dir. Lisa Cholodenko
In Laurel Canyon, thoroughly modern young lovers Sam and Alex (Christian Bale and Kate Beckinsale) are stranded at the home of Sam's mother, Jane, a famous record producer, played by Frances McDormand. During the course of the film, the couple's uptight romance is threatened by Jane's swinging lifestyle, which includes liberal pot-smoking and the free-ish love of her musician boyfriend Ian (Alessandro Nivola). Alex is tempted by both Ian and Jane, while Sam, still angry about his mother's loose parenting style, seethes. Soon, however, he too finds himself tempted by the fruit of another (Natascha McElhone), and a bizarre love pentagon heats up.
Though this description might lead one to believe Laurel Canyon is a bedroom farce between hippies and yuppies, the film is in fact a smart, emotionally insightful exploration of the multigenerational consequences of the quest to live free. SEAN NELSON
Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary
dir. André Heller and Othmar Schmiderer
She is in her 80s; she smokes cigarettes; and she is recounting roughly three years of her life in which she witnessed, from her secretarial position, the dreamy decline of her boss, Adolf Hitler. She came from common German stock, and she got the job through a connection--and though we see her as an old, ordinary woman in what appears to be her flat, we imagine that she was once beautiful, a Hitlerian ideal of German purity and possibility. Early in the interview she admits that, in terms of proficiency, she wasn't the best secretary; she also admits what we all darkly suspect--that she satisfied her boss' lower needs. She saw everything, and during the interview she recounts it all with startling clarity--from Hitler's happy moments with his gifted dog (it could do all sorts of amazing tricks) to the cyanide pills he handed her as Berlin fell to the dreaded Russians. This documentary was shot on video shortly before her death in February 2002, and it offers no enhancements, no footage from the past, no music; all we have is her face, and the direct reality of her story. Her name is Traudl Junge, and she knew that her boss was a criminal. CHARLES MUDEDE
Spider
dir. David Cronenberg
The first shot of Spider tells you everything you need to know: After the opening titles (which make Rorschach patterns out of peeling paint on decrepit walls), we find ourselves in a train station. A long line of diversely normal people disembark from the train, happily moving toward their average lives. Then, after the last healthy citizen has breezed past the camera, out steps Spider (Ralph Fiennes), looking gnarled and crepuscular in a shabby suit, spiky hair, and four shirts, carrying a ratty suitcase. Everything about the way he carries himself screams psychologically damaged, and the nature of the shot defines the character's troubles in relation to the rest of the world. In short, this is a film about a cipher, and the only dramatic motion the filmmaker affords himself is in revealing just how much of a cipher Spider is. Cronenberg clearly views this as an opportunity for humanism; the problem is that Spider represents a window into only the narrowest corner of humanity--a man whose illness prevents him from getting over the primal issues of adolescence--and so we're forced to empathize with an almost perversely vulnerable figure. But what you really feel is a kind of pity, watching him wander through his unreliable and violent childhood memories (which are artfully realized by the director). More than that, you feel like the film is pretending to be suspenseful as it winds toward a revelation that everyone but its main character can see coming a mile away. SEAN NELSON
Nowhere in Africa
dir. Caroline Link
One awful result of the holocaust (aside from the obvious) is the rise of the Hollywood Holocaust Movie (HHM), in which millions of innocent people are hideously slaughtered, and everyone who's not slaughtered feels hideously guilty, and everyone who goes to see the movie gets a hideously sick feeling about it all, and all the actors get Academy Awards.
Anyway, thank God for movies like Nowhere in Africa, in which there are (miraculously) no gas chambers designed to look like showers, or little girls in bright red coats walking through otherwise black-and-white scenes. Nowhere in Africa follows members of a rich Jewish family who leave Germany in 1938 and move to Africa where they can avoid the Nazis but have to deal with some other issues like, oh, the lack of water. Naturally, the characters all experience guilt (you just can't have a holocaust movie without guilt), but there are also things here you never see in any movie, such as the scene in which a swarm of locusts plunders a field of maize. The hazards of humanity and the hazards of nature are not dissimilar, this movie argues, though (at two and a half hours long) not very succinctly. Thankfully, the actor Merab Ninidze, who's very sexy, is in almost every scene. CHRISTOPHER FRIZZELLE
The Hunted
dir. William Friedkin
The last film William Friedkin directed, Rules of Engagement (2000), also starred Tommy Lee Jones as an American soldier investigating another American soldier (Samuel L. Jackson). In The Hunted, the problematic soldier is played by Benicio Del Toro, who Tommy Lee Jones trained to be a killing machine for some elite army unit. The movie opens in fiery hell: Sarajevo, 1999; and ends in paradise: the green and wild outskirts of Portland, Oregon, 2003. In between these extreme points is an uneven story that fails to properly explain why and how the once brave soldier Del Toro went insane and started killing deer hunters in the woods; or why Tommy Lee Jones, who is an excellent killer and hunter, is also a pacifist who worries about the hunting of wild animals, refuses to use a gun, and has never killed a person. The film might be about the pleasure of hunting, but the chases through the woods, the city streets, and parks (one of which is a Lawrence Halprin-designed park--he designed our mazelike Freeway Park) are not that amazing. The movie, in a word, lacks everything that would make it a reasonable film; and the people of Portland will certainly weep and moan at the ways it mutilates their city's distinct topography. CHARLES MUDEDE
