major miscarriage of justice perpetrated for racist reasons. However, they do give our hero some leads, which lead him to a local bunch of wannabe gangsters led by a certain Mike Juhn (Jun Sung Kim), who was briefly the successor of the murder victim as the manager of a 32nd street “room lounge” which is a Korean institution resembling a cross between a bar and a whore house. The term “briefly” is quite important here, because it leads to conflict between Mike and his superior in the Korean mob(Jun-ho Jeong). A perverse friendship develops between John and Mike, who takes our hero through the Korean underworld.

This is about as exotic a film as one can get. Despite being Korean, John is an outsider and as such is fascinated at the exoticness of the whole subculture that’s right under his nose, and that sucks the viewer into the film even more. That all involved except John and the kid’s family [the kid himself is never actually seen for more than a couple of seconds near the end], want the kid to go to jail is an interesting plot point which adds to the mystery of whether he’s actually guilty or not.

The acting is rather good. Cho and JS Kim have a good chemistry together and JW Kim is excellent in her extended cameo as the mother. This is a taught thriller to be sure, and does indeed keep one interested. Worth the bucks despite the subtitles.

Tribeca Reviews: the third batch

2007-04-29T18:50:00.000-07:00

I'm running behind. Five Flicks a day, then I'm bushed. I managed to get a few written early this morning. I'm not doing as well as I should, but that's life...

The Animated World of John Canemaker (U.S.A.)

There's an old saying that goes: “Those who can't do, teach.” This is the glory and tragedy of John Canemaker. He's been teaching animation at NYU for decades and has written extensively on the subject. His books are excellent for the most part, and those people I know who've taken his classes say he's excellent, that's how he's maintained his reputation, but this retrospective isn't mostly about John Canemaker the historian or John Canemaker the teacher, it's about John Canemaker the animator.

Those who can't do, teach.

There are four films shown here, and for the most part, they're not very good. The first one was a thing called the Sorcerer's Son, and quite frankly, it's mediocre. Less than mediocre, bad. The animation isn't all that fluid, the plot, about a sorcerer teaching his son, who wants to be a musician, how to do magic is neither interesting nor funny. The movement of the characters is jerky, and while it might be okay for a beginner in a college or even high school, it's not up to professional snuff.

Bottom's Dream is a confused mess. In artistic circles, poor draftsmanship was all the rage, and while Canemaker clearly can draw far better than some people who were celebrated in artistic circles back in the early '80s when this was done, the film itself is muddled and makes little sense, it's too clever by half.

Then there's a documentary that Canemaker made about Otto Messmer, who created Felix the Cat. It's a very nice documentary, and a necessary one, if for no other reason that Messmer was very old at the time it was made and some record had to be made before everyone in that generation croaked. However, it's not a GREAT documentary. Nor did it have to be. This is Canemaker the historian, not Canmaker the animator speaking, which is why it sticks out like a sore thumb here.

Finally, there's 2005's The Moon and the Son. This is by far the best in the bunch, mainly because it's a personal film with no real artistic pretensions, just memoir in the only way he knows will get seen.

Those who can't do, teach. That's John Canemaker.

The Bubble, (Israel)

Written and Directed
by Eytan Fox

The title refers to Tel Aviv, which is the heart of an Israel that most in the world is unknown. It's the Israel that has little or nothing to do with the stereotype of a fascist nation founded with one purpose: to oppress the Palestinians and humiliate Islam. No. The Sheikin St. district is where hipsters of the gay persuasion like to hang out and do their thing. It's a bubble where all that is far in the distance.

The film centers on three, Lulu(Daniela Wircer) and her two gay roommates, Yali(Alon Friedmann) and Noam(Ohad Knoller) live in this “bubble” and are stereotypical lefties. Lulu is part of a group that is trying to promote peace by holding demonstrations and raves, and her roommates are primarily about having sex.

Noam is a reservist in the army, and while on checkpoint duty [Fox shows how evil the Jews are by having a poor Arab woman have a miscarriage at the very beginning], he meets Ashraf(Yousef "Joe" Sweid), a gay Palestinian, and takes him home to meet his mates.

We then go forth with a gay Israeli version of “Friends.” Ashraf and Noam have a relationship, Yali has one with a macho soldier named Golan(Zohar Liba), and Lulu has a tempestuous fling with the editor of Tel Aviv's “Time Out” franchise(Oded Leopold).

Everyone is cute and is oblivious to what is going on in “the real world” and when Ashraf goes home to the West Bank for his sister's(Ruba Blal) wedding, things suddenly get serious. Her fiancée(Shredy Jabarin) is an Islamic Terrorist of course, and his opinion of Gays is far less tolerant than the Israelis. Clearly Eytan Fox and his writing partner Gal Uchovsky are clearly conflicted by the political situation. Otherwise why would they ruin the film with it's atrocious ending, which for the most part negates everything that came before?

If you're not gay or a fan of gay cinema, don't bother.

Invisibles (Spain) - U.S. Premiere.

Written and directed by Mariano Barroso, Isabel Coixet, Javier Corcuera, Fernando Leon de Aranoa and Wim Wenders.

Academy Award nominated actor Javier Bardem teams with Doctors Without Borders to present a series of propaganda shorts, allegedly giving voice to those silenced by international indifference, In other words, it's a series of commercials indirectly asking for money to help various causes and non-governmental organizations.

Yes, there are conflicts in Africa and South America that have been going on for decades, and yes there are diseases which kill thousands in poor countries and are not being fought hard enough. But what are we supposed to do besides give money to Doctors Without Borders?

The shorts are done professionally, although as propaganda they don't really convince the viewers what action we should take. There is, in fact a short which tries. The NGO representatives berate the representative of a major drug firm because they're not doing enough on their own initiative. The debate winds up in a draw. Most of the rest of the films are about armed conflict. How do you end the civil wars in Columbia or Uganda without getting involved militarily? These are questions that are not answered, this is propaganda, after all, and such questions will not bring in the money for Doctors Without Borders, which BTW, is a worthy organization for the most part. Don't bother.

Tribeca Reviews: the second batch

2007-04-26T05:30:00.000-07:00

Here's our second batch from Tribeca:

Golden Door (Nuovomondo),

Written and Directed
by Emanuel Crialese

From 1892 to 1924, tens of millions of immigrants were processed at the facility at Ellis Island, New York, all of whom were looking for a better life. The voyage from the Old Country to the New was fraught with dangers, and not everyone, once they got here, was let through “the golden door” that led to America and had to go back to Europe. This film is a look at how this procedure worked, a slightly comic version of “Law and Other” or “CSI,” showing how things work through a story than just doing a documentary.

The film begins in Sicily, where A barefoot Salvatore Mancuso (Vincenzo Amato) and his older son Angelo (Francesco Casisa) climbing a mountain barefoot with rocks in their mouths, as a sacrifice to Jesus in return for advice as to whether or not to actually buy passage across the wide Atlantic and build a new life in America. The answer is positive.

Following Salvatore and Angelo on this epic voyage are his mother
Donna Fortunata(Aurora Quattrocchi), who's a local faith healer, his other son Pietro(Filippo Pucillo), who's mute and apparently somewhat dim, and two neighbors, Rita(Federica de Cola) and Rosa(Isabella Ragonese), who had been promised husbands on the other side of the ocean.

When they get to the port, they unwittingly pick up a “hitchhiker” named Lucy(Charlotte Gainsbourg), who's British and uses the Mancusos to sneak on the ship. Why she's doing this is to some extent uncertain, but her desire to get to America is genuine and she even entertains advances from a wealthy stranger(Vincent Schiavelli, in his final role) who promises her a wealthy husband.

But in the end, this is more about procedure than personality, and nearly half the film takes place on Ellis Island, where it was filmed, and we learn about all the medical and bureaucratic crap that immigrants had to go through to get to the other side. This is an authentic recreation of what went on back then, and is very educational. What isn't are the fantasy and dream sequences, which while they sort of fit with the rest of the film, are rather annoying.

Be that as it may, the acting is rather good and the story is almost compelling, and the penultimate scene is a bit of a gratuitous shocker. Wait 'till it gets on cable.

Black Sheep

Written and directed
by Jonathan King

In New Zealand, sheep outnumber people by about ten to one. So it's only natural that the first major horror film about killer sheep should come from there, right? and with the with the WETA workshop, one of the best FX houses out there doing what's basically a charity job for purposes of patriotism, this thing can't miss, right?...right!?

Well actually, it can, but forutunately it doesn't. For those of us who like gross-out films with some intelligence behind it, this is exactly what we're looking for, which is why it's been such a hit at the film festival circuit.

The film centers around two brothers, Henry(Nathan Meister) and Angus Oldfield (Peter Feeney), who were brought up on a huge farm, and the film begins with a traumatic incident back when they were played by Neick Fenton and Eli Kent, which would traumatize Henry for the rest of his life. In fact it might traumatize you! But that's neither here nor there, for when Henry appears as an adult, he's taking a taxi from one of New Zealand's few large cities [at a cost of hundreds of dollars NZ] in order to sell out to his brother, who's about to show the world his latest creation, the perfect sheep, genetically engineered to be…uh oh. You know what that means.

So after Henry gets his check, He's given a last tour by Tucker (Tammy Davis), the farm's long time manager, but there's danger about, for moronic animal rights activists Grant (Oliver Driver) and Experience (Danielle Mason) have arrived to collect evidence of evil genetic experiments conducted by the evil Dr Rush(Tandi Wright), and unsurprisingly manage to get it. Then even more unsurprisingly, screw it up, releasing a mutant sheep fetus that infects the massive herd nearby and turn them into carnivorous killers!

What's best about this film is not the effects, which are actually rather cheesy, no the best thing is dialogue, which is unerringly witty and perceptive the acting is really good. While the film isn't the last bit scary, the gross-out factor more than makes up for it. This is one heck of a funny movie, and for fans of gore, one of the mandatory films of the year.

Go for it.

Lady Chatterley

Written and Directed
by Pascale Ferran

The classic work of high class smut in the 20th century is D. H. Lawrence's “Lady Chatterley's Lover.” For over seventy years the work has been translated into almost every language and into cinema, getting people in trouble again and again along the way.

The above is very well known, but what is not, is that Lawrence wrote the novel three different times before publishing it, leaving two complete versions sitting gathering dust on a shelf. That was before the second version was published decades after Lawrence's death. It is this version that Pascale Ferran, and her collaborator Roger Bohbot decided to turn into a miniseries for French television. I'm not sure if it was for pay cable or broadcast, but they're a lot less prudish over there and it could very well be the latter. It also explains why this thing is so damned long.

Sir Clifford Chatterley (Hippolyte Girardot) had his nether regions severely damaged during the First World War, and thus cannot have a normal sex life with his lovely wife Constance(Marina Hands), and when the film opens, they are living in an opulent estate out in the boonies, where with the help of myriad servants, she takes care of him while he runs a large coal mine nearby.

With the exception of momentary glimpse of Connie's beautiful naked breasts, the first hour of the film has nothing to do with sex or eroticism in general. In fact, the first third of the film could be rated G! Imagine: G-rated porn!

When she and her sister hire a nurse(Helene Alexandridis) for Clifford, Connie goes out more often and begins the immor(t)al relationship with Olivar Parkin (Jean-Louis Coulloc'h), the gamekeeper, and title character of the novel. Again, as they start getting hot and heavy, the film remains chaste. They don't actually take anything off. The sex is fully clothed and there's nothing here that would get the film past the PG-13 barrier until well into the final third of the film.

The problem with a film as long as it is, almost three hours, is the boredom factor. Yes indeed, there are times when one looks at one's watch and eyes become a bit heavy, but for the most part, the drama sustains it. Maybe if they cut out the brief closeup of Parkin's penis, they would be able to show the entire miniseries on cable, this is too long for one slog, even with the great acting.

You Kill Me

Directed by
John Dahl

We have a winner! The worst movie of the first half of the years is this one! Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely have written one of the most inane and unfunny comedies I've ever seen, and have managed to completely waste a brilliant cast of wonderful actors.

Frank Falenczyk(Ben Kingsley) is a hit man for Buffalo's Polish mob, which is run by his uncle Roman (Philip Baker Hall), who wants him to whack Irish Godfather Edward O'Leary (Dennis Farina), but is so dunk that he passes out waiting for him.

So his uncle sends him to San Francisco, where a friend, Dave (Bill Pullman), gets him a job and a place to stay, and the tenor of the film changes to a celebration of Alcoholics Anonymous and a romantic comedy, y'see, Our hero meets a woman named Lauren(Tia Leoni) and because she's a bit of a maniac herself, they fall in love…and oh yeah, there's Frank's sponsor Tom(Luke Wilson), who knows Frank's secret…in fact, everyone knows Frank's secret, as he's a chatterbox.

While the film has its moments, the whole mess is painfully unfunny, with unlikeable characters and mediocre writing. The cast is fantastic, but that's why this isn't one of the worst movies of all time. Avoid this like the plague.

Tribeca Reviews: the first batch

2007-04-26T05:26:00.000-07:00

So here we are again, Tribeca has, at least for me, been going on since last week, and not that it's started, I can start posting stuff.

Santiago, (Brazil) – North American Premiere.

Written and Directed
by Joao Moreira Salles

In 1992, Joao Moreira Salles started making a film about Santiago, the butler who had been working for his parents since his childhood, then, because he realized he had nothing actually usable, he put it all away and for the most part forgot about it for over a decade.

Santiago was a bit of a character, spending his free time going to concerts or writing lists and histories of various royal dynasties from ancient to modern history. But the film isn’t as much about him as it is as Salles and the problems associated with writer’s block. There are the long, loving scenes of the family piazza, and various artistic abortions from the original edit of the film of 1992, which are really pretentious and appear to be embarrassing to the filmmaker, who presents them to us as a form of self-flagellations.

Not worth the money, it’s probably good that this film will never be seen in these parts again.

Making Of– International Premiere.

Written and Directed
by Nouri Bouzid

The film’s title is basically a fake-out. It becomes obvious later on, but not well into the third reel. Bahta(Lotfi Abdelli) is a Tunisian break dancer, who’s a bit of a crook. His father hates him, his mother is too protective, and aside from the Islamic aspect, it resembles any slum area in the Western world. But after our hero decides to “borrow” his cousin’s police uniform and cause havoc in a local bistro, and gets into real trouble.

So when he can’t stow away on a ship leaving for Europe, he’s stuck, but, then he’s introduced to a mysterious stone carver(Lotfi Dziri), who wants to make our hero a jihadist. It’s at this point the film suddenly becomes grainy and discolored, and the actor playing Bahta rebels. He was hired to play a dancer, he tells the director(Bouzid, himself), and the latter explains what his goals are, and not very well, although, the film resumes.

Much of the rest of the film is about the making of a suicide bomber, and while characters from the first part of the film make some further appearances, such as our hero’s girlfriend(Fatima Ben Saïdane) getting pummeled “for her own good” in the name of Islam by our now-fanatical protagonist, it’s almost entirely the two Loftis discussing religion and why blowing innocent people up is a wonderful and peaceful thing to do.

The ending doesn’t make much sense, but this is a Greek Tragedy, and everything has to end badly. Sure, Bouzid is on the side of peace and modernity, but the film isn’t well constructed, and the need to break away from the action in order to further discuss the issues involved gets really old really quickly. The acting is good, and the dancing at the start is excellent, it would have been nice if the filmmaker stayed with that, but politics got in the way, which is why we’ll probably never see this again.

Half Moon– U.S. Premiere
Strand Releasing 114min NR

Written and Directed
by Bahman Ghobadi

Kurdistan has great scenery. Perhaps that’s why The Turks and the Persians want it so much. Bahman Ghobadi is a Kurdish patriot who loves his culture and very much wishes to celebrate it, which is why he’s made variations on this film several times.

The movie begins with a middle aged rascal named Kako(Allah Morad Rashtiani), running a cockfight with his sons [PeTA take note, animals WERE harmed in the making of this movie], when he’s informed that the great singer Mamo (Ismail Ghaffari) and his multitudinous offspring(Ismail Ghaffari, Hassan Poorshirazi, Golshifteh Farahani, Sadiq Behzadpoor and some others) have been invited to sing in front of a throng of half a million in Iraqi Kurdistan and it would be nice if Kako would kindly drive them there.

Thus begins an epic journey through Western Iran, where going through the mountains they pick up and drop off various characters, most notably the beauteous Hesho (Hedieh Tehrani), who has been exiled to a remote village because in Iran, musicians of the female persuasion are banned.

Hesho is first hidden, and then when she’s found, sent back where she came from, then found again, lost again, and Mamo and at last family have to go on without her. Then there’s the thing about another famous singer dying of joy and the introduction of the title character.

This is protest presented as dark comedy. The whole thing is cute, and while the scenery is spectacular, Iran seems a place that we most definitely wouldn’t want to spend much time in. Worth a matinee for the scenery alone, however.

Gardener of Eden
(U.S.A.) – World Premiere.

Directed by
Kevin Connolly

Somewhere in the heart of New Jersey, there are two pubescent boys arguing about superheroes. One says to the other, “The only reason that Batman gets to be a superhero is that he’s very, very rich. If he was middle class he’d never get to first base.” The other isn’t so sure, but agrees he’s probably right. Well, Tex Davis, who’s done quite a few screenplays in the past [a few of which have even been produced] simply doesn’t agree, and has decided to show us what Batman would be like if he started out as a lower middle class slacker.

Adam Harris(Lukas Haas) and his friends(Jim Parsons, Jerry Ferrara and ) have had a deal with each other since they were kids. Each would steal from their employers and share the proceeds with each other. That works pretty well, that is until one day, our hero’s life falls apart, getting fired by his evil Israeli boss [anti-Semitic? Don’t really know], because of what his disgusting brother did and Adam tried to stop. Then his parents throw him out of the house. Finally, at the end of his rope, Adam loses it, and beats the crap out of the next person he meets. That of course, is the local serial rapist, and instead of getting arrested, he’s acclaimed a hero.

So he decides to become Batman without the cape. Since he’s just a schlub from New Jersey, his arch nemesis isn’t the Joker, but a local drug dealer named Vic(Giovanni Ribisi), who mainly deals in weed and coke, but can get just about anything. He’s very popular with just about everybody, even, at the beginning, Adam.

This sudden change in attitude, alienates him from his friends, gets him in trouble with the police, and maybe even causes him to commit involuntary manslaughter, but it does get him a girlfriend in the person of Mona(Ericka Christensen), who was the rapist’s last victim.

The problem with this thing is that by the end of the film, Vic is far more sympathetic a character than Adam. Vic is popular because he’s providing what he thinks is a necessary service for the town, while Adam is just full of righteous indignation. He abandoned his friends and is surprised when they don’t like him any more. Also, he wants to join the police, but asks in such a way as to insult just about everyone on the force. The ending is a bit of a shocker, but it actually fits the Batman mold. It’s sad in a way. It’ll probably just get a nominal release before going to that great video bin in the sky.

The monday document dump.

2007-04-24T14:01:00.000-07:00

Well, here we go again. The GVG didn't publish again and we have to put it here.

Fracture

Directed by
Gregory Hoblit

Exactly what the title mean is rather obscure. But my best guess is that the protagonist, Ted Crawford(Anthony Hopkins) a who is structural engineer, looks for fractures in airplanes and such, that the tiniest of fracture can destroy an entire vehicle.

The film begins with Ted's wife Jennifer(Embeth Davidtz) having an affair with a hunk named Rob Nunally(Billy Burke), and we know from the trailers exactly what's going to happen to poor Jen. So on with the latest episode of “Law and Order: Los Angeles!”

So, since this is a glorified “Law and Order” episode, the usual stuff happens. The detectives arrive, arrest Ted, who immediately confesses and DA Joe Lobruto(David Strathairn) appoints DDA [“deputy, not assistant, same difference] Willy Beachum(Ryan Gosling), who is about to go to a much better job at a top law firm, the job of doing the arraignment, and since this an open and shut case, the entire trial. That's when things start falling apart and Willy loses the case. Hannibal Lector is oh so much smarter than the cocky pretty boy.

While our hero is having all sorts of troubles with his case, he's also having a tussle in the hay with his prospective new boss(Rosamund Pike), which is something he obviously should have reported to the people upstairs, but that's neither here nor there. The thing is just filler, and it would have been better if they had just concentrated on the case at hand. The redemption arc is actually rather interesting.

But the thing is pre-ordained and the viewer knows how it's going to end from the minute Ted is acquitted. However, if you're a L&O fan, it's worth a look.

In the Land of Women

Written and Directed
by Jonathan Kasdan

Sometime during George W. Bush's first term, Jonathan Kasdan was given a chance to direct a film he had written. He took that chance, and the film was completed in early 2005. Years passed, and the film's release was delayed and delayed and delayed. Not only that, it was transferred from Warners' proper to Warner Independent. Exactly why is a bit of a mystery. The film isn't that bad, but still, the film is a little off and that's never stopped anyone before.

Carter Webb (Adam Brody), a young Hollywood screenwriter specializing in soft core pornography, is going out with a supermodel named Sophia (Elena Anaya). As the film begins, their in a Hollywood diner, and he's in the process of dumping him.

Now, Carter is God's gift to women and he knows it. How could she do this to him? He's really depressed and is discussing it with his mother(JoBeth Williams), when his grandmother (Olympia Dukakis) calls and announces that she's about to kick off. Now mom's all set to go to suburban Ann Arbur and take care of her when Carter says that he's going to do it, he's got to get his butt out of the glamorous world of Hollywood and finally finish that novel about his horrible life in High School he's been working on since he was seventeen, he's 26.

Now when he gets there, and we are reassured that Granny is comic relief, Carter stumbles across Sarah Hardwicke (Meg Ryan), the across the street neighbor, and since she's still gorgeous and he's God's gift to women not only is a friendship immediately established, but she tells him her most intimate secrets, such as the fact that her husband(Clark Gregg) was having an affair and what she'd really like to do with her life. She also arranges a date between Carter and her teenaged daughter Lucy (Kristen Stewart), with younger sister Paige(Makenzie Vega) acting as a chaperone.

Since he's God's gift to women, they fall in love with him immediately, and thus he gets beaten up by the guys when Lucy takes him to a party. Then of course, there's the obligatory cancer subplot in order to spice things up. It's all very soapy and gets rather boring in parts, but the acting is good, but that's really no reason to spend good money on this throwaway picture.

Perhaps that's why it's only coming out now instead of a year ago.

Vacancy

Directed by
Nimród Antal

Don't get me wrong. I LIKE horror films. I've seen some extremely good ones over the years, and I even enjoy mediocre to bad ones. I'm really ticked off when stuff like "Hunted Mansion VI" comes out and they don't have any press screenings. I've missed some good chances to tell my readers about some excellent gorefests because someone at the publicity departments at the various studios thinks that horror fans don't read movie reviews and there's no real reason to screen these, which is a pity, really.

Usually, horror films are not THAT bad, and much of the time they are original and entertaining filmmaking. Not this. While this has some good dialogue, here and there, the film is the least original I've seen. This is a paint-by-numbers affair that is not only tired, but looks as if it was written by a computer program.

Kate Beckinsale and Luke Wilson play a generic married couple driving down a lonely road in the middle of nowhere. He thought that it would be shorter than the interstate, where there was a traffic jam. Ain't that always the case? Well, to make a long story short, they get stuck at a isolated motel where the proprietor(Frank Whaley) provides them with one of he worst hotel rooms in the history of the movies, complete with a VCR library of what happened there previously. Not being morons like the other six thousand previous tenants, our heroes fight back.

If you're going to start with episode VIII, it's always better to have at least someone running around who's seen episodes I-VII. That's what this is, we're in the middle of a series and nobody's told us. Beckinsale and Wilson are the special guest victims and somehow, they're going to figure out how to revive the staff of the motel for number IX. However, judging from this thing, Mark L. Smith isn't smart enough to figure it out. Best quit while you're ahead and go see “Hot Fuzz” like you're supposed to.

Everything's Gone Green

Directed by
Paul Fox

Money can't buy happiness. We all know that but, is trying to find out all that wrong? Writer Douglas Coupland apparently thinks it does, because that's the theme of this hypocritical little gem.

Ryan(Paulo Costanzo) is an all-Canadian slacker living in Vancouver, BC, who, as most sitcom heroes are, gets fired from that job he hates and is thrown out of his snotty girlfriend's pad almost simultaneously. While he's being lambasted for not being ambitious enough, he mother(Susan Hogan) calls: Dad(Tom Butler) has won almost six million bucks in the lottery, but can't find the ticket.

The number is wrong [of course], but somehow Ryan impresses the guy from the lottery(Aidan Devine) enough to offer him a job. Luck works in mysterious ways, apparently, because on the way to the official interview, he meets up with the beauteous Ming (Steph Song), who unfortunately is going out with the skuzzy Bryce(JR Bourne), who allegedly designs golf courses, but in fact is more into other things, and he gets Ryan into a money-laundering scheme.

The film is snarky and mean-spirited, which if you think about it is perfectly fine. Coupland and director Paul Fox have nothing but contempt for anyone who wants to play the lotto, or even getting ahead, and it shows. No one is pure, everyone except maybe Ming is greedy and vacuous, and therefore, easy to laugh at. The jokes, for the most part, work. You'll have a good time, but with a need for a shower afterward. Perhaps it's the Luddite nostalgia for the nobility of poverty, or an innate neo-Marxism with its hate for the “bourgeoisie.” Still, hate makes better humor possible, and that's the case here. Worth a cheap matinee.

Hot Fuzz

Written and Directed
by Edgar Wright

Two centuries ago, the great actor Edmond Kean lay dying of some disease. A friend of his who was at the scene asked him if dying was hard. The immortal reply was “Dying is easy, COMEDY is hard.”

Indeed comedy IS hard to do. Some of the top people in the business have made some extremely expensive turkeys over the years, and when a true comic masterpiece comes around that's truly a cause for celebration. Start celebrating: its here.

Sgt. Nicholas Angel(Simon Pegg) is the best that Scotland Yard has. He's so good, in fact, that he's being sent to Sandford, the most boring place in all of England, in order to stop him from making everyone else look bad. Little do they know….right?

Welcoming Sargent Angle to the force is Inspector Frank Butterman(Jim Broadbent), his son PC Danny(Nick Frost), who's a bit of a drunk and loves action movies, and a bunch of slacker cops(Rafe Spall, Olivia Colman Paddy Considine, and a couple of others) who wouldn't know a murder from a ham sandwich, and soon prove that the previous statement is true.

At first, it seems such cluelessness is completely benign, as the local notables, all of whom are played by former action stars (Timothy Dalton, who was James Bond, Edward Woodward who was” the Equalizer”, Paul Freeman, who played Belloc in “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, Billie Whitelaw, who played the nanny in the original version of “The Omen' and a bunch of others), seem to be the usual sitcom stereotypes, but of course there's something rotten going on here, expecially when various people start getting whacked with astonishing regularity.

Angel is astonished that nobody in the local force wants to investigate, but this script is far more intelligent than it appears to be, and auteur Edgar Wright, co-writer Pegg and their partner in crime Nick Frost have more than one trick up their sleeve. When the action starts for real…WOW!

This is what an action comedy should be. It's a real trip and makes the stuff Broken Lizard puts out look lame by comparison.

Alice Neel

A documentary
by Andrew Neel

Alice Neel was a minor 20th century American artist who did portraits and illustrations and only achieved great acclaim late in her life. Her grandson Andrew decided to do a memorial tribute to her by using found footage and video as well as interviewing his parents and his uncle, who didn't seem to be very happy when recalling their childhoods. There was also an aunt, who killed herself some years before the film was constructed.

She didn't seem like all that nice a person, and reading the notes, I was shocked to learn that her second son's father was a bigwig in the US communist party and of her work as an illustrator was in quite a few lefty illustrations during the 1930s and '40s. This part of her life, and a decent selection of her art, was not even shown, which could very well create a false impression of the lady

AS a documentary, it wasn't all that bad, but it didn't really go below the surface. We're left with lots of questions, especially why she abandoned her daughter...after all, there's that portrait of her at eight or ten, so there must have been contact. As to the personal stuff, Neel is open and honest about his grandmother, but as to the rest, it's all coverup. This is a film for her fans and art historians, and the general public will probably find this film rather boring.

The Valet

Written and Directed
by Francis Veber

The French can do sitcom! That isn't really news but not that many get over here and most those that do are to cerebral or too stupid to be really funny. This one hits it right on the mark.

Pierre Levasseur (Daniel Auteuil), a billionaire, has been dating Elena (Alice Taglioni), a supermodel, for several years now and she's getting fed up with it. She either wants him to marry her or dump her. He, being French, doesn't understand that kind of thinking [After all, President Mitterand made his mistress Prime Minister a couple of decades back] and to make matters even worse, his wife Christine(Kristin Scott Thomas) is getting suspicious…well probably not, but she's definitely getting annoyed.

The problem with the divorce is the usual tax problem. Wifey owns a majority of the empire's stock, and…this movie was done a thriller just last week, a thing called “Perfect Stranger,” at least the setup was…so, Pierre's lawyer Maitre Foix (Richard Berry) comes up with a sneaky plan. Since the tabs printed a photograph of Pierre and Elena with a third person, why not get that third person to pose as Elena's boyfriend for a while while the finances are finagled in Pierre's favor.

The Schnook in question is a François Pignon(Gad Elmaleh), who parks cars for a fancy restaurant [Valet parking, get it?] and is madly in love with his childhood sweetheart, Emilie (Virginie Ledoyen), but she doesn't want to because she's in debt and he's a schnook, who lives with his even schookier coworker Richard (Dany Boon).

So with a financial incentive, both François and Elena agree to the scam, and with the paparazzi doing their thing, we get the standard farce with witty dialogue and cute situations. The acting is rather good, and Daniel Auteuil does a great slow burn. There's also a rather cute turn by Patrick Mille as a smarmy cel phone salesman who has the hots for Emilie. This is the one of the few French films that is a definite must-see.

The Holy Mountain (1972)

Written and Directed
by Alejandro Jodorowsky

Long ago and far away, a Hispanic Jewish lunatic named Alejandro Jodorowsky invented the midnight movie. It was called “El Topo” and it was bloody and misogynistic and made little or no sense. Which, coming at the end of the 1960s, was perfect for the consumers of illegal intoxicants. Thus, Jodorowsky became rich and famous, and was able to create a second film, more expensive and inexplicable than the first. This was the too-mystical-for-it's-own good “Holy Mountain,” which has been mysteriously lying on a shelf for lo these many years.

The film follows a Jesus look-alike (Horacio Salinas) and a deformed dwarf, as they wander around the wilderness and Mexico City's Zocalo district. Here Jodorowsky thrills us with a reinactment of the conquest of Mexico with all the characters played by frogs and lizards. I'm serious. Jesus also gets attacked by bakers or something like that, and is saved by whores and a chimp, like I said, the whole thing doesn't make a lot of sense.

So the filmmaker takes JC to another place, a tower, where an A mystical Alchemist(Jodoworsky) and his bald and beautiful assistant explain…holy shit! No I'm serious, that's what they explain. When they're finished with the divine feces, the Alchemist introduces us to an entirely new cast of characters, a bunch of mostly evil industrialists who own entire planets, who are going with JC and the Alchemist to the mountain of the title. The rest is Joseph Campbell.

The film is worth seeing for the visuals. Jodoworsky was a master stylist, and imagination oozes out of every pore. Everything comes out of left field, and there's method to this madness, even though it's intentionally obscure. The HD DVD's picture is exquisite, and even makes up for the mostly useless script. It's going to be given a nominal release here and there, and might be worth a look, especially if you have illegal intoxicants about.

The Pope isn't Catholic anymore.

2007-04-21T09:56:00.000-07:00

According to the AP newswire, Pope Benedict XVI has done away with Limbo, and either little unbabtized babies are going to HELL or original sin is a crock of shit.

I've always known the latter, but doing away with a major tennent of faith like that means that being a Catholic, or even a Christian for that matter, is a waste of time as far as salvation goes.

Gen Art films, part two

2007-04-16T13:44:00.000-07:00

High Maintenance

Directed by
Phil Van

One of the more effective ways of telling a joke is to make a short film. This is about an allegedly married couple(Nicolette Krebitz and Wanja Mues), who are having dinner and don’t seem to be very happy about it. So she turns him off and calls the robot company to get an upgrade. She gets it and then there’s the punch-line, which is obvious the minute it happens [writer Simon Biggs picked a very OLD joke] but in no way stifles the giggle. Van and Biggs will be heard from again.

When A Man Falls in the Forest

Written and Directed
by Ryan Eslinger

What do movie stars do when work begins to fall off? They work for scale in small independent films. That’s what Sharon Stone, who hasn’t been getting to many big paydays lately, has been doing for the last few years.
Nothing wrong with that, I guess.

This is one of those tiny films where the cast is hoping for a left field Oscar® nomination to get back in the big time. This is exactly the kind of film for that kind of hope. It’s well directed, well acted, and depressing as hell. I mean leave-the-theater-and-jump-in-front-of-a-moving-car type thing. Perfect for a date on a Saturday night.

The film is mostly about a janitor named Bill(Dylan Baker), who has no real people skills and works at night and sleeps during the day. One day he’s discovered by an old nemesis, Gary(Timothy Hutton) who’s been staying late at the office mostly to avoid his wife Karen(Sharon Stone), who is suffering from empty nest syndrome [their son(Nicholas Elia) is off at college], and clearly sick of Gary’s continued presence.

After discovering Bill’s existence, Gary contacts his old pal Travis(Pruitt Taylor Vince), who has been in a holding pattern since an auto accident some years before. Is any of this going to go anywhere? That’s the question. Aside from a subplot about Bill and a thing called “lucid dreaming” it most certainly does not. It keeps on keeping on it’s unfocused way until it arrives at a completely arbitrary ending, the kind that says: “I can’t think of an decent ending, so I’m going to do something violent for no earthly reason”

This is a professional cast doing the best they can with what they’ve got, which isn’t all that much. This is not going to do what was intended, and won’t come to a theater near anyone in the near future.

The Saddest Boy in the World

Written and Directed
by Jamie Travis

Timothy Higgins(Benjamin B. Smith), the title character is going to commit suicide on his ninth birthday. His mommy(Kirsten Robek) has invited all his enemies(Jerocko Harder, Colton Boreen, Paige & Danika Martin, Megan McKinnon and Garnet Barrett) to the party, and the fact that he hates his sister(Hailey Conner) and his shrink(Babs Chula) is a moron doesn’t help matters much.

Once Timmy’s tale of woe is finished, we wait for the happy ending, but auteur Jamie Travis refuses to end this live action cartoon that way, giving in to the obvious conclusion. Nicely done, but rather too artzy for it’s own good.

The National Film Board of Canada and the Government of Alberta paid for this thing, presumably as a public interest educational film intended to fight overpopulation. Either that, or because the subject matter is extremely Canadian.

He Was a Quiet Man

Written and Directed
by Frank Cappello

Frank Cappello has a day job. It’s what’s called a script doctor. Fixing up other peoples’ stuff while he writes stuff like “Suburban Commando” and “Constantine,” the latter of which made quite a bit of money, so he doesn’t have to go around selling shoes and other stuff like that.

Like most writers, he knows that the job of director is rather unnecessary and that he could probably do it himself if given the chance. So with this script, he’s managed to get a chance to prove it.

The film begins with a joke of sorts. Bob Maconel(Christian Slater) is one of
those cubicle drones on the edge of madness. We know this because when
he gets home he has a conversation with one of his goldfish, who calls him a
wimp for being still alive along with all his evil coworkers.

So the next day, while his immediate superior(Jamison Jones) is castigating
him for doing his job properly, Bob finally gets up the gumption to do the
deed. Nervous, he drops the last bullet, and while he tries to pick it up, he
hears shots. SOMEONE HAS BEATEN HIM TO IT!!!! So Bob shoots the shooter,
and thus saves the life of the lovely Vanessa(Elisha Cuthbert), who is
unfortunately paralyzed from the neck down. We now have gone from a black
comic short, to a genuine feature.

Bob is acclaimed a hero and is given a job as the CEO’s(William H. Macy)
assistant, or as the sign on the door says, “VP in charge of creative thinking.
He also starts a romance with Vanessa, who has movement in her left pinky
and thus has hope for recovery. This leads to a whole new set of problems.

The acting is, obviously professional and Slater gives one of his best performances ever. Cuthbert shows she’s not just another pretty face, and the film keeps us interested for the entire hour and a half. It should find a distributor rather quickly.

Frank Cappello has a day job. It’s what’s called a script doctor. Fixing up other peoples’ stuff while he writes stuff like “Suburban Commando” and “Constantine,” the latter of which made quite a bit of money, so he doesn’t have to go around selling shoes and other stuff like that.

Like most writers, he knows that the job of director is rather unnecessary and that he could probably do it himself if given the chance. So with this script, he’s ma

No Diving

Directed by
William Hoffman

A man. A dock. No ego. That’s the subtitle of this cute little short, where our hero(Michael Cuomo) jumps into the lake a dozen times with no form whatsoever. That’s it. It might have made it’s money back at some film festival.

Chalk

Written and Directed
by Mike Akel

The school year is a long one in Texas, and former high school teacher
Mike Akel has decided to make his feature debut with the slogan “write what
you know” clearly in mind.

Mr. Stroope(Chris Mass) is a novice on his first job as a history teacher;
Mr. Lowrey(Troy Schremmer) has more experience but has too much of
an ego to get where he wants to be. Mrs. Reddell(Shannon Haragan) has
just been promoted to assistant principal and thus her relationship with
with her old pal Coach Webb(Janelle Schremmer), who is straight. [She
makes a point about that]. At the quartet go forth into the world of
education, in a Christopher Guest kind of way.

The “mockumentary” format isn’t always the best way to do things, but in
this case, there’s really not much of a choice. The film was done on the
cheap, and with very little in the way of plot aside from the foibles of the
staff of the high school, they HAD to do it that way in order to keep the
general tone of the film intact.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Akel got himself a winning cast, and the
writing is rather good for what it’s supposed to do. While this is rather
hamless as a comedy, the film is mostly meh, and is not something that one
would actually pay to go out and see on a Saturday night. However, it’ll get
all those involved more work in the future, and it’s a good thing to have on
one’s résumé. However, it won’t get past the festival circuit.

Gen Art films, part one

2007-04-14T18:51:00.000-07:00

The Gen Art film festival, as I said below, has been going on for a few days, and here are the first batch of new reviews:

Gimme Green

Written and Directed by
Isaac Brown and Eric Flagg

This is propaganda, no doubt about it. Granted some propaganda docs have some genuine passion and are believable to some extent. Not this. What we have is a particularly nasty attack on suburbia in general and lawns in particular. Apparently, lawn grass is the biggest crop in America and those evil busybodies at neighborhood associations all over are forcing people, mostly against their will to keep their front lawns nice and neat in order to keep resale values up. The FIENDS!!!!

Not only that the filmmakers insinuate that lawncare products are the main cause of pollution and prove it by presenting two dead fish. Then comes the commercial by the artificial lawn manufacturers association, or it seems like it is. They lovingly interview a couple of people who are putting some in, and then go on ranting their hatred of grass and all it stands for. On the other hand, it’s almost entertaining.

Sharkwater

A documentary
by Rob Stewart

Rob Stewart loves sharks. Not that way!...um…maybe it IS that way. One
of the first shots in this feature is of him in his scuba gear holding one and
petting it while it just sits there like a pussy cat on his lap. One wonders how
he managed to do that. This is a man obsessed, and he admits it. His mission
in life is to tell the world that all sharks, be they great whites or nurses are completely harmless and wouldn’t hurt anyone. While it’s true that more people are killed by elephants than sharks, it’s also true that elephants are considered giant rats in many parts of Africa.

Using old US government training films, he tries to prove that fear and hatred
of sharks is a form of bigotry akin to that against Jews and Blacks and then
goes on with footage he shot himself how beautiful the entire class
Chondrichthyes truly is. That part is really cool. Stewart is a gifted
cinematographer, and he manages to get some weird and interesting people
to interview, like a representative of the Shark fin soup industry and some
very loud Australians. They even make Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore
look positively sane. But pretty pictures and strident advocacy can only take one so far, so he joins up with eco-terrorist and Sea Shepherd Conservation Society founder Paul Watson, who, Stewart claims, has been invited by the President of Costa Rica himself to patrol the seas around Cocos Island in the Pacific and make sure those nasty long line fishermen [who, sadly, really are]
don’t poach the wildlife out of existence.

But while in Guatemalan waters, our merry band comes across a fishing boat pulling in the lines in question and with Stewart filming, Watson and company confront them, and the fishermen radio in a distress call, which gets Stewart, Watson and company in deep trouble when they get to Costa Rica, and Stewart, on the sly, manages to get footage of huge illegal sharkfin soup factories, which are the cause of the population of the entire biological class Chondrichthyes to be reduced to a mere ten percent of what it was a decade ago. This is exiting stuff, to be sure, but one wonders why Watson didn’t get official authorization to protect himself and his people legally before going on his mission south. It seems, if you’ll forgive the pun, rather fishy.

There is a happy denouement of sorts, but footage of de-finned sharks being thrown back still alive is pretty gross, but I guess that’s the point. The film does what it’s supposed to, inspire outrage. But still, Jaws will never have the appeal of those baby pandas.

The Angel

Directed by
Paul Hough

Shorts nowadays are for the most part samples. The director or writer wants to do major films in whatever genre they like the best. In this case Paul Hough wants to make zillion-dollar comic book movies, so he's made a seven minute long epic, which will show those producers looking for an eager beginner with talent to make “Aquaman III” or whatever, he or she has the right stuff.

Taking place in what's presumably the same universe as “The Matrix”, a little girl watches over her grandmother, as she lay sick in what must be one of the dingiest hospitals in the Western World. As the kid goes down the hall to get some candy, she comes across a mysterious one-legged hero, or so we think.

When she returns, she comes across a monster, and the one-legged hero does battle, in a way that reminds one of the famous trilogy, emerges victorious and then there's the nifty plot twist. Not bad at all. Ten years from now, this little gem's going to be an extra on a DVD for some popcorn flick.

The Signal

Written and Directed by
David Bruckner, Dan Bush,
and Jacob Gentry

David Bruckner, Dan Bush and Jacob Gentry quite clearly want to do television, otherwise they wouldn't have done this as a miniseries. True, this is one SICK miniseries, but we have three half hours neatly divided into three episodes, each written and directed by a different one of the trio, and with mostly the same cast and crew.

The film begins, or we think it begins in the middle of a crappy horror film in which some actresses are handcuffed to trees or something, but that doesn't really matter, because the picture begins to disintegrate and nothing is left but a pulsating image, which may or may not be from another planet. This is annoying, especially to Ben (Justin Welborn) and Mya (Anessa Ramsey), who have just finished making love and were busy resting after the deed. She realizes that she has to leave, because as a cheating wife, she has to get back home before her husband Lewis(AJ Bowen) gets suspicious. But they mysterious snow on the TV is doing something to the public at large, and soon, as Mya drives home, people are suddenly killing each other with wild abandon.

When Mya gets back home, she finds Lewis with pals Rod (Sahr Ngaujah) and Jerry(Matt Stanton), who are arguing about what happened to the TV, Lewis seems unusually jealous, and doesn't seem to notice that the people in the apartment bloc have suddenly turned into homicidal maniacs, then he becomes one himself and Mya flees, and the next morning she finds Lewis tied to a chair and Rod hiding in a closet, where he explains clearly and succinctly how he's not crazy and everyone else is and thus had to die. Clearly, this is getting into some really strange territory.

The second act finds Mya having crashed into a dumpster and left the proceedings, leaving us with a new set of characters. This is played primarily for comedy as Anna (Cheri Christian), who is getting ready for a party, kills her husband (Christopher Thomas), who has just turned into a signal-induced zombie. In walks her landlord Clark(Scott Poythress), who had killed Rod at the end of the previous act. In comes Lewis, who thinks that Mya is in the house and a guy named Jim Parsons(Chandrian McKnight), who seems to be the only clueless person in the entire city.

Just when the comedy begins to flag, the gore returns, and boy is there gore. This film hasn't been rated yet, but I'd be surprised if it doesn't get an R.

The third act brings Clark and Ben, who has around all along, on a quest to find Mya and they discuss the apocalyptic nature of what's happening and what to do next. This is actually rather poignant.

This film has everything needed to become a cult classic. It's well written, original, funny and chock full of sex and violence. I never once looked at my watch. Just the thing for a summer afternoon, and you don't even need illegal intoxicants!

The Sunday morning document dump

2007-04-14T17:45:00.000-07:00

As the GVG isn't putting anything up, we might as well put it up here:

Aqua Teen Hunger Force
Colon Movie Film for Theaters

Written and Directed by
Matt Maiellaro and Dave Willis

Blame this on Pokémon. Back in the late 1990s, Warner Bros. released a theatrical version of the then wildly popular TV show/video game, and the thing almost broke a hundred million bucks, since then, there have been a number of other theatrical episodes of animated TV shows, and with the exception of “South Park: The Movie” which was brilliant, most were not and returns became lower and lower until the people at Warners’ decided to finally give up on the idea.

However, that didn’t stop the people at Cartoon Network from giving it another go. The people at the WB generously gave the film to First Look Pictures, who specialize in independent films with small runs, in other words they cater to the “art house crowd.” While this may play in a house, I can hardly call it “art.”

The makers of this film know who their audience is, and it probably isn’t you. It’s insomniacs who watch the TV version late at night on various types of intoxicating substances. Why this “movie film” is in theaters is a mystery. Who in their right minds would blow eleven bucks to see what they can watch for nothing on cable?

This is supposed to be an action epic that explores the origins of the Aqua Teen Hunger Force (better known as Master Shake, Frylock, and Meatwad), cartoon fast food products who save the world every episode, fighting the same evil aliens, and mad scientists (Dr. Weird and Steve) and whatnot in the theatrical version. God help us.

This time out, they discover an exercise machine from outer space [or is it millions of years ago? Who cares?] which threatens downtown Philadelphia. The plot, actually is something that only fans of the show would appreciate, although there are a few laughs here and there [I didn’t find any, but there were several chuckles resonating throughout the screening room] the whole thing is relatively incomprehensible. I guess ita bit too highbrow for the likes of me. If you don’t like the TV show, then don’t see the movie.

Disturbia

Directed by
D.J. Caruso

I was arguing with a friend about this film before either of us actually saw it. From the promos, it looked like warmed over Hitchcock. The basic plot is a rehash of “Rear Window,” and my friend was complaining how there’s nothing new in film anymore and why should one spend the bucks to see this thing if you can rent the original for a lot less? Well, he’s both right and wrong. D. J. Caruso and writers Christopher B. Landon and Carl Ellsworth have indeed ripped off Hitchcock to some extent, but it’s also quite original, and some of the visuals are breathtaking.

The film begins with such a visual. Kale(Shia LaBeouf), the protagonist, is out in the Pacific Northwest with his father(Matt Craven), it’s out in the middle of nowhere, and nothing much happens until just before the opening credits start, but we have ten minutes of great introspective acting in gloriously beautiful scenery. It’s a fake-out of course, which has both nothing and everything to do with the rest of the film and has a completely different tone than everything that comes later.

Dad, gets killed in a horrific car crash while talking to Mom(Carrie-Anne Moss) on the phone [car crashes are always fun], and BANG! We’re in a completely different movie, since our hero is now a prisoner in his own home after being sentenced to house arrest for punching his Spanish teacher(Rene Rivera) in the face in class, something we in the audience are manipulated into thinking is justified.

So Act One is bucolic lyricism and tragedy, Act Two is pure comedy. Bored out of his skull, Kale starts surveying the neighborhood with his sidekick Ronnie (Aaron Yoo), using the binoculars featured in the poster and that is kind of how he hooks up with next door neighbor Ashley (Sara Roemer) and the trio have some interesting misadventures within the confines of the house and front yard, speculating on, among other things, whether or not creepy and mysterious neighbor Mr.Turner (David Morse) is in fact the serial killer being talked about on the television. Of course he is, which leads us to Act Three, which is pure thriller.

Morse has never been better. He exudes an evil air that pretty much blots everything else out as he slowly begins to dominate the picture as the tone of the film changes from teen comedy to something else entirely. Le Beuf, Yoo and Roemer have great chemistry together and it’s easy to suspend disbelief.

Yeah, one can tell where much of the film was stolen from, but the repackaging is so good that it doesn’t really matter. It’s most definitely worth a bargain matinee.

Slow Burn

Written and Directed
by Wayne Beach

If you’re going to blatantly rip off something, you might as well do it from the best, and Bryan Singer’s “The Usual Suspects” is about as good as it gets. Unfortunately, blatant ripoffs are almost always inferior to the originals. However that doesn’t mean that it can’t be entertaining. This is a classic refrigerator film.

What is a refrigerator film? It’s a film you have a blast at, then you go home, and while you’re getting a snack out of the fridge when you get home, it suddenly hits you how awful it was. So I’m of two minds about this.

The film starts with Nora Timmer (Jolene Blalock) looking horrible in the pouring rain, and we find out exactly why extremely soon. It seems that the corpse(Mekhi Phifer) had a sexual relationship with her and so did her boss DA Ford Cole(Ray Liotta).

Nora claims that she killed him while he was raping her, but then, out of nowhere, comes Luther Pinks(James” LL Cool J” Smith), who claims that Isaac, the corpse, was completely innocent and that Nora is a ho. So Ford leaves journalist Ty Trippin(Chiwetel Ejiofor)
waiting in the lobby for the rest of the film while he goes fishing for red herrings, the chief of which is a drug lord named Danny. Either that or Keyser Sozé, I’m not sure.

So we get the conflicting stories and a number of nifty explosions, signifying very little and making for a film that’s lots of fun and rather confounding, but as I said before, it’s best not to think about it too much because it might give you a headache, which is why it’s been sitting on a shelf for almost five years [it was completed in ’03 and was shown at the 2005 Toronto film festival]. It’s a half way decent way to waste an afternoon on a bargain matinee, but no way is it worth full price.

Perfect Stranger

Directed by
James Foley

I’m surprised that the red herring isn’t extinct yet. It’s almost as if the makers of this film fished them all out of the sea and put them in this film. There are so many of them, Wow!

The film starts with investigative reporter Rowena Price (Halle Berry), posing as a lobbyist, where she’s showing Senator Sachs(Gordon MacDonald) some blackmail photos sent by a former gay intern to her newspaper. She has a scoop! But to the chagrin of both herself and her sidekick Miles Hailey (Giovanni Ribisi), the Senator is too powerful, and gets the story quashed. Both are furious, and Ro quits.

Just as she walks out of the door, she’s accosted by her old pal Grace(Nicki Aycox), who wants her to expose the sexual misconduct of powerful ad executive Harrison Hill (Bruce Willis), who had a brief affair with Grace, and had the audacity not to divorce his wife and give up his entire world for her! Thus he must be destroyed!

Of course Ro has no intentions of doing that, seeing as Grace had stolen her boyfriend Cameron(Gary Dourdan) some time before, that is until Grace turns up dead in the Hudson River. So Ro gets Miles to get her a job in Hill’s office, and the two of them begin looking for dirt, because obviously, Hill did it to save his marriage to the beauteous Mia (Paula Miranda), who owns 60% of his company. Or did he?

Like I said, this thing has so many red herrings in it that I’m afraid they might have fished them into extinction. There are lots of other suspects, and but that’s only misdirection. It’s clear that YOU did it, and at the end of the film the only people that don’t seem like total creeps are Hill’s two assistants(Patti DArbanville and Clea Lewis) and the editor of the newspaper(Richard Portnow). The twist at the end is a bit of a shocker, but it doesn’t help very much. The acting is great, but that doesn’t change the fact that the script is too dense and misanthropic. Don’t bother unless you like seeing Holly Berry almost naked.

Private Fears in Public Places

Written and Directed
by Alain Resnais

Exactly, what is it about depressing movies that people keep making them? I mean, who in their right mind would want to see a thing that makes you want to kill yourself at the end?

Thierry (André Dussollier) is a Parisian real estate broker and is trying to find an apartment for a shrew named Nicole (Laura Morante) and her drunk of a fiancée Dan (Lambert Wilson). He lives a lonely life with his sister Gaelle(Isabelle Carré), who doesn’t like him very much. She goes out every night to read at the local bistro and get away from him. The days aren’t much better, because his assistant Charlotte (Sabine Azéma) is a religious fanatic.

Dan spends most of his day at a hotel bar, where he whines to Lionel (Pierre Arditi) the bartender, who’s very patient with everybody, especially his aged father(Claude Rich), who’s a comic monster. Dad needs 24 hour care, and thus hires Charlotte as his part-time caretaker. This is supposed to be a comedy, so it’s obvious that Dan and Gaelle will hook up eventually. We watch people hurting for no reason and it’s all very painful, especially for the viewer.

This flick was based on an English play by Alan Ayckburn, and its clear that Resnais doesn’t understand how English drama works. First off, it’s too stage-y. While the camera travels around the various sets, it doesn’t do so very much, and thus it’s all rather boring visually. Second, the characters aren’t very interesting. All sorts of things are alluded to, but the filmmakers don’t get much beyond the surface, this is especially true of the Nicole character, who is just a bitch, nothing more, we want to know what it is that Dan did, and why Theirry doesn’t kick his sister out on her ear or confront Charlotte about the maguffin. But I guess that’s the point of the original play in the first place. T’ain’t worth the bucks.

Redline

Directed by
Andy Cheng

Stupid movies can indeed be fun. This is one of those scripts that appears to have been originally written by a twelve year old and is about crashing cars and baring breasts. There’s nothing actually wrong with that, but remember this is not “Citizen Kane.”

Apparently real estate investor Daniel Sadek financed the $26 million movie because he promised his car collection that he would make it a movie star, and so all those Lamborghinis, Ferraris, Rolls Royces and such are given as much love on the screen as are the human stars, which is something we can clearly see,

The plot: Nadia Bjorlin is Natasha, a rock star wannabe who’s day job is an auto mechanic on the NASCAR circuit, and can drive like nobody’s business. Dragooned into the illegal racing circuit, she’s forced to become the bimbo of an evil vegan counterfeiter(Angus Macfadyen), who wants her to drive in the next secret race, or he will kill her mommy, who for some reason is almost as hot as Nat is.

Of course Mom has to be rescued by someone, and our villain’s nephew Carlo (Nathan Phillips), a recently discharged Iraq vet, fits the bill. In the meantime, we get to watch lots of almost naked women cavort in a resort, and Eddie Griffin and Tim Matheson lose whatever credibility they ever had. While this isn’t the worst film of the year by any means, it still reeks. This must be seen only when intoxicated. Seeing this with a clear head will just make it ache.

Year of the Dog

Written and Directed
By Mike White

Before I begin I should make a confession. I’m prejudiced against vegans. I am not apologizing, being prejudiced isn’t always a bad thing. I’m also prejudiced against Nazis and pedophiles, and I don’t care if David Duke or Nambla are offended. Also, the comparison between vegans and Nazis is apt, for both are a bunch of intolerant fanatics. Mike White is a vegan and he’s made a propaganda film as hateful as it is badly made, which is strange because his resume is one of the best in Hollywood.

This is the spiritual journey of Peggy(Molly Shannon) is a nerd living in California. She works for a company filled with icky cartoonish people, her brother (Thomas McCarthy) and sister-in-law(Laura Dern) are disgusting bores who are far too concerned with their two kids and the only consolation she has from an awful world is her beloved dog Pencil.

One night, Pencil goes under the neighbor’s(John C. Reilly) fence and dies of “toxic poisoning [is there any other kind?]. Peggy is naturally devastated. Al the neighbor comes over and commiserates. It turns out that he’s a hunter who accidentally shot his own dog many years ago. So He’s evil.

Her family doesn’t seem much of a help, and her boss boss Robin (Josh Pais) merely gives her her bonus early and her best friend Layla (Regina King) tells her to get a boyfriend. Then she gets a call from the man of her dreams. Newt (Peter Sarsgaard) works for the ASPCA as community affairs liaison, and offers her a new dog as a replacement. He introduces her into the world of veganism and animal activism. The film then becomes an exercise in propaganda.

The film was ugly, boring and unfunny. the characters were badly drawn, poorly acted (and this with a killer cast, too), and the "it's hard to be a fanatic, but it's worth it" message was telegraphed in a particularly unappealing way. I think it's one of the worst films of the year. Pass this by, go to a restaurant and eat a dead animal instead. You’ll be glad you did.

Dreaming Lhasa

Written and Directed by
Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam

What was unexpected was that is film is not a documentary. It begins as one, kind of. Karma (Tenzin Chokyi Gyatso) is a filmmaker working on a doc about refugees from Tibet living in Dharamsala, North India, where the Dalai Lama and his court live in exile. The film begins with an extra telling the story of her escape from Chinese oppression, then another, and then the filmstock changes and Karma and her assistant Jigme(Tenzin Jigme), preparing the next interview.

This particular interviewee is Dhondup(Jampa Kalsang), who after his testimony is recorded makes an unusual request. He wants Karma to go with him to New Delhi in order to find a certain
Loga(Phuntsok Namgyal Dhumkhang), who was at one time the owner of a certain object that his dying mother asked to return.

Jigme, being a worldy type, thinks that Dhondup is just trying to get laid, but Karma doesn’t think so, and thus begins a wild goose chase across northern and western India trying to track the guy down. Meanwhile Karma and Jigme have other problems. She with her main project and husband back in the ‘States, and he with the usual third-world unemployment related stuff. He mostly hangs out with his friends in the local bar and plays the guitar while waiting for Karma and Dhondup to come back from wherever they went.

The film is as much about normal life for the Tibetan exile community as it is about politics and oppression. The characters are real people, not just archetypes, and the question of whether or not the missing person is alive or dead is open until the very end, this despite the predictions of a local oracle(Lobsang Choedon).

The film is actually worth paying full price for, although it’s getting a limited release and may play very long before going to DVD.

Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis

A Documentary
by Mary Jordan

Jack Smith was the enemy of art. He was a talented lunatic who according to auteur John Waters "bit every hand that could ever, ever feed him," and died of AIDS, something he deliberately contracted, broke and alone. Today he is mostly forgotten, a catalyst of an age gone by who influenced the likes of Waters, Andy Warhol, Federico Fellini and Matthew Barney, whether or not he deserves to be remembered is an open question, but this film is an argument in the affirmative.

This tragedy, for that’s what it is, reminds one of Jeff Feuerzeig's “The Devil and Daniel Johnston” another madman who had a brush with fame and influenced those who would do it much better and change the culture.

It was Smith who created Warhol’s “superstar system.” He had gotten into a hell of a lot of trouble for his 1963 pornographic feature “Flaming Creatures”, a phantasmagoric brew of Art Nuveau pornography that was banned in nearly half the country and was nationally notorious. Soon after he began to feud with his distributor and business manager Jonas Mekas, and although he did another feature, which he would re-edit every time it was shown, he never completed anything ever again, at least on his own.

So it was a bunch of bits and pieces that Mary Jordan had to work with and with interviews with a bunch of people who knew him back in the day, such as Waters, Mekas, Tony Conrad, Gary Indiana, Ken Jacobs, Judith Malina, Mario Montez, and Andrew Sarris, among others we get a portrait of sad and hateful individual who turned his back on that which he loved the most and wasted much of life.

Jordan uses the fragments to their best effect, giving the viewer a good idea of what Smith was all about. It might be interesting to find a copy of “Flaming Creatures” just to see if it had a plot, although this film kind of makes that unnecessary. The man needs a monument, and this is all the monument he needs.

Pathfinder

Directed by
Marcus Nispel

It’s no wonder why Fox tried to bury this flick. It’s completely ahistorical and possibly racist. The seasons change back and forth and it’s really, really violent. Not only that the lighting is all wrong and you can’t see very much.

Now, I’ve never held any brief for the Vikings, they deserved their bad press, and were a bunch of bloodthirsty scoundrels in general. However, the Aboriginals they met were more than their match, which is why their attempted conquest of Newfoundland ended in disaster extremely quickly. A slight advantage in weapons technology couldn’t counter the 3000 to one Indian advantage.

But this is politically correct to the extreme, and the Peaceful People of the Dawn, led by the Pathfinder(Russell Means), who are perfect in every way except they live in an area that’s always covered in a smoky mist. Their peaceful utopian existence is disturbed by the Vikings, who try to kill everybody, but somehow are destroyed all except one boy, who is adopted into the tribe and named Ghost, in account of his pasty white skin.

Cut to fifteen years later, and Ghost(Karl Urban) is almost integrated into the tribe. Almost, as he’s still a recovering foreigner, although Pathfinder’s daughter StarFire(Moon Bloodgood) might have the hots for him and he’s not permitted to be a brave. That is until the Vikings(Ralph Moeller Clancy Brown, a bunch of others who speak a guttural Icelandic) come back and start massacring people left and right. Director Marcus Nispel’s first main gig was a remake of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and he’s rather adept at gore.

This is what we get. Blood and guts in the misty forest, more of the same in the snowy mountains, or is it the snowy forest and misty mountains? We don’t know because the climate keeps changing all the time and the lighting is so smoky we can’t really tell.

If you like slasher flicks, this will do just fine, but this is for genre fans only, which is probably why they didn’t let any but a select few critics screen this film prior to it’s release. I guess it’s better to have a snooty connoisseur of highbrow cinema pan this than a fan of the genre. Still, while it has it’s good points, it’s generally useless.

Tribeca and Gen Art festivals

2007-04-14T06:03:00.000-07:00

Since the editor of the GVG is sick and hasn't put up anything in a while, the entertainment editor has put a link to this thing for the time being, or at least until the Tribeca film festival is over. Since there are a number of films at Gen Art and Tribeca that have been reviewed here before at other festivals, I'm going to add a link to them here.

So, later on today, I'm going to add this week's document dump, that is if the publisher is still to ill to put up anything. Meanwhile, there's that link above.

Sunday Document Dump....Easter edition

2007-04-08T13:17:00.000-07:00

Since none of the reviews have been put up by the GVG this week, here they are. However several have been published elsewhere.

Are We Done Yet?

Directed by
Steve Carr

Here's a high concept idea: Do a remake of one film that is very old and nobody remembers anymore, and turn it into a sequel to a bad comedy which made some money and nobody really hated that much. “Are We There Yet?” was insipid, but it made quite a bit of money, and 1948's “Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House” is a classic which is only seen on Turner Classic Movies about two or three times a year. Hey, it could work.

When we last met Nick Persons (O'Shea “Ice Cube” Jackson), he had just reconciled with his fiancée Suzanne(Nia Long) and her two demonic kids (Aleisha Allen and Philip Bolden), and were about to live happily ever after. Well, two years have passed, the kids have become slightly less demonic, and there's no room left in Nick's bachelor pad. So, as parents usually do in such situations, he moves to the suburbs, where he does battle with the local wildlife and a demon who controls them. Not exactly what Cary Grant and Myrna Loy did, but it's close enough for our purposes.

So they get what's a beautiful old house that's a major steal, and except for the fact that the daughter misses her friends, everything seems fine, that is until the house starts to fall apart, and the only person who is authorized to fix it is the Chuck Mitchell(John C. McGinley), the devil who sold them the place in the first place. That is because he's also the building inspector, and the only contractor who's authorized by the person who's authorize such things [himself, natch]. So within moments, he's taken over the lives of Nick and his entire family, something only Nick seems to object to.

This being a family comedy, it's a bit over the top and Nick has to reconcile with evil rather than defeat it, because it's better to make love not war. That's the problem, while Nick and Chuck are interesting characters, Suzanne isn't and to make things worse, her attitude is one that makes one wish that Nick had left those little brats, who are much less interesting this time out, in the train station in the middle of the last film, or even better, they had actually did a relatively faithful update of the original.

But no, the cringe to laugh ratio is about 60/40 cringe. It's watchable, but just barely. Give this a pass.

Black Book

Written and Directed
by Paul Verhoeven

World War II is a perfect backdrop for a movie. The good guys are the good guys and the bad guys are the bad guys, and you can do just about anything except maybe launch a spaceship [and that might have been done, I'm not sure]. Here Paul Verhoeven, who's made many a Hollywood movie in his time, and co-writer Gerard Soeteman, rethink with genre, and come up with one heck of a thriller.

We start in Israel in 1956, where a Dutch tourist named Ronnie(Halina Reijn), vacationing with her husband, comes upon an old friend from back home teaching school in a Kibbutz. Rachel Rosenthal(Carice van Houten), is happy to meet her old pal, and when Ronnie leaves, Rachel sits down by a lake and goes into flashback mode, where she remains until just before the end of the movie.

It's the Netherlands: September 1944, and , Rachel Stein, as she was then is hiding out with some ultra religious fundamentalists, who are actively trying to convert her to Christianity. When an allied bomb blows her hiding place to smithereens, she's at a loss as to what to do, but a fighter with the resistance named Van Gein (Peter Blok), has a plan to get her out, but that turns out to have been a disaster, and everyone on board the barge that was supposed to take her and everyone else to safty is attacked by a Nazi gunboat led by Gunther Franken(Waldemar Kobus), who loots the corpses and pockets the proceeds.

Rachel then hooks up with the Resistance herself, taking the name Ellis de Vries, she takes a job at a food cannery run by Gerben Kuipers(Derek de Lint), and is soon working on various missions, culminating in the seduction of Col. Ludwig Muntze(Sebastian Koch), head of the local Gestapo and one person we'd think is a real baddie. Not exactly so, for deep down inside, he's really a nice guy. However, everybody else in Nazi headquarters isn't, except maybe Ronnie, who's only there for the sex. What's interesting is that many in the resistance are just as bigoted as the Nazis, and there's several traitors lurking about and while we generally root for Rachel and the resistance, we don't know exactly what to expect when the you-know-what finally hits the fan. The excitement isn't over when the war ends. When the Canadians occupy the town, everything unravels and we don't exactly who was the traitor. All we know is that it wasn't Rachel, and someone is going to try to sneak away with all that loot taken from those dead Jews.

The thrills and chills are nonstop, and one extremely long movie manages to flash by in no time at all. This is one of Verhoeven's best movies in years and years and years. See it.

The Hoax

Directed by
Lasse Hallström

In his quasi-documentary, “F For Fake,” Orson Welles focused on the famous art forger Almir Omar, and in some of the footage, a fellow who claimed to be writing his biography is seen to be following him around.

The guy's name was Clifford Irving, and between the time the footage was originally shot, and the time Welles got enough money to finish the picture, Irving had gone on to other things, and the great eccentric auteur was more than glad to add some newsreel footage of what exactly those other things were.

In the world of great hoaxes, the biographer had outdone his subject, for while Almir became famous for painting fake Picassos, and Welles scared the country silly by faking an invasion from Mars on the radio, Irving had nearly gotten away with faking an autobiography by reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes, and bamboozling the entire publishing industry.

The film begins with a semi-traditional flash-forward opening, where Irving(Richard Gere)and his editor, Andrea Tate(Hope Davis),
are on the roof of the McGraw Hill building, waiting for Hughes' helicopter to show up. It does, or does it? We flash back to the beginning before we find out, and Tate is telling Irving that they're going to publish his new novel.

He starts spending money like water, celebrating with his wife Edith(Marcia Gay Harden) and his assistant and old pal Dick Susskind (Alfred Molina), until the thing falls apart at the last minute [that happens more often than most of us writers would like], leaving Cliff in lots of debt. Then he has a brainstorm.

As W. C. Fields once said, “You can't cheat an honest man,” and Tate and the other suits at McGraw Hill [Stanley Tucci is understated but brilliant, as president Shelton Fisher], clearly are so enamored kof the money, they're willing to allow themselves to be snookered.

While you have all sorts of side characters taking up space, the film is dominated by Molina, Gere and Harden, who give the performances of their lives, and Halstrum brings a light touch to the film which makes the proceedings a lot more fun then it might otherwise be. The era of the Nixon administration is brilliantly recreated, and while the story and it's ending are well known, we still have to root for Cliff and Dick in their audacious endeavour.

The Oscar® race has begun!

The Reaping

Directed by
Stephen Hopkins

Just what we need, a born-again Christian Passover movie! Either the Devil or the Lord has no real imagination, they keep on doing variations on the same script over and over again. If not the exact wording of the book of revelations, then something from the old Testament, say, the twelve plagues. Yeah, the perfect thing for Passover, JeeeeeeeeeZ!

Katherine Winter (Hilary Swank) is a former minister who's lost her faith and has become a debunker of miracles. She and her assistant Ben (Idris Elba) go around the world checking things out, and always finding a scientific explanation. Oh these poor, deluded fools! That's why God HIMSELF has sent a message to Catholic priest(Steven Rhea), who was a friend of hers back in the day when she had faith, and a husband and a daughter, who were sacrificed to Baal or someone like that in the Sudan. [This is the first time I've ever seen such an excuse for the genocide in Darfur, but I'm sure it wasn't intentional].

He of course calls to warn her [The Omen], she hangs up on him, and right about that time, she gets a report on a little village out in the Bayou where the river has turned to blood. This was right after a little girl named Loren(AnnaSophia Robb) has allegedly killed her brother. They obviously think the little tyke is the Devil, and local bigwig Doug Blackwell (David Morrissey) wants Kat and Ben to debunk the “miracle” before poor Loren gets lynched by a bunch of yokles with torches.

Of course the writers of the film go down the list, frogs, flies, locusts etc, and the special effects are pretty good, and the attempt at misdirection is relatively successful, but still what's the point?

Why can't someone do a theological disaster film where they know the difference between atheism and Classical Satanism,[i.e. orthodox Catholics who've chosen the other side.] “You're not a Catholic or a born-again Christian? then you must be a Satanist!”

Parts of the film make sense, but why bring the Priest into it? Why would the infernal or divine powers care about this guy to send a message to HIM? It's totally stupid and doesn't fit in with the rest of the film. Some day, someone's going to do an ORIGINAL Armageddon film. Till then, let's just hope Hillary Swank remains too big to do a #2.

The TV Set

Written and Directed
by Jake Kasdan

Write what you know. Except for science fiction or cheesy romance , that's the first rule of fiction. Jake Kasdan has been in and around show business all his life [his father Lawrence is a big shot honcho] and he's done TV, including a pilot that never was picked up. So he knows what he's talking about.

Kasdan's doppelganger is Mike(David Duchovny) a writer with a vision. He's doing a thing called “The Winslow Chronicles” about the adventures of guy recovering from his brother's suicide. The script's gotten past gate, so to speak, and it's actually going to be produced. This is exiting news indeed, but there are other factors involved that are going destroy the pure vision Mike originally had.

Lenny(Sigourney Weaver) is the number two person in the network, and she wants as much input on the series that Mike has, but doesn't want him to actually think that. Her number two is Richard(Ioan Gruffudd), who's marriage is in trouble because his wife hates LA. Slightly different visions lead to conflicts, and since Lenny is paying the bills, Mike generally loses.

Not for want of trying. He and his assistant Alice(Judy Greer) try to force the hands of the powers that be by getting a bad actor named
Zach Harper(Fran Kranz) to go against the person he wants for the job, so Zach gets it instead, of course. This sort of thing happens for the entire film and by the time it gets picked up, it's completely different than what was originally pitched.

This is the writer's protest against the suits who destroy creativity in the TV business. If the writers had been left alone with their vision would the world be a better place? Dunno. But the film is funny, and everyone in the film is fighting on the same side for truth, justice and the American way. Writing for TV is compromise anyway, so nobody should really have all that much to complain about. This is inside baseball and is only going to be popular with the people in the biz.

G.I. Jesus

Written and Directed
by Carl Colpaert

As the war in Iraq goes on and on, the anti-American propaganda becomes more vicious and vicious. This is as brazen as it can get for a dramatic film and is a lousy movie to boot. Hate oozes out of every single frame of offensive piece of shit.

Corporal Jesus Feliciano (Joe Arquette) is coming back from the war, traveling first class, of course, and when his plane arrives at LAX, he's greeted by his wife Claudia(Patricia Mota) and daughter Marina (Telana Lynum), who are thrilled to see him. They're driving an expensive SUV and when they get to the trailer park, the crappy trailer they live in is full of hyper-expensive, state-of-the-art entertainment stuff. Apparently, there's this guy named Fred(Wes W. Thompson) who's very rich and Claudia isn't all that faithful.

As Jesus begins to reintegrate himself to life back home, he encounters all the standard off-the-wall conspiracy theories that the far, far left likes to spew in flyers distributed at commie-instigated antiwar rallies. Did you know that the 1973 CIA coup in Chile was instigated in order to sell Pepsi cola? No, then you're in good company; neither do PepsiCo or the CIA.

While Jesus is winding his way through long-winded expositions on how truly evil America and everything it stands for, he's haunted by a mysterious man named Mohammed(Maurizo Farhad), who cheerfully condemns poor Jesus for murdering him and his innocent family. After all, Saddam Hussein and his government never would hurt a fly, and oh yeah, I forgot to mention, Jesus and his family are illegal aliens, and if he does anything besides what he's told, he'd be deported back, along with his American-born daughter and Dominican wife back to Mexico.

Not only is the story preposterous, the acting is some of the worst seen in any movie this year. This film is definitely in “Plan 9 From Outer Space” territory. This is an embarrassment for all involved, and they should be ashamed of themselves.

Grindhouse

2007-04-06T05:51:00.000-07:00

Just in case the GVG hasn't put up my stuff yet....

Grindhouse

To be perfectly frank, before Tarantino and Rodriguez announced that they were making this package, I don’t remember ever hearing the term “grindhouse” before. Oh, I’d been to quite a few back in the day, but they never were called that, at least by anyone I knew. Second Runs, dollar theaters, shitholes, sure, but never grindhouses.

Here in New York, they were mostly located on 42nd street between seventh and eighth avenues among the live sex shows. They stank of urine mixed with stale coke [the soda] and were a good place to get robbed. There were also a few on seventh avenue around 50th street, and one on 110th and Broadway, and yes they showed cheesy horror and blaxpolotiation flicks as well as first run stuff for half the price of the “high class” multiplexes around the corner on 43rd and Broadway. They also had some in White Plains and Elmsford, up in Westchester.

Going to the movies was a different experience back then, and Tarantino and Rodriguez have decided to recreate that experience of their youth, when, hiding out for an afternoon, they saw at least two or three bad flicks in a row.

Aside from the two features, and they ARE indeed features, there are three faux trailers, and an ad for a restaurant somewhere on the Texas/Mexico border.

The trailers are, of course, jokes. The first one, by Rodriguez, has Cheech Marin as a homicidal priest out for revenge, because his pal, the Mexican assassin(Danny Trejo), has been betrayed. It’s one of those things I would usually avoid as a kid. Then, after the first feature, there’s three more. One by Rob Zombie about Nazi werewolf supervixans, one by Eli Roth for a horror film called “Thanksgiving” and a thing called “Don’t” by Edger Wright, which is the only thing I might want to see as a real movie.

Now, as to the grindhouse experience, when the initial run of the package is over, and the people at Weinstein/Dimension put this in the second-run or third run theaters, they’re probably going to cut up the package and show the two features separately, [after all, for three bucks, why would any theater owner in his/her right mind let a person sit in their seats for over THREE hours?] so that’s how we’ll treat them:

Planet Terror

Written and Directed
by Robert Rodriguez

AS Michael Medved once said before he got religion, “If you set out to make a bad movie, how can you not succeed?” I know that this was to some extent a joke, but couldn’t Robert Rodriguez have pretended to TRY making a halfway decent movie?

This is your standard operational zombie movie. The film starts with Our heroine Cherry(Rose McGowan) quitting her job as a stripper, much to the chagrin of her sleezy boss(Michael Parks), since she doesn’t have a car she walks all the way to J.T.’s(Jeff Fahey) barbecue place, where she accidentally meets her old beau Wray(Freddy Rodriguez). Meanwhile evil Dr. William Block(Josh Brolin) is arguing with his wife, Dr. Dakota(Marley Shelton), about something that is serious and unexplained, and from out of nowhere, even more evil Dr. Abby(Naveen Andrews) has a confrontation with some military types in which he cuts off…this is before he has a fight with a colonel played by Bruce Willis.

As a parody of the genre, it’s not all that great. Granted McGowan, Shelton and Fergie, who has a smaller part, are really easy on the eyes, and some of the action is actually nicely choreographed, however, the whole thing is cliché after cliché, and if you’re stone cold sober, the whole thing gets really old after a while.

The special effects are old fashioned, which makes the use of blackberries kind of anachronistic, and if it wasn’t for the fact that the zombies were really disgusting, the whole thing would be a bore. [which is why, back in the day, we would get stoned first].

Death Proof

Written and Directed
by Quentin Tarantino

Unlike, Robert Rodreguez, Quentin Tarantino is a cinematic genius. True, not everything he’s done in the past is great, but he knows how to make a decent film. Even with the obvious flaws, the payoff is much better and the chase sequence is actually thrilling.

The film is about two sets of really hot chicks and their relationship with the despicable Stuntman Mike(Kurt Russell). The film can use some editing to make it really good, the first act is waaaaaaay to wordy. It’s about three twenty-something beauties: Arlene (Vanessa Ferlito), who’s visiting her old college chums Shana(Jordan Ladd) and local DJ Jungle Julia(Sydney Tamiia Poitier) in Austin, Texas.

This is an introductory sequence for the character of Stuntman Mike and as such is far too long. There aren’t enough close-ups [at least for the body parts we want to see], and when they get to the cantina where the gals meet up with their boyfriends(Michael Bacall, Eli Roth and Omar Doom) and their usual nemesis Pam(Rose McGowan) it’s just talk talk talk. True, Tanantino is a master of dialogue, but even when Stuntman Mike shows up and joins the proceedings, the film just seems to be treading water. This is a setup for the second act, and it takes far too long.

As to the second act, we’ve got four new victims(Zoe Bell,Rosario Dawson, Tracie Thoms and Mary Elizabeth Winstead), who are a completely different group altogether. Zoe(as herself) and Tracy Thoms’ character are stuntwomen, Dawson’s a makup artist, and Winstead is the star of a movie, and by now we’ve learned that Tarentino has the same problem as Kevin Smith, his women sound like men. These preliminaries go on for some time as well, but at last Stuntman Mike shows up while Zoe does a marvelous stunt and one of the best chase sequences of the decade starts up. This is why we spent eleven bucks in the first place! The faux-crappy quality of the film stock even improves considerably. This is by far the better of the two.

Before you go, GO. In the old days, you knew that you probably wouldn’t miss anything by going to the john in the middle of the film, and in the case of the first feature, this is the case, and also in the beginning of the second. But you want to see the trailers and the final half of the second feature in its entirety. Hopefully they won’t clear the theater after the show and you can come in in the middle and leave at the point you came in. That’s how must of us used to do it back in the day.

Hey, it's monday!

2007-04-02T10:16:00.000-07:00

yes, folks, it's the first monday in April, and the bad guys are winning the war on terror. Not only that, Hillery Clinton is WAAAAAAY ahead in the polls because of the Laureen Wallace effect. Democrats want Bill Clinton back, and they're willing to put the White House in his wife's name.

The US of A will remain at fifty states for the time being, as Quebec's separatists got their heads handed to them in the in the election last week. Meanwhile most of my reviews actually got put up at the Gazette last sunday.

Sunday Document Dump....

2007-03-25T12:33:00.000-07:00

I sent the stuff in, and they don't...here we go again:

Shooter

Directed by
Antoine Fuqua

Well, the studio wanted a franchise, and I think they might have one. It's obvious that Gunnery Sergeant Bob Lee Swagger(Mark Wahlberg) has the makings of a superhero, and Jonathan Lemkin's adaptation of Stephen Hunter's novel pushes all the right buttons.

We open in the Horn of Africa, where Sergeant Swagger is doing his thing as part of a covert op in the War on Terror, or so he thinks, and is left behind by his platoon. Hoo—ya!

Cut to Montana a couple of years later, where our hero is hanging out minding his own business, when Colonel Isaac Johnson(Danny Glover) of the Secret Intelligence Agency [or whatever] arrives from Washington and says that there's an evil conspiracy to assassinate THE PRESIDENT and only HE, as the best marksman in the known universe, can figure out how to save him.

So being a patriot, he decides to go for it, only to have been set up as the fall guy for the assassination of “The Archbishop of Ethiopia” who was going to make a speech right after the prexy.

So while Swagger is off to Tennessee to get repaired by the beauteous Sarah(Kate Mara), who was the fiancée of his pal who got blown up in the prologue, FBI special agent Nick Memphis(Michael Peña) is fighting the power in the FBI because he was a witness and they want him to cover the truth up.

The politics of the film is the usual left-wing “it's all for oil” crap, but that doesn't really matter. What really matters is whether there's a whole bunch of nifty car chases and stuff gets blown up in abundance. The answer to both questions is yes, and it's done in a way to make it look less gratuitous than usual.

Peña and Marky Mark do a more than professional job, Ned Beatty Elias Koteas and Rade Serbedzija are really sleazy as bad guys, Rhona Mitra, who plays Peña's associate and Mara have really nice breasts, and Danny Glover is Danny Glover. In other words, Halfway decent script, good acting, good chases and stuff gets blown up. What more do you want? Godzilla? Worth the bucks.

The Hills Have Eyes II

Directed by
Martin Weisz

It's a law. I think it was passed by the California legislature back in the middle of the 1930s and signed into law by Governor Earl Warren. If a horror film is a hit, there must be a sequel. If that is a hit, IT must be a sequel, and if the producers run out of ideas for sequels, then a remake of the original is required. Wes Craven and his son, Jonathan know all about this, and that is why they wrote a script for the remake of the sequel. I'm sorry. It just had to be done.

The most incompetent brigade in the entire US National Guard [apparently, all fifty states, the three territories, two commonwealths and the District of Columbia refused to let their names be mentioned in this thing] is on a training mission in New Mexico, when they hear a distress call from a top secret base, where, as you remember Emile De Raven and her family were mostly decimated by mutant hillbillies in the previous flick.

So Sergeant Millstone (Flex Alexander) takes his merry band of troopers(Jacob Vargas, Michael McMillan, Daniella Alonso, Jessica Stroup and a few other interchangeable pre-corpses) into the hills where they get sliced up by the remaining mutants or by their own incompetence. Then they go down into the mine in the middle of the mountain, where a couple of more of the group get killed by the magically endowed, though horribly disfigured mutants [They can kill someone with his wallet!].

Think of this as a kind of guessing game, you get a bunch of dislikable morons, and you guess who's going to get it in which order. It's kind of fun and there are a number of genuine scares. The acting is okay, but there's not really much to do besides run, yell and scream through the desert and the soundstage.

Happily, I don't think there's going to be a “III”, but you never know.
In the meantime, don't bother.

Memory

Written and Directed
by Bennett Davlin

There are reasons why some films spend years on the shelf. Companies go broke, producers fight with each other over rights, distributors forget where they put the print, and so on and so forth.

Which brings us to Bennet Dalvin's “Memory.” There's nothing actually 'wrong' with this film. The dialogue is actually rather good, in a naturalistic sort of way, and the acting is fine, too, but there was a problem selling it because most of the cast USED to be major movie stars, and people on the way down generally don't attract the attention of distributors and theater owners as well as a cast of shiny unknowns or the hotties of the moment.

The plot is somewhat intriguing, Dr. Taylor Briggs (Billy Zane) and his sidekick Dr. Deepra Chang (Terry Chen) are at a conference somewhere in Brazil, when they are called to a hospital to consult on a strange case of a researcher found in the Amazon jungle, and through a series of happenstances, Briggs finds himself having visions of a serial killer who did his nasty deeds before our hero was born.

Going back to Boston, he is plagued by these visions while he's trying to go on with his life, which means taking care of his mother(Deirdre Blades), who has advanced Alzheimer's, and hanging out with old family friends Max Lichtenstein(Dennis Hopper) and Carol Hargrave(Ann-Margret), with whom he has a loving relationship.

Somehow, he discovers a painting by a certain Stephanie Jacobs(Tricia Helfer), who he woos and starts seeing romantically while he gets more and more into the mystery wracking is brain.

The problem is that the story isn't compelling or believable, or at least when it comes to the supernatural pseudoscience. Zane underplays his character, who is relatively banal, and when he's not conversing with the various other characters about other things, he's downright boring. The problem is that when everyone's doing normal things the actors shine, Hopper especially. The whole thing is rather a waste of talent.

Since it's theatrical run is only a brief stop on the journey to the video counter, save your money and wait until it arrives.

The Last Mimzy

Directed by
Bob Shaye

The Christian right has been making inroads into Hollywood of late, and obviously those evil secular humanists have to push back. Call it the “revenge of the New Age.”

This is one of those inspirational kiddy flicks that is supposed to have some sort of cosmic message but doesn't. Instead the viewers are given a mishmash of New Age slop and pseudo-Buddhist mysticism, which isn't nearly as bad as it could have been. That's because the people who made this film, New Line head honchos Bob Shaye, who directed, and Toby Emmerich, who wrote the screenplay with Bruce Joel Rubin, James V. Hart and Carol Skilken Pride are professionals with decades of experience and know that if you want to make a successful kiddy flick, you can't talk down to the kiddies like too many filmmakers do.

Emmerich and company's update of Lewis Padgett's (Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore) 1943 short story “And Mimsy went the Borogroves” begins in the middle of “THE NEW AGE®” where a history teacher is going to telepathically tell her students the story of how the would was saved centuries before…

Noah(Chris O'Neil) and Emma Wilder(Rhiannon Leigh Wryn) are two extremely normal children who live in Seattle, where her mother Jo (Joely Richardson) is a housewife and father David(Timothy Hutton) is a bigshot lawyer. It's Easter Vacation, and Mom takes the kids to the beach house, where they find a mysterious box in the ocean, which, on further inspection, contains a bunch of mysterious plastic things, some green rocks, and a toy bunny rabbit. Clearly, they are either magic or from outer space, and clearly Mom and Dad will take them away if their origins are found out.

The kids develop super-powers, and this is noticed by both the parents [who aren't THAT clueless] and Noah's science teacher Mr. White(Rainn Wilson), who sees a vast improvement in Noah's grades, and strange drawings in his notebooks, which is where the New Age® claptrap comes in.

There's also a subplot concerning the FBI and blacking out half the state of Washington, but since this takes place during the end of the Bush 2 administration, that's par for the course. What's good, is that while the clichés are indeed there, they're not as annoying as they could have been. The action and special effects are actually well integrated, and the kids, while not particularly compelling as actors as are the grownups, Wilson and Naomi Schwartz(Kathryn Hahn, as his wife, are delightfully dizty, and Michael Clarke Duncan is wonderful but underused as the FBI guy.

A workmanlike film, it's effective as a standard kiddy adventure flick, but not anything genuinely brilliant, like that which is advertised. It would have been nice if a real adaptation of the original short story, which is still beloved after more than half a century, had been made, but this is generally harmless and is worth taking the kids.

Reign Over Me

Written and Directed
by Mike Binder

New York can be a very lonely place. This is a film about that kind of loneliness. Charlie Fineman (Adam Sandler) lost his family during 9/11 and has been drifting along in a daze for five years. Alan Johnson (Don Cheadle), who's a wealthy dentist, has been drifting along in a daze to some extent too. His marriage is getting stale and when a nutcase named Donna (Saffron Burrows) arrives and screws up his life, he gets no support from the other members of the practice. It's a midlife crisis in the making.

So when Johnson comes upon Charlie by accident for the second time in as many weeks after not seeing each other for decades, a strange bond begins to grow. Each sees something in the other that they are lacking and as Johnson begins to spend more and more time with Charlie, he finds a kind of freedom and Charlie finds a new companionship that really annoys Johnson's wife Janeane(Jada Pinkett Smith) to no end, which is an interesting conflict. The emotions are complicated than in most comedies, which is understandable since this is most definitely NOT a comedy.

Sandler's violent streak, as seen in previous movies, is used to it's best advantage here, and the otherwise understated portrayal of his usual character, makes up for an unusual performance, and the deadpan and serious performances of the other characters, notably Pinkett Smith, Liv Tyler as Johnson's friend and Charlie's shrink Angela, Robert Klein and Melinda Dillon as Charlie's in-laws, and Donald Southerland as the judge in the climax, actually make the film more affecting. This is heavy stuff, and Mike Binder, who has “graduated” from comedy to drama, has shown that he can do it rather well.

This is an Adam Sandler movie for those who think themselves too good for Adam Sandler movies.

The Prisoner: Or How I Planned To Kill Tony Blair

A Documentary Directed by
Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker

In Epperman and Tucker's “Gunner Palace” journalist Yunis Khatayer Abbas and his brothers are taken and detained, allegedly for trying to construct bombs in order to blow up British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Many months later, the documentarians heard that someone was making a film about incident and they decided to take the project over as a sequel to their previous film…and that's exactly what they did.

Using a long interview with Yunnis; outtakes from “Gunner Palace” Yunnis' home movies and photos; an interview with former Abu Ghraib guard Benjamin Thompson and a bunch of animatic illustrations to fill in the visual gaps. The documentarians put together a reasonable reconstruction of the events that took place. The only problem is that they try to do it with a touch of humor about the whole thing, and that takes away from the basic message of the film.

The thing starts with a series of faked home movies of Yunnis with his relations clowning at the lake, where we get to see that he's a nice guy. Then he begins to tell the story of his life, and how he was in the army during the Iran/Iraq war and then was later imprisoned by Saddam Hussein and his disgusting son Uday. How this proves his innocence is problematic. We went to war because they did things like that, and a lot of the insurgents were oppressed by the Baathist regime and worked very hard to keep their oppressors in power, but since this is a personal story, we don't get into that.

Since the filmmakers were there when Yunnis was arrested, we get to see it, and there's footage of US troops discussing it. What we don't get footage is of Yunnis' interrogation, and for that they substitute comic book style animatics, which doesn't work all that well, especially with the lousy choice in background music.

The style of the animatics really hurts the film when Yunnis gets talking about the months and months he spent in the detention camp at Abu Ghraib prison, where the food was inedible, the water unsanitary, and the prisoners alleged allies, the insurgents, would do their best to kill them by bombing them with morter shells.

The interviews with Ben Thompson give more of a balanced picture of the whole sad mess, and in the end the film does it's job in getting the viewer mad at the Bush administration for all the usual reasons. It's a good tool for research, but not something that one would spend eleven bucks on to waste an afternoon.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Written and Directed
by Kevin Munroe

Back in the mid 1980s, Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird were among the many artists taking part in the comics “black and white revolution” in which all sorts of self-published titles were thrust onto the public and for a brief time, were the forefront of a great creative movement. The corporate media pounced on these artists, and the vast majority, with their exaggerated sense of integrity, pointedly refused to deal with them. The main exceptions were Eastman and Laird, who's “Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles” [fun title that], was turned into a Saturday morning cartoon with all the licensed trimmings. Everyone else, with the exception of Dave Sim's “Cerebus the Aardvark”, vanished into oblivion.

TMNT came and went, and by 2000, when Eastman and Laird finally split up, they had pretty much joined Strawberry Shortcake and He-man, gathering dust in Gen-Y closets. But if something was popular once, it might be popular again, you never know.

So Laird and animation director Kevin Munroe have come up with a revival of the turtles, and with Gen Y now becoming parents themselves [who are called? Gen Z is almost sixteen by now, right?], the “I thought this stuff was good when I was your age” concept, which has rarely worked, is now in action once again.

So, with an omnipotent narrator (Laurence Fishburne) telling the tale of astrological conquest three millennia ago, and updating us as to what's going on with Leonardo (James Arnold Taylor), Michelangelo (Mikey Kelley), Donatello (Mitchell Whitfield), Raphael (Nolan North) and Master Splinter (Mako). It's not pretty.

So, we find Mike in Central America, where he's working as a superhero in the jungle, here he meets former sidekick April O'Neil (Sarah Michelle Gellar), who's collecting valuable antiquities for a mysterious zillionaire named Max Winters (Patrick Stewart), she convinces him to return to New York, where there's all sorts of angst, and personality conflicts, and a major plotline involving the end of the world [isn't there ALWAYS in these things?] and mistaken identities. All things considered, it's not nearly as bad as I feared.

The voice cast is fine, the animation is professionally done, and the script is relatively intelligent. Whether or not the Ninja Turtles will reignite the minds of today's kids is anyone's guess. It all has to do with whether or not the parents are fond enough of the franchise to force their kids to see this or wait until it comes out on video. My guess is the latter, although watching this stuff on the big screen in the dark is always better, but it may not be worth the extra bucks.

The Page Turner

Written and Directed
by Denis Dercourt

Revenge is a dish best served cold, or so says the proverb. Auteur Denis Dercourt certainly thinks so, and he serves it right out of the fridge.

It's the early 1990s, and 11-year-old Melanie Prouvost (Julie Richalet) is practicing for her big day. She's auditioning for a fancy-schmancy concervitory and if she gets in, the tuition is free, something that would greatly ease the financial burden on her working class parents(Jacques Bonnaffe and Christine Citti). But then comes the inciting incident, which ruins that dream. An extra barges into the room where Melenie is in the process of auditioning, and demands an autograph from one of the juges, concert pianist Ariane Fouchecourt (Catherine Frot). This throws Melenie completely off, and she blows the rest of the piece. Her career as a concert pianist is over.

Cut to a decade later, and the beauteous Deborah Francois now plays Melanie. She's got an internship with a major law firm headed by Jean Fouchecourt (Pascal Greggory), who, by a strange coincidence, is the husband of the very person who inadvertently destroyed her dreams all those years ago. So when she discovers that the Fouchecourt's au pare [they have a 12 year old son named Tristan(Antoine Martynciow)] is going on holiday, and offers to replace her for a while. Thus our protagonist is able to worm her way into Ariane's life and destroy it.

Melanie does this in a stealthy way, winning the love of Tristan and Ariane, who gives her an extra duty as the title implies, and starting what seems to be the beginnings of a lesbian relationship. There is also the problem with Ariane's partners(Xavier De Guillebon and Martine Chevallier), in the trio she tours with, and that leads to one of the more delicious scenes in the entire film.

At only 85 minutes, this is a surprisingly leisurely film. Dercourt takes his sweet time, and except for a couple of brief scenes, including that one I mentioned about one of Ariane's partners, there's absolutely no violence. Ms. Francois is passive and for the most part unemotional. She smiles little, except for one scene where she meets a friend, and appears to have the makings of a female Hannibal Lector. The supporting cast is quite excellent. This is one of the better films to come out of France in the past year. See it.

Offside

Written and Directed
by Jafar Panahi

There are many people nowadays who are sympathizing with the Government of Iran. They rail against Bush for his naming Iran as part of the so-called “axis of evil” and…guess what? Bush is right.

The Government of Iran is very evil indeed. Fortunately, the Iranian people aren't and there are many talented filmmakers who are willing to take on their fascistic government and expose these monsters for what they are. The filmmaker is named Jafar Panahi and his weapon against oppression is a cheery sports comedy.

One of the lesser crimes against humanity that the Iranian regime has committed is one of misogyny. Women are not allowed to attend public sports matches, and if they try to attend, say, a soccer match, they will be arrested and sent to jail. One would think that in a civilized country that sort of thing wouldn't even be considered.

In the spring of 2005, Iran was fighting Bahrain for a berth on the next rung of the World Cup, and naturally, the stadium was packed. Since being a sports fan is a gender-free occupation, there are plenty of women who are enamored of the sport, and a certain number of the ladies are brave enough to try to crash the party.

The film begins with an old man(Reza Farhadi) flagging down a minibus filled with rowdy [male] fans to try to grab his daughter before she can commit the crime of gate-crashing. She's not aboard the vehicle, but another woman(Sima Mobarak Shahi) is, and this is her first attempt at crashing a game. The boys in the bus are all on her side, but she wants to get in on her own, and this includes getting ripped off for a scalped ticket, and getting frisked by the army, something that gets her caught.

So she's sent to the holding pen, which is occupied by a half a dozen others(Shayesteh Irani, Nazanin Sedighzadeh, Golnaz Farmani and Mahnaz Zabihi) and are guarded by three young army conscripts (Safdar Samandar, Mohammed Kheir-abadi, and Masoud Kheymeh-kaboud) who don't want to be there and actually sympathize to some extent with their prisoners. But orders are orders and everyone has to remain there while waiting for the bus to take the women to the vice squad.

So the results of the situation is a debate over the sexual policies of the Iranian government and whether or not women should be protected from “naughty” language and good ol' fashioned cussing, something that is illustrated when one of the gals(Sadeqi) has to go to the bathroom, and her minder(Samandar) has to clear it of men who have to go as badly as she does. This is the old trick of making injustice look ridiculous, which in this case it is.

The acting is terrific, and had Iran been a free country the gals would be major international movie stars [they might be in Iran, but popular films from over there don't generally make it over here], but there you have it. This is thought provoking and lots and lots of fun. Worth the bucks.

Colour Me Kubrick

Directed by
Brian Cook

They say truth is stranger than fiction, and sometimes we've got evidence for this maxim. Take the con man who spent a number of years impersonating director Stanley Kubrick during the last couple of years of his and Kubrik's life.

This is the story of Alan Conway(John Malkovich) a con man who goes around fleecing innocent artistic types, pretending to be Kubrick, promising his marks the moon, and disappearing when the loans come due. The film begins with two punkers who were thus fleeced harassing some rich shlub demanding that Kubrick pay them the money they lent.

Conway is a flaming queen and a chameleon who changes accents and mannerisms whenever he meets someone new, and he's also a bit lazy, he gets caught by anyone who knows the work of the real Kubrick just a little bit. Apparently, the real Conway never saw any of his films.

The film is basically a one-man show. Malkovich gives the performance of a lifetime, while the hamminess drips out of every pore, there's an honesty in the dishonesty of it all which makes the performance priceless. He's so brazen that he goes up to NY Times film critic Frank Rich (William Hootkins) and his wife Alix (Marisa Berenson) in a London restaurant screaming his displeasure at what the newspapers have been saying about him. This proves the beginning of the end. Rich is suspicious, and so are quite a few others, including the cops.

Meanwhile Conway continues his impersonation, and this time hits real paydirt, a midlevel celebrity(Jim Davidson) who thinks he could make it big in the US. It's a hoot. The supporting cast, which is made up of has-been TV stars are really good.

Anthony Frewin's script is a bit erratic. The film goes on in a hpahasard way for the first half at least, but Malkovitch's perfornace makes up for it. This is a perfect revenge by two of Kubrick's most loyal assistant. Had he lived, I'm sure Kubrick would have wanted to make this film himself.

First Snow

Written and Directed
by Mark Fergus

Sometimes elaborate plans don't always work. The mystical jigsaw puzzle that is this film doesn't quite fit together, and the characters are a little too skuzzy for any sense of identification with them.

We meet the gratuitous Jimmy Starks(Guy Pearce) bleeding in his car as the radio gives the weather report. This whole thing is technically a flashback from this opening scene. Jimmy has just managed to wreck his car somewhere in New Mexico and is waiting around for the mechanic to finish the repairs, when, as a lark, he decides to get his fortune told. The fortune teller(J.K. Simmons), we soon discover is the real deal, and the end of the fortune, which was withheld, is something we, and Jimmy can rightly guess for ourselves.

Jimmy goes back to his life. That means screwing his live-in girlfriend Deirdre(Piper Perabo) hanging out with his coworker Ed(William Fichtner) and firing another one(Rick Gonzalez) but then there's this figure from his past, an old pal named Vincent(Shea Whigham), who's just out of prison and may want Jimmy's promised demise. This is an illustrated version of famous five steps of grief: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. The structure of the film is based on these, conflicted on whether or not the prediction is actually going to happen when the “first snow” of the title finally arrives.

The skulking and the paranoia are what makes this film watchable. Pearce gives a dynamite performance, as does Whigham, who mostly [and literally] phones it in. The penultimate scene is riveting.

It's just about worth a bargin matinee.

Pride

Directed by
Svinuari Obert Gonera

Once again, we have the inspirational heartwarming sports film for children. We've seen them before and we'll see them again and they've long since blended in with each other. Coach X heads off to the ghetto and takes a bunch of impoverished reprobates and transforms themselves into winners with a future, this despite the opposition of the POWERS that BE and the local drug dealers. Also, each and every one claims to be based on a true story.

Each and every IHSPfC has the same plot and villains, only the sport and location change. This time, it's Philadelphia in 1974, where champion swimmer Jim Ellis (Terrence Howard), who cannot get a job as a math teacher because he is Black [the film opens in the 1960s south, where he is arrested for competing in a segregated pool]. The only place he can get a job is at the Philadelphia Recreational Authority, where he's to help dismantle the place as the neighborhood has gone to hell in a hand-basket.

When he gets there, he discovers the situation is worse than he thought, and the only other employee there, Elston (Bernie Mac), does absolutely nothing, and the kids do nothing but play basketball(Kevin Phillips, Evan Ross, Nate Parker, Brandon Fobbs and a couple of others) and are watched over by Franklin (Gary Sturgis), the stock villainous drug dealer. Clichés and stereotypes all the way, but isn't that always the case with these things?

So Ellis discovers a pool in the basement, and for his own amusement, fills it up. With the basketball hoops taken down, the kids just hang around doing nothing, and Elston invites them in and forces them to become a swimming team, something racist back before the day thought Blacks were unable to do.

There are the usual stumbling blocks and challenges, mostly oppostion from Franklin and his thugs on the one hand, and
Councilwoman Sue Davis (Kimberly Elise) [her brother is on the swim team], on the other. Same old same old.

As to the factual basis for the film, the real Elston made a career with the PDR as a swim coach, and what REALLY happened might have made a decent movie, but they had to shoehorn everything into the IHSPfC mold. But this is what always happens. There is usually one or two great sports movies a decade, and this ain't it.

Give it a pass.

Sacco And Vanzetti

A documentary
by Peter Miller

The best way to get sympathy for the bad guys is to frame them for something they clearly didn't do. That's what happened to two terrorists named Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in the year 1920, and the repercussions are still felt to this day.

“Terrorists?!?” I hear you say, “I thought they were innocent victims” Well actually, they were both, for as the documentary, clearly admits, they belonged to a terrorist organization headed by Luigi Galleani, which was responsible for quite a few murders, and fled with him to Mexico to wait for the fall of the American Government when the first world war started. On the other hand, as the doc also clearly shows, they had nothing to do with the particular murder that they were charged with.

Peter Miller, who was a collaborator the renowned documentarian Ken Burns, goes about telling the story in a workmanlike way. He interviews the usual suspects (Howard Zinn, Arlo Guthrie, Studs Terkel and others of the left) as well as Sacco's niece [one wonders whether his children or grandchildren cooperated or not], and the daughter of the murder victim [one wonders if Miller actually did the interviews or found them in an archive somewhere]. The tone of the film is rather dispassionate at first, being somewhat unsure as to whether or not to depict Sacco and Vanzetti as saints or not. John Turturro and Tony Shalhoub read the letters of the doomed pair, and ones they read tend to the former, while the facts of the case tend to the latter.

However, there's no problem about how to depict the government of Massachusetts. They get the full demonization treatment, and that's something they clearly deserve. The trial was clearly a farce, and so was the cover-up that followed. The whole thing was an embarrassment to both the governments of Massachusetts and the United States as a whole, making the S&V case a cause celeb throughout the world.

With a case of such importance, it's always a good idea to be reminded every now and then as to how things can go wrong, and justice means that just because a person is guilty of SOMETHING, doesn't mean that it's okay for the state frame them for something else. This is worth a look when it comes out on video or PBS.

The Third Document dump: Supplement

2007-03-19T09:37:00.000-07:00

To that guy who asked why I didn't put up every single film that's opening: It was impossible to do, and here are a couple of reviews I wasn't able to see because they didn't have press screenings. Notice that if you go to the Greenwich Villiage Gazette, you will see the one for "The Nomad," which I will put up here as well. I hope I won't have to do this in the future.

Dead Silence
Universal Pictures, 89mins, R

Written and Directed
by James Wan

“If you even THINK of saying I told you so, I’ll shoot you!” So says
Det. Jim Lipton(Donnie Wahlberg) to hero Jamie Ashen(Ryan Kwanten), when the former discovers the latter is, of course right. This is a great line and the reason I’m telling you this is now you don’t have to see this movie and thus save yourself or your significant other upwards of thirty bucks [what with popcorn and all]. That’s my job, after all.

Auteur James Wan and his co-writer Leigh Whannell the people who wrote the really scary and original “Saw” series, have decided to revisit the overused “Killer Dummy” genre with a allegedly twisted tale of a ventriloquist Mary Shaw(Judith Roberts), who was murdered by vigilantes back in the days before Pearl Harbor, because they thought [rightly] that she had murdered a kid(Steven Taylor), who was heckling her during her act. They even made up a nursery rhyme about her.

So we start with Jamie and his lovely wife Lisa(Laura Regan) doing the usual stuff in their New York apartment, when they receive a strange gift. It’s the dummy we’ve seen on all those ugly posters!

With the obvious happening and Det. Lipton thinking that Jamie is guilty as sin, our hero heads up north to his childhood home in the village of Raven’s Fair, which seems to have undergone a major war sometime in the recent past, to confront his father(Bob Gunton) and his wife Ella(Amber Valletta), who are obviously up to no good, and then the local undertaker(Michael Fairman), who has an insane wife
(Joan Heney), and here’s something new: Instead of teenagers, the monster lady gets to kill off senior citizens! That’s two out of six hundred for the filmmakers.

The film pretty much goes forward on autopilot, what with all that idiot plotting. There is that one great line and some decent scenery, but the acting isn’t all that great, and there isn’t all that much gore.

These guys have talent, and you can’t hit a home run every time. So perhaps their next outing might be better. In the meantime, don’t bother.

Nomad: The Warrior

Directed by Sergei Bodrov,
Ivan Passer and Talgat Temenov

Allegedly made to counter Sasha Baron Cohen’s Borat. This is the national epic of Kazakhstan, where the national hero is sent by providence to save the nation and live on in the hearts of all who live in said nation forever onward.

Now the Kazaks haven’t make many epic films in recent years. After all, they’ve been recovering from two hundred years of Russian domination since finally getting independence in 1991 and there hasn’t been very much in the way of creativity to make it to the outside world, which is why they had to hire two Slavs to direct.

The film starts sometime at the end of the 17th or beginning of the 18th centuries, and mystical Kazak warrior Oraz (Jason Scott Lee), who can talk to the animals, is arrested by the agents of the Kazak Galdan Ceren (Doskhan Zholzhaxynov), who threatens to put him to death if he doesn’t pick out the perfect horse. This, is somehow the best way to inspire loyalty over there in Central Asia, I dunno, but Oraz has the gift of prophecy, and he knows immediately, where the Kazak Christ is born. Unfortunately, so do the Uigars, who send some baddies to kill the kid, who’s saved by Oraz and is raised by him to become Mansur Khan(Kuno Becker), who looks Aryan and can do pretty much anything.

The script is simple to be just above idiotic. The various main characters, like the love interest(Ayanat Yesmagambetova). and the best friend(Jay Hernandez), are complete morons, and that pretty much moves the plot forward. The good guys are the good guys and the bad guys are the bad guys, and Kazakhstani steppe looks very much like the Midwestern prairie, and the scenery looks gorgeous, but we don’t see enough of it to really appreciate it.

Also, they filmed quite a bit of it in English for some reason and decided to dub the rest into English as well. This helps a little, but since the film really isn’t worth viewing, it’s still a waste of money for the people at Weinstein. Maybe the Kazaks will make something really entertaining to show the world what they can do. But this isn’t it. Sad, really.

New Directors, New Films series.

2007-03-19T09:21:00.000-07:00

These films are generally not all that great, but one or two of them managed to get an Oscar® nomination for acting or best foreign film or something like that. sometimes, they're quite good.
The series starts today.

Here's the first batch:

√Glue: Adolescence in the Middle of Nowhere
See the review I did in Miami, posted eariler this month.

The Art of Crying
Final Cut Film 106mins, NR

Directed by
Peter Schønau Fog

Sometimes monsters have human faces, and this is a monster movie, no doubt about it. 11-year-old Allan(Jannik Lorenzen) is not the monster. His father Henry(Jesper Asholt) is. Every night, Mom (Hanne Hedelund) and Dad have a fight over something or other and the latter threatens to commit suicide. So it is up to sister Sanne(Julie Kolbech) to make him happy again and live another day.

One day, older brother Asger(Thomas Knuth-Winterfeldt) returns from university and discover what Sanne exactly does to achieve this result, and everything begins to unravel. Sanne begins to refuse, and Allan must find an alternative method of cheering Dad up.

Dad likes to make funeral orations. So his enemy Grocer Budde (Bjarne Henriksen), son Nis (Tue Frisk Petersen) will die, While this is obviously a coincidence, the death of Aunt Didde (Gitte Siem Christensen) isn’t, and when Sanne gets a boyfriend (Sune Thomsen), Dad uses Allan to wreak terrible revenge. Child abuse and murder are treated in a matter-of-fact fashion, and this makes the whole thing appear somewhat exotic.

What makes this thing work is the acting. Young Lorenzen gives a brilliant deadpan performance, and Kolbech is almost as good as his sister. They have great chemistry together and seem quite natural. But it’s Asholt’s movie. He gets to chew the scenery with wild abandon, but can reign it in when necessary. He does so to perfect effect, and for much of the film, we’re not sure whether he’s just an overemotional fool or something more malevolent. Everyone else is just fine.

All in all, this is a pretty perverse movie, but then this is from Scandinavia, and they do that better than most. It’s the wild-eyed innocence of the thing that make this something special and which might make the quarter-finals of next year’s Oscar race.

Cowboy Angels
Artworx Films 100mins NR

Written and Directed
by Kim Massee

Finding a babysitter in France can be just as hard as it is in any other Western country, and filmmaker Kim Massee has come up with an ingenious solution as to what to do with the kid while she’s out working:
She having him star in her latest film. She must be the envy of stage mothers everywhere.

Massee's son Diego Mestanza plays Kevin, AKA Pablo, the eleven year old son of a drunken whore(Françoise Klein), with whom he lives in a skuzzy hotel in Paris. He doesn’t go to school, just plays video games in a bar, annoying both Mom and the proprietors. Pablo isn’t very happy with the situation, and when Mom decides to split for a while, he decides to step out on his own.

His plan is to hire a chauffeur, who’s going to drive him to Spain, where he will find his long lost father. The driver in question is Louis(Thierry Levaret), a small time hood, who is in a bit of trouble with the local mob for possibly cheating at cards. At first Louis isn’t very willing to go along with the plan, but next month’s rent and some goons trying to break his legs are enough to change his mind.

So what follows is a relatively uninspired road movie, with Pablo and Louis bonding while on the quest for Daddy, and all that disappointment when they finally get there. Then, there’s the the trip back, where we meet mom’s previous boyfriends, none of whom is willing or able to take Pablo on. Then there’s the part about a waitress named Billie(Noëlie Giraud) who’s gratuitously joins the pair presumably in order to pad the film to it’s full hour and a half.

The acting’s fine. Massee managed to pass on her talent to her kid, who does a really good job. Lavarent has a bug up his ass for most of the picture and the sudden bonding is not quite believable. Klein is scary and Giraud is gorgeous, which is why, I guess, they were hired.

While the film isn’t boring, the whole project is quite forgettable and I don’t think this will see the light of day outside of a couple of film festivals in the spring and summer.

√Red Road, Andrea Arnold, UK, 2006; 113 mins,
See my review from Sundance, posted last January.

Gradually…
Iran, 2006; 81 mins,

Directed by
Maziar Miri

Have you heard about the term a “comedy of manners?” Well this is something similar, a “tragedy of manners.” This is a sad film about good people quietly suffering, and thus is a hit on the film festival circuit.

Mahmoud(Mohammad-Reza Foroutan) is a welder working on the railroad all the liveling day. That is until he receives a message stating that his wife Pari(Niloofar Khoshkholgh) is missing and that he should go find her.

So he goes to Teharan and starts looking. His landlady(Maryam Boobani) sure that she’s a nutcase who’s just run away from home, as does his old friend Firooz(Hassan Poorshiraz), who sent him the note in the first place, but our hero can’t believe that, and he keeps on looking until he finds the body of a woman with no face who has a mole in the right area of what remains of her head. There’s a funeral, and the film goes into a second phase, that is until someone claims to have seen Pari and even has her phone number. Guess what?

That’s right.

While it’s all very innocent on Pari’s part, the whole thing seems rather pointless. Why have this big mystery when you have such an innocent explanation? The acting is fine as far as it goes, but the characterizations seem one dimensional and the mystery appears solved too early in the film to make much of an impact on the characters or the audience.

Apparently, the film was reedited and scenes reshot since its debut back in 2005. The press notes reprint a negative review from that time describing scenes that have been cut out. Perhaps they wanted us critics to see how big an improvement was made, and I guess there was, but it doesn’t make it worth looking at, much less pay money for. Forget it.

The Great World of Sound
Plum Pictures 106mins, NR

Written and Directed
by Craig Zobel

They called them “song sharks.” It’s a scam, where thieves pretend to be record producers and they bilk unsuspecting suckers out of hundreds or thousands of dollars pretending to help said suckers start up a musical career.

Martin (Pat Healy) is a 30ish white slacker, who’s had a number of jobs in the radio industry and is currently unemployed and living off his girlfriend
Pam’s (Rebecca Mader), knickknack business, so he sees an ad placed by two sharpsters named Layton (Robert Longstreet) and Shank(John Baker), who hire him to go around the south and audition would-be recording artists and get them to invest a few thousand bucks in production costs for their first albums.

So Martin is partnered with Clarence (Kene Holliday), a middle-aged black man, and he starts his new career as an unwitting conman. It first seems like it’s going alright, and Martin even contributes some of his own money for a promising prospect. Then reality begins to set in.

This is about a moral dilemma. What do you do when you realize what you’re doing is wrong? Do you immediately quit or keep on doing it and hope that you’ll manage to make enough to pay the bills before the boss goes to jail. It’s also about the art of selling. Martin and Clarence get better and better at selling recording time and their pitches change constantly. Also, we get to hear a lot of bad to mediocre music, made by people, who presumably, were lured by the same type of ads that are highlighted in the film. [think the first few episodes of American Idol] This is a disturbing work about how low people will go sometimes and how morality sometimes goes out the window when the wolf is at the door. One can see why it was one of the highlights at Sundance last January.

√Once, John Carney, Ireland, 2006; 85 mins,
See my review from sundance that I posted back in January.

What the Sun Has Seen
Poland, 2006; 107mins, NR

Written and Directed
by Michal Rosa

Silesia is Polish-occupied Germany, and in an unnamed town that was once German, a bunch of people live in quiet desperation. It’s All Saint’s Day, and twelve year old Seba (Damian Hryniewicz) is lighting the candles on his dead mother’s grave. Meanwhile, Josef (Krzysztof Stroinski) and his wife (Jadwiga Jankowska-Cieslak) listen to Marta (Dominika Kluzniak) and the rest of the choir do their thing. After the service is over, Joseph and his wife notice Seba leaving the graveyard and promptly slam their car into something.

Cut to the following summer. Marta is trying to sell stuff in the town square as are Seba and his father(Tomasz Sapryk), while Josef is handing out flyers while wearing a pelican suit. All want to raise money for various projects that seem very important to them. Seba wants a certain tree cut down, Josef wants to get some valuble photographs of his long lost son replaced, and Marta wants out, period.

So we have three stories about three relatively desperate people who’s paths cross from time to time and to whom nothing much happens, except they screw up to some extent and wind up mostly unhappy until the deus ex machina shows up at the very end.

That this is an understated movie is obvious. The characters aren’t very well developed, and while we kind of care about Seba and Marta, they barely rise above one-dimensional cutouts. The reason is because of the acting. It’s surprisingly good, and this is why the movie has any interest at all.

Also, Ms. Kluzniak has one heck of a good singing voice, and she’s probably going to have a very nice career in Eastern Europe. But this isn’t worth the effort.

Congorama
Crystal Films 105min NR

Written and directed
by Philippe Falardeau

Melodrama is sitcom without the jokes. You have some characters who drift through a predetermined situation while someone decides if these actions have some sort of meaning. It’s a very old form of theater.

In this case, we have Michel(Olivier Gourmet), the engineer son of a famous novelist named novelist Herve(Jean-Pierre Cassel), who after the latter [who has had a stroke] receives an award, learns that he is not in fact the latter’s son, but a bastard given away in a private adoption and is in fact from Quebec.

So our hero leaves dad in the care of his Congolese wife Alice (Claudia Tagbo) [Michel and Alice have a kid named Jules (Arnaud Mouithys), BTW], and heads to the wilds of Canada, where he goes to look for his roots.

After striking out in his quest because the adoption broker couldn’t remember the last name of the mother correctly, a kindly priest (Gabriel Arcand) introduces Michel to Louis(Paul Ahmarani), who’s going to give him a lift. This leads to a bizarre accident, which not only changes the main focus of the film from Michel to Louis, but knocks the viewer for a loop, with the plot doing a 90-degree turn involving electric cars and theft of intellectual property.

The Third act brings the first two together quite nicely, and while it does have a happy ending, the whole thing relies too much on heavy-handed plotting. However, Gourmet and Ahmarani do good enough a job acting to make the whole thing relatively believable and the film itself kind of interesting.

This is the kind of thing that Hollywood is famous for remaking, and they should. It would help.

Suely in the Sky
Celluloid Dreams 90mins, NR

Written and Directed
by Karim Aïnouz

Making money is a bitch, especially in Brazil.

Hermila(Hermila Guedes) knows this very well. Having run off to the big city with her boyfriend, she returns from Sao Paulo in defeat with her toddler son and moves in with her grandmother(Zezita Matos) and Aunt Maria (Maria Menezes) while waiting for hubby to show up.

While she waits, she buys an expensive bottle of Scotch and raffles it off, [it seems that the denizens of this part of Brazil, which is nothing like the Amazon rain forest, but rather west Texas, like to gamble] and takes up with her old flame João (João Miguel) and hangs out with her old friends
Georgina (Georgina Castro) and Marcelia (Marcelia Cartaxo), who work on their backs, a profession Hermila doesn’t really want to get in to.

But when Hubby never disappears in transit, and lets it known through channels that he doesn’t want to be found, Hermilia begins to have second thoughts. Taking the nom-de-guerre “Suley” she begins selling raffle tickets for a new and exciting prize. HER! That’s right, a night with your own private dancer with all the trimmings.

Of course this is a bit of a scandal. While Grandma and Joåo are horrified, most of her friends are all in favor of the idea. This is an interesting concept, and Ms Guedes has a really winning personality, which makes this slightly silly movie watchable. She’s the kind of person we can really root for, even though the prize she’s shilling isn’t one that is quite kosher.

The moral ambiguity of he scheme is offset by the cinematography, which is beautiful. This part of Brazil is nothing like the huge tropical paradise that one is used to from various nature and travel shows. The people are real, not just stick figures, and on the whole this is a rather deep film, although it’s pure melodrama. Worth a look.

Day Night Day Night,
IFC First Take; 94mins NR

Written and Directed
by Julia Loktev

The Terrorist (Luisa Williams) arrives in New York for her mission. Where she came from and why she’s doing what she’s doing isn’t made clear, all we know is that she’s up to no good. She prays a mantra about how everyone dies and foreshadows what’s expected to happen.

She’s met by a mysterious stranger(Tschi Hun Kim), who buys her lunch and drives her to a nondescript hotel, and here she waits…and waits.

This is a film about the minutia of waiting. The cinematographer and the foley artists have a field day making close-ups of many parts of her body and creating sounds in such a way as it appears the audience is listening from inside her head. She cuts her nails, watches TV, takes a shower, naps, goes outside on the balcony…something that makes her omniscient
Commander (Josh P. Weinstein), call and tell her not to do that anymore.

Then they show up. Masked men (Weinstein, Gareth Saxe and Nyambi Nyambi) inspect her and quiz her on her mission. They make a video, Then she waits some more, until she’s taken to get fitted for her bomb.

Then comes the plot twist. It’s a very nice plot twist that is not only unexpected, but in complete keeping with the tone of all that has gone before.

That is on a different subject: frustration. It’s also a tour of the Times Square area, which as the film was shot on HD in the middle of one of the great tourist destinations of the United States, is rather easy to do. It’s quite effective.

Even with a literal cast of thousands [most of whom had no idea they were being filmed], this is a one-woman show. Ms. Williams is in frame almost the entire time, and the expressions on her face, especially her eyes, tell the entire story of the film that is otherwise spare and devoid of meaningful dialogue. This is pure visuals, and would work even if it was silent. This is filmmaking!

Rome Rather Than You
Neffa Films 111m NR

Written and Directed
by Tariq Teguia

Looking back at history, the people of Algeria made a huge mistake in wresting independence from France. Since achieving “freedom” in 1962, they’ve known little save poverty, civil war and despair. Thousands of Algerians attempt to cross the Mediterranean in order to achieve the better lives that liberation failed to provide.

Kemal(Rachid Amrani) wants out. He claims to have been in Europe before, but he doesn’t have a passport, much less work visas, but he has heard of a guy called “The Bosco” [no relation to the chocolate syrup], who can get forged papers. So he grabs his girlfriend Zima(Samira Kaddour), who’s a nurse and isn’t too happy about being stuck in the stifling Islamic atmosphere, and they head off to the seaside resort where the Bosco is allegedly hanging out.

So they look. And they look. They meet some friends. They encounter a Police Inspector(Ahmed Benaissa), who insults and arrests them for the horrid crime of looking suspicious. It all ends badly and pointlessly.

Exactly why this movie managed to get funding is somewhat problematic. This is generally a pointless film. There’s no real story, the characters are barely above the stick figure level and the violence is gratuitous and there’s not nearly enough of it. A good car chase or gunfight is fine if we have some idea what it’s for, but if it comes out of the blue for no reason other than the filmmaker doesn’t know what else to do, then what’s the point? Either there’s action, or there isn’t. Here there isn’t but there’s a promise of it which isn’t actually fulfilled. This is not only disappointing, but frustrating.

There’s nothing to get involved in either on the story or character levels. As there’s no THERE there, don’t go there.

Third Friday Document Dump

2007-03-16T14:55:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure when they're going to get the GVG put up again, but until then, we'll put up this week's batch here...

Premonition

Directed by
Mennan Yapo

Linda Hanson(Sandra Bullock) has become unstuck in time. If you have read Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s “Slaughterhouse Five” you would understand what that means. Unfortunately, Vonnegut's books generally make bad movies, I'll have to explain a bit. Thursday is followed by Monday, which is followed by Saturday and so on. We know this in advance because they make it clear in the trailer.

When we first meet her, she's a suburban housewife with two cute little girls(Shyann McClure and Courtney Taylor Burness) and her husband Jim(Julian McMahon) is coming back from a business trip. Linda comes back from doing her morning chores when a cop arrives and informs her that Jim was killed in a car accident. The usual stuff happens in cases like this, and then when she wakes up in the morning, Jim is alive and it's Monday. Thinking that she might be going nuts, Linda shrugs it off.

Then comes the funeral, and we see a major plot point and a huge, I mean HUGE, plot hole. This is never actually addressed, and everyone seems to have forgotten about something so huge. Exactly why this is isn't addressed by anyone, but it's really annoying. So's much of the rest of the movie, in which Linda, with SOME knowledge of the future, plays into fate's trap and in turn gets herself into trouble with her mother(Kate Nelligan), best friend(Nia Long), and shrink(Peter Stormare), not to mention her dead husband, who is not as wonderful as we think he is for the first two thirds of the film.

The problem with this film is that it's not adventurous enough. It goes to great lengths to show how banal and boring Linda's life has become as a stay-at-home mom, but it also seems that Linda's bit of a bore herself, and this boringness pervades every millimeter of celluloid. We know that nothing is going to change fate, and that makes the climax somewhat anticlimactic, which itself is a surprise.

The acting is perfectly fine, and everyone, especially the two kids, manages to rise above the sub-par script, but unfortunately, not much. This is a bit of a waste, especially for Bulluck, who has made much better choices in the past. Don't bother.

I Think I Love My Wife

Written and Directed
By Chris Rock

When Chris Rock and Louis Szekely [pronounced “C.K.”], decided to do a remake of Eric Rohmer's 1972 “L'Amour L'après-midi” they must have not have known what they were getting into. After all, this was a very, very French film, and their previous effort together [“Down To Earth”] crashed and burned with a white hot fire. Could they manage to translate that film into one for the American public without it appearing drab and slightly misogynist? Actually, it appears so, for it's drab and VERY misogynist.

Rock plays one Richard Cooper, an investment banker commuting daily to Manhattan from the suburbs, he has a lovely wife named Brenda(Gina Torres), who's a grade school teacher and two very young kids. All would be wonderful if he was getting any, but no, she's all but kicked him out of bed. Richard is getting frustrated with state of affairs, for it seems that he's a “pussy-whipped” fool.

Then one day, Nikki Tru (Kerry Washington) comes back into his life. She's beautiful, intelligent, needy, selfish and evil. Soon, she's trying to take over his life and ruin his marriage. Exactly why, we're not sure. But there you have it. Richard wants to be faithful to his wife, and to some extent remains so throughout the film, but soon Nikki has him jumping through hoops and having him dance like a puppet on a string. This is a stereotype if there ever was one, and therein lies the problem.

This film isn't exactly ANTI-adultery. George(Steve Buscemi), Robert's best friend at the firm, is cheating on HIS wife left and right, and he's apparently extremely happy. It's the wife and would-be mistress who are the problem. With the exception of Richard's secretary(Welker White), all the women are depicted as either callus or evil, and to make things worse, the men aren't depicted that much better.

The problem is primarily the script, but secondarily is Rock. He's not very good as the haggard hero. While he's sympathetic for the first part of the picture, one wants to slap him upside the head that he's sooooooooo stupid. Even worse, most of the jokes fall flat.

This is not a date film, nor is it a chick flick. I'm not sure who it's for, but it's probably not you. Don't waste your money.

The Wind That Shakes The Barley

Written and Directed
by Ken Loach

What is the difference between terrorism and revolution? What are the rules of war when only one side agrees to play by them? And when the game is over, what if one side doesn't actually want to stop playing? That's the tragedy of Ireland in the first quarter of the 20th century. Ken Loach tries to answer that in what seems to be biased retelling of the history of the Irish revolution and civil war which followed it.

When we first meet him, Dr. Damien O'Conner(Cillian Murphy) is a pacifist who's going to go work in London, when the war ruins his plans. He and his brother Teddy(Padraic Delaney) are playing a form of field hockey with his friends Micheail(Laurence Barry), Finbar (Damien Kearney),Leo(Frank Bourke), Rory(Myles Horgan), Dan(Liam Cunningham) and Chris(John Crean), something that has been banned by the British authorities. The “Black and Tans” get wind of this little act of rebellion and counterattack by heading to the house of Damien's girlfriend Sinead(Orla Fitzgerald) and her grandmother (Mary Riordan)s, and start harassing the players. Micheail acts defiantly obnoxious, and pays with his life.

Damien is determined to leave this all behind when he sees some soldiers try to buy some train tickets, only to be told that the engineer refuses to let them on the train. They respond with violence, and this not only ruins Damien's trip, but drives him to join the Irish Republican Army. He and his pals are now soldiers at war, except they're dressed in civies and go around like normal people, except when they meet up with the British soldiers, who suspecting the truth, treat them as the enemy. They innocently respond with murder. The British don't like this at all, and there's more reprisals, which leads to even more (this is a low level war) and we get to see our “heroes” kidnap and execute the local lord (Roger Allam) and their pal Chris, who betrayed them. Justice in the areas controlled by the revolutionaries is definitely in the communist mold, which causes dissention in the ranks.

Thing get worse when the war against the British is one and the Irish turn on each other, leading to a heartbreaking ending.

This is a brutal film of terrorism and how it works. What's strange is that Ken Loach and Paul Laverty's screenplay is very much pro-terrorist, having the anti-treaty forces in the civil war be the good guys and the leaders of the newly independent Irish government portrayed as traitors, when in fact it was the other way around.

The acting is excellent. Murphy is overdue for an Oscar®, and the rest of the cast does a bang up job. This is one heck of a scary movie. If you're interested in history, it's worth a look.

American Cannibal: The Road to Reality

A Documentary Directed by
Perry Grebin and Michael Nigro

This is a documentary. That's the shocking part because this doesn't seem like one. It's more like one of those faux “mock-umentaries” that make fun of such crap. In fact, the press notes starts out with a FAQ starting with “is this for real? It's so damn stupid that one can't think that anyone would actually go as far as it did and put down real money to produce it.

Gil Ripley and Dave Roberts are two schubs trying to make it in show business. They've had an actual failed pilot made, and their agent thinks they should get into reality television, so they start pitching a few ideas, none of which are very good and all get rejected. Then they meet a certain Kevin Blatt, who foisted the Paris Hilton Sex Tape on the world. He likes two of the more perverse ideas they pitch, and soon, much to their chagrin, the most stupid one, the title of the film, is put into production as a pilot.

Remember “Springtime for Hitler?”

This flick oozes contempt from every pore. The interviews with the various professionals who discuss how the whole creative process works aren't particularly enlightening. They are only in it for the money and know that they're going to the lowest common denominator. The production team doesn't seem to be very high on it except for Blatt, and some of the prospective contestants, who are all depicted as morons. There is genuine sympathy shown for Roberts and Ripley, and we almost forget that they thought up this stupid idea themselves.

Despite all odds the pilot is actually shot, and things go horribly wrong and everyone bugs out. If it hadn't there wouldn't have been a film now, would there. At least not this one.

If you want to laugh at the moronic extremes of Reality TV, you should rent “Series 7” which, while completely fictional is far, far better, or check out the original version of “The Producers,” which is brilliant. Pass this one by.

Document Dump number two

2007-03-09T16:15:00.000-08:00

Since there still are problems with the Greenwich Villiage Gazette, here's the reviews for this week.

300
Warner Bros. Pictures, 91mins, R

Written and Directed
by Zack Snyder

Shot on a bare soundstage with a minimum of props, this is a masterpiece of digital art. As one of the most beautiful and grotesque films of the decade, it's also bad history and an ambiguous political statement. Zack Snyder has created one of the most stylish and intense comic book movies ever made-period.

That the history is bad does not matter that much. This is art for art's sake, after all, and the artistic license is stretched to it's breaking point, Frank Miller's comic book is followed as a template, and the film is a series of tableaux with theatrical overacting.

In the year 480 BC, King Leonidas (Gerard Butler) and his Queen Gorgo (Lena Headey) rule over the insane city-state of Sparta, where all male citizens are drafted into the army at the age of nine and are turned into brutal, insane lunatics. None more so than Leonidas himself, who killed a hungry wolf in the wilderness, when he was sent out in the snow with nothing but a loincloth and a spear while still a young prince.

After a minutes-long course in Spartan culture, which ends with that story, our hero is visited by a Persian Emissary (Tyrone Benskin), who promises him overlordship of all Greece in return for an oath of aliegence. As brutal lunatic, he murders the emissary and everyone else in the Persian party, thus precipitating the invasion of Greece by Persian king Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) and his million-man army.

Even though he is forbidden to by the evil and monstrous Ephors to go and defend Sparta with his army, he decides to go anyway with only three hundred men, led by himself and Captains Artemis (Vincent Regan) and Dilios (David Wenham) [who narrates].

The three hundred Spartans, with the assistance of a few dozen “Arcadians” [in reality, there were well over a thousand Greek troops], head over to the Hot Gates, which is what Thermopylae means in English, and prepare to do battle with a million Persians.

It is here the cartoon nature of the film comes to the fore. The battle pits around 400 Greeks against an uncountable multitude, and this multitude is an army so inept, so incompetent, that the Greeks can build hundred-foot high walls with their bodies, For most of the film, the Persians never land a blow. Not one. That is until near the end. Snyder fills the eye with all sorts of marvels that collapse against the wall that is the 300. There is no reality here, nor is there supposed to be. This is the telling of myth, and the Spartans are supermen and hence, invulnerable. The bad guys, from the pathetic hunchback Ephialtes(Andrew Tiernan), to Xerxes himself, are presented in a grotesque, cartoonish manner which bares no resemblance to anything authentically Persian.

All this doesn't mean that the film isn't vastly entertaining. This is one heck of a ride, and is well worth the price of a ticket, and may look even better on the IMAX screen. Go see it, then read a history book to find out what really happened.

Beyond the Gates

Directed by
Michael Caton-Jones

The Holocaust in Rwanda in 1994 is probably one of the most shameful incident in the history of the United Nations. Eight hundred thousand people were hacked to death while the powers that be in the rest of the world just sat there and told the UN peacekeeping forces to keep all the peace to themselves.

This is the story of a bunch of people heroically doing nothing while over half the population of a country went criminally insane.

Joe Connor(Hugh Dancy) is a missionary teaching school at the Ecole Technique Officielle, which is jointly run by the Catholic church and the government. The guy in charge is Father Christopher(John Hurt), who is a jolly old soul who loves his work with the less fortunate in the capitol of Kigali. Everyone, at first appears to be happy. Joe is a bit of a goof, and commentates as Marie(Clare-Hope Ashitey), a Tutsi teenager, runs laps. We notice how easygoing everyone is just before the fact. Francois(David Gyasi), the school's Hutu custodian takes Joe to meet his parents, showing how friendly everyone was.

Then the UN shows up, led by a certain Captain Delon(Dominique Horwitz), who sets up camp on the school's grounds. Soon the killing starts and the refugees begin arriving. Both Joe and Father Chistopher venture out to discover that old friends have succumbed to the genocidal madness.

The scenes of graphic violence don't start until well into the movie, and aside from Marie, and to some extent Francois, none of the African characters are more than ciphers. An explanation for what was going on is not forthcoming. All demand an explanation and there are no answers. Aside from pure hate and some veiled accusations against the French and Belgians, I guess there are none.

The performances are fine. Hurt is especially good, but then he always is, and the bit parts of the Africans are well acted as well. But this still is an extremely disappointing movie. There are no heroes, really. It just gets the viewer mad. That's modern cinema, I guess. But it explains why this took over two years to get a release here in the 'States. Not worth the bucks.

The Host

Written and Directed
by Bong Joon-Ho

The South Koreans have an ambiguous relationship with the United States. They hate us because they're sick of having to be grateful. It's a normal reaction. So in the tradition of blaming us for anything and everything, an evil American medical worker (Scott Wilson) orders his Korean assistant to pour a few dozen bottles of spoiled formaldehyde down the sink and into Seoul's Han River. In a couple of years there's a monster swimming in the river and a couple of years after that, we get to start the fun.

Park Kang-Du(Song Kang-Ho) is a slacker working in a food stand next to the river in downtown Seoul. He works with his father Hee-Bong(Byun Hee-Bong) and the two are raising his young daughter Hyun-Seo(Ko A-Sung). The only success in the family is the sister Nam-ju (Bae Du-na), who's a champion archer. All is going well, at least for a slacker in a teen comedy, but then the monster, comes out of nowhere and starts chasing pretty much everybody in the park. This was done done by San Francisco-based The Orphanage, and it's brilliant. What they do with it is amazing.

The monster eats Hyun-seo, or so we think, and the family is mourning in the refugee clinic, where Nam-Ju and brother Nam-Il(Park Hae-Il), who is doing slightly better than Kang-do, arrive and soon K-d is having visions. He thinks his daughter is alive, which isn't that strange, considering how he comes to this conclusion.

The family escapes, and its one chase after another until the semi-happy ending. This thing has it all. Comedy, tragedy, excitement, pathos, you name it, its here. This is probably the best horror comedy of the decade. South Korea made a mistake in not submitting this for the foreign language Oscar [Not that the one they DID submit was bad, mind you…] see it.

Maxed Out

A Documentary Directed
by James D. Scurlock

The issue here is an old one. Charles Dickens put it succinctly almost a century and a half ago, when he had Mr. Micawber say in 'David Copperfield': “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery.” In this film, James D. Scurlock sets out to prove it.

What Scurlock's thesis is, is that the people who get themselves into into mountains of debt aren't the least bit responsible for what they do. It's those big, mean, corporate banks who are to blame. After all, getting people with bad credit to make those minimum interest payments for the rest of their lives are pretty damn profitable, right?

Then of course, there's those companies like that bank who was recently fined that was fined $400 million dollars for SHREDDING customers checks to charge false late fees, and other usurious institutions that will be happy to lend you a couple of hundred bucks on your car if you agree to pay fifty percent interest a month.

Scurlock interviews a few dozen people, ranging from Harvard Law School economics professor Elizabeth Warren, who shocks us with the revelation that "Consumer lending is obscenely profitable," to a retarded man snookered into refinancing the mortgage on his house at much higher rates…and oh yeah, a lot of these poisonous shenanigans are done by institutions owned by some of the biggest banks in the country. Whoop-de-doo.

The film gives a good description of many of the scams that are going on, and the Bush administration and Republican congress's so-called “reforms” which make bankruptcy harder for the middle class. As an educational tool, this is rather good, because it gives warning to the young about how to start properly looking after one's finances. If you want a credit card, go to a college campus in September, where they give them out for free and provide free Frisbees besides.

The interesting thing about this documentary, is that it gives absolutely no solutions to the problem. Scurlock merely denounces the Republicans in Congress and the Bush administration.

Sadly, this sort of thing will go on forever. People are smart and others are dumb and the former will always prey on the latter. That's life. IN the meantime, it's always good to be prepared.

The Namesake

Directed by
Mira Nair

The structure of film is partly based on time. For instance, Jhumpa Lahiri's epic novel, on which this film is based, spans decades, going from the 1970s to the 2000s, and while this has a small set of characters, this doesn't have an actual focus on which generation of the Ganguli family the filmmaker wants to look at until well after much of the story has unfolded.

The film starts in Southern India where a young Ashoke Ganguli (Irrfan Khan) is on his way to visit his grandfather when the train he is on derails. We see him in traction briefly before, meeting Ashima (Tabu), the pretty daughter of a rich Bengali family, who is given to Ashoke in marriage. Apparently, he's a professor of something and he's teaching in New York, so they go off to the New World and build a life for themselves, falling in love with each other and having two kids: Gogol(Kal Penn) and Sonia (Sahira Nair), the former, named after the Russian writer, is the namesake of the title.

We see them grow up quickly as the years pass, Gogol comes to despise his name, and is you're typical American slacker, of the kind Penn has made a career of portraying. Here, he proves he can actually do something else, a revelation to be sure.

This is the American experience. The immigrant parents and their American kids. Gogol changes his name to Nick and falls in love with a rich blonde named Maxine(Jacinda Barrett) whom his parents don't like for ethnic reasons, but when Ashoke dies, Nick decides to embrace his ethnicity and eventually marries Moushumi(Zuleikha Robinson), whom is ethnically correct, but turns out to be less of a catch than has been promised.

Sooni Taraporevala's screenplay is much like a long Russian novel. It has its moments, but goes on and on, and when it slows down near the end, it begins to stumble a bit, Still, the film is affecting, and the acting is terrific. We can understand why Tabu is India's biggest star. Robinson is sure to get more work out of this, but it is Kal Penn who's the biggest revelation. This could make him.

See this, but bring a pillow.

Saturday Document Dump number one.

2007-03-09T16:10:00.000-08:00

There's some internal trouble in the Greenwich Villiage Gazette, so here the reviews that should have been put up.

Wild Hogs

Directed by
Walt Becker

People have bills to pay. You have them, I have them, rich and poor alike owe people money and credit cards fees go up exponentially with minimum monthly payments. So what's a formerly major movie star to do? Make a movie like this, of course.

Touchtone is Disney, we've always known that. Disney-brand live action comedies have generally followed a certain formula, and for the most part, they're terrible. This is a Disney-brand kiddie comedy targeted at grown-ups. Paint-by-numbers, cookie cutter, you name it, it's all the same thing. Brad Copeland, who did some excellent TV work, has written a basically lazy script

Doug(Tim Allen), Bobby(Martin Lawrence), Dudley(William H Macy) and Woody(John Travolta) are a group of middle aged men with middle aged jobs, who like to pretend they're bikers. With the permission of Doug's wife(Jill Hennessy) [Bobby's(Tichina Arnold) doesn't know, and the others don't have any], they head off for a weeklong road trip, have zany adventures, and get into trouble with a REAL biker gang run by Ray Liotta, which leads to the preordained confrontation and happy ending.

The only reason to see this film is the cast. We're talking about people who've won or were nominated for an Oscar (Marisa Tomei, Macy and Travolta), Golden Globes (Liotta, Allen, Macy, and Travolta), and various other “major” trophies. Everybody seems to be having a wonderful time reciting the generally terrible lines, and on occasion there are actually some real laughs and a whole bunch of giggles in-between. The entire cast aquits itself and none do anything so embarrassing that they can continue to have something to fall back on when they make bad investments.

Worth a look when it gets on cable, which should be soon.

Zodiac

Directed by
David Fincher

We'll begin with the spoiler because this is based on a true story and everyone is supposed to know it anyway. The Titanic sinks-Surprise!!!! Zodiac got away with it. They never actually found the guy. This is will not ruin the movie-going experience for anybody.

The film begins on the fourth of July 1969 with the second set of murders, and follows the case for next thirty years. This isn't as much about the murders as the reaction to those murders. David Fincher is one of those directors who's a specialists in thrillers, and this is kind of his masterpiece. It's two and a half hours of tension and boredom, burrowing into the lives of the investigators and press as the case goes from white hot, to eventually very cold as decade follows decade. This is Fincher's tribute to the passage of time.

After the initial murder, which takes up quite a bit of time, the film moves it's focus to the newsroom of the San Francisco Chronicle, where political cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) is starting out his new job. The Zodiac has just sent a letter with a coded message to the paper and made some threats. As Graysmith watches from the sidelines, crack crime reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.) takes on the case. This puts him in conflict with SF police inspectors David Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) and Bill Armstrong (Anthony Edwards) and their boss(Dermot Mulroney), after the Zodiac kills someone in the city proper [the others were in the suburbs], and the two detectives in conflict with the cops in the suburbs(John Ennis, Elias Koteas, and John Hemphill some others).

The hysteria over the murders and Zodiac's love of puzzles, something he forces on the public, basically takes over the media, and the circus that follows. He even takes over the airwaves when he forces famed attorney Melvin Belli (Brian Cox) to talk to him on a TV show. Parts of the film are actually rather funny, but the tension never waivers, even when the case cools down and people's lives begin to collapse along with the case. Time is as much a character in this film as are any of the principles.

The depiction of time is deftly handled. Greysmith, who's obsession with the case never waivers and by the last third of the film is the only person who's still interested, is newly divorced with a young child when the film starts and by the end is breaking up with his second wife(Chloë Sevigny), with whom he had some more kids. Most impressive is the use of archival footage of the construction of the Transamerica pyramid. That was cool.

The acting is fantastic throughout. Downey gives one of his best performances to date, stealing every scene he's in, and so does Cox. Ruffalo clearly reflects the frustration the audience feels as the film goes on and on and on. Gyllenhaal is understated as the heart of the film, and John Carroll Lynch is slyly ominous as the prime suspect.

As great as it is, the film is ultimately disappointing. It dwells on minutia, which it has to, and unlike most “fiction films”, which have to have a satisfying ending [a point Fincher makes clear by having most of the cast attend a screening of “Dirty Harry,” which itself was loosly based on the Zodiac case], this doesn't. But that doesn't mean that this isn't worth the time to see this, just bring a pillow for your butt, that's all.

Two Weeks

Written and Directed
by Steve Stockman

Death is a tricky thing to portray. It can be done in all sorts of manners, from slapstick to tragedy. Usually, funny deaths are accidental and violent, like a guy slipping on a banana peel and falling off the roof of a twenty story building. That would be funny only if we didn't see the poor soul actually landing on the ground.

Usually long and painful deaths are tragic. There can be funny stuff around the periphery, but the actual person kicking the bucket is always tragic, especially if the filmmaker focuses on the pre-corpse suffering, which is exactly what auteur Steve Stockman does in this fictionalized memoir.

Stockman's mother died a few years back and he ruminated on it for years, apparently. The surrogate for his mother is named Anita(Sally Field). She and her second husband Jim(James Murtaugh) have been living in North Carolina for years and she has terminal cancer. The end is nigh, and so daughter Emily(Julianne Nicholson) sends the word out to her brothers Keith(Ben Chaplin), Barry(Tom Cavanagh) and Matthew(Glenn Howerton) to come home and get ready for the inevitable.

So before the inevitable happens, the inevitable happens. There's fighting, commiserating, denial, the whole works. Unless everyone hates each other and the soon to be deceased, which they don't here, the pattern for this type of thing is universal, which I guess is why Stockman got the money to produce this thing.

This is a professional job done by professionals, and although the acting is excellent, the writing isn't. There's an air of claustrophobia about the film and while sometimes this is a good thing, it doesn't work in comedy, which apparently this is supposed to be. Sally Field kind of has a monologue that was allegedly filmed somewhere at the beginning of the film, which is meant to be counterpoint to the action on the screen. It doesn't work all that well, but that's primarily Stockman's fault. By trying to be “fair” to all the siblings, the lesser characters, such as Jim and various wives are just put on the stage with little to do.

There's supposed to be some insight here, but while the experience is indeed universal and there's lots that's identifiable as such, it doesn't really know where it's going, and is eventually boring. Also, but going past the death, the film meanders to a close. This was supposed to be Oscar bait, and as we all know, it never got anything, and that's a good thing. We should let this die a decent death.

Black Snake Moan

Written and Directed
by Craig Brewer

Having explored the creative process with his “Hustle and Flow”, auteur Craig Brewer has decided to go after bigger fish: the blues, and in doing so has come up with one of the most bizarre and perverse musicals of the decade. This is probably why it works so well. It's probably best to explain what the title means.

“Black Snake Moan” was the title of a song by Blind Lemon Jefferson, who “flourished” during the 1930s and '40s. It was about the “black snake” of depression invading his soul. Depression so bad it hurts, and so debilitating that you cannot scream, but only have the strength to moan. That's the blues.

Rae(Christina Ricci) and Lazarus(Samuel L. Jackson) have the blues and it's that bad.

Rea's the town slut and everyone in this small town near Memphis, Tennessee knows it. Her mother(Kim Richards) hates her, and add to this the fact that she's sick and that her fiancée Ronnie(Justin Timberlake) is going off to the Army and as the only way she can deal with it is via the oblivion of meaningless sex and overdoses of drugs, so Ronnie's best pal Gill(Michael Raymond-James) does the “gentlemanly thing” beating her to a pulp and leaving her for dead on the side of the road.

Lazarus has it only marginally better. A talented musician, he gave it all up to marry his beloved Rose(Adriane Lenox) and raise a family, but she aborted what would be their only child, and when we meet him, is dumping him for his brother. Ouch.

So when Lazarus finds her three-quarters dead by the side of the road near his property, he decides that the best way to conquer the blues is to do something good, and goes into town to get some cough medicine from a pharmacist named Angela(S. Epatha Merkerson), who's got a mild crush on him.

When Rae finally comes back to full consciousness, she finds that Lazarus has chained her to his radiator, ostensibly because she was wondering around in a drug-induced haze, but he refuses to remove it, and thus begins a bizarre sadomasochistic tug-of-war over the redemption of both, which includes the participation of Lazarus's best friend, a preacher named R.L. (John Cothran Jr) and a kid named Lincoln(Nemous Williams). It's all very steamy.

This is actually the clearest cinematic explanation of the blues ever.
We've got pain enough to go around, and the central trio of characters, Rae, Lazarus and Ronnie [who comes back from the Army somewhat earlier than planned], has enough to kill a herd of elephants. Brewer has managed to explore the emotions of his characters here from every angle, and this is made raw and exciting by the superlative acting of Jackson and Ricci. This is a profoundly weird movie, and a musical to boot, but that's a good thing.

The R rating is well earned, but this is would be well worth a look if it were NC-17. This may earn Jackson and Ricci much kudos a year hence.

Exterminating Angels

Written and Directed by
Jean-Claude Brisseau

There was a scene of three beautiful women having sex and it was really hot, when the guy sitting next to me whispered “This is the greatest movie ever made!” I burst into laughter. It wasn't anywhere near great, of course, it was porn, plain and simple. Porn is supposed to make you hot in the nether regions, and this certainly does that. This is why that it makes more money than regular movies on an annual basis. It's a basic human need, despite what the fundamentalists say.

But what makes great porn is something besides sex, a decent plot and good acting when out of bed, and as to the former, it's got a whopper: it's to some extent autobiographical. When auteur Jean-Claude Brisseau finished his previous film, several actresses sued him for sexual harassment. Apparently, they claimed he was scamming them by faking making a film in order to get his rocks off. He managed to fend off the suit, but this is an interesting thing to hang a plot on. Also, he has an excuse, the Devil made him do it!

The film begins with our hero, a film director named Francois (Frédéric Van Den Driessche) in bed…sleeping. He is visited by his dead Grandmother (Jeanne Cellard) in a dream. She's warning him that his curiosity may bring about the functions of the infernal machine. We discover what that means when the eponymous Exterminating Angels (Raphaele Godin and Margaret Zenou) show up out of nowhere and they announce, cryptically, their infernal plans…and bitching about their boss.

IN the morning, Francois, has a heaven…erp…OTHER place-sent idea: He's going to make his next film about the sex drives of women and what makes them hot. His wife(Sophie Bonnet) isn't so hot about the idea herself, but she can't stop him, and he begins auditions, which are actually funny, there is lovely montage of women saying “no” in hundreds of ways and this hot chick who does what has to be the worst dance ever done. But, there comes Extremely blonde Julie (Lise Bellynck), who gets this film it's probable NC-17 [it's not going to be submitted to the MPAA] right away, then the EA's inspire our hero to hire the clearly unstable brunette Charlotte (Maroussia Dubreuil), who is sometimes possessed by the Devil. They meet up with Julie and there's more hot sex in a restaurants, which is really cool because they do it with their clothes on.

Finally, in comes Stephanie (Marie Allan), who joins in a hot lesbian…this is where the guy next to me called this the “greatest movie ever made.” This is really, really good porn. Unfortunately, there's an actual movie that has to take over and our trio of nymphets gang up on our hero and it all turns sour. There is violence for some good reasons, and nothing turns up right.

Outside of the sex, this film has a lot of humor. The acting is also rather good. The trio of hot starlets plays really good whackos, and an den Driessche is delightfully clueless. The supernatural aspect is kind of dumb, and it reminds one of an episode of “Touched by an Angel.” This is not going to do the French cinema any good, but hey, this stuff looks better on the big screen then it does on the TV.

The Cats of Mirikitani

Directed by
Linda Hattendorf

Jimmy Mirikitani is an old coot who was homeless in the spring of 2001. Linda Hattendorf decided to adopt him and get him back in the system where he could have a house and a home.

He is also an artist who, as the title of the film implies, likes to draw pictures of cats. But primarily, he's a surviver of the Japanese internment camps that were set up during World War II.

He's still justifiably bitter about it. While he isn't talking about or painting about the camps, he's watching TV or walking around outside talking to either Hattendorf or some social worker.

The film isn't all that interesting, as Mirikitani isn't. He might have been made so had Hattendorf tried, but this is nothing more than a glorified home movie, and the journeys of an itinerant artist could have been so much moreso.

AAAAAAAAARG!!!!!

2007-03-05T13:14:00.000-08:00

The Goddamn computer ripped my copy of Microsoft word to shreds and now I can't get most of my stuff updated.

The Miami International Film Festival: Day Five

2007-03-03T05:57:00.000-08:00

We leave sunny Florida and head back to New York City, where we dream of the tropics, start planning further adventures and attend press screenings for the New Directors/New Films series at the Museum of Modern Art.

The Page Turner
Tartan USA 85min NR

Written and Directed
by Denis Dercourt

Revenge is a dish best served cold, or so says the proverb. Auteur Denis Dercourt certainly thinks so, and he serves it right out of the fridge.

It’s the early 1990s, and 11-year-old Melanie Prouvost (Julie Richalet) is practicing for her big day. She’s auditioning for a fancy-schmancy concervitory and if she gets in, the tuition is free, something that would greatly ease the financial burden on her working class parents(Jacques Bonnaffe and Christine Citti). But then comes the inciting incident, which ruins that dream. An extra barges into the room where Melenie is in the process of auditioning, and demands an autograph from one of the juges, concert pianist Ariane Fouchecourt (Catherine Frot). This throws Melenie completely off, and she blows the rest of the piece. Her career as a concert pianist is over.

Cut to a decade later, and the beauteous Deborah Francois now plays Melanie. She’s got an internship with a major law firm headed by Jean Fouchecourt (Pascal Greggory), who, by a strange coincidence, is the husband of the very person who inadvertently destroyed her dreams all those years ago. So when she discovers that the Fouchecourt’s au pare [they have a 12 year old son named Tristan(Antoine Martynciow)] is going on holiday, and offers to replace her for a while. Thus our protagonist is able to worm her way into Ariane’s life and destroy it.

Melanie does this in a stealthy way, winning the love of Tristan and Ariane, who gives her an extra duty as the title implies, and starting what seems to be the beginnings of a lesbian relationship. There is also the problem with Ariane’s partners(Xavier De Guillebon and Martine Chevallier), in the trio she tours with, and that leads to one of the more delicious scenes in the entire film.

At only 85 minutes, this is a surprisingly leisurely film. Dercourt takes his sweet time, and except for a couple of brief scenes, including that one I mentioned about one of Ariane’s partners, there’s absolutely no violence. Ms. Francois is passive and for the most part unemotional. She smiles little, except for one scene where she meets a friend, and appears to have the makings of a female Hannibal Lector. The supporting cast is quite excellent. This is one of the better films to come out of France in the past year. See it.

Glue: Adolescence in the Middle of Nowhere
Argentina/UK, 2006; 110mins, NR

Written and Directed
by Alexis Dos Santos

Lucas (Nahuel Pérez) lives in the middle of nowhere, Argentina. It’s very much like the middle of nowhere USA or the UK. There’s nothing much to do and not very many people to do it with. Fortunately for him, he’s got his main man Nacho(Nahuel Viale), and their mutual girlfriend Andrea(Inés Efron) to keep him company.

Bordum is not Lucas’ only problem: His parents(Héctor Díaz and Verónica Llinás) split immediately after the film begins, and Lucas and his sister Flor (Florencia Braier) are stuck in the middle. But this is actually rather in the background as Lucas and his two best friends try to figure out the eternal mysteries of adolescence.

Using a seventeen-page treatment instead of a script, auteur Dos Santos leads his cast on an adventure in improvisation. He leaves it to Biscayart, Viale, and Efron to wing it through the philosophical and the filthy to give the audience an interesting look at life in a film about nothing. For the most part it works. We actually get involved. While for most of the film i Lucas narrates, for some reason near the final third of the film, Dos Santos gives the job to Andrea. The fact that they cut almost an hour might have something to do with it.

This is a very erotic film. While they never show any actual straight or gay sex, there’s lots of kissing between Andrea and the two guys, and Nacho and Lucas get very physical. Also, the title is not exactly a metaphor for anything. There’s real glue involved in one scene.

The camerawork is also something to be mentioned. The use of a super-8 camera to film some scenes gives a dreamy quality to the points of narration. However, it does seem to be a bit of a distraction.

This is one of the better artsy-fartsy adolescence flicks to come out of South American recently and is worth a look.