Category: Film Features

“My film is not a movie. My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam.”

Francis Ford Coppola said those words at the Cannes Film Festival in
1979, debuting his epic Apocalypse Now as a “work-in-progress.”
Apparently still a work in progress, the film appears again as Apocalypse
Now Redux, a reedited version that adds 50 minutes of new footage and
forces us again to contemplate Coppola’s grandiose claim.

What does “Vietnam” mean in this context? The last thing that Coppola, or
America itself, associates with the word “Vietnam” is Vietnam itself — the
country and its people or their particular experience of that war.
Apocalypse Now is surely not about that “Vietnam.” Though more
thoughtful and truthful than other celebrated American films on “Vietnam,”
most notably The Deer Hunter, one of the central failings of
Apocalypse Now is still its refusal to give voice or perspective to the
Vietnamese themselves. Not a single Vietnamese speaks in the film (or, rather,
those permitted voice in the film’s aural background are denied subtitles),
and the closest thing to an actual Vietnamese presence in the entire film is a
young VC woman who throws a grenade into an invading American helicopter
before being shot down.

The “Vietnam” in Apocalypse Now is really “America” and our
particular experience of that war. As an examination of this “Vietnam,” the
film is a bag of mixed messages. The film’s opening sequence is bravura
filmmaking, with visions of Vietnamese jungle decimated by napalm and the
flutter of helicopter blades morphing into a ceiling fan in the hotel room of
Martin Sheen’s Capt. Willard. Synced to Jim Morrison singing, “This is the
end,” the scene ignites a fever dream about American confusion. Willard
glances out his window as the off-screen narration mutters, “Saigon shit.”
Audiences in 1979 could surely relate.

With its plotline lifted from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,
the film is also a mystery story. Willard joins a group of American GIs on a
river journey into the heart of the war, his mission to assassinate the rogue
Col. Kurtz (Marlon Brando), who Willard’s commanders say has gone insane. In
this context, Willard is an audience stand-in, with Kurtz a personification of
America transformed by its experience of the war. But the film’s fatal flaw
isn’t so much its lack of an answer as its insistence on trying to be all
things to all people — to embody all of the feelings its audience would bring
to the film. War is hell and war is awesome spectacle. The white man is a
devil and the white man is a god.

The bulk of the film’s new footage concerns a stop Willard’s boat makes
at a ghostly French plantation, a remnant of the land’s colonial past. But
this scene only adds to the mixed message. “Why didn’t you Americans learn
from our mistakes? With your power, you can win it if you want to,” one
Frenchman says to Willard, speaking for the hawks in the audience. “You
Americans are fighting for the biggest nothing in history,” says another,
speaking for the doves. The film’s famously bad acid-flashback of an ending
likewise gropes for poetic vagaries rather than saying anything clear about
the war or America’s involvement in it. Dennis Hopper babbles incoherently,
Sheen rises from the swamp in a shot that looks like parody now, and a bald,
fat Brando spouts T.S. Eliot.

Perhaps the truest “Vietnam” this film is about is filmmaking itself, an
epic visualization of director Samuel Fuller’s axiom, “Film is a
battleground.” Coppola’s comments at Cannes continued this way: “We were in
the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too
much equipment, and, little by little, we went insane.” These comments are
almost obscenely glib but not unwarranted. Much like his country, Coppola took
his megalomania and noble cause to the jungles of Southeast Asia
(Apocalypse Now was shot in the Philippines), only to be dragged into a
quagmire with no sight of victory and a decidedly unsure exit strategy. The
epic scope and foolhardy passion of the production itself are like something
out of silent cinema, on par with the likes of D.W. Griffith or Cecil B.
DeMille or Erich Von Stroheim. It is mad, passionate cinema that shames the
timidity and artificiality of current Hollywood product, but I’d still rather
watch a more modest Coppola film like The Conversation.

Perhaps the biggest flaw of all is the inherent impossibility of making a
mainstream entertainment about something as politically prickly and tragic as
the Vietnam war. Coppola’s battle scenes, regardless of his politics, are
filmed to be exciting. The famous, technically magnificent helicopter attack
by Robert Duvall’s mad Col. Kilgore, ushered in by Wagner’s “Flight of the
Valkyries,” may be a deeply sarcastic commentary on military power run amok,
but I don’t think viewers cherish it for its irony. The cinematic power and
glory of the sequence bulldozes all irony. It’s a triumph of sorts, but I was
dreading its approach and not just because of what happened last Tuesday.

For a movie as lazy-draggy as Rock Star, it has moments that are true heartbreakers.

That’s because it taps into that thing that makes each and every one of us — admit it! — take a hairbrush, tilt a hip, and

sing, “Freebird, yeah,” or “‘Cause I got high, la di dah,” or, God forbid, “Oops, I did it again.” Call it innate. It’s about having millions

of people love you and some detest you. It’s about having your picture taken and your autograph sought. It’s about lust and

conspicuous consumption. It’s about having it all. But it’s not mere celebrity — think about all those actors who want to sing (hello, Keanu). To be

a rock star is to create something, then put it out there, then reap what you sow.

Rock Star is about a man too scared to

create. Instead, he hollowly re-creates, and then, through dumb luck and a pair of

big-haired hussies, this ordinary chucklehead lives his dream.

Mark Wahlberg stars as Chris Cole, a Pittsburgh office cog who still lives at home with his parents. But when night falls,

Chris evolves into Bobby Beers, lead singer of a British metal group called Steel Dragon. Chris’ tribute band, Blood Poison, have the moves,

the looks, the sounds, everything down. And if they don’t, tempers flare and fists fly — among the members of the group. This turns to

that, and Chris is kicked out of the band. He’s sad, his guitarist says, that he’s living the life of another person. It’s time to do his own thing.

Even Chris’ beyond-devoted girlfriend Emily (Jennifer Aniston) suggests the same in the gentlest manner.

Then, the phone call. The guitarist from Steel Dragon wants Chris in L.A. the next day. It seems that the hallowed lead

singer Bobby Beers is on the outs — perhaps, worse yet for the band, he’s also out of the closet. In to replace him are all those wannabes,

including Chris. He nails the audition and gets the gig. He is

the new lead singer of Steel Dragon, and without so much as a peep in front

of the larger public, he changes from Chris to Izzy and becomes the rock star he’s always dreamed of being. But among the

percussions, there are repercussions. Chris realizes that even while living the good life he’s still a cog.

The story of Rock Star is loosely based on what happened with the band Judas Priest in the early ’90s: lead singer bumped;

ordinary Joe replaces him. But the real story was too difficult to secure, given issues concerning song rights and cooperation with Judas

Priest. Consequently, Rock Star goes for a sweeping representation of the life —

three-ways and Batmobiles — wrapped in the bigger theme of a

man who got his (good) and then got his (bad).

It works to a degree: the shocking lasciviousness, the excessive makeup, the fuzzy morals via a bandmate on dialysis,

and the road manager who walks away from an ideal life, too afraid to be normal.

And then there’s that defining moment. Chris, now Izzy, is posing for his first publicity shots with the band. As the other

Steel Dragon members ooze disdain and menace, Chris can’t help but smile smile smile. He is there. And then there’s the flip side: the sense

of awful wastefulness. It’s summed up in a cameo by Rachel Hunter, model and ex-wife of Rod Stewart. She plays a band-member

wife relegated to the “wife limo,” while the men ride the tour bus and

indulge in whatever they see fit. The women in the limo explain

to Emily that such allowances are what make such relationships work. Each time the camera lands on Hunter, though, she registers

a truly sad fatigue and embarrassment, as if the role hits too close to home.

Director Stephen Herek (Bill and Ted’s Excellent

Adventure) takes all this material and presents it as “material,” meaning

that, except for those genuine moments — Chris’ uncontrollable smile, Hunter’s grimace — emotion, excitement come as canned as

extra-strength hairspray. The audience is dragged rather than engaged, and sometimes attention may drift.

Rule number one in Two Can Play That

Game: Each man and woman should have a chubby friend who can give it to

them straight — that is, take it to the gutter. Can we talk about laying pipe and smacking booty?

Two Can Play That Game stars Vivica A. Fox as Shanté, the Jag-driving superwoman with her own-bought property and a

confidence that comes from being young and having curves. Shanté is the together one in her group of girlfriends. If a man’s cheating,

loitering, or all-around no-gooding, Shanté tells them to kick the dog to the curb. Then, Shanté’s forced to take her own advice when she

sees her man Keith (Morris Chestnut) wiggling on the dance floor after he told her he had to work late.

Hence the Ten Day Plan, Shanté’s scheme to lure her man, hook him, maybe struggle a little, and then reel him in. Trouble

is, Keith has Tony (Anthony Anderson) on his side. Tony is squeaky, large, and full of advice. For every move Shanté makes, Tony suggests

a counter-move for Keith. It’s an intricate, sometimes cruel game. The aim: to stay on top or suffer.

Yet, the draw of Two Can Play That

Game isn’t what it’s about. The performances and the trash-talking are the strengths of

this film. The girlfriends and the boyfriends mix it up and take it low. Anderson especially has a comic presence that is silly and endearing.

Two Can Play That Game is a trifle and goofy. But don’t count it out as a date movie. At least you’ll have something to talk

about when it’s over.

Nearly four years after its original release date O — a contemporary retelling of Shakespeare’s Othello directed by Tim Blake Nelson (You know him as Delmar in O Brother Where Art Thou?) — has finally

opened on 150 screens around the country.

The story, which ends with a spate of killings by a handful of teenagers, was pulled from

release in 1998 after the Columbine shootings. Its release was delayed yet again after similar

shootings in Santee, CA. The multiple shelvings of this project certainly make it seem as if the notoriously, ?who me?? Hollywood has a real conscious after all, but more than likely the delays were an act of self preservation to stave off inevitable if dubious accusations that the excessive violence of America?s entertainment

culture is at least partly if not entirely to blame for so much real world bloodshed.

No doubt Lion?s Gate execs feared that like the

wrongfully vilified Fight Club ?a film where only one person dies and that death changes everything?O would become a fetish item for tinseltown?s semi-annual bout of self flagellation. And while there is an irksome quality to much of the glorified violence that spills out of southern California O is not your garden variety high school shoot-em-up. In fact, had the film been released after Columbine it might have gone a long way to answer all the dangling, ?Whys? that surrounded that horrible event.

The ancient Greeks ascribed a certain medicinal quality to tragedy and O is every bit as classical as it is contemporary. An as-scheduled release amid the media whirlwind that was Columbine might have spawned useful debate. It could have become a part of the healing process. It might have helped other disenfranchised teens to see that their plight was neither new nor singular, reducing the number of copycat shootings.

Or not. Either way there has not been a better examination of the dark, seemingly invisible forces that lead

teens to take up arms against a sea of troubles to oppose and ultimately end them. If

anything, O?s conclusion is a pill too true and too bitter for most adults to swallow. It shows clearly how the status quo established by

adults ? a random system of neototalitarian rewards which glorify such ultimately unimportant things as wealth, physical beauty and athletic

prowess beyond measure ? establishes volatile and dangerously oppressive hierarchies resplendent with cruelty, and bristling with violent

opportunity.

Anyone who has lived through high school will recognize every unsettling moment. Nothing has been exaggerated and it is this straight up portrait of true teen angst and its ?say it ain?t so? origins that makes O more terrifying than any beasty Stephen King

ever conjured. Students of Shakespeare will also be delighted by the fact that while all of the language has been made contemporary and certain liberties have been taken in adaptation, the film is true in every way to the source material. It is

the finest big screen adaptation of Shakespeare to date. In some ways ? dare I say it ? for

modern audiences it is a less eloquent improvement over the original.

O tells the story of a promising black athlete named Odin

who has been recruited to play basketball for an exclusive and otherwise white southern

prep school with a winning tradition. The power structure in place could not more closely resemble that of Shakespeare?s Venice. Desdemona?s

father Barbantio, a man of great influence, becomes the dean of students. The Duke becomes Coach Duke. Iago (Hugo in this adaptation, excellently played by Josh Hartnett becomes Duke?s slighted son, an able and underrated power

forward consumed by the jealousy his own father has set into motion. Othello/Odin (Mekhi ?just give me the damn Oscar? Phifer) is a sensitive

black beauty, brilliant point guard, gracious MVP and able team captain who is ass over elbow in love with the lovely, lovable and oh-so lilly

white Desi/Desdemona (Julia ?No, give me the damn Oscar? Stiles).

The tension lines could not be more perfectly drawn. Coach Duke (an over-the-top Martin Sheen doing his best Bobby Knight) is an abrasive leader for whom winning is the only thing. He continues to praise and protect Odin while neglecting his son who struggles for his attention and affections. Desolate, disconsolate, and wise beyond his years Hugo plays the existing power structure like a Stradivarius. He convinces Odin that Desi is cheating on him with Michael Cassio (Andrew Keegan) and that the secret lovebirds call him ?the nigger? behind his back. Odin tries to be

rational, but as Hugo?s plan unfolds he is torn apart by the same green-eyed bugaboo that fueled Shakespeare?s original.

The story?s most potent element comes in the form of Rodrigo/ Roger

Rodriguez (Elden Henson), a wealthy young student bereft of beauty, ace or skill on the court. He is less the classic, typically laughable

screen geek than an average high school nothing convinced by the ersuasive Hugo that with proper instruction he has a chance to woo and win the beautius Desi. Though Henson?s on screen time is limited it is ime well spent. The rage that bubbles up in his crying eyes as his

oversized ears are thumped red by smarmy preps and cocky jocks is angible and stomach turning. You can taste the bitterness, and it comes

as no surprise that he ends up with a gun in his hand and a bullet in is head. His is the most simple, head splitting portrayal of

potentially homicidal anger since Chris Penn?s chilling appearance in ?s Short Cuts.

The film?s final gruesome scenes though shot simply and without excess gore are often too painful to watch in light of recent tragedies. But as

Odin comes face to face with the truth paraphrasing The Moor of Venice?s final command to ?Tell my story,? it is impossible to turn

away. The rest is, just as Shakespeare wrote it, an awful silence. Hugo, refusing to explain his actions shows more arrogance than remorse.

?Why,? lingers on everyones? lips as eyes dart from side to side looking for someone to blame. Othello is doubtless the most troubling account of

man?s darkest angels in action, and O unflinchingly tells it like it is.

Memphis has been chosen to host the national premiere of the coming-of-age film Academy Boyz this Friday, August 24th at area theaters. The film, set in Connecticut, chronicles the high school relationship between three teenagers attending a college preparatory boarding school and the scholarship program that brought them together. Written and directed by Dennis Cooper (Chicago Hope, Miami Vice), the movie is a semi-autobiographical look at authentic friendship.

Donald Faison (Remember the Titans) and Jeffrey Sams (Soul Food) play inner-city African-American boys sent to Loomis Chaffee School as part of the ?A Better Chance? program. Justin Whalin (Dungeons & Dragons) plays a white student (representing Cooper himself) sent to the school to improve his chances of being admitted to an Ivy League college.

Although Cooper says he was not part of the scholarship program at Loomis Chafee, he still felt alienated from the school?s wealthy students and therefore aligned himself with the scholarship participants. From that relationship, he says his life was forever enriched and one of the main reasons for his success.

?This is a unique project because some people didn?t believe the story, and I had the opportunity to portray credible inner-city kids and not the usual stereotypes,? says Cooper. Academy Boyz will be premiered at Malco?s Majestic, Bartlett, and DeSoto theaters, Muvico at Peabody Place, and Hollywood 20 theaters.

Ghost World‘s credit sequence opens with an ecstatic clip from a ’60s Bombay Bollywood musical then proceeds to alternate that cinematic nightclub romp with a scanning glimpse at a succession of apartment windows, each filled with a weary-looking person staring blankly into the dull glow of a television screen — all the lonely people, where do they all come from? But the last window reveals the source of the Bollywood clip in the form of Enid, the film’s teenage heroine, dancing madly to the film, a poster affixed to the wall in the background offering a subliminal plea — “Be an artist.”

This sequence reveals Enid’s view of herself in relation to the rest of the “creeps” in the world. And if the remainder of the film brings Enid’s worldview into question, this sequence also offers a loving testament to the film’s view of Enid and her gloriously outré tastes.

Ghost World is the debut fictional feature from Terry Zwigoff, who directed the masterful Crumb, a documentary bio of underground comics icon Robert Crumb, and is based on a graphic novel by Daniel Clowes. Like so many films before, Ghost World is about the summer after high school graduation, but, offhand, I can’t think of a more perceptive or heartfelt film on the subject since the ’70s boy-centric classic Breaking Away.

The film centers on Enid (Thora Birch, who was so great as Kevin Spacey’s daughter in American Beauty) and her best friend Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson, a pale, breathy beauty who comes across as a young, sweeter Kathleen Turner). At the outset of the film, Enid and Rebecca are rolling their eyes through a hilariously on-target high school graduation ceremony (sponsored by Hostess, Dunkin’ Donuts, and Tropicana, if you look closely at the signs) then having a gloriously bad time at the post-graduation party. “This is so bad it’s almost good,” Rebecca says of the party’s middle-aged lounge band. The girls then scan the room, offering witheringly sarcastic appraisals of their ex-classmates.

Mainstream American culture simply isn’t good enough for these smart, funny, bohemian goddesses. And if the jocks, cheerleaders, and goody-two-shoes they were subjected to in high school weren’t bad enough, wait ’til they see what awaits them on the outside! With no college plans in sight, the girls dive into a post-high school summer (though Enid does have to make up an art class in summer school) and discover a ghost world of such cultural decay that it might as well be a rebuke to their very existence: strip-mall theme restaurants (Wowsville — “The Taj Mahal of fake ’50s diners”), video stores where clerks have never heard of 8 1/2, abrasive commercial radio announcers, obnoxious bar-blues bands. “Now I remember why I haven’t been anywhere in months,” Enid’s adult friend Seymour (an inevitably cast Steve Buscemi) whines. “You give people a Big Mac and a pair of Nikes and they’re happy. I can’t relate to 99 percent of the population.”

This thread of cultural revulsion comes through clearest in Enid’s honest inability to hold down a job at a movie theater, where she isn’t allowed to commiserate with patrons about how much the movies suck, she can’t cringe at the “chemical sludge” she has to douse popcorn with, and she’s forced to push “upsizing.” There’s a remarkable scene in Zwigoff’s Crumb where the artist sketches a streetscape and we see how his sketches depict the street changing over time, becoming busier, uglier, and less distinct, a mangled snarl of power lines, chain stores, and commercial billboards. That scene, more than the magnificent one of Crumb receding into the comfort of his collection of blues and jazz 78s, demonstrated his contempt for contemporary culture and made a case that the view was as justified as it was reactionary. There are scenes in Ghost World — Enid walking or driving against a similarly imprisoning Los Angeles backdrop — that seem to be a direct reference to this scene in Crumb, a uniting of outsider sympathies.

But the catch is that Ghost World‘s greatness lies in how it both explains this kind of cultural negation and critiques it. The film manages to simultaneously understand its characters’ alienation and cynicism as an understandable reaction, a culture entirely unworthy of them and also show what a dead end that alienation and cynicism is. In other words, these characters are right to feel the way they do, but it still makes them feel all wrong.

It soon becomes clear that Enid and Rebecca’s seemingly united front against the world is a lot of false bravado. Enid is as unsure of who she is as she is “sure” in her evaluation of the rest of the world. And Rebecca, much to Enid’s uncomprehending dismay, seems to be embracing the normalcy that the girls have always mocked. As the two girls drift apart, Enid latches onto Seymour, a 40-ish corporate middleman and obsessive record collector who feels as alienated by mainstream culture as Enid does. “He’s the exact opposite of everything I really hate,” Enid explains to a dismissive Rebecca.

As Ghost World‘s transitional summer unfurls, the film becomes more prickly — and more moving — than the caustic cultural comedy that you might anticipate early on. In one subtle, heartbreaking moment toward the end of the film, Enid is packing, finally moving out of her father’s house after a summer of avoiding it. She comes across a 45, seemingly a remnant of childhood, and puts it on the record player. As the song plays, the girlish singer crooning what was likely Enid’s adolescent theme — “I’ll be special/I’ll be rare” — Enid continues to pack, putting her latest employee uniform, a T-shirt for her job at Computer Station, into the suitcase.

American cinema is in the midst of a glorious stretch of teen films — and I’m not talking about American Pie. Over the last three years great to greater films as varied as Rushmore, Election, Gummo, The Virgin Suicides, and George Washington have graced American screens. Ghost World is absolutely in that category — by my estimation not quite as good as George Washington or the majestic Rushmore but better than the others.

It is a film about many things — the transition into adulthood, the plastic, desiccated state of mainstream American culture, the toothless platitudes of secondary education, the value of art, the precariousness of friendship — and in its meditation on all this it says more about contemporary life than any other film I’ve seen this year. — Chris Herrington

About two-thirds of the way into the World War II romantic drama Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, people weren’t only laughing, they were leaving. Maybe Nicolas Cage’s Italian accent — which wasn’t so Italian — was to blame. Or maybe it was that this film felt as long as the war. Or maybe it was the distinct lack of grounding of the drama’s time and terror.

Cage stars as Captain Antonio Corelli, an officer of the Italian army unit that is occupying the Greek island of Cephallonia. There, Corelli falls for the beautiful local Pelagia (PenÇlope Cruz), who has just given up on her betrothed, Mandras (Christian Bale), whom she hasn’t heard from since he left to fight. Meanwhile, Dr. Iannis (John Hurt), the village’s resident physician and Pelagia’s father, exposes Corelli to his daughter when he offers him a room in their house. Corelli uses his mandolin to charm her.

Pelagia, torn between Mandras and Corelli, finds that she can no longer wait for Mandras. So, as they used to say, whoop, there it is. The turning point in the story seems all too sudden. One minute Pelagia is enraged by the captain’s drunken behavior; the next the two are sharing some erotic together-time.

Almost every aspect of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin is annoying. Most of Cage’s lines start out Italian enough but end up utterly American (Cruz sounds believably Greek). And despite the eventful warfare, the movie makes oh-so-slow progress — emotionally confused progress at that. At the same time that Greeks are grief-stricken about what is yet to come in the war, Italians are singing on the beach as if on vacation. During one beach scene, the camera stops then zooms in on five or six topless women playing in the water. War is hell. — Hannah Walton

DROWSILY DREAMING

About two-thirds of the way into the World War II romantic drama Captain Corelli s Mandolin, people weren t only laughing, they were leaving. Maybe Nicholas Cage s Italian accent which wasn t so Italian was to blame. Or maybe it was that this film felt as long as the war. Or maybe it was the distinct lack of grounding of the drama s time and terror.

Cage stars as Captain Antonio Corelli, an officer of the Italian army unit that is occupying the Greek island of Cephallonia. There, Corelli falls for the beautiful local Pelagia (Penelope Cruz), who has just given up on her betrothed, Mandras (Christian Bale), whom she hasn t heard from since he left to fight. Meanwhile, Dr. Iannis (John Hurt), the village s resident physician and Palagia s father, exposes Corelli to his daughter when he offers him a room in their house. Corelli uses his mandolin to charm her.

Palagia, torn between Mandras and Corelli, finds that she can no longer wait for Mandras. So, as they used to say, whoop, there it is. The turning point in the story seems all too sudden. One minute Pelagia is enraged by the captain s drunken behavior; the next the two are sharing some erotic together-time.

Almost every aspect of Captain Corelli s Mandolin is annoying. Most of Cage s lines start out Italian enough but end up utterly American (Cruz sounds believably Greek). And despite the eventful warfare, the movie makes oh-so-slow progress emotionally confused progress at that. At the same time that Greeks are grief-stricken about what is yet to come in the war, Italians are singing on the beach as if on vacation. During one beach scene, the camera stops, then zooms in on five or six topless women playing in the water. War is hell.

Only in a film climate as riddled with marketing-driven clunkers as this one could a film as simple, straightforward, and, well, old-fashioned as The Deep End be considered an “art” film. Hopefully the film’s lack of “star-power,” it’s relatively miniscule marketing budget, and the attending media neglect that comes from such deficits won’t scare blockbuster-weaned audiences away. Because, while The Deep End is far from a great film, it is a uniquely satisfying one.

One imagines that there must be a large film-going population out there dissatisfied with the current state of things: Most of the “mainstream” films are clearly product, commercials for themselves that lure large opening weekend audiences through promotion but don’t deliver on the movie’s storytelling promise. And, on the other hand, most critical darlings in recent years — foreign films and those so-called indies — are, by and large, films whose pleasures are either highly formal and stylistic or films infused with a postmodern or ironic edge. They just don’t make ’em like they used to.

Except that The Deep End is that rare American film that does indeed play with the precision and realism of a Hollywood drama from the ’40s or ’50s. It’s a subtle and honest connection of two Hollywood staples — the woman’s picture and the film noir — transposed effortlessly to the present day: no nudges, no snickers, no knowing winks. It might well be a second-tier Fritz Lang.

The film is actually based on a ’40s thriller, The Blank Wall, that was later adapted to the screen by Max Ophuls as The Reckless Moment. In the original, a protective mother disposes of the dead body of her teen daughter’s older lover then fends off the threats of a blackmailer. Teen girls and older guys no longer so taboo, The Deep End makes it a teen son with an older male lover. The mother is Tilda Swinton (Orlando), whose finely calibrated performance is likely to be remembered come Oscar time. Swinton is realistic as a 40-something soccer mom managing three kids and a faltering father-in-law while her military husband is away at sea. She perfectly conveys the reason in every crazy action she takes, making each step seem like the most logical damage control of a mother protecting a son. One ingenious aspect of the film is that the son, Beau (Jonathan Tucker), is never aware of what his mother is up to, and Swinton dabs her loving mother role with dashes of resentment toward her son’s combination of cluelessness and his status as the source of a spiraling crisis. The blackmailer is played by Goran Visnjic (of TV’s ER) in a hunky-yet-sinister “dark stranger” turn that might have gone to Robert Mitchum or Robert Ryan once upon a time.

Written and directed by the team of Scott McGehee and David Siegel and shot by cinematographer Giles Nuttgens, who won the Best Cinematography award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, The Deep End is a gorgeous blend of blues and greens, making stellar use of its Lake Tahoe location. Like those great Hollywood genre movies of the “Golden Age,” the film is artful in the classical style — artful without ever drawing attention to its own artfulness, every frame devoted to telling a story.

— Chris Herrington

At the beginning of The Others, Grace (Nicole Kidman) wakes up screaming, not bloody murder exactly but loud and hard. But, then again, Grace is mad. Everyone says so. Her daughter Anne and the maid, Mrs. Mills, have uttered those words. Even Grace herself has considered it.

And what’s there not to be mad about? It’s 1945, and Grace is stuck in a gigantic and gloomy mansion on a damp English isle. Her husband went off to war and never came back. Both of her young children, Anne and Nicholas, cannot be exposed to natural light, lest they be covered in burns and blisters. And so it goes. Grace holds 50 keys to 50 doors, all of which must be locked immediately upon passing through. The drapes, too, must be opened and shut in time with the children’s movements.

But is it the strain of keeping up that leaves Grace reed-thin and sickly pale? Is it something simpler? Perhaps it’s cheeky Anne, who taunts her fearful brother with stories of an invisible little boy named Victor who lives in the house and then won’t back down when her mother tells her to take it back. Maybe it’s that Mrs. Mills, kindly, sure, but maybe a bit too knowing and a bit too eager to hand Grace her migraine pills. Or could it be something more sinister? What are all those bumps and crashes that Grace hears overhead, and who is it who plays the piano when she knows full well that the music room was locked?

The Others is directed by Spanish filmmaker Alejandro Amenábar, who, at 29, is being championed as the next hot young director (the upcoming Cameron Crowe/Tom Cruise film, Vanilla Sky, is an English-language remake of one of Amenábar’s three films). Compared to those who’ve had that honor before — Todd Solondz (Happiness), Paul Thomas Anderson (Magnolia), Darren Aronofsky (Requiem For a Dream) — Amenábar isn’t trying to break the mold. Instead, at least for The Others, he’s charmingly old-school. A rattling doorknob and the clump-drag, clump-drag step in a foggy forest are the avenues for his chills. And if the film doesn’t quite scare the wits out of its audience, the slow play of details is certainly agitating. Amenábar’s chief skill appears to be the direction of Kidman. As Grace, Kidman comes off as cold, not driven by blood pumping through her heart but by sheer determination to get a grip — on her kids, on her servants, on that something that makes her question all that she knows.

And then there is the ending — a twist, to be sure, though not the knockdown sort. If anything, it makes the viewer review the film to work out if it all makes sense. Not a bad thing, really, thinking about a film after the credits have rolled.

— Susan Ellis

About a third of the way into German director Tom Tykwer’s The Princess and the Warrior, his rambling follow-up to his surprise smash Run Lola Run, is perhaps the most thrilling movie scene I’ve witnessed this year.

The “princess” in the film is Sissi (Franka Potente, who was Lola), a psychiatric nurse beloved by a group of patients who come across as stock film crazies. The “warrior” is Bodo (Benno FÅrmann), a former soldier stricken with suicidal grief who is planning a bank robbery with his brother.

At the outset, the film follows both characters separately, and the show-stopping scene occurs when the pair finally meet.

Bodo has just robbed a gas station and is running from the police; Sissi is taking one of her patients for a walk. Bodo’s flight unwittingly leads to Sissi being hit by a truck while crossing the street. Bodo dives under the truck to evade his pursuers only to find Sissi

prone and struggling to breathe. With a pocket knife and a straw, Bodo performs an emergency tracheotomy on Sissi, sucking the

blood through the straw in order to clear a passage, Sissi staring, terrified, into his eyes the entire time.

It is an unbearably intense scene — at once frightening and erotic and emotional — and Tykwer’s use of sound and pacing

is bravura. Tykwer adds a grace note afterward: Bodo accompanies a still-silent Sissi in the ambulance (more to escape the police than

to be with her), then Sissi reaches out desperately as Bodo walks away, a button from Bodo’s jacket in her hand.

This meeting (fateful or coincidental, the film seems to be asking — you decide) is the crux of a long (130 minutes), rambling, ambitious film that, in Tykwer’s own words, is about the healing power of love.

But it is not an entirely successful film. Filled with startling shots (Bodo’s entrance is a bit of show-off camerawork that

really does impress) and expert staging (the bank heist shows Tykwer has a lucrative future as a Hollywood genre director if he wants it),

The Princess and the Warrior confirms Tykwer as a directorial force, but the film’s whole doesn’t quite match the sum of its parts.

Both Bodo and Sissi have family tragedies in their past. Bodo witnessed his wife killed in a gas station explosion; Sissi’s mother was electrocuted in the bathtub. Both characters are clearly scarred by these events, and by bringing them together in a series of fateful encounters (the tracheotomy scene isn’t their only “chance” meeting), Tykwer is trying to say something profound or mysterious about healing, but it doesn’t cohere.

The film’s awful title implies something archetypal about the characters and, unfortunately, though both are striking screen presences, they sometimes come across as archetypes rather than actual people. This sense of emotional distance is partly built into

the characters, but FÅrmann, in particular, has trouble making us care about the inexpressive Bodo. And Tykwer’s ambition gets the better of him at the end with his laborious literalization of Bodo’s recovery from this previous emotional shell shock.

This typifies a film that at times reaches for too much. But in a season most often marked by the lowest common denominator, Tykwer’s grasp offers enough to make his film well worth seeing. —

Chris Herrington

“There is no contradiction between faith and science — true science,” snaps Dr. Zaius in the original 1968 version of Planet of the Apes. The learned orangutan’s burden is a heavy one, and of his conflicted occupation he gravely notes, “I take no pleasure in this.”

He is not only the minister of science but also the chief defender of the faith. As such he is forced to refute any and all scientific discovery that is at odds with ape religion and charge offending scientists with heresy. He cannot let it be known that humans, now a race of primitive, parasitic mutes who devour their own food supplies then raid ape-run greenbelts like some kind of bipedal locusts, were once the masters of this wrecked planet. He knows that, just as the sacred scrolls point out, “a human will kill his brother to take his brother’s land.” He knows that should these hairless, foul-smelling, speechless, and, therefore, soulless animals ever be allowed to grow strong again they will initiate a second and perhaps final apocalypse. “The forbidden zone was once a paradise,” he announces. “[Humans] made it into a desert.”

Yes, of course, the message was a heavy-handed one: a thinking man’s Ten Commandments with Charlton Heston again in the lead. But the sledgehammer approach was well mitigated by savory storytelling, complex character development, and inspired, makeup-transcending performances from Maurice Evans, Kim Hunter, and Roddy McDowall. Everything from ape economics to romance, race, religion, and rebellious youth-culture was touched upon in the epically proportioned original. The undeniably cool ape costumes and Linda Harrison’s silent appearance in a wet buckskin bikini gave the film a wealth of drive-in appeal, making Planet of the Apes the rarest of all Hollywood birds: a smart, socially progressive manifesto aimed at the broadest of all possible audiences.

Don’t expect anything even half so smart from director Tim Burton’s startlingly vacant bowdlerization of the 1968 sci-fi classic. In his rigorously altered retelling, nonstop action usurps quality storytelling, hollow jingoism stands in lieu of thoughtful political commentary, and tidy stereotyping eliminates the need for anything like character development. And why would anyone bother creating genuinely comic situations when you can make smirking references to the original ape films? The new flick fearlessly asks the difficult question, “Do animals have souls?” It should have asked the same of Burton and, if no, to whom it was so recently sold.

Helena Bonham Carter singlehandedly inherits the mantle of original chimps Cornelius and Zira, the put-upon scientists whose faith is challenged by the appearance of a talking human. Carter’s Ari has no such conflicts. All humans can talk in this kinder, gentler land of apes, so why should she be conflicted? She’s a hot little bleeding-heart human-hugger with a Jennifer Aniston haircut, a Banana Republic pantsuit, and a cause. More than anything she functions as a possible romantic interest for Mark Wahlberg’s poor lost astronaut, and that’s more than a little creepy.

While Tim Roth is certainly fun to watch as the villainous Thade, he can’t keep our attention. The brand of snarling comic-book evil he embodies always ensures diminishing dramatic returns. Once you learn that this chimp’s a malevolent psycho, nothing he does can surprise you. And true to form, nothing does. Wahlberg’s character, Captain Leo Davidson, isn’t anything like Heston’s misanthropic philosopher turned astronaut. Davidson is a clean-shaven, cookie-cutter action figure, flirting with the ladies while spewing Dirty Harry-style one-liners like, “Never send a monkey to do a man’s job.”

The original Planet of the Apes was shot on location in a number of national parks. The sweeping, deep-focus desert shots not only made the world seem harsh and uninviting but amplified the film’s already mythic proportions. Burton built his Planet of the Apes inside the studio, and the resulting claustrophobia makes for surprisingly sloppy camerawork from a director known for his typically sumptuous visuals. Long-time Burton collaborator Danny Elfman’s percussion-heavy soundtrack is omnipresent and short on dynamics. It’s more ornamentation than punctuation, and it fades without a trace into the artificial background. The ape makeup, while far superior to the original, in no way improves upon the original. It alone is not, as they say, worth the price of one’s admission.

At a time when our beloved president uses economic scare tactics to empower both giant corporations and deeply prejudiced religious groups while thumbing his deviated septum at all scientific reason, it could do the world a lot of good to see Lady Liberty up to her neck in radioactive sand. Burton’s visually stunning but spiritually empty closing image lacks the original’s reverberating finality. All this new one does is scream out, To be continued (as if we didn’t know). Do yourself a huge favor. Ignore this furry carnival ride. Get the original on DVD and share it with your kids (who’ll love it) before their attention span gets any shorter.

The exposure to Julia Roberts these days is so intense that when you look at a white surface you see her outline. One of my coworkers, however, complained not of too much Julia but of the way Roberts and co-star Billy Crystal kept looking at each other funny in all the print and TV promotions for their new film, American Sweethearts.

American Sweethearts is a look-at-each-other-funny kind of film. It?s a romantic comedy that yearns to be one of those romps of yore. The rallying cry on the set was surely ?Think broad!? And if the elements of American Sweethearts don?t completely come together, it?s good enough and even funny enough.

The driving idea is that Hollywood people are different from you and me. They are selfish and odd and sometimes a little evil though not a kill-you evil. Stuck in the middle of all the craziness is everywoman Kiki (Roberts), assistant/sister to Gwen (Catherine Zeta-Jones), a so-so actress with a sexpot pout and an inner focus that threatens to one day turn her cross-eyed. Gwen has been on the receiving end of a lot of scorn lately, having dumped her husband and co-star Eddie (John Cusack) for the sweaty Spaniard Hector (Hank Azaria). The last movie Gwen and Eddie made together is just being released and has got to be a hit ? for the almost has-beens Gwen and Eddie and for the nearly bankrupt studio. Complicating matters is Hal Weidmann (Christopher Walken), the director who demands that the final print of his film be seen first not by the studio but by the press. Enter Lee Phillips (Crystal), the film?s publicist, who swears he?ll get Gwen and Eddie together for the press junket to end all press junkets.

All forces gather in a hotel in Las Vegas. Gwen and Eddie, who?s been pried from an ashram-like ?wellness? center, grin and bear it during their countless interviews. In the wings is Lee, orchestrating ? and stalling for the film?s arrival ? like mad. If Eddie?s caught on security cameras doing something nasty outside of Gwen?s cabana, good for Lee and the movie. If Eddie seems to be on the cusp of suicide, better still, just make sure it gets to the press. All the while, Gwen moans and frets about how this reflects on her; good thing Kiki is there not to just lend support but to fetch her mouthwash as well.

American Sweethearts, co-written by Crystal, is near-bursting with little jabs at Hollywood. Gwen is part-Liz Taylor, part-Russell-Crowe-era Meg Ryan who can dish it out but can?t and will not take it. Eddie, in turn, is a tortured mess looking for meaning in life through a fistful of herbs and nonsensical chants. In fallback position are Lee and his boss Dave Kingman (a particularly gestural Stanley Tucci), both gifted backstabbers with varying degrees of sincerity, plus the director Hal, a reclusive multimillionaire genius a la Kubrick, and Eddie?s ?wellness guide? (Alan Arkin), who releases his troubled charge in exchange for a bitchin? set of wheels.

Then there?s Kiki. She won?t take butter on her toast, and she leaves out the toast, too. A former fatty (Roberts is seen briefly in a fat suit), she is the pushed-around girl next door with a great laugh and cuddly charm. The fetching she?s done for sister Gwen was fine 60 pounds ago, but now she needs some play and that neurotically earnest Eddie is looking mighty fine, even while mooning over her sister.

In the end, Roberts, playing it straight, comes off rather thin amid all this activity. And the raison d?etre, the romance between Kiki and Eddie in this romantic comedy, appears to have been shoehorned in. But if there?s a message in American Sweethearts, it?s that nothing about Hollywood makes sense. Don?t think, just watch.