Film Freak Central

Punch-Drunk Love (2002) [Two-Disc Special Edition] - DVD|[The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

****/****
BD - Image A Sound A+ Extras B+
DVD - Image A+ Sound A+ Extras C+
starring Adam Sandler, Emily Watson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Luis Guzmán
written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

by Walter Chaw Indicated by spacious compositions and a bracing unpredictability, Paul Thomas Anderson's romantic comedy Punch-Drunk Love is a marriage, if you will, between Claire Denis's audacious Trouble Every Day and Steven Shainberg's sadomasochism fairytale Secretary. Here's a trio of films that announce 2002 as a year perhaps best defined by its aggressively non-traditional, hopelessly romantic love stories (toss Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven, Cronenberg's Spider, and Roger Avary's The Rules of Attraction into that mix).

SDFF '13: Borgman

****/****
starring Jan Bijvoet, Hadewych Minis, Jeroen Perceval, Sara Hjort Ditlevsen
written and directed by Alex van Warmerdam

by Walter Chaw Screening at the SDFF and now travelling with the Alamo Fantastic Fest, Alex van Warmerdam's Borgman gets the Yorgos Lanthimos Award for Most Devastating Absurdist Metaphor for Familial Dysfunction. Smart as hell and unapologetically surreal, its central motivating image is a tableaux vivant of Henry Fuseli's "The Nightmare," tipping off not just the ethos of the film, but also that there may be running threads concerning mothers (Fuseli was Mary Wollstonecraft's lover), monsters (Mary being the mother of Mary "Frankenstein" Shelley), the empowerment of women (the mother again), nightmares, of course, and maybe Romanticism, if only in the picture's awareness and perversion of nature. Demanding a specific kind of active spectatorship, Borgman is a complex film with heat, and somewhere in the middle of it there's a performance within a performance that ends with a declaration of intent that stands as one of the most existentially chilling things in cinema this year.

SDFF '13: I Used to Be Darker

***/****
directed by Matthew Porterfield

by Walter Chaw Matthew Porterfield's quiet and humane I Used to Be Darker provides an interesting contrast to Richard Linklater's talkier improvisations while covering the same interpersonal landscapes of how people speak to one another, react to one another, and interact physically within a space. One of the first images is of a little Irish girl, Taryn (Deragh Campbell), taking a knife to a couple of paintings. It's a rejection of many things, as well as a declaration. I Used to Be Darker will privilege the cinematic (i.e., showcase the complexity and eloquence of communication through moving pictures), and Porterfield's DP on this production, Jeremy Saulnier, who's pulled off something like a masterpiece with his own Blue Ruin, is just the man to do it. Taryn, run away from the UK all the way to the U.S. to stay with her aunt and uncle, discovers that she's gone from perceived familial strife to tangible familial strife, as the pair is in the process of separating--leaving Taryn's cousin Abby (Hannah Gross) embittered and caught in the middle. More clues to Porterfield's intent come in the casting of musicians Ned Oldham and Kim Taylor as the aunt and uncle: non-actors (as is Porterfield's practice through three films), both, they inhabit their roles with the winsomeness, and indistinctness, of dedicated artists. It's not a far reach for them to access the despair that's essential, I think, to a certain kind of creation, and Porterfield allows them each a moment to express themselves in song: one in a basement before Oldham destroys his instrument, the other on stage and then over the closing-credits, with the coda being a sigh from Taylor and a little shake of her head. I Used to Be Darker isn't about anything more complicated than observing unhappiness and conflict; take it as the counterpoint to Felix Van Groeningen's Broken Circle Breakdown: the quiet between notes, a celebration if you can call something this downbeat celebratory, of what film should act like and look like when you leave it alone.

"Are Movies Breaking Bad?": See Walter Chaw in Person

Our own Walter Chaw will be speaking on a panel tomorrow (Sunday, November 17^th) at the Starz Denver Film Festival. From the Denver Film Society website:

Are Movies Breaking Bad?
Happening: Sunday, November 17, 12:15 PM
Duration: 120 Minutes
Venue: SDFF Sie FilmCenter

Lines along various parts of the entertainment/arts continuum seem to be blurring on a daily basis. Long gone are the days when watching a movie meant buying a ticket and sitting in a theater. But over the past decade or so, series—most aired on premium cable channels—have accomplished what many criticize the movies for not doing: focusing on characters, developing compelling stories, and dominating the national conversation. Long-form storytelling even has spread to services such as Netflix, which provide on-demand streaming as well as disc rentals. Panel moderator Robert Denerstein leads a discussion about whether the best of television now rivals and possibly surpasses movies in both relevance and artistry. Our panelists also will consider which form penetrates more deeply into the national consciousness. Put another way: Were you more likely to hear watercooler talk about such cable series as Breaking Bad, Homeland, and Game of Thrones than about Argo, last year's Oscar winner for best picture? Our panel will examine seismic shifts in the entertainment business, and chime in on whether movies are keeping pace. And, yes, we're talking content, not just delivery systems.

Panelists include: Joanne Ostrow, Denver Post Television Critic, Lisa Kennedy, Denver Post Film and Theatre Critic, Walter Chaw, Film Freak Central Film Critic

SDFF '13: The Fifth Season

La cinquième saison
****/****
starring Aurelia Poirier, Django Schrevens, Sam Louwyck, Gill Vancompernolle
written and directed by Peter Brosens & Jessica Woodworth

by Walter Chaw It begins as a puzzle, the active-engagement kind where a film, maybe an art film not very good and certainly not lacking in pretension, wears all the hopes of its creators on its sleeve. But then, out of nowhere, Peter Brosens and Jessica Woodworth's The Fifth Season (La cinquième saison) ties together all the pretty pictures into an entirely honourable updating of a few of the ideas from, but most importantly the atmosphere of, Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man. Truth be told, the pictures are more than just pretty: they're stunning at times, and it's easy to be mesmerized by them--by their surrealism and meticulous framing, and, at the end of it all, by their gorgeous absurdity. This is rapturous filmmaking that in its first minutes watches two teens kiss, tentatively, in the cold and the woods, their breath trembling the soft down on each other's faces. We feel, with them, the discovery of something new. The Fifth Season is a film about textures, but rather than just be a film about textures, it does something that maybe Terrence Malick's movies do, certainly Bela Tarr's: it makes its form comment on its function.

SDFF '13: Blue Ruin

****/****
starring Macon Blair, Devin Ratray, Amy Hargreaves, Kevin Kolack
written and directed by Jeremy Saulnier

by Walter Chaw Six years after his surprisingly poignant, unexpectedly deft, and, of course, funny debut Murder Party, multi-hyphenate Jeremy Saulnier (he writes, directs, and photographs his movies) returns with something very much like a genre masterpiece with Blue Ruin, the best Coen Bros. noir since they were making them. Grim in exactly the way that can be delightful, it's paced beautifully, written beautifully, and performed, that's right, beautifully. Saulnier's intelligent script is a model of restraint and a strong sense of humour. Macon Blair's reluctant avenging angel Dwight is someone I've never met before in a movie, and when Dwight seeks out old pal Ben (Devin Ratray) for help at some point, well, I'd never met him before, either. It's fair to say that nothing that happens in Blue Ruin happens the way I thought it would happen, if it happens at all. Note an early moment in the picture where Dwight sets up an ambush and doesn't pay it off, or that standard thing in movies now where the hero goes to a drugstore to pick up the supplies they need to perform self-surgery, which here ends with...that would be telling. All the requirements are there for a grand satire, it's true, yet Blue Ruin isn't that. Instead, it's a film that understands exactly what it is and what space it occupies, and at the end it's not merely an extraordinary character piece (Blair's turn would be star-making in a just universe), it's also a nimble thriller full of outrageous fortune and stunning reversals meted out perfectly between its breathless moments and the moments where it breathes.

SDFF '13: The Broken Circle Breakdown

***/****
starring Johan Heldenbergh, Veerle Baetens, Nell Cattrysse, Geert Van Rampelberg
screenplay by Carl Joos & Felix Van Groeningen, based on the play by Johan Heldenbergh & Mieke Dobbels
directed by Felix Van Groeningen

by Walter Chaw Felix Van Groeningen's The Broken Circle Breakdown eventually loses impetus and becomes political theatre, but until it does it's exceptional melodrama, raw and emotional. It walks the fine line for a while, staying just this side of exploitation in its alinear tale of a little girl who gets cancer and her parents--how they met, the aftermath, and then the far aftermath. The film's central event, then, isn't the child's fate, but rather the meet-cute of the parents, with squarish Didier (Johan Heldenbergh) asking about Elise's (Veerle Baetens) tattoos in the parlour where she works. A bit shocked, and maybe titillated, that each has a story of a different man attached to it, he invites her to, essentially, come see him perform with his bluegrass band in a tiny club down the way. Van Groeningen, working from an original idea and stage play by Heldenbergh, adroitly alternates the events of the film with Didier's band's songs; in other words, The Broken Circle Breakdown owes a greater kinship to Cabaret than to Once--even though, at its best, its intent leans more towards the personal than the political. This means, of course, that once it becomes more political than personal, it also loses its rudder and balance. Already, effortlessly, about so much, it stumbles badly when it tries to be.

SDFF '13: Soft in the Head

**½/****
directed by Nathan Silver

by Walter Chaw Nathan Silver's second film in less than two years (he reports he now has four in the can) is the surprisingly affecting Soft in the Head, which works as a detailed study of lives of loud desperation. Natalia (Sheila Etxeberria) is a drunk, makes bad object choices, and is an all-around loser who also has the misfortune of being really pretty, making her the target of just about everyone she comes in contact with. Exteberria, the sister of an ex-roommate of Silver's, is a true find, as is Ed Ryan as kind, mild Maury, who walks the streets in search of lost souls to invite to bunk with him in his little apartment. Shades of Viridiana, and for all of Silver's protestations to the contrary, there's a certain formalism in his satire that gives an arc to what was, by his report, an almost-completely improvised, looser-than-loose adaptation of Dostoevsky's The Idiot, with only the character of poor, saintly, benighted Prince Myshkin remaining somewhat intact in Maury. Soft in the Head is saved from pretension, though, by the complete naturalism of the performances. Exteberria astounds for her unself-consciousness as a character irredeemable, defined by her lack of impulse control and horrific decisions. A friend, Hannah (Melanie J. Scheiner), provides the film its foil while Hannah's autistic brother Nathan (Carl Kranz) has a pivotal moment where he speaks directly to Natalia's essential problem as an insufficient object of desire. The last moments between Natalia and Maury are touching, and the final scene, where I swear I see Maury moving his hand on her thigh, speaks to puzzles, deep, in how there may be no such thing as holy saints invested in pure altruism. The only thing worse than a world with Myshkins, after all, is a world without them.

SDFF '13: Go Down Death

½*/****
written and directed by Aaron Schimberg

by Walter Chaw Okay, I'm gonna take a stab at this one. Aaron Schimberg's aggressively pretentious Go Down Death is an attempt to speak to the idea that communal storytelling is the key way in which humans communicate culture. Ostensibly based on a lost folklorist's collected works, it acts like a Guy Maddin, looks like early Jim Jarmusch, and really doesn't work at all, because if the film is a variation on a theme, it's a riff that goes on way, way too long. I spent an evening once watching mushroom prints, stained directly onto film negative, by Stan Brakhage. The idea is interesting--a lot more interesting than the execution. It's more interesting that he thought of it and made it, in other words, than it is to endure it. I feel this way about most experimental cinema; I feel this way about experimental jazz, too. It's all perilously close to clever, highly-intellectualized masturbation. After a while, one begins to wonder if it's even still engaging to the person jerking off. Go Down Death does a nice job with its black-and-white, wilfully-grainy cinematography, which creates a convincing carnival/period feeling. Unfortunately, the dialogue is so impossible to deliver, and in the mouths of friends and family who need a lot more help than this. What remains is a film that can't quite get its fingers to close on valuable subtext or meaningful philosophy. Ending with an anachronistic jump to a neo-Pinter, kinda-Woody Allen modern-dinner-party epilogue that underscores the equation of cinema with the vessel of new tribal mythology, it's, you know...I get it, I get it, and I wish this were a short instead of a feature.

SDFF '13: Tricked

Steekspel
*/****
directed by Paul Verhoeven

by Walter Chaw Its title maybe referring to the audience, Paul Verhoeven's newest is a pain-in-the-ass gimmick piece done by a filmmaker I used to really admire and maybe don't so much anymore. The first third is dedicated to a built-in, manic "making-of" featurette that essays, in deadly, deadening detail, how Verhoeven posted four pages of a script online, then invited anybody with a laptop and a Starbucks to submit the next five pages, and the next, and so on and so forth, thus pushing Verhoeven out of his comfort zone and inspiring him to new heights as a filmmaker. As is always the case with Verhoeven, it's very likely that this whole project is some elaborate satire of exactly how stupid we are. His RoboCop, Starship Troopers, Basic Instinct, Total Recall, and Showgirls have each enjoyed long, healthy second lives as critical darlings; in his way, he's the Douglas Sirk of the late-'80s/early-'90s: dismissed in the moment, but appreciated through the perspective afforded by time. I'm a fan. Enough so that I want to believe the prototypical mad-director persona Verhoeven inhabits in this thing is a piss on self-important meta stuff like The Five Obstructions. (Honestly, just the jaunty "fuck you" score suggests that Verhoeven is fully aware of the game he's playing here.) As for the short film that occupies the latter 50 minutes or so, it's a tale of corporate intrigue featuring unknown but game actors, playing out a sexual blackmail that feels more the lark for the context provided by the attendant documentary. Indeed, it's impossible to see the two halves as independent entities, however unintentionally, and as such, the product of the experiment lands as Verhoeven's most conventional film...ever. It's an example of the fallibility of giving people what they think they want and indulging what they think they understand. That doesn't make it better, though it does suddenly make it make sense.

Starz Denver Film Festival '13: All Together Now

**½/****
screenplay by Ryan Kasmiskie & Alexander Mirecki
directing Alexander Mirecki

by Walter Chaw Two scenes: one featuring a bonfire-illuminated kiss against a forest backdrop, the other a man standing on a platform in a clearing as a crowd fills in around him. Both are captured in glorious 16mm, shot through with grain and lit by natural light; both are suffused with a magical, twilit glow that only really happens in exactly this way when you use old, some would say obsolete, technology. These moments almost, by themselves, justify the existence Alexander Mirecki's All Together Now. At the least, there's nothing about the substance of the film that detracts from the beauty of Zoran Popovic's cinematography. Plotless, listless maybe, wobbling slightly from portentous to unassuming and slight, the picture is a half-fictionalized document of an all-night music festival that, in the tradition of Richard Linklater's earliest forays into proto-mumblecore (Harmony Korine's, too), doesn't have much on its mind and would even, given its lo-fi visual beauty, be better served as a silent. Still, it demonstrates just enough in terms of instinct to suggest that Mirecki has a future. Lou Taylor Pucci presents an affable semi-centre for the piece as the organizer of the concert and recipient of the aforementioned kiss, while bands like Manicorn, Pedestrian Deposit, Nice Face, and Night Control provide the right CBGB authenticity when we pull away from the overly-scripted (overly-slotted, truth be told) interactions of the audience. 

Dogtown and Z-Boys (2001) [Deluxe Edition] - DVD|Blu-ray Disc

***/****
DVD - Image A Sound A Extras B
BD - Image C- Sound A Extras B
directed by Stacy Peralta

by Walter Chaw Winner of the Audience and Director's awards at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival, the kinetic social history document Dogtown and Z-Boys suggests that the amalgamation of art and sport created a unique brand of protest performance art centred around eight kids growing up in the "dead wonderland" of Venice Beach (and the surrounding urban wasteland referred to by the locals as Dogtown). Directed by Stacy Peralta, a member of the legendary Zephyr Skating Team that almost single-handedly defined the modern X-Game at the 1975 Del Mar Nationals Bahne-Cadillac Skateboard Championship, Dogtown and Z-Boys accomplishes several tasks at once, evoking the ethic that captured the imagination of American punks, portraying the dangers of stardom, and telling a rags-to-riches fable about how boys (and a girl) from the wrong side of the tracks sometimes make good on their own terms. The film is so intent on harnessing the off-the-cuff spirit that informed the Zephyr Team ("Z-Boys") that we hear narrator Sean Penn cough and clear his throat.

DIFF '06: The Aura

El aura
***½/****
starring Ricardo Darín, Dolores Fonzi, Pablo Cedrón, Nahuel Pérez Biscayart
written and directed by Fabián Bielinsky

by Walter Chaw The late Argentine director Fabián Bielinsky's swan song, The Aura (El Aura) is a throwback in spirit and execution to the grim, inward-gazing paranoia dramas of the 1970s. Hero Esteban (Ricardo Darin) is an epileptic taxidermist who wakes up, as the film opens, in a bank vestibule; we proceed to follow him into a credits sequence that sees him resurrecting, in his meticulous craft, a fox for a museum panorama. The title The Aura might refer to that illusion of life to which Bielisnky's sadsack loner endeavours to manufacture--to imbue--in his projects; or maybe it refers to the vicarious pleasure he takes in planning out imaginary heists (like the father and his friend in Shadow of a Doubt) before ultimately becoming embroiled in an armoured-car robbery scheme after accidentally shooting the plot's kingpin. The title could even point to the spirit of The Aura itself, buoyed as it is by the spirits of the films from the American New Wave, which Bielinsky counted among his favourite eras in cinema. (I wonder if Bielinsky didn't think of himself as born too early or too late, trapped in a film industry eating itself from the inside out.) Whatever the case, it's a detective story in its purest incarnation, with the hero on a journey to find himself amidst the ruin of what he's made of his world; and it's a caper flick, one where the prize--that is, the only prize that matters--is a friend for Esteban as he finishes out his life on the desolate outskirts of truly living. The picture, then, is gripped by a reverence for genre (noir especially) stripped down and reconstructed as a weary attitude and a flawed protagonist ultimately driven by loneliness to become a member of the world rather than just a chronicler of its past and possibilities. Reminding of Jules Dassin's expat heist flicks, it's infused with a whiff of the outsider's stale regret.

DIFF '06: Starfish Hotel

*½/****
starring Kôichi Satô, Kiki, Tae Kimura, Akira Emoto
written and directed by John Williams

by Walter Chaw Stylishly shot, enough so that the neophyte might mistake it for a sparkling example of J-horror, Starfish Hotel addresses that old saw of a character wondering if he's a "character" as mysterious events unfold around him. Handled with more care and intelligence by the first 4/5ths of Marc Forster's Stranger Than Fiction, Starfish Hotel acts as a survey of other pictures (most notably the mascot motifs of Donnie Darko and Kontroll) as it goes on its merry non-horror, In the Mouth of Madness way. In this one, workaday Tokyo stiff Arisu (Koichi Sato) begins to believe he's a construct in his favourite novelist's latest when his wife disappears and he becomes unable to stop reliving his brief encounter with seductress Kayoko (the smoking-hot Kiki). Aided by a mysterious pamphleteer in a grey bunny suit, Arisu traces his wife to a high-class brothel that matches a recurring dream in addition to conveniently evoking a Kubrickian set-piece that is likewise unerotic and tainted this time around by the feeling inescapable that not only have we been down this velvet-rimmed, cigar-tainted alley before, but that each time the returns have diminished. Starfish Hotel is beautiful to look at, but for all its desperation for surreality and mystery (it ends with a series of oblique nothings), it resolves itself as not much more than a reminder that guys like Takashi Miike are doing it better half a dozen times a year without breaking this kind of sweat.

DIFF '06: The Architect

ZERO STARS/****
starring Anthony LaPaglia, Viola Davis, Isabella Rossellini, Hayden Panettiere
written and directed by Matt Tauber

by Walter Chaw I am sick to death of pieces of shit like Matt Tauber's The Architect--sick of the White Guilt Trip, which here finds architect Leo (Anthony LaPaglia) the boogeyman behind all the cultural evils housed in the Cabrini-Green tenement he designed. When he protests to neo-Alfre Woodard Neely (Viola Davis) that he's just the mastermind behind the building's outline and thus unaccountable for the collapse of urban civilization housed therein, the effect is one of outrage not at the arrogance of The Man, but at the cult of victimhood nursed by people like Tauber. By disempowering the film's blacks of even their own fall, Tauber performs an act of racism so odious that his next picture should be about these stock ghetto characters (the righteous mom, the good girl, the drug dealer, the dreamer) demanding an explanation as to why he's perpetuated these damning stereotypes in the guise of laying the paddle to hapless whitey. The picture meanwhile casts Isabella Rossellini as a variation on the same crazy suburban housewife Edie Falco played in The Quiet (and Juliette Binoche played in Bee Season--the better analogy for its complementary boy/girl child and rich/poor sub-dramas) and Hayden Panettiere as the teen-queen doing her best to get raped in the back of a semi-trailer, the better to allegorize her parents' disintegrating marriage and her brother's (Sebastian Stan) simultaneously-unfolding realization that he'd very much like to shag project-hustler-with-a-heart-of-gold Shawn (Paul James). Said events do not and do happen, respectively, with the gay union punished in typical gay-union fashion as Shawn swan-dives off Leo's precious edifice in an act of society-restoring self-loathing. Would that Shawn and Leo do the same as they gaze moonily into one another's eyes while the curtain falls on this umpteenth revival of contemptuous liberal cinema. My only question, doubly rhetorical because he might as well be if he isn't: Is Tauber a Canadian filmmaker?

DIFF '06: Breaking and Entering

*½/****
starring Jude Law, Juliette Binoche, Robin Wright Penn, Ray Winstone
written and directed by Anthony Minghella

by Walter Chaw Carefully modulated for maximum inoffensiveness and awards-season consideration, Anthony Minghella's King's Cross diary Breaking and Entering plays less like a London native's Crash than like Woody Allen's solipsistic version of the same. Find the Aryan faction led by architect Will (Jude Law) and girlfriend Liv (Robin Wright Penn) and the foreigners by Croatian single-mom Amira (the increasingly one-note Juliette Binoche) and, in another star-making turn by Vera Farmiga, a Polish hooker named Oana. A weary detective (Ray Winstone) verbalizes the social schism Minghella doesn't trust his broadly-drawn depiction to articulate by itself and the storylines begin to mingle when Will follows, yes, a burglar back to his tenement flat. The wink and nod, of course, is that "breaking and entering" also refers to Will's intrusion into Amira's life, the immigrants' intrusion into London, Will's ambition to rebuild a marginal neighbourhood, and so on and so forth. Stunned with angsty white gentrifiers and tortured immigrants, it's the British Quinceañera, the kind of film that pans so desperately for importance that long passages of dialogue are wordy mission statements while the finale, in the ultimate concession to sloppiness and condescension, caves to that fatal compulsion to tie things up in tidy, attractive little passages. (Squint just a little and rainbows and ponies burst out of Will's ass.) Minghella's only ever been good when writing fairy tales, but making a children's story out of this material is a betrayal of a dedicated cast and a middlebrow demographic that deserves better than this handsome, pedagogical tongue bath whether it asks for it or not.

DIFF '06: The Lives of Others

Das Leben der Anderen
***/****
starring Martina Gedeck, Ulrich Mühe, Sebastian Koch, Ulrich Tukur
written and directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck

by Walter Chaw Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck makes his hyphenate debut with The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen), a picture revolving around the days leading up to and immediately following the fall of the Berlin Wall as experienced by prominent playwright Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), his actress girlfriend Christa (Martina Gedeck), and the Stasi investigator Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) assigned to listen in on their conversations for evidence of dissent. The premise--monster grows a soul in the presence of humanity--is tired, but the execution is solid and smart from script to performance, replacing sentimentality and cliché with keen observations and long, wordless passages in which Wiesler moves through his victims' empty apartment before returning to his own with a hooker for desperate, lonesome encounters. The separation between East and West (and, fascinatingly, between the artist and the audience), then, transcends the ideological and becomes a story about isolation and voyeurism. The Lives of Others pulls off the neat trick of being truthful without being meticulous, and of universalizing a very particular place and time by creating three-dimensional characters and putting them in an impossible situation. A scene where Wiesler confronts Christa and speaks to her about the "truth" of her profession as a stage performer touches on one of Donnersmarck's key inspirations: Thomas Mann's writings about the nature of desire and how that desire is nourished by separation and fantasy. The Lives of Others is intensely literate and, as a consequence, slipperier than just another Eastern Bloc genre exercise. Brecht is referenced visually and literally in the appearance of a purloined manuscript, suggesting that the author's carefully-armoured politicism is mirrored here and, more, that we've been invited to peel away the layers with which Donnersmarck has overlaid his own little melodrama. It's that wonder of a populist, bittersweet-but-ultimately-feel-good piece that has a heart you believe in and a working brain to match.

DIFF '06: Americanese

**½/****
starring Chris Tashima, Allison Sie, Sab Shimono, Munda Razooki
screenplay by Eric Byler, based on the novel by Shawn Wong
directed by Eric Byler

by Walter Chaw Eric Byler's follow-up to his haunted, blue Charlotte Sometimes is this adaptation of Shawn Wong's American Knees, which, like Charlotte Sometimes, follows the day-to-day of Asian-Americans--though unlike that film, it fails to find that buried thrum to tie together the little glimpses comprising the whole. It's not for lack of trying, as Byler (over)uses the dissolve as his primary editing tactic in what tracks as an attempt to poeticize the essentially mundane and to literalize what, in the novel, is completely internal. Being Chinese-American myself, a lot of the emotional frigidity and distance the film's central figure Raymond (Chris Tashima, a dead ringer for Bruce Campbell) exhibits required little clarification, yet because Americanese is left without a dramatic centre, once frayed-wire Betty (a tremendous Joan Chen) is introduced as a love interest for lovelorn cipher Raymond, its tonal shift and narrative acrobatics strain patience and credibility. It's not the glacial pace that fatigues, but a lack of connection with the characters, while the feeling that long passages have been left out in the interest of mood distracts instead of entrancing us. It's refreshing and lovely to see Asians on screen as conflicted, romantic, flawed characters, but for all the patience and inarguably good intentions of Americanese, Charlotte Sometimes remains a much more affecting contribution to the conversation.

DIFF '06: Rescue Dawn

**½/****
starring Christian Bale, Steve Zahn, Jeremy Davies, Marshall Bell
written and directed by Werner Herzog

by Walter Chaw Though a perfectly serviceable actioner, one that avoids almost every pitfall and cliché of the POW genre while supporting a singularly eccentric performance, Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn, sadly, could have been directed by any one of a dozen directors. Gripping but not especially memorable, it lacks the mad Bavarian's insanity: his belief that nature is obscene, as well as his ability to make a trance from the mendacity of routine. (Because Herzog is a rare talent, his films butt up against greater expectations.) The irony of this being Herzog's most accessible film is that it's still probably best appreciated by Herzog fans, who will note--besides the obvious link to Herzog's Little Dieter Needs to Fly--an early moment where a sadistic Laotian guerrilla regards a giant butterfly on his arm like Kinski in B-roll for Fitzcarraldo. German-born Dieter Dengler is brought to life in Rescue Dawn as a bizarre pastiche of nervous tics and unrestrained energy by Christian Bale (the most impressive Method actor in Hollywood who still manages to leave no lasting impression whatsoever). Here Dieter, after getting shot down over Laos on a covert bombing run early in the Vietnam War, serves as leader to--and inspiration for--a group of prisoners-of-war closed off somewhere in the lush South Asian jungle. If it's meant as a continuation of Herzog's interest in blurring the lines between fiction and documentary, consider that Little Dieter Needs to Fly is already a near-perfect example of that particular auteurist concern, with even recent Herzogs like Grizzly Man addressing the same issues (and others, such as the horror of the Natural and the futility of man's struggle to transcend) with more subtlety, tragedy, and wit. Exactly no more and no less than what it is, Rescue Dawn is a Vietnam flick without a discernible political agenda; another opportunity for Jeremy Davies to act like a paranoid, emaciated junkie; and another chance for Steve Zahn to cement his second-banana status. There is one moment, however, that sings with poetry, as Dengler hallucinates a lost buddy and offers him the tattered sole of a shoe they'd been sharing through the wilderness. It's Herzog peeking through a canopy of expert nullity.

DIFF '05: Love, Ludlow

**/****
starring Alicia Goranson, David Eigenberg, Brendan Sexton III, Andrea Maulella
screenplay by David Paterson
directed by Adrienne J. Weiss

by Walter Chaw Utterly stagebound and seldom anything but a small Sundance indie version of Dominick & Eugene, Adrienne Weiss's Love, Ludlow, against all odds, kicks free of its quirk crutches at around the halfway mark--long enough for it to modestly divert, if not especially edify. "Roseanne"'s Alicia "Lecy" Goranson is a tough-talking Queens girl, Myra, charged with the care of her bi-polar, Shakespeare-quoting brother Ludlow (Brendan Sexton III). That she gives the most self-conscious performance in a film about some sort of animalistic social misfit/typical painter speaks ill--but all is salved by David Eigenberg as mild-mannered suit Reggie, who is, for whatever reason, interested in the crass, brassy Myra and so suffers all manner of abuse from her and Ludlow in order to engage in whimsical date-centric misadventures, the inevitable break-up, and the inevitable reunion. Eigenberg has the quality of "Kids in the Hall" vet Kevin McDonald--a fetching blend of innocence and resourcefulness--and his struggle to reconcile his own feelings of inadequacy with those engendered by Myra (and what must be some kind of metaphor in the impossible Ludlow) is well-wrought. In her feature debut, director Weiss too often mistakes revolving around two characters having a dialogue for expanding the boundaries of a play--she demonstrates by her indecision a more general cluelessness about how, exactly, to free Love, Ludlow from its roots. But the writing, however thickly mannered, is at least dense enough with nice turns of phrase (and gifted with Eigenberg's excellent turn) to make the exercise an earnest try rather than a misguided disaster.

DIFF '05: The President's Last Bang

****/****
starring Song Jae-ho, Han Suk-kyu, Baek Yun-shik, Jeong Won-jung
written and directed by Im Sang-soo

by Walter Chaw Im Sang-soo's transcendently good political satire The President's Last Bang is so far the smartest, chanciest flick of the year--an alchemical brew of balls and technical brilliance that produces tremors of recognition and aftershocks of import. Whether it's DP Kim Woo-heong's rapturous tracking shots or Kim Hong-jib's tango soundtrack, there is something ineffable embedded in the fabric of the piece, making of the assassination of South Korean president Park Chung-hee something like the boxing sequences of Scorsese's Raging Bull. It's appropriate, with Park a puppet of big business (it's rumoured that Samsung launched a campaign to discredit the picture prior to release, in part through the censoring of documentary footage owned by Samsung's sister-company CJ Entertainment) and an officer of the Japanese army occupying Manchuria during WWII, hunting down members of the Korean Independent Army arm-in-arm with Hirohito's wolves. (Park's assassin calls him by his Japanese name before he kills him--not a popular decision.) Im frames his action in short segments, little dances of torture and madness, kidnapping and other florid abuses of power, having at one point a military man deliver his frothing soliloquy in his underwear. With the sly thought that maybe the butler did it, Im encompasses a nation's class, politics, military/industrial infrastructure, and skeletons in the closet with the same elegant outrage. It's one of the best films of the year--more so for how it turns up the heat, ever so slightly, on our own turbid waters. This, not well-intentioned fluff like Good Night, and Good Luck., is how to do righteous indignation.

DIFF '05: Duane Hopwood

*½/****
starring David Schwimmer, Janeane Garofalo, Judah Friedlander, Susan Lynch
written and directed by Matt Mulhern

by Walter Chaw David Schwimmer goes the grimy indie route for actor-turned-director Matt Mulhern's sophomore feature Duane Hopwood, finding himself an alcoholic pit boss in Atlantic City about to lose custody of his two daughters to ex-wife Linda (Janeane Garofalo). Duane (Schwimmer) takes in aspiring stand-up comedian Anthony (Judah Friedlander) as a roommate/sidekick in the mold of Friedlander's previous role as a lovable spaz in American Splendor, their travails building to an unlikely custody hearing and an even unlikelier climax at one of Anthony's gigs as Duane, hopped-up on scotch and mescaline, goes blithely off the edge. Salvaging the rudimentary motions of this broken family drama, however, is a surprising turn by Schwimmer, who blunts his trademark whinging nebbish persona to turn in a human performance, if not necessarily an assured one. His Duane approaches three dimensions (likewise Garofalo, shoehorned into the thankless role of inconstant ex), struggling against the constraints of what's essentially a formula picture. He's fine, but Duane Hopwood is flat and uninvolving for long stretches, hurt by jokes that fall flat and the over-familiarity of this story, as well as by a strange kind of desperation/pretension (a shopping cart overturned in the dreary New Jersey surf; a poignant bike escort to punctuate a sad goodbye). It doesn't help that the film culminates in two Thanksgiving dinner tableaux that seem, obliquely, to reward Duane for driving drunk with his daughter in the backseat and threatening mom's new boyfriend with a baseball bat while punishing Linda's reasonable desire to support her spawn with a McDinner in her newly-displaced life with her kids and knucklehead beau (John Krasinski).

DIFF '05: Brick

**½/****
starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Lukas Haas, Nora Zehetner, Laura Dannon
written and directed by Rian Johnson

by Walter Chaw Brick is a cult classic-in-the-making and one for which I harbour a goodly amount of affection. (I should say I admire its chutzpah, if not its ultimate success.) It's an experiment in screenwriting and matching shots, a gimmick stretched to feature-length by first-time hyphenate Rian Johnson that puts Raymond Chandler's hardboiled lexicon into the mouths of disconsolate teens seething at a high school somewhere in the twenty-first century. It would've been a fantastic noir except for that displacement, as its coolness decomposes every time the film contorts into an unnatural posture to honour its trick, nifty as it is. Consider femme fatale Laura (neo-Winnie Cooper Nora Zehetner): When she finally, inevitably, seduces our gumshoe, Frye (the always-marvy Joseph Gordon-Levitt), for instance, it's hard to know whether they've slept together or just made out on someone's parents' bed. It matters. There's an inevitable infantilizing that goes hand-in-hand with the premise, which can be used to either its benefit (as when Kingpin's (Lukas Haas) mother fusses about like Scorsese's mom has a tendency to do in her son's pictures), or, as is more usual, its detriment (see: a ridiculously awkward meeting with the school's Vice Principal (Richard Roundtree)). As straight noir, Brick would be an easy project to get behind, as it's post-modern and rejuvenating in the most respectful sense (more Sin City than Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid). But to set it in a high-school milieu, no matter the accomplishments of its cast (uniformly excellent), makes the whole production seem smug and, ultimately, just a little bit silly. A shame I didn't catch this about 15 years ago.

DIFF '05: The Matador

**½/****
starring Pierce Brosnan, Greg Kinnear, Hope Davis, Philip Baker Hall
written and directed by Richard Shepard

by Walter Chaw Wearing a sleazebag moustache and an ugly print shirt, Pierce Brosnan watches a bartender shake his drink instead of stirring it and the film slows down and blurs accordingly. It's post-modernism as gauzy, lazy hallucination--a swoon that suggests a minor, nearly-imperceptible tremor in reality and the only moment in which hyphenate Richard Shepard acknowledges the irony of the former 007's presence in another licensed-to-kill role as assassin-for-hire Julian Noble. Fond of bottomless tequila and "sucky-fucky" instead of "blushy-blushy," Noble is an unctuous, pathetic character. In any other film, he'd be selling office-furniture and drowning his sorrows in booze and floozies, wondering why nobody's calling on his birthday. On a fateful trip to Mexico, Julian intersects with Danny (Greg Kinnear), a suit-and-tie salesman trying desperately to secure an all-important contract so that his mousy wife (Hope Davis, cast against type as a kind person) doesn't droop into the wallpaper. A lightning-felled tree crashes through Danny's kitchen, no less a harbinger of calamitous change than Julian turning up on his doorstep months later with an offer Danny can't refuse. It's a comedy of murderous Freudian manners in the vogue of Grosse Point Blank or "The Sopranos": there's nothing particularly original about an odd-couple in a thriller nor, even, a thug having an existential crisis while involving Ward Cleaver in his maleficent deeds. The Matador, then, would do well to bring something new to the conversation, but instead, it functions as a workmanlike bit of easy entertainment. Neither challenging nor incompetent, the picture isn't courageous enough to fail and thus not courageous enough to be a masterpiece. It's a studiously inoffensive diversion for an audience of a certain age; for a shot of the real stuff, try Ripley's Game.

DIFF '05: The White Countess

**/****
starring Ralph Fiennes, Natasha Richardson, Vanessa Redgrave, Lynn Redgrave
screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro
directed by James Ivory

by Walter Chaw Even without recently-deceased partner-in-crime Ismail Merchant, stalwart period-costume-drama codger James Ivory delivers the slavishly middlebrow, meandering, Anglo-centric goods with The White Countess, the tale of a sightless American ex-diplomat, Jackson (Ralph Fiennes), who falls for refugee Russian countess Sophia (Natasha Richardson) in Shanghai on the eve of Japanese occupation. Packed to the rafters with Redgraves (Lynn and Vanessa also appear) and meticulously airless accents, the picture represents a certain ossified breed of prestige picture of the A Room with a View and Howards End variety, complete with novelist-turned-screenwriter Kazuo Ishiguro (he of The Remains of the Day) contributing another story of reticence and romance with a lead character who's actually blind this time, rather than just metaphorically so. Jackson dreams of insulating himself from the ugliness of the world within the velvet walls of a "perfect nightclub" he constructs with his savings, with Sophia--exuding that delicate balance between the erotic and the tragic--enlisted as the perfect hostess to minister to his guests. But it all feels dusty--the romantic dreams of old men, tired-out and beaten-up by life and enacted by stuffy actors so great at what they do that it's terrifically boring to watch them do it. It's tempting to hold a mirror under the film's nose for long, tasteful stretches, that sense of un-offended apathy not even quenched by my honest-to-goodness crush on the gracefully-aging Richardson. At the end of it all, The White Countess is as deluded and retreating as its hero, looking to duck the uglier aspects of its tale (prostitution and genocide never looked this chic) without even the early Merchant-Ivory inclination to offer at least a bittersweet ending to counteract the requisite 140 minutes of sickly chamber-room ethic.

DIFF '05: Casanova

*/****
starring Heath Ledger, Sienna Miller, Jeremy Irons, Oliver Platt
screenplay by Jeffrey Hatcher and Kimberly Simi
directed by Lasse Hallström

by Walter Chaw Casanova is a perfectly dreadful Lasse Hallström/Miramax picture that can be claimed, appropriately enough, by Buena Vista now that the Weinsteins have moved on to produce this kind of stuff for their new company. It's "The Merchant of Venice" stripped of any whiff of controversy, going through the motions of its shrivelled little romantic-comedy checklist with the miserable meticulousness of the truly unimaginative. For a change, why don't you tell me how it works? Two people meet and hate each other, right, and then the one has a secret that the other discovers just as things are finally going well, yes? And so he has to make some sort of grand gesture to win her back (preferably in a public place)--but don't forget the bit about how no matter the era in which the film is set, she's a progressive thinker, if not a proto-feminist, and he's the tamer and the tamed in turn. See? You've seen it already. Heath Ledger is the boy, Casanova literally this time; Sienna Miller is Venetian Francesca, the girl who needs the love of a suddenly-reformed Casanova to get her panties out of a bunch. The Inquisition (embodied by a vamping Jeremy Irons) and the arrival of a disgusting fat slob of a lard merchant (Oliver Platt, the object of derision--the man deserves better than a role that has his stomach emit "squishy" noises when touched) provide the conflict. There's also a lovely American Pie tribute where Casanova receives a blowjob under the table (from a virgin who orgasms whenever she looks at the guy--feminism, hurray!) while talking to his future in-laws. Toss in a dash of totally unearned sentimentality and a ridiculous action sequence wherein everybody knows how to fence but no one knows how to win and you have Casanova. Enjoy!

DIFF '05: Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story

***/****
starring Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon, Gillian Anderson, Keeley Hawes
screenplay by Martin Hardy, based on the novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Esq. by Laurence Sterne
directed by Michael Winterbottom

by Walter Chaw This whole idea of post-modern meta-movies just doesn't thrill me the way it used to. Nonetheless, Brit maverick Michael Winterbottom's once around on the Adaptation. wheel is buoyed by a game cast and an actual purpose: rather than the impossibility of a blocked writer trying to adapt a bad novel, find here a post-modern film about a novel that predicted, in a way, post-modernism itself. Winterbottom addresses the difficulty of translating an 18^th century novel concerning the vast chaos of interiority (and writing a novel within a novel); instead of turning it into a film school exercise (like Marc Forster's Stay, for instance), he allows it to become a manifestation of that insular chaos. It's the story of a tornado told as a tornado. The eye of the storm is Steve Coogan, who plays an actor named Steve Coogan (who is much like Coogan, but different) cast in the title role of Laurence Stern's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Esq., which is directed in the film by an actor (Jeremy Northam) playing a director, with Kelly Macdonald playing his girlfriend. Or is she actually his girlfriend (and is that their kid?), or is the fact of her and their alleged child together merely a pointed echo of the action of the film-within-a-film of Walter Shandy (also Coogan) on the day of the birth of his son, Tristram? Doesn't matter. What does matter is that the conundrum is right there at the front of your head--and that the doubt is deposited with the sense of embarrassed, absurd propriety that's the hallmark of great British humor. Not so much a mindfuck as a mindlovemaking, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story is delighted, like the novel, by the incapacity of art to encompass the vast incomprehensibility of life, and so it makes a piece of art that gently reminds us that there's more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in any philosophy.

DIFF '05: The World's Fastest Indian

*/****
starring Anthony Hopkins, Christopher Kennedy Lawford, Chris Williams, Annie Whittle
written and directed by Roger Donaldson

by Walter Chaw Kiwi filmmaker Roger Donaldson follows up his intensely impersonal The Recruit with the intensely personal The World's Fastest Indian, a fictionalization of a documentary he shot some thirty years ago about dotty old coot Burt Munro, who in 1967 set a land speed record for motorcycles under 1000ccs on Utah's Bonneville Salt Flats. Funny how the results of both are sanded down almost beyond recognition: so baptized are they in the scouring attentions of high-grade clichés that they're inhumanly frictionless. See Burt (Anthony Hopkins) dodder around his shack in Invercargill, deliver long, rambling monologues and homey homilies like "if you don't follow through on your dreams, you might as well be a vegetable" to whoever will listen, and rebuke that he's no "POME" to repeated Yankee inquiries as to whether or not he's British. (Here I am thinking that "POME" (Prisoners of Mother England) referred to Australians--the one thing I learned over the course of the picture's interminable, 127-minute runtime.) It's the kind of movie where a lovable--maybe even magical--old imp lightens the life of every lost soul he meets, including a transvestite, a crotchety sea captain, a beatific little boy (think "Finding Geezerland"), and a pair of randy old birds. His charm knows no boundaries--and the universal adoration lavished upon him within the film is bound to dupe certain segments of the audience like a spit-soaked laugh-track that can only "awww." The World's Fastest Indian aims to make old people huggable and mythological while Hopkins drones on incessantly to extras trying to look interested, to inanimate objects, and most of all to himself. No mystery why Hopkins climbed on board, the only mystery is why anyone else did. Originally published: November 10, 2005.

DIFF '05: Duck

ZERO STARS/****
starring Philip Baker Hall, Bill Brochtrup, Amy Hill, Noel Gugliemi
written and directed by Nicole Bettauer

by Walter Chaw In Duck, hale character actor Philip Baker Hall finds himself delivering long, rambling, and likely improvised monologues to a duck that has imprinted itself on him in Los Angeles, 2009. Though it's probably more interesting to talk about why so many science-fiction films are set in Los Angeles, it's more fascinating to try to reconcile all the car-wreck non-sequiturs that comprise the mismatched, miasmic whole of this piece. Hall plays Arthur, freshly widowed and ready to pill himself into oblivion when a duckling fort/da gives him a new lease on life. Soon, though, the last pond in L.A. is drained, and simultaneously--allegorically!--Arthur is evicted, leading our "Boy and His Dog" futuristic odd couple on a whimsical "Travels with Charley" trudge through the social ills of a crazy, neo-conservative, caste-obsessed world to the rejuvenating bosom of the ocean. A scene where the body-of-water-starved fowl finds refuge in an open toilet doesn't carry the tragic weight I think it's meant to (taking a cue from the very sad score for the scene, it's intended to carry a really, really heavy tragic weight), giving Duck the distinction of being at once one of the worst, most insipid "message" films ever made and, on the bright side, one of the most unintentionally hilarious.

A Taste of Freeman: FFC Interviews Morgan Freeman

December 19, 2004|A man who needs little introduction in American cinema, Morgan Freeman is taller in person than you'd expect (slimmer, too) and gracious to the point of delaying his lunch so that we could finish our conversation. In town to receive a lifetime achievement award at the 27^th Starz Denver International Film Festival, Mr. Freeman granted interviews with no specific movie to hump, his long-awaited reunion with director Clint Eastwood, Million Dollar Baby, still flying low on the radar at that point. He was there sans agenda, in other words, a rare place to find an interview subject and an invitation--a daunting one--to go over some ground that has already been trampled flat. The challenge of chatting with someone as well-known as Mr. Freeman is always going to be finding something new to discuss: even if you come up with a fresh question, after all, like anyone polished in the apple of the public eye, the super-famous and the oft-dissected have developed a skill for reverting to stock answers and widely-published responses. (As the saying goes, they answer the question they wish they were asked.) It's not affectedness, exactly--it's training. And after a while, that training becomes as helpless a reflex as blinking.

Prolific: FFC Interviews Kevin Bacon

December 5, 2004|"It's just orange juice, no vodka," I said, pointing to my little plastic cup emblazoned with the brand name of a certain Russian beverage that, this autumn morning, was also a sponsor for the ten-day 27^th Starz Denver International Film Festival. "Would've been all right with me," Kevin Bacon assured. Spectral in frame and bearing, Mr. Bacon is in town to receive the John Cassavetes Award--an honour that would seem questionable but for the actor's recent output: unfailingly maverick, skirting with dangerous. Handsome in a feral sort of way, he's best known for his iconic turns in guilty Gen-X pleasures like Footloose, Flatliners, Diner, and, at the top of the heap, Tremors, and yet a closer look at Mr. Bacon's career reveals his tendency towards the dark in the middle of the tunnel as a thing a long time in the making. His is a gallery of rogues and misfits stretching from a bit part in JFK (which the actor cites as a breakthrough for his career) to psychopath performances in films like Criminal Law, The River Wild, and Murder in the First. Between his work in last year's criminally dismissed In the Cut and now The Woodsman, a cautious ode to a recovering pederast, it's possible that Bacon will finally stop being a prisoner of his good-guy, middle-American hero image.

Work De Soleil: FFC Interviews Soleil Moon Frye

November 7, 2004|Petite, pretty, and irrepressible, Soleil Moon Frye (pronounced "So-Lay," like the Cirque) is probably still best known to folks of a certain age as Punky Brewster, though a memorable cameo on "Friends" as the girl who punches Joey a lot (ah, wish fulfillment) may have provided her a new pop-cultural brand for that generation. Soleil, though, is looking to make her mark as a filmmaker, and judging from a pair of documentaries she helmed, she might have the chops to do it. In person, Soleil Moon Frye is a bundle of energy whose emotions are ever close to the surface. And so when we sat down to talk about her documentary, Sonny Boy, which screened at the 27^th Starz Denver International Film Festival last month, her demeanor was serious--intense, even; as we spoke in detail about the tragedy of our health-care state and the reticence of our leadership to affect change long-in-coming, she would lift off the sofa to perch in the space between us. Sonny Boy captures a two-week trip that Ms. Frye took with her father, Virgil Frye--he, stricken with Alzheimer's Disease, looking to reconcile with a daughter from whom he'd spent much of her life estranged, as well as to revisit the places of his life before his memories of them are swallowed by the long night of his affliction.

DIFF '04: Tomorrow's Weather

Pogoda na jutro
**/****
starring Jerzy Stuhr, Malgorzata Zajaczkowska, Roma Gasiorowska, Barbara Kaluzna
screenplay by Mieczyslaw Herba & Jerzy Stuhr
directed by Jerzy Stuhr

by Walter Chaw Polish institution Jerzy Stuhr fashions a peculiarly self-serving morality opera starring himself as a man who drops out for seventeen years to serve in a monastery, only to be "outed" one day by his jilted wife, two daughters, and son. Each child represents some newly-contracted ill that his beloved homeland has acquired since his auto-sequester: youngest Kilga (Roma Gasiorowska) is a dreadlocked hophead pushing dope to thirteen-year-olds; middle Ola (Barbara Kaluzna) is the star of a smutty reality television show that features her doing every imaginable thing in a glass apartment; and oldest Marcin (Maciej Stuhr, son of Jerzy) is the Karl Rove to a seedy Polish politician. Heavy-handed in its sociology, Tomorrow's Weather (Pogoda na jutro) seeks to be an indictment of the dark side of Solidarity (poor papa Lech Walesa--sort of a ringer for Stuhr, come to think of it--never saw this coming), but more resembles a bit of self-aggrandizement, martyr-style. Stuhr's rotund everyman carries the weight of the world in the creases of his bloodhound kisser, resolving as a pale imitation of mentor Krzysztof Kieslowski's mini-parables: too leaden, too obvious, and, as it happens, too unpleasant. Kilga gets maimed, Ola gets a horror movie gash on her arm...and maimed, Marcin shoots himself in the arm and lacerates his scalp (maimed), and long-suffering wife Renata (Malgorzata Zajaczkowska) has a heart attack (not maimed)--all this Sturm und Drang at the service of a joke epilogue and a self-pitying conclusion. Bad form to roll the old peepers, but the temptation to do so is nearly irresistible.

DIFF '04: Python

Pitons
The Python
***/****
starring Juris Grave, Januss Johansons, Mara Kimele
written and directed by Laila Pakalnina

by Walter Chaw Latvian filmmaker Laila Pakalnina delivers Python (Pitons) somewhere in the netherland between Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Roman Polanski. Her first film in colour, it's a locked-room drama about a boarding school presided over by insane Nurse Ratched acolyte Mara Kimele, doggedly trying to match feces found in her school's attic to samples collected from the students in empty matchstick boxes. Favouring long, isolating tracking shots of children being children as madness and inanity erupt around them in a quiet fog, Python reduces to a series of vignettes that range from the sublime to the interesting to the banal. The best of the bunch include a wonderful sequence where the school photographer comes in to take class pictures armed with a camera, a monkey in a cotton candy-pink dress, and the titular python ("Do you want to pose with the monkey or the snake?"--predictably, there are no takers for the snake), and the intrusion of a beaver hunter on the trail of a rabid beaver. Grounding the absurdities of the piece are the children, who to a one absorb the strangeness of the piece like the demented little aliens that kids are. It all reminds a little of that Harlan Ellison story where reality begins to adapt itself to the ways that television mutates a child's imagination. Python concerns the malleability of perception: it's almost expressionist--and as experiments in world cinema go, it's a little like a breath of bent air.

DIFF '04: Tu

Here
***/****
starring Jasmin Telalovic, Marija Tadic, Zlatko Crnkovic, Ivo Gregurevic
screenplay by Josip Mlakic & Zrinko Ogresta
directed by Zrinko Ogresta

by Walter Chaw Six loosely-connected vignettes form the body of Zrinko Ogresta's Croatian film Tu, a study in six parts of the difficulty of communication in a modern age (Hopper's eternal verities of nature and technology askew) and the scars left by the Balkan War on the lives of the collateral chaff. It opens with a simpleton at the mortar-torn front finding hope in the life of a bird that he saves, and ends with an old veteran unable to sleep because of his memories of conflict. Ogresta's strength isn't subtlety, clearly, but a sort of Kieslowski-esque interest in morality plays illustrated in brief and painted with a pleasantly textured cinematic eye. Tu suggests timelessness in the inevitable progression of its hermetic capsules--moving into the lives of an addict rejected by her family, a television personality driven to drink, and a loner looking for anything to call family. Devastation is the most obvious side-effect of war, the film suggests, but the long half-life of societal disintegration is the lasting fallout. The picture is rhymed by its opening pull-outs and push-ins through long tunnels--the first leaving the light at the end of the tunnel, the last rushing towards it in a suggestion of a sentiment that must be optimism, courageous and flagging, in the midst of all that decay.

DIFF '04: King of the Corner

**½/****
starring Peter Riegert, Isabella Rossellini, Jennifer Albano, Eric Bogosian
screenplay by Peter Riegert & Gerald Shapiro
directed by Peter Riegert

by Walter Chaw Peter Riegert, Animal House's Boon, makes his directorial debut with King of the Corner, a Jewish mid-life crisis of a film that casts Isabella Rossellini in the long-suffering wife role she played so well in Fearless and Riegert himself as a travelling salesman on the verge. Eli Wallach is the father, Rita Moreno is the mother ("He started calling me a 'wetback'"), and Eric Bogosian has a splendid cameo as Rabbi Fink, a man without much patience for mincing words. A eulogy he delivers late-film ("What did he have to offer? Not much") is something like a minor classic--no surprise that the confessional monologue is the man's stock in trade. (With Spalding Gray tragically out of the picture, it's just Bogosian and David Sedaris keeping the home fires glowing.) The film grinds down, though, in its contrivances--a lot happens to this schlemiel Job, and it doesn't take long for the constant keen to get a little Woody Allen-cum-Seinfeld wearisome. A daughter (Ashley Johnson) is underwritten, while an almost unrecognizable Beverly D'Angelo deserves more screen-time as an old high school flame passed along the way. With all the problems in its pocket concerning first-time directors and trying to adapt books of short stories (if your name isn't Robert Altman, don't do it), King of the Corner does have a nice, familiar warmth to it. It's not going to set anything on fire, but it's not a bad way to cleanse the palate between more challenging, piquant fare.

The Go-To Guy: FFC Interviews Bill Pullman

October 24, 2004|Wearing a baseball cap and red jacket, Bill Pullman seems like any other sturdy middle-aged guy. He does, that is, until he talks. Like his screen persona, Mr. Pullman chews over his words with careful, delighted concentration--his speech is laced with just a hint of savoury, not the least because of his affection for "hmmm" as a lead-in to his laconic delivery. There's something about this vital sense of Mr. Pullman always being in the process of discovery (of evolving, if you will) that I suspect draws directors as creepily revolutionary as David Lynch, Wim Wenders, Wes Craven, and Thomas Vinterberg into his orbit. Mr. Pullman fights battles with himself in his performances, a sense of tension that's made palpable when he's matched with artists similarly engaged in refereeing the wrestling match between the intimate and the profane. In town for an experimental theatre project with which he's involved at the National Theater Conservatory, Mr. Pullman was joined for a few days at the 27^th Starz Denver International Film Festival by Curtiss Clayton, who directed him in the filmed re-telling of Verdi's Rigoletto, Rick.

DIFF '04: Green Hat

*/****
starring Liao Fan, Li Haibin, Dong Lifan, Li Congxi
written and directed by Liu Fendou

by Walter Chaw Liu Fendou's Green Hat opens with a jab: a man on a beach muses about the difference between an art film and a popular film, and he does so by pondering the place of masturbation in polite conversation. In a nutshell, Fendou provides the madness and the method for his directorial debut, an onanistic roundelay concerning the nature of love that begins with another bank robber (sigh) who finds out he's been doing it all for a love he's been cuckolded to, proceeds with the impotent cop who bears witness to the last moments of the robber's life, and finishes with the audience's dawning understanding that Fendou is probably attacking the hypocrisy of the myth of masculinity. Guns and intimidation rule the first portion, castration and humiliation rule the second, and, armed with the knowledge that Fendou originally envisioned a trilogy of short films instead of this schizophrenic vehicle, Green Hat's maddening emptiness swims into focus. The whole thing is a self-satisfied exercise in militant cinema (militant in the face of repressive regime--and not our repressive regime) loaded down with the worst of independent film (talkiness, quirkiness for quirk's sake) and the worst of mainstream, too (gunplay, sexplay). Green Hat is a bad, disjointed film, but sadly just another example of the direction that Chinese cinema has taken, with few exceptions, since Hong Kong slid back under the Mainland's control.

DIFF '04: Kontroll

Control
****/****
starring Sándor Csányi, Zoltán Mucsi, Csaba Pindroch, Sándor Badár
screenplay by Jim Adler & Nimród Antal
directed by Nimród Antal

by Walter Chaw A cross between Chris Noth and Clancy Brown's The Kurgan from Highlander, Bulcsú (Sándor Csányi) is the Oedipal anti-hero at the heart of Hungarian director Nimród Antal's drop-dead brilliant Kontroll. A ticket-taker and a rent-a-cop, he's assigned to a misfit crew at odds with every other misfit crew in their Orwellian transit agency. The film, a surprisingly violent and kinetic slapstick comedy reminiscent of Clive Barker's "Midnight Meat Train," begins with one character aping Harpo Marx's blowtorch lighter bit from Duck Soup and ends with scenes that recall Vincent Ward's visionary The Navigator. Bulcsú is a Hal Hartley protagonist, too smart and too damaged for the world, set adrift in the film on the heels of a hooded figure pushing commuters into the path of onrushing trains. He tries to find love with a young woman (Eszter Balla) who rides the subway dressed in a bear suit while seeking his own identity in the motivations of the killer haunting his adopted, infernal home. Vilmos Zsigmond apprentice Gyula Pados's fulsome cinematography makes of the subterranean sets the kind of textured iconographic landscape of Wim Wenders's late American films. (The picture was shot entirely in the labyrinthine subway warren beneath Budapest.) A Jungian dream (paced by electronica group Neo's rowdy, fantastic score), in which Bulcsú finds himself crawling through something like an endless vaginal tunnel, is the moment when Kontroll comes fully alive: it's the juncture between metaphor, craft, and narrative--and for almost all of its final hour, the picture maintains an unbelievably high level of invention and insight. This is a great science-fiction piece, a razor-sharp satire, and an impressive calling card for an emerging Hungarian cinema.

DIFF '04: Sonny Boy

***/****
directed by Soleil Moon Frye

by Walter Chaw At times deeply affecting, erstwhile "Punky Brewster" Soleil Moon Frye's second film is a personal memoir of a two-week trip taken by Soleil and her father, actor Virgil Frye, across the physical landmarks of the latter's life, with Virgil's Alzheimer's-afflicted mind disintegrating in chunks of recollection as the film progresses. At its best, Sonny Boy captures the troubled emptiness of the rural United States' back roads, expanding its personal story into an almost metaphysical statement about being lost in America; as it happens, Virgil even worked on the production of friend and confidante Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider, which shares curious parallels with Sonny Boy in its road trip and unmasking. (Aiding its extra-textual fascination, the picture fits comfortably in 2004's abundance of films dealing with memory.) But moments that begin as revelatory at times become uncomfortably intimate. It's not that we're too close, it's that looking at someone else's photograph album--flipping through a stranger's diary--is at once a violation and an example of trying to decode signs without a key to the signifier. We feel sympathy because we're human and we feel moved for the same reason, but with a project this personal, there is almost always the moment where you realize, during a passage too extended or a reference too opaque, that the scissors were put away prematurely. Soleil at least demonstrates a supple eye and a canny use of images, an ability to blend different film stocks to good effect, and a knack for soundmixing, while the farewell at Virgil's supervised care facility lands with the weight of an Emily Dickinson poem--and all the cruel disassociative irony of one, too.

DIFF '04: Being Julia

*½/****
starring Annette Bening, Catherine Charlton, Jeremy Irons, Michael Gambon
screenplay by Ronald Harwood, based on the novel Theatre by W. Somerset Maugham
directed by István Szabó

by Walter Chaw Shrill and unlikeable, Being Julia is reasonably assessed as an at least thematically faithful adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham's soulless novel Theatre, just as it's fair to compare it to the acclaimed Mephisto, director István Szabó's other condemnation of the stage. But that doesn't mean it's any good. Annette Bening plays Julia Lambert, a grand dame of London's West End accurately labelled a cold, evil bitch by her emotionally-unavailable actor husband, Michael (Jeremy Irons). Julia beds down with young Tom (Shaun Evans), who in turn beds down with ingénue Avice (Lucy Punch); in a fit of pique, Julia sets out to destroy Avice. The idea is that poor monster Julia is incapable of separating reality from the stage--setting the stage, as it were, for a film that addresses layers of sign and signifier through a climactic play-within-a-play-within-a-film. But it's all done with so much spite and so little self-awareness that Julia is actually made the hero in some kind of klutzy, pre-Blitz version of The First Wives Club. Older women deserve to be humiliated for sleeping with younger men and young women deserve to be humiliated by older women. Only the men win, an important thing to remember when this male-dominated production is brought up in conversation as an example of a woman's film. Lesbian and gay subplots abound, mainly for the purposes of giggling at their whimsical perversity (there's more giggling in Being Julia than there is at a Japanese schoolgirl convention), and no other middlebrow peeve goes unpunished either when writers and the expressionist theatre are mocked for the bemusement of what the picture refers to as the jackassery of the unwashed, anti-intellectual public.

DIFF '04: Rick

***½/****
starring Bill Pullman, Aaron Stanford, Agnes Bruckner, Sandra Oh
screenplay by Daniel Handler
directed by Curtiss Clayton

by Walter Chaw Priestly black in its absolute stentorian corruption, Curtiss Clayton's brilliantly twisted Rick is an essay on the cancerous progression of machismo, on the dehumanizing influence of power structures--on the ultimate, ironic strength and futility of family bonds. Written by Daniel Handler, better known for his Lemony Snicket novels, the film's veneer of misanthropy and nihilism hides a strong sense of moral certitude in decay: the affirmation--even if it offers neither succour nor shield--that despite the pervasive rot of the day-to-day, there remains one true place in the space between a father and his daughter. Rick (Bill Pullman, brilliant) is a middle-management prick as imagined by Kafka, running through mazes and crawling around the floor of his boss's (Aaron Stanford) office as part of his daily ritual and spending his bottled bile on a hapless applicant (Sandra Oh) for an executive assistant position. It's Secretary, Interrupted, if you will, a celluloid update of Verdi's Rigoletto incorporating Internet sex, murder for hire, and social satire elevated to piquant grand comedy and, in fact, high opera. A holiday-themed film, Rick is an attack on venality (think It's a Wonderful Life set entirely in Pottersville and written by Neil Labute) that charts the topography of the cratered new-millennial language of cinema. A scene of revelation, happening late in the game and following a virtuoso sequence where Rick walks through a labyrinth to emerge in the barred-shadows underneath (Clayton cut his teeth as ace editor on the films of Gus Van Sant and Vincent Gallo's Buffalo '66), is shot, in a stroke of genius, as a literal shadow play. And so Rick finds its central motif and intention: commentary on the act of filmmaking and the experience of film-watching, as well as the creation of new mythologies with new morals for a rough, uncertain age.

DIFF '04: Monster Road

**½/****
directed by Brett Ingram

by Walter Chaw Monster Road details the life and process of underground claymation hero Bruce Bickford, best known for a pair of collaborations with underground music hero Frank Zappa. Knowing that the work itself is the best entrée into the mind of the artist, director Brett Ingram uses a great deal of invaluable footage from Bickford's archives to lend balance to his subject's obsessive, somewhat dismal existence in his cramped basement studios. The tragic fate of Bickford's brother and the failing capacities of his father (who lives in an even more obsessive-compulsive environment than Bruce's, if such a thing is possible), whom Bruce visits often throughout the piece, find subtle life in the animator's miniature epics of consummation and cleavage. His is a process of desiring absorption and requiring separation--instincts at odds with one another, creating in the art this sense of tense, anxious, constantly-redistributed energy. Ingram's picture doesn't break any new ground in the documentary field, but it does what it does with clear, workmanlike precision. Monster Road shines a light into a corner unexamined with no little poignancy besides, and if by the end we're a little edified if essentially unchanged, there must be a place for that, too.

DIFF '04: Tradition of Killing Lovers

Rasm-e ashegh-koshi
Tradition of Lover Killing
***/****
starring Hossein Mahjoub, Hossein Abedini, Gohar Kheir-Andish, Arman Nikzad
written and directed by Khosro Masumi

by Walter Chaw An Iranian film of surpassing simplicity and beauty, Khosro Masumi's debut Tradition of Killing Lovers involves a man sent to prison for smuggling lumber. While interred, his young son Jallal tries to pay off the family's debts by running the remote region's lone chainsaw to scattered smuggling camps. Shots of Jallal, impossibly dwarfed by the chainsaw blade poking straight up from a knapsack on his back, framed against a bleak Iranian winter, conjure innumerable visual references from as varied of visionaries as Satyajit Ray and the Akira Kurosawa of Dersu Uzala. Moments where Masumi shows civilization as a series of close-set houses, thick as mushrooms, sprouting corpse white from the blighted earth, hint at the corruption just beneath the surface of what seems a sunny fable. (Not otherwise a supernatural thriller, Tradition of Killing Lovers boasts of one of the most chilling reveals of any film this year.) And though the performances veer from the excellent (Salar, the father, and Jallal) to the Bollywood (sister Majan and her Dudley Do-Right constable/suitor, Latif), with a courtship subplot and kvetching mother threatening at every moment to disrupt the quiet poetry of the central story, it doesn't really matter, as the stars of the show are the Iranian outback and the young boy bravely travelling across his desolate reality. Think of it as an Iranian The Swimmer (the Burt Lancaster film about a man getting home by loping across the backyard pools of his suburban neighbours): at its best a sad, existential journey through the emptiness of the self, interested in something so simple and complex as honouring the father and being to his own self true.

Bride of the Woodsman: FFC Interviews Kyra Sedgwick

October 17, 2004|Taller than you'd think and luminescent on a drizzly autumn day in Denver, Kyra Sedgwick has a smile that lights up a room, even this cavernous warehouse space rented out for the 27^th Starz Denver International Film Festival in LoDo. Best known for playing prettier versions of the down-to-earth romantic interests in which Amy Madigan used to specialize, Ms. Sedgwick is approachable and engaged in person, holding a cup of hot tea between her hands for warmth as she talks about the importance of hope in her films, even as her work of late has tended towards a darker hue. This is no doubt the influence of her husband Kevin Bacon's recent forays into the territory of the haunted, spotlighted by the fact that the couple have three collaborative projects out or in the works. Their latest, The Woodsman, finds Ms. Sedgwick cast opposite Mr. Bacon as the girlfriend of a recently-released child molester, a character reminiscent in her sexual liberation of the one she played in Personal Velocity. Ms. Sedgwick has never struck me as the type looking for fame--there is a quality to her work that suggests something as indefinable and inadequate as "carefree." It wasn't that much of a surprise for me to learn that Carole Lombard is one of her idols.

DIFF '04: The Woodsman

**/****
starring Kevin Bacon, Kyra Sedgwick, Eve, Mos Def
screenplay by Steven Fechter and Nicole Kassell
directed by Nicole Kassell

by Walter Chaw An impossibly-conflicted film about the impossibly complicated issue of child sex offenders (that is, their recovery, recidivism, and release), Nicole Kassell's The Woodsman retreats, perhaps understandably, into the refuge of allegory. Before it does, though, Kevin Bacon's hollowed-out, haunted performance as a man released from prison with an indelible human stain moors the picture in a strong, melancholy reality. He moves in across the street from an elementary school, gets a job in a lumber yard, and befriends a woman (Kyra Sedgwick) who, a little too conveniently, suffered at the hands of molesters somewhere back down the road. Things start to fall apart as a new pederast begins to circle and a suspicious detective (Mos Def, mos def) starts making surprise visits. The Woodsman's vision, courtesy that all-too-rarity of a female writer-director, is beautifully shot and, as it should be, bleak: the world is an ugly, dangerous place--especially for little girls, Kassell suggests. It's a hard message told in an uncompromising way, at least it is until the film's final act, where a reference to the "Little Red Riding Hood" story, already signified by the title, is dragged kicking and screaming into the text, dispelling the starkness of its reality in favour of an ending that suggests big closets and the kind of rosy optimism the rest of the film's done such a masterful job of shaking. It's a problem--and not a small one--that the lingering last shots of The Woodsman include temptation in the rearview and the monster turned, however briefly, into the woodsman hero of a fairy tale that doesn't entirely deserve its happy ending. Originally published: October 16, 2004.

DIFF '04: Stage Beauty

**/****
starring Billy Crudup, Claire Danes, Tom Wilkinson, Rupert Everett
screenplay by Jeffrey Hatcher, based on his play "Compleat Female Stage Beauty"
directed by Richard Eyre

by Walter Chaw A Samuel Pepys quotation opens Stage Beauty, something about how in the seventeenth century, Ned Kynaston was the most beautiful woman on a stage that forbade women from strutting and fretting their hours. Playing Desdemona in a mannered production of "Othello", Kynaston (Billy Crudup) is king of the roost, oblivious to the crush of his ahistorical assistant, Mrs. Margaret "Maria" Hughes (a sort of well-cast Claire Danes), the first lady of the theatre, who fulfills her destiny when bawdy King Charlie II (Rupert Everett in fine form--why not a film about him?) turns the gender tables and declares it illegal for women's parts in the theatre to not be played by women. The one comparison that sticks is a somehow more dewy Shakespeare in Love, where delighted trills of "ribaldry" threaten to roll ironically off the tongue in the voice of Jon Lovitz's late, lamented English dandy theatre critic from "SNL". Playful but not fun, teasing but not sexy, Stage Beauty is an airless exercise in Method that, when the time comes for the film to finally reach its apogee, suggests that Stanislavsky/Strasberg was born on a stage in 1660. Intended as piquant, the ending is just shades of that episode of "Cheers" where nobody notices that someone is actually killing Diane in a bar-bound production of, you guessed it, "Othello". It was better--and shorter--the first time.

DIFF '04: Imaginary Crimes

**/****
starring Sigourney Weaver, Emile Hirsch, Jeff Daniels, Michelle Williams
written and directed by Dan Harris

by Walter Chaw Another installment in the ongoing Ice Storm chronicles, screenwriter-turned-hyphenate Dan Harris's Imaginary Heroes also incorporates elements of stuff like A Home at the End of the World and Moonlight Mile. The picture shows its hand early and often, with a star swimmer (Kip Pardue) killing himself before the main titles have finished, thus leaving his already-dysfunctional family to pick up the suburban, Ordinary People pieces. Mom is Sigourney Weaver, sis is Michelle Williams, Pa is Jeff Daniels, and the star of the show is likeable Emile Hirsch; the early scenes where Hirsch goes back to school to a slo-mo parade of kids doing their best to be sympathetic (see: Donnie Darko) demonstrate a sort of comfortable indie familiarity with the material. Dad drinks too much and doesn't go to work anymore, Mom discovers the joys of joints and the humiliation of being arrested (a reaction extreme that doesn't ring true), sis falls in love with an emotionally shattered but affable young lad (Jay Paulson), and the "other" son decides to kiss his best friend (Suzanne Santo) one night whilst standing under a plastic snake that acts as an ersatz Freudian mistletoe. (To its credit, the picture resists the Judd Hirsch-ian (no relation) shrink, though given the situation, one does wonder why none of these people are in therapy.) So, if you're sick of this master plot and these stock characters, rest easy that you know all there is to know without needing to suffer through it. But if you miss Sigourney Weaver and wouldn't mind seeing her transfer over to the Joan Allen role in another white-collar blues bit, hell, Imaginary Heroes is just the ticket.

DIFF '04: À Tout de Suite

**/****
starring Isild Le Besco, Ouassini Embarek, Nicolas Duvauchelle, Laurence Cordier
written and directed by Benoît Jacquot

by Walter Chaw Benoît Jacquot's homage to the Nouvelle Vague has a weird, emotionally-detached feeling to it, something to do with the fact that paying tribute to the French New Wave is, at its essence, paying tribute to a tribute. (Something to do, too, with the nihilism that has infected world cinema in the new millennium.) The story proper concerns a young girl in the Anna Karina mold (Isild Le Besco) who, fashioning herself a bohemian, rebels against her bourgeois parents, beds down with a bank robber, and gets abandoned in a foreign country before coming home to France to face the music. It's dreary when it should be, er, breathless, and obscure when it should be incandescent--enough so that the freedom our heroine tastes (sexually, parentally, financially) feels like a gathering storm without the surcease of sorrow that a good, clean cloudburst brings. A tout de suite is heavy without being weighty. Besides, the bank robber melodrama is hardly a genre in need of revitalization in the public mind (what is au currant in American cinema? The comic book film, perhaps? The Charlie Kaufman?), nor is, more to the point, the New Wave in need of a breath of fresh air. À tout de suite (which translates somewhat ironically as Right Now), then, is a film of a style and an inclination that fulfills no need, and ultimately does nothing to nourish the soul of the now.

DIFF '04: Kinsey

***/****
starring Liam Neeson, Laura Linney, Chris O'Donnell, Peter Sarsgaard
written and directed by Bill Condon

by Walter Chaw Liam Neeson plays the venerable zoologist-turned-sex scientist Alfred Kinsey, who, buoyed by a supportive Indiana University Bloomington dean (Oliver Platt) and a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, single-handedly drew back the curtains on the human libido in the rigid 1950s (1948-1953). The picture (written/directed by Gods and Monsters' Bill Condon) covers Kinsey's contentious relationship with his stentorian father (John Lithgow, reprising his evil preacher performance from Footloose), his open relationship with wife Clara "Mac" Kinsey (Laura Linney), and his stewardship of young Clyde Martin (Peter Sarsgaard). The importance of Kinsey, a typical biopic in a lot of ways, is ultimately identical to the importance of Kinsey himself: it opens the conversation again on the infinite varieties of human sexuality. Kinsey says at one point that he's examined hundreds of thousands of gall wasps and found not a one to be the same; when he turns his obsessive eye on humans, he muses that he just found a more complicated insect. Neeson, Linney, and Sarsgaard are all excellent, though special credit is due for the casting of Tim Curry as a prudish faculty member. Condon, you cad.