Film Freak Central

Out for a Kill (2003) - DVD

*/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Steven Seagal, Michelle Goh, Corey Johnson, Kata Dobó
screenplay by Dennis Dimster
directed by Michael Oblowitz

by Bill Chambers The other day, my friend and I were at the CNE, Toronto's annual expo of overpriced amusements, when we got a hankering for the raw sewage peddled inside its flea-market-sized food court. Where we wound up eating was at Kentucky Style Chicken, one of the many transient take-outs named for maximum copyright infringement and serving a synthetic mock-up of the already-inedible. Out for a Kill exists in the same spirit: Steven Seagal's first direct-to-video production in weeks, its designation combines the titles of his early pictures Hard to Kill and Out for Justice while mixing and matching nearly every trend, past and present, of the martial arts genre, on whose outskirts Seagal has toiled throughout his film career. Here, imitation isn't the sincerest form of flattery, it's a cloaking device--"Doesn't this remind you of something?" vs. "Boy, does this stink." You know something? Sometimes I get a hankering for movies I know I'll regret, too.

Like Looking Into a Mirror: FFC Interviews Mark & Michael Polish

August 31, 2003|I met Mark and Michael Polish in the Green Room of Denver's NBC affiliate just after the pair had appeared live on local television to banter with the indigenous fauna about their latest film--and last in a loose trilogy of Americana--Northfork. Garnering a great deal of national praise for their audacity-verging-on-pretension and collecting comparisons to filmmakers like Wim Wenders and Terrence Malick, the brothers, in person, have an air of something so rare it's like vintage from a forgotten cellar: they're grateful for where they are, excited for what the future may bring them. It's a lesson in thankfulness that found me at the right time, just before the crushing festival season, right at the tail end of the summer (and winter and spring) doldrums--questioning, truth be told, what it was again that I was supposed to be doing here when it just didn't seem that much fun anymore.

Never on Sunday (1960) + The Man from Elysian Fields (2002) - DVDs

Pote tin Kyriaki
***/**** Image A Sound B
starring Melina Mercouri, George Foundas, Titos Vandis
written and directed by Jules Dassin

THE MAN FROM ELYSIAN FIELDS
**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C-
starring Andy Garcia, Mick Jagger, Julianna Margulies, Olivia Williams
screenplay by Phillip Jayson Lasker
directed by George Hickenlooper

by Walter Chaw They could be sisters in philosophy. The school of happy-go-lucky hookers perfected by Billy Wilder and his Irma La Douce (1963) also graduated Melina Mercouri's Ilya three years previous in expatriated filmmaker Jules Dassin's ebullient Never on Sunday (1960). Dassin and Wilder are involved in a perverse sort of mythmaking--fed by the artifice of classic theatre for Dassin, and for Wilder, more, the hysterical artifice of musical theatre, reclaiming the state of whore to the state of Madonna in what feels like a mania for order in a world without it. The whore as pacific nurturer, Rose of Sharon recast as Xaviera Hollander, represents a cynic's compromise: the font of life and hearth nursed in the oft-fondled breast of a wanton woman. Mary Magdalene, unrepentant--ascendant.

Bend It Like Beckham (2002) [Widescreen Edition] - DVD

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A-
starring Parminder Nagra, Keira Knightley, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Anupam Kher
screenplay by Gurinder Chadha, Guljit Bindra, Paul Mayeda Berges
directed by Gurinder Chadha

by Bill Chambers This year's British-import-pre-sold-as-a-hit Bend It Like Beckham coasts on its similitude to John Badham's magnificent Saturday Night Fever, but when all a picture is doing is reminding you of a better one without embarrassing itself, it can hardly be called a triumph. I'm surprised that more critics haven't picked up on the film's debt to Saturday Night Fever, actually, which extends to the set design and placement of key props. It's this kind of popular coding that has, I suspect, buoyed Bend It Like Beckham aloft the market doldrums of other mainstream-pitched East-meets-West comedies (East Is East, Bollywood/Hollywood): the subliminal affiliation of one ethnicity (orthodox Sikh) with another (Italian-Americans) that was long ago embraced by the masses.

Vintage Mickey - DVD

Image B Sound B
Steamboat Willie (1928), Plane Crazy (1928), The Karnival Kid (1929), The Birthday Party (1931), The Castaway (1931), Mickey's Orphans (1931), Mickey's Revue (1932), Building a Building (1933), Mickey's Steam-Roller (1934)

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The difference between Disney and Warner Bros. animation isn't exactly the standard business vs. art dichotomy--it's about the smoothing over of rough spots vs. the celebration of their interruptions. Where the whole point of Looney Tunes was to affirm the thing that caused the chaos, Disney either healed that thing or pretended like it didn't really matter. But before the battle of the trademarks began in earnest, there were only the shorts, and Disney's M.O. was simply to provide a salve--not through the personality cult of its sadly conservative mastermind, but through the reduction of things that can hurt. The new compilation "Vintage Mickey" is thus bittersweet occasion to look through the prism of the company's semi-fascistic present at the apparent innocence of the beginning and wonder where it all went wrong.

Down with Love (2003) [Widescreen] - DVD

*/**** Image B Sound A Extras B+
starring Renée Zellweger, Ewan McGregor, David Hyde Pierce, Sarah Paulson
screenplay by Eve Ahlert & Dennis Drake
directed by Peyton Reed

by Walter Chaw Renée Zellweger doesn't look altogether well and Ewan McGregor appears a little bored in Peyton Reed's post-modern take on the three Doris Day/Rock Hudson innuendo operas of the late-'50s and early-'60s. An opening voiceover informs that it's "Now, 1962!" and the jokes don't get any funnier than that; Down with Love makes so many miscalculations about its cast and premise that its theatrical release concurrent with The Matrix Reloaded doesn't seem so much "counter-programming" as "hide the evidence." Its greatest crime isn't that its one joke is tiresome from the thirty-minute mark on, it's that at the end of the day the picture doesn't particularly convince as a romance, tickle as a comedy, or score as a satire of any kind.

American Splendor (2003) + The Secret Lives of Dentists (2003)

AMERICAN SPLENDOR
*½/****
starring Paul Giamatti, Hope Davis, James Urbaniak, Harvey Pekar
screenplay by Shari Springer Berman & Robert Pulcini, based on the comics by Harvey Pekar & Joyce Brabner
directed by Shari Springer Berman & Robert Pulcini

THE SECRET LIVES OF DENTISTS
****/****
starring Campbell Scott, Hope Davis, Denis Leary, Robin Tunney
screenplay by Craig Lucas, based on the novella The Age of Grief by Jane Smiley
directed by Alan Rudolph

by Walter Chaw The same between American Splendor and Ghost World is that both have middle-aged outcasts as protagonists who each collect old blues 78's, that both were adapted from comic books, and that there's a bus stop in Cleveland. The difference between American Splendor and Ghost World is that with two solitary figures in search of completion, there is the possibility for recognition of sameness--but with two figures (underground comic book writer Harvey Pekar and his wife Joyce Brabner (Hope Davis)) who have found in one another a sympathetic orbit, a partner in life and lo, with a child dropped willy-nilly into their midst to tie up loose ends, there is instead a sort of alien, island of lost toys exclusion that makes for a further alienation of the very alienated audience to which Pekar's comic so appealed and, eventually, took for granted and pandered. The difference between American Splendor and Ghost World is that one is in love with its contrivance and the other is in love with its melancholy.

The Medallion (2003)

½*/****
starring Jackie Chan, Lee Evans, Claire Forlani, Julian Sands
screenplay by Bey Logan, Gordon Chan, Alfred Cheung, Bennett Joshua Davlin, Paul Wheeler
directed by Gordon Chan

by Walter Chaw I think it's fair at this point to say that I'm no longer so much a Jackie Chan fan as I really like a few Jackie Chan movies. His career has taken a rather conspicuous downturn since he reintroduced himself to Hollywood almost a decade ago, just after his last great film Drunken Master 2, scraping and bowing and remixing a few of his Hong Kong hits with English-dubs (and why is it that Asian films are the only ones consistently re-voiced for North American release?) and consenting to play ethnic Kato caricature to a string of Yank comedians for inexperienced directors and that screaming idiot Brett Ratner.

Walking on Water (2002)

***/****
starring Vince Colosimo, Maria Theodorakis, Judi Farr, Nicholas Bishop
screenplay by Roger Monk
directed by Tony Ayres

by Bill Chambers Last year's admirable ode to grief Moonlight Mile was given an injection of freshness by the cruelly luminous Ellen Pompeo, but in the end, the chaos the film depicted seemed too straightforwardly resolved. Australia's Walking on Water, which likewise explores the aftermath of an untimely death (thus finding itself plum in a new niche market with Moonlight Mile and the cable phenom "Six Feet Under"), isn't as entertaining as Moonlight Mile, but nobody in it can say one thing that will fix everything, and, boy, is it well observed. The picture is little more than--yet sufficiently--a medley of grief gestures (as screenwriter Roger Monk has remarked, "No two people react [to the death of a loved one] in the same way"): some joshing (praying for reincarnation to spare the departed from coming back as a "poof"), others piercing (kicking a mourner out of the wake for crying too loud), all coalescing into a gripping and mildly devastating viewing experience.

Dirty Pretty Things (2003); Shanghai Ghetto (2003); Camp (2003)

DIRTY PRETTY THINGS
***/****
starring Audrey Tautou, Sergi López, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Sophie Okonedo
screenplay by Steve Knight
directed by Stephen Frears

SHANGHAI GHETTO
**/****
directed by Dana Janklowicz-Mann & Amir Mann

CAMP
*½/****
starring Daniel Letterle, Joanna Chilcoat, Robin de Jesus, Steven Cutts
written and directed by Todd Graff

by Walter Chaw Stephen Frears, like antipodean director Phillip Noyce before him, found the Hollywood waters to be a touch turgid and so in 2000 went back to the small country where he first rose to prominence. For Frears, who made his first resonant mark with a fantastic quartet of films--My Beautiful Laundrette, Walter and June, Prick Up Your Ears, and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid--in the mid-'80s, the return to his homeland presaged a return to his interest in England's bottom caste and immigrant class, first with the grim, slight Liam and now with the trancelike, nightmarish Dirty Pretty Things. Its title both a reference to smarmy hotel manager Juan's (Sergi López) philosophy of hotel management ("Our guests are strangers--they leave dirty things, we make them pretty things") and the idea that the "pretty things" might be the film's pretty heroes, Nigerian refugee Okwe (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and Turkish illegal Senay (Audrey Tautou), dirtied by the realities of blue-collar London. The struggle between the pragmatism of Juan's outlook and the idea of sullied purity of Okwe and Senay is really all you need know about the picture--it's a piece composed of equal parts social realism and fairytale martyrdom, with either part watered down by the other.

Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992) - DVD + John Carpenter: The Prince of Darkness - Books

MEMOIRS OF AN INVISIBLE MAN
**/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras C
starring Chevy Chase, Daryl Hannah, Sam Neill, Michael McKean
screenplay by Robert Collector & Dana Olsen and William Goldman, based on the book by H.F. Saint
directed by John Carpenter

JOHN CARPENTER: THE PRINCE OF DARKNESS
FFC rating: 6/10
written by Gilles Boulenger

by Bill Chambers In John Carpenter: The Prince of Darkness, a new interview book by Gilles Boulenger, John Carpenter says that you don't see the possessory credit on Memoirs of an Invisible Man (i.e., "John Carpenter's Memoirs of an Invisible Man") because the film is not 100% his, but rather the product of studio interference he knew full well would take place prior to signing on. ("Warner Bros. is in the business of making audience-friendly, non-challenging movies," Carpenter declares.) Boulenger doesn't ask his subject how he stomached accepting the project--funnyman Chevy Chase's darling, which Chase had shepherded through an abortive incarnation to be directed by Ivan Reitman and scripted by William Goldman before Carpenter climbed aboard--despite his misgivings, since he obviously did it for the A-list boost and the last time he did that (Christine) felt tormented about it for years after. ("When there is no connection between the movie and my inner soul, I get lost and I walk through it.") You'll find that's the pattern of Boulenger's Q&A: Carpenter feeds his interrogator provocative morsels, and they go untested because Boulenger has a set-list he wants to get through. (It's the spontaneous follow-up question, the willingness to confront, that tests an interviewer's mettle.) I fear we may have another Laurent Bouzereau on our hands, for Boulenger's favourite query--he uses it over and over again--is also his most reductive: "Do you recall one telling anecdote about the shoot?"

The Hunted (2003) [Widescreen] - DVD + William Friedkin: Films of Aberration, Obsession and Reality - Books

THE HUNTED
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Tommy Lee Jones, Benicio Del Toro, Connie Nielsen, Jenna Boyd
screenplay by David Griffiths & Peter Griffiths and Art Monterastelli
directed by William Friedkin

WILLIAM FRIEDKIN: FILMS OF ABERRATION, OBSESSION AND REALITY
FFC rating: 9/10
written by Thomas D. Clagett

by Walter Chaw Hot on the heels of Bruce Willis's bwana wish-fulfillment fantasy Tears of the Sun comes William Friedkin's The Hunted, a film that introduces its titular fugitive in a flashback to Kosovo at the height of the Albanian genocide. The parsing of historical atrocity functioning as shorthand for backstory to what is essentially a pretentious action movie is distasteful, the insertion into that history of elite American soldiers righting wrongs un-righted to this day a kind of unspeakable arrogance late unique of Yankee cloth. That being said, The Hunted is a cheerfully ridiculous movie that manages over the course of its running time to entertain with a series of action set-pieces that recall Friedkin's work in The French Connection. Though riddled with plot impossibilities and stunning coincidences, the picture, courtesy, perhaps, of Caleb Deschanel's magnificent cinematography, reminds of the nearness of nature and violence of John Boorman's Deliverance; of the kineticism of Doug Liman's The Bourne Identity; and of the premise and execution of a little-read Rex Miller novel called S.L.O.B.. If it also reminds of the creaky Abraham/Oedipus by way of Robert Bly wilderness dynamic of Mamet's appalling The Edge, so be it: the fun parts outweigh the infuriating ones.

City Hunter (1993) - DVD

ZERO STARS/**** Image C Sound C Extras D
starring Jackie Chan, Joey Wong, Kumiko Goto, Chingmy Yau
written and directed by Wong Jing

by Walter Chaw There's a scene towards the middle of Jackie Chan's unwatchable City Hunter where starving, womanizing Ryô (Chan) leers at a pretty bimbo, and director Wong Jing provides a point-of-view shot that replaces her breasts with hamburgers and her arms and legs with corresponding fried chicken parts. The film never gets any funnier. City Hunter is garbage--fetid and painful from its prologue to a conclusion one-hundred minutes later that feels for all the world like a week-and-a-half later. It's misogynistic, which is not really a surprise as almost all of Jackie Chan's modern-era films are virulently so, but it does what I wouldn't have suspected to be possible: it makes Chan a smarmy, oafish reptile. The modern Buster Keaton is here recast as Lorenzo Llamas, with the level of violence towards women in the film so extreme and unacceptable that it feels not so much prehistoric as something of a first.

Identity (2003) [Special Edition] - DVD

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring John Cusack, Ray Liotta, Amanda Peet, Alfred Molina
screenplay by Michael Cooney
directed by James Mangold

by Walter Chaw Although by the end it isn't nearly as interesting as it is clever, James Mangold's take on the slasher genre Identity is a tricky little beast that fits in peculiarly well with the recent trend of deconstructive horror films (such as The Ring and Soft for Digging). Its use of Hughes Mearns's haunting "Antigonish" (1899, "I was going up the stair/I met a man who wasn't there!/He wasn't there again today!/I wish, I wish he'd stay away!") reminds of Dario Argento's nursery dirge in Deep Red, while the film's telescoping storytelling style evokes, of all things, the caper genre. With its title suggesting a certain high-mindedness, when a character glances for a swollen moment at Sartre's Being and Nothingness, it tells too much of what the film will be about: the philosopher's existential definition of consciousness projected onto reality and the dangers of mauvaise foi (bad faith), the process by which people, within themselves, elude responsibility for what they do. Still, the film is such a professional exercise on every level that its obviousness--better, its literalness--can be forgiven.

The Rose (1979) - DVD

*½/**** Image C- Sound C Extras C
starring Bette Midler, Alan Bates, Frederic Forrest
screenplay by Bill Kerby and Bo Goldman
directed by Mark Rydell

by Walter Chaw Lenny by way of John Waters, Mark Rydell's The Rose is a film made obsolete by years of "Behind the Music"--this story of a Janis Joplin-inspired singer boozin' her way into a theatrical grave counts a lack of vitality and anything resembling surprise as chief among its faults. Bette Midler's performance scored an Oscar nomination in 1980, but it lands with a shrillness now that defeats its attempts at pathos and depth. Why we should care about a self-destructive blues siren with impulse control issues is one of those things unwisely taken for granted while by now, twenty-three years after the fact, the lessons of hedonism and the downward spirals of the performing kind are curiously tepid, delivered as they are with a bullhorn and a bad Otis the Town Drunk impersonation.

He Who Courts Controversy: FFC Interviews Peter Mullan

August 10, 2003|An indisputable sign of my provincialism, ten minutes into my conversation with Scottish actor-filmmaker Peter Mullan and I was still thinking to myself how awesome his rolling brogue is--I've never been more tempted to ape Irvine Welsh. But there's more to Mullan than an accent raised on Guinness, cigarettes, haggis, and golf: the man, a former schoolteacher and favourite of director Ken Loach, is an amazingly erudite and charismatic cultural observer, expounding at length about film craft, racism, even poetry. (It's not often one can talk at length about Samuel Coleridge with anyone, and if Mullan's next project is a biopic of the scribe, I'll be the first in line--and wanting an acknowledgment for the casting suggestion of Timothy Spall.) An unlikely lightning rod for one of the most controversial films of the year, Mullan is quick with a smile and an indecipherable regional profanity, spry the morning after an extended Q&A session following a late invitational screening of his The Magdalene Sisters and duly impressed by Denver's exceptional selection of quality microbrews. The man knows his beer, I'll give him that, and while his film isn't without its imperfections, Mullan seems to know his capacity for outrage as well; let's not kid ourselves: that quality of passion in any filmmaker, in any age, is certainly not strained.

Johnstown Flood (2003) + The Pennsylvania Miners' Story (2003) - DVDs

JOHNSTOWN FLOOD
*/**** Image B Sound B Extras A
directed by Mark Bussler

THE PENNSYLVANIA MINERS' STORY
*½/**** Image B- Sound B
starring Graham Beckel, Michael Bowen, Tom Bower, Dylan Bruno
screenplay by Elwood Reid
directed by David Frankel

by Walter Chaw Richard Dreyfuss's voice is like a weasel rubbed against a blackboard: not entirely nasal (not entirely not), with a sort of lisping sneer that makes him a particularly bad match for narration work. It's not an axiom--but it should be--that lately the only thing worse than watching Dreyfuss in a film is listening to him; to the credit of peculiar direct-to-video documentary Johnstown Flood, though we have to listen to Dreyfuss narrate the piece, we don't have to watch him emote his way through it. The effect of having Dreyfuss go on about one of the most horrific dam-break tragedies in the United States is that his Napoleon-complex, constipated Snagglepuss wheeze ("Heaventh to Murgatroid!") lends the recreated bits of the documentary a tense sort of edge that it doesn't otherwise earn and feels slightly left of true, besides. Through it all, it's not Dreyfuss but the badly written and performed re-enactments that are the main problem with the piece, demonstrating by their weakness just how good The History Channel's stolid re-enactments actually are.

Thirteen (2003)

***/****
starring Evan Rachel Wood, Holly Hunter, Nikki Reed, Jeremy Sisto
screenplay by Catherine Hardwicke & Nikki Reed
directed by Catherine Hardwicke

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I'm a bit surprised to have liked Thirteen as much as I did. For one thing, it has no particular point of view--things simply happen in and of themselves and aren't much related to the outside world. For another, the film is somewhat obvious in the way it depicts its various outrages, almost cuing us to register their brutal nature instead of simply letting us draw our own conclusions. But Thirteen's heavy-handed chaos mirrors that of its teenage protagonist, who is in the grip of emotions she doesn't understand and whose responses are as arbitrary as they are destructive. The agony depicted is real, and while the film is no aesthetic miracle, it manages to blast through its limitations with its primary emotion.

Piglet's Big Movie (2003) - DVD

*½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C-
screenplay by Brian Hohlfeld, from stories by A.A. Milne
directed by Francis Glebas

by Bill Chambers To its credit, Piglet's Big Movie, unlike so many Disney franchise pictures, is inoffensive (unless being monotonous is offensive), but it was hamstrung (har-har) from the outset by the departure through death or firing of original Pooh voice actors Sterling Holloway (Pooh), Paul Winchell (Tigger), Ralph Wright (Eeyore), Junius Matthews (Rabbit), and Hal Smith (Owl). Only the inveterate John Fiedler returns to lend his pipes to the eponymous Piglet, and while Jim Cummings technically sounds like Holloway and Winchell in replacing them, he lacks the mischievous twinkle that both brought to their respective roles. Meanwhile, the character-sprung songs, a major ingredient of the series' charm, are too attached this time around to Carly Simon, who appears in an inexplicably live-action closing-credits sequence singing solo in the Hundred-Acre Wood like she's a real "get" for an audience that hasn't learned to tie their shoes yet. (There are no tunes to get kids in touch with their melancholy side early like Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day's depressing "The Rain Rain Rain Came Down, Down, Down," only stuff to teach them how most songs are sub-folk music until you replace your Fisher-Price radio with a ghetto blaster.) And while it makes more sense here, given that Pooh's first feature film The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh was a compilation of short subjects, did we really need another Disney flick with an anthology structure on the heels of Cinderella II, Atlantis: Milo's Return, and Tarzan & Jane? It's starting to feel like an injection mold.

American Wedding (2003)

*½/****
starring Jason Biggs, Seann William Scott, Alyson Hannigan, Eddie Kaye Thomas
screenplay by Adam Herz
directed by Jesse Dylan

by Walter Chaw Joining the Porky's triptych as teensploitation smut franchises that have made it to three instalments (the Revenge of the Nerds series has four chapters, but only the first two are really all that smutty), American Pie finds (hopefully) its conclusion in the dreadfully incomplete-feeling American Wedding. A series of set-ups without punchlines that compensate for the deficiency by featuring a truly impressive number of random de-pantsings, people caught in unlikely tableaux that are inevitably mistaken for some sort of sexual deviancy, and a stable of stock characters so locked into their exploitative roles that existential questions of predestination and choice tickle at making the picture interesting. Featuring the best fecal-consumption-mined-for-yuks scene since the second Austin Powers movie (though a disappointingly minimal amount of gratuitous nudity), American Wedding can, in all honesty, be analyzed with profit as a satire of the whole tits-and-zits genre. It resembles Jurassic Park III in its general disdain for its audience and fatigue with its own shake-and-bake premise, but it does have a couple of laughs--the best bits involving a surreal dance-off and a ridiculously convoluted sequence with a pair of role-playing strippers.

Mondays in the Sun (2002); Freaky Friday (2003); The Eye (2002)

Los Lunes al sol
**/****
starring Javier Bardem, Luis Tosar, José Ángel Egido, Nieve de Medina
screenplay by Fernando León de Aranda, Ignacio del Moral
directed by Fernando León de Aranda

FREAKY FRIDAY
**/****
starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Lindsay Lohan, Harold Gould, Mark Harmon
screenplay by Heather Hach and Leslie Dixon, based on the novel by Mary Rodgers
directed by Mark S. Waters

Jian gui
*½/****
starring Angelica Lee, Lawrence Chou, Chutcha Rujinanon, Yut Lai So
screenplay by Jo Jo Yuet-chun Hui, Oxide Pang & Danny Pang
directed by Oxide Pang & Danny Pang

by Walter Chaw Fernando León de Aranda's Mondays in the Sun is probably best described as a Spanish version of Fred Schepisi's Last Orders: a journal of a depressed nation's aging gentry, ferrying one of their own on to the great symbolic hereafter. It aspires to the sort of myth of Vittorio Di Sica's neo-realism, portraying the plight of the dispossessed working class in its unadorned splendour, succeeding by the end only to be a repetitive tattoo around the threadbare theme of men defined by work and destroyed by obsolescence. A castration melodrama in several anecdotal horizontal movements, Mondays in the Sun loses steam and tests patience by making its one point to exhaustion. A scene where the great Javier Bardem rails at the fable of the grasshopper and the ants ("This is bunk! It has no sympathy for someone who is born a grasshopper instead of an ant!") says almost all there is to say about the film, while a lingering close-up of Bardem's battered mug in all its injured brute eloquence is, by itself again, enough.

The Magdalene Sisters (2002)

**½/****
starring Geraldine McEwan, Anne-Marie Duff, Nora-Jane Noone, Dorothy Duffy
written and directed by Peter Mullan

by Walter Chaw Most discussions of Peter Mullan's The Magdalene Sisters will probably focus on the extent to which the story that it relates is inspired by truth; the Catholic Church has been predictably swift in its blanket condemnation, while the film's supporters have presented actual "Magdalene Laundry" survivors who attest that the reality was actually much grimmer. The skeleton truth of the film, then, falls somewhere between those extremes, and its presentation, likewise, vacillates between elegant reserve and keening hysteria. The picture is a fictional treatment of the forced labour of tens of thousands of "wayward" girls in the convents of the Irish Catholic order of the Sisters of the Magdalene--compelled through intimidation and abuse to literally wash their sins away with backbreaking work scrubbing butcher's whites and the like under Dickensian conditions. When it works (as in a prologue and conclusion that mute dialogue in an approximation of collective guilt), it works on the strength of Mullan's smooth visual sensibility and narrative acumen. And when it doesn't work (as in a subplot concerning a priest stridently not a "man of God"), the film tends to grate and, worse, cast doubt on the extent to which Mullan's willing to go to take sides on his subject.

The Cuckoo (2002)

Kukushka
**/****
starring Anni-Christina Juuso, Ville Haapasalo, Viktor Bychkov
written and directed by Aleksandr Rogozhkin

by Bill Chambers As with the ineffably similar No Man's Land, Danis Tanovic's "Twilight Zone"-esque morality play in which a Bosnian and a Serb duke it out while the dead body of a Serb soldier threatens to detonate a landmine between them, when you're done watching The Cuckoo, you're done thinking about it as well. Both films make their points too baldly--the stress of analysis and the joy of drawing conclusions are pleasures you won't much experience after a viewing of The Cuckoo despite its having the pretense of being profound. An awkwardly-translated quote that writer-director Aleksander Rogozhkin provided for the film's North American pressbook--"I don't write scripts, I write novels for cinema... I could just note 'Sniper Veiko shoots from a rifle,' but it will be an absolutely different approach if I write 'Sniper Veiko shoots from old Austrian rifle, with optical sight rifle'"--is telling: he's not a man who likes to leave many doors open to interpretation.