From the Sep 9 – Sep 15, 2004 issue

Film

On Screen

This Week's New Releases

Criminal
dir. Gregory Jacobs
Opens Fri Sept 10.
Criminal may have been directed by Gregory Jacobs, but the fingerprints of producer Steven Soderbergh are everywhere. The shaky camera, the natural lighting, the catchy score--call it Out of Sight redux.

Or don't, since Criminal fails to approach Soderbergh's now-classic comeback film. A remake of the Argentinean film Nine Queens (in which a con man takes a new apprentice under his wing--but is he merely doing a scam?), it is twisty to a fault, delivering a ridiculous huh? ending that fairly well undermines the entire endeavor. If the hackasaurus M. Night Shyamalan has taught us anything it is that a twist for a twist's sake does nothing for either the film or the audience, no matter how cool it looks. Criminal looks cool, but in the end, despite the always-welcome presence of both John C. Reilly and Maggie Gyllenhaal, it will leave you pissed off. BRADLEY STEINBACHER

Red Lights
dir. Cédric Kahn
Opens Fri Sept 10.
After an opening sequence that basks in geometrical Parisian majesty--wide-open public spaces, broad light, beautiful people--this strange little film then narrows in on a strange little Frenchman. The shadowy edge to these lovely images, along with a Debussy score and the news that the film is based on a novel by Georges Simenon (M. Hire, The Last Train), immediately suggests Hitchcock, as does the appearance of Antoine (Jean-Pierre Darroussin), whose bald head and pinched face seem to belong to a criminal waiting to be born of circumstance.

In constant cell phone and e-mail contact with his wife Héléne (Carole Bouquet, who ages like wine), our creepy little hero is trying to get out of Paris for a family vacation, and there are endless details to sort through. When Héléne arrives on the scene, diffident, escorted by another man, and far more beautiful than Antoine seems to deserve, the stage is set for a "when's he going to kill her" thriller. But just when you think the film is going in that direction, it veers off into a far more hallucinatory chasm of the psyche. Road raging through the French countryside, Antoine does some veering of his own--off the highway, and into the parking lot of every bar he passes. Is Antoine a cuckold plotting the perfect crime, or is he an increasingly sweaty, smiley drunk plotting his next drink? Next thing you know, Héléne has ditched him... unless something more sinister took place.

The story turns not on suspense, but on genuine mystery; is this hallucination, memory, fantasy? Before it's all over, the film has defied the viewer's desire to know what kind of film it is--though you could certainly call it dark. Not all of it adds up. Too many surreal episodes leave you wondering which characters and events were real and which were imagined. But like its chief forebear, Eyes Wide Shut (there are shades of Godard's Weekend, too), Red Lights submerges itself in the metaphorical dark corners of contemporary marriage and shines a mesmerizing (if slightly unsettling) beacon. SEAN NELSON

Warriors of Heaven and Earth
dir. Ping He
Opens Fri Sept 10.
Warriors of Heaven and Earth concerns nothing less than the heady years, the amazing events, leading up to the establishment of the prosperous T'ang Dynasty (AD 618-906). The T'ang Dynasty, as anyone with a certain level of education knows, produced some of the greatest poetry in China's long history. Here is a passage from a poem by that era's greatest poet, Li Po: "And the autumn wind is blowing in my heart/ For ever and ever toward the Jade Pass... / Oh when will the Tarter troops be conquered/ And my husband come back from the long campaign!"

The grandeur found in Li Po's poem has been translated into Ping He's film. It is a time of horses, emperors, and palaces. The composition of the society is very basic: Men are either superheroes with mighty swords or fodder for wars that last forever; women are either beautiful princesses or wives who wait for their husbands to return "from the long campaign." In this particular story, a Japanese agent (K--chi Nakai), in the service of the emperor, is sent to kill a great soldier (Wen Jiang) who has refused to follow a direct order. Though ferocious on the battlefield, the great soldier is ethical--he will kill only other soldiers and not, as the emperor demanded, women and children. Abandoning the emperor's army, he becomes a freelancer (in the original sense of that word) disguised as a Turk.

"The Gods of Thunder and Lightening/ Shatter the whole range/ The stone gate breaks asunder/ Venting in the pit of heaven," writes Li Po in another poem. These lines might as well have been in Warriors' script, because it's exactly what the sword blows look like when the emperor's assassin finally meets the great, fallen warrior. It is a beautiful to scene watch, and it's impossible not to enjoy this movie. CHARLES MUDEDE

THX 1138
dir. George Lucas
Opens Fri Sept 10.
Given that this re-issue of George Lucas' first film is here but for a heartbeat (before a DVD release), I'll keep this brief. TXH 1138 remains a creepy and inspired (and very '60s) sci-fi yarn, blessed with surprisingly smart direction (did you know Lucas once believed in close-ups?) and a great performance by Robert Duvall. Time may have made the authority-controlling-the-masses story a tad stale, and Lucas' inability to refrain from tinkering may have added some special-effects blunders (dig those weird monkeys attacking THX near the end!), but the movie on the whole is definitely worthy of your attention, be it once again or for the first time--especially since it will be showing at the Cinerama. BRADLEY STEINBACHER

Bonjour, Monsieur Shlomi
dir. Shemi Zarhin
Opens Fri Sept 10.
Visually speaking, Bonjour, Monsieur Shlomi is not impressive. It has the look of a Lifetime channel miniseries, in which rooms are simply rooms, and clothes are simply clothes. It is the drama that makes this film rise above the ordinary substance of a cable show. It involves an Israeli family that's experiencing several crises at once, the first of which is the recent break between the mother and the father (he was caught fucking a young woman). Another crisis is between the only daughter in the family and her husband, who, much to her frustration, is addicted to Internet porn. And then there is a beautiful Moroccan woman who lives next door and is driving the eldest son and his young brother crazy. The younger brother, Shlomi Bardayan (Oshri Cohen), is the center of the family; he prepares the suppers, does the chores, and, unbeknownst to his average parents and siblings, is actually a mathematical genius. The director, Shemi Zarhin, entirely erases his presence from the development of this plot, which is why Bonjour, Monsieur Shlomi seems so artless. Nothing but fate itself appears to be in control of this family's little story. CHARLES MUDEDE

Uncovered: The War on Iraq
dir. Robert Greenwald
Opens Fri Sept 10.
The man who directed Xanadu is the same man who directed the documentary Uncovered: The War on Iraq, Robert Greenwald. Greenwald is also the same man who directed Outfoxed, a documentary that, like Uncovered, sees President Bush as the root of our present troubles. But to make his claims against Bush's war convincing, in Uncovered Greenwald does a very clever thing: He interviews only men and women who are veterans of America's intelligence communities--soldiers, spies, policymakers, and information analysts. These are not liberals; they are people who've been employed by some of the most powerful and deadliest institutions in the world. And so when they say Bush deceived the American public, and that the war has done greater damage than good, it strongly confirms what the liberals have known all along: There was no justification to attack Iraq a second time. CHARLES MUDEDE

Evergreen
dir. Enid Zentelis
Opens Fri Sept 10.
A success at this past year's Seattle International Film Festival, Evergreen is a well-meaning, locally shot mother-daughter tale infused with a rather sizeable heart. The story is pure cheese: Kate (Cara Seymour) and her daughter Henri (Addie Land) are forced to move back in with Kate's mother after their lives take a tumble. The daughter falls for a local rich boy, the mother falls for a dealer at a Native American casino, and strained relations predictably heal--all while the damp beauty of the Pacific Northwest surrounds the proceedings.

Evergreen is not going to startle anyone; the story and themes are far too familiar, and the script's angle on the rich vs. poor dynamic is far too cursory to be of much merit. It is what it is: safe, somewhat bland, but on the whole fairly pleasant to watch. BRADLEY STEINBACHER

Love Me If You Dare
dir. Yann Samuell
Opens Fri Sept 10.
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. Julien and Sophie have the faces of adorable French schoolchildren and the hearts of sociopaths. They trade a 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