Keanu Reeves has the sort of wooden, unremarkable presence that lends itself well to blockbusters. He's a prop, not an actor. Lacking vocal range, unable to muster any real conviction, it's best to think of him as you would a well-designed throw rug--pretty to look at, able to tie the room together, but never the first thing you think of when designing a movie. Which is why he works so well when surrounded by mayhem. Computer-generated tomfoolery can easily spin movies out of control these days; Reeves, with his rock-solid blandness, offers filmmakers a perfect antidote.

In Constantine, Reeves plays John Constantine, a wounded soul who spends his days and nights attempting to earn God's favor. Being a Catholic, this of course means suffering--so much so that the years of inner turmoil have encouraged a nasty tobacco habit, a habit that, as the film opens, is about to kill him. Cancer, however, is the least of Constantine's worries; due to a brief two minutes of death during a botched suicide, hell still awaits him, and it's this seemingly inescapable fate that drives his work. His self-appointed job: to keep hell's demons in line when they vacation in our world, a vocation that's becoming increasingly difficult to keep up with. His means to keep the peace: ass kicking.

As crackpot Catholicism goes, Constantine ain't half bad--in fact, I enjoyed it far more than I expected. Reeves may struggle mightily during some of the quiet moments (if Latin wasn't already a dead language, he'd surely kill it), but his stumbles are more than made up for by the always welcome presence of Rachel Weisz (as a detective who finds herself embroiled in Constantine's religious fury), as well as the surprising work of director Francis Lawrence behind the lens. A recent refugee from the slums of video directing, Lawrence has a curious, assured eye that works well with the material, as much of the film rises above its comic-book limitations simply on the strength of his beautiful framing alone. The action sequences are especially well honed, and it's impressive to watch him refrain from the easy rapid-fire editing that so often befouls his contemporaries. To fumble this review to a close with a cliché: He's one to watch. As is, for the most part, Constantine. BRADLEY STEINBACHER

Days of Being Wild
dir. Wong Kar-Wai
Fri Feb 18-Thurs Feb 24 at the Varsity.

As with all of Wong Kar-Wai's movies, Days of Being Wild is about nothing--plot wise and philosophically. And it's not a Buddhist concept of nothingness, but a very Western one; in Kar-wai's cinema of nothingness we encounter the sorrows of Pascalian existentialism rather than ecstasies of nirvana. This is why, as a film experience, Days of Being Wild is barely there at all; it emerges from the nothingness of a wild jungle not like a solid form of animal life (with its meaty body and heavy breathing noises), but like the shade of a silent ghost that is as soon here as it is soon gone.

Made in 1991, Days of Being Wild is Wong Kar-Wai's second film, and the first of his films to be photographed by Christopher Doyle. This picture, however, is distinct from later Kar-Wai/Doyle collaborations (Chungking Express, Fallen Angels, Happy Together) in one way: The camera is never handheld but always steady or moved on tracks. The reason for this is that the film is set in the cool '60s (a reality that could be contained by the screen), and not in the heated '90s (a reality that was too fast, too much for the screen).

In Days of Being Wild, beautiful Leslie Cheung plays a ladies man and a thug in search of his biological mother; pretty Maggie Cheung plays a concession-stand attendant who falls in love with the ladies man; and handsome Andy Lau plays a police officer who falls in love with the concession-stand attendant. Because the world is made of nothing, their desires come to nothing, and the movie ends in the same mysterious jungle that it barely began. CHARLES MUDEDE

Moolaadé
dir. Ousmane Sembene
Fri Feb 18-Thurs Feb 24 at the Varsity.

The second film in Ousmane Sembene's forming trilogy "Heroism in Daily Life," Moolaadé leaves the city where the first film, Faat Kiné, was set, and takes a hard look at village life. Once again, what we see are things falling apart. While the urban society of Faat Kiné is under construction, the village society of Moolaadé is disintegrating. In Chinua Achebe's world-famous novel, Things Fall Apart, the traditional practice that undoes the village society is the killing of twins, which when born were considered to be a sign of evil; in Sembene's Moolaadé it is the circumcision of women, which in some parts of Africa is still considered to be a purifying ritual. But the most famous novelist in Africa (the Nigerian Achebe) has never been entirely certain about modernization, whereas the most famous director in Africa (the Senegalese Sembene) has always been sure--he believes that, overall, more democracy, science, and commerce does improve the standard of living for Africans.

Moolaadé opens in the village square, which is dominated by a termite mound (which is considered a spirit of some sort) and a monstrous looking mosque (a cluster of spires made of earth and spiked by dead branches). Four of six girls who have escaped a circumcision ceremony appear at an evidently prosperous enclosure pleading for protection. The girls know from gossip that the second wife of this enclosure, Collé (Fatoumata Coulibaly), prevented her daughter from being cut, and so ask this mother to do the same for them. Collé casts a good spell, a moolaadé, that prevents anyone from removing the girls from her place. At this point, the revolution begins, the old order is challenged, and the transformation that is described by Sembene's muscular direction is painful but inevitable.

After all these years, after the universal betrayal of the black independence movements (starting with Ghana in 1956 and ending with Zimbabwe in 1981) that defined the postcolonial era, after Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka shot down negritude with tigeritude, Sembene, who is 81 and made his first film 1966, has remained committed to the Hegelian/Marxist/Fanonian program of the world spirit--a world mind that moves in stages from lower to a higher understanding. Sembene is the last absolute humanist in world cinema. CHARLES MUDEDE

Son of the Mask
dir. Lawrence Guterman
Opens Fri Feb 18.

Oh my god. Guys, I seriously have nothing to say. Usually when a movie is terrible--I mean, like, really bad--I can go on and on and on about just how tragically awful it is, peppering the review with my hilarious observations, and thus turning a piece of shit to gold. But what is there to say about Son of the Mask? There's NOTHING! This atrocity was unspeakably bad! Like, the soul sucking kind of bad. Like, I think my heart stopped about 20 minutes into it, when we got to the absurd musical number, because my body just couldn't take any more. I can't even be funny about how dreadful it was. All I can do is think of new ways to say T-E-R-R-I-B-L-E.

Anyways, as you probably have guessed, Son of the Mask is the follow-up to The Mask, a mediocre comedy starring Jim Carrey and what's her name… that chick sleeping with Justin Timberlake. This time around, Jamie Kennedy gets hold of the magical mask, fucks his baby-craving wife whilst under its powers, and then out pops a creepy half human/half computer-generated cretin that pisses tidal waves of urine all over his daddy and giggles about it. Fuckin' sick.

While the baby tears the house apart at home, Loki, the god who made the mask, is trying to get his magic piece of wood back because his dad is pissed that he lost it. So the mom leaves on a business trip, the baby pukes green shit everywhere, the neighbor gets turned into a giant nose, and eventually we all learn the importance of birth control. Not even the 8-year-olds liked it--and they're dumb enough to like almost anything. MEGAN SELING