A standard good girl-meets-bad girl formula wrapped around a gloss on high school shooting (our own perverse millennial take on the fin-de-siecles phenomenon), Home Room presents its vision of post-traumatic stress disorder with such ham-handedness that it threatens to spawn the same in the viewer. Essentially an Afterschool Special complete with pre-packaged messages about the evil of cigarettes, the secret pain of goth chicks, the importance of not taking the Lord's name in vain, and the crass stupidity of well-meaning cops and school administrators, the picture is not only awful but also possessed of the potential for being truly offensive to the victims of the atrocities off which it pings. When a cigarette passing from one chubby pubescent hand to another (Erika Christensen: early-'50s good girl; Busy Philipps: late-'80s bad girl) is laced with the kind of gravitas reserved for the exchange of the Olympic torch to heroically paralyzed democrats, you know you're in for a long haul. Home Room is the sort of liberal group hug every bit as ignorant as the actual fundamentalist Christian response that erupts after a killing spree--all of it just proving that thirteen years later, Heathers remains the final word on these matters. * (out of four)

capsule index (top)

One of my earliest memories is watching Haven Moses catch a touchdown pass from Craig Morton in the 1977 AFC Championship games against the hated Oakland Raiders; since that time, I've only missed a total of three Broncos games (preseason included). If there was ever a viewer to which a documentary was tailor-made, then, it is Dick Olson's Denver Center Media-produced Mile High: A Tale of Two Stadiums, a soft-sell documentary commissioned to ease the transition to a new football stadium in the Mile High City, my hometown. Comprised of over 100 interviewees and clips from key moments and games in the history of Denver sports at the 19^th and Clay Street site, which has housed a stadium of some sort from 1948 on, it's almost useless for me to try to analyze the film on its own merits. It's slickly edited and indicated by a single-mindedness that's refreshing, but its appeal is so limited that I doubt it will ever be screened, much less find an audience, outside of its appearance at the 25^th Denver International Film Festival. As a dyed-in-the-wool Broncos fan and lifelong resident of Colorado, however, I was shocked to learn that the first NFL overtime game was played in Denver and that The Jimi Hendrix Experience played its last gig at old Mile High. Though the picture does provide a catalyst for self-reflection wherein it's possible to wonder at the pervasive power of blood sports in uniting otherwise sprawling city-states, the content is specific to hardcore historians or those who bleed orange and blue. All others need not apply. **1/2 (out of four)

capsule index (top)

An often-harrowing collection of amateur video taken on the days in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, what 7 Days in September accomplishes is what so many retrospectives since that day have failed to: an evocation of the immediacy of atrocity and outrage, fear and fury of a day that is already fading into the repository of memory and irony. Footage, seldom-seen in a dangerously squeamish United States, of a person jumping from a building shares time with the immediate reactions of people hiding from the smoke and debris. The picture is very possibly the first documentary to attempt, however successfully, to discard sentimentality in favour of the kind of reportage and scrutiny that has proven too painful for many to this point. The most thought-provoking thing about the piece, though, is the suspicion that no American-made film tackling the events of that day will be free of bracing, consoling self-platitude--that instinct to seek out reassurances in the midst of calamity that indicates much of the dialogue post any apocalypse. Had 7 Days in September ultimately resisted the urge to join in the clamour to congratulate New Yorkers on their strength and resilience (inarguable, but banal as far as observations go), the picture would be one of an admirable power and restraint--as it is, it's at once the best document we have to date of the visceral realities of the events of 9/11 and another strong argument for the importance and pervasiveness of digital video in a post-information age. ***1/2 (out of four)

capsule index (top)

Scottish director Lynne Ramsay's remarkable follow-up to her remarkable debut Ratcatcher, Morvern Callar edges into the ground ploughed by Claire Denis, fashioning here a blend of the feminine travelogue of Chocolat (the 1988 version), the haunted monumentalism of Beau Travail, and the carnal suffering of Trouble Every Day, all merged by Alwin Küchler's brilliantly malleable cinematography. Anchoring Morvern Callar is a breathtaking and courageous performance from Samantha Morton (who in addition to never appearing to have played the same role twice, also has yet to make a major misstep); the picture is also indicated by the kind of absolute confidence that allows for extended periods of silence and the Buñuel-ian image of an ant crawling over a young girl's hand in a Spanish pasture. Morton is Morvern, a woman who discovers her boyfriend dead by his own hand lying in an expanding welter of blood lit by the blinking lights of a sick-looking Christmas tree. On the computer is his brief suicide note and the novel he's just completed--and in the bank account just enough money to send Morvern and her best friend Lanna (Kathleen McDermott) to Spain. After, of course, Morvern disposes of the corpse. Drenched with sadness and entropy, Morvern Callar is unhinged and fanged--raw and rough-hewn and another in Ramsay's slowly growing portfolio of youth smothered by their incapacity for enlightenment. **** (out of four)

capsule index (top)

One of the truest children of The Blair Witch Project, Neil Burger's Interview with the Assassin is a mockumentary shot on digital video that mixes an urban mythology and our current fascination (and ease) with digital imaging technologies. Voyeurism is touched upon, as are its attached issues of privacy and the loss thereof in our information dystopia; that the picture manages to juggle its points-of-view while remaining faithful to its one-camera pony is testament to the cleverness of Burger's debut screenplay and direction. (Its faithfulness in this arena also separates it from the inferior The Last Broadcast.) Interview with the Assassin, rather than dealing with an imaginary beastie, deals with the phantom second-gunman on the grassy knoll--played by veteran character actor Raymond J. Barry--as he's interviewed by a faux documentarian played by Dylan Haggerty. Interview with the Assassin, then, also tackles the fear of suburban monsters, rednecks, and middle-class mid-life malaise that leads spoonfed milquetoasts to believe that they, too, can be filmmakers. At its heart--again like Blair Witch Project--a cautionary tale about the accumulation of knowledge and the foolhardiness and prejudices of a certain class, Interview with the Assassin impresses most with a super-creepy home-invasion sequence and Berry's fabulous, seething performance. *** (out of four)

capsule index (top)

The problem with Austin Chick's hyphenate debut XX/XY is that despite an intervening decade in the storyline, the characters enjoy no appreciable evolution. It's possible the film is meant to be about a trio of arrested knee-jerk reactionaries; it's also possible that the film is about how these people are really bad for each other. But the aggregate effect is that XX/XY is devoid of much real tension and actual character development. Sam (Maya Stange) and Thea (Kathleen Robertson) are roommates who meet Coles (Mark Ruffalo) one drunken college night and experiment with a three-way before breaking off into a pair (Sam and Coles) and a dangling third (Maya). Bad carnal decisions and understandable immaturity lead to a rift that lasts ten years, after which Sam and Coles have a chance encounter and start the same cycle all over again only with more at stake and the immaturity appreciably less understandable. Less a plot curve than a plot flatline, XX/XY is peppered with smart moments and wonderful performances but also an over-reliance on the gravid moment and a general degree of aimlessness that grates. The soundtrack is well utilized, the sets and the cinematography professional--the only thing really missing from Chick's promising debut is a destination or, failing that, an ambiguity that gives fruitful pause. ** (out of four)

capsule index (top)

Ken Loach returns to his blue-collar roots with the incendiary Sweet Sixteen, a fabulous evocation of place and the plight of the lower class in the mean streets of Glasgow. Supremely well acted and marked by Loach's gift for an effortless transparency in setting and the performances he coaxes, the picture follows young Liam (Martin Compston) on the eve of his sixteenth birthday as he shuck-and-jives his way towards a better life for him and his soon-to-be-ex convict mother, Jean (Michelle Coulter). At first hustling stolen cigarettes with his best friend Pinball (William Ruane), Liam decides to steal heroin from his mom's no-good boyfriend Stan (Gary McCormack) to sell on the streets, putting him in the hot seat with the local cosa nostra. With a home invasion reminiscent of the one in John Boorman's The General (the differences between the two illustrate an interesting division between the directors' styles and philosophies: the one grimy, the other lyrical), Sweet Sixteen is ever in danger of succumbing to the sickly irony of its title, but Loach invests a level of exhilaration into his wayward youths that honours the halcyon highs of childhood even in the midst of privation and decay. With frequent screenplay collaborator Paul Laverty and a cast of newcomers, Loach's Sweet Sixteen would be perfect but for a final few minutes that succumb to the kind of tidiness the rest of the film ably avoids. ***1/2 (out of four)

capsule index (top)

Roger (Campbell Scott) is a fast-talking lothario with the usual laundry list of the insecurities, sexual or otherwise, that plague the modern man. But this far meaner and smarter version of The Tao of Steve (and what slight praise that is) takes a turn to the intriguing when Roger's sixteen-year-old nephew Nick (Jesse Eisenberg) appears for a few lessons on the art of pitching woo. In three brilliantly scripted and wondrously paced sequences, Kidd points his Casanova Virgil and virginal Dante into the concentric circles of casual sex hell: the Happy Hour pick-up, the drunken party encounter, the brothel-bound hooker. A nigh brilliant stream-of-male-consciousness black comedy filmed with genuine flair and theory by first-time hyphenate Dylan Kidd, Roger Dodger is a film with Labute-ian teeth minus the accompanying misanthropy. It hits its marks with a feline sure-footedness, eliciting career performances from Scott, Jennifer Beals, Elizabeth Berkley, and young Eisenberg who, mark my words, will be a star. As satisfying and accomplished a debut since Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko, Kidd represents another in a new wave of Hollywood film brats with the chops and love to rejuvenate an American industry that has fallen into disrepute: they are the true successors to Zoetrope's romantic promise, and Kidd has a lot to live up to with his sophomore feature. ***1/2 (out of four)

capsule index (top)

With a fade-out/fade-in editing style that pulses like quickening breath, Paul Greengrass' harrowing documentary-style recreation of the January 1972 Derry Massacre--immortalized in U2's song ("Sunday, Bloody Sunday") and about thirty years ("centuries" seems more appropriate) of violence between Irish separatists and the British army--is thick with an oppressive sense of inevitability. As Greengrass moves between the British troops readying for war and well-meaning Irish activist Ivan Cooper (James Nesbitt) stumping for a peaceful demonstration, the anger of the British paramilitary ("We've lost 43 men in the last few weeks") and the frustration of the Irish demonstrators gel into something like a coherent portrait of a violent legacy swelling into flashpoint. Greengrass' approach is unfailingly naturalistic, from performances that astonish for their transparency to the grittiness of his 35mm eye. It's hard to imagine a better document of the fog of war, the tension of a maddening crowd mustering for riot, and the impossibility of a "peaceful demonstration" in an ideological war. Bloody Sunday is transporting and educational--not merely from a strictly historical standpoint, but from an anthropological perspective--and Greengrass is a major talent to watch. Though proximate explanations for what happened that day are maddeningly elusive, what remains is as clear an explanation as any of how a tinderbox sometimes erupts into conflagration with nothing so much as a strike. **** (out of four)

capsule index (top)

Sort of a "Crucible" of period repression and sexual hysteria tied uncomfortably to Roman Polanski's Bitter Moon, Kathryn Bigelow's unreleased and maybe unreleasable The Weight of Water looks to parallel two distinct genres by mining the sexual tension in both. The problem with such a conceit is not its ambition--sort of admirable in a soggy, pretentious way--but rather the essential misunderstanding of the disparateness of the sources of that tension: the one stemming from a societal ban on sexuality (particularly of the homosexual kind), the other from being in love with a boorish philanderer who looks like Sean Penn. It's not difficult to see through the machinations of the piece, and the film is so desperate to be taken as gender allegory that, by its cacophonous conclusion, The Weight of Water is not so much a story as a badly-formed thesis the audience tries in vain to piece together in lieu of actual metaphoric coherence. Though the visuals impress, as they always seem to in Bigelow's work, the picture suffers from the kind of vague, unfocused narrative structure and characterization as the director's other films--sharing, too, a queasy unwatchability born from the story's inevitability and a general patina of distaste. Between Sarah Polley's tired shtick, Penn's ridiculous phoned-in pomposity, and Elizabeth Hurley's patented upper-lip-curl-as-acting, The Weight of Water is slicked-up jazzy lit-porn: all nice-looking people in various stages of excitement in the room coming and going and talking of Michelangelo. *1/2 (out of four)

capsule index (top)

"Dear Penny, I'm in Las Vegas tonight. It's hot, it's very very hot, but I'm close." So goes the tenor of James Coburn's narration in the mawkish, unfocused American Gun, an Alan Jacobs film that seeks to trace the history of a gun as a means to either indict the lack of regulation in gun sales, the way that Las Vegas is the city of sin, or the failure of almost all films to use flashbacks in different media separated by letters from an old man to his murdered daughter. What the picture fails to do is find much culpability in the perpetrators themselves, choosing at every turn to suggest that it is the gun itself that is the source of evil rather than our broken culture, the essential failure of many of our school systems (the only demographic with a higher self-esteem than public-school children are convicted felons, giving lie to the idea that teaching self-esteem in place of reading and math is such a very good idea), and the squeamish nullification of consequence that is at the root of all this fear, frustration, and madness. American Gun--essentially the Coburn character's odyssey on the trail of the gun that killed his daughter (Virginia Madsen)--is never terribly successful as politics or entertainment, but sinks to a new low when it gets mired at its conclusion into an unforgivable miasma of trick endings and stupid surprises. Already bad and made far worse, the film's message is terminally obscured by pathological righteousness and just too much cuteness. *1/2 (out of four)

capsule index (top)

Ponderously employing a modern eruption of Vesuvius as a metaphor for what is essentially a Telemundo soaper about an aging gangster reaping a lifetime of bitter fruit, Italian director Nicola de Rinaldo's clumsily titled Other People's Life is melodramatic, unintentionally hilarious, and derivative to boot. Mariano (Renato Carpentieri) is a Camorra lifer who, stricken by the guilt of wrongly murdering his brother decades before, decides to become a completely passive presence in his own life, allowing through his inaction his daughter and sister to become endangered by a younger generation of hungrier mobster. Because Mariano lives on the side of Mt. Vesuvius, vulcanologist Luisa (Maria Teresa Saponangelo, bearing a passing resemblance to the breathtaking Natalia Verbeke) visits to set up her instruments in his yard and sitting room. Provoking something of a surrogate daughter situation, Luisa's presence inspires Mariano to warn his own horrible and not-worth-saving daughter and attempt to save his housekeeper and her family. Other People's Life is an insipid and saccharine Godfather II that oozes with self-pity and appears to be missing entire transitional sequences. Long takes and lingering glances substituting for sense and character development, the picture is an endurance test of the worst kind: maudlin and muddy, mistaking a tired extended metaphor for the meaning of life. The only lessons offered by Other People's Life, sadly, involve being very careful with how one uses a score and more cautious still in hiring an editor. * (out of four)

capsule index (top)

Directed by Hu King for the legendary Shaw Brothers, 1966's Come Drink with Me ("Da zui xia"), presented at the DIFF in a 35mm print newly minted for this year's Cannes Film Festival, is one of the obvious headwaters for Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, featuring the legendary Cheng Pei-pei (villain Jade Fox in Lee's picture) as swashbuckling Golden Swallow, sister to a kidnapped imperial official. Between this film and its sequel, Golden Swallow, Pei-pei established herself as a watershed action hero while Hu's style, alternately lyrical and blood-geyser visceral (something between the painterly quality of Inagaki's Samurai trilogy and the Guignol conclusion of Akira Kurosawa's Sanjuro), proved wildly influential in the work of Tsui Hark and the modern Hong Kong cinema. With pioneering wire-work that includes a (now familiar) confrontation in a restaurant and twilight chase across rooftops, Come Drink with Me also features the Chinese martial arts film conventions of a drunken master (Yueh Hua) and a fallible hero who admits occasional wrong and proves, ultimately, to be mortal. Evocative and reserved (particularly from a modern perspective), Come Drink with Me is from a period in Chinese cinema still strongly connected to traditional opera forms and dance; Pei-pei is a trained dancer, not initially a martial artist, a link reflected in the classical purposefulness of the film's structure. Important, entertaining, and deeply influential, Come Drink with Me is a seminal film in a genre experiencing an unprecedented western diffusion and visibility: a bit of the old magic for a suddenly receptive audience. ***1/2 (out of four)

capsule index (top)

PRINCESS BLADE (Shurayuki-Hime)
starring Hideaki Ito, Yumiko Shaku, Shirô Sano, Yoichi Numata
screenplay by Kei Kunii, Shinsuke Sato, based on the comic by Kazuo Kamimura and Kazuo Koike
directed by Shinsuke Sato

An indescribably cool post-apocalyptic martial arts fairy tale, Shinsuke Sato's Shurayuki-Hime ("Princess Blade") follows the saga of a young woman named Yuki (Yumiko Shaku, bearing a startling resemblance to Pat Benatar) who discovers that her adoptive band of assassin ronin might have killed her mother and stolen her birthright as the heir to a kingdom. With swordplay choreographed by Hong Kong master Donny Yen (Iron Monkey), there are things in Shurayuki-Hime that defy description and bugger the imagination, including the first slow-motion bullet evasion post-The Matrix that doesn't play as some rip-off or sickly parody. With bombastic kinetics tempered by beautiful comic-art tableaux (note the meticulous framing of one-shots) and an amazing trust in silence for an action film (see also The Bourne Identity), Shurayuki-Hime is this year's Brotherhood of the Wolf; bracingly innovative and exhilarating, it mixes fantasy with sword-fu in a brew so intoxicating as to threaten at every moment to rouse the audience to exuberant display. Melodramatic and overblown in the best possible way, Shurayuki-Hime is indicated by mad genius but weighed down in its middle by laggard plotting and a deadly slackening of pace. Still, a live-action film that owes as much to animé and manga as Tsui Hark and King Hu--and done this well besides--is cause for celebration. *** (out of four)

capsule index (top)

BLUE CAR
starring David Strathairn, Agnes Bruckner, Margaret Colin, Frances Fisher
written and directed by Karen Moncrieff

An object lesson in how Swimming could have turned out had Swimming been weepy and apparently based on a bunch of Carpenters songs, ex-soap star Karen Moncrieff's hyphenate debut Blue Car is a coming-of-sexual-age puberty melodrama that plays like a film written and directed by, well, an ex-soap star. Sayles-favourite David Strathairn plays crinkly-eyed poetry teacher Mr. Auster who has a yen for quoting Yeats, Rilke and of course Whitman with the kind of earnest evangelism that points to easy uplift in mainstream twaddle (Dead Poets Society, The Emperor's Club) and a dark Humbert Humbert unreliability in independent twaddle (Smooth Talk). Meg (Agnes Bruckner, a talented young actress) is the product of a broken home: mom is never home, dad is missing, and little sister Lily (Regan Arnold) likes to cut herself and talk as though reading from an overwritten script. Naturally, then, Meg is a bad poet fond of barren-tree imagery and referring to the titular blue car that bore her father away on a "road to nowhere." Blue Car is the sort of film where funerals only take place in the rain and throwing oneself on a bed in a welter of tears is akin to striking the Christ pose on a tabernacle (which also happens)--there is the instantly regretted, probably justified maternal face-slap to introduce the third act, and a penultimate act of public demonstration that summarizes, shames, and elucidates. When Meg looks mournfully over a box of scattered pictures (lighting the corners of her mind, no doubt), Blue Car, already maudlin, suddenly and terrifyingly becomes Purple Rain. * (out of four)

capsule index (top)

Obviously inspired by the discovery of videotapes made by Eric Harris and Dylan Kleibold, the grating and amateurish Zero Day is sensationalistic and prurient, offering nothing in the way of insight while falling uncomfortably into the exploitation camp. Shot on digital video in a style popularized by The Blair Witch Project, the picture makes weak-kneed attempts to address the media-makes-killers controversy, hoping to find poignancy in the pointed incineration of CDs, DVDs, and Lord of the Flies. (Points for not zooming in on a copy of Catcher in the Rye, but it occurs to me that if they really wanted to be clever, they'd have burned a copy of Book of Ruth or some other similarly brain-sucking pod product of Oprah's Book Club.) The performances horrible and obviously improvised, Zero Day gives no explanation for the obvious editing and dated title cards of its "found footage" as it searches in vain for something chilling in extended scenes of the nee Kleibold/Harris musing about the beauty of a dying campfire. Its final fifteen minutes mocked-up footage from school surveillance cameras as our two teen anti-heroes rampage through suspiciously familiar halls, Zero Day is exactly the kind of broad, simple-minded exploration of the root causes of violence that its protagonists purport to despise. ZERO STARS (out of four)

capsule index (top)

Wonderfully directed, beautifully shot, amazingly well production-designed, yet dull, Julie Taymor's Frida is marked by an excellent performance by Alfred Molina and a screenplay (a collaboration of four writers--already a bad sign--with a shooting script ghost-written by its star's boyfriend, Edward Norton) that is a spider's breakfast of grandiloquent monologues, sweeping gestures, and tedious biopic conventions. Interesting for the Frida Kahlo devotee for its painstaking recreations and innovative, multi-media art design, Taymor's follow-up to her Stygian Titus is a technical triumph and an extraordinary bore. Perhaps realizing this, it relies on an unseemly amount of the kind of easy vulgarity that, when coupled with an arthouse draw, is mistaken for insouciance and courage. (Being the crudest girl in class is a pretty tired source for feminist uplift.) The picture is best when Taymor warps the medium, imagining parts of Kahlo's reality as her paintings come to life (a conceit used to similar effect, though superior rationale, in Eric Rohmer's The Lady and the Duke), the best of these coming in a post-trauma animated sequence that reminds of The Brothers Quay or Svankmajer in its stop-motion grotesquery. Hayek as the titular artist plays it loose and broad, Geoffrey Rush embarrasses himself as Trotsky, and Ashley Judd embarrasses everybody as a Mexican. Through it all, the most interesting character is Frida's philandering husband Diego, and the most interesting aspect of the picture is Taymor's visual sensibility which, at the end of the day, is still not enough to salvage the pretentious little nothings that form Frida's centre. ** (out of four)

capsule index (top)

Mike Leigh's return to the character-driven nihilism of his astonishingly raw Naked is All or Nothing, a story of an apartment barrio in London where three broken lower class families struggle to find meaning and happiness in the midst of their dreadful lives. Phil (the always-great Timothy Spall) is a woebegone taxi driver living with mousy Penny (Lesley Manville) and their corpulent children: deeply troubled Rory (James Corden) and Rachel (Alison Garland), the most affecting role amongst a passel of affecting roles. Neighbour Maureen (Ruth Sheen) sings Crystal Gayle songs on karaoke night while her wayward daughter runs in with the wrong boy and finds herself in a bad way while housing development lush Carol (Marion Bailey) spends her days in a vodka-sotted haze. When a tumultuous event reveals each character's true value under crisis along with all that long-submerged unhappiness, All or Nothing has the opportunity to sink into the mire of pat resolutions and sentimentality. Instead, the picture offers no easy answers and, for every glimmer of hope, an overbearing burden of the frank probability that inertia will rule the day. Hard, uncompromising, and tracing a non-linear narrative track, All or Nothing is full of an indefatigable conviction and the kind of vertiginous unpredictability that makes for enthralling--and edifying--viewing. After the frothy excess of the almost unwatchable Topsy-Turvy, Leigh crafts something here on the other end of the spectrum: spare, unsentimental, moody, and, like many films of this skill and observation, really funny. ***1/2 (out of four)

capsule index (top)

A miserable, over-directed bit of heated allegorical melodrama, JianXin Huang's The Marriage Certificate seeks to monumentalize the loss of the titular document and its disastrous effect on the marriage between a goofy shrink and his grasping wife into a jab at the rigidity of the communist Chinese bureaucracy. It succeeds in being cutesy in an Amélie sort of way (told from the point of view of an insipid little girl complete with bad voice-overs, double pony-tail flips, and rough animated skits) while being a disaster in terms of satire and the basic precepts of mature entertainment. Shifting tone discordantly from scene to scene with a restless camera zoomed and shaken to no good end, The Marriage Certificate makes unfocused stops in a mental institution populated with a collection of Cuckoo's Nest stereotypes and punctuated by visits to various government offices that make the gentlest of fun of the Chinese government (and women). Though appreciative of the difficulties of working within a restrictive system to create works of political resonance, The Marriage Certificate is so broad and winking that it's hard to believe that this thing wasn't setting off klaxons and clarions every step along the way. Perversely light-hearted even as it strays into the bizarre and grating, the picture is blissfully forgettable though, admittedly, the unforgivable winsomeness of its conclusion proves difficult to exorcise. * (out of four)

capsule index (top)

Sports as empowerment as heady a trip as sports as oppression (Columbine's real villain, after all, is a virulent administration-sanctioned jock culture), Chiefs follows a Wyoming Native American High School basketball team through two consecutive seasons of state championship basketball. Indians perhaps the most marginalized minority in terms of insensitive sports mascot stereotype and caricature (The Cleveland Indians' unforgivable Chief Wahoo, anyone?), that the documentary chooses to champion a team self-named "The Chiefs" is both interesting and thorny. (Enough so that when a more interesting film fails to emerge, Chiefs at the end bears the increased burden of expectation and disappointed anticipation.) Rather than take a good look at the open hatred and racism demonstrated by a few Wyoming yokels, Chiefs decides less interestingly to concentrate on a few Chiefs players and their struggle to get off the rez and/or into a college. A broader examination of the way sports can provide minorities a community and that community an identity (and, conversely, how sports can pervert that unifying power into something clannish and dangerous) is reduced by the picture into a somewhat standard look at disadvantaged youth. A worthy topic for sure, it's also an extremely familiar one; Chiefs, for every bracing game sequence, offers frankly too much spiritual mumbo-jumbo and confused narrative to justify its length and breadth. ** (out of four)

capsule index (top)

A low-aspiring, semi-inspiring documentary about nine Latino teens vowing not to become a racial stereotype of underachievement, crime, and early dropout-ism, the Denver-based Sweet Ambition examines the effect of smaller class sizes on future success. With a soundtrack cribbing tracks from sources as varied as local Latino rap to Antonio Banderas, Willie Nelson, Santana, and loads of Ani DiFranco, the production looks and feels slick, but interviews with the youths (some wayward, some twice-mothers at the age of sixteen) are naïve and often redundant. Over it all hangs the spectre of "So what?" It's nice to hear these disadvantaged youngsters climb up on the "by the shoestrings" soapbox after circumstance and inexperience have laid them low, but the overriding message of "when life gives you lemons..." invariably grates. Media and popular cynicism have made the mean streets so familiar that such a project as Sweet Ambition has the difficult responsibility one of presenting either new perspectives or old truisms in a new light. Too soon for its end-cards to mean very much, there is perhaps the possibility for a 42 Up-type situation wherein we catch up with these kids (and their kids) in a decade or so--for now, Sweet Ambition is just a community activism stump that should really be more careful about using un-licensed music. * (out of four)

capsule index (top)

Colin Nutley's insufferable (and interminable) in-joke of a roundelay concerning nine aging Swedish actresses each vying for the coveted role of Queen Christina in a remake of the Garbo classic suffers from that peculiar malady of actors occasionally thinking it novel to pretend that their lives are as laden with the indignities of outrageous fortune as ours. While one wonders if the auto-fun-poking would be more trenchant were one more familiar with the reputations and peccadilloes of the actors in question (among them Pernilla August, Lena Endre, and Nutley's wife Helena Bergstrom), the quintessential truth is that this sort of thing is never particularly interesting (see also America's Sweethearts). Stretched well past the breaking point at a back-heavy 134 minutes, Gossip elicits a smile a time or two, but ultimately depends on the same indulgence in celebrity that it supposedly lampoons. Harsh irony for a film that seeks to deflate show-biz egos that the only people interested in watching such a spectacle are the very people clamouring for the juicy tidbits that feed a cult of personality. Regardless, the actresses to a one are interesting enough that it's impossible not to wish that Gossip had discarded the bulk of its unmanageable dross and brought to the fore any one or two of the intersecting storylines. As it is, Gossip is a colossal bore. *1/2 (out of four)

capsule index (top)

Marius Holst's haunted Øyenstikker ("Dragonflies") is weighted like a Terrence Malick film (or like Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock) by the ominous, oppressive indifference of the Natural. Its drab Scandinavian landscapes as timeless and purposeless as the subterranean tides that govern human behaviour, it's a lovely, poetic thing then when we're introduced to Eddie (Kim Bodnia) floating on a lake and his lover Maria (Maria Bonnevie) wandering through high grass like Ruth lost in alien corn (stark contrasts to Kullman's (Mikael Persbrandt) introduction at a gas station). Essentially a three-person drama, Eddie and Maria live in a red house that rises like an affront from a flat wet marsh--Holst has a laudable comfort with silence and we learn of the couple's contentment in a series of quiet vignettes punctuated by sighs and laughter. When Eddie meets his old pal Kullman in town one day and brings him home to stay, the fragile web holding the two lost souls together begins to separate as the past converges like a Flannery O'Connor plot. Indeed, Øyenstikker ("Dragonflies") resembles the Southern Gothic in a great many ways, forging its story from the earth and the grotesqueries of man striving to escape his baser natures. That the film opens and ends with a flow and ebb serves its innate rhythms: now unbearably tense, now lilting and lyrical--always inexorable. ***1/2 (out of four)

capsule index (top)

The War ("Vojna") is a peculiar low-budget version of Proof of Life that opens like that episode of "The Twilight Zone" about dolls come to life in a Beckett-ian toy box before it falls into some all-too-familiar patterns of folks getting kidnapped for ransom in Chechnya as foreign governments remain powerless (or disinclined) to get them back. Pitched with feverish earnestness, The War is high melodrama told without much in the way of moderation nor ultimately interest, its story proper that of a British man (Ian Kelly) and a Russian man (Aleksei Chadov)--ex-prisoners, both, of a terrorist cell--taking matters into their own hands against their former captors. The film is marred by an egregious over-simplicity and enough narrative gimmickry to choke a horse: the Brit keeps a video diary while the Russkie is involved in one of those flashback framing stories that ensures his safety, thus providing the filmmakers even more padding to what probably would have been better off as a thirty-minute short. Footage of the borderlands between Russia and Chechnya is occasionally breathtaking, but that in itself does little to forgive the jarring guitar-heavy score and the bald inevitability of the entire exercise. Unconvincing and oddly dated given the topicality of its subject, The War is a flat, overlong picture that lacks much in the way of insight on the one hand and excitement on the other. *1/2 (out of four)

capsule index (top)

Something like a Renoir film or a Bronte novel, Tian Zhuangzhuang's first feature film in nearly a decade, Springtime in a Small Town ("Xiao Cheng Zhi Chun") a remake of the Fei Mu's 1948 classic, is painterly and patient--a map of the inner rhythms of love and jealousy and sacrifice drawn with a master's steady stroke. The film introduces its three main characters in the same gently swooping style: the sickly scholar in the antebellum ruins of his family's home; the long-suffering wife reduced to duty and malaise; and the handsome doctor debarking at a South China train station. Springtime in a Small Town pulses with sensuality and submerged anxieties--that the scholar's ruined household hangs in the entropic vicissitude of ritual is a matter of fact; that the handsome doctor disturbs that delicate equilibrium is also never in question. What amazes about the picture is the way that silence is allowed to tell the tale and swell the meaning of every sigh and each glancing touch. An extraordinary film of manners and meticulous compositions, Springtime in a Small Town unfolds at the pace of a simmer: inevitable, inexorable, and possessed of that unmistakable air of Prufrock-ian half-life spent measuring out time in meaningless units until mermaids calling each to each lull frustrated lovers to action at last. **** (out of four)

capsule index (top)

An extremely naturalistic German product, Valeska Grisebach's short (65 mins.) hyphenate debut Mein Stern ("Be My Star") demonstrates an unerring ear for the maelstrom of first love and just-pubescent angst but fails to maintain much interest in its inevitable story arc even over its brief running time. The picture is structured as an allegory for the capriciousness of adult relationships, though in route to its broad statements about the fickleness of attraction and devotion it finds itself choppy and unstructured. Distinguished by a pair of very fine performances from its young romantic leads (Nicole Gläser and Christopher Schöps) that only now and again fall to self-consciousness, Mein Stern plumbs ground already covered with more courage and insight by French auteur Catherine Breillat as well as American filmmakers like Harmony Korine and Larry Clark. More, the editing choices are bizarre (sixty-some minutes can't support two awkwardly extended dance sequences)--a malady that gives the film a padded, arbitrary, and erratic feeling that only serves to make the film seem much longer than it is while clarifying a dearth of real content and insight. Still, as a student film, Grisebach's painful portrait of that confused liminal period between childhood and sexual maturity is often possessed of a carefully unobtrusive hand and a refreshing understatement. A promising debut, Mein Stern is also not much more than that. **1/2 (out of four)

capsule index (top)