Writer-director John Sayles did a rush job on this Chandler-esque mystery about corporate corruption during a Colorado gubernatorial race, in order to get his Bush-bashing picture into theaters before the election. But with so many informative political documentaries in release, it seems misguided if not downright perverse to resort to a 60-year-old dramatic template as a form of persuasion, while congratulating the viewer for having the right opinions. Some of the cast are fun to watch (Kris Kristofferson, Danny Huston as the gumshoe), though the hackneyed script makes others look ham-fisted (Chris Cooper, Richard Dreyfuss, Daryl Hannah). With Thora Birch and Tim Roth. R, 129 min. (JR) Read more
In 1998 educators at Whitwell Middle School in rural Tennessee decided to teach their students about the Holocaust by asking them to collect six million paper clips, so they might grasp the enormity of the Jewish death toll. This excellent idea grew in momentum and ambition, attracted coverage from around the world, and brought about this low-tech documentary by Elliot Berlin and Joe Fab. It’s a story worth telling, though once the participants and the filmmakers start basking in their virtue, the material begins to feel overextended. G, 88 min. (JR) Read more
This New Agey production combines all sorts of digital effects with sound bites from experts on quantum physics, neurophysiology, molecular biology, and metaphysics. Intercut with all this is a fictional narrative about a deaf-mute photographer (Marlee Matlin) that’s meant to illustrate the various concepts, a strategy that sometimes works but sometimes doesn’t. This is fun, instructive, and stimulating, but it’s never beautiful and it’s less original than the three filmmakers (Mark Vincente, Betsy Chasse, and William Arntz) seem to think. The Hollywood head trips of the 60s are a clear antecedent, for better and for worse. 111 min. (JR) Read more
Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier (Dogville) persuades veteran director and old friend Jorgen Leth to shoot five different remakes of his 14-minute film The Perfect Human (1968), each governed by a set of highly restrictive rules: the first must be limited to 12 frames a shot; the second has to be filmed in the worst place on earth (which turns out to be Bombay); the fourth must be animated (the best of the bunch, incidentally, employing some of the artists who created Waking Life); and so on. All of the remakes are shown complete, but we see the original only in snatches. An ersatz experimental film and an ersatz documentary, this is too frivolous to explore any of its ideas. But it’s never dull, enhanced as well as limited by von Trier’s signature sadism, which is softer here than in his fiction films. 90 min. (JR) Read more
The only excuse for remaking a good foreign movie for the American market is to make it better; otherwise it’s an exercise in cynicism. Two of the cynics in this case are producers George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh (Soderbergh also worked on the script pseudonymously). Last time around they squeezed most of the good stuff out of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, and this time they’re adapting Nine Queens (2000), Fabian Bielinsky’s very entertaining Argentinean thriller about two con artists that anticipated the country’s economic collapse. The filmmakers have lovingly retained and expanded on that film’s only flaws, some implausible plot details. But even without the same cultural significance, it’s still a good story, and the interesting cast—John C. Reilly, Diego Luna, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jonathan Tucker, and Peter Mullan—helps us overlook some of its holes. Gregory Jacobs directed. R, 87 min. (JR) Read more
While it didn’t convince me to give up corn dogs, Ron Mann’s 100-minute celebration of actor Woody Harrelson’s Simple Organic Living tour (a bus-and-bicycle caravan spreading the gospel of holistic living along the Pacific coast) is a highly entertaining form of ecological agitpropradical but accessible. Mann’s shrewdest ploy is to shift his focus from Harrelson to Steve Clark, his junk-food-addicted production assistant, whose comic encounters with strangers along the way look staged but purportedly weren’t. Great music and animation plus a pivotal cameo by Ken Kesey helped make this a popular favorite at the 2003 Toronto film festival. (JR) Read more
A teenage girl (Addie Land) and her mother (Cara Seymour) are forced to move in with the mother’s mom, who owns a rickety shack on the outskirts of a Pacific northwest town. Miserable at home, the girl becomes involved with a boy at school (Noel Fleiss) and begins to idolize his rich parents (Bruce Davison and Mary Kay Place), overlooking their problems. This sincere first feature by writer-director Enid Zentelis is enlivened by Gary Farmer’s wonderful performance as the mother’s boyfriend, but it’s ultimately hamstrung by storytelling that seems both underdeveloped and overdetermined. PG-13, 86 min. (JR) Read more
I missed the notorious Cannes premiere, when many critics trashed the film. After that, Vincent Gallo cut his highly self-regarding, handcrafted road movie by 26 minutes, and I have to admit I find the results more interesting than not. The film’s flaws are the exclusive property of its producer, director, writer, cinematographer, editor, and star, and if some elements are irritating, at least they’re not borrowed goods. The character Gallo playsa semiautistic motorcycle racer driving back to the west coast from a New England event, picking up ravenous stray women and trying to deal with a traumatically concluded relationshipisn’t very interesting, but what Gallo does with sound, image, chutzpah, Ted Curson’s Tears for Dolphy, and the windshield of his own van has its moments. With Chloe Sevigny and Cheryl Tiegs. 90 min. (JR) Read more
Ernst Lubitsch’s first talkie and first operetta, costarring Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald, shares with the other two 1929 features showing at the Music Box on Thursday the excitement of movies being reinvented, so that silence as well as sound becomes a brand-new plaything (in contradistinction to “silent” movies, which usually had musical accompaniment). A study in playfulness, this fantasy about a country preoccupied with its queen getting married actually has a dog barking out half a chorus of one number, perfectly in tune, and the pre-Code erotics and sexual politics seem pretty advanced in spots. Secondary leads Lillian Roth and Lupino Lane offer some acrobatic low comedy as servants whose best song is called “Let’s Be Common.” 110 min. Also on the program is the silent short Big Business (1929), Laurel and Hardy’s classic grudge match with Jimmy Finlayson. Read more
I don’t have much patience with colleagues who dismiss Charlie Chaplin by saying that Buster Keaton was better (whatever that means). To the best of my knowledge, with the arguable exception of Dickens, no one else in the history of art has shown us in greater detail what it means to be poor, and certainly no one else in the history of movies has played to a more diverse audience or evolved more ambitiously from one feature to the next. The opening sequence in Chaplin’s second Depression masterpiece (1936), of the Tramp on the assembly line, is possibly his greatest slapstick encounter with the 20th century, and as Belgian filmmakers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne have brilliantly observed, the famous shot of his being run through machinery equates him with a strip of film. Still, there’s more hope here than in Chaplin’s preceding City Lights, perhaps because this time the Tramp has Paulette Goddard, another plucky urchin, to keep him company. 89 min. (JR)
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First-time director Vadim Perelman directs his own adaptation of Andre Dubus III’s novela tragic melodrama about real estatewith a fine sense of balance. Jennifer Connelly plays a recovering alcoholic who loses her house after an error is made in her tax assessment; Ben Kingsley is an Iranian colonel in exile who acquires the house at auction and won’t sell it back. Responsibility for the ensuing tragedy is so finely calibrated that neither can be comprehensively blamed or exculpated. Shohreh Aghdashloo is especially good as the colonel’s wife; Ron Eldard is also fine as a cop and family man who falls for the dispossessed woman, although the script doesn’t accord his character as much depth as it does the central figures. R, 126 min. (JR) Read more
A dozen Warner Brothers cartoon classics, including Chuck Jones’s imperishable What’s Opera, Doc? and One Froggy Evening as well as There They Go-Go-Go, Little Beau Pepe, Rabbit Seasoning, No Barking, Rabbit’s Kin, Fractured Leghorn, Zoom and Board, Bunker Hill Bunny, Heaven Scent, and Hot Cross Bunny. (JR) Read more
While it’s a bit programmatic for my taste, this 1968 black comedy in black and white is undeniably creepy — once director Juraj Herz enters the fractured mind of his protagonist, he refuses to budge. Based on a novel by Ladislav Fuks (who cowrote the screenplay with Herz) and set in Prague before and during the German occupation, it concerns a smugly bourgeois crematorium operator (Rudolf Hrusinsky) who loses his sanity and drifts into collaboration with the Nazis, ultimately turning on his half-Jewish wife and their children. An outlying figure of the Czech New Wave, Herz demonstrates an undeniable flair for telegraphic, almost subliminal editing and deep-focus mise en scene. In Czech with subtitles. 95 min. (JR) Read more
With a minimum of dialogue, Francisco Athie’s 2002 experimental narrative feature follows the spiritual journey of an elderly Mexican miner who’s fatally injured in a cave-in, then visited by an androgynous, extraterrestriallike Mayan fairy who helps him prepare for death. I loved the beauty and simplicity of this film’s special effects as well as its sound and music, but its underlying meaning, which seems less fresh, didn’t hold me as much. Certain scenes involving occult rituals reminded me of Tarkovsky and Paradjanov; other sequences suggested an Eraserhead with fewer laughs. But on the whole it’s a triumph of style over content. In Maya with subtitles. 86 min. (JR) Read more
A young man (Billy Crudup) comes to terms with his dying, self-mythologizing father (Albert Finney) in this fantasy directed by Tim Burton (Ed Wood, Mars Attacks!) from a script by John August based on Daniel Wallace’s novel. The illustrations of the old man’s tall tales would seem tailor-made for Burton, a magical realist par excellence, but there’s not much substance underlying the whimsy. The Alabama setting is as phony as the one in Forrest Gump, and for all of Finney’s effectiveness as a yarn-spinning geezer, his whoppers seem disconnected from his character and each othera weakness Burton fails to resolve with an awkward Felliniesque finale. With Ewan McGregor (as the father’s younger self), Jessica Lange, Helena Bonham Carter, Danny DeVito, and Steve Buscemi. PG-13, 110 min. (JR) Read more
