TIFF 2002 RUNS FROM SEPTEMBER 5-14, 2002
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I'm largely impassive towards L' Idole, a Gallic production directed by an Australian and co-starring two Americans of different ethnicities who admirably perform their parts in French. Leelee Sobieski's task is made more difficult by the role's requirement of her to deliver foreign-language dialogue in a tertiary accent, as the native New Yorker plays an Australian touring France with a theatre company. (I'm not enough of a linguist to judge Sobieski's technical achievements here.) Sarah Silver (Sobieski) moves into a Paris co-op and befriends next-door neighbour Mr. Zao (James Hong), an elderly Asian gentleman who comes out of retirement, so to speak, to wait on Sarah hand and foot. L' Idole thus bears a resemblance to the Sobieski starrer My First Mister but replaces Hollywood bullshit with European humbug--the last half-hour is full of stock ambiguities and the filmmakers mistake Sarah's coquettishness for depth of character. (And, it must be said, the moment in which Sarah tells Mr. Zao that they will never make love drains the movie of its bewitching sexual tension.) Save a Storytelling-esque subplot involving a duplicitous little girl, the picture draws its power from the worldly Hong, perhaps best known on these shores as the centuries-old villain from Big Trouble in Little China; Hong overcomes L' Idole's tendency to dismiss Chinese courtliness out of hand--cavalier treatment of Mr. Zao by every other character, in other words--with a quiet dignity that speaks to the same. I just hope it's not his swan song, because going out as the sage equivalent to Ghost World's Seymour is no kind of curtain for this screen legend. **1/2 (out of four) | 110 mins. PROGRAM: Contemporary World Cinema | SHOWTIMES: Saturday, September 7, 6:30 PM, ISABEL BADER THEATRE; Monday, September 9, 9:00 AM, UPTOWN 2

Almost every French actress I can rhyme off without help from the audience is in the cast of François Ozon's 8 Femmes, a delightfully odd murder mystery with song-and-dance interludes--imagine if John Waters had directed Clue. The film takes place during Christmastime in 1950s France at a country manor where various women have gathered to celebrate the holidays with Marcel, the only significant man in any of their lives. But Marcel has been stabbed in the back (literally), and a snow drift outside leaves the eight femmes of the title stranded together with nothing to do other than accuse each other of his murder. Was it Marcel's loveless wife (Catherine Deneuve)? One of his off-kilter daughters (Virginie Ledoyen and Ludivine Sagnier)? The "ugly" sister-in-law (Isabelle Huppert, donning horn-rimmed glasses) or patently dishonest mother-in-law (Danielle Darrieux)? His promiscuous sister by blood (Fanny Ardant)? Or did the butler--rather, either of the two maidservants (Firmine Richard and Emmanuelle Béart)--do it? With a plot that strikes as stream-of-consciousness and musical numbers that do, too, 8 Femmes indicates little desire to change the world, but it works as a frothy, hyper-theatrical experience. Compounding the amusement are the sparse, candy-coloured sets--which bring to mind Gold Key's exiguously-drawn comics from yesteryear--and watching so many famously sedate performers let their hair down; one can't imagine the Meg Ryan remake of The Women, in lieu of which this film was made, being half as much fun. *** (out of four) | 103 mins. PROGRAM: Special Presentations | SHOWTIMES: Tuesday, September 10, 09:45 PM, VISA SCREENING ROOM (ELGIN); Thursday, September 12, 3:30 PM, UPTOWN 1

The remarkable Raising Victor Vargas (formerly Long Way Home) stars soon-to-be somebody Victor Rasuk as the titular Victor, a 17-year-old raising the ire of his strict abuela (Altagracia Guzman) during the long, hot New York summer by virtue of having outgrown her idle threats. As the film opens, Victor asks out the beautiful Judy (Judy Marte) at a public pool in a pre-emptive bid to salvage his reputation for getting it on with a neighbourhood lass nicknamed "Fat Donna." When Judy shoots him down, he naturally devotes his waking life to the pursuit of her affection, which gives Victor's grandmother another hollow reason to believe that he's a bad influence on his younger brother and sister (Silvestre Rasuk and Krystal Rodriguez). For the first couple of minutes of Raising Victor Vargas, you're worried--or titillated--that Larry Clark might have sparked an imitator, but even though I'm a devout Clark fan, I feel the premier Peeping Tom of American youth could learn a thing or two from Peter Sollett, who makes his feature-length writing and directing debut here. Like Clark, he ekes transparent performances lacking in narcissism from inexperienced talent, but Sollett's characters are a kindler, gentler breed--Victor's 'make love, not war' attitude (some contentious debates with his elders notwithstanding) has a revolutionary quality in particular for the story's Lower East Side setting (which Tim Orr photographs with the same sepia brilliance he brought to George Washington). At the risk of hyperbole, I treasured every single scene of this film, especially the tender exchanges between the Vargas boys (played by brothers in real life); ending on a note so low key as to induce goosebumps, Raising Victor Vargas is filled with veracious observations that add up to more than just another entry in another year's coming-of-age sweepstakes--much, much more. A goddamn poem, actually, one that transcends age, race, and finally genre. ***1/2 (out of four) | 88 mins. PROGRAM: Contemporary World Cinema | SHOWTIMES: Saturday, September 7, 9:00 PM, UPTOWN 2; Monday, September 9, 2:00 PM, VARSITY 3

They had more number-one hits than Elvis Presley, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and The Beach Boys combined. They were...The Funk Brothers? That reversal of expectations, which occurs in the opening voice-over of Paul Justman's Standing in the Shadows of Motown, is one of the few attempts at clever that actually works in this documentary about the rotating panel of studio musicians who helped turn Berry Gordy's Detroit record company into a hit factory. In the film's first reel, producer/drummer Steve Jordan offers that it wouldn't matter if "Deputy Dog" had sung the songs on Gordy's label, they were unassailable compositions to begin with, and Justman's approach suggests a determination to prove him right, since he peppers Standing in the Shadows of Motown with new renditions of such old favourites as "Do You Love Me? (Now That I Can Dance)" by the spastic likes of Bootsy Collins--in substitution of any substantial vintage performance footage at that. Needless to say, one does not expect to hear current guitar-wielding R&B-gospel sensation Ben Harper butcher The Temptations (after he has delivered the most banal explanation of soul music conceivable, one hastens to add) in a movie that purports to tell the untold story of Motown. (Granted, it does, but at what price? Even the topic of 'Nam--a war that was practically scored by The Funk Brothers--steps aside for a Chaka Khan number.) In addition to the youth-pandering cameos, a handful of the stories told by the Brothers Funk are re-enacted in sitcom-quality vignettes--either Justman took the adage "show don't tell" to literal heart or he doesn't realize how sufficiently photogenic his title subjects (among them Eddie Willis and Joe Hunter) are when they're reminiscing. From the rave reviews received by Standing in the Shadows of Motown thus far, it appears that there are suckers out there for the picture's brand of shrink-wrapped nostalgia. I'm not one of them. *1/2 (out of four) | 108 mins. PROGRAM: Special Presentations | SHOWTIMES: Wednesday, September 11, 7:00 PM, VISA SCREENING ROOM (ELGIN); Thursday, September 12, 4:00 PM, UPTOWN 3

Shuffling the picture's sequences like a deck of cards, Atom Egoyan practices postmodernism yet again in Ararat, but this time it smacks of a diversionary tactic--a film about the Armenian Genocide was Egoyan's dream project, yet he maintains his intellectual distance throughout Ararat, transparently terrified of its ostensible subject matter. Drawing from his well-stocked stable of thespians while tossing a few fresh faces into the mix, Egoyan casts wife Arsinée Khanjian as an art history critic named Ani, newcomer David Alpay as her son, Raffi, bombshell Marie-Josée Croze as her stepdaughter (who happens to be Raffi's lover), and Exotica vets Bruce Greenwood and Elias Koteas (in the film's most compelling performance) as actors in a docudrama being directed by Edward (Charles Aznavour) and produced by Rouben (Eric Bogosian) for which Ani is the technical supervisor. (Also recycled from Egoyan's Exotica are issues with customs in a hollow framing story co-starring Christopher Plummer.) The movie-within-the-movie depicts the Turkish government's mass murder of its Armenian citizens, and unfortunately this is our only window into that atrocity: through scenes we know to be thus in an epic that's continually criticized by Ani for taking poetic license and looks mockingly artificial besides. The French Lieutenant's Woman gimmick says more about the stench of Oscar bait--with Greenwood's American doctor character the typical white saviour in a foreign land--than anything else, and it reduces the victims of a holocaust to extras on Stage 9--more crucially, even the depictions of what is explicitly "faked" violence lack the visceral shock of Schindler's List: politeness is no way to raise our ire or even send us to the library. (Welcome to Canada, I suppose.) Too timid to bring a sense of closure to an ugly chapter of the twentieth century, Ararat finds Egoyan up to his old tricks with nothing up his sleeve. ** (out of four) | 116 mins. PROGRAM: Galas | SHOWTIMES: Thursday, September 5, 7:15 PM, UPTOWN 1; Thursday, September 5, 8:00 PM, ROY THOMSON HALL

A loose remake of Jean-Pierre Melville's Bob Le Flambeur (director Neil Jordan seems to have cast Tcheky Karyo opposite Nick Nolte for the way "Bob le flambeur" rolls off his tongue), The Good Thief is a minor work from Jordan that benefits, as most movies would, from Chris Menges' cinematography. Nolte inherits Roger Duchesne's role as Bob Montagne, an expert gambler and exquisite larcenist who hooks himself on heroin between scores out of what appears to be sheer boredom. His rubber arm is twisted until he joins a band of novice thieves in the jacking of a Monte Carlo casino, and that's The Good Thief in a nutshell. The film, as you may have gathered, steers the caper genre on course--Nolte also sticks to clothes that fit him glove-like in portraying a fatigued man of poor hygiene, though he's exceptionally good here. With originality in short supply, the devil had better be in the details, but there's a nagging simplicity to Jordan's screenplay keeping the pivotal heist--to say nothing of the film's only female character, a 17-year-old prostitute (played by the appealing Nutsa Kukhianidze) rag-dolled from one man to the next--from capturing the imagination. Kukhianidze never gets a foothold on The Good Thief and neither do we, although one can't deny that both actress and film are easy to watch. **1/2 (out of four) | 109 mins. PROGRAM: Galas | SHOWTIMES: Friday, September 6, 9:30 PM, ROY THOMSON HALL; Saturday, September 7, 12:00 PM, UPTOWN 2

Love Liza is a potent movie about addiction, and I'm growing fonder of it by the hour; the film rises above some hoary tropes to become almost peerlessly unsettling. As a man who lost his wife and can't bring himself to read her suicide note, Philip Seymour Hoffman once again dissolves on-screen from a clean-cut corporate drone into something sweaty and ticcy stuck between sleep and awake, but here, without the reprieves you get from his strange behaviour in such ensemble pieces as Happiness, Hoffman's performance becomes confrontational--we're forced to take a position on this guy once and for all. Hoffman's Wilson Joel reduces himself to human pudding through gasoline huffing, an arduous habit the film treats comically at first by having the widow blame his sulphuric odour on a model airplane hobby, which of course requires Wilson to go out and actually buy a model airplane when a co-worker introduces him to an R/C enthusiast (the very authentic Jack Kehler). Before we know it we've been snookered into a cautionary tale far more disquieting than, say, Requiem for a Dream, because the film acknowledges, in an almost Hitchcockian manner, the treacherousness of the mundane. It's unfortunate that first-time director Todd Louiso (he played the meek record store employee in High Fidelity) and writer Gordy Hoffman (Philip Seymour's older brother) resorted to romanticizing the dead spouse to a Hollywood degree (not only is she impossibly beautiful, but our only substantial glimpse of her is a nude one), though it appears the aim of the film's poetic conclusion to undercut her. Depressing but rewarding, the experience of Love Liza is a difficult one to encapsulate. ***1/2 (out of four) | 90 mins. PROGRAM: Contemporary World Cinema | SHOWTIMES: Sunday, September 8, 7:00 PM, UPTOWN 3; Monday, September 9, 3:00 PM, VARSITY 8

I find it amusing that people continue to misspeak Auto Focus as Out of Focus in my presence, what with both titles applying to some degree. The former insinuates the vanity of the film's subject, "Hogan's Heroes" star Bob Crane, the latter the shambles his life became, and aye, there's the rub: it's too easy to tag Auto Focus. Greg Kinnear is affable as Crane, who used his fame and fortune to get laid as often as possible, documenting it all with a newfangled technology called videotape supplied him by bottom-feeder John "Carpy" Carpenter (Willem Dafoe, amazing again). In the latest issue of Creative Screenwriting, script doctors Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski (self-appointed rulers of the biopic as the co-writers of Ed Wood, The People vs. Larry Flynt, and Man on the Moon) touch on a difference of philosophy they had with Auto Focus director Paul Schrader that boils down to Schrader's controversial belief that addicts are born not made. By imposing this thinking on Michael Gerbosi's screenplay (adapted from the Robert Graysmith book The Murder of Bob Crane), Schrader imbues the early frames of Auto Focus with a sad inevitability--chided by his highschool-sweetheart wife (Rita Wilson) for keeping a collection of skin mags in the garage, he makes excuses as desperate as those of an alcoholic, and we intuit that the celebrity he'll achieve through "Hogan's Heroes" will be an enabler above all else. But once the downward spiral comes to pass, Auto Focus bears out as your typical junkie opera with tits instead of needles, right down to the proverbial pledges of going straight. Carpy emerges as the real tragic figure, a human barnacle--one pines for a glimpse of his life post-Crane, prohibited by the picture's impatient ending. **1/2 (out of four) | 107 mins. PROGRAM: Special Presentations | SHOWTIMES: Sunday, September 8, 9:00 PM, UPTOWN 1; Tuesday, September 10, 9:00 AM, VARSITY 8

As much as I don't mind Phillip Noyce's Jack Ryan films, they failed to live up to the artistic promise held by Dead Calm, the claustrophobic Aussie thriller that brought Nicole Kidman to the attention of Hollywood in addition to Noyce. Well, after a decade or so of marginal filmmaking in Hollywood (and in the Hollywood style), Noyce returns to his homeland--and reminds us that he can be a pretty effective director--with Rabbit-Proof Fence, a movie that will grab your attention immediately for Peter Gabriel's redolent score. The picture covers the early part of a dark and too-long period in Australia's history, when the "half-caste" children of Aborigines were taken from their parents and placed in Catholic reformation camps, all in attempt to discourage the mixing of white settlers with indigenous peoples and, eventually, phase out the non-pure breeds of either race. Three industrious little girls escape one such institution, finding their way back to their mothers by following along the rabbit-proof fence that bisects the countryside; it's a 1200-mile journey they're committed to making on foot. Noyce is overreliant on the Dutch angle, but he maintains visual interest in the repetitious outback setting through some fantastical compositions, and the human drama is always compelling. In the tradition of early works by Peter Weir and Nicholas Roeg, Rabbit-Proof Fence lacks subtlety, probably a by-product of Noyce's prolonged exposure to American cinema; it gets us politically up in arms, though, and that matters. Featuring a charismatic performance by "Crocodile" Dundee's David Gulpilil as a tracker. *** (out of four) | 94 mins. PROGRAM: Special Presentations | SHOWTIMES: Sunday, September 8, 6:30 PM, UPTOWN 1; Tuesday, September 10, 12:00 PM, CUMBERLAND 3

This portrait of the artist as a young man posits Hitler as your semi-average disenfranchised youth. Living in squalor at an army outpost, feeling burned by the Treaty of Versailles, he befriends Max Rothman (John Cusack), the dashing, one-armed Jewish gentleman who runs the local art gallery--an abandoned warehouse with a leaky roof. (Working conditions are tough in postwar Munich, even for the upper class.) The result is the kind of thing you watch with your hands over your eyes but peeking between your fingers; Hitler (Noah Taylor) is determined to prove to Rothman that "I'm not an anti-Semite," partly because he's desperate for Max to exhibit his expressionistic pencil sketches. What I can't wrap my head around--and what I appreciate--about Max is its sticky conclusion: a misreading could find acclaimed screenwriter Menno Meyjes, making his directorial debut here, blaming his title character for the existence of the Third Reich. With that ending, Meyjes also follows Billy Wilder's rule of screenwriting "Don't hang around" to striking effect. John Cusack is likable as Max, but the role adapts to his tiresome persona; while the normally droll Taylor finds little humour in Hitler, he does more humanizing than demonizing--he plays him like the self-serious nerd with aspirations to student-body president. Max overcomes easy ironies though not reams of somewhat dull exposition, but any film that can be said to feature a sequence in which teddy bears are tossed into a meat grinder definitely brushes up against greatness. *** (out of four) | 106 mins. PROGRAM: Special Presentations | SHOWTIMES: Tuesday, September 10, 7:00 PM, VISA SCREENING ROOM (ELGIN); Thursday, September 12, 12:30 PM, UPTOWN 1

Making Happiness look like Dumbo, Ken Park does not push the envelope--Ken Park runs the envelope through a paper shredder, douses it in lighter fluid, and sets it aflame. It then urinates on the ashes. The latest from Larry Clark, the film was co-directed by Steven Soderbergh's occasional cinematographer Ed Lachman, and if you're worried that this Zaphod Beeblebrox would result in Clark's voice being muted, think again: we sense the pair playing a wicked game of one-upmanship. And who or what is a Ken Park? He's the Big Chill figure uniting several mixed-up youths, however incidentally. The people in the photograph that Shawn (James Bullard) elucidates through opening narration are all acquaintances of "Crap Neck" ("Ken Park spelled backwards"), though they socialize together only rarely on-screen, for too busy is Shawn performing oral sex on a much older woman, Claude (Stephen Jasso) averting his physically abusive father (Wade Andrew Williams), Peaches (Tiffany Limos, far less irritating than she was in Clark's Teenage Caveman) averting her psychologically abusive pop (Julio Oscar Mechoso), and Tate (James Ransome) averting his grandparents. Each sequence in Ken Park, a sex-themed anthology, more or less builds to an orgasm, but the climax becomes less an occasion of joy as the film wears on. Unlike Clark's Kids, Ken Park takes the pleasure out of intercourse without preaching against promiscuity--rather, what you have here is an anti-family picture that gets Reefer Madness hysterical about procreation in its dogged march of dysfunction. (Just wait 'til you get a load of the last line in the picture.) Clark's voyeuristic grit and Lachman's slick visual sense are an odd but happy marriage: it's the most 'Hollywood' kiddie porno the former has made yet, almost functioning as a comment on the next step in Britney Spears. While Clark and Lachman will be taking heat for Ken Park's explicitness for years to come, their first priority is to exploit our collective squeamishness; with this one X-worthy, ultimately heartbreaking black comedy, they become Catherine Breillat's American soulmates. God bless you, Larry. ***1/2 (out of four) | 96 mins. PROGRAM: Special Presentations | SHOWTIMES: Tuesday, September 10, 9:00 PM, VARSITY 8; Saturday, September 14, 3:30 PM, UPTOWN 1

Punch-Drunk Love or, Un Redemption de Adam Sandler. Paul Thomas Anderson's latest film finds him at both his most experimental and least windy--the tip-off is a running time of well under two hours. But first: Adam Sandler. When you hear Oscar buzz around a box-office draw, it generally means they've repressed everything that made them popular. (Jim Carrey in The Majestic, for example; Carrey may do a mean James Stewart impersonation, but he's no Jimmy himself.) Sandler has not been cast against type as Barry in Punch-Drunk Love, he's simply been micromanaged--after Barry's first sudden outburst, you'll find it difficult to imagine anyone else in the role, since Anderson needed someone who could go from 0-90 in a flash, a basset hound with a rabid streak. (Sandler's excellent, if that isn't clear.) Barry runs a business that involves crates and a warehouse but it's a vague, frustrating life and he can do better--and so he tries, by simultaneously purchasing pudding in bulk to collect the Air Miles, standing up to the extortionists running a phone sex line (run by Philip Seymour Hoffman, a standout in a cameo-length role), and allowing Lena Leonard (Emily Watson) to court him. Watson has never looked as luminous as she does through Punch-Drunk Love cinematographer Robert Elswit's lens, nor are their any cracks in her veneer that lead us to doubt her attraction to such a wayward soul. A sequence in which she is in physical jeopardy is among the more difficult things to watch in movies, she's just so precious. The combination of Watson, the onset of autumn, and Anderson's totally idiosyncratic style left me more euphoric than you can suggest with words--isn't that the foundation of "Punch-Drunk Love"? ***1/2 (out of four) | 91 mins. PROGRAM: Special Presentations | SHOWTIMES: Friday, September 13, 11:00 PM, UPTOWN 1; Saturday, September 14, 2:15 PM, VISA SCREENING ROOM (ELGIN)

As dawdling and peculiar as Robert Duvall's last directorial outing, The Apostle, Assassination Tango has many checks in its 'pro' column, not the least of which is a performance from Duvall that, while not necessarily endearing, is definitely all of a piece. Duvall plays John J., a volatile hitman stuck in some kind of follicle timewarp who's sent to Buenos Aires on a high-stakes job for his potential to camouflage with the locals. Once settled in, he discovers that he can't carry out his execution for another three months but must stay in the country, and so he takes up the tango--moreover, he takes up a flirtation with a prominent tango dancer (Luciana Pedraza), increasingly perplexed the closer they get that this pretty lady half his age even gives him the time of day. Produced by Francis Ford Coppola, the film has shades of The Godfather's Sicily section in John J.'s gradual assimilation into Argentine culture, and one is reminded of Gordon Willis' enshrouding lighting scheme for the Corleones in a kitchen scene featuring John J. and his Argentinean hosts. Assassination Tango sheds its pretence of formalism as it progresses, which is exciting to witness when we get to a blatantly improvised first date between Duvall and Pedraza at a café but not so much thereafter; the picture's loss of momentum presents too much opportunity to contemplate that very thing. **1/2 (out of four) | 114 mins. PROGRAM: Special Presentations | SHOWTIMES: Wednesday, September 11, 9:45 PM, VISA SCREENING ROOM (ELGIN); Friday, September 13, 12:30 PM, UPTOWN 1

Given the genre affiliation of its title and that it opens with a clip from Double Indemnity, Brian De Palma's Femme Fatale is unapologetically a film noir--which is not to say the picture has nothing to apologize for. Oh, for a pair of Armond White's De Palma beer goggles to beautify Femme Fatale, a flat, trés familiar, idly tongue-in-cheek caper starring Rebecca Romijn-Stamos in a role she's not threatening enough to play, that of a bisexual American thief who switches places with her suicidal identical twin, a French woman of no blood relation. Tempted though I am to blow the plot beyond that vaguest of summaries, it'd be kind of grinchy to do so: although the twists and turns are not substantially rewarding, the element of surprise might be the only thing Femme Fatale has going for it. De Palma has served up a frozen dinner with portions of his Mission: Impossible, Obsession, Body Double, and Blow Out--reheating isn't cooking, alas. ** (out of four) | 114 mins. PROGRAM: Galas | SHOWTIMES: Saturday, September 14, 8:00 PM, ROY THOMSON HALL; Saturday, September 14, 8:45 PM, UPTOWN 1

The Yakuza doesn't rear its head until well into Dolls, a gripping, fractured ensemble piece written and directed by that down-and-dirty poet of Japanese cinema, Takeshi Kitano. I must confess to feeling ill-equipped to discuss the mechanics of the film--it's storytelling that gives you the impression of being steeped in oral tradition, and all I can say is that Dolls is accessible to monkey-brained North American viewers like myself all the same. Beginning with an elaborate puppet show shot with verve and affection, the film proceeds to fabricate a human backstory for these Bunraku dolls; intersecting the tale of the "chained beggars," a tranquil young couple leashed together by an orange rope, are subplots involving a "famous lady" who shows up with two lunches at a park every Saturday, sitting in wait for the boyfriend who left her fifty years before, and a pop star disfigured in a car accident unwilling to greet fans for that reason, leading to sick ingenuity among her stalkers. Unfortunately for Dolls, its least resonant fable is front and centre (even though the obvious point of the film is that to keep a love, you'd better tie a knot), and anyone capable of sitting through the last ten minutes of the film without getting restless is a Kitano apologist. Those major quibbles aside, the picture burrows its way under the skin. *** (out of four) | 113 mins. PROGRAM: Visions | SHOWTIMES: Saturday, September 7, 3:30 PM, UPTOWN 1; Friday, September 13, 12:00 PM, VARSITY 8

The makers of The Sweatbox--Sting's wife, Trudie Styler, and John-Paul Davidson--were granted unprecedented access to behind the scenes of the Walt Disney production The Emperor's New Groove; with such corporate permissiveness, don't expect to see teeth marks in many hands by the end of the picture. (When it was over, audience members could be heard to ask if the film had been sanctioned by Disney; Xingu is the actual culprit.) Originally hired to write and perform a song score for an Incan tale spun from "The Prince and the Pauper" called Kingdom of the Sun, Sting miraculously doesn't jump ship when the picture undergoes a conceptual overhaul so severe that it drives The Lion King's Roger Allers out of the director's chair. The titular "sweatbox" is the nickname for Disney's private screening room, which is more pressure-cooker than movie theatre, since that's where rough cuts get shown to merciless executives; Sting never actually sets foot inside it during this film, and that sort of sums up the proceedings: the pretentious musician is in the thick of it but not. His presence in The Sweatbox becomes increasingly intrusive and obligatory as the animators rush to get something in the can. All told, The Sweatbox is not much more edifying than your average DVD featurette. ** (out of four) | 86 mins. PROGRAM: Real to Reel | SHOWTIMES: Friday, September 13, 9:30 PM, ISABEL BADER THEATRE; Saturday, September 14, 6:00 PM, UPTOWN 2