Already pegged as another legendary fiasco for Man of the Year helmer Barry Levinson, What Just Happened? strongly suggests that Levinson is trying to Peter Bogdanovich himself into unemployment. Ben (Robert De Niro) is a fading Hollywood producer torn between two projects in need of salvaging. One is an action film starring Sean Penn that the director, Jeremy (Michael Wincott), has ended by having the villains shoot Penn's dog point blank in the head, spraying viscera on the camera lens. Test audiences are appalled and the higher-ups demand changes. Jeremy won't budge; he is, after all, an artist. Ben's second project features Bruce Willis, who has grown a "Grizzly Adams" beard for his character. The studio executives are so against this that they are threatening to shut down the project altogether unless he shaves, but Willis is arguably more stubborn than Jeremy. Levinson would appear to be saying that there is no such thing as art--that Jeremy and Willis are callow, self-absorbed morons, and even if a work of art were made it would never get past the powers that be, who have contempt for anything that doesn't follow the straight and narrow. It's hard to share his cynicism in the age of No Country for Old Men, and the film's crassly tongue-in-cheek happy ending struck me as particularly galling. Still, Levinson's sheer black rage obscures any real sense of superiority. Like Man of the Year, the film might have been unwatchable had he played any of it for laughs. As is, What Just Happened? is suffused with a pungent feeling of melancholy I find fascinatingly subversive. The best joke of the film is that this is the finest role Robert De Niro has had in years, requiring both his laconic screen persona and the weight of a once-great actor rendered irrelevant by more than a decade of shitty movies. Being washed-up is apparently the only feeling either Levinson or De Niro can tap into these days.

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In the opening scene of The Wackness, teenager Luke Shapiro (Josh Peck) is having a session with his psychiatrist, Dr. Squires (Ben Kingsley). Dr. Squires tells him that a "quarter bag" will buy him forty-five minutes. Luke produces the requested pot and goes on to discuss his problems as Dr. Squires fills and lights up a bong. In one of the film's closing scenes, Luke is having dinner with his family when an uncle asks him what he wants to be once he finishes college. He responds that he's thinking he'd like to be a "shrink"--after all, he should be an expert, having been surrounded by so many fucked-up people. These two scenes go far in illustrating both the film's sickly sentimentality and its muddled perspective towards adolescence. Not to get moralistic on you, but Luke is essentially being exploited by his psychiatrist: instead of trading sex for a sympathetic ear, he's trading drugs. It isn't that great a leap. But rather than growing to realize that Dr. Squires is a user and a loser (the humour of seeing Sir Ben Kingsley toke up is rooted in the incongruence of such a prestigious actor behaving so immaturely, right?), he ultimately views him as a figure to emulate in a sea of unworthy adult role models. I'm not saying that The Wackness is morally bankrupt, exactly, just that its values are confused. Luke at times comes off as an omniscient demigod who sees through the corruption and hypocrisy of the adult world and at other times comes off as a complete fucking idiot who overuses "mad" in its colloquial form. Dr. Squires is sometimes a wise and loving mentor and sometimes a total mess who needs Luke to rescue him. Writer-director Jonathan Levine may have intended these contradictions to inform a co-dependent relationship between them, but for the most part it merely seems like he wants it both ways. The Wackness strikes me as a very primitive film. To cover up the sentimentality of the material, Levine gives us a lot of drug use and a repetitious use of the word "fuck." Meanwhile, Petra Korner's cinematography desaturates the colours in an apparent attempt to make the film look less cute, but it ends up looking grungy in a very aesthetic way. Ben Kingsley is pretty good and appears to be enjoying himself, yet his presence in the film--like that of Mary-Kate Olsen--remains cheap stunt-casting. (To heighten the novelty factor, Levine has the two lock lips in a barroom phone booth.) Most annoying is the easy nostalgia Levine preys on by setting the film in New York circa 1994. His pretense for doing so is that this was when Mayor Rudy Giuliani began cleaning up the city, but it seems informed by a desire to show our hero playing "The Legend of Zelda" as much as anything else. It was probably only a matter of time before Generation Y got around to memorializing the good old days, I just wish it wasn't this soon.

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Hilariously bad. See it with somebody you love just so you have it in your mutual lexicon. The titular Red, a fourteen-year-old dog, belongs to Avery (Brian Cox), a small-town storeowner. Avery and Red are fishing one lazy afternoon when they are approached by a trio of delinquent teens, who rob them at gunpoint. When Avery is unable to produce a satisfactory amount of money, the leader shoots Red in the head. Avery goes to the boy's wealthy father (Tom Sizemore) to get an apology only to see his accusations dismissed. He can't let this go, however--Red wasn't only his best friend, he was the last remnant of his family. And so he pursues the three boys himself, his rage at this injustice increasingly mounting. A typical scene in the film shows Avery walking into the local gun shop to suss out who bought the shotgun that killed Red. The clerk refuses to divulge the information until Avery tells him, "They shot my dog," at which point the proprietor tells the clerk to give Avery whatever he asks for. He has a dog, too, you see. On a hunting trip he accidentally shot his foot off and the dog started barking for help. That was the last time the little guy ate Alpo, it's been top sirloin ever since. I am not making any of this up. Red is, without irony, a straightforward revenge tale centred on Man's bond with Canine. There is no attempt to explore this material from some kind of sane perspective. Lightly, it suggests that Avery never got over the death of his wife, thus preventing him from forming a romantic bond with other women; and he finds a parental relationship with his adult son (admittedly pretty rotten, we learn through a hilariously melodramatic monologue) too complicated to pursue. He prefers the company of dogs because they're endlessly loyal, loving, and simple--much unlike human beings. The film takes this at face value, never pushing Avery to see that attitude as a crutch and grow as a person. I suppose Red deserves praise for never condescending to the material or copping a superior attitude, but it needs to be a lot more sophisticated if it is to survive even the most rudimentary analysis.

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Michel Gondry has said he always wanted to make a film like Back to the Future (i.e., a quirky, funny, big-budget movie), and I guess this is his version of it. It has science-fiction, toilet humour, a lovable man-child (à la Adam Sandler or Jerry Lewis, here played by Jack Black), slapstick, romance, and a classic storyline involving evil developers with plans to pave over the community hangout unless the heroes can stop them in time. Gondry clearly wants to break the one-hundred million dollar mark with Be Kind Rewind--and who knows, he just might do it. Much worse films have made the cut. There's something wonderful and crazy about Gondry's utter lack of cynicism. He treats crowd-pleasing blockbuster filmmaking like a genre on which he'll put his personal stamp. I mean this lovingly, but you might need to be French to be this wacky. Be Kind Rewind is a thrift shop and video store in urban New Jersey that has yet to transition from VHS to DVD. It's owned and operated by Mr. Fletcher (Danny Glover), who, having learned that his building will be demolished and his business relocated to the projects, takes off to figure out how to save the store, leaving Mike (Mos Def) in charge. After Mike's best friend Jerry (Black) becomes magnetized and erases every tape on the shelf, the two decide to replace them with their own homemade recreations. The videos don't convince anybody, of course, but they're a huge hit anyway; what at first seems like a celebration of art for art's sake quickly becomes rather achingly poignant. There's one thread in particular that really encapsulates the charm of the film for me. Slightly batty Ms. Kimberly (Mia Farrow), a good friend of Mr. Fletcher, commissions a version of her favourite film, Driving Miss Daisy. Mike is reluctant, as he finds the picture paternalistic and condescending, but he goes along with it only to be driven off the deep end by Jerry's impersonation of Jessica Tandy. Later, they decide to remake the films with the customers in them, casting Ms. Kimberly as Miss Daisy and Mr. Fletcher in the Morgan Freeman role. Suddenly, the nature of Ms. Kimberly's attachment to Driving Miss Daisy becomes clear. (To actually verbalize it seems almost cruel.) To say that Gondry loves all movies is a covert way of saying he loves all people, even crazy white ladies who are racist without understanding that they're racist. That sense of compassion extends to the bad guys, too: when Sigourney Weaver shows up to enforce the copyright notice on the front of the tapes, Gondry has her say to a co-worker, "They think we're the villains, don't they?" The film earns its populist sentiments and then ends on a surprisingly thoughtful note by suggesting that sometimes winning isn't as important as losing with dignity.

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Broadly speaking, bad movies come in two distinct flavours: boring and obnoxious. I'm always conflicted as to which is worse, but as of this moment I feel like it would be faint praise to say that Riprendimi (the preferred English title is Good Morning Heartache) is just plain boring. Small-time actor Giovanni (Marco Foschi) and television editor Lucia (Alba Caterina Rohrwacher) are a young Roman couple who have agreed to appear in a documentary about temp workers. The thesis of the documentarians is that the vicarious employment and financial instability of freelance work stunts emotional growth--which would appear to be proven at the start of the film when Giovanni tells his wife that he is no longer in love with her and needs to go "find himself." Meanwhile, Eros (Allesandro Averone), the director assigned to cover Lucia during the break-up, starts falling in love with his subject. Riprendimi director Anna Negri doesn't distinguish between the documentary footage and 'reality,' shooting everything in beautiful 35mm. Is she suggesting that real life and "reel life" have become inextricable for everyone involved? Not really. As opposed to lending this thin material some kind of raison d'être, the documentary angle mostly provides Negri and her co-writer Giovanna Mori a way to approach their material outside of a traditional dramatic narrative. Far from challenging or alienating the audience, Negri's goal seems to be to make the film considerably less demanding. When she gives us a scene of the documentary filmmakers psychoanalyzing their subjects, it's as though she's doing all the work for us. Though I never ran out of empathy for the constantly-feuding Giovanni and Lucia, I did run out of patience. The film goes on and on in circles and never really gets anywhere. Eventually, I found myself staying just to soak in Negri's Italy, a fantasyland of wine, rigatoni, plunging necklines, and hand gestures all marvellously shot with a carefully-cultivated sense of off-the-cuff spontaneity. If there isn't anything of substance to be found in Riprendimi, it's no small consolation to know that it's pretty great wallpaper.

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Choke lost me in the very first scene. The hero, Victor Mancini (Sam Rockwell), is at a support group for sex addicts and describing all the regulars for us. There's the housewife who put mayonnaise on her crotch for her dog to lick off. There's the guy who had to have a gerbil removed from his anus. And then there's the cheerleader who needed a stomach pump after swallowing too much semen. I want to talk about the cheerleader. I think Victor said that doctors pumped two quarts out of her stomach. Considering the amount of semen in a typical human ejaculation is about 1.5 to 5 millilitres, that's a lot of blowjobs! Two quarts is around two litres, right? So she would've had to service at least 400 men. Assuming this would take about three minutes apiece, she'd have to have been at it for twenty hours straight, without vomiting up or digesting any of the semen--which, by the way, is completely non-toxic and would not require the use of a stomach pump--in the meantime. What kind of dipshit expects me to buy this? I admit I haven't read Chuck Palahniuk's source novel. I might very well be alone on this--the critics at my press screening were buzzing with anticipation and the gang over at my message board instantly recognized the title. I'd like to think something was lost in translation, but it seems Palahniuk deserves a fair share of the blame for what goes wrong with the film. Choke regurgitates the satire on support groups and airplane-etiquette gags from Fight Club, employs a bit of dollarbook Freud by sourcing Victor's intimacy problems back to mommy, and sloppily works in the suggestion that Victor is a partial clone of Jesus Christ. (How hip, edgy, and irreverent!) But it's more than that: just as Towelhead was no American Beauty without Sam Mendes, Choke is no Fight Club without David Fincher. A truly visionary filmmaker, Fincher was able to transform Palahniuk's petty, self-congratulatory sarcasm into the evolved and thorny hyperrealism that would go on to characterize the cinema of the early twenty-first century. In the hands of writer-director Clark Gregg, this material is transformed into just another quirky coming-of-age story in the vein of Napoleon Dynamite. The film has exactly two redeeming features. The first is Sam Rockwell. He's damn good, successfully fusing his character with his persona while compromising neither Victor's repulsiveness nor his own likable vulnerability. The second is the last shot of the film. Through what might be one of history's longest screen kisses, we see Victor making love instead of fucking for what appears to be the first time in his life. To quote Death Proof's Stuntman Mike, that's so sweet it makes sugar taste just like salt.

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The key image of Mia Trachinger's Reversion, her follow-up to the eight-year-old, still-undistributed Bunny, is star Leslie Silva's outrageously unkempt Afro and supermodel physique. Trachinger betrays nostalgia for the early-'90s nostalgia for the 1970s. Her cool is a grungy slacker cool, all heroin-chic and deadpan nihilism. She's delightfully fifteen years behind the loop, making a hipster film for an audience that no longer exists. Almost everybody in Reversion looks and acts fashionably homeless. In an early scene, Silva's character Eva even goes into a supermarket with her peers and eats the food right off the shelves! It turns out these people are mutants born without the "time gene." The past, present, and future all co-exist for them in a non-linear fashion. So you would think them philosophically deterministic like the space aliens in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, right? Well, sort of, but not quite. Trachinger focuses instead on their amorality. Having never learned to associate a cause with its resulting effect, they steal cars at gunpoint and of course eat out of grocery stores without paying. One of the ideas floating around in the film is that this genetic defect might actually make them more "human" than most humans in that they are freed of the mechanizing effect of Skinner behavioralism. This notion has a kind of adolescent romance to it: they're simultaneously more damaged and more evolved than the rest of us. Nevertheless, Eva hates being a mutant, particularly since she knows that she will somehow shoot and kill her lover Marcus (Jason Olive). The brunt of the plot is focused on their attempts to avoid this inevitable conclusion. So, has the gene hopelessly rendered them free agents or are they cogs of fate? Somehow, Trachinger has convinced me that it's both, and she has the proof if I ever want to study it. The film ends on a softly ambiguous note, and this ambiguity seems to be the mutant version of a triumphant ending. Reversion is too pretentious and dense to be truly elating and, to be perfectly honest, the philosophy appears to be a function of cool rather than the other way around. Yet I can't help but appreciate it on those terms, too. If it's fashionably nihilistic, it's at least earnest and a little romantic about it as opposed to protectively sarcastic. As far as pseudo-science-fiction goes, that makes Reversion worth ten Gregg Arakis.

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Real life is just like the movies, according to Nanette Burstein's American Teen. The film follows the adventures of The Brain, The Athlete, The Princess, and The Basket Case as they finish their last year of high school. By the end, we learn that each one of them is a brain, an athlete, a princess, and a basket case. In other words, they're all individuals while being pretty much the same. Burstein seems to have turned complete control of the film over to her subjects and resisted refining anything through her own perspective. The results are predictably excruciating to watch. Via the resources of the cinema (slick photography and editing, animated sequences), the teens are transformed into gods, a needlessly flattering notion to the adolescent ego. You're worried about getting into college? Your boyfriend broke up with you and you're depressed? These problems really are as monumental as they seem; it's substance enough for a feature-length film! Some reviews have complained that the fantasies that inspired the animated sequences are tired clichés: the jock dreams of winning the big game, the geeky kid dreams of getting a girlfriend, etc.. If the fantasy sequences don't have a whole lot of depth, that's because their originators don't have a whole lot of depth, either. What do you expect? They're only 17. The hilariously damning thing about American Teen is that it actually comes across as an accurate depiction of the high-school years. At 26, I think I have a certain distance from adolescence where I'm too young to be shocked by the teenage sex and drinking caught on camera but old enough to be shocked by the petty cruelty and hyper-superficiality that characterizes that age group. Most disturbing is the "Princess" character, who paints a red cock and balls and the word "fag" on a fellow student council member's window simply because she was angry that his "tacky" idea for a prom theme beat out her own. She's afraid that the resulting punishment will affect her chances of getting into Notre Dame. This strikes me as mildly sociopathic behaviour and it creeps me out that she's going to have the resources to blend in with respectable society. (The story of a nude photo e-mailed around school is even more chilling.) Of course, most teenagers grow up and are lucky enough to not have their misadventures memorialized in a feature film. Perhaps the only time I ever plan on seeing American Teen again is if there's a twentieth-anniversary edition where we can hear audio commentary from the now-older subjects as they watch the film. Now that would be redeeming.

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Based on the available evidence, it's clear that American Beauty worked because Sam Mendes' aesthetic provided a spiritual component that elevated writer Alan Ball's reductive and rather misanthropic satire. If opinion of the film gets worse as time goes by, it may be because Ball's screenplay comes to the fore. Ball's feature directorial debut Towelhead is, to state the obvious, all Ball and no Mendes; it manages to be bad the very first time you see it. Jasira (Summer Bishil) is a half-Lebanese 13-year-old struggling to come to terms with her blossoming womanhood. Her mother (Maria Bello) kicks her out of the house after Jasira lets her would-be stepfather shave her pubic area. She relocates to Texas (the asshole of the United States in the Alan Ball universe), where she moves in with her Lebanese immigrant father Rifat (Peter Macdissi), who slaps her when she comes down for breakfast with her navel exposed and forbids her to use tampons when she has her period. Rifat gets her a job babysitting for next-door neighbour Mr. Vuoso (Aaron Eckhart), a military reservist restlessly awaiting deployment to Iraq on the eve of the first Gulf War. Courtesy of the Vuoso son, Jasira inherits a stack of dirty magazines and discovers how to masturbate to orgasm. Once Mr. Vuoso learns of this, he begins to see her as some potential sexual relief from a loveless marriage. Ball's satirical point is that American culture sends conflicting messages towards sexuality that are exacerbated when immigrants from the Arab world--which has a more concrete idea of sexual morality--attempt to assimilate. He also wants to make the point, already made without a touch of superiority in Peter Berg's great The Kingdom, that the values of the Middle East and the United States closely align. Berg suggested that we share a love of wealth, power, and ruthlessly crushing enemies in the name of vengeance, while Ball sees both cultures as being ruled by emotionally insecure men threatened and demeaned by expressions of female sexuality. The heroes of the film are a married couple of social progressives who offer Jasira safe haven from her abusive father as well as a horny black classmate who nonetheless respects Jasira's boundaries. (Rifat and, more subtly, Mr. Vuoso, are threatened by his racial make-up.) While I identify with the progressives, I find it typical of Ball's liberal naivety that he can't seem to conceptualize how traditional Islamic standards of modesty can help give value to female sexuality. If this mode of morality is arguably not as developed as the fairly radical progressiveness espoused here, it is at least superior to the confusing sexual culture of mainstream America. Towelhead is finally exploitive, not in its depiction of early teen sexuality, per se, but in its rendering of Jasira a passive perpetual victim as a means of criticizing the World of Men. Everything happens to her and it's never her fault. She doesn't take any sexual initiative of her own. The porno mags and her classmate are adventures she just stumbles upon. She is after all, only a kid. Suffice it to say that in a film culture where Catherine Breillat's Fat Girl already exists, there is no excuse for a film like this.

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Margaret Brown's The Order of Myths is the flipside to blandly noble docs like The Recruiter. Faithful to the ideal of "objectivity," the typical documentary filmmaker doesn't love anything; Brown's problem is that she loves everything. The result is a film that works very well as cinema: it has a pulse, a mood, a feeling, and is never boring. Yet it also has a terminal case of the cutes, and after it was over I can't say I felt all that edified. The film is about the traditionally segregated Mardi Gras carnival in Brown's hometown of Mobile, Alabama--the white Mobile Carnival Association's celebration and that of the black Mobile Area Mardi Gras Association. There's controversy regarding the white Mardi Gras queen's slave-trading ancestors, who are credited with bringing the very last ship of African slaves to America--illegally, after the trade had been abolished--and forming the "Africa Town" community of Mobile once their smuggling was discovered and the slaves escaped. White residents dismiss an integrated Mardi Gras by saying that blacks want their own celebration. The blacks respond that they don't have a choice. There's a brief bit in the film where we learn that the MCA rents out their floats to the MAMGA as soon as they're done with them. Of course, MAMGA could make their own floats if they only had the kind of Old Money flowing through MCA thanks to centuries of slavery! But I dunno--this doesn't register very high on my social-outrage meter. Given that she's a native of the town, I doubt Brown has enough distance to develop a real perspective on the material. She seems to have made a documentary about Mobile because she loves Mobile. I thought there might be a touch of paternalism when she pays off a scene of a portly black girl reading several essays describing her love of Moon Pies with an elderly black man complaining that he got beads instead of Moon Pies. Except, how would I then explain the scene where we see a white Mardi Gras society of men talk about how you can drink beer through their plastic Mardi Gras masks, even though they're made to look like "Mongoloids"? Stopping just short of condescension, Brown exhibits affection for the idiosyncrasies of white and black Southerners alike. By the end, you realize she isn't even advocating an all-inclusive Mardi Gras as much as simply warmer relations between the camps. In her conception of Mobile, the two have already been integrated.

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The Recruiter, which also goes by the moderately less forgettable title An American Soldier, is just another Sundance documentary, barely distinguishable from past efforts like The Ground Truth or Ghosts of Abu Ghraib. The film follows Army recruiter Sergeant First Class Clay Usie as he brings a new generation of soldiers to the front lines. Director Edet Belzberg's splintered narrative sees four recruits go off to boot camp, where they find themselves in way over their heads. Belzberg's thesis seems to be that these recruits are kids--unprepared for the real world, much less the United States Army--who join simply because they are unsure about their future and feel out of place in their families of origin. There's real warmth to Usie's interactions with his recruits. I particularly liked a scene where he coaches a shy, pudgy teenager on the required two-mile run by saying, "You don't even need to worry because I'm not going to let you fail." And I really liked fresh-out-of-high-school Lauren, a butch lesbian into drawing and Slipknot who complains that she's not learning anything in boot camp that will make her "smarter." There's a funny scene that kind of encompasses everything wonderful about puppy love where she holds up a picture of her girlfriend (a moody-looking, slightly Goth type) and proudly informs us, "That's my baby." Later, when she goes home, her mother tells her that in the "real world," you always have to work a job you hate and do things you don't want to, and maybe the Army is good for her if it teaches her to accept this. The subtle suggestion is that the Army doesn't work too well as a vehicle for social mobility, as it reinforces the passivity and blithe acceptance of your lot in life that perpetuates poverty. (Increasingly, I found myself wishing the film were about Lauren's experiences alone.) The Recruiter is ultimately a human story, but beneath this fairly broad Army recruitment topic, Belzberg obviously hopes to give it pseudo-political gravitas. Alas, the film doesn't have enough edge to work. I don't know if it necessarily needs less heart and more bile, but its failure to penetrate, agitate, or provoke renders it just one more digital video doc to add to the pile.

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Yasukuni is a Shinto shrine in Tokyo dedicated to the spirits of soldiers who died serving the Emperor of Japan. Included within the 2,466,532 names are 27,863 Taiwanese, 21,181 Koreans, and, most significantly, 1,068 convicted war criminals. The shrine is a centre of controversy for many Asians, some of whom feel their ancestors were forced to serve the Emperor and thus wouldn't want to be listed. Others could never endorse a shrine that features, for example, the names of Mukai Toshiaki and Noda Takeshi, the two officers who participated in a beheading contest during the massacre at Nanking. Still, the shrine is held in high regard among many Japanese. Former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi visited it annually, a move that severely damaged Japanese relations with China and Korea. This constant opposition has inspired many hardcore Japanese fundamentalists, such as a group of Nanking deniers, to congregate at the shrine, where they throw their own counter-protests. Director Li Ying, born in China and living in Japan, regards Yasukuni with a curious ambivalence. He's not objective, per se--he's subjective but cold. It seems that his joint identification with both the Chinese and Japanese keeps him from wanting to take sides. The centrepiece of Yasukuni the documentary is Ying's extensive interview with an elderly sword-maker, who made the very swords Toshiaki and Takeshi used in their beheading contest. Treating this craftsman with a great deal of warmth, Ying gently teases out how the sword-maker feels about Koizumi visiting the Yasukuni shrine. His nervous response is that Koizumi was merely honouring the dead soldiers and praying there will never be another war--and strangely enough, I found myself unable to come up with a lucid counterpoint to this. Reflect that war criminals constitute less than .1% of the names and you can see how the Yasukuni shrine might be regarded admirably. Yasukuni is a dull film, slow-paced and with a rather muted colour palette. This has the curious effect of giving everything a certain pall of death. Ying doesn't regard the fundamentalists with anger as much as a slight sense of pity. The Japan they're trying to resurrect appears to be dead; I think they're trying to reclaim a piece of the Japanese identity that is gone forever. The very last shot is of the Tokyo cityscape (the first time we've really seen it in the film), and it provides a fascinating context for everything that preceded it. In the face of increasing urbanization, the Japan of the past--militarism and all--has essentially become obsolete.

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