dir. Yann Samuell
Opens Fri Aug 6.
This little tale of l'amour fou starts off too clever and ends up gruesome, but the route it takes along the way is so soggy that it's hard to work up any enthusiasm or dread for the conclusion you know is coming. (And you'll know exactly what's coming--if you already haven't seen a half-dozen movies with the same plot, the initial foreshadowing has all the subtlety of a concrete block.)
Julien and Sophie have the faces of adorable French schoolchildren and the hearts of sociopaths. There's some modest attempt to explain this unfortunate coincidence of traits--Julien's mother dies a tragic death early on, and Sophie's parents are suspiciously absent throughout--but mostly, the film asks you to accept the unconscionably cute kids the way they are. Their mutual mischief gets started when Julien's mother bequeaths him a tin box painted like a merry-go-round. After wheezing some nonsense about how both she and Julien have carousels in their hearts (say what?), she dies, and Julien tromps off to join his comrade Sophie.
The two friends trade the sentimental trinket back and forth in exchange for the execution of outlandish dares, like sending a school bus full of children careening down the street without a driver. Meanwhile, director Yann Samuell illustrates their sad relationship with bursts of overwrought whimsy, accompanied by hectic editing and bright stage-play scenery that could have been cribbed from any number of recent French-language films. I wish I could say the dares start off small and escalate until the friends have trouble distinguishing right from wrong and love from sadism, but the plot has no such momentum. The challenges range from heinous to reprehensible to vaguely sad, and then the movie's done. ANNIE WAGNER
Open Water
dir. Chris Kentis
Opens Fri Aug 6.
Cheapest movie ever made, financed with stolen credit cards, filmed entirely on skateboards, whatever: For an indie film to rise above the teeming masses and get noticed, it's gotta have a hook. This year's Sundance bidding champ, Open Water, made with a skeleton crew and produced on a budget unfair to most shoestrings, has a central gimmick that's hard to trump: actors in the water messing around with real live sharks. Discovery Channel fanatics and Robert Shaw freaks may as well buy multiple tickets now.
Based on true events, the film follows a yuppie couple as they get separated from their dive boat and spend the next few days at the mercy of the currents. Their situation does not improve. Husband-and-wife team Chris Kentis and Laura Lau (he writes, directs and edits, she produces, they both shoot) demonstrate a nice touch with the back-and-forth bickering in a relationship under stress, and, more crucially, the dawning realization of ostensibly civilized people in way over their heads. Where they excel is in creating the steadily mounting feeling that something could go terribly wrong at any moment, both in front of and behind the camera.
The obvious reference point here is The Blair Witch Project, which left some folks nauseous, many people pissed, and some genuinely, honestly freaked. (When I spoke with them during the Seattle International Film Festival, Kentis and Lau were wary of any such comparisons, rightly pegging the earlier film's success as an anomaly and fearing a similar backlash among the multiplex crowd.) Personally, I should confess that these two flicks are the only in recent memory that had me seriously considering wussing out and looking toward the floor.
Unlike the almost hermetic brilliance of Blair Witch, however, there's no denying that as a film this has some glaring flaws: The neophyte actors occasionally seem uneasy carrying their considerable load; the quality of the digital video, while a necessity to get the project made, feels almost gratuitously shoddy; and Kentis' decision to occasionally cut back to the mainland during the third act both undercuts the considerable tension and strains the all-important illusion of unmanipulated events. On a base level, though, none of this matters much next to the sheer primal genius of the concept and the frisson of humans and predators sharing unwanted space. Reality, however manipulated, beats CGI hands down. ANDREW WRIGHT
The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi
dir. Takeshi Kitano
Opens Fri Aug 6.
In The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi, filmmaker "Beat" Takeshi Kitano repeatedly insists on the fallibility of eyesight, nudging the audience to pay attention to the soundtrack. The title character, played by old Beat himself, is a kindly-looking old masseuse, white-haired and blind, who also happens to have an almost superhuman ability to slice people (villainous types, mostly) into all sorts of pieces. The plot has something to do with that, but mostly focuses on how the swordsman passes the time with a household of other ultra-marginalized characters just outside of town. Just because the Kitano who made Sonatine and Fireworks has moved a few centuries into the past doesn't mean he's left the yakuza genre, however. Here, the weapon of choice is a sword rather than a gun, but Zatoichi is most decidedly a gangster film, and, having Beat at the helm, it adheres quite faithfully, in a broad-strokes kind of way, to all your expectations of the genre.
Although Kitano's attempts at inserting choreography (both the dancing and fighting kinds) are probably better as an idea than they are in execution, the movie is still funny and light, and deliciously gory to boot. It is also deceptive. For one thing, it's a kind of quasi-musical. There isn't much singing, and the big dance number doesn't come until the very end, but Kitano most definitely had something musical in mind. And the climactic battle isn't really a battle at all, but rather, a carefully executed slaughter, in which the hero lightly steps around geysers of spurting blood to hack through an army of gangsters, the bloodshed once again being used more for punctuation than actual content. Zatoichi may not be Beat's masterpiece, but I'd be thrilled to give it another look to see what I may have missed. ADAM HART
Little Black Book
dir. Nick Hurran
Opens Fri Aug 6.
Brittany Murphy hasn't exactly earned a reputation for starring in good movies (Uptown Girls, anyone?), and Little Black Book is no exception. The premise, of a girl who snoops in her boyfriend's Palm Pilot to look up his old girlfriends, is lame enough. The plot--which I'll divulge, since I doubt you'll see this pseudo-chick flick--doesn't make it any better.
Murphy's character, Stacy, learns her adorable boyfriend used to date a supermodel, and wonders what else he hasn't told her. When he goes out of town, she uses his Palm Pilot and her new job as an assistant producer on a trashy talk show to track down his former girlfriends--the supermodel, a gynecologist, and a chef. She discovers that the boyfriend still chats with these women, and--oh no!--the chef is still in love with her man. Meanwhile, at work, Stacy's twisted coworker Barb (Holly Hunter) is guiding her on this train wreck of relationship havoc.
What's wrong with these two women? This question is answered in the final scenes, when wicked Barb turns the tables on Stacy and throws her onto the live talk show, along with--surprise!--the three former girlfriends, as well as Stacy's boyfriend (who, of course, all think they're at the studio for a different show). People cry, Stacy realizes the chef and the boyfriend are meant to be together, and Barb gets bitch-slapped by Stacy for putting her stupid life on the air. The final scenes almost make the film worth sitting through, if only to see Stacy humiliated, and Barb cackling maniacally. But it also makes you wish Little Black Book's director had pulled a meta-version of Barb's dirty trick: a live tabloid confrontation of every person in this film--including Kathy Bates, Carly Simon, and Gavin Rossdale--asking them what the hell they were thinking starring in such a crappy movie. AMY
