Summer Break 2002

[Pre-'96 films not included.]

EIGHT LEGGED FREAKS (42) (dir., Ellory Elkayem) David Arquette, Kari Whurer, Scott Terra, Scarlett Johansson, Doug E. Doug [Order of turning-into-spider-food goes approximately as follows : cat, black guy, ostrich, rest of cast - not counting Tom Noonan, who provides this patchy monster movie with its only glimpse of genuine creepy-crawliness. The rest tries for humour, but it's mostly the curse of media in-jokes - references to THE SIXTH SENSE, L. Ron Hubbard, FIELD OF DREAMS, Spiders From Mars - and such cringe-worthy moments as the prepubescent science-whiz (Harry Potter glasses, hair parted down the middle) musing that no-one's going to believe him about the giant spiders because "I'm the kid ; they never believe the kid". It's a slick sense of humour, as joyless and prepackaged as the hordes of CGI spiders (why the overkill? TREMORS only had a half-dozen monsters) leaping and scuttling after the characters - even more inappropriate given that the film tries for blue-collar, back-of-beyond atmosphere (TREMORS again) : a broken-down, middle-of-nowhere small town (Prosperity, Arizona!), a pony-tailed sleazeball for Mayor, a "trailer-trash" (female) sheriff who got pregnant at 16, a nicotine-stained old harridan who tells the hero his goatee makes "your mouth look like a stripper's crotch". One can almost imagine Elkayem and Co. starting out to make a sassy, ballsy monster flick - cute little doggies and kitties among the spider-munched, for one thing - then slowly giving in to trendy 'irony' and the dead corporate hand of empty spectacle. Holds the attention, more or less, but it's just people running and blasting, and they don't even explain why the spiders are all in one place at the climax (other than making it easier to wipe them out). Stun-gun scene is perhaps the weirdest, Ms. Johansson frying her boyfriend's balls for having the temerity to try and cop a feel (emphasis on how he pisses his pants from the pain and is generally humiliated), but you can't beat the anti-smoking Message for sheer jaw-droppingness. Guys, it's a monster movie...]

POUR RIRE! (63) (dir., Lucas Belvaux) Jean-Pierre Léaud, Ornella Muti, Antoine Chappey, Tonie Marshall [Starts off straight, gets progressively loopier, soaring in increasingly outré flights of fancy, though in such a deadpan way it's easy to miss the halfway shift into - what, exactly? (Parallel universe? Wish-fulfilment fantasy? Something I was too unsubtle to discern?) Not that it matters, once the point is made - viz. that the farcical lunacy is no more laughable (as per the title) than the ordinary course of relationships (jealous husband Léaud stalking his wife dramatically with collar turned way up to hide his face, or abandoned wife Marshall - whose husband left her for a girl named Romance - tearfully excusing him, blaming herself for still being in love with him after he'd ceased to love her). Thematic analysis possible - see e.g. the adultery / suicide equation - but it really works much better as a blithe comedy with a melancholy undertow (what a man will do to keep his woman - even though she's actually long gone) and another hilarious Jean-Pierre Léaud performance, esp. when his character throws in little non sequiturs like asking a nurse if they've met before or telling a story of his scuba-diving friend who got eaten by a crocodile ; truly, the man is a treasure. Film itself is a little too deadpan for my taste, shading into rarefied abstraction, but impossible not to admire ; final shot is startling even by the standards of abrupt French endings - then blissfully funny.]

SCOOBY-DOO (22) (dir., Raja Gosnell) Freddie Prinze Jr., Sarah Michelle Gellar, Matthew Lillard, Linda Cardellini [Audience applause - albeit scattered - at the end of this charmless, pointless enterprise must be a contender for Most Depressing Moment of my filmgoing career. Pretty much a waste of space for anyone old enough to dress themselves, with nothing clever or imaginative or in any way special once you get past Mr. Lillard's uncanny vocal stylings and Ms. Cardinelli's striking resemblance to a young Jane Fonda. Chuckled briefly at the body-switch gag (before they over-milked it) and the whole Scrappy-Doo angle (ditto), and I may have smiled at the throwaway gag - just because it was a throwaway - of an offscreen someone complimenting Velma on her famously dorky sweater. Otherwise, disaster ; but it's obviously a crowd-pleaser, so what do I know?]

VISITOR Q (49) (dir., Takashi Miike) Endo Kenichi, Uchida Shungiku, Watanabe Kazushi [Takashi Miike is a very bad man. "Have you ever done it with your Dad?" asks the opening caption, followed by a teenage girl slowly disrobing - interspersed with freeze-frames and weird angles - while Dad looks on guiltily, saying stuff like "This is wrong. We can't do this" (after they do it, he tells her she should study more). Further atrocities include a son beating his mother, a microphone shoved up someone's ass, nipples aroused in ECU and a penis getting trapped by rigor mortis in the throes of necrophilia - all done in phenomenally ugly low-res visuals (daytime interiors are the worst, suffused with a flat, even light that fairly screams TV) and increasingly desultory in terms of plotting and pacing. An empty provocation, then - except that the real provocation isn't in the shock tactics but what lies beneath. "Some things are truly strange," muses our hero as he gets ready to launch himself on the corpse - and none stranger than to find such a ringing paean to family values enfolded in a film so unpleasant, literally calling for a 'whack to the side of the head' (or whatever that business-book maxim was), preferably with a large rock, to bring the Japanese family back to its traditional equilibrium (Dad the patriarch and protector, Mum the milk-squirting nurturess) : a shocking conservatism - but expressed in imagery so extreme it carries its own in-built irony - and reminder of the old-fashioned normative streak in the other Miike that I've seen, whether the extended 'punishment' in AUDITION or avenging angel in ICHI THE KILLER. As in DOG DAYS, pervasive miserablism is a form of social comment, but this director - unlike Seidl - is stern rather than cynical, willing to believe his characters can find their way with a moral shake-up and a little tough love. Takashi Miike - just like Captain Spaulding - is a very moral man.]

PEPPERMINT CANDY (67) (dir., Lee Chang-Dong) Sol Kyung-Gu, Moon So-Ri, Kim Yeo-Jin [Nothing like MEMENTO, really, given that a scene rarely affects the narrative meaning of the one before (i.e. after) : it's discrete blocks of biography in familiar FORREST GUMP style, except going backwards in Time - theoretically enriching our knowledge of the hero as it goes, even though the final revelation (presumably the key to his character) doesn't seem especially significant. Probably works best for native audiences, hero standing in for Korea as it tries to shake free of its violent past under military rulers (no coincidence that we see him as a soldier then a cop), though it also works just fine as a neat, skilful drama : details recur at every stage, a person limping or a song being sung, hero growling like a dog or reading the paper while he's eating, or of course the peppermint candy itself and image of Life as a railway line, implying both determinism - we can't stray from our predetermined path - and the possibility of manifold journeys (plus the possibility of two-way temporal traffic, our future being equally our past : "I've been here before," says our hero at the picnic ground where he's due to come again 20 years later). Needed a stronger ending to put it over the top, but Lee is a careful artist (you can tell it's the work of an older film-maker) and achieves some very fine textures - the slightly strained merriment of an outdoor party (expressed via long-shots of the revellers surrounded by the stillness of Nature) and the moonlit, abandoned look of a courtyard in a sleepy residential neighbourhood where our hero rides his bike at night. A low-key pleasure, though it's strange how Korean directors don't seem to have a problem making their heroes surly and obnoxious (based on the admittedly small sample I've seen) ; no doubt a cultural thing.]

SUPER TROOPERS (63) (dir., Jay Chandrasekhar) Broken Lizard, Brian Cox, Daniel Von Bargen, Marisa Coughlan [Why so fond of this amiable trifle? Partly just a breath of fresh air seeing a crazy comedy aimed at the post-college / thirtysomething crowd rather than the teen market - and it can't be coincidence that it starts off with a couple of pothead teens, making you groan inwardly till you realise the teens are in fact the whipping-boys, our heroes in fact the grown-ups with jobs and families. Mostly, however, it's the fact that Broken Lizard are a team, have obviously been working together for years and developed a wonderfully relaxed rapport, bouncing easily off each other's timing (you can sense Cox and Von Bargen settling gratefully into the ambience, happy for the chance to underplay for once) ; who can hate a comedy with a drinking-buddy vibe? Jokes are rude but rarely gross, rivalry between the cops due - it's acknowledged - to "mutual boredom" and the chief figure-of-fun isn't a nerd but a crude, noisy blowhard ("Our shenanigans are cheeky and fun. His shenanigans are cruel and tragic"). Props include a Cherman accent, a spot of bear-humping, cotton candy used as a lethal weapon and an Afghani manga hero named Johnny Chimpo ("It's Afghanistanimation!"). No masterpiece, but it doesn't have to be.]

HARVARD MAN (50) (dir., James Toback) Adrian Grenier, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Joey Lauren Adams, Eric Stoltz [... in which James Toback - vying with Larry Clark for the coveted title of Middle-Aged Dude Who's 'Down' With The Kids - starts as he means to go on, layering Bach, a pop song and the voice of a sports commentator all on top of each other under the opening credits, meanwhile tilting from Rodin and Gauguin on the walls to a couple rutting madly below (highbrow / lowbrow, all mixed together) and adding to the general cacophony by split-screening pointlessly and enthusiastically. He's a Baz Luhrmann with an 'alternative' (but equally self-conscious) sensibility, and can drive you nuts if you start to take him seriously with his logorrhea and flash-forwards and the way he'll jump-cut a simple scene of two guys walking down the street till it begs for mercy ; fortunately the film is awash in a sense of its own absurdity, whether an overload of philosophical blather delivered in the squeaky voice of Joey Lauren Adams or a narrative that cheerfully disintegrates in outrageous implausibility (I more or less gave up around the point when Adams 'accidentally' spills her drink on the FBI agent then steals the tape from her tape recorder when she isn't looking). By the time we get to the big acid trip, done mostly with the kind of funhouse-distorted faces you might do on your Adobe Photoshop if you're 14 and really bored, one can either (a) dismiss Toback as a wannabe-hipster with the cinematic equivalent of Tourette's, (b) enjoy the energy and gutsiness while admitting the result is really pretty hollow (esp. compared to something like WAKING LIFE, which also stretched ideas to breaking point without letting go of their validity), or (c) decide the whole restless movie is deliberately shot to approximate an acid trip and indeed to approximate Life itself, in which we constantly and messily push against the void - Dread, "the fear of Nothing" - seeking transcendence through sex or drugs or religion (or indeed movies) ; (a) is probably unfair, (c) probably excessive - though Toback is probably serious about the broad-based existentialism (things don't "just happen", we make them happen), a constant in his work since THE GAMBLER. I also think Sarah Michelle Gellar is sexier here than she's ever been, especially when that female cop's pushing her down over the table, though of course that is Only My Opinion.]

DAGON (51) (dir., Stuart Gordon) Ezra Godden, Francisco Rabal, Raquel Merono [Setting (travellers wash up in remote Spanish village) recalls the Euro-horrors of the 70s, habitually set in forgotten places weighed down with echoes of a feudal past ; what actually happens is at first closer to THE OLD DARK HOUSE - mute hotelier forestalling attempts at conversation, various flunkies lurching about in the background - then devolves into a zombie chase movie with a sense of humour, notable mainly for simplicity and coherence, hampered by rote dialogue and a lack of anything very special. Gordon neither uses space very effectively (usually shoots head-on, without much variation or sense of composition - none of those suggestively 'dead' spaces you find in John Carpenter) nor possesses much Raimi-like flair for pyrotechnics, meaning that the film isn't very exciting, let alone scary (except for the mermaid-woman's face, with its wide-set, unnaturally bright eyes) - but nor does it go in for FX-overload or fashionable irony. Trying to discern meaningful subtext - creatures of water destroyed by fire ; hero's "binary world" of either-or negated by this race of in-betweens - probably not worth the effort ; vampire-style monster teeth seen in dream sequence don't have much to do with anything, presumably included as ineffably cool image for the poster and / or DVD cover.]

THE BUSINESS OF STRANGERS (51) (dir., Patrick Stettner) Stockard Channing, Julia Stiles, Frederick Weller [What it comes down to is perhaps that IN THE COMPANY OF MEN ended up ambiguous on its protagonists whereas this (ultimately) doesn't : the Stiles character remains much the same throughout - cold-blooded Youth, privileged and nihilistic - acting mostly as a sounding-board for Channing who inches her way from frigid career-bitch to human being, going through the familiar arc of sympathetic movie heroes - having control over her life, losing control, regaining control in a less arrogant way (cf. Aaron Eckhart in MEN, who never loses control and is all the richer for it, both pitiful and shamefully admirable). Comparison with the LaBute may seem unfair but is hard to avoid, given both stylistic similarities - percussive score and antiseptic images, lots of glass and clean straight lines - and the way it's semi-implicitly about femininity just as MEN was about (duh) being a man : hints are dropped that Channing's sterile corporate life negates her womanhood (she even drinks Scotch, "a manly drink") as the only way to progress in a sexist world - but the film's structure gradually makes this irrelevant, turning into a battle of wills without much in the way of gender overtones (unless we're meant to see the rejection of Stiles's lesbian overtures as a kind of refusal to go down the path of man-hating separatism, not that the film particularly encourages such interpretation). All a bit half-hearted, like Stettner's intermittent attempts to get flashy (close-ups down the inside of whisky glasses, etc) or the way he tries to make a recurring motif of planes roaring by overhead but never does, quite. The ladies just about keep it going.]

STORYTELLING (56) (dir., Todd Solondz) John Goodman, Mark Webber, Julie Hagerty, Paul Giamatti, Selma Blair [Actually quite positive on this one, but it just peters out - nothing in the last half-hour really works, and Solondz seems to run out of ideas. Before that, his worldview remains stunted - caught between the idiocies of political correctness and its opposite, insensitive brutality, with nothing in between - and he tends to use buzzwords (Columbine, the Holocaust) in place of actual discourse, but there's enough flashes of incisive, darkly funny honesty (on racism, families, Art and its discontents) to confirm he's doing something valuable, even admirable : "Fiction" is a great little joke, everyone swimming around in suppressed self-loathing as they were in HAPPINESS, and even in the limp "Nonfiction" he comes up with a perfectly-judged moment every time you're ready to give up on him - the high-school counselor asserting that "studies show" the stress levels of high-school kids preparing for SATs is higher than of Bosnian kids in Sarajevo is precisely the kind of plausible (maybe even true) factoid you barely notice in everyday life, till a film-maker calls attention to its subtle offensiveness - just as the crude-and-ugly visuals occasionally give way to a crude-but-stunning image like the tiny naked white girl suddenly dwarfed in long-shot by the hulking silhouetted black man. It's good that we have a Solondz around, though admittedly one is enough ; bonus points for the dig at AMERICAN BEAUTY.]

NOVOCAINE (37) (dir., David Atkins) Steve Martin, Helena Bonham Carter, Laura Dern, Elias Koteas, Scott Caan [Fancy opening credits - X-ray shots with Danny Elfman music - promise much, till you realise that X-ray effect's going to be repeated at regular intervals, like a series of electric shocks trying to revive a clearly lifeless patient. Disasters pile up, hero stupidly digs himself deeper and deeper in trouble, and the whole thing isn't bad, just enervatingly sterile and increasingly banal (hero framed for murder, must escape the cops, etc etc) - and all the time Atkins is trying to jazz it up and being different for the sake of it, trying to disguise the lifelessness with quirky detail (a prison guard with a nosebleed, a DEA agent in a plaid cardigan) and outlandish casting (Martin and Koteas as brothers? Bonham Carter as a femme fatale?). Downhill all the way, and extremely depressing ; final twist might be more effective had it not been used (more or less) in THE WHOLE NINE YARDS. Not to mention CHARLEY VARRICK.]

FLOWERS OF SHANGHAI (65) (dir., Hou Hsiao-Hsien) Tony Leung, Michiko Hada, Michele Monique Reis [Add a couple of points (at least) if watching this on the big screen ; even on video, the sense of a sealed, womb-like world is palpable - it's a jolt when something happens in the world "outside" about three-quarters of the way in, and a relief when it's announced that "it's nothing" and we get back to the world of soft lamplight and sensual pleasures. Pleasure (Hou makes clear) is the point of the flower-girls' complicated world, standing in ironic counterpoint to the intrigues and minor tragedies, just as the gossipy stories and boisterous drinking games stand in counterpoint to his own implacable style (as in all the Hou I've seen before MILLENNIUM MAMBO, the director's over-aestheticised qualities are balanced by his characters' rustic, unpolished sense of life) and the film's lush visuals stand in counterpoint to its cynical worldview - setting up a grimly capitalist system where people are reduced to their monetary value (possible comment on modern Taiwan, presumably), love has no place, leading only to disaster, and the world is explicitly based on exploitation. Dramatically patchy - the drifting narrative is par for the course but characters never really compel, least of all Leung's (nominal) protagonist - but the sense of an unfolding world is ripe with discovery (how awful that the girls are bought by the madam at six and seven years old! how surprising that the maids are so forward, telling off their mistresses' "callers" in no uncertain terms!), making it more than the sumptuous visual experience it already is ; works by immersion, which is why - as with any dream - it won't work if you fight it. Sometimes drags, but I'd watch it again ; ideally in a theatre.]

ENIGMA (56) (dir., Michael Apted) Dougray Scott, Kate Winslet, Jeremy Northam, Saffron Burrows [An "amateur sleuthing adventure" complains Winslet's character, but that's part of its charm - tying in with the irresistible premise (nerdy amateurs with a penchant for puzzles fighting the might of the Third Reich), just as the twisty plot with its ostensibly lame devices (a painting on the wall helping our hero solve the mystery) ties in with the sense of cryptic clues and ubiquitous codes to be deciphered. Could've been smarter - a car-chase is a car-chase, even with vintage cars - genius-geek angle is undernourished and the Burrows character (the ultimate enigma) remains opaque to the audience as well ; Stoppard seems to have been working on autopilot, even falling back on repeated laugh-lines (characters twice look round a nondescript home and joke "Ah, bliss...", twice ask someone "Do you have any idea what you're saying?"), but it's still a more likeable script than his flashy SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE job, gently submerging itself in an era of blackout-blinds and Ovaltine. Codes are cracked, chaps say "Listen here, old thing", ancient jokes are trotted out once more ("You know, without your glasses, you don't look half bad" ; "You know, without my glasses, nor do you") and an awfully big adventure is had by all ; Northam pleasingly languorous, Scott plays psychological torment by looking half-asleep throughout - but Winslet is delightful. Mild but fun, with a good-natured earnestness ; recommended to anyone who finds something inherently endearing about the word "boffin".]

MURDER BY NUMBERS (47) (dir., Barbet Schroeder) Sandra Bullock, Ryan Gosling, Michael Pitt, Ben Chaplin, Chris Penn [Actors make it worthwhile, Bullock clearly committed to the role and the youngsters sensational - Pitt with Byronic air and floppy hairdo impressively distinct from his pothead in BULLY, Gosling doing Arrogant Prick with scrunched-up face and lethally bored expression (and some nice touches like his look of mild surprise just before he tumbles off a cliff) - but it's all so pedantically overwritten it just dies on the screen, crossing 't's and dotting 'i's till the life drains out of it. What might've been a pungent B-movie gets turned into a tale of Redemption, woman learning to trust her feelings again, etc., and it's all spelled out - sexually aggressive (but emotionally frigid) behaviour as defence mechanism against the memory of her abuse, which is mirrored in the murder, which is represented in the Gosling character (who, we're repeatedly told, has a lot in common with her abuser), whom she therefore has to battle then finally move beyond, realising the truth is more complex than she thought (cue groan-worthy coda wherein she resolves to Face Her Demons). All mapped out, except the heroine's Journey gets in the way of the movie - the Nietzchian premise of high-school nihilists committing murder as an act of self-assertion ("Freedom is Crime") gets muddled to a film that's really about violence to women, from S&M porno to the assistant DA who "got a little rough with me" ; it's as though the murder victim gradually becomes the focus of a film that started out being about the perpetrators, whether due to post-Columbine anxiety or simply the fact that the (female) star is also the producer. Might've worked if fast and poetic, the way old 'films noir' used to start off on murder then segue into psychology, but it takes ages to unravel, mostly in boringly-staged two-person dialogue scenes, and you see it all coming, as if on a checklist - stopping dead completely when the time comes for Bullock to Tell Her Story. Penn is wasted, detective work is dopey (esp. the business with the clock), but it has its moments - and the actors make it worthwhile. Is that true about female hyenas having a penis, though? That's bound to create misunderstandings in my opinion.]

KUNG POW: ENTER THE FIST (57) (dir., Steve Oedekerk) Steve Oedekerk, Fei Lung, Ling Ling Tse, Chia Yung Liu [MST3K-funny, which is good enough for me (mileage may vary) ; still very puerile - LION KING reference suggests its target audience may have only recently moved beyond kiddie fodder - but I knew I was positive on it when the inevitable closing-credits roll of fluffs and bloopers came on (has that joke ever been funny, except maybe in A BUG'S LIFE?) and I realised the preceding 80 minutes had at least been unpredictable. Oedekerk the performer has an appealingly dazed, squirrelly quality, and the whole thing's full of bits you can imagine aficionados cracking each other up with at Kung Pow conventions : squeaky shoes ... "My finger points" ... "Avoid the meadow" ... kung-fu cow ... swallowing a moth ... "It is a great honour having you beating random people in our town" ... "Your story makes my heart heavy and my prostate weak" ... "So on he walked. And sometimes drove. And occasionally partied with the desert creatures". Not as wild / subversive / ambitious as POOTIE TANG or FREDDY GOT FINGERED, but I think I laughed a little more. It's nothing to be proud of.]

SHOWTIME (42) (dir., Tom Dey) Robert De Niro, Eddie Murphy, Rene Russo, William Shatner [Main joke : 'reality shows' don't actually reflect reality. Secondary joke : "This is America. Everybody wants to be on television!". Bonus joke : William Shatner (as himself) gives an acting lesson. Assets (mostly wasted) : couple of mega-stars plus the SHANGHAI NOON - and "Smallville" - writing team. Occasional compensations : couple of effective De Niro slow burns, imaginative death-by-swimming-pool for the main villain, mysterious streak of self-loathing in frequent mention of "Hollywood dickheads". ED-TV-type premise underbaked, at least one major scene - Rerun's confession to the "Justice Channel" - embarrassingly flat and unfocused, Murphy's fast-talking schtick grew whiskers a decade ago. Pleasant, nonetheless.]

SERENDIPITY (48) (dir., Peter Chelsom) John Cusack, Kate Beckinsale, Jeremy Piven, Molly Shannon, Eugene Levy [Why do these fluffy rom-coms make it so hard for themselves? The trailer was bad enough ("When Destiny has a sense of humour, you call it ... Serendipity!"), but we also get a swing-jazzy standard over the opening credits, then a restaurant called Serendipity - "one of my favourite words," sez Beckinsale - and assorted cutesiness like Cusack describing his fiancée as the GODFATHER PART II of romances (because she might even be better than the first, i.e. his first love, yet can't replace it, or some such contrived nonsense) ; you could swear it's deliberately trying to provoke charges of insufferable Miramax-fodder, yet - as in BOUNCE last year - it actually comes close to some nifty ideas, especially in the second half when it throws around words like "quasi-Jungian" and quotes the philosopher Epictitus ("If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid"). Shannon's spirited riposte to the whole soulmate / predestination guff - 'Life is supposed to be chaotic, so we can make mistakes and learn from them' - is more than the usual straw-man argument, and there's also something loose and attractive to the whole comic spectacle of two people wandering round New York looking tormentedly for 'signs', the camera tagging along in a kind of bemused detachment (love the pull-back to a hive-of-activity wide shot at the end of the golf-club sequence). For a while it's easy to recall that seeking a pattern in chaos has been the theme in much of the best 90s cinema, from Egoyan to MAGNOLIA - yet the film doesn't follow through, fully endorses the predestination guff by the end (faith in Destiny as a necessary part of "harmony with the universe"), resolves everything meekly and conventionally ; one gets a sense of a better movie glimpsed and ignored (or rejected) - and a sense that the whole ONLY YOU / SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE soulmate genre could yet produce a masterpiece, in the hands of a director temperamentally opposed to the twee and cosy. Eugene Levy steals scenes, albeit a little over-milked ; St. Germain's "Rose Rouge" finally appears in a movie, as we always knew it would.]

ESTHER KAHN (68) (73 - second viewing) (dir., Arnaud Desplechin) Summer Phoenix, Ian Holm, Fabrice Desplechin, Frances Barber [Gonna go out on a limb here and nominate M. Desplechin as the most original director currently working - if only because so many people seem to have no idea how to take him ; someone like Wong Kar-Wei is easy to file under 'hipster' and respond to accordingly, but it's kind of astonishing how misinterpreted this really-quite-coherent film has been (Philip Kemp's "Sight & Sound" review is almost comically clueless - even referring to Fabrice as the director's son - and the IMDb User Comments (with one exception) seem affronted by the film's very existence). In fact it's quite similar to MY SEX LIFE, OR HOW I GOT INTO AN ARGUMENT, dealing again in solipsism and alienation, based around the notion of acting as a singularly egocentric - almost autistic - activity : the key to Esther is simply that she's utterly uninterested in the world around her ("You see this? It's nothing!" she exclaims, picking up a handful of gravel - or else sits on the fringes observing her voluble family and their warm interaction, the narrator coolly informing us that this is "what she supposed 'real life' was"), indeed uninterested in anything beyond her immersion in a role, the "larger force" waiting (so we're told) to mould her expectant face. The film's fascination lies in differentiating her from other actors - significantly she doesn't care about theatrical superstitions (wearing the 'unlucky' green dress), just as she doesn't see the point in amassing lots of real-life experience - yet suggesting she's a kind of ur-actor, the wholly selfish core other actors try to camouflage or soften : acting stripped of 'Artistry' or pious humanism, pure and cold as a thing being crafted (Esther as a child, fascinated by a rabbi's hands as he puts together a sacred charm - totally indifferent to its higher purpose). Its perversity is undeniable, flying deliberately in the face of the 'luvvie'-style, gregarious stereotype actors love to cultivate, yet the film makes its intentions so clear, and Esther's alienation so obvious ("It's as if you're all in the river and I'm sitting beside it, watching you go by," she explains), you have to wonder why people find it baffling and opaque, and why they complain we never see Esther's supposed talent or exhilaration at being onstage when it's patently obvious Desplechin has chosen not to show it (because it's a wholly self-enclosed exhilaration, totally separate from the thing - the performance - it produces ; one might as well fault a film for not 'showing' Einstein's brilliance as he's producing the Theory of Relativity) ; maybe he's just too ferociously original - I stand by my comment re: MY SEX LIFE that he comes across as "the kind of genius who probably has no friends at all" - and too restless and befuddling a film-maker, setting his cold cerebral story amid the most beautiful burnished-amber images, adding period-drama clichés without apparent irony (meanwhile Howard Shore's majestic score tiptoes into Michael Nyman territory), doing iris-ins on irrelevant-seeming details and cutting jaggedly, seeming to leave out the middles of scenes (see e.g. the bizarrely-played bit when Esther's mother finds her masturbating, cutting straight from heated discussion to full-fledged quarrel, seconds or minutes later). Unfortunately - as in MY SEX LIFE - he also lets the narrative lag, losing excitement in the all-important third quarter ; one somehow feels the film should be more memorable than it is - but it's still bold and bracing, and Phoenix, in her strange way, is hypnotic. Why does her accent keep sounding South African, though?] (All the above still valid on second viewing, but the good parts sufficiently brilliant to overshadow the third-quarter lag. Desplechin is the only director I know (possibly with PTA) who makes self-awareness a spur to greater creativity rather than a holding device; he's like a chess grandmaster not even bothering to think about the introductory moves, going straight to the good stuff. Someday all films will be made like this.) 

NO SUCH THING (62) (dir., Hal Hartley) Robert John Burke, Sarah Polley, Helen Mirren, Baltasar Kormakur [Hartley does KING KONG, tarting it up with rather tired media satire (conclusion : you can get a hugely original writer to write it, and one of the world's great actresses to play it, and the cynical soulless TV producer will still be a tedious caricature). Not on a par with his best work but no-one else could've made it quite like this, from the clipped shooting style tending to isolate people in the frame to the mordant humour with its deadpan recital of enormous catastrophe - news of the day : "Mayor sold Lower Manhattan to a Hollywood studio" - to the rogue sadistic streak underlying the impeccably civilised sensibility (why so much emphasis on pain during Polley's operation?). He's probably better when he sticks to relationships instead of grand themes though I counted three possible Meanings, all of them worthy and intelligent : the curse of Immortality, transience as the most valuable part of being human (also known as the "Theme From A.I."), the Monster standing in for the abiding (but decreasing) power of folk-tales and local culture in a relentlessly globalised world, and of course the Monster as embodiment of our primal fears (as explicitly stated), terrors of the id we can never - indeed, should never - entirely shake. All very interesting, but what really works is the use of Iceland as a magical place of foggy cliffs and strange local customs - best bit : the crowd ritualistically laying hands on our heroine in slo-mo as she leaves the hospital - and Polley's quiet conviction as a fragile but fearless heroine ("You don't scare me"), perched at the confluence of sensible and sexy. Suggestion for Mr. Hartley's next film : no big themes, no media satire, man and a woman talking in a room. Take it from there, Hal...]

8 WOMEN (73) (dir., Francois Ozon) Catherine Deneuve, Virginie Ledoyen, Isabelle Huppert, Emmanuelle Béart, Fanny Ardant, Ludivine Sagnier, Firmine Richard, Danielle Darrieux ["This comedy has gone on too long," says Richard as the family maid, and it does a bit - but does it really matter when Ozon is tweaking 50s snobbery and prejudice (note early nod to ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS), incidentally finding thematic justification for the artificiality - mirroring Deneuve's spurious values and denial of reality - possibly making an elaborate cinematic in-joke and undoubtedly allowing his glamorous cast to strut their stuff? On a basic but important level, works in the melancholy elegance of a Demy musical (or EVERYONE SAYS I LOVE YOU), with charming old songs used to anchor emotion and bolster the brittle plot (it's a film to make you grin with pleasure) - but it's also, on another level, profoundly lonely, the eight women trapped by the structure (both the rigorous absence of men and the almost claustrophobically neat plotting) just as they're trapped in their lives, all of them yearning for love ("What good is freedom when you live without love?" sings Ardant). Playful with a definite undertow, stylised cartoonishness (the women all jumping at once when a door bangs, or huddling together to peek out the window) shading into unexpected sadness, hopscotching blithely through the creaky theatrical conventions - occasional bursts of portentous music at another Shocking Revelation - yet caught in a suffocating busy-ness ; stagy gives way to transgressive, rather like the New Wave killing off the stodgy 50s cinéma du papa (and papa himself, the lone paterfamilias, lying upstairs with a knife in his back), Huppert lets her hair down in a glorious comic performance, only Virginie is inexpressive. Part of the pleasure is Ardant peeling off her drab suit to reval a shocking-red dress as she launches into song, or Deneuve slinking around in a coat fringed with leopard-skin, or of course the lilting, wistful songs in their faintest of ironic quotation marks, ending on Deneuve offering wry words of wisdom ("Il n'y a pas d'amour heureux") as the others weave and sway ; then it starts to get interesting. My kind of movie.]

THE VERTICAL RAY OF THE SUN (62) (dir., Tran Anh Hung) Tran Nu Yen Khe, Nguyen Nhu Quynh, Le Khanh [Don't know what I thought this would be like but I never expected it to be so laid-back, given the rigour of SCENT OF GREEN PAPAYA and intensity of CYCLO. Just-hanging-out vibe makes for irresistible sensual langour when the characters are waking up in the morning, or having a gossip or trimming each other's nails, but tends to seem inadequate and desultory when it tries for melancholy, bogging down in terminal drift around the 80-minute mark ; what it's about - beyond delicate textures and faces in repose - is another matter, but Tony Rayns' identification (in "Sight & Sound") of 'saving face' as the dominant theme, scandals and adulteries hushed up in a Confucian society (no doubt tying in with the heroine's vow of silence when she's with her lover), seems reasonable enough - though there's also something of the feminist parable, women finding their way to a greater independence, etc. Speaking of which, my chronic inability to tell one lovely Oriental actress from another - often waiting for a scene to play out so I can determine from the context who the characters are - is now officially a Cause For Concern...]

SCHIZOPOLIS (73) (dir., Steven Soderbergh) Steven Soderbergh, Betsy Brantley, David Jensen, Mike Malone [Title appears on the T-shirt of a wild-looking dude - who then turns round to reveal he's wearing nothing else besides that T-shirt, before running off into the distance pursued by men in white coats. It's that kind of movie - though perhaps unique in the history of movies, in that it was made by a noted stylist as an act of rebellion against style (it goes way beyond something like THE STRAIGHT STORY - not a change of pace, but an angry act of self-destruction), as ragged as his later films are smooth. Probably improved by knowledge of those later films, bringing out Soderbergh's alienation and personal investment (it's the Todd Solondz Factor), but really pretty great just in itself - constantly inventive, cinematically savvy as a riff on 60s Richard Lester, transcending its own self-indulgence by luxuriating in it (Soderbergh films himself making faces in the mirror!), often just hilarious. Language consistently mangled, fourth wall consistently broken, non sequiturs a-gogo (a musical trash can, a golf ball skittering across a lawn, inserts from an old nudie picture), bad puns gleefully scattered (Soderbergh as dentist : "I'm a firm believer in gum control"). Best of all, "no fish were harmed during the making of this motion picture". A blast.]

BIG TROUBLE (55) (dir., Barry Sonnenfeld) Tim Allen, Rene Russo, Dennis Farina, Stanley Tucci, Janeane Garofalo, Patrick Warburton, Tom Sizemore, Jason Lee, Ben Foster, Zooey Deschanel [Probably more comic character actors in Hollywood right now than at any time since the 30s, and they all seem to be in this helter-skelter farce - which is reason enough to watch it, though in fact they're on variable form (only Warburton really made me laugh, maybe because he hasn't been as over-exposed as some of the others). Otherwise lots of running around, rudimentary 'dumb' humour, casual snark and easy cynicism, copious references to people's butts, one-liners both good ("What are you watching cookery shows for? All you know how to make are reservations") and not so good ("Only the female mosquito sucks your blood" ; "Sounds like my ex-wife"), a foot fetish, a water gun, a hippy who loves Fritos, a toad that squirts hallucinogenic chemicals and a Dalmatian that gave birth to a litter of 17 over Lake Okeechobee. Possible biggest laugh-line : "Was that a goat?".]

THE BELIEVER (72) (dir., Henry Bean) Ryan Gosling, Summer Phoenix, Glenn Fitzgerald, Theresa Russell, Billy Zane [Flawed, but way better than expected given its distinctly dubious premise (a variation on the fuzzy thinking whereby all homophobes are really closet homosexuals) : always stylish and well-acted, even more than that when it goes beyond its troubled hero to his place in the wider context (and meaning) of being Jewish. Makes sense that a culture so naturally argumentative would produce a "Nazi Jew" as a kind of conclusive argument - the political equivalent of 'winning' a chess game by knocking all the pieces off the board - or an introspective culture would produce a rebel who turns inwards, but what's even more perceptive is the hero's hatred as a kind of coming-of-age - seeing the story of Abraham as a "test of faith" rather than the cruel caprice of a "power-crazed madman" isn't really all that different from, e.g. seeing a nine-to-five as a necessary burden rather than cruel oppression ; it's all part of growing up - and what's bravest of all is perhaps the suggestion that he's better than his culture in some ways, not just seeking self-assertion in a culture that demands (indeed, draws its power from) submission but also looking for something to believe in beyond the petty proscriptions of the Torah. You want to cheer when the point is made - regardless of its truth, just for the intelligence of the argument - that Judaism is less about belief than simply "doing things", binding a community together (which of course is what this particular community needed most, historically), just as you want to cheer when the canny publisher answers Danny's "People still need values and beliefs" with a shrugged "Not the smart ones" (tying in with the earlier bit ascribing the appeal of Fascism to a sense of emptiness in a world of "free trade, mutual funds and IPOs"), or when it's made clear the hero's obsessive self-loathing only makes him more at one with the culture he claims to despise (only Jews talk about Jews all the time, points out our heroine, and one also recalls the old Kirk Douglas quote : "The only advantage I have found to being Jewish is that I can be openly anti-Semitic"), or when neo-Nazis come face-to-face with Holocaust survivors in a "sensitivity training" class and both groups end up bickering among themselves (no easy answers here), or even when Phoenix playfully says she likes sex with Danny because of the "tragic dimension" and he smiles without answering then tosses his head self-consciously as she runs her fingers through his hair. The only major problem is deciding how much the anti-hero speaks for Bean himself - predictably, he tries to have it both ways - not (obviously) in his racist screeds but e.g. in his assertion that anti-Semitism has nothing to do with Jews themselves, but is simply hot-wired into Gentiles' worldview (which seems ingenuous, not to say dangerous, though at least Sabra and Shatila get a mention) ; otherwise admirable, with a throbbing score, compelling lead performance and the (very) rare pleasure of seeing an American movie tackle socio-politics without platitudes and simplistic answers. It's almost enough to make you forget AMERICAN HISTORY X ever happened...]

DARK BLUE WORLD (42) (dir., Jan Sverak) Ondrej Vetchy, Krystof Hadek, Tara Fitzgerald, Oldrich Kaiser [Aviator tensions and heroics, DAWN PATROL-style (only set in WW2), with a Commie post-war prison camp as an afterthought. Why did Czechoslovak authorities intern these flyers once the war was over? Presumably because they'd done their flying in England, making them potential Western spies - but the film prefers "because they feared these heroes would once again fight for freedom", typifying both its simple-mindedness and how squarely it's geared to the Western audience (Nazis, Commies, same difference). Pastoral setting, with funny - but soulful - foreigners speaking mangled English (no need for those pesky subtitles) and stiff-upper-lip types saying things like "This is England : keep off the grass" makes it perfect Oscar-bait, filling the inevitable gaps with internationally accepted Indicators du Feelgood - young love, period trappings, little kids trying to say complicated words, a dog who wears goggles and 'talks' on the phone. Strange that the prison camp barely features, given it's (a) where the real drama lies, fallen heroes haunted by their memories, and (b) what presumably attracted Sverak to the story, being something he'd have heard about as a Czech long before researching the rest of it - but maybe it's not so strange : who wants to see depressing Eastern European prisons when you can see fresh-faced youngsters flying planes and getting into dog-fights, and romancing English girls and singing funny songs like "Hitler has only got one ball / Goering has two but very small"? Guess that's what you get for selling your soul to the global marketplace...]

SHAOLIN SOCCER (47) (dir., Stephen Chow) Stephen Chow, Vicki Zhao, Man Tat Ng ["Please don't play like this. I really want to play soccer," whines an opponent in one of the teams crushed by our heroes' spectacular prowess. My thoughts exactly. The CGI stunts are fun - goals from the middle of the pitch, balls kicked so hard they burst into flames or so high they don't come down for at least an hour - but you kind of wonder why they had to drag soccer into it ; even worse, everything in between the special effects ranges from overstretched (finding the various team members - who don't add up to 11, incidentally, but whatever) to uninspired (the nightclub song, the thinly-imagined 'everyday uses' for kung fu, the whole romantic sub-plot with its ugly-beautiful angle). Points to ponder - Chow's allegiance to misfits (from broken shoes to broken people), populist undertow, villains pointedly using American technology, other stuff noted in this article - cheerfully acknowledged but it doesn't make it any less threadbare, though it's no doubt a cultural thing that I'd rate a similarly goofy Hollywood crowd-pleaser - THE SCORPION KING, say - higher than this. Crap but fun, or maybe vice versa.]

THE WOMAN CHASER (59) (dir., Robinson Devor) Patrick Warburton, Emily Newman, Paul Malevich, Ernie Vincent [First half is one thing, with faux-noir narration matching the black-and-white look ("It was late July, and my San Francisco wardrobe was weighing a touch heavy on my back"), square-jawed Warburton - a Rock Hudson type, which is also (coincidentally or not) his surname in the movie - doing Capitalist Man, and 50s values tweaked in all kinds of ways, e.g. when a paean to Mom includes a glimpse of her firm delectable breasts. Second half is another thing, a film about film-making with an airy tone and some deft observations likely to provoke a nod of recognition from anyone who's ever been involved in making a movie ("What bothered me was the sense of unreality in what I was doing"). What's interesting is the way our hero goes from salesman to artist - initially agreeing that "the making of money [is] the reason for existence", finally upbraiding venal producers in the name of Integrity - while remaining exactly the same unshakeable go-getter, merely re-channelling his bluster in the name of Art (implication : artists are salesmen too, and forget it at their peril) ; what's not so interesting is the inconsistent style and shambolic structure, making for a film that's less than the sum of its parts. Always pleasant, but it never really goes beyond a doodle ; fairly clear why they cast Warburton as the voice of Kronk, though...]

CROSSROADS (32) (dir., Tamra Davis) Britney Spears, Taryn Manning, Zoe Saldana, Anson Mount, Dan Aykroyd [Britney Spears is the third Olsen twin : plastic-looking, bubbly yet sensible, full of bright thoughts and dimply smiles, wrapping her baby voice round a hilariously limp version of "I Love Rock'n Roll" in the most ludicrous scene of this cheerfully idiotic drama. She teases mightily about deigning to sing at all, doing the whole 'you must / but I can't' routine (seems one of her friends is the real singer and Britney just steps in at the last moment blah blah blah), but then teasing is what she does best, given she spends the first scene - but none of the subsequent ones - in her panties and takes forever to regale eager fans with "I'm Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman" (having first written it as a poem (!), which stud-muffin Mount then sets to music as a token of his love). Mixed messages abound, whether it's the star doing Little Miss Perfect while also whining that she's never partied or stayed out late, or the way it's made clear a teenage virgin is a social leper while also hemming and hawing about how the first time should be special and you mustn't rush these things, etc etc (spare a thought for Justin Long as the high-school boyfriend, who's left out in the cold for no other reason than because his awkward geeky self isn't "special" enough for Princess Britney) ; just about the only unequivocal tenets are the anti-drink message and assumption that a runaway mother must be a bad person, plus of course the whole 'girlfriends rule' / 'you go, girl' / 'best friends forever' angle. Might've shaded into so-bad-it's-good territory with a bit more oomph, but it's more like a timid little sister to COYOTE UGLY (why do all these heroines have portly comics playing their fathers?) ; special mention to my protegée Taryn - though she doesn't do much worth mentioning, beyond a gutsy hospital scene - and the 'crime' our hero turns out to have committed, which is like the result of a contest to find the dullest, least morally objectionable thing a person could do time for. It's not like we'd hate him if it turned out he'd been in a bar brawl or something, you know...]