Category: Film/TV

Ben Affleck is Matt Murdock: arrogant attorney by day and vigilante by night. He is “The Man Without Fear,” otherwise known as Daredevil, nemesis to a villain he’s never seen: The Kingpin (Michael Clarke Duncan). Unlike other men of intrigue and shadows, Daredevil is blind; his sight robbed from him as a child by a toxic-waste spill. However, the accident that took his sight also heightened his other four senses to superhuman extremes.

Most notable among his powers is a kind of bat-like radar that allows him to “see” with sound waves. He is also able to leap small buildings in a single bound and can stalk hot women by following their scent. The hottest woman around is Elektra (Jennifer Garner, Emmy-winner for TV’s Alias), and after a brief flirtation in a coffee shop, Murdock follows Elektra to a nearby playground, where the two engage in public, Matrix-y foreplay. Schoolchildren cheer as they jab, kick, leap, and spar as Murdock tries desperately to get Elektra’s phone number. This scene, while fun, flaunts the film’s complete disregard for Murdock’s secret identity, which is compromised again and again without any consequences. Also, the film sets Murdock up as a cold fish from the beginning (a lame answering-machine break-up from a whiny, unseen girlfriend unravels all the exposition we need to conclude this) — so what is it about Elektra that attracts Murdock? He can’t see that she’s played by Jennifer Garner. Does she smell that good?

Anyhoo, romance inevitably occurs and life seems grand until Elektra’s father is killed by the Kingpin’s mercenary henchman Bullseye (crazy, fun Colin Farrell), who can make any object a deadly weapon with his extraordinary aim (hence the moniker). Bullseye manages to frame Daredevil for the crime, prompting all-too-short confusion, whereupon Elektra becomes the hunter and Daredevil the hunted. In a matter of moments all of this is cleared up, and Bullseye manages to put both of these dark lovers seemingly out of commission, leaving Daredevil no recourse but to gargoyle-ishly haunt his local church (a handful of smug, unapologetic confessional scenes makes it apparent that Daredevil is Catholic — how ironic!) and duke it out with Bullseye amid organ pipes and stained glass.

It’s a shame that Farrell isn’t a bigger star yet or he would probably be playing Daredevil. He’s got more darkness and mystery in a mere dart of his eyes than Affleck can muster in a page of dialogue. Affleck, attractive and appealing in roles that let him be boyish and cute, flounders here trying to be grown-up and tortured. And he seems to think that blind people have no facial expressions — or maybe that’s just him trying to be aloof. I dunno. It doesn’t work. And there’s absolutely no chemistry between him and Garner, despite a very pretty scene in the rain where Murdock can “see” her by the sounds that raindrops make on her. Garner is the most interesting force in this movie and is sadly missing from most of it: an irrevocable flaw.

It’s a shame that Daredevil, with a blind superhero, never explores or fleshes out any real drama concerning the blindness. Murdock’s other senses are so heightened we never think of him as disabled. He is a superhero, yes, but it would have been more interesting to see more of his limitations. In fact, most of my film-logic questions stem from this: If he is blind, how does he make his costume — a blood-red, leather devil get-up? A reporter remarks “cool color” of Murdock’s cane, which doubles as Daredevil’s hook/javelin. Murdock replies, “I wouldn’t know.” And while Murdock wouldn’t know, Daredevil would, because it’s part of the ensemble. Does he have a secret shopper? Or is he on the mailing list of some weird, fetish boutique? And if he can jump off buildings and land effortlessly on flagpoles, why is he too blind to comb his hair for court? If Daredevil is a good guy, why is he so cruel to his victims?

As in all superhero movies, logic and sense are stretched beyond our own non-super world, and in a movie as sloppy as Daredevil, it’s best not to ask questions. — Bo List

More on Daredevil

Here’s the basic plot of Shanghai Knights: Two unlikely friends with an uncanny knack for landing in trouble travel to turn-of-the-century London to avenge a father’s death and, with the help of a street urchin and a kindly Scotland Yard inspector, uncover a conspiracy by a nasty British royal to stake a claim to the English throne.

Jackie Chan returns as Chon Wang, rejoining his former wisecracking Shanghai Noon sidekick, Roy O’Bannon (played by Owen Wilson). They travel to England to investigate the circumstances of the death of Chon’s father. His father was killed by a sinister aristocrat named Rathbone, who, we come to find out, is 10th in line to the throne and lusts for the chance to take it. Rathbone killed Chon’s father to snag a jewel-encrusted imperial seal, and he subsequently plots to murder all nine royals above him in the British hierarchy, making one of his steel-eyed henchmen emperor of China along the way. Chon’s sister, Lin (Fann Wong), is already hot on the trail of the stolen seal by the time he and Roy get to London, and together they make a desperate attempt to thwart Rathbone’s plot.

Shanghai Knights proves that Chan can still showboat with the most acrobatic of quick-stepping stuntmen. His fight scenes, as ever, are choreographed brilliantly, but there’s a lot more comedy this time to go with all the eye candy. During one of the action scenes, for instance, Chan makes hilarious use of an umbrella to dispatch the obligatory anonymous henchmen to the tune of “Singin’ in the Rain.”

The giddy glimpse we get of Chan in Shanghai Knights shows he’s still got a long way to go before you can write him off as an action star. As in every movie he makes, there is such pure joy in simply watching the man move. His smile has a serene radiance, and here Chan demonstrates for the first time, and most effectively, his low-key acting ability beyond the swashbuckling stunts. That’s not to diminish the importance of Wilson, whose hilarious drawl offsets all the derring-do quite nicely. The writers pepper the screenplay with enough droll one-liners and gags for Wilson that there’s no chance of losing interest in between all the fisticuffs, and they even let him get in on the action at times. Wilson manages to take lines that should fall flat and turn them into quirky gems.

Bottom line: If you see only one slapstick, Victorian-era, martial-arts buddy movie this year, by all means, this is the one. — Andy Meek

Widely characterized as “anti-American” during the height of the Red Scare, Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American, about the early days of America’s mucking about in French Indochina, occasioned plenty of controversy in its day. And though the long, tragic history of American involvement in Vietnam only confirmed Greene’s prescience, one can understand why American studio Miramax has been trigger-shy with Australian director Phillip Noyce’s recent adaptation of the novel.

Set for release in the fall of 2001, The Quiet American was pulled post-9/11 by Miramax honcho Harvey Weinstein, who feared U.S. audiences wouldn’t be very receptive to a film that points out their own country’s past complicity in terrorist activities. Miramax relented a year later when it was screened at the Toronto Film Festival and after critical raves for the film and Michael Caine’s lead performance made the Oscar-hungry studio smell possible nominations. A late-2002, Oscar-qualifying release later, Caine is indeed up for Best Actor and the film is in wide release. The unintended delay couldn’t have worked any better in the film’s favor. Now, with the United States on the verge of unilaterally provoking a new war in an oft-colonized region and with America’s standing overseas at perhaps an all-time low, the material seems more vital than ever.

As directed by Noyce (who also helmed the recent art-house hit Rabbit-Proof Fence) and shot on location by genius cinematographer Christopher Doyle (who lensed visually stunning Wong Kar-Wai films such as In the Mood for Love and Chungking Express), The Quiet American is a careful, subtle adaptation, refreshingly old-fashioned in its straight-ahead, subdued structure and quiet, deliberate intelligence. The film’s visual style and relaxed pacing are matched by Caine’s magnificently natural performance.

The film opens, like Sunset Boulevard, with a dead man floating face-down in the water, then flashes back and proceeds to show you how he got there. But unlike Sunset Boulevard, the dead man doesn’t narrate the film. In this case, the narrator is Thomas Fowler (Caine), an aging correspondent for the London Times who is stationed in Saigon. It’s 1952, at the height of the French Indochina War, a couple of years before the French will withdraw and the United States will take over the fight against Vietnam’s Communist insurgents. (Though, as the film intimates, the U.S. was already financing much of the fighting.) Fowler isn’t that interested in his job — he’s filed only three stories in the past year, a fact that threatens to have him yanked back to Britain — but has grown very fond of Saigon, where he spends his days sipping tea in the outdoor cafes in front of grand colonial buildings like the Hotel Continental. “I can’t say what made me fall in love with Vietnam,” Fowler says early on in a voiceover, but it could be his young mistress Phuong (Do Thi Hai Yen), on whom he dotes despite having a Catholic wife back home who refuses to grant him a divorce.

Complicating this happy set-up is the arrival of Alden Pyle (Brendan Fraser, making the most of his rugged good looks and natural innocence in a serious role, much as he did in Gods and Monsters), an American “aid worker” in the country for some sort of ill-defined humanitarian mission who takes a shine to Fowler and later to Phuong.

With his condescending niceness and lumbering carriage, baseball-cap-clad head and dog at his side (“You call him Duke?” Fowler asks with the vocal equivalent of casually raised eyebrows), Pyle embodies the well-meaning, naive American set loose in a world he wants to “save” but doesn’t quite comprehend, and Fraser skillfully conveys the cheerful simplicity of Pyle’s seeming innocence.

Pyle’s is “a face with no history and no problems,” Fowler muses, but the American’s will to action exposes Fowler’s own cynical detachment. “I have no point of view. I take no action. I don’t get involved,” Fowler says to Pyle when asked about his role in covering the war. But Pyle has other ideas. He carries with him a book that calls for the need for a “third force” between the Communists and the French. But when Fowler queries whether he thinks the Americans should assume that role, Pyle demurs: “No, we’re not colonialists.”

Soon Fowler and Pyle’s friendly intellectual rivalry over the future of Vietnam and the nature of the present conflict manifests itself in a more personal way, as Pyle falls for Phuong and makes this known plainly to Fowler. Since Fowler cannot marry Phuong and is far older than she, he knows Pyle has more to offer. “I know I’m not essential to Phuong,” Fowler admits in one of the film’s most touching moments, “but if I were to lose her, for me that would be the beginning of death.”

As you might imagine, this love triangle is richly allegorical, the three characters standing in for their respective countries, but, even more so, for the battle between young, swaggering America and old, battle-worn Europe over the hearts and minds (and control) of a pliant Third World. Yet this potentially cumbersome material is handled so delicately that the film works equally well on a personal level and on a political/historical level.

Unsurprisingly, Pyle’s “humanitarian” mission turns out to be a much more complicated affair, as we learn just what this “third way” is and what his and America’s role in creating it is. Noyce keeps the horrors of the war at a remove for most of the film, but the two exceptions — the discovery of the remains of a massacred village and a car-bombing in Saigon — are more than enough to reinforce the human cost of using this poor country as a political chessboard.

A late confrontation between Pyle and Fowler over Pyle’s real role in the conflict unintentionally yet unavoidably forces the viewer to confront America’s current role around the globe and consider the same crucial notion that Fowler must ultimately face: “Sooner or later, one has to take sides if one wants to remain human.” — Chris Herrington

At 72, Jean-Luc Godard stands as the world’s most important living filmmaker, the greatest standing Colossus of a medium that has largely defined the past century. It is a career unlike any other. A critic before he was a filmmaker, Godard emerged in the ’60s as the postmodern prophet of the movies, his first 15 films, made in only nine years, forever altering the medium in a manner that perhaps no other body of work, outside that of early pioneers D.W. Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein, has.

His first film, 1959’s modest-on-the-surface letter-bomb Breathless, could be reasonably said to have reinvented the very idea of a movie. And the film that ended Godard’s great early run, 1967’s apocalyptic Weekend, was his attempt to destroy the medium. Everything since has been a long journey in the wilderness: experimental films and videos, leftist agitprop, the occasional semi-narrative “comeback.” There is a growing sentiment among critics and historians that this later work, more than three decades’ worth, is equal in its own way to Godard’s early string of masterpieces. But it’s difficult to judge: Godard’s negation of anything close to traditional filmmaking coincided with a diminution of foreign-film distribution (and discussion) in the United States, and most of his work over the past few decades has screened in only the very largest cities and then only briefly and inconsistently. Video availability is equally hit-and-miss.

All of which makes the current local screening of Godard’s latest “comeback,” In Praise of Love — the subject of great controversy at the Toronto and Cannes film festivals — such an event. In Praise of Love, which opened at Muvico last week and which will be screened several times over the next month by the Memphis Digital Arts Cooperative at their space at Cooper-Young’s First Congregational Church, is the most unlikely multiplex screening in Memphis since Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Kandahar screened at Studio on the Square last year and is the most difficult film to screen locally in recent memory. (Maybe the only truly difficult film, actually. Full Frontal wasn’t difficult. It was just bad.)

The French title of the film is Eloge de l’amour, translating directly as eulogy of love, which is probably closer to the spirit of the film, though elegy is even better. An elegy and rumination, balancing rage and resignation, In Praise of Love is frequently maddening, only intermittently absorbing, always eye-popping, and with a gestalt that lingers. It is a film that I like better than I thought I did while I was watching it.

The first half of the film is shot in stunning black-and-white and is set in present-day Paris. It deals with the attempts of a young director, Edgar, to make a movie about three couples (one young, one old, one “adult”) and the “four stages of love meeting, physical attraction, separation, reconciliation.” Most of the “action” (this is a film in which much of the “plot” is what happens offscreen) concerns Edgar’s casting of the film. There is one woman, Berthe, whom Edgar particularly desires to be in his film, and it is hinted that the two have a past.

In the second half of the film, which is shot in vibrantly oversaturated digital video, we learn a bit about that past. This section is set two years earlier (is this the first Godard film with a flashback?) in Brittany, as Edgar is interviewing figures from the French resistance for a different project. Berthe is the granddaughter of a couple who are in the process of selling their story to an American movie company. Berthe is, reluctantly, negotiating the contract for them.

Visually, In Praise of Love is marvelous. The black-and-white section (where Godard shoots on the streets of Paris for reportedly the first time in 30 years) is stunning, its blacks deeper than anything seen on the screen in years and its feel for street life true urban poetry. The close-up portraiture of women in the casting scenes is also breathtaking. The color section, by contrast, is surreal, its landscapes Martian Monet.

Meaning is much more problematic. The film’s key line of dialogue may well be “There can be no resistance without memory.” Resistance is the film’s theme: Godard ruminating on the French resistance in WWII, which marked his youth, and the failures of the May ’68 revolt, which stamped his adulthood, and the impossibility of resistance now in the face of what he clearly sees as American political and cultural imperialism. (“Trade follows film,” an American State Department official explains, and Godard seems to agree.) In Godard’s view, Hollywood has co-opted history, thus negating the possibility of resistance.

Having struggled through it twice now, it’s easy to sympathize with Roger Ebert’s recent pan of the film, though I didn’t exactly agree with it. Ebert describes Godard “stumbl[ing] through the wreckage of this film like a baffled Lear” and writes, “If you agree with Noam Chomsky, you will have the feeling that you would agree with this film if only you could understand it.” The funny thing is, Godard, while he would no doubt take offense with the sentiments, would probably appreciate the references. Lear and Chomsky –the first literary, the second leftist, both academic — fit the references of this film and this reference-mad filmmaker.

The Lear reference is apt because In Praise of Love, more than anything, comes across as the night thoughts of an aging provocateur, causing one to wonder how much of his critique is legitimate and how much is a product of his own deterioration and resentment. Godard equates film history with political history with personal history and lashes out angrily at how Hollywood is devouring film culture around the world, summed up neatly in a shot of side-by-side movie posters for The Matrix and Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket at a Paris theater.

“Americans have no real past, so they buy the past of others,” one character says, no doubt speaking for Godard himself, who finds a handy shorthand for his ire in the form of “Spielberg,” whose associates are attempting the buy the rights to the couple’s resistance story in the film’s second half. Godard is cruel to Spielberg, perhaps unfairly so. One wonders what Spielberg thinks of it, since he once cast Godard colleague Francois Truffaut in a film (Close Encounters of the Third Kind) in the same kind of respectful homage that Godard used in casting his own Hollywood heroes (Samuel Fuller and Fritz Lang, a German who made many of his best films in the American studio system). Indeed, Godard’s early work was a celebration of American culture. Does he now renounce his love of classic Hollywood, trading in pop (America) for high art (Europe) once and for all? Or does he see the mainstream entertainments of Spielberg and contemporary Hollywood as a corruption of those older values? No doubt many American critics and filmmakers would be sympathetic to the latter argument, but Godard makes it with such single-minded force that it is problematic.

Of course, forcing the audience to grapple with the film in this way is part of the intent. From his conscious deployment of alienation effects to the way he puts ideas directly on the screen rather than merely filtering a “message” through a “story,” Godard makes films that are meant to be interacted with, not passively absorbed. In Praise of Love is an awful lot to swallow in that regard. I’m still not sure to what degree the film confirms Godard’s place as the medium’s Jeremiah and to what degree he seems to have finally met the fate hinted at in the French title of his galvanic debut, A Bout de Souffle: Out of breath.

In Praise of Love will be shown at the First Congo Theatre 10 p.m., Saturday, February 22nd; 7:30 p.m., Saturday, March 1st; and 10 p.m., Saturday, March 15th. For more information on these screenings, see the MeDiA Co-op’s Web site at mediaco-op.org or call 278-9077. — Chris Herrington

Deliver Us From Eva has one of those great titles that movie critics love but only if the movie is terrible. It affords the opportunity to slam the film with just a pun or twist of phrase. There’s so much you can do with titles like Very Bad Things, Mr. Wrong, or 10 Things I Hate about You. My favorite review headline of all time is that of a much-maligned production of a popular Stephen Sondheim musical in my native Lexington, Kentucky: “Nothing Funny Happened On The Way To The Forum.” I leave the headline for the review of this so-so romantic “comedy” to your own imagination — a Choose Your Own Adventure, if you will.

Deliver stars the promising and beautiful Gabrielle Union as Eva Dandridge, eldest of four sisters whose parents were killed in a car accident years ago. Eva has raised them ever since, and though they are now married or engaged adults, she hasn’t yet softened her grip as family matriarch. The younger Dandridge sisters each has a wussy man in her life — all of whom resent Eva’s meddling and “advice” that she dispenses in high-pitched peals of feminist rants, using big words that these three buffoons can’t understand.

The buffoons in question are played by Duane Martin, Mel Jackson, and Dartanyan Edmonds. The sisters are Essence Atkins, Robinne Lee, and Meagan Goode. Their character names are mostly irrelevant because we never get to know these six except as one-dimensional foils or disciples to the formidable Eva. They are deprived of individual personalities, and their dialogue is mostly interchangeable — with the possible exception of Edmonds, who is given the most limited, unflattering urban vocabulary of the bunch.

Anyway, after their TV-viewing of the Big Game is interrupted by Eva’s book-club viewing of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the men concoct a plot to be rid of Eva forever: They will pay a handsome “playa” to date her, make her fall in love with him, and then break her heart so badly that she moves away. Enter LL Cool J as Ray, studly meat deliverer and playa with a capital P. He is soon enlisted, at a price of $5,000, to play Romeo-for-hire. Ray is unlike his three buddies, however. He has a heart, a brain, and non-booty-related ambitions like moving up in his job and buying a house. It’s only a matter of time before he really does fall for Eva, who is different from his other conquests: smart, tough, strong. So, the plan doesn’t go according to these three stooges’ design. Ray and Eva make a great couple, and there’s no end to Eva in sight. That’s when Plan B goes into effect, which is even more callous and terrible than the first. I will not spoil this for those of you who will, despite this review, elect to see this movie.

Deliver Us from Eva is a classic example of lowest-common-denominator comedy, where wit and character are sacrificed in favor of attitude and posturing. The three conspirators overact their one-dimensional undersex-edness with abandon, but there is nothing funny for them to say. One of them gets this line: “Tupperware? That’s Eva’s middle name.” But this isn’t just a man-bashing exercise. Nobody has funny lines, including the soul-sistah beauty-parlor queen, whose big tell-off scene amounts to little more than crass genital-belittling with no punchlines. Also in the salon is the obligatory acerbic gay commentator who breaks the tradition of stereotypical gay film depiction by being unfunny. In fact, he’s kind of gross, with lines like, “You know you want the soul pole — bam!”

LL fares best here, always poised and never losing his cool. This works against him later on when he spills the beans on the unsavory arrangement that brought them together. It would be nice to see some sensitivity behind his suave veneer. But, alas, neither the unsubtle direction nor the witless script allows him or Union to play anything better than a third-rate Taming of the Shrew. — Bo List

“Nothing is what it seems,” Al Pacino says early and often in The Recruit, Hollywood’s latest paint-by-numbers spy thriller. We can take it for granted, since in such spy thrillers nothing is ever what it seems. At least in the best ones, like No Way Out. Because the very nature of espionage and patriotic voyeurism implies deceit and surprise, we expect this and are delighted when we have been lured into thinking that we can believe our eyes. However, when our attention is so frequently drawn to the idea that we, as young, would-be CIA agents and audience members, can “trust no one,” we race ahead of the game and start figuring things out.

Colin Farrell is James Clayton, a rough-but-soft-around-the-edges computer whiz-kid whose fledgling software company has just developed a program that can invade interconnected computer systems. As he’s courting a potential buyer, he notices that he’s being watched by a mysterious, goateed stranger in the form of Walter Burke (Pacino) who makes an offer Clayton can’t refuse: Join the CIA. The pay is terrible, the work hard, and the rewards anonymous. But what fun! Intrigued, Clayton plays along partly to occupy his aimless (but formidable) intelligence and partly to find out the truth behind Burke’s assertion that Clayton’s beloved late father was an agent himself, killed on a mission and not in a random plane crash as was the official story.

But CIA-ing is hard and not without emotional expense. Clayton forges an instant chemistry with another trainee, Layla (The Sum of All Fears‘ Bridget Moynahan); they are pitted against each other by Burke to test their mettle and compatibility. Once it’s clear to all Burke, audience, each other that these two really do want to get it on, missions get assigned, and Clayton’s is to uncover a mole that has intercepted a potentially catastrophic computer program. Is Layla the mole? Is Clayton sleeping with the enemy? Which of these two intense young spies is the Mata Hari? Trust no one. Nothing is what it seems. And, according to this film, the CIA is as secure as a Circle K so, anything can happen.

The Recruit, I believe with some sincerity, is basically a star-making vehicle for the Who’s That Guy comer-of-the-moment, Colin Farrell. Having subtly upstaged the talents of Tom Cruise in Minority Report and Bruce Willis in Hart’s War, Farrell proves that he’s got the right stuff as a leading man, and The Recruit showcases all the right angles: cute and cuddly (as when he is missing his father), sexy (as when a security-camera-evading make-out waltz turns into a steamy throwdown), intense (anytime he tilts his head down and peers vulnerably with black laser eyes through decisive, angled eyebrows), tough (despite a few fights, his best jabs are at a punching bag). And he can hold his own against Pacino no easy feat. Pacino, incidentally, could make an industry of mentor films. Donnie Brasco and Scent of a Woman revealed an impressive ability to draw great work from the younger pups in those films Johnny Depp and Chris O’Donnell, respectively. He provides the same stewardship here, though suppressing his more bombastic scenery-chewing skills in favor of subtler underplay is a nice contrast to the intense and athletic demands of his ward, Farrell. It’s nice to see Pacino so at ease in a role, and in fact his work seems effortless, as in last year’s equally measured Insomnia. He is casual, tempered, always on the lookout but never losing his cool or showing his hand. This allows for a satisfying, even funny payoff at the end, where Burke’s mission is completed with unexpected results.

The Recruit succeeds in that it is appealing, with engaging stars, fine, swift pacing, and tense, moody cinematography. It will please most who see it, as most audiences have no problem checking their brains at the door. Discriminating viewers, however, will find that surprise is mightily outweighed by the humdrum of routine, and it’s a shame that the seasoned Pacino and vibrant Farrell have to generate all of the film’s sparks, with no particular help from the script. Bo List

Spanish director Pedro Almodovar probably gets American distribution and attracts U.S. audiences more consistently than any other foreign-language filmmaker. His films are colorful, flamboyant, erotic, and often screwball, smart and sexy yet somehow lighter than what many domestic filmgoers envision when contemplating the term “foreign film.” Almodovar’s latest, Talk to Her, combines two of his favorite topics: his devotion to and affection for women (see All About My Mother) and his penchant for casting an understanding eye on obsessive, borderline transgressive love (see Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down!).

The film opens inside a movie theater where two men, Benigno (Javier Camara) and Marco (Dario Grandinetti), sit next to one another and gaze at the screen showing two women walking in a stuporous state are they blind? are they sleepwalking? Two men scurry around pushing tables and chairs out of their way. Marco weeps at the show of devotion. Benigno, also moved, bears witness to Marco’s tears approvingly. The two men, at this point, have never met and are seated next to one another only by chance.

Afterward Benigno massages his object of devotion and desire and tells her about the man he saw at the movie. She does not respond and for good reason: She’s in a coma. Alicia (Leonor Watling) is a ballerina who was in a car accident four years ago and has been in a coma ever since. Benigno is a nurse at the private clinic where Alicia is kept and has been hired to tend to her exclusively.

Meanwhile, Marco, a travel writer, has fallen in love with Lydia (Rosario Flores), a famous matador whom he has been assigned to write about. Marco watches Lydia being gored in a bullfight, which puts her in a coma and in the same clinic as Alicia, in the adjacent room. Marco and Benigno become friends, Benigno instructing Marco in how to tend to Lydia, his most important piece of advice the film’s titular command.

The bulk of the film follows Marco and Benigno as they watch over their sleeping beauties. This is straight-faced melodrama without a shred of camp. It’s sort of a “women’s picture” that happens to star men, its association of “feminine” characteristics weeping, nursing, caretaking with its male leads one of its most compelling and daring qualities. The film is also interesting formally in that it communicates narrative information, and commentary, through the use of other films, as with the scene that Marco and Benigno watch at the beginning of the film which predicts their own roles. This strategy is also deployed in the film’s most triumphant moment, as Benigno relates to Alicia the details of a silent film he has seen, Shrinking Lover. Here Almodovar re-creates the (fictional) film, an ecstatically inventive and sexually explicit Freudian meditation on desire and the desire to please. Only later do we realize it communicates some concurrent and crucial off-screen action that Almodovar doesn’t show.

Neither as freewheelingly entertaining as Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down! or as richly accomplished as All About My Mother, Talk to Her is something of a curiosity a bit ponderous and self-indulgent, more than a little pretentious but worth it for that fanciful, bravura silent interlude.

Chris Herrington

The femme fatale of this wacky game-show/CIA hit-man movie is Julia Roberts, who, over coffee in the film’s third act, quotes Nietzsche: “The man who despises himself still respects himself as he who despises.” This kernel of wisdom comes too late for Chuck Barris, who has spent his whole life ambitiously despising himself. It’s difficult to know whether Barris, who has much to atone for (The Gong Show, The Gong Show Movie, killing 33 people), despises himself for his past sins or if he sins because of his self-loathing, but it is clear that he was unhappy with himself and took his life on a colorful, reckless path to deal with it.

Based on his 1981 “unauthorized autobiography,” Confessions of a Dangerous Mind traces the rise and falls of Barris (Sam Rockwell), an obscure man turned obscure celebrity. Beginning as a page at ABC Studios, Barris climbs the ranks until he is pitching his own shows to the network president. His brainchild: a game show where young single women select one of three young, unseen men for a possible date, based on their answers to “important” questions. Sound familiar? It’s The Dating Game.

Before success strikes Barris, fate does — in the form of CIA agent Jim Byrd (George Clooney) who offers Barris a deal he can’t refuse: to become a special agent for the CIA too — a hit man. Once The Dating Game takes off, he has the perfect cover. Babysitting googoo-eyed twentysomethings by day, whacking foreign operatives by night. Simple. Fun. Patriotic.

Complicating things (as it will do) is true love. Barris spends years trying to figure out a place in his heart for young, perky Penny (Drew Barrymore). Their open relationship weathers poorly over the years (funny how that happens) and his infidelity soon gets the best of them — forcing him to confront the fact that his life of self-hatred and aggressive self-involvement has prevented him from learning how to love (funny how that happens). Cancelled shows, failed relationships, and murder anxiety take their toll and Barris breaks down — nervously, that is. The result: endlessly standing naked in front of a TV, unkempt, dirty, out of it. Perhaps this is hell for bad TV producers — frozen in front of a TV with nothing good on for all eternity. That’s karma. But Barris snaps out of it and writes a book about his life, purging himself of his Technicolor transgressions. The rest: history.

George Clooney marks his directorial debut with this film, and it is a marvelously accomplished first go. The style of the film is a colorful, moody patchwork of vivid lighting, clever music, funny editing, and goofy casting — very much in keeping with the ’60s and ’70s game show/spy fantasia that was Barris’ life. Would that the Austin Powers franchise had the sense of genuine fun and shadowed homage. Would also that all first-time directors could so cannily navigate in and out of riotously funny absurdity through to real pathos — as in the scene where a paranoid, delusional Barris, in the middle of a Gong Show taping, begs a stagehand to get it over with and kill him. The world, for a moment, is frozen in fear. That this occurs on the set of The Gong Show is hilarious yet somehow so profound that we cannot laugh. Just as effective: when Barris turns the tables on the CIA mole that’s been sent to kill him. What could be/should be very funny is darkened by a reprise of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” and by the straight-playing real acting of its stars — well-timed and superbly composed by Clooney.

Rockwell provides an uncanny likeness to the look and spirit of King Gong. Snarky, twitchy, leering, he channels considerable authenticity from a mostly unlikable but compulsively watchable dark clown. We never quite sympathize with him, nor does the film try to get us under his skin. It’s unnecessary. As an audience, we view as one would rubbernecking past a circus-y train wreck — all bright colors and strange messes. Best to view from several feet back, but, unlike anything else associated with Chuck Barris, this is must-see TV. — Bo List

The historical drama Rabbit-Proof Fence is Australian director Phillip Noyce’s first project in his home country in more than a decade — a decade spent helming such forgettable Hollywood director-for-hire projects as Sliver, The Bone Collector, and The Saint. And while it’s a welcome departure from that sort of product, Rabbit-Proof Fence, in its own way, is just as anonymous as those films.

Noyce, who also directed the well-received The Quiet American, set to open in Memphis next month, puts very little personality into this tale of three Aboriginal girls who are abducted from their outback home and taken to a government training school. Yet the material is so compelling on its own terms that it seems sufficient for Noyce to get out of the way and merely present the facts in such a simple and direct way. And perhaps Noyce deserves credit for his restraint and for his refusal to exploit the material for easy sentimentality or pathos.

Set in Western Australia in 1931, the film is adapted from a book by Australian writer Doris Pilkington that recounts the true childhood story of her mother, Molly (Everlyn Sampi), then 14, her aunt, Daisy (Tianna Sansbury), then 8, and their cousin Gracie (Laura Monaghan), then 10, who were abducted from their mothers by government agents and transported 1,200 miles away to the state-run Moore River training school.

The film, dedicated to the “stolen generations” of Aborigine children, documents a controversial passage in Australian history in which official government policy (enforced into the 1970s, the film tells us) was to take “half-caste” children from their Aboriginal homes and train them (to be house servants and factory workers, basically) to live in the “white” world.

The government rationale for this policy is embodied by A.O. Neville (a historical figure, here played by Kenneth Branagh), the administrator of the relocation policy, who exudes a well-meaning yet sinister racial paternalism. An amateur eugenicist, Neville is shown giving a slide show about the “native problem” to a ladies-who-lunch crowd, demonstrating how, by taking half-caste children out of their Aboriginal communities, it is possible to “breed the color out” in just a couple of generations and insisting that, “in spite of himself, the native must be helped.”

The offspring of Aboriginal women and since-departed white construction workers who helped build the titular fence (a modest wood-and-wire contraption that spans the continent and separates white-owned farmland from the pestilence of the country’s rabbit population), Molly, Daisy, and Gracie are marked for removal. The abduction scene itself, in which a government officer in a jeep chases down the fleeing girls and their mothers outside the dusty, desert depot of Jigalong and forcibly removes the girls from their mothers’ clutches, is the film’s most harrowing and memorable scene.

The girls are taken to the Moore River school, where nuns teach them to be good, Christian, white girls who perform manual labor and scold them to “stop that jabbering” when they try to talk to each other in their native language. They run away, following the fence on a months-long trek home, pursued by a tracker from the school. And it is this journey, oddly calm and free of narrative tension, that forms the bulk of the film.

This slow-paced, naturalistic stretch, in which the untrained young actresses traverse the country’s outback, is as likely to remind filmgoers of some of the Iranian films that have played Memphis in the last few years as it is Nicholas Roeg’s superficially similar outback drama Walkabout.

Rabbit-Proof Fence is a subject of much debate in Australia, where this history is still very controversial and a sore point for a government that refuses to apologize for the policy. But American audiences need not be familiar with the political history of Australia to get the point. This is a film whose legitimate sense of outrage rhymes all too closely with our own history. — Chris Herrington

The premise of The Hours was a little intimidating to me before I saw the film: Three women are linked through three time periods to Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway. I was concerned that my blazing ignorance of Ms. Woolf’s work, and this one in particular, would hinder my enjoyment of the film and my ability to understand it. Not so. Yes, Mrs. Dalloway is at the heart of this film and at the root of the three stories presented, but everything you need to know is in the film. This is it, basically: Mrs. Dalloway decides one morning — the morning of a party she is throwing — that she will buy the flowers herself. Though she projects the appearance of togetherness and cheer, she is a lonely, empty woman inside. Oh, and someone dies at the end. That’s it.

In The Hours, we meet three women. First is Virginia herself (Nicole Kidman), and our introduction comes in the form of her 1941 suicide at age 59. A feminist Ophelia, she places a stone in her dress pocket, walks into a nearby stream, and lets it carry her away. Her brief, mortal stroll is voiced-over by her suicide letter, which explains to her husband that this act of desperation is to spare him the madness she feels is returning. The rest of her story takes place in 1923 as Mrs. Dalloway is working its way out of her.

Flashing forward to 1951, we see Laura Brown (Julianne Moore), depressed housewife of WWII veteran Dan (John C. Reilly) and mother of a young son. It’s Dan’s birthday, and Laura, in the middle of reading Mrs. Dalloway, decides that she will feel better today and bake a cake.

Cut to 2001, and publisher Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep) is preparing a reception for author and friend (and long-ago lover) Richard (Ed Harris). Richard has just won a prestigious poetry award but is too ill from AIDS and related dementia to want to go to the party.

Each of these women is depressed. Each awakes and acquires flowers. Each has something special going on that day — a party of sorts. Each of these women kisses another woman. They all face suicide, and they all face the choice between death and the imprisonment of life. They each make a choice. The variations on these choices, while sometimes disorienting, are exactingly faithful to each other. Sometimes they reveal themselves suddenly, consecutively. Other times they surface gradually, inconspicuously. Like Philip Glass’ subtle, driving score, they build gracefully from a whisper into a cry and by film’s end find themselves whispering again.

The Hours is a miracle of a movie. Literate, involving, active — it is that rare film about women and their unique experiences that neither excludes nor condemns the role of men in their lives. The men of The Hours, Woolf’s stoic and supportive husband (Stephen Dillane), Brown’s husband and son, poet Richard and his former lover Louis (Jeff Daniels) — the sexual politics of the film are sometimes scattered but fascinating — are innocent bystanders who, while making decisions to maintain or find their own happiness, neither victimize nor devalue these unhappy women. Their depressions are unto themselves, and their lives entrap them in ways that their respective others cannot assist or understand.

All of the performances in this film are excellent and uniquely extraordinary. Kidman, unrecognizable behind a prosthetic nose, does more refined work here than I have ever seen from her. Her Woolf is depressed but never pitiful and always strong whatever the hardship. Moore, playing a very different ’50s housewife from her Far From Heaven turn, gets it just right. In the midst of true depression, something as simple as baking a cake becomes an overwhelming, impossible task. Moore’s battle with the cake is heartbreakingly sorrowful when she fails, yet somehow sadder when she gets it right. Streep, meanwhile, shows us again why she is Streep — equally profound unraveling before the party and, in a devastating scene at the end, as she just listens to a voice from the past that puts things into perspective.

Sad, but never far from hope, The Hours is one of the finest films of recent memory.

Spike Lee’s 25th Hour begins with several nighttime cityscapes of Manhattan. As the film’s haunting, almost tribal musical score swells, we see ghostly blue lights emanating and converging from or to the city in a series of variously obscured configurations and angles. This serves as an eerie, sobering prologue of both hope and doom as the camera gradually secures itself to a recognizable perspective on its subject: the place where the World Trade Center used to be and the two memorial light beams that, for a time, reached heavenward as a tribute to the fallen of September 11th.

When we first see Monty Brogan (Fight Club‘s Edward Norton), he’s interrupting a drug run to save a wounded, abused dog found on the side of the road. Monty decides to take him to an emergency vet and keep him — despite the pooch’s frightened, toothy protests. This moment with the dog, juxtaposed with the opening skyline footage, prepares us for, essentially, two films in one about New York: a film in which the city is rebuilt and one in which an inhabitant confronts his own destruction.

Next scene: Daytime now and Monty quietly, decisively walks his new dog through some of his old neighborhood haunts. Something is changed about Monty; he is reflective now, deliberate. Monty’s been caught and is on his way to jail — tomorrow, that is. For now, he has one last day of freedom before beginning a seven-year prison term for drug dealing. And he’s going to spend it the way he wants. This includes a few necessary stops and activities. Among them: a last dinner with Dad (Brian Cox, the original Hannibal Lecter from Manhunter), a going-away party thrown by his gratefully unimplicated distributor, Nikolai, and attended by his two uneasy best friends, Wall Street shark Frank (Barry Pepper) and frumpy high school teacher Jacob (Philip Seymour Hoffman), and a few last moments with his beautiful girlfriend, Naturelle (Rosario Dawson).

I hope I’m not spoiling the plot by reporting that this is not a thriller. 25th Hour is instead a patient, thoughtful meditation on the ephemeral opportunity within limited time. What would you do with your last 25 hours of freedom before spending 61,320 of them in the hell of incarceration? The mind boggles at the infinity of things you can’t do in jail, and 25 hours would offer scarce time to even brush the highlights. What does Monty do? He quietly, tidily wraps things up, prepares his family and friends for his departure, and comes to terms with the person responsible for putting him away: himself. In fact, the most fascinating scene is a dialogue between Monty and a mirror in which he condemns just about every possible minority as complicit in his situation. The result is at once funny and unnerving.

25th Hour is strongest when it focuses on Monty and how he deals with his impending detention. We are spared the trial and most of the nasty legal business, which, frankly, would detract from the strength of the film’s meditative flow. But there’s an awful lot of flow. Running two hours and 14 minutes, 25 hours seems like an eternity. Lengthy subplots are introduced, developed, and discarded with no particular narrative value derived from them. One subplot follows Jacob’s crush on one of his students — Oscar winner Anna Paquin — who ends up at the same nightclub and compromises essential teacher/student boundaries. Also, Monty has doubts about whether it was Naturelle who turned him in. A tighter film would make this more important; here, it comes and goes and doesn’t seem to bother Monty too much until the truth is revealed.

It’s hard to appreciate the depth of the film’s insights amid all the grandstanding, apocalyptic WTC imagery, and parallels drawn between Monty’s deserved sentence and the triumphant New York spirit. They don’t gel. Also, it is difficult to tell whether drug-dealing is being romanticized or disparaged. The lifestyle is made very attractive, and getting caught seems to be the biggest mistake — not the dealing. No matter. Good performances all around keep things interesting, if not as compellingly as unsubtle director Lee would have it. n

To I have an original thought in my head?”

“My life is a cliché. I need to turn my life around.”

“I have no understanding of anything outside my own panic and self-loathing.”

These are the words of Charlie Kaufman in the throes of writer’s block, waddling around his apartment in wrinkled flannel and sweatpants, perspiration spreading across his brow, speaking feverishly into a tape recorder about his inability to make progress on his latest screenplay.

Kaufman, the celebrated oddball screenwriter behind Being John Malkovich, Human Nature, and the soon-to-be-released Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, is famous for having very original thoughts, of course, and with Adaptation, his latest collaboration with Malkovich director Spike Jonze, he accomplishes what may well be a film first: Adaptation is a movie in which the screenwriter’s claim of primary authorship is so complete that he becomes as played by Nicolas Cage the film’s protagonist.

And, unsurprisingly, Adaptation is a great film about the act of writing, with a keen sense of the elaborate system of goals and rewards that writers give themselves to push slowly materializing work along: “Okay, I’ll finish this paragraph then (have a snack) (walk the dog) (watch some television) so I can clear my head enough to write the rest.” It captures the onanistic nature (figurative and literal) of the solitary exercise and the often-exhausting struggle between the desire for the relief that completion brings and the desire to do good work. Yet Kaufman portrays his own writing process in an adaptation an interpretation of someone else’s work.

Some background is in order: Kaufman in “real” life (and this is just the sort of film that inspires those quotation marks) was hired to write an adaptation of a real book, The Orchid Thief, by a real writer, New Yorker scribe Susan Orlean. The book is, as Kaufman (the character) says to a studio executive in the film, “great sprawling New Yorker stuff.” Orlean’s title subject is John Laroche, a thirtysomething Floridian and self-taught horticultural expert arrested for leading three Seminoles, for whom he worked as a nursery manager, into the Fakahatchee swamp and extracting pillow cases full of endangered and protected orchids. In the course of detailing Laroche’s case, and his life, Orlean delves into the history and character of Florida, the subculture of orchid collectors, the fascinating (no, really) history of the plant itself, and the nature of collecting and obsession.

Kaufman, both on-screen and off, obviously thinks very highly of the book. In the film, he tells a studio executive that he wants to be true to the book, that he doesn’t want it to be a Hollywood thing with car chases and guns and drug deals, with people falling in love and learning life lessons. Later, when struggling with the adaptation, his agent suggests he “make up a crazy story,” since, after all, that’s what he’s known for. But Kaufman responds, with utter sincerity, “I didn’t want to do that. I have a responsibility to the material. I wanted to grow as a writer. To do something simple. To show people how beautiful flowers are.”

And to a degree, Kaufman’s script is a success. Many of the more memorable yet seemingly noncinematic passages in the book find their way onto the screen: a meditation on the delicately specific relationships between different types of orchids and the insects that pollinate them, for instance. But these scenes invariably bleed into Kaufman’s personal life, such as Orlean’s description of the different varieties of orchids morphing into a romantically unsuccessful Kaufman’s description of different varieties of women.

But Kaufman, in real life and in the film, finds himself incapable of writing (or, one wonders, unwilling to write) a straight adaptation of The Orchid Thief, whatever that might mean with a book about flowers, and so Adaptation interweaves three layers of action. There is the action that takes place within The Orchid Thief itself: the story of plant poacher Laroche (here played brilliantly by former Lone Star leading man Chris Cooper) and his Florida orchid schemes. Then the film pulls back for a second layer of action, envisioning an elegant Orlean (Meryl Streep in fine comic form) writing the book in New York. And finally, there is Kaufman struggling with his screenplay adaptation.

As the film develops, it’s this last layer that begins to take over, with Kaufman’s own insecurities and doubts blocking out his ability to get The Orchid Thief onto the screen. Adaptation is a film that unfurls as it is written, or, as the film itself intimates when Kaufman compares himself to an ouroboros, the mythical serpent that eats its own tail, it’s a film that begins to devour itself as it goes along. As Kaufman’s frustration mounts, Orlean’s “great sprawling New Yorker stuff” becomes “that sprawling New Yorker shit,” and it becomes clear that Adaptation is less a film about flowers than a film about failure, though perhaps the most deliriously entertaining film on that subject ever made.

Because the film’s characters stand in for real people, there seem to be different levels of communication embedded in the dialogue and one can see a discussion between the real Kaufman and Orlean over the screenplay’s relationship to The Orchid Thief happening in the film. At one point, late in the film, Cage’s Kaufman looks up from reading a particularly evocative passage in the book, gazes at Orlean’s photo on the jacket, and says, “Such sad, sweet insights. So true. I don’t know how to do this. I’m afraid to disappoint you. You’ve written a beautiful book.” It comes across as an actual apology to Orlean for a screenplay that some, including possibly Kaufman, might view as an act of extreme selfishness.

To further convey his frustration and anxiety over the writing process, Kaufman creates a fictional twin brother, the cheerfully crass Donald (also Cage), who is as happily oblivious as Charlie is helplessly self-conscious.

Enticed by the Hollywood lifestyle, the deadbeat Donald decides to become a screenwriter too, just like his successful brother. So, while Charlie stares at blank pages and spews self-loathing into his tape recorder, Donald enrolls in screenwriting seminars given by real-life formula guru Robert McKee (a blustery Brian Cox).

As Charlie’s inability to adapt The Orchid Thief worsens, as the pressure from the studio and his agent builds, and as Donald’s unlikely career takes off, a desperate Charlie takes his agent’s advice and solicits Donald’s help on the script, even attending one of McKee’s lectures. Charlie then humiliates himself by asking the action-oriented McKee a question about how to write a script where the characters “struggle and are frustrated and nothing is resolved, like in the real world.”

With McKee assuring Charlie that if you “wow them in the end, then you’ve got a hit,” Charlie gives up and turns the screenplay over to Donald, who earns his (real-life) co-writing credit with a denouement that takes a gleeful dive into the exact same Hollywood clichés Charlie had earlier denounced. What to make of this ever so ambiguous plunge into the abyss? Is it a final admission of failure and defeat? A satiric swipe at Hollywood convention? An insistence that personal contentment trumps artistic integrity? All of the above? Ultimately, perhaps Adaptation is a film whose conclusion has to be written by the audience. Chris Herrington

Narc, Joe Carnahan’s new film, begins with a heart-stopping chase sequence. Detective Nick Tellis (Jason Patric) is in hot pursuit of a crazed junkie through a project-y neighborhood in dirty Detroit. The scene is shot with a hand-held camera. We hear determined footsteps and Patric’s frantic, heavy breathing. Our own breath deepens. Our heartbeats speed up.

Tellis meets up with the “perp” in a playground. He has to make a split-second decision. Tellis is screaming, in equal parts terror, failure, and exhaustion. Blackout. This is Narc.

After the incident at the playground, Tellis sits out to re-prioritize and hold his life together. But months later an undercover cop has been killed on the job, and nobody seems to be able to produce any evidence. Tellis, all too successful at worming his way into the underbelly of the Detroit drug scene, is reluctantly returned to active duty to help the murdered cop’s partner solve the case.

Enter the partner, Lt. Henry Oak (Ray Liotta, with much more complicated intensity than his usual, glaring rage). Hard-edged and not hung up on, say, rules or anything like that, Oak definitely puts the “bad” in the expression “good cop, bad cop.”

So, Oak and the kinder, gentler Tellis are a tense but effective team that becomes tested as details of the case hit closer to home: Tellis neglects his family as he becomes obsessed with solving the murder, and Oak’s closeness to the case obscures his judgment and temper both to near-disaster by the film’s dizzying end, which achieves the same frenetic desperation as the film’s arresting opening.

This is Carnahan’s second film. His first, Blood, Guts, Bullets and Octane, was a well-regarded, gritty action-comedy that Carnahan was miraculously able to compose for a mere $7,500. His rising star is easily explained by the slick and stylish look and feel of Narc shot mostly in weird, cold, clinical, washed-out bluish colors that not only make being a police officer feel like extra-dirty work, they make Detroit look downright unlivable. Or extra-unlivable. Either way, audiences will leave Narc with a little more appreciation for good, drug-free neighborhoods and a little less faith in the police force, whose enforcement of the law can, when only slightly corrupted, seduce the most honorable toward their own rights and wrongs. Bo List

Chicago has been kicking around Hollywood for 60 years. Two previous film versions exist, and the story finally was

musicalized in a 1975 Broadway show directed by Bob Fosse and composed by Kander and Ebb, the songwriting team behind

Cabaret. Efforts to film the musical

Chicago have waxed and waned for years, with innumerable stars attached at various times: Rosie

O’Donnell, Goldie Hawn, Madonna, John Travolta, Kevin Spacey. Based on the 1942 play

Roxie Hart, Chicago captures a not-so-unique

period in history when Americans were obsessed with scandal and instant celebrity (see

The Anna Nicole Show, American Idol).

Keeping up with famous murderers was a national pastime.

Particularly intriguing among 1920s homicidal fascinations were the husband-killers.

Chicago introduces us to several of them — most prominently, Roxie herself (Renee Zellweger) who, in the ’20s, gunned down her lover when his promises of

helping her become a star turned out to be lies told to get her in the sack. A mousy beauty, Roxie is immediately out of place in

prison among harsher, angrier women. But it’s not long before she figures out the system and learns to stay afloat as the media

favorite. You see, there’s an attorney in Chicago who’s never lost a case: Billy Flynn (Richard Gere), and as long as he can make

headlines, he’s your best friend. When a new flavor-of-the-month comes along, so goes Billy’s attention. Roxie goes to substantial lengths

to make sure she’s Billy’s #1 star. Meanwhile, last

month’s flavor is Velma Kelly (Catherine Zeta-Jones), whose husband made

the fatal mistake of playing with the wrong half of Velma’s sister act. (So too went the sister.) Velma’s not used to being outshone

and does whatever she can to top Roxie’s celebrity. Velma’s glam-vamp posturings are no match for Roxie’s newly created Girl

Next Door routine. So, with a little help from the prison matron, Mama (Queen Latifah!), Velma concocts a plan to undo Roxie’s

defense and put herself back on top.

Richard Gere’s Billy Flynn, explaining what the jury and media and public really want, sings “Give ’em that razzle

dazzle.” Director Rob Marshall follows through on Billy’s advice and razzles and dazzles the hell out of this movie. Marshall, known

primarily as a choreographer and as the director of the TV

Annie a few years ago, delivers a powerful punch in the

sequins-and-feathers fabulousness department. The singing and dancing are great, and the quick and choppy editing of each sequence is

razor-sharp. (Some may hate this, and I suspect that it masks the more skilled hoofers standing in for the more complicated dance moves —

but pish! The results are dynamic and rousing.) The film’s only drawback is that, in dividing into book scenes and fantasy

musical numbers, the talky time just can’t sustain the energy and attention of the flashy songs and dance. Ah well — the musical

numbers are never far off.

Zeta-Jones, in particular, is fantastic. Her

opening number, “All That Jazz,” sets a high bar of pace and style for the rest

of the film, and her “Act of Desperation” (a plea for Roxie’s cooperation that displays her old act’s moves, sans sister) shows

that Zeta-Jones, a professional dancer before turning actress-cum-Mrs. Michael Douglas, truly has the right stuff.

Zellweger, more actor than dancer, is particularly good at suspending disbelief in high-concept dramadies

(Nurse Betty leaps to mind). She balances Roxie’s vulnerability and manipulation with great skill (in fact, she holds the movie together) and pulls off the

jazzier demands of the role just fine, albeit in Zeta-Jones’ formidable shadow but that’s okay — her star power is based on her scandal, not

her soprano. Additionally, there are extremely sound supporting performances from Gere (who has a strong, if not pretty,

musical-theater voice), Latifah (who steals the show with her bawdy “What Mama Wants”), and John C. Reilly as Roxie’s doltish husband.

Anyone expecting the depth of

Cabaret will be disappointed in

Chicago‘s relatively thin story and its broadly drawn

characters. However, even as Chicago mocks those in the spotlight who have arrived there by style over substance, it delivers that

style 100 percent.

Stop me if you have heard this plot before: Poor working-class girl dreams of a better life for herself, magically (and a touch deceptively) becomes beautiful and attractive to a rich mover-and-shaker, and then must flee lest she be found out as the real (poor) woman she is — but not without proving herself first. The story is that of Cinderella, remade countless times into countless romantic comedies that, in the last two decades, have included Working Girl and Pretty Woman.

Someday, moviegoers will grow weary of this formula. Shouldn’t romance and achievement be more evenly distributed among the boys and girls of our impressionable youth, not to mention their adult counterparts? I long for the day when movie formulas include impoverished, scrappy young men (more sincere than Jerry Lewis’ 1960 Cinderfella?) going through ridiculous, labyrinthine trials to secure the attentions of successful, wealthy, powerful, eligible women. “Wow,” he would say, “If only I could escape the dirt and grime of my crowded urban tenement and unpromising, dead-end job in the mailroom and get that pretty, corporate lady to take notice of me. Maybe I should disguise myself as a Wall Street executive and ” And, to the tune from Snow White: “Someday my princess will come “

Until that day, we are stuck with mindless retreads like the latest incarnation — Maid in Manhattan. Structurally, Maid is a bit more faithful to the fairy tale and thankfully lacks Melanie Griffith as the heroine and features housekeeping as the mercifully less-syphilitic profession than Ms. Julia Roberts’ vocation in Pretty Woman. Jennifer Lopez takes over daydreaming duty as Marisa Ventura, maid in a hoity-toity Manhattan hotel. She dreams of more than changing sheets and replacing toiletries, however. She wants to be a manager. Meanwhile, hotel guest Christopher Marshall (Ralph Fiennes) is a New York assemblyman on the verge of announcing a senatorial campaign. Handsome and high-profile, he is the Prince Charming of our tale, and an unlikely mix-up has him meeting Marisa in the hotel’s “Park Suite” while she’s trying on another guest’s fancy outfit. He thinks she is another guest — not the maid, certainly — and the rest of the film has Marisa dodging her bosses and trying not to get caught being courted by someone whose sheets she should be changing (not mussing!). Meanwhile, Marshall has a campaign to run, and paparazzi everywhere are dying to know who this Mystery Lady is. Natasha Richardson is thrown in as Caroline, the guest who really is staying in the “Park Suite” and who accidentally interprets Marshall’s romantic overtures as intended for her.

Maid in Manhattan, alas, has none of the ambitions of Working Girl (ironically, they share a screenwriter in Kevin Wade), where heroine Tess dreamed way outside the box and believably risked it all. Nor is there the charm of Pretty Woman. But wait. Admire the true-to-design Pretty Woman parallels: gruff, lovable, and bald hotel employee who sees through her ruse and helps her along (then Hector Elizondo, here Bob Hoskins); gruff, unlovable, and bald Prince Charming stooge (then Jason Alexander, here Stanley Tucci); and tough-talking Italian confidante who inspires her to dream (then Laura San Giacomo, here Marissa Matrone). There is even a musical dressing-up montage (of course). It’s just not the same.

Fans of romantic “comedies” will like this okay. Jennifer Lopez is pretty and spunky and all of the things Meg Ryan used to be and less annoyingly so than Meg. She’s very cute with the goofy-grinned Fiennes, whose initially wavering American accent is shielded by fellow Brits Richardson and Hoskins, who effectively throw us off the scent. Hoskins, incidentally, turns in the film’s best performance as the hotel’s stately butler, while Richardson is deliriously over-the-top as the snobby Caroline. But, unfortunately for all of this talented cast, there’s just no writing to support them. No jokes for which to apply comic timing. No drama (just some whining) for which we can really care about them. And, am I crazy or does the couple’s last embrace occur in front of a mural of New York City being attacked on September 11th? What’s that about?

Stay home tonight instead. Rent a better movie. Cuddle. Tell jokes. Save your money.

Fans of the Star Trek industry — yes, it is an industry: with five television series, 10 films, and zillions in merchandise — will be familiar with the old saw “Even-numbered Star Trek movies are better than odd-numbered ones.” And this is true. Now, it’s time for number 10. Ladies and gentlemen (drum roll, please), we have a tie!

Some background on me and where I come from: There are two kinds of Star Trek fans. The first, more harmless variety is called a “Trekkie.” Trekkies will have some videos on their shelf and a fan magazine or two tucked away and will catch as many episodes of whatever series is currently in production as is humanly and socially responsible and possible. The only time you may see a Trekkie in a Starfleet uniform will be at Halloween. Then, there are Trekkers — die-hard fans. They’re hard-core. They go to conventions. They wear the uniforms and Star Trek ties to non-Star Trek occasions. They can order a pizza or hail a cab in pitch-perfect Klingon with a straight face. I am more of a Trekkie. I never went to a convention, though I did meet Mr. Sulu at a video-store opening and got an autographed picture. (It’s framed, along with my cocktail napkin from the real Cheers). I provide my context here, because it is as a Trekkie that I am here to report that the franchise is just about out of steam. I hate that! I love Star Trek (though I lost touch after The Next Generation left the air, I confess). As a young, nerdy teenager, it was Star Trek that first introduced me to concepts of justice and diplomacy and social responsibility and racism and everything I didn’t know existed outside of my then-myopic, uneducated universe. It opened doors. Doors aren’t opening anymore. But they are creaking a bit.

The plot, kept brief to showcase the plagiarism of the essence of The Wrath of Khan: The captain is getting older and pondering mortality and the future. After a festive occasion, the Enterprise is called to confront a menacing foe from the captain’s past — who knows the captain almost as well as he knows himself. After a familiar face from the crew is turned against the ship, there is a showdown in which Enterprise and assailant are both immobilized and only the ultimate sacrifice will save the ship — and possibly Earth — from a Doomsday device.

If you followed The Next Generation series, you will know that plots were borrowed heavily from the 1967-1969 original. This was fine. Technology had sped so fast in the interim 20 years that minor tweaking was all that was needed to spruce up old story lines. There were new issues, new ethics. Not so anymore. Nemesis doesn’t seem very interested in exploring complicated issues. There is no inspiring liberal agenda like glasnost or “Save the Whales” or scientific responsibility. Nor is there the action that supports fandom of truly cool science fiction like The Matrix or Aliens franchises. The special effects are fine, but nothing new at all, and when the ship is attacked, the camera still shakes and everyone falls down just like they did 30-odd years ago. Also, in the 80 years since the setting of the original series, the Federation still hasn’t figured out how a cloaking device works. And I report no new developments in phaser or photon torpedo technology. I demand progress!

In Nemesis, the old foe is actually a younger version of Captain Picard: a clone, created by the Romulans as a weapon to destroy the Federation. He is played by newcomer Tom Hardy and, while a fine, acid-tongued villain, Hardy is almost too damn cute for the part. Doe-eyed and pouty-lipped, he’s an all-too-adorable nemesis against the steely gaze of Patrick Stewart’s Picard. And Picard’s mortality is, well, old news. William Shatner’s 1982 mortality was more interesting because Captain Kirk was an athletic hothead learning how to be wise. While a better actor, Stewart’s Picard was always introspective. The variations are not interesting enough to revisit — again.

Welcome to Libria: your friendly, utopian megalopolis. The flag is a red background with a white circle at the center and a German cross in the middle. (Sound familiar? If that cross were just bent a bit it might look just like a swastika.) The spiritual leader is an omnipresent television face called the Father (you know, like Der Fuhrer? Hitler?). Emotion is outlawed and enforced by the daily self-administration of the stabilizer Prozium. (Sound familiar? Can you think of another contemporary drug that begins with “proz”? Get it?) You see, after World War III, surviving governments decided that emotion, not money, was the root of all evil and that the only way to preserve the human race is to be rid of all feelings — and to be rid of all feelers.

Metaphors and parallels run a bit rampant. This is not your father’s 1984. Equilibrium stakes an immediate claim as a cross between The Matrix (with its fancy, scattered camerawork, blending of martial arts and savage gunplay, and dark, sleek, severe wardrobe) and Gattaca (with some of its retro interior design and aspirations toward “importance” in its futuristic cautioning). Its antihero, played by sometimes coolish actor Christian Bale, is John Preston — a high-ranking “clerick” (read: supercop) whose job it is to seek out renegade “sense-offenders.”

After an impressive killing spree, Preston and company come across a hidden stash, including a book of poetry by Yeats and a certain da Vinci portrait of a lady with a mysterious smile. Books and artwork are forbidden since art, music, and literature can inspire emotional responses. A scanner is aimed at the painting, which verifies its authenticity, and then Preston orders it burned immediately. This verification is unnecessary, since, real or not, it must be destroyed as contraband. This occurs only because everyone in the audience knows this painting and Preston’s showdown with Mona Lisa is the lowest-common-denominator way of showing just how dedicated his cause is toward the eradication of feelings. So dedicated is he that when he discovers that his wavering partner has lifted the Yeats book, not for evidence but for light reading, he has no problem with blowing him away too.

But not everything is utopian in Utopia. Preston misses one of his daily Prozium doses and starts — well, you know. Suddenly he starts noticing things, smelling the roses, as it were. He is moved by a sunrise, by the way a handrail feels on his fingers as he ascends a staircase, and, in one of the film’s best scenes, by the sound of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony played over a phonograph he has discovered in another raid. He stands, overwhelmed, by sights of what is essentially kitsch — memorabilia, an Eiffel Tower snowglobe paperweight, girlie calendars, even a ceramic-rooster butter plate — as Beethoven swells in a crescendo. Preston cries. There is a profound banality to this, since this assortment of knickknacks is stuff we non-Librians take for granted. In Libria, there are freedom fighters willing to die for their preservation. It’s really kind of beautiful but is immediately followed by a maudlin execution of puppies, and so the beauty fades quickly.

Preston’s new partner, opportunist Clerick Brandt (Taye Diggs), suspects but says nothing until Preston’s attempt to understand his new feelings leads him to the leader of the Resistance — possibly ending all hope of freeing the world from emotional dictatorship and depersonalizing uniformity. Thus begins the obligatory Race Against Time.

There is a great deal of naive charm to Equilibrium, though its message is somewhat muddy in our current climate. War is actually okay? It’s cool to kill people, so long as you have feeling behind it? There is a celebration of individuality suggested, but Preston’s transformation is only into a more invested killing machine. And why does Taye Diggs smile all the time if nobody’s supposed to be feeling anything? It’s odd. But Equilibrium at least is trying to say something. Not as cool as The Matrix or as smart as the actually relevant Gattaca, Equilibrium reduces its preposterous (or are they? boo-hahaha!) issues to black-and-white, yes, but at least does so with some intelligence and style.

It took me about 40 minutes to realize that, mercifully, Disney’s Treasure Planet is not a musical. I was so caught up in the characters and style of this adaptation (a few months ago, when I first saw the trailer, I rolled my eyes: “Treasure PLANET?” I muttered to myself. “Disney must be scraping the bottom of the story barrel”) that it took me that long to figure out that the success-mold of the studio’s better animated films was broken slightly. Near the 40-minute mark, there is a coming-of-age montage set to Goo Goo Doll Johnny Rzeznik’s original “I’m Still Here” that is both clever and revealing, and it took me a moment to notice that the protagonist, Jim Hawkins, was not singing it. This was especially impressive because this attractive film succeeds at creating characters that are not only lovable but respectable and without the usual sentimental trappings of cartoon-y fare.

Very similar to the Robert Louis Stevenson original Treasure Island (‘cept for the aliens and such, that is), this Planet has a young Jim Hawkins longing for adventure not on the open sea but in the heart of space. The year is I dunno some futuristic time where spaceships are great wooden galleons with a mix of rocket boosters and solar sails more Jules Verne than Jetsons. Jim, speaking of breaking molds, is different from the other boys. He’s a bit of a loner and a rebel and likes nothing more than racing his jet-craft through dangerous, off-limits industrial landscapes until the police-bots cart him home with a stern warning to his patient mother that next time it’s juve-y hall for him. Ma Hawkins runs the Benbow Inn, full of all sorts of lovable alien types, including the doddering, dog-like scientist Dr. Delbert Doppler. When Jim is given a secret map to Treasure Planet, Doppler concludes rather necessarily that what Jim really needs is a life-threatening adventure in space to build his character, and when thieving rogues burn down the inn searching for the map, there is no choice: Jim must find Treasure Planet!

The most enduring appeal of Treasure Island is not in the swashbuckling escapades of the fortune-seeking Jim but in the complicated relationship between him and Long John Silver, here a cyborg with a mechanical robot arm and leg. As a child, I recall Silver as my first exposure to a literary character who had elements of both good and bad in him. There is a fatherly affection with which Silver regards young Jim, even as he competes for the map and later the gold, once Treasure Planet is within reach.

Treasure Planet is a truly enjoyable film succeeding as a faithful but liberating adaptation and as a visual marvel. The detailed and sprawling starscapes are particularly beautiful, and the anachronistic 19th-century-meets-Futurama stable of ships, robots, and locales are exactingly conceived within the same technological palette. A 2001: A Space Odyssey moment occurs when Jim looks up to a sliver of a moon and a close-up reveals that it is not a moon at all but an elaborate, bustling crescent-shaped space station. This is neat-o. There are, however, some instances where the mostly hand-drawn characters look kind of flat against the dazzling, more 3-D backgrounds, but this works more often than not with the rest of the film’s past-meets-future juxtaposition, which looks charmingly like the backgrounds from Toy Story populated with characters from the enjoyable but shoddy Disney film Robin Hood. But Treasure Planet‘s real accomplishment is in having not one but two cutesy sidekicks a shape-shifting Mr. Bubble reject called Morph and the daffily old C3PO-ish B.E.N and they don’t ruin the film à la Jar Jar Binks in the newest Star Wars. Neither are annoying or take away from the film, even though B.E.N. is voiced by Martin Short a time-bomb of cloyingness used in just the right amounts here.

My transparent stab at getting a quote into the corporate marketing of the film: “Fanciful but intelligent, Treasure Planet strikes it rich with parents and kids alike.” It’s true.

When Kevin Kline, as Western Civilization professor William Hundert, mutters in a voice-over late in The Emperor’s Club‘s second half, “This is a story with no surprises,” all I could think was “Hell, if I had known that in the beginning, I might not have stayed!”

Deep breath. Okay. Kline plays Hundert, a respected and upright instructor at the prestigious St. Benedict’s boys’ prep school, who teaches about ancient Greek and Roman civilizations. We know that beneath his square exterior he is cool because he has his students wear togas when studying Julius Caesar. Enter Sedgewick Bell (Emile Hirsch), son of a good ol’ boy West Virginia senator. Bell is a handful undisciplined, uninterested, and sloppy who quickly wins over the attention of his classmates, including the standard ragtag gaggle of school-film stereotypes: brain Deepak (also doubling as the foreign one), nerd Martin, and goof Louis. They even row a boat to the girls’ school on the other side of the lake! Hundert manages to keep the boys in check and has faith in Bell’s potential and so searches for the right way to reach this spoiled boy, accustomed to getting what he wants and not having to work for anything. Hanging over the heads of the students is the upcoming Mr. Julius Caesar contest a prestigious Greco-Roman trivia competition whose laurels all students covet. One of the film’s only good scenes features Hundert alone in his office grading papers. Bell, by now, has begun to apply himself and is ranked fourth in the class. Only the top three will go on to the contest. But Hundert knows that this might be just the push Bell needs to make something of himself. Hundert stares at Bell’s essay, graded A-. Patiently rendered, this scene shows all we need to see of Hundert’s swaying priority as he reluctantly reaches over with his red pen and makes the grade an A+. Bell is now in the top three, pushing out Martin, whose father won the title as a boy and expects the same of his son.

The big day arrives, and (watch out major “suspenseful” plot points revealed here) Hundert notices that during the contest Bell is cheating. Caught in a pickle, Hundert finds a discreet way of forcing Bell to lose to Deepak. When Hundert asks why Bell needed to cheat when he could have won on merit, Bell answers, “Why not?” The rest of Bell’s stay at St. Benedict’s is like his beginning: disappointing.

Flash-forward 25 years. Bell is now a politically minded CEO and Hundert a recent retiree. Bell wants to make a contribution to the school on the condition that Hundert will moderate a rematch of the Caesar contest. Has he changed his ways? Have some of Hundert’s lessons in character and government sunk in? Stay tuned to find out. Or don’t.

William Hundert is a cheap distillation of cinema’s best inspirational teachers. Kline is in typically fine form here, but he is utterly wasted on obvious, inferior material and deprived of an Oscar Moment that might explain to his students (or us) why it’s important to know the classics or how they enrich our lives. Similar, better films afford their star this courtesy. Instead, this script is a parade of mind-numbing, formulaic clichés that could easily be constructed by a recipe like this: Mix 1 cup Mr. Holland’s Opus with 2 cups Dead Poets Society with two tablespoons To Sir, With Love. Sprinkle generously with Goodbye, Mr. Chips and overbake for a merciless 109 minutes. Smother with cheese and let stand. Serve cold.

This is a recipe that many will enjoy. The Emperor’s Club is extremely easy to swallow, as it is completely without complication or ambiguity. Right is obviously very right and wrong is wrong. Studying + applying yourself = good. Shirking responsibility + looking at nudie magazines = bad. Written by the scribe most famous for penning star vehicles for Corey Haim, Macaulay Culkin, and Pauly Shore (License To Drive, Richie Rich, and Jury Duty, respectively), these are the issues at work in this clumsy and pandering film.