Film Freak Central

Million Dollar Baby (2004) [2-Disc Widescreen Edition] - DVD

**/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras C+
starring Clint Eastwood, Hilary Swank, Morgan Freeman, Jay Baruchel
screenplay by Paul Haggis, based on stories from Rope Burns by F.X. Toole
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Walter Chaw As a fighter, Clint Eastwood's boxing flick Million Dollar Baby telegraphs its punches, demonstrates some muddy footwork, and, when all's said and done, doesn't pack much of a wallop no matter how many roundhouses it throws to the rafters. It stretches for timelessness, which Eastwood seems to equate with poor lighting and a lack of coverage, and it casts Morgan Freeman in another one of those Morgan Freeman roles where he contextualizes, in his homey, lightly-accented basso profundo warmth, the life and times of the white iconoclast for whom he is the catalyzing agent and confidante (The Shawshank Redemption, Driving Miss Daisy, Bruce Almighty, Clean and Sober). The picture has a framing story and a movie-long narration, two more ingredients in the neo-noir/American Gothic stew that Eastwood has continued to perpetuate long after his twin Americana triumphs A Perfect World and Unforgiven rendered the conversation--at least inasmuch as Eastwood is capable of carrying it--moot. Not to say that Million Dollar Baby is a total mutt, just that it's an obvious, self-important, overwritten thing designed to appeal to specific, stodgy, awards-season prestige audiences that love film so much, this will be the first movie they see this year.

Premonition (2004) - DVD

Yogen
*½/**** Image B Sound A- Extras C-
starring Hiroshi Mikami, Noriko Sakai, Maki Horikita, Mayumi Ono
screenplay by Noboru Takagi, Norio Tsuruta, based on the comic by Jiro Tsunoda
directed by Norio Tsuruta

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I could spin many a yarn about the kernel of goodness trapped inside Premonition. As the tale of a teacher named Hideki Satomi (Hiroshi Mikami) who finds supernatural newspapers that predict horrible events, it's poised to say plenty about the information age, the anxiety of which is manifested in the fact that Hideki is either helpless to stop the events or winds up physically wasted as a result of trying. But the point of mentioning that is scotched by the production team's total obliviousness to thematics, which makes any exegesis purely symptomatic. There's a swell sociology paper somewhere in Premonition's context within the rest of the J-Horror canon, but its pleasures are largely as an artifact rather than as something to be enjoyed on its own terms.

The Garbage Pail Kids Movie (1987) - DVD

**/**** Image B+ Sound C
starring Anthony Newley, Mackenzie Astin, Katie Barbieri, "The Garbage Gang"
screenplay by Melinda Palmer & Rod Amateau
directed by Rod Amateau

by Alex Jackson I don't think that there is any getting around the fact that any true connoisseur of trash cinema has to see Rodney Amateau's The Garbage Pail Kids Movie. This was, after all, the feature film debut of Mackenzie Astin, a.k.a. the horny kid from "The Facts of Life", and of Spanish soap star Katie Barbieri. Just as the picture marked the start of a career for some, it marked the end of a career for others. The presence of child star, singer, and Joan Collins's bitchy ex-husband Anthony Newley is a chief selling point in the film's trailer, but he was on his way out. And The Garbage Pail Kids Movie was the last feature from television director Amateau, who seems to have viewed it as his own personal Fanny and Alexander, taking on writing and producing chores in addition to casting other Amateaus (J.P. and Chloe) in minor roles.

Hans. Solo.: FFC Interviews Hans Petter Moland

July 24, 2005|I sat down with Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland over a cranberry muffin and a cup of coffee in one of the subterranean meeting rooms of Denver's Hotel Monaco. Moland, in town for an early sneak of his The Beautiful Country (a long-simmering Terrence Malick project produced by the maverick filmmaker and released this month in the United States to some critical fanfare), has been a favourite of mine since I happened across his blistering Zero Kelvin close to ten years ago. And though I tried to introduce as many people as I could to that film and its follow up, Aberdeen (both starring the incomparable Stellan Skarsgård), I confess there was something wonderful about feeling like one of an underground band's handful of fans. So the relative visibility of The Beautiful Country is bittersweet: a validation of a kind, but one that comes with an irrational proprietary jealousy. You want your heroes to do well, but at the same time you fear that now that they're gaining momentum, they're going to end up like John Woo. With The Beautiful Country, Moland has created a solid refugee drama that, while breaking no significant new ground (it's probably the least of his films so far), at least does nothing to dishonour his work in his native Norway. Erudite in heavily-accented English, Mr. Moland is at a place now where he's still surprised that anyone's seen his other pictures. And for however long that lasts, that's just how I like it.

Bad News Bears (2005)

*½/****
starring Billy Bob Thornton, Greg Kinnear, Marcia Gay Harden
screenplay by Bill Lancaster and Glenn Ficarra & John Requa
directed by Richard Linklater

by Walter Chaw Richard Linklater essentially does for Michael Ritchie's The Bad News Bears what Gus Van Sant did for Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. That is, not much. It's the same song sung in the same tune, though the film's missteps are unique to Linklater and company's often-puzzling desire to soften the original by introducing a love-interest for our drunken anti-hero and re-ordering the big game so that his redemption comes after an ugly on-field incident instead of just before when it still means something. This is not to say that the original film is much better than a button-pushing vehicle for the Walter Matthau persona, but to suggest that, for what it was, at least it was better than another button-pushing vehicle for the Billy Bob Thornton persona. And Richard Linklater, who seems content now to alternate nice little Rohmer-inspired talk-pieces with higher-profile formula flicks starring unknown kid-actors and manic curmudgeons. The only way to assess his career is by taking a closer look at his independent-minded projects (such as the upcoming Philip K. Dick adaptation A Scanner Darkly) and deciding whether or not better-earning stuff like Bad News Bears was worth it.

The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005); Hustle & Flow (2005); Last Days (2005)

De battre mon coeur s'est arrêté
***/****
starring Romain Duris, Niels Arestrup, Jonathan Zaccaï, Gilles Cohen
screenplay by Jacques Audiard, Tonino Benacquista, based on the screenplay for Fingers by James Toback
directed by Jacques Audiard

HUSTLE & FLOW
*/****
starring Terrence Howard, Anthony Anderson, Taryn Manning, Taraji P. Henson
written and directed by Craig Brewer

LAST DAYS
****/****
starring Michael Pitt, Lukas Haas, Asia Argento, Scott Green
written and directed by Gus Van Sant

by Walter Chaw On my better days, I still think of film as the quintessential artform of the last century--a medium for expression uniquely suited to our Modernist Yeatsian decomposition, what with its malleability beneath the knife, as it were, cut and spliced back together again as the un-spooling literalization of some patchwork Prometheus. Likewise, in its 24 flickers a second, it's an illusion of life, teased from the amber of still photography, drawing, painting; mixed with symphonies; blended with dance and movement; enslaved to the syncopation of words and imaginary drum beats. It's a miracle, a golem, capable of illuminating the rawest humanity in one stroke and of exhuming the most abject failure of human impulse in the very next. Its tractability is astonishing--protean, not too much to say magical; in describing his first film experience as a visit to "the kingdom of shadows," Maxim Gorky brushes up against the ineffable sublimity of a medium that mimics the eye, stimulates the ear, and has as one of the key elements of its academic study a concept that suggests the moment a viewer finds himself "sutured" into the text. Like all fine art, then, when it's right, its "rightness" is indescribable--Frank Zappa's "dancing about architecture." And like the stratification of art imposed by some in varying orders to describe the proximity of each to the inexpressibility of their souls (prose to dance to painting to poesy to music, for me), when film aspires to combine the more abstract elements of human expression in its mélange, the results, always mixed, at least have the potential to be grand.

The Island (2005)

*/****
starring Ewan McGregor, Scarlett Johansson, Djimon Hounsou, Sean Bean
screenplay by Caspian Tredwell-Owen and Alex Kurtzman & Roberto Orci
directed by Michael Bay

by Walter Chaw What films often get wrong in depicting Satan is that Satan is beautiful. He tells intoxicating lies, was--at least according to Milton--the most stunning of the angels, and, if modern hackery is to be honoured, directs action movies that are kinetic and exciting. The problem of a guy like Michael Bay is that for as close to vermin as the man may be (and stories of his on-set behaviour, especially his treatment of women, are legion and ugly), his films are, at least on the surface, sleek, pulpy, thrill-ride fun. He's defined almost by himself a new way of seeing that has infected lesser technical talents with those same quick scissor-fingers and the attention spans of mayflies. Would that that were all, but this influence has secondary victims in a generation of young male moviegoers, bludgeoned with Bay's rubber mallet into a tacit acceptance of/complicity with Bay's opinion of women (strippers or bimbos or bimbo strippers), race, and how best to feed a movie into a Cuisinart. Still, his latest film, The Island, came with reasons to be hopeful: writers from sometimes-smart (as in not-always-stupid) show "Alias"; stars in Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson; and no Jerry Bruckheimer in sight. But the result isn't good so much as more of the same except without any excitement or novelty. His mask is slipping, and The Island is awkward, dated, and so fuddy-duddy (like in its retarded Logan's Run finale, shot on Bay's trademark Lazy Susan) that I actually caught myself feeling, just for an eye-blink, embarrassed for the guy. That Satan, he's a slippery puck, ain't he.

Hustle (1975) - DVD

½*/**** Image B+ Sound A-
starring Burt Reynolds, Catherine Deneuve, Ben Johnson, Paul Winfield
screenplay by Steve Shagan
directed by Robert Aldrich

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover In 1955, Robert Aldrich directed Kiss Me Deadly. Ending in a fiery conflagration that suggested the end of civilization, its chief selling point was the chance to watch a bunch of degenerates lose their last shred of decency. And because it transgressed norms that would not be fully shattered until a decade-plus later, it had a nasty kick that was hard to shake. Flash forward twenty years to 1975, and the director is in a bit of a bind: with norms everywhere falling like a stripper's pasties, it's clear that civilization has, indeed, come to an end--not with the bang of Kiss Me Deadly, but with the whimper of Hustle, a film that flaunts its creep credentials with such pathetic stridency that you can't even raise the enthusiasm to take offense. You're merely bored with a director whose raison d'être had been rendered obsolete.

Steamboy (2004) [Collector's Gift Set] - DVD

*/**** Image C+ Sound A Extras B+
screenplay by Sadayuki Murai and Katsuhiro Otomo
directed by Katsuhiro Otomo

by Walter Chaw Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira is both the best and the worst thing ever to happen to anime in the United States. For the believer, its Blade Runner cyberpunk ultra-cool was an eye-opener, but to hold the film up as the standard for the medium means that a lot of people looking to it as their introduction believe that anime is a little excitement cordoned off by long stretches of confused, gravid exposition. It tries to condense hundreds of pages of metaphysical text into scientist characters delivering what seem like endless exchanges in high-minded gobbledygook. Akira's popularity obscures the finest examples of the medium, films that manage to balance serious metaphysical musing with actual forward momentum (the two Ghost in the Shell films, for instance); to tell adult tales in affecting ways (Grave of the Fireflies); to redefine genre thriller (Perfect Blue), action (Ninja Scroll), and fantasy (Princess Mononoke); and to present children's fables as artifacts that are as useful for adults as they are for kids (Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro). Akira isn't the greatest anime film, just the most well-known, and it's worth speculating how its notoriety may have retarded the maturation of American animation.

Happy Endings (2005)

½*/****
starring Tom Arnold, Jesse Bradford, Bobby Cannavale, Steve Coogan
written and directed by Don Roos

by Walter Chaw As abortion dramedies go, this year's already seen Todd Solondz's far superior Palindromes and will soon see the abhorrent right-wing stem cell flick The Island, and for bellwethers of such things, there's still Hal Hartley's timeless Trust from fifteen years back. (Not incidentally, Don Roos's best and first film as a director, the teen-pregnancy drama The Opposite of Sex, features Trust's Martin Donovan.) So Roos's Happy Endings isn't just irritating, it's superfluous, too: a gimmicky way to tackle the tired romantic roundelay format that should be viewed in a double feature with Miranda July's almost-as-irritating Me and You and Everyone We Know just so you can say you've done your time this year in the indie coal mine. Truth is, if you can suffer through Roos's device of insouciant half-screen captions that periodically comment on the action, critique his characters, broadly clarify his themes, and make predictions about their futures (a lot like the video for Van Halen's "Right Now") without punching the person in front of you, you're made of sterner stuff than I. They've honestly handed out Purple Hearts for less.

Wedding Crashers (2005)

*½/****
starring Owen Wilson, Vince Vaughn, Christopher Walken, Rachel McAdams
screenplay by Steve Faber & Bob Fisher
directed by David Dobkin

by Walter Chaw It should be over a half-hour before it's over--you can almost mark the exact moment when David Dobkin's Wedding Crashers starts running on fumes. Worse, its jokes are the same jokes that the jovial, fraternal gross-out sex comedy genre has been riding into the ground since Animal House--though the picture does provide a certain breed of rough beast its annual fix of unabashed homophobia, gratuitous body-double skin, arbitrary ass-invasion, lame surprise cameo, and the inevitable forced-sentiment finale. For that, offer a minor hosanna. Like talk radio, besides a couple of laughs against one's better judgment, movies like this offer a communal outlet for aggressions that might otherwise be visited on society at large. (See also Young Republican conventions, Promise Keepers conclaves, Young Life retreats, Klan rallies, and Scientology cloisters.) It's not as bloodily cathartic as Christians and lions, Jai Alai, or live execution, but it'll do.

My Mother (2004) + Exiles (2004)

Ma mère
*½/****
starring Isabelle Huppert, Louis Garrel, Emma de Caunes, Joana Preis
screenplay by Christopher Honoré, based on the novel by Georges Bataille
directed by Christopher Honoré

Exils
***/****
starring Romain Duris, Lubna Azabal, Leila Makhlouf, Habib Cheik
written and directed by Tony Gatlif

by Bill Chambers Even after the Hays Office lost its stranglehold on the screen trade, mainstream American erotica remained a largely intellectual affair. Rather than try to get you off, films like Paul Mazursky's Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice and Mike Nichols's Carnal Knowledge were interested in examining the fallout from sex. Meanwhile, France was cranking out Sylvia Kristel movies, and the raincoat crowd could enjoy even such highbrow fare as Last Tango in Paris for long stretches. If the legit French sex cinema ultimately bore a closer resemblance to red-blooded American filth in the '70s (and not just ethically: the 'X aesthetic' was like dumbed-down nouvelle vague), it makes sense that it would chart a course parallel with stateside porno's gradual descent into the penetration abyss. But while the (d)evolution itself is an organic one born of desensitization, things have progressed along a more self-conscious path in recent years, with the incendiary work of Catherine Breillat, Gaspar Noé, and Michael Haneke helping to foster the impression of contemporary Gallic life as a veritable Sodom and Gomorrah.

The Story of My Life (2004) - DVD

Mensonges et trahisons
Mensonges et trahisons et plus si affinités...
**½/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras N/A
starring Edouard Baer, Marie-Josée Croze, Alice Taglioni, Clovis Cornillac
written and directed by Laurent Tirard

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Ugly flashbacks to the indie '90s are unavoidable when considering The Story of My Life (Mensonges et trahisons). This French rom-com integrates the worst of Woody Allen worship with the worst of pre-fame artist's angst: it practically screams that it wants to be taken seriously while making every effort to ensure that you don't, a tactic typical of the callow and the imprecise. But though it treats the artistic vocation as just another tony career move, the film has its charms as light entertainment, with a couple of appealing performances and some handsome design. If nothing else, The Story of My Life is proof positive that Canada has had the bad effect on Quebec export Marie-Josée Croze and not the other way around.

The Modernist: FFC Interviews Chris Terrio

Heights director Chris Terrio isn't afraid of Virginia Woolf

July 10, 2005|Dressed in a New York uniform of black-on-black and in town for a cup of coffee to discuss his feature debut, the Big Apple roundelay Heights, Chris Terrio is slight and slightly nervous. Modeled loosely after Shakespeare's "Macbeth", the film is defiantly literary in its approach to metaphors and doppelgängers--something that makes sense when one considers Mr. Terrio's background as a Harvard and Cambridge-bred English scholar who turned his attentions away from academia's air-conditioned Ivory Tower to toil in the boiler room of cinema and its attendant indignities of PR tours and ink-stained wretches. When I met Mr. Terrio, I was so exhausted I had prepared mainly by watching his film a second time an hour before getting in the car and hunting down a stray, orphan quote attributed to a "Chris Terrio" commenting on Cambridge by way of Harvard. I wasn't at all certain that they were one and the same person, but deadlines and borderline depression being what they are, I was ready to make an ass of myself. The happy discovery, of course, is that Mr. Terrio is delightful: self-effacing, smart, and still-vital in the way of a young filmmaker not yet soured on his profession and his peers--who hasn't learned that it's become all but verboten in the modern mediascape to admit to loving Lars von Trier and hating the low bestial tingle-moments that lace crap like Cinderella Man, and to have something passionate to say about culture, such as it is fresh into the twenty-first century.

Fantastic Four (2005)

½*/****
starring Ioan Gruffudd, Michael Chiklis, Jessica Alba, Chris Evans
screenplay by Michael France and Mark Frost, based on the Marvel comic
directed by Tim Story

by Walter Chaw Terrible. Tim Story's Fantastic Four is just terrible. It's not overly offensive, not sociologically damaging, and the only way it'll pervert your children is by making them stupider. But if you love and respect the cinema as a medium capable of giving life to fantasy and passion to the impossible, the picture's crimes are no less egregious. Fantastic Four is a prime example in every respect of how not to make a movie: it's badly cast, poorly written, clumsily-directed, respects no internal logic, and looks extremely ugly to boot--it resembles those '80s production-line comedies (Police Academy, Hot Dog: The Movie) populated by fashion-plate superheroes instead of fashion-plate stoners. The pacing is so mortally off that it feels like days have been slipped in there in place of minutes, and there's so little rapport among the cast that it often appears as though the actors were filmed separately and later composited in some dork's basement mainframe. You can feel your life being siphoned away by this thing. Did I fail to mention that the special effects are bad? It's a lot of things simultaneously: a nightmare; a joke; a disaster. I dropped my notebook at one point during the screening and spent the rest of the time wondering if I should just leave it there as Fantastic Four finally dribbled to a close. It's bad enough to put you off movies for good.

Invincible (2002) - DVD

***/**** Image A Sound A+
starring Tim Roth, Jouko Ahola, Anna Gourari, Jacob Wein
written and directed by Werner Herzog

by Walter Chaw With casting, in true Herzog fashion, being the lion's portion of performance, Finnish strongman Jouka Ahola starring as legendary Jewish strongman Zishe Breitbart in Herzog's Invincible is a stroke of inspired madness. Herzog fashions Ahola's total lack of experience and guile into something like an ecstatic holiness. He's done this before, of course, with madmen Bruno S. in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser and Stroszek and the certifiable Klaus Kinski in some five astonishing pictures (astonishing not only for their quality, but also for the fact that there were five), so although extratextual complexity ever-threatens to become a distraction in Herzog's films, it's the sort of distraction that edifies Herzog's preoccupation with blurring the distinction between performance and naturalism, fiction and documentary. No less so than in Invincible: The first time Herzog has returned to the pre-Bellum Nazi period in Germany since his directorial debut, Signs of Life, it pits one of Herzog's classic social naïfs against a creature of pure manipulative malevolence, Hanussen (Tim Roth), who is, naturally, the kind of master showman/entertainer Herzog has always mistrusted.

The Machinist (2004) [Widescreen] + Enduring Love (2004) [Widescreen] - DVDs

THE MACHINIST
***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Christian Bale, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Aitana Sanchez-Gijon, Michael Ironside
screenplay by Scott Kosar
directed by Brad Anderson

ENDURING LOVE
***/**** Image A Sound A
starring Daniel Craig, Rhys Ifans, Samantha Morton, Bill Nighy
screenplay by Joe Penhall, based on the novel by Ian McEwan
directed by Roger Michell

by Walter Chaw Sickness sweats out of every pore of Brad Anderson's The Machinist. It's leprous green, corpse flesh lit by sulphur light, marking the end of a progression that took Anderson from the sunny Happy Accidents to the sepia-inflected Session 9 to the bleak and subterranean--Plutonian, really--The Machinist. But like all of Anderson's work, the current film seems best described as coitus interruptus--congress interrupted at the moment of climax by the director's peculiar fixation on mendacity in favour of the supernatural. It's all about the tease for Anderson's genre explorations: time travel in Happy Accidents, haunted asylums in Session 9, and now--what, possession? Murderous blackouts? By plumbing the depths of human failings in a literal-minded fashion, one after the other (obsession, then greed, and finally guilt), Anderson ignores the possibility that genre is sharpest when wielded as metaphor for the same. Even the profession of machining speaks to the idea of precision and craftsmanship over flights of fancy or suspicions of otherness. It's a shame that The Machinist isn't ultimately more than an elaborate Rubik's Cube: not that hard to solve, not high on replay value.

I, Robot (2004) [Widescreen + All-Access Collector's Edition] - DVDs

*/****
DVD - Image A Sound A+ Extras C
DVD (CE) - Image A Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Will Smith, Bridget Moynahan, Bruce Greenwood, James Cromwell
screenplay by Jeff Vintar and Akiva Goldsman
directed by Alex Proyas

by Walter Chaw Alex Proyas makes movies about men who don't know who they are. The Crow, Dark City, and, to an extent, his underachieving small-band-doesn't-make-good dramedy Garage Days, feature main characters forced to come to terms with their identities before becoming empowered by them. It would appear, then, that Proyas is the perfect fit for the faux-philosophical science-fiction epic I, Robot, wherein a Luddite detective played by Will Smith struggles with his stupid past while an Aryan robot played by Alan Tudyk wonders if it's a person. But instead of the existential grief of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, or even A.I., I, Robot is a mess of spare parts cannibalized from superior models and victimized by bad wiring. Poor Isaac Asimov is sparking in his grave--good thing the movie was only "suggested by a book by," which at some point simply means "has the same title as."

The Pacifier (2005) [Widescreen] - DVD

½*/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras D+
starring Vin Diesel, Lauren Graham, Faith Ford, Brittany Snow
screenplay by Thomas Lennon & Robert Ben Garant
directed by Adam Shankman

by Bill Chambers Three months after failing to return kidnapped professor Howard Plummer (Tate Donovan) to safety, Special Ops lieutenant Shane Wolfe (Vin Diesel) is assigned to stay with the late scientist's family while their mother (Faith Ford) visits Switzerland with Shane's superior (Chris Potter) to claim the contents of Howard's safety deposit box. Professor Plummer was killed over a piece of software named G.H.O.S.T. (though not in the pantry with a candlestick) now believed to have been stashed somewhere in his home; when the snot-nosed kids--vain Zoe (Brittany Snow), surly Seth (Max Thieriot), precocious Lulu (Morgan York, also one of the Cheaper by the Dozen brats), and reaction-shot fodder Peter (Keegan & Logan Hoover) and Baby Tyler (Bo & Luke Vink (and with "The Dukes of Hazzard"'s impending renaissance, boy are those two in for a rude awakening at the start of school))--grease the stairwell to take out Shane, they end up driving away their German nanny (a typically misused Carol Kane) instead, forcing Shane into a more maternal role and leaving him little time to search for the computer program.

Clarifying the Image: FFC Interviews Sally Potter|Yes (2005)

Sally Potter reflects on her films

YES *½/****

A loaded word, "pretentious," and one that I think is overused, but whatever its dictionary definition, to me the idea of "pretentious" has a lot to do with the ratio of intent to teach vs. what's actually taught. From The Tango Lesson to The Man Who Cried to Orlando, Sally Potter's films have generally been admirably high on ambition if lamentably low on insight: You can make a film about how cinema is protean and existentially thorny, but unless there's a greater purpose to that insight, it's just first-year film school mixed with a little first-year biology. Take Yes, a picture concerned with lenses and reflective surfaces--written in the high style, The Bard's own iambic, but not so much in play form as in couplets (call it "playful" playwriting)--featuring not only an agile (and game) cast, but also a boatload of pretensions that lead the viewer to the conclusion that what Potter believes is very interesting is only very interesting to her. Trapped in a loveless marriage with Anthony (Sam Neill), "She" (Joan Allen) is having a torrid affair with "He" (Simon Akbarian); she's people are from Belfast, He's are from Beirut, and throughout the tension of He/She is set against the three-R archetypes of polarity: race, religion, and region. Potter uses different film stocks to express disconnection, Antonioni's framing tactics to express the same, and a handful of soliloquies delivered on the so-called fourth-wall-breaking proscenium by a taciturn maid (Shirley Henderson) that explain the Brownian motion of the motes that open the piece, the microbes She examines in her day job, and the ultimate deconstructionalist rationalization that for all this talk of difference, it's just a matter of semantics. Yes is thus film about language and communication at mortal war with true emotion and protean thought, boasting a lot of arresting images and briefly interesting ideas that unfortunately deflate when it becomes clear that a pretty picture and a clever turn mask subterranean drafts of aimless, circular comings and goings and talk of Michelangelo.-WC

July 3, 2005|A chat in the basement of Denver's Hotel Monaco with the loquacious, eloquent Sally Potter wrapped three interviews in three days, not counting the one with Gregg Araki conducted via e-mail, which was apparently pre-screened by someone (a first in my experience, as I've never interviewed Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie) at tiny distributor Tartan and has not, since a minor blow-up on my end, been completed as promised by the "maverick" director. Whether he was offended, put-off, or frightened by the questions, if they even got to him, I'm not sure (maybe he's just too busy with his alien-abduction comedy to honour his commitment), but I'll be honest, I'm finding it hard to give a shit. Less to transcribe. I ask them all and filmmakers, to a one, complain about how far the art of film criticism has fallen in the United States, about how it's consumer reportage nowadays instead of an invitation to a conversation and those tentative early steps towards immortality. But a mouth has two corners, and you talk out of one in righteousness and the other in insecurity; although I provide an outlet for the outrage of the artist jilted at the hands of one too many clever wordsmiths, I also get the sense that most of these film professionals would prefer getting the junket line to any actual serious inquiry into their work.

Credit Sally Potter, then, for having the guts to discuss what her work is actually about. They're pretentious, her films, they're always meaningful and they always strike me as trying too hard to impress an imaginary demographic. Ironically, Potter's pictures underline the truism that artist intentionality is a decent place to start an autopsy but a horrible place to end one. In her case, without the auteur theory, there's nothing to say, and so it is with her latest film, Yes, another of Potter's examinations of the meta-quality of film-within-film and the cinema as a medium of projection and inversion. Written in couplets of proto-Shakespearean iambic pentameter (done with more liquid realism--and fewer rhymes--on HBO's "Deadwood"), it's an intriguing experiment for a good half-hour before its usefulness as a glass held to language diminishes, leaving a soggy, vaguely orientalist romance to hold as its symbolic centre. Give her due for being courageous enough to make a picture so unapologetically rigorous in its intellectualism, particularly in an age when "nuance" is effete and the most minor critical analysis is seen as an unforgivable offense to God and country. Potter is articulate and gracious in explaining what she's getting at in an environment grown too comfortable with not getting at anything at all.