From the Nov 20 – Nov 26, 2003 issue

Film

Film Shorts

LIMITED RUN


Affluenza
America the bloated: a documentary on consumerism in our great nation. University Heights Center, Thurs at 7 pm.

* Audrey Hepburn Miniseries
This ever-too-brief series concludes with Hepburn's 1963 turn with Cary Grant, the thin and functional comedy Charade, which was recently harpooned by that oaf Marky Mark in The Truth About Charlie. Grand Illusion, Fri at 6, 8:30 pm, Sat-Sun at 3:30, 6, 8:30 pm, Tues-Thurs at 6, 8:30 pm.

Blondie: Eat To the Beat
The Sunset presents the VHS tome that complimented the generally maligned fourth Blondie record of the same name--but let's face it: Blondie always sounded better on video. Sunset Tavern, Mon at 8 pm.

Breaking the Bank
Filmmakers from the Independent Media Center preach with a documentary about the protests against the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Independent Media Center, Sun at 7:30 pm.

* CANFilms
Before there was Sonic Youth, Talking Heads, The Fall, and PiL, there was Can, the '70s Krautrock experimentalists said to have influenced them all. The groundbreaking nonconformists created an avant-garde sound all their own using elements of minimalist electronic textures, out jazz, and the mad man vocals of Kenji "Damo" Suzuki, progressing rock into total mind fuck territory. Tonight EMP screens a double feature on the band with Can: the Documentary and Can: Free Concert. JENNIFER MAERZ. JBL Theatre, Sat at 7 pm.

* F For Fake
Orson Welles' greatest achievement was to make his failures as impressive as his successes. Indeed, the line between failure and success--which is so easy to determine in, say, an important director like Francis Ford Coppola--is almost invisible when it comes to Welles. In its own way, Citizen Cane, his most famous film, is a great success because it is a great failure. And then there are the films that Welles never finished--we know they are great, though we (and Welles, for that matter) have never seen them. For the most ambitious of all American directors, to start a project, to prepare the script, to find investors, to determine locations--all of this preparation, even if it did not culminate in a final and complete movie, was enough to justify that unfinished film's greatness. F is For Fake, the last completed film to be directed by Welles, is a wonderful mess of a documentary. It is about two real frauds: one a writer, Clifford Irving, who wrote a book about a forger/painter, Elmyr de Hory, who is the other fraud. Irving's biography suggested that a number of Hory's paintings, which perfectly imitated the style of several European masters, had been purchased and hung in major museums around the world. After that sensational book, Irving wrote another about Howard Hughes, in which he claimed to have interviewed the eccentric billionaire. This was soon proved to be false. Welles narrates the documentary, which mostly takes place on the sunny island of Ibiza, amongst the jet set, who drink wine during the day, dance at dusk, make love at night, and recover at outdoor cafes in the morning. Welles begins the documentary by secretly filming men going nuts over his then-lover's, Oja Kodar, ass, as she switches it down a city street. The connection between Kodar's ass and what it does to men has a very distant connection to the actual matter of the documentary, which concerns the frauds and their island friends. All the sexy sequence says with any kind of clarity is that even so late in the game, even as an old and fat man, Welles is still a player. He can lure and capture the heart and full body of a European beauty. (CHARLES MUDEDE) Consolidated Works, Fri-Sun at 8 pm.

* The General
Yeah, yeah... Buster Keaton, classic silent cinema, blah blah blah. But guess what! Buster Keaton's work holds up better than ANY of the so-called classic screen comedians--Chaplin, Lloyd, the Marx Brothers (all of whom I'd take a bullet for)--and The General holds up better than most Keaton films. Buster plays Johnnie Gray, a dixie boy who loves only three things: the South, his train, and a girl named Annabelle Lee. When the war of Northern aggression breaks out, all three of his loves fail him--the Confederacy tells him he's more important as an engineer than a soldier, Annabelle thinks him a coward, and his train is stolen by Yankees. Spoiler alert: He prevails, hilariously. (Sean Nelson)

* The Omen
"Wrong? What could be wrong with our child Robert? We're beautiful people, aren't we?" Grand Illusion, Fri-Sat at 11 pm.

* Spirited Away
Caution: This version shows with those annoying words at the bottom. In spite of its conspicuous cute deficiency, Spirited Away is by all means a striking visual composition--just make sure you're not drowsy going in. (ZAC PENNINGTON) Egyptian, Fri-Sat at midnight.

* To Be and To Have
The tempo of To Be and To Have is set in the opening scenes: first, some farmers herding, using only voice and handclaps, a group of complacent cows out of a snowstorm, and then a couple of turtles making their slow way across an empty schoolroom floor, precisely like they own the place. This pace, unhurried but also at the same time somehow urgent, is exactly the way that Georges Lopez runs his one-room school in rural France, a pace adjusted to the way a child learns, a pace that may or may not have something to do with rural life, or at least how we perceive it. In this really very lovely documentary--without voice over and with very little obvious agenda--we follow Lopez and about twelve students, from very little kids to unpredictable pre-teens, over the course of a half-year, as he gently but firmly guides them toward reading, counting, and something higher and better and more ineffable: being good, thoughtful, communicative people. The elegant gray-bearded Lopez has the bony intensity of the actor Jean Reno, and under his calm but probing attention his students find their way through the thickets of new material (when he turns his catechism to their personal problems, he sometimes moves them to tears). He is often out of the frame, or shown from the knees down, so that he registers as a disembodied voice from above, firm and quite traditional; the children adore him, though, you can tell. The scene stealer is a five-year-old boy called Jojo, who often says one thing and does another, but doesn't seem to mind being caught out by M. Lopez, and seems most likely to make M. Lopez' firm, traditional demeanor dissolve. This is not Mr. Chips, the children are not the happy Von Trapps (they can be mean, selfish, competitive, and sullen at times), but they are utterly human and in being so give the film a depth that scripted characters (the brat, the teacher's pet, the hard-to-reach child who is the teacher's greatest success) probably could not. The cumulative effect of this film--the repetition, the forgetting, the slow dawning--is to throw us back on the experience of making big leaps in cognition: what strange things letters are before you can read them; how infinity works (you watch Jojo's mind implode as he realizes he can count into the billions); how time passes and eras are marked and goodbyes are final. This is reflected even in the title, which sounds lofty and portentous but turns out to be the two most basic French verbs. The most significant things, as it turns out, you learn right away. (EMILY HALL) Varsity, Fri-Sun at noon, 2:30, 4:40, 7, 9:30pm, Mon-Wed 7, 9:30 pm, Thurs at noon, 2:30, 4:40, 7, 9:30 pm.

* West Coast Visions
Highfalutin short film and video works from this half of the country, featuring greats like Miranda July, Harrell Fletcher, Shannon Oksanen, and Matt McCormick. Seattle Art Museum, Fri at 7:30 pm.

NOW PLAYING


Beyond Borders
Beyond Borders opens and closes in London, with jaunts to such cheery locales as Ethiopia, Cambodia, and Chechnya along the way. It stars the great Clive Owen and the rapidly deteriorating Angelina Jolie. It aims to be an important, life-affirming romance. It is, in a word, a disaster. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

Brother Bear
The Disney movie you have to take your kids to between Pixar movies.

* Bubba Ho-Tep
In an East Texas convalescent home, a penis-cancer-ridden Elvis Presley (Bruce Campbell) and John F. Kennedy (Ossie Davis) are awaiting death. The two geezers are revitalized when they band together to fight a mummy who's been sucking the souls out of old people's asses. Surprise number one is that the film, while being a complete piece of trash, is actually pretty great. Aside from its crackpot intelligence, fine acting, deadpan absurdity, and startling sweetness, however, Bubba Ho-Tep is exactly what you'd expect. (SEAN NELSON)

The Cat In the Hat
This screened too late for us to review, so in the interest of fairness all we can say is that we're pretty sure it's gonna suck. Majestic Bay, Factoria, Grand Alderwood, Meridian 16, Metro, Oak Tree, Woodinville 12

* Die Mommie Die!
Die Mommie Die! is packed with witty banter and drop-dead set pieces that simultaneously pay homage to and send up B movies, Douglas Sirk's melodramas, and '50s boilerplate women's pictures. And Charles Busch (Psycho Beach Party) is the perfect leading lady for it. (NATE LIPPENS)

* Elephant
There are many faults in Gus Van Sant's Elephant, including subpar acting, a pretentious eye, and an over-saturation of time-lapse photography (by now one of the stalest tools in Van Sant's arsenal). But there is also something mysterious and engaging about it, something that follows you home after you've left the theater. It's a haunting piece of work, one that refuses to take a stand on a weighty social concern, and instead uses light and film stock to bring not the meaning of a tragic event, but the feeling of it, to an audience. It is, in short, pure cinema. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

Elf
No matter how tanked you get before you hit the theater, nothing will change the fact that Elf is a kids' movie. Written and directed by a softened John Favreau (Swingers), Elf is the vehicle that finally puts Will Ferrell on the Jim Carrey path from adult comedian to sensitive family-movie guy. Not that there's anything really wrong with that, but for my comedic dollar, I'd stick with Ferrell's Old School way of doing things. (JENNIFER MAERZ)

* Finding Nemo
Finding Nemo proves yet again Pixar's current chokehold on big-screen animation. The end product is a flower of a movie, exceedingly well imagined, that is more than worth the multiplex gouging. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

Good Boy
The only thing better than a talking dog movie (in this case, talking dogs from outer space) is a talking dog movie voiced by third-tier Hollywood celebrities. The agents of Matthew Broderick, Brittany Murphy, and Carl Reiner suggest "broadened horizons," and have a good laugh at their clients in Good Boy.

Gothika
After the murder of her husband, a criminal psychologist (Halle Berry) wakes up on the otherside of the plexi-glass under the watchful eye of a host of other fucked-up tabloid celebrities (Robert Downey Jr. and Penelope Cruz). Factoria, Grand Alderwood, Lewis & Clark, Meridian 16, Varsity, Woodinville 12

The Human Stain
Director Robert Benton spends most of the film focusing on the relationship between a professor (Sir Anthony Hopkins, a Welshman playing a Jew who is actually an African American) and the last love of his life, a janitor played by a terribly thin Nicole Kidman. The janitor is attracted to the professor's prestige; the professor is attracted to the janitor's youth. They have hot sex and eventually fall in love, and it is the quality of this fall into love, its problems, its complexities, the scandal it generates, that the film revolves around. The conclusion of the affair is the substance of The Human Stain. Nevertheless, the film manages to be lyrical, and the love affair ends, as all love affairs end, tragically. (CHARLES MUDEDE)

In The Cut
Much ink has already been spilled over Jane Campion's In the Cut, specifically in regard to its star, Meg Ryan, whose performance critics and other scribblers have labeled a "departure." But unless by "departure" they mean "from her clothes," I find the hullabaloo a little perplexing. Yes, yes, "America's Sweetheart" engages in pseudo-explicit coitus with her co-star, Mark Ruffalo, but outside of all the slap 'n' tickle, Ryan's performance offers very little surprise. Still, this doesn't mean that Ryan is bad in the film, for she's not--she's merely adequate, if a little bland, in a bad picture. And In the Cut is indeed a bad picture; surprisingly bad, really, given the pedigree involved. Based on Susanna Moore's best-selling novel, it aims to be a sexual thriller with a feminist tweak, but the film, while certainly sexual on more than one occasion, is rarely thrilling. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

Intolerable Cruelty
To malign Intolerable Cruelty as the worst Coen brothers film to date is really only a testament to their decades of consistency--a legacy of quirk and pop vision that seems to only improve with age. And despite its relative visual artlessness, Cruelty boasts quality (if not altogether brilliant) performances, a decent amount of humor, and some of the Coen's lyrical delivery. Even the worst Coen brother's movie is still a Coen brother's movie. But with its slapdash directions--and their names deeply buried amongst the screen credits--the whole debacle comes off with the sense that they owed somebody a favor. (ZAC PENNINGTON)

* Kill Bill Vol. 1
The first half of Quentin Tarantino's opus has very little character development, only the thinnest of stories, and more severed limbs than you can count. It is brilliant. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

Looney Tunes Back In Action
Dumb. (MEGAN SELING)

* Lost In Translation
Lost in Translation is a tiny movie, as light as helium and draped upon the thinnest of plots. There is very little conflict, and even fewer twists and turns. It is as close to a miracle as you're likely to get this year. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

Love Actually
"Trite" doesn't begin to describe Love Actually, a movie that America will probably gobble up like grease in a bucket of gravy because it's about love and Christmas, and who doesn't like love at Christmas? And really, who doesn't love Hugh Grant? (JENNIFER MAERZ)

* Master and Commander
If Master and Commander sounds soundly square, that's because square is exactly what the film is; massive and solidly made, Peter Weir's picture is a throwback, of sorts, to the works of David Lean, delivering the sort of rousing, smart, and earnest adventure rarely delivered nowadays. It has been far too long since I'd felt the joy and excitement such spectacular entertainment as Master and Commander provides. This is not to say the film is equal to Lean's Lawrence of Arabia, but that it reminds one of that film's greatness. Big and loud, thrilling and expensive, it is the type of film that only major Hollywood studios can produce. It is also, perhaps, the best work a major Hollywood studio will produce all year. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

* Matchstick Men
Ridley Scott has never been known for a feather touch; when given the choice during his lengthy career between beauty of image and subtlety of character, image has almost always trounced. But surprisingly, subtlety is in abundance in his new picture Matchstick Men, and the result is his best film since Thelma & Louise. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

Matrix Revolutions
And so the bloated series ends, bringing about a resolution (of sorts) to the toil and tomfoolery of Neo, Trinity, Morpheus, et al. What is the Matrix? Who is the Oracle? Are the Machines defeated? For those who still care, each of these questions is answered, in a way, by the conclusion of the trilogy, which means that geeks obsessed with the Wachowski brothers' tangled vision will surely depart the multiplex happy--or, if not happy, at least fully armed with plenty to argue about. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

* Mystic River
For all the "inexorability" and "meditation" of its violence, Mystic River feels desperately contrived. Whether director Clint Eastwood has some deep understanding of the nature of violence remains unclear. What is certain is that he knows how to make a movie, even a dumb one, well worth watching. I only wish someone would send him some better books. (SEAN NELSON)

Pieces Of April
Starring Katie Holmes, Patricia Clarkson, and Oliver Platt, Pieces of April has a look and feel that I hesitate to label "documentary-like." Gritty due to its transfer of digital to celluloid and mainly handheld, there is a certain spontaneity in the film, almost an improvised feel, that is enhanced by the sharp cast. Clarkson is particularly good, becoming the heart of the film that the rest of the group rotates around. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

* Pirates of the Caribbean
The summer's best blockbuster. And Johnny Depp gives one of the best performances of the year. Perhaps maybe Oscar will finally realize that comedy also takes acting talent? (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

Radio
Combining the two most odious tools at Hollywood's disposal--celebrities portraying the mentally handicapped and Cuba Gooding Jr. --Radio is something like Rudy meets The Waterboy. With "heart." Oh, the heart.

Runaway Jury
Runaway Jury is completely solid and completely unsurprising--a John Grisham adaptation in the A Time to Kill vein, which is to say this: It is watchable Hollywood tripe.

The Rundown
The Rock, the guy from Dude, Where's My Car? (no, the other one), Ewen Bremner and Christopher Walken--in a cast destined for greatness--come together to fight crime or some shit in the Amazon. Most assuredly trash, but have you see the Rock's eyebrows? Hypnotizing.

Scary Movie 3
Maybe the Scary Movie franchise is smarter than I thought. Maybe their consecutively devolving sequels thrust upon a deaf-earred public are in fact just an extenstion of the grander joke on horror franchises. Or maybe some damn fool won't quit funding this shit. Be warned: 4's already in the fucking can. No, seriously.

* School Of Rock
Like Kindergarten Cop, the concept behind Rock is one of those near-hokey ones where "kids teach us more than we teach them," and where, in the end, everybody wins in some way because everybody loosens up a bit. What makes this movie different, though is that it tackles the parts of rock culture where people take themselves way too seriously, a subject that could use a little unwinding of its panties. (JENNIFER MAERZ)

Seabiscuit
Maybe I'm too cynical for Triumphant Lessons like this, but I like a little more grit under the nails of my Hollywood movies, and the manicured emotions in Seabiscuit are a bit too Hallmark for me, even if they are based on a true story. (JENNIFER MAERZ)

* Shattered Glass
Stephen Glass scandalized the journalism world in 1998 when it was unearthed that an article he penned for his employer, the New Republic, not only distorted facts but was an outright fabrication: Creating fictional characters, businesses, and events, Glass spun an entertaining tale about a teenage hacker that was eventually exposed as complete fiction by another journalist. Shattered Glass (which, yes, is a terrible title), directed by first-time helmer Billy Ray, chronicles Glass' exposure and tumble, offering as its lead Hayden Christensen, previously seen as Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones. Don't let this bit of casting deter you from seeing the film, however, for if Shattered Glass proves anything it's that George Lucas is supremely untalented when it comes to directing actors. Christensen burrows himself beneath Stephen Glass' tics and charms, and the result is a smart, noteworthy performance; creating a character both endearing and repellent at the same time, he manages to shed the blunder that was his previous performance and emerges, somehow, as a talented actor. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

* The Station Agent
Peter Dinklage plays Finbar McBride, a train aficionado who inherits an abandoned depot. The remote location suits him fine because he's not the most social of people. That doesn't stop the nearby Cuban hot dog vendor Joe (Bobby Cannavale) from talking to him, nor does it stop the woman who almost runs him over (Patricia Clarkson) from stopping by for an apologetic drink or several. They befriend him despite his better efforts to brush them off. Dinklage is positively magnetic here: What director Tom McCarthy has captured in his debut feature is a sense of happy loneliness--those times when it feels right to go for a walk and just look around and not talk to anyone. (ANDY SPLETZER)

Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Michael Bay and Marcus Nispel rape a classic. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

* Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion
Narrated by Martin Sheen, and made over a 10-year period, the purpose of Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion is to offer Western eyes clear documentation of the suffering that Tibetans have experienced under Chinese rule. The film is a work of propaganda by sympathetic Westerners who place Tibet completely on the side of the right, and China completely on the side of the wrong. According to their view, Tibetans just want to prey in peace, to ring their bells, journey to their sky temples, knell and mumble to incense, and find within the confines of their physical bodies the path to eternal wisdom. China, on the other hand, wants to enforce its foreign and worldly will on the "alter of the world." The documentary offers no real explanation as to why China wants to do this; all we are lead to understand is that China is bad, has a big and powerful army that has in the past and will in the future beat down any resistance. I'm certain that China (as with U.S. in Iraq) is in the wrong in all of this, but I really don't care for theocracies (or despots for that matter) of any kind, which is what Tibet will become if China pulls out of the land of the mountain monks. (CHARLES MUDEDE) Harvard Exit

Tupac Resurrection
The success of the documentary Tupac Resurrection, which attempts to do nothing less than produce a saint from MTV videos, news reports, and intimate interviews, is that it focuses less on his music and more on his actual life--his childhood in New York, his teens in Baltimore, his early 20s in the Bay Area, and, finally, the transformation of this ordinary life into a pop life. Narrated by Tupac himself, as if from the grave ("I always knew I was gonna be shot"), the most important revelation the documentary has to offer is that Tupac was not a thug to begin with, but something of a geek who took ballet lessons, read Shakespeare, and wrote poetry in notebooks. His troubles with the law, which didn't begin until he was famous, were not a consequence of his upbringing but an invented gangster personality that the police mistook for the real thing. Ultimately, it did become the real thing, because Tupac died a real death in the most unreal city of the world. (CHARLES MUDEDE)

Under The Tuscan Sun
Under the Tuscan Sun is based on Frances Mayes' nonfiction bestseller and stars Diane Lane, who manages to save the film from utter formula. And it is formula--the sex talk can't disguise the fact that this film is designed to make your mother feel good. Lane is the plucky divorced heroine, who impulsively buys a crumbling villa in Tuscany and discovers that "family" need not conform to the customary model but can be anything one makes of it (this last bit is Hollywood's favorite beaten horse). There are cute Italian people, cute Polish laborers, beautiful wildflower-filled vistas, and the obligatory gay best friend--a stock role salvaged by the splendid Sandra Oh. The movie is pleasant anyway. (CLAUDE ROC)

Underworld
Once again Romeo & Juliet is dusted off and given a refurbishing. This time the setting is the gloomiest of all gloomy cities, where vampires and werewolves wage a secret, exhausting war with one another. The experience: much Matrix-like action (save for the wire work), crackpot dialogue, and a PVC-clad heroine (Kate Beckinsale) who looks sexy as all get out, but can barely muster a sprint thanks to her garb. The result: a boring, uninspired hack work. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)