Summer Break 2001

[Pre-'96 films not included.]

SHREK (31) (dir., Andrew Adamson / Vicky Jenson) With the voices of Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, Cameron Diaz, John Lithgow [Probably works better as will-they-won't-they romantic drama than it does as comedy - but that's only because it works so execrably as comedy. Enter the Hall of Shame : (i) In-jokes about the evil tyrant's kingdom being just like Disneyland (who cares if one prima-donna billionaire is pissed at another?), leading to (ii) a group of mechanical Munchkins singing a little song about the rules you have to follow in said kingdom: "Stay off the grass / Wipe your shoes, wipe your ... face" - bending over in unison just before the word "face", turning their backsides to camera so even the dimmest bulbs in the audience can figure out which body part can be wiped and rhymes with "grass" (we get it! we get it!) ; (iii) Hero, looking up at the villain's towering castle, grinning that he's probably "compensating for something" - and the line gets repeated, then actually spelled out ("I think he means Farquaad's got a really small..."), as if a mildly adult gag in a cartoon were an absolute novelty, as if we'd never seen Kuzco discreetly (and hilariously) enquiring over Yzma's toy-boy in THE EMPEROR'S NEW GROOVE, as if we were still in the 80s and THE LITTLE MERMAID was as sophisticated as it got ; (iv) Lame self-consciousness, post-modern pap about "fairytale creatures" and cringe-worthy lines like "This is the part where you run away" ; (v) A princess who's demure and 'feminine' then suddenly kicks ass so she can be a politically-correct role model, incidentally (vi) making a reference to THE MATRIX in the process (groan!) ; (vii) Smug refusal to include Disney-style songs, because that stuff is corny and this is a hip, up-to-the-minute movie even though (viii) it has no problem filling its soundtrack with the bland MOR likes of Smash Mouth (and speaking of the soundtrack, (ix), yes, the Eels have a song called "My Beloved Monster" - you think that gives you any right to put your grubby paws on it, you talentless motherfuckers?) ; (x) Endless parade of gross-out humour, from the opening toilet-paper gag to Shrek sending fish belly-up when he farts in a pond (to cite only the first 5 minutes) ; (xi) Heavy-handed references to TV shows, the WWF, signs reading "Applause", etc. ; (xii) Not just a pointless, outdated reference to 70s pop hit "The Pina Colada Song" but the song itself coming on the soundtrack two minutes later, just to make absolutely sure we get the joke ; (xiii) Murphy recycling his patter from MULAN (in turn ripping-off the Genie in ALADDIN) and getting called "hilarious" ; (xiv) Unattractive animation, low on the imaginative curlicues and edge-of-the-frame gags Pixar invariably bring to it ; (xv) "Two things : Shut. Up." ; (xvi) "Who would want to live there?" "That's my house, Donkey!" "Oops ... Uh, this is lovely. You are such a good decorator" ; (xvii) None-too-subtle message about Beauty being only skin-deep, don't judge a book by its cover, etc. (if you're going to be the anti-Disney, at least lose the irritating aspects of Disney movies) ; (xviii) Myers trying to do a Scottish accent yet again (why does he bother?) ; (xix) On second thought, I don't think it works all that well as romantic drama either - that has got to be the most contrived way of bringing an ogre and princess together in the annals of such matters ; (xx) What were all those critics thinking?...]

DRIVEN (56) (dir., Renny Harlin) Sylvester Stallone, Burt Reynolds, Kip Pardue, Gina Gershon [Key shot : couple of burly dudes swaying in the stands at a Formula One race, Finnish flags painted on their torsos (Mr. Harlin, you'll recall, is Finnish-born), cheering lustily even though the heavens have opened all around them, sending down the mother of torrential downpours. Perfect image for the only current action-flick maestro who genuinely seems to be enjoying himself behind the camera, even when material is unpromising and his cast includes Sylvester Stallone (thespian equivalent of a torrential downpour) : clearly a race fan, he also brings the tongue-in-cheek humour of THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT and DEEP BLUE SEA as well as an expansive full-on style, piling on the camera swoops and helicopter-shots and a majestic sense of space, thumping music almost continuously in the background as he fills the foreground with emotion-for-the-sake-of-it - it's the action movie as caffeinated, semi-abstract pop opera. Five minutes into it, before we've even gotten to know anyone, we're already thrust in a passionate lovers' quarrel, music wailing behind overwrought dialogue ("This is my life!" "This is not your life! This is what you do for a living!") ; montages ripple breathlessly across the screen, grabbing everything from girls in shorts to German weather forecasts ; cars crash spectacularly - sending involuntary shivers down the spines of Ayrton Senna fans - or else race through the city, toppling the papers on a newsstand and whipping up girls' skirts to reveal their panties as they zoom past ; even the villain - call him the Michael Rooker character - gets a silky Peter Lorre accent (albeit presumably meant to suggest Michael Schumacher) ; even the bimbo heroine gets a spot of synchronised swimming as part of her poolside seduction technique (albeit presumably because she's played by a former champion in that sport). Silly, excessive, happy and invigorating ; only trouble is, it should've been a 60-minute movie - wears out its welcome by the final third, starts repeating its effects, forcing us to pay attention to the tiresome plot. Still makes it three unappreciated films in a row for Harlin, far as I'm concerned...]

THE FATHER (65) (dir., Majid Majidi) Hassan Sadeghi, Mohammad Kasebi, Hossein Abedini [Weird catching up with Majidi in reverse order - and depressing, since he ended up at the synthetic COLOUR OF HEAVEN just a couple of films after this complex, tough-minded drama. Very much of a piece with the other two, except that all the icky things about his style - fearsome cutesiness, crude melodrama, flashbacks set to sickly music - are at a minimum, and all the interesting things - obsessed young hero, fraught father-son relationship, drama that turns unexpectedly into an action movie, capped by a lyrical final touch - are at the forefront. Audience sympathies torn in all directions, which is extraordinary for a film with an abused kid hero - but he's also unpleasant, consumed with hatred (linked implicitly to the harsh labour he's forced into after the death of his father), and his troubles dwarfed by the remorseless landscape in any case, adding a layer of philosophical detachment. Cinematically not brilliant, but it works on pretty much every level ; maybe Majidi can scale these heights again on his new one...] [Addendum: He can't, but not by much.]

EYE OF GOD (72) (dir., Tim Blake Nelson) Martha Plimpton, Kevin Anderson, Nick Stahl, Richard Jenkins [Predictable, certainly ; pretentious, quite possibly (the ocular symbolism is a little much, and the folksy-solemn voice-over was a bad idea). Yet the compact sense of familiarity finally works to its advantage, as if Nelson were very deliberately putting his cards on the table and saying 'Look : here is an everyday small-town tragedy. Why should these things happen?'. It's a question asked explicitly and (of course) never answered, the point being that God alone (allegedly) knows the answer, giving meaning to absurd sacrifice and senseless slaughter (the story of Abraham being among the touchstones) : the film deals in secrets and the unknown, all the hidden life of its rigidly opaque setting of oil-pumps and telegraph poles and rundown barber shops (and signs reading "Jesus Saves"). People are introduced as one thing and turn out to be another - the tragic aunt seen first as a jolly waitress, Anderson's obsessive nature gradually revealed ; others' private lives merely glimpsed in passing, like the bitter parole officer or the man with six kids - and it's all about this hidden richness, layers unfolding, things coming together. Fragmentation is the film-maker's own 'eye of God', being the sole redemption for the bleak goings-on : if the story weren't fragmented - were it told linearly, to the bitter end - it might well be unbearable. Flawed, but generally an auspicious debut : grim, compelling and superbly acted.]

A SINGLE GIRL (72) (dir., Benoit Jacquot) Virginie Ledoyen, Benoit Magimel, Dominique Valadie [Seem to have a soft spot for these close examinations of a working life (see also ROSETTA, WILL IT SNOW FOR CHRISTMAS?, etc), but this elegant meditation - and visual ode to Ms. Ledoyen - is indeed rather special. Our heroine isn't especially sympathetic - not too giving, not too interested in other people - her attitude to relationships ("Everyone splits, so let's just do it now") downright self-destructive ; she's defined by one thing only, her sense of self and compulsion towards independence (as per the title), which is why it makes perfect sense that we stay so obsessively within her space, as if she were the whole world (as indeed she is) - studying and perusing her, following her around then finally stopping abruptly (great final shot), letting go, releasing her into the world. Something about our basic aloneness, sense of abandonment, the existential condition - but mostly about the minutiae of a daily life, relentlessly catalogued. Not exactly satisfying, but hypnotic to watch.]

SIGNS AND WONDERS (64) (dir., Jonathan Nossiter) Stellan Skarsgard, Charlotte Rampling, Deborah Kara Unger [Creative use of DV, as you'd expect from a visual stylist of Nossiter's calibre, using its incorporeal fuzziness - indeed, heightening it via hot light and over-exposure (or digital equivalent) - for the tale of a man who can no longer tell what is real and what is not ; it all seems to take place in a world of dreamlike ambiguity (what with this and SUNDAY, 'dreamlike ambiguity' might be Nossiter's job description), with its overheard musical snatches and profusion of "Alice in Wonderland" references ("EAT ME" yell the cakes in a shop window), not to mention its striking colour-scheme. Cool blue stands for the rational world, red and mustard-yellow the colours of fantasy, unbridled passion and the world of 'signs and wonders', shoring up our precarious existence with their fickle harmonies - and incidentally raising the very real possibility that the final section (when the yellows have crossed to Rampling and her lover while Skarsgard sits in his cool-blue prison cell) may be merely the product of his fevered imaginings. It's a film about delusion, the hero's self-delusion that everything is right with his life (when in fact it's collapsed) rhymed with the delusions of America (the country he represents) that it's brought about a golden age of post-ideology, unable (or unwilling) to acknowledge that capitalism is itself an ideology, "the white glove that covers the unclean hand" (the first thing we see is a McDonald's sign in the middle of Athens). Despite the flash and dazzle, it's in the end (like SUNDAY) an ode to the everyday human connection : grand statements, like hidden meanings, are easy to make and easy to fake, it says - the trick is holding on to reality, and our own moral compass. A bold, thought-out movie, further proof that Nossiter may someday make a great one ; though he'll have to start writing more believable characters first, and lose such lame bits of business as Unger overhearing our hero talking to his tape recorder and mistakenly assuming he's got someone in the room with him. I mean, come on...]

A MOMENT OF INNOCENCE (69) (second viewing: 61) (dir., Mohsen Makhmalbaf) Mirhadi Taiebi, Ali Bakhshi, Ammar Tafti, Mohsen Makhmalbaf [Quirkier, packing less of a punch (but more graceful) than SALAAM CINEMA ; themes are similar, though, including the figure of the manipulative director (played by Makhmalbaf himself), even if his tyranny is more subtle here - he allows the policeman to find an actor who'll play the 'young him' (but promptly vetoes his choice), and is determined to "recapture his youth with a camera", thereby imposing a new regime, viz. the camera, on the youngster playing his rebellious self (the final scene is, significantly, the only one where the youngsters aren't being visibly directed in the film-within-a-film - and of course they depart from the script in new and touching ways, literally 'changing the world'). In a way, it's an apologia from a former militant, as if to show that pacifism is also an act of revolution, involving the overthrow of patriarchal forces demanding violence (viz. the director, and the film he wants to make) ; it's a truly post-modern film in that it depends on transcending itself, i.e. the kids fighting the tyranny of the camera - film is an oppressive force, as it sometimes seems in Kiarostami's 'village' movies - and we're constantly asked to look beyond it, whether in the glaring continuity 'errors' (one scene snow-covered, the next miraculously thawed) or the use of two cameras and two narratives, intersecting / coinciding only at occasional points (a camera can only show you part of the truth). Yet everything is so light, and those chance intersections are choreographed with the casual grace of a Buster Keaton comedy - whom the 'young policeman' resembles so strikingly, esp. when he's walking in that stooped, serious way carrying the flower-pot, you begin to feel it must be deliberate, especially in a movie where even a tailor turns out to be a film buff - and it all looks so lovely, carefully composed and photographed largely in magic-hour ... Slight stuff - little more than an exercise, really - but the slightness is deceptive.]

OPEN YOUR EYES (64) (dir., Alejandro Amenabar) Eduardo Noriega, Penelope Cruz, Fele Martinez, Najwa Nimri [Feel those symmetries : a film about deja vu which I saw primarily so I can see it again as VANILLA SKY, and immediately after LOVERS OF THE ARCTIC CIRCLE - also a film about deja vu - which also co-stars Nimri and Martinez (though they don't share any scenes in this one). So much for external factors ; in itself, looks and feels like exactly what it is, i.e. the work of a young man (you can tell from the way party scenes focus on the energy and getting smashed, without any real observation) who's seen way too many Hollywood movies (you can tell from the scene where hero and best friend play racketball to disguise expository dialogue, or the way mysteries are solved via two clicks of the Internet) ; mixes trendy sci-fi with Hitchcockian pastiche - and, to be honest, it's carried off superbly, getting real shocks with no obvious resources besides skill and imagination. Saw it late at night, planning to switch off halfway through, but it hooked me right to the end (though the denouement itself isn't as ambiguous as it seems to think) ; hard to see how Cruise and Crowe can Hollywoodise it further, though, unless perhaps by removing references to God and quick shot of Penelope's boobs...]

LOVERS OF THE ARCTIC CIRCLE (55) (dir., Julio Medem) Najwa Nimri, Fele Martinez, Nancho Novo, Maru Valdivielso [One of those films - magical-realist, I suppose you'd call it - where everything is metaphor and echo and recurring motif, and games of what-if and near-misses and coincidences, and you strain to discern any larger message in the mix beyond the Valentine's-Day-card likes of 'Love is the only true thing in a world of flux'. Actually quite enjoyable, with a confident rhythm and novelistic sense of detail (the buzz of flies presaging the discovery of a corpse), but why should car-crashes and paper airplanes be significant, and what does it mean that the hero consciously 'prefers' the heroine over his mother at one point just as she consciously 'prefers' him over her father, or that Ana is the wife's 'gift' to old Otto just as young Otto was her father's 'gift' to her? And why the mirror-images and palindromes, except for their own sake? Then again, I've never really dug John Irving or Gabriel Garcia Marquez, so I'm obviously not the best audience for this kind of thing...]

MONKEYBONE (39) (dir., Henry Selick) Brendan Fraser, Bridget Fonda, Chris Kattan, Whoopi Goldberg [Things can get ugly when this kind of comedy (baroque cartoon, Tim Burton-style) goes out of sync : plenty of imagination here, but it seems to have been thrown at the screen without worrying too much about what sticks, and the result is just a mess. Has a hell of a time deciding if the accent is on "monkey" (funny monkey, monkey in a man's body, Brendan Fraser clowning like in GEORGE OF THE JUNGLE) or "bone" (sexual frustration, repressed id, simian embodiment of profound unhappiness), and it never really does decide, so you never really know where you are : one moment Fraser (in Monkeybone mode) is leering at primates on the Discovery Channel, totally ignoring Fonda taking a shower behind him, the next he's trying to jump her bones with "Let's Get It On" plastered on the soundtrack ; one moment the humour's tame and puerile, geared at pre-teens giggling over fart sounds, the next it's dark and a little tasteless, with an adult-comic sensibility ; then there's Whoopi Goldberg as Death (she's no Bengt Ekerot), and a deranged bid for the GHOST audience towards the end - and of course it does rhyme "coma" with "home-sweet-home-a". Animated grotesques in the first half - potato-head Cyclops and the like - easily the best of it.]

THE CUP (32) (dir., Khyentse Norbu) Orgyen Tobgyal, Neten Chokling, Jamyang Lodro [A new kind of exploitation film, wherein a Western producer and his crew go to an exotic Third World country - joint-venturing with a local auteur - and make its exoticism quaint and unthreatening, meanwhile reassuring the audience of their high-mindedness by spouting political bromides, flashing the Dalai Lama (for the country is Tibet) like an all-areas admittance pass. It can be a thrill when Western pop-culture appears in primitive surroundings - mention of the World Cup in AND LIFE GOES ON, or the body-builder poster in A TIME FOR DRUNKEN HORSES - reminding us that the alien world we're watching is in fact our own, but not when it's there to be deflated by native wisdom in a kind of inverse racism : "What is the World Cup?" asks the High Lama ; "Two civilised nations fighting over a ball," replies a monk ("How true!" nods the audience wryly ; "How very true!"). KUNDUN made this culture beautiful but strange, and a little scary (remember those vultures?) ; this merely invites us to gawp at the foreign customs - they put porridge in their tea! - and nudge each other at lines like "They say that in America everything is made of plastic", and laugh indulgently when the young monks act just like ordinary kids, diluting and demystifying and adding another little brick to the globalised world-as-theme-park, with Tibet as Spiritual Land (hence the Zen-like homily at the very end). Noxious.]

EVOLUTION (37) (dir., Ivan Reitman) David Duchovny, Orlando Jones, Seann William Scott, Julianne Moore [Not a lot to say, really : kind of flat and undernourished, pumping up "Let's do this!" boisterousness to disguise how lame it is (imagine if the loud, Attitude-laden entourage in TWISTER got their own movie). GHOSTBUSTERS had enough geeky scientist in the mix for a certain old-fashioned charm, but these are just sops to the target audience - revved-up, randy, faux-adolescent heroes (they even moon the General!) ; Duchovny kids his "X-Files" image, Orlando Jones says stuff like "This looks like the kitchen from my first apartment" and Reitman directs because, well, someone had to ; it's bad enough that the alien attacks are played for real, yet even here the handling is witless (when the monster thingy's pulling the guy into the lake, there's a perfectly decent shot of the victim getting dragged away from the camera, gradually disappearing over the crest of a hill - which Reitman totally ruins by cutting to a medium side-view, showing the scene in unnecessary detail). Won't bother with the product-placement ending - since when is it news for Hollywood to get into bed with corporate sponsors then pretend it was all in fun? - but isn't it a little weird how Jones, being black, 'naturally' gets jokes about prejudice and institutional racism, in much the same knee-jerk way as Scott, playing a teen, gets jokes about cars and McJobs? Isn't that a little, like, demeaning to black people?...]

THIRTEEN DAYS (72) (dir., Roger Donaldson) Kevin Costner, Bruce Greenwood, Steven Culp, Dylan Baker [Couple of unfortunate assumptions getting in the way : JFK as baby-boomer god, all the more godlike for being so human ; Adlai Stevenson as the shining moral beacon right-wing America never knew what to do with ; military men as by definition warmongers, ranting about the "big Red dog" (and probably behind the Kennedy assassinations too, if a throwaway line means what I think it means). Once you accept all that, both a riveting hothouse thriller in the FAIL SAFE / BEDFORD INCIDENT (and, more recently, CRIMSON TIDE) tradition - guys playing power games in enclosed spaces - and, more importantly, a film about problems of communication and information, which is why it's so remarkably evocative of its setting (the early 60s, an over-settled time with unthinkable changes just around the corner). Donaldson shoots with hardly any close-ups, privileging the whole space over any one individual : everyone knows the same, even looks the same (similar clothes, similar haircuts) so you really feel the burden of their limitations - the unknowability of whatever's out there and the weight that must be shifted to make way for original thinking or a man of genius : the film's too-solid texture becomes a character, in exactly the same way as the run-on paragraphs in "The Trial" create the feeling of oppression commonly called 'Kafkaesque'. Lukewarm reaction it's received is a little baffling, but maybe it's a case of Kennedy backlash, or perhaps critics being annoyed by historical / ideological inaccuracies ; or perhaps 145 minutes is just a little long for a film that merely simmers without exploding...]

THE HOLE (57) (dir., Nick Hamm) Thora Birch, Desmond Harrington, Daniel Brocklebank, Laurence Fox [Had me on edge for half an hour afterwards, so I'd have to say it works as a psychological thriller in (approximate) BLAIR WITCH vein ; but Hamm's horror-movie stylings (flash-cuts of maggots and walls dripping blood) are both over-flashy and inappropriate, not really motivated by the story or characters - his reliance on jump-out-of-your-seat moments as Birch is startled by sudden dangers (incl. false alarms, like the guy in the tunnel) makes it look like she's hysterical / delusional, when in fact the opposite is true. Very much a commercial product, down to its blatant bid for the US market (why on earth would a news reporter in England quote a local school's tuition fee in dollars?) - which is not a bad thing, but you just know it was made by folks whose top priority throughout was to make each moment as attention-grabbing as possible. Plausibility hard to question without spoiling it (and it generally plays fair anyway), but you have to wonder - knowing what we know at the end, and what the cops have known from the beginning - if a certain arrest would really have been made on the basis of a certain statement. Hits pretty hard, nonetheless.]

ONE NIGHT AT McCOOL'S (43) (dir., Harald Zwart) Liv Tyler, Matt Dillon, Paul Reiser, John Goodman [Presumably pitched as black-comedy THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY ; bungled fairly comprehensively, though. Lots of bits where I rather detachedly thought "Yeah, that was pretty funny", but only once did I actually smile - at a seemingly throwaway line about the Village People (and partly because it was a throwaway), which led almost immediately to an excruciating slapstick shoot-out scored to "YMCA" (Zwart thinks this is so amusing he repeats the song over the end credits). So predetermined it kills the jokes, yet it's not even predetermined very skilfully : it has one of those endings where everyone gets what they want in a slightly twisted way - very neat, if you can pull it off - yet one character (Goodman's) patently doesn't get what he wants, so the whole effect is ruined. The constant 'sexiness' is intermittently amusing in a bone-headed adolescent kind of way - flurries of fast cuts at the sight of a wet T-shirt - but also flashed as an all-purpose trump card whenever motivation starts to flag, which is kind of shabby. Sample dialogue : "So, this guy Utah, is he a Mormon?".]

LES DESTINEES SENTIMENTALES (67) (dir., Olivier Assayas) Charles Berling, Emmanuelle Béart, Isabelle Huppert [Certainly the least satisfying of Assayas' recent films - possibly because it's the most ambitious, all about the ways Life can slide away from us, leaving the most unexpected details as enduring memories : major events happen offscreen, the ellipses themselves containing the inexorable flow of Time. We only need to learn that a character is sick to know what's going to happen (she's long dead by the time anyone mentions her again) ; we see the beginnings of an extra-marital affair, then lose track of it - till the husband tells his wife that he knew all about it, years or decades later (why dwell on the dramas in between? these things happen in Life) ; people change, dreams fade, big ideas atrophy - it's the rare film that shows idealism (Berling's constant battle against "mediocrity") sympathetically even while conceding that it can destroy your life. The glancing, allusive style is magnificent - Assayas can show passion through a single unremarkable shot of Béart with the sun on her face, speaking of earthy (as opposed to spiritual) things, and no-one else can do party scenes with such attention to detail (the old women clapping along as the youngsters dance, the maids asleep in a heap in the next room) - but the fact remains that most of the film is missing. That the lacunae are of course deliberate doesn't really answer the problem ; as someone warns our self-tormenting hero, "Beware of over-subtle ideas"...]

DUDE, WHERE'S MY CAR? (47) (dir., Danny Leiner) Ashton Kutcher, Seann William Scott, Kristy Swanson ["Who are you guys?" ask our heroes of the female aliens, foxy fem-bot types in skin-tight jumpsuits. "We are not guys," they point out. "We are hot chicks". Well, exactly : you could write a thesis on the sexual confusion in this movie - exemplified, of course, by the Fabio Moment, though also including the woman who turns out to be a man and Scott telling Kutcher "I know your body" - no doubt reflecting the muddle and mixed signals of adolescence. Otherwise not very interesting, but surprisingly sweet, with space-nerds out of GALAXY QUEST - "Go ahead and laugh. We are used to being mocked" - and funny-foreigner jokes to gladden the hearts of our inner 12-year-olds : probably mismarketed (or misconceived), actually, going for raunch and the ROAD TRIP audience when it's actually more innocent and Bill-and-Ted-ish. Have to admit this 80s teen felt right at home ; speaking of which, is the Rubik's Cube back to being fashionable now?...]

BLOW (45) (dir., Ted Demme) Johnny Depp, Penelope Cruz, Rachel Griffiths, Ray Liotta, Franka Potente [Demme seems to be specialising in a new kind of genre, the film that works actively against itself ('all over the place,' in technical parlance), following LIFE - a drama that thought it was a comedy - with this one, a comedy that thinks it's a drama. First half is fun but cartoonish - zippy pace, happy colours, everyone-into-the-pool parties ; was Pablo Escobar really a stock Third World villain saying things like "Thees causes me much inconvenience"? But the film is determined to turn its hero into a tragic figure - not to mention an embodiment of the American Dream a la PEOPLE VS. LARRY FLYNT, the title wrapped in Stars-and-Stripes colours - wants him betrayed and abandoned by everyone from his shrewish, castrating mother to his double-dealing partners, wants him losing the love of the little daughter he adores ("Every single day in the joint I thought of one thing, one thing only : my baby girl"). The final third is unforgivably maudlin - not to mention morally dubious - wrecking most of what's gone before ; Depp understates, but his noble passivity is a little too perfect for this kind of martyr role. Disappointing.]

REQUIEM FOR A DREAM (52) (dir., Darren Aronofsky) Jared Leto, Jennifer Connolly, Ellen Burstyn, Marlon Wayans [Aronofsky can certainly build a rhythm, but it's usually the same rhythm - just like Clint Mansell's musical stylings come in only two registers (hip-hop-y and Philip Glass-y), and Matthew Libatique tricksy visuals draw heavily on a single bag of tricks (split-screen, fisheye lens, fast-motion). The tricks aren't even very well deployed - the split-screen in an early Leto-Connelly love scene seems to place a visual barrier between them, just at the time when they should be coupled and in harmony - nor does it seem to be saying much beyond the drugs-are-bad message : it even equates Burstyn's addiction to diet pills with the others' heroin habit without apparently caring for the rather obvious (and significant) point that the former are legal while the latter is illegal. Still dazzling, in occasional spurts : Aronofsky should become a Hollywood action director (his "Batman" gig is an excellent start), and then this can be his early, misguided foray into artsiness, like THX-1138 or Tony Scott's THE HUNGER. I would like to nominate the visual trick - first seen, I believe, in THE AGE OF INNOCENCE - where a character fantasises himself as a man of action, assaulting policemen and whatnot till a shock-cut reveals it was All In His Mind, as the most over-used device in recent movies.]