Films Seen - January 2000

(Pre-'96 movies not included)

DOUBLE JEOPARDY (39) (dir., Bruce Beresford) Ashley Judd, Tommy Lee Jones, Bruce Greenwood [Pretty bad, obviously, but not offensive-bad (nor, alas, so-bad-it's-good) : a big-screen variation on all those female-empowerment TV movies starring Jaclyn Smith, except that it stars the delectable Ms. Judd (and her body-hugging grey slacks). It's the kind of film that slobbers sentimentally over mother-love and button-cute kiddies, fawns respectfully over wealth and glamour, and finds something inherently suspicious and untrustworthy about being cultured or intellectual (yes, the heroine's husband is rich, and yes, he buys her expensive sailing-boats - but he also knows a lot about modern art, and he insists on letting a bottle of wine "breathe" after he uncorks it, so you know there has to be something not quite right about him). Guilty pleasures : the thoroughness with which Judd is framed for murder (even incl. a tape-recording of her supposed victim moaning, "Aarghhh ... I've been stabbed"), and the whole montage of her jogging, pumping iron etc. when she decides to take revenge on her husband (is she planning to bludgeon him to death with her bare hands?). Non-guilty pleasure : the shot of Judd and Jones underwater, swimming up towards the camera as a car sinks into the murk behind them. Oh and, just for the record : committing the same crime under different circumstances creates a new "actus reus", so the double-jeopardy defence is inapplicable (otherwise you could burgle the same house twice and get away with it). Always knew that legal training would come in handy sooner or later...]

MY SON THE FANATIC (55) (dir., Udayan Prasad) Om Puri, Rachel Griffiths, Stellan Skarsgard, Akbar Kurtha [A flipside to (the same writer's) MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE - now it's the father who wants to integrate, son clings to the old ways - but the fun seems to have gone out of Kureishi's worldview : LAUNDRETTE, for all its faults, treated both sides with irreverent affection (even the greedy uncle was a likeable rogue), whereas this attacks one side virulently and over-protects the other. The fundamentalists range from buffoonish to hateful while Puri is something of a secular saint, liberal yet moral, superior both to the bigoted puritans of the old country and the decadent wastrels of the new : his ideology is a Louis Armstrong tape and a quiet glass of Scotch - and who can argue with that? Nicely-done, subtly acted, but rather unyielding, hard to get into ; possibly because there's only one way in.]

THE MUSE (34) (dir., Albert Brooks) Albert Brooks, Sharon Stone, Andie MacDowell, Jeff Bridges [Why has Brooks the actor suddenly become annoying? My theory is, his nagging, querulous-old-fart persona is funny (because incongruous) on a pushy young man, merely tiresome now that he's grown into flabby middle-age. Why has Brooks the writer-director suddenly gone slack, his punchlines obvious, set-ups laboured, satirical ideas not sharp enough to skewer Hollywood dumbness, merely dumb enough to backfire embarrassingly? I have no theory on that. Intermittently kind of fun in a gossipy way - but, dammit, this is Albert Brooks we're talking about here...]

AMERICAN PIE (64) (dir., Paul Weitz) Jason Biggs, Chris Klein, Thomas Ian Nicholas, Eddie Kaye Thomas, Eugene Levy [Could be over-rating this, just for being better than the PORKY'S-for-the-90s hype suggests (kill the marketing men and world peace will surely follow), but it struck me as only one-third glib and plastic, two-thirds funny and perceptive, which is far and away the best teen-movie ratio of the year. The school's mostly egalitarian society, where everybody's keenly aware of each other's differences but mixes with them anyway, struck this (non-American) viewer as a lot more familiar than the usual ultra-polarised movie high-school, ditto the pathetic chat-up lines ("My friends call me Nova...") and the way everyone's kind of klutzy and unformed, seizing on sex as an all-purpose short-cut to Growing Up. It gives the impression of film-makers looking back as well as (maybe even more than) creating a product, hence no doubt the moments of tenderness among the raucous highlights : Levy's aghast reaction to the pie-humping, or his dorky lecture on masturbation ("it's like banging a tennis ball against a brick wall") are amusing enough, but the way he hugs his son goodbye on the threshold of the Big Night, holding on just a few seconds longer - that whole sense of letting go, sending him out into the world - is surprisingly poignant. A deserved smash, though many of the genre's usual problems are depressingly present, notably a weak third quarter (the result of having to set everything up for the inevitable happy ending) : everything between the WebCam scene and the Prom Night climax is pretty much a blur.]

THREE KINGS (68) (dir., David O. Russell) George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, Ice Cube, Spike Jonze [Really wish I'd seen this one on the big screen (not that it's playing, but it's bound to turn up sooner or later) : who knew Russell could orchestrate such a kinetic, viscerally satisfying ride? Flashy tricks skilfully deployed (love that slow-motion shoot-out), wartime chaos impressively rendered, wonderful bleached look to everything ; above all, an appropriate film to describe Desert Storm, more bloody farce (and "media war") than actual confrontation. Finding a terrific action movie that's also politically savvy about Western hypocrisy and media manipulation is the kind of dream-come-true that seems to herald a new, 'grown-up' Hollywood - yet the film also suffers from AMERICAN BEAUTY Syndrome, willing to tackle complex issues but doing so in a reductive, conventional-wisdom way that's almost more annoying than no wisdom at all (it's as though Hollywood's taken off its childish mask only to reveal the superficial adult behind it). The basic message is a plea for greater American interventionism in the name of human rights, which is fair enough (though I personally disagree with it), but it's done through a demonisation of Saddam that wouldn't be out of place on CNN, and a division into good and bad Iraqis - the former incl. various 'adorably' traumatised tykes - that weights the film down and is just embarrassing. Giving the heroes Conscience (taking them from mercenary to compassionate) is, in itself, rather a square, one-dimensional idea - the real story is the way good intentions often lead to tragedy, and the way "compassion" is a relative term anyway, different values ruling different places : nothing in the film comes close to the magnificent moment when Ice Cube berates Jonze for referring to the Iraqis as "dune-coons", pointing out that "towelheads" is a perfectly acceptable alternative. Cinematically bracing, politically woolly.]

END OF DAYS (25) (dir., Peter Hyams) Arnold Schwarzenegger, Gabriel Byrne, Robin Tunney, Kevin Pollak [Satan assumes human form - and what d'you suppose is the first thing he does? Why, he grabs a strange woman's tits and shoves his tongue down her mouth, of course (the fiend!). Also giggled when Arnold mangles the word "heard" ("heee-urred"), and when a priest orders him out of his church then casually walks away, pulling a secret door shut behind him thereby allowing Arn to follow him down to the cellar, where a woman with stigmata is babbling in tongues ("Forget everything you've seen," says the priest ; yo, he wouldn't have seen it if you'd just locked the door, padre!) ; nor is it quite clear why the Evil One schleps around New York waiting for his intended instead of just materialising in her bedroom, or why he waits till a couple of hours before midnight to do the deed, thus giving Arnie a chance to time him out. Lazy, hollow, nonsensical and murky-looking, with a ghoulish sadistic streak ; Udo Kier was born to play a scene with a rattlesnake, though...]

LIFE (52) (dir., Ted Demme) Eddie Murphy, Martin Lawrence, Ned Beatty [Strangest part of a very strange movie has to be the way it makes prison something of a sanctuary for its two protagonists. There's a lengthy prologue showing how they got there, and everything about that prologue sets them up as hapless victims of a cruel, malevolent world : very nearly killed by a brutal gangster, robbed by unscrupulous card-sharps, thrown out of a diner by gun-toting racists, finally framed by the cops and unfairly convicted. Prison, on the other hand, is a just, intelligible place : everyone has their roles, knows what to do and what to avoid ; a fight is stopped when the loser is adjudged to have "had enough" ; it's like a family, presided over by father and mother figures - a firm-but-fair warden and his shorter, shriller assistant (who at one point storms into the prisoners' dormitory and yells at them for talking after lights out). Yet the film tells a sad story, of two black men forced to waste away in jail while history - specifically black history - passes them by (surely it isn't saying that American blacks are better off unempowered?) ; it's likeable, thoughtful, rather sweet and well-acted (Lawrence at his career-best, which admittedly isn't saying very much), yet it doesn't quite work. It desperately lacks a sense of tragedy ; then again, for a film that's supposed to be a comedy, that can't really be considered a major flaw.]

TWIN FALLS IDAHO (42) (dir., Michael Polish) Mark Polish, Michael Polish, Michele Hicks [So - is this a joke or what? More of a "what", unfortunately, bizarre but turgid and heavy-handed. The Polishes would no doubt like to be the single-egg Coens (the first 15 minutes in a grey-green BARTON FINK hotel, complete with eccentric lift-attendant - "Fifty-two years and I have yet to guess the desired floor" - are memorable), but their sensibililty is closer to television : "In time every sad ending becomes a happy one," says someone halfway through - apropos of nothing very much, so it's pretty obviously cueing up the ending of the movie - yet the line gets repeated, in V.O., when that ending finally arrives. Tiny but significant detail : the brothers sit forlornly on a park bench, lost in their own world, oblivious to the crowd of onlookers they're attracting - yet the film cuts from them to the onlookers' POV, shattering the sense of a privileged moment (did first-time director Polish want to show prospective employers he'd given the scene maximum coverage, as required by the corporate rule-book?). [Note : It has since been pointed out to me that the onlookers' POV, being framed behind the bars of a fence, shows their view of the brothers as exhibits in a zoo (or freakshow) - hence the switch in POV is there for a reason. Still think it's a bad idea, though, weakening the scene for the sake of a rather trite message.] References to marriage scattered throughout - fun idea in the abstract, rather lame when you think about it (being married is not like being a Siamese twin, Polishes!). Scene where the heroes' mother tearfully recalls giving them up for adoption - "They couldn't adopt my feelings of abandoning my boys" - faintly absurd. Michele Hicks looks like Valeria Golino, which is not a bad thing.]

TOPSY-TURVY (83) (dir., Mike Leigh) Jim Broadbent, Allan Corduner, Timothy Spall, Lesley Manville [This year's SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE in many ways (actors together, magic of the theatah) and I understand critics who'd tar both with the same brush - but Madden's was a bit of fluff and this is so much richer, more human, more incisive : a film where great joy and great sadness co-exist, though you probably have to be a fan of Gilbert and Sullivan's comic operettas to appreciate the former. The joy comes in the blissful silliness of these "trivial soufflés" ("low burlesque" somebody calls them - and a link is also made to Laurel and Hardy), and in the incredible feats of clockwork precision they involve (embarrassing but true : the scene where Sullivan directs a trio of actors in a supremely intricate harmonisation moved me to a round of applause in my own living-room!) ; the sadness comes in the realisation that Art solves nothing, changes nothing, which is why the film dispenses with the standard putting-on-a-show structure, with its comforting fiction of an everything-alright-on-the-night climax. No triumphant first night can help the actor who's a drug addict, or the actress forced to give up her illegitimate child, or Sullivan's ailing kidneys or - saddest of all - the emotional aphasia of Gilbert, a limited man increasingly lost to his own little world (which is surely what he's thinking when he watches his senile father battle imaginary demons) ; the film's greatness lies in this clear-eyed, ultimately rather sour take on creativity, and in the way it builds a mosaic of a world built on decorum, folks drinking tea in top hat and frock-coat even in the kind of heat that "addles the noodle" - and, of course, in Leigh's marvellous aliveness to character : many of the truest, most valuable moments are throwaways, like Sullivan, even in the midst of all his problems, unable to resist a little jovial banter with the dour waiter who serves him his pigeon. Didn't like the coy references to cigarette-smoking, Winston Churchill etc - nudging the 90s audience in the ribs - but that's a minor quibble ; this is rich, subtle work from a master film-maker.]

SLC PUNK (40) (dir., James Merendino) Matthew Lillard, Michael Goorjian, Annabeth Gish [Definitely something going on here - teenage hi-jinks with a sting in the tail, keeping everything detached and arm's-length via snarky narration so it can put the boot in (hero's older self realises he was just a mixed-up rich kid playing punk) in the last few minutes ; no doubt sincere, no doubt autobiographical. Problems : (i) arm's-length detachment actually indistinguishable from TRAINSPOTTING-style 'irony' ; (ii) Merendino's panoply of jump-cuts, in-your-face montages, wacky gimmicks (words don't match lip movements to suggest dislocation of an acid-trip) get annoying fast ; (iii) round about the twentieth interminable rant and forty-sixth scene of people shooting guns and smashing up stuff to show what a "madman" they are, I started wishing slow and painful deaths on every member of the cast, crew and production team. Sorry.]

ROSETTA (75) (second viewing: 65) (dir., Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne) Emilie Duquenne, Fabrizio Rongione, Olivier Gourmet [Starts with a bang, literally, then explodes into furious, relentless, handheld-camera movement. Unnecessary? Unintentional self-parody, even? Not quite, for it's an equivalent to the heroine's own relentlessness, her go-getting zeal in struggling to pull herself out of the mire (or the symbolic bog she falls into, and crawls her way out of). The film's point is that her eyes-on-the-prize single-mindedness isn't enough, needs to be softened with a sense of empathy and human decency - which is presumably why it's been labelled "Marxist" in some quarters, rather unfairly : it can be read as an attack on the excesses of 'pure' capitalism but its message is a moderate one, and its heroine isn't punished for 'betraying her class' the way Natascha Regnier is in DREAMLIFE OF ANGELS (the two characters - abrasive, prideful - have a lot in common, I thought). More important question is, Does it actually tell us very much about Rosetta as a person? Yes and no - "telling" would go against these film-makers' quasi-documentary ethic, but we do get a sense of her persistence, unsocialised-ness, occasional childishness ("Swear it's true!" she commands her mother, as if swearing would make it so), and we get an excellent sense of her physical surroundings and the rhythm of her life : its triumph, oddly enough, lies in making you not pay attention, making you watch dispassionately as if it were actually real life, actually happening to a stranger glimpsed on the street - so that, when it turns dramatic and elaborate (the boy stalking her silently on his motorbike, Banquo's Ghost-style), it has the dislocating power of the transcendent suddenly impinging on the everyday : it's exactly the feeling you get when something weird suddenly happens in real life and you think, "Wow, it feels just like a movie". Probably a lesser film than LA PROMESSE - but a purer one as well.] [Brief second-viewing comments here.]

COOKIE'S FORTUNE (45) (dir., Robert Altman) Glenn Close, Julianne Moore, Charles S. Dutton, Liv Tyler, Chris O'Donnell, Patricia Neal [Note to interested parties (you know who you are) : I've been meaning to see this for ages, but the DVD was always out when I went to the video-store. Not entirely sure it was worth the wait, though Altman's approach is alive to the quirky detail (O'Donnell's gun-belt caught in the door, delaying his tryst, or our final glimpse of Close, a telling close-up of her outstretched arm), and there's certainly something irresistible to the notion of impersonal professionalism constantly scuppered by the laid-back majesty of human failings - making it more "intimate", as Close tells her actors at the church play. Unfortunately that translates into the hokiest, most annoying kind of small-town Atmosphere, drenching everything - suicide, madness, Peeping Toms, miscarriages of justice - in the same kind of bless-my-soul, slide-guitar-driven, deep-fried Southern folksiness, while Altman's laissez-faire way with actors means only that they all perform to the best of their natural abilities : Dutton's fine, but Tyler's puppyish attempt at Spirited Young Thing is painful to watch. Close still seems to be playing Cruella de Vil half the time (it's a poorly-written part, to be fair) ; Moore plays Stan Laurel, tediously.]

LEILA (74) (dir., Dariush Mehrjui) Leila Hatami, Ali Mossafa [A passionate love story in which the lovers never even touch (not just touch sexually, never touch at all : censorship problems) ; not the least of this film's achievements is the way it walks a tightrope between critiquing an unjust social system and working within it (I saw it as part of an officially-sanctioned Iranian Film Festival). Its main weapons are a sense of humour, attention to detail and, above all, a meticulous mapping of the heroine's emotional state, showing just when and why she falters, stands firm, cracks under pressure, self-destructs (or of course does the right thing, for the film doesn't judge her, up to and including the ambivalent last line) ; you might almost say its richness works as political subversion - Leila's such a complete character, and so obviously the architect of her own (mis)fortune, that she makes the action specific to herself (a different woman might've acted differently), camouflaging the polemic - but this kind of richness needs no justification, political or otherwise (compare it, say, with KADOSH, which treats many of the same themes - sexist society, women seen as child-bearers - but can only reduce its women to blank-faced victims). Mehrjui's handling is exemplary, working poetic touches (mid-scene dissolves, a character talking to camera) and emotional indicators - a teapot overflowing, a string of pearls shattering, the screech of constant phone-calls standing in for a nagging mother-in-law - within a careful, methodical style of chilling simplicity. It's a message-movie, but it moves with the panther-like precision of a Chabrol, cutting clinically from detail to detail as Leila prepares the bedroom for her husband and his second wife (spreading the bed-sheets, removing all photos of herself), each humiliating cut like a slash to the throat. Superior stuff, though the middle third does drag a little.]

AFTER LIFE (61) (dir., Hirokazu Koreeda) Arata, Erika Oda, Susumu Terajima [Poetry of the quotidian - the intense joy of a cool breeze on a hot day, stuff like that - in gratifying doses, and a very fluently-made film as well (crisp editing, mobile camera) ; intriguing premise makes for a strong start (even if spending Eternity with only one memory sounds like a recipe for insanity more than anything), but it gets repetitive and wears out its welcome, especially when it moves into half-baked Cinema analogies. Long before the end, uncomfortable questions were starting to gnaw at me : why are they bothering to recreate memories if they've got it all on video anyway? how come some people are allowed to decide after the deadline? and, despite the obligatory dig at Disneyland - Real experience good, Manufactured bad - aren't the heroes engaged in precisely that kind of hollow theme-park approximation?]

LIMBO (59) (dir., John Sayles) David Strathairn, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Vanessa Martinez [One of those films - TRUE CRIME is another - where you admire the unusual, possibly perverse qualities of the design even while conceding that it doesn't work, and probably never could. Sayles weaves a pageant of Alaska, a big tent holding a procession of different viewpoints, going from voice to voice (most obviously in the bar-room scene, where he cuts between unrelated conversations) - the fishermen facing obsolescence, the developers who want to turn the whole thing into a theme park, the outsiders who've come in from Seattle and points south, the ex-locals who got out as soon as they could, the groups of tourists wandering through it all - each with a wholly different concept of what the state means to them ; then, having built this up for over an hour, he suddenly strips away everything but the one incontestable fact about Alaska - its physical ruggedness, the last-frontier quality that tests men (and women) to the limits of their endurance, its status as a place where you're forced to confront your own strength, or die trying. It's ingenious, listening to the warring sides then cutting to the one thing uniting them (the essence of the place, you might say), though it also amounts to a jarringly disjointed film and an unsatisfying cop-out - Sayles has no solution for the state's future (hence the title, and the open ending), though there's clearly an environmentalist thrust in his back-to-Nature climax. He can still write dialogue, though - Joe recalling a week on a fishing-boat, Donna talking about her "moments of grace" - and Strathairn's evolved into a most eloquent interpreter ; even his muttered non-replies have character.]

NEW ROSE HOTEL (54) (dir., Abel Ferrara) Christopher Walken, Willem Dafoe, Asia Argento [Argento looks at the world with voluptuous scorn, like a dirty-minded 16-year-old princess who knows she's going to live forever. Walken limps around with a cane, tossing off addled bits of faux-philosophy ; Dafoe sneers affectionately and asks him if he's ever going to find "that pie-shaped wedge that's missing from your psyche" ("Psyches? These things are for idlers and dreamers!" comes the reply). The film itself courts abstraction till it's unfortunately incomprehensible (esp. the last half-hour), but it takes more than that to dim the pungent sleaze of the early scenes in a naked-red-lightbulb dive, willowy chanteuses singing morbid songs ("Her eyes are black / Her hair is black / Her fingernails / She paints them black"), or the casual lunacy of the sequence where conspirators Dafoe and Walken meet in a restaurant to discuss their plans - a scene that begins with Walken saying "I wrote a haiku in honour of the occasion" and ends with the line "Waiter! Coleslaw for everybody in the house!". You gotta love it.]

BESHKEMPIR / THE ADOPTED SON (63) (dir., Aktan Abdykalykov) Mirlan Abdykalykov [Got a little nervous, I admit, when my first-ever Kyrgyzstani film opened with a slow pan down a multi-coloured rug - seemed for a moment like we might be back in the beautiful but abstruse place known as GABBEH-Land. What follows, fortunately (or unfortunately, according to taste) is a lot more straightforward, and a lot more lyrical as well - an evocation of a village childhood with a feeling for the way days melt into one another, the constant simmer and bustle of kids at play (arguments flaring and instantly forgotten), the contours of a gentle, pastoral landscape, the sounds of birdsong, cackling chickens, chirping crickets, dogs barking in the night, the patter of beans dropped into a sieve. Nothing is forced - even such devices as the use of colour for privileged moments (and, uh, multi-coloured rugs), standing out like individual memories, or the narrative moving from Birth to Death, all occur with a minimum of fuss - which is probably why it taps into some real feeling near the end, when the boy's reconciled with his family (shame it's undercut by a cutesy puppy-love coda). Not a lot to it, but it's pleasing.]

SAFE SEX (47) (dir., Thanasis Papathanasiou / Michalis Reppas) Spiros Papadopoulos, Anna Panayiotopoulou, Michalis Reppas [The biggest local hit for decades in Greece, which is why I'm including it here - though I doubt it'll be exported, being heavily reliant on local TV stars. Rudimentary sex farce in a SHORT CUTS-style framework, with fashionably frank talk cloaking such old chestnuts as the adulterous couple who get stuck (via an inconvenient muscle-spasm) in mid-shag. Competently crafted, but the wit is rather mechanical.]

THE IRON GIANT (72) (dir., Brad Bird) with the voices of Eli Marienthal, Harry Connick Jr., Jennifer Aniston [Such a likeable little hero, smart and resourceful with a welcome touch of goofiness (I love it when he gets all hyper on his first espresso) ; wonderful character animation really, with a real eye for the delightful detail (the way he twirls the cable while speaking on the phone, or scratches the back of his head in momentary thought). The only problem is he's far too much of a 90s kid, nor does the film - for all its Red Menace talk and attractively clean (i.e. "old-fashioned") drawing style - feel much like its supposed period in terms of attitudes (though a faithful reconstruction would admittedly have bewildered its target audience) ; still, there's enough incidental fun to take us through the less emotive early scenes - before the plot's kicked in or the Giant's developed much of a personality - after which the film pretty much plays itself. It's a charmer, wide-eyed and open-hearted, full of joyous good humour and apparently untainted by the contrivances of political correctness. Too bad it pulls its punches on the militarism - carefully distinguishing it from patriotism - though.]

BEING JOHN MALKOVICH (74) (dir., Spike Jonze) John Cusack, Cameron Diaz, Catherine Keener, John Malkovich [Funny thing : a film rating consistently lower while I was watching it than after it was over (I'd shave off 1-2 percentage points, going solely on how much I enjoyed it qua film). It has its longueurs and flat bits, at least till the last 20 minutes (aided by Carter Burwell's yearning score) turn into the loveliest mix of fantasy and heartbreak since TWELVE MONKEYS ; but it has a wonderful integrity as well, never feeling the need to apologise to the unimaginative - and of course it's fascinating as (among other things) a twisted variation on celebrity culture, the way we feed on celebrities (even if we don't really know who they are : being a celebrity is enough), burrow into their private lives, dehumanise them ("I'll meet you in Malkovich in one hour"), finally demand control over them. It's a question of brand-naming, the way Malkovich is reduced to "Malkovich", repeated mantra-like till it's leached of meaning (tying in with the way Craig keeps repeating "Maxine", as if thinking - wrongly - that he can possess her by possessing her name), and the startling, humorous clash when brand-name and product start to diverge : why are we surprised to see "John Malkovich" pal around with Charlie Sheen? is Cameron Diaz still "Cameron Diaz" if she's unrecognisable? Not quite as original as some have claimed, perhaps, though certainly unusual in movie terms - it's the kind of wheeze that might've made a Woody Allen short story (like "The Kugelmass Episode") in his "New Yorker" days (reminiscent also of Boris Karloff playing Jonathan Brewster - who killed a man "because he said I looked like Boris Karloff" in the original Broadway production of "Arsenic and Old Lace"!) ; rather patchy, esp. on second viewing, but treasurable for its blissed-out sense of daring, the casual way it treats (i.e. ignores) its same-sex Hot Potato, its unexpected potency as a touching tale of unrequited love, and its incidental flights of fancy - Elijah's flashback, the story of Floor 7 1/2, etc. Even if the best scene is a variation on a George Michael / Mary J. Blige music video.]

DEEP BLUE SEA (57) (dir., Renny Harlin) Thomas Jane, Saffron Burrows, Samuel L. Jackson, LL Cool J [One Renny Harlin is worth a dozen Joel Schumachers, even if he does have a mile-wide sadistic streak (remember how we got a glimpse of the smiling, unsuspecting passengers just before their plane blew up in DIE HARD 2?). JAWS doesn't really come into this red-blooded, unpretentious shark movie, though the opening scene rather cleverly plays, then trumps, the inevitable connection (we think the characters are safe once they're out of the sea and on their boat ; guess again). Closer to a cocktail of THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE and ANACONDA - no doubt what the CGI hot-shots were thinking of when they have the sharks lash out lightning-fast at their victims - and surprisingly effective, considering the unpromising nature of those ingredients (not to mention the JURASSIC-style clichés inherent in the set-up). Action scenes are intricate, lines suitably portentous - "Sharks are the oldest creatures on the planet. From the time when the world was just flesh and teeth" - the shock moments really shock and the characters are really put through the mill (remember what we said about a sadistic streak?). Good gory fun from an under-valued director ; now will someone please give him the TRUE LIES sequel?...]