Hidalgo

By Elise Nakhnikian

If I had a boat
I'd go out on the ocean
And if I had a pony
I'd ride him on my boat
And we could all together
Go out on the ocean
Me upon my pony on my boat

I’m thinking about that Lyle Lovett lyric because I just saw Hidalgo, an old-fashioned action adventure about a cowboy (played by the King himself, Lord of the Rings’ Viggo Mortensen) and his faithful horse, Hidalgo. Like Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, where the two are working when the movie starts, the movie’s full of hokum but fun to watch, and it’s catnip for the kids — especially boys, I suspect — who are its main target. The preteens in the front rows at the showing I went to were galvanized by it, pumping their fists in the air at the end.

Frank Hopkins is a burned-out former soldier, trying to drown his memories of the Wounded Knee massacre in alcohol, when a sheik (Omar Sharif) tracks him down. It seems the sheik is insulted by Buffalo Bill’s claim that Hidalgo is the greatest endurance runner in the world. To put that claim to rest, he wants Hopkins and his horse to compete against more than 100 champion Arabians in the Ocean of Fire, a 3,000-mile race across the Arabian Desert. Hopkins accepts the challenge — and yup, he rides Hidalgo right onto that boat.

Right from the start, there’s so much talk about “impure” blood and infidels that you know our plucky American heroes — a half-breed Indian and a valiant little mustang — will beat those snooty old-world thoroughbreds. But first they have to overcome showy obstacles like an avalanche of a sandstorm and a pit full of sharpened stakes. They have to perform daring feats like rescuing the sheik’s feisty daughter from kidnappers. And Hopkins has to kill quite a few bad guys, including a bunch that go after Hidalgo in an attempt to rig the race so their employer’s horse can win.

This kind of movie is easy to ruin. Make the cliches too campy and you leach out the drama; amp up the emotions too high and you’ve got a lead balloon like Last Samurai, another story of a traumatized 19th-century war hero who regains his honor in a foreign land. Cruise’s star vehicle was grounded by his somber self-regard. Hidalgo is weighed down a bit too by its a bombastic, Titanic-style soundtrack and too many speeches about being true to yourself, but on the whole it’s as nimble as its four-legged hero.

Director Joe Johnson, who debuted with Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, probably deserves the credit for keeping things light. The story originated with screenwriter John Fusco, and it might have gone the way of Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, an animated feature Fusco wrote that hammered home its message with all the subtlety of a pneumatic drill. Like Hidalgo, Spirit centered around a horse and portrayed Native Americans as saintly and wise. In Hidalgo, the sympathy still lies with the “people of the horse” — in this case, Bedouins and Lakota Sioux — but it takes itself less seriously, refrains from anthropomorphizing the horses, and doesn't paint all the white men as bad or all the brown ones as good.

Mortensen fits neatly into the movie's mythic mold, roping us in by underplaying his emotions in classic cowboy style. A laconic hero who talks almost as much to his horse as he does to other people, he also brings a wry, comic-book humor to the part, sounding John-Wayne tough when he drawls, just before punching out a man who insulted Hidalgo: “Mister, you can say anything you want about me. I’m gonna have to ask you not to talk about my horse that way.”

The movie claims it was “based on the life of Frank T. Hopkins,” but it would have been more accurate to say it was based on his stories. There was indeed a Hopkins who wrote a lot about mustangs, but people who looked into those stories have found that several — including his claims to have served in the U.S. Cavalry and performed in the Wild West show — appear to be untrue. More to the point, many people believe that Hopkins could not have ridden in the Ocean of Fire because there was no such race: he invented the whole thing, they say.

That wouldn’t surprise me, but it doesn’t bother me either. Even if the story was true, it’s clearly been fictionalized past the point of recognition. So why did the folks at Disney choose to pitch it that way? Could they think we’ve have gotten too literal-minded to enjoy a good old-fashioned western with a twist? If so, they need to talk to Lyle.

The Dreamers

Bernardo Bertolucci often locates his movies at the intersection between personal and political history, but he’s always more interested in the personal. In 1900, The Last Emperor, and The Conformist, he achieves a balance, saying something about the culture in which his protagonists’ stories unfold. But in films like Little Buddha and his latest, The Dreamers, the political context is no more than a poorly painted backdrop.

The Triplets of Belleville

An animated movie aimed primarily at adults, The Triplets of Belleville is unlike anything else you’ve ever seen. At the same time, it’s as familiar as an old friend you haven’t seen in years. That’s because the emotions of writer/director Sylvain Chômet’s characters are transparent even when their actions are opaque, and the world they inhabit is an amalgamation of parts from our own, most of them old but still good.

Triplets opens with a black-and-white sequence that looks like a scratchy old Max Fleischer cartoon of a newsreel. This invented bit of history turns out to be on a TV that two of the main characters are watching in a Paris suburb in the 1950s. The images in the rest of the movie are anything but scratchy or monochromatic, yet it maintains the feel of an early talkie, with plenty of sound but very little dialogue.

The almost wordless characters are defined by their actions — and by their bodies, which are exaggerated enough to function as sight gags. Champion, a melancholic French orphan who lives with his grandma and grows up to be an obsessive cyclist, is all nose and legs, his torso as thin as his calves and thighs are huge. His unflappable grandma clumps steadily along despite a clubfoot and a wandering eye, which she shoves matter-of-factly back into place when it starts to float, and their dimwitted but loyal dog Bruno skitters along on scrawny legs that tremble beneath his gelatinous bulk. The most abstract of all these stylized figures are a group of gangsters who kidnap Champion. Black rectangles with identical faces, they snap together like Legos, creating a wall of darkness when they stand side by side.

The gangsters smuggle Champion to Belleville. Grandma and Bruno follow, hooking up with the triplets of the title, a trio of beatific music-hall stars who don’t seem to have noticed that their salad days ended decades ago. Together, they save Champion.

The lack of dialogue amps up your awareness of everything else. Just watching Bruno lumber upstairs to bark at a passing train made me laugh louder than I have at a movie in months. Grandma and Bruno’s ocean crossing, which is scored to a Mozart Mass, is eerily beautiful, and Belleville, an Ur-city whose production designer calls it “a baroque combination of Paris, Montreal and New York,” is fun to watch even when nothing much is happening, partly because of the grossly fat people who crowd its sidewalks, as bloated as balloons in the Macy’s parade.

Chômet cites the classics of Disney’s golden age in the 1950s as one of his main influences for animation style, and there’s an implicit nod to those movies in the way Triplets pauses to record little moments like the shadows cast by raindrops sliding down a windowpane. It took five years and scores of people to complete Triplets (stay for the credits to appreciate their numbers — and to savor the movie’s last joke). Uncle Walt would have approved of the care with which the movie was made, but he would have been scandalized by gritty realities like the hookers working the halls of the triplets’ flophouse. Chômet, who started as a comic-book artist, put in a brief stint at Disney, but its production-line style and whitewashed sensibility weren’t for him. “I've never been paid so much to be so useless,” he says.

The director draws all his own characters and works closely with the animators who work on his films. “What I am really interested in,” he told Animation World magazine, “is drawing caricature, how far you can push it, seeing if you can achieve something really strong, almost abstract.” Triplets is his second movie, but it’s the first to augment hand drawings with computer animation. Initially wary of the technique, Chômet warmed up to it when he realized it could, as he says, take care of “all the boring stuff” like vehicles that don’t change as they move, allowing the animators to concentrate on the characters.

The movie’s infectious score ranges from music hall ballads to an acoustic guitar number in the style of Django Reinhardt to a Stomp-like performance by the triplets and Grandma Souza on an assortment of household appliances. Watching four unarmed elderly women take down the French Mafia is a pleasant bit of wish-fulfillment. Watching the same four perform a jazzy little number on newspaper, refrigerator, vacuum cleaner and bicycle wheel is even better. Getting both in one 80-minute movie, along with all of Triplets’ other visual and aural treats, is exhilarating.

If you want to feel bad about the state of movies these days, meditate on the fact that Triplets is playing on less than one-tenth as many screens as Disney’s blah Brother Bear. But if you’re looking for good news, think about this: Triplets got a standing ovation at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, and it’s been sold to 37 countries so far.

Given the chance, a lot of us clearly love to watch an unfettered imagination at play.

Coen Heads

By Elise Nakhnikian

The fourth wall has been broken so often it’s a wonder there’s anything left of it. But even at this meta moment in the history of movies, Joel and Ethan Coen’s unconventional stories stand out.

The Coen brothers, who have co-written, co-directed and co-produced nine highly stylized movies since their 1984 debut, Blood Simple, are to movies what Madonna is — or anyhow was — to pop music: They revive one mothballed genre after another, sometimes sampling several at once, and make them look sharper than ever.

Blood Simple is a no-star 1940s-style film noir, while The Man Who Wasn’t There is a slick, more Hitchockian noir. Miller’s Crossing is a 1930s-style gangster picture. Barton Fink is a portrait of a self-important Clifford Odets-type playwright set in 1940s Hollywood. The Hudsucker Proxy is a story of corporate duplicity that takes place in the ’50s but has the crisp yet creamy look of Depression-era Deco. And so on.

The Coens aren’t interested in gritty realism. Not even murder is played straight, but they exaggerate the horror rather than the thrill, aiming for something other than cheap sensation. People rarely die easily in their movies (the husband in Blood Simple, who is finally buried alive, is far from the only example, though he may be the most extreme). And when they do, their bodies aren’t easily disposed of (remember that wood chipper in Fargo?)

These guys clearly love movies.

They also love actors — especially character actors with interesting faces and stars with old-fashioned sex appeal, who might have stepped out of one of the old movies theirs are modeled on. Their crew includes Joel Coen’s wife, Frances McDormand; John Turturro; John Goodman; and Steve Buscemi, all of whom look like real people and can give the brothers the exaggerated performances they usually want, stylizing their emotions like kabuki players. Lately the in group has added George Clooney, whose macho good looks and self-mocking intelligence helped him channel Clark Gable in O Brother Where Art Thou and Cary Grant in Intolerable Cruelty, the brothers’ latest.

An update of 1930s screwball comedies like The Awful Truth and The Lady Eve, Cruelty is a perfectly serviceable vehicle, but it’s more Ford than Cadillac. The Coens’ snappy dialogue, bizarre setups and quirky supporting characters fit right into this genre, making this their most accessible movie yet. Probably not coincidentally, it’s also their least distinctive and the first they didn’t write from scratch, instead polishing somebody else’s screenplay. Aside from the brother’s top-notch technique – arresting set, sound, and costume design and beautifully paced editing – this movie is powered mainly by the sparks that fly between its high-voltage stars, the debonair Clooney and the glossy Catherine Zeta-Jones.

Maintaining your vision in Hollywood can be tough, but it’s probably easier if you have the trust, support and shared understanding of a twin/collaborator. Whatever the reason, the Coens always seem to have known what they wanted and how to get it. They’ve been granted final cut on their meticulously constructed movies from the start, and they’ve always had a good eye for talent: They were the first directors to hire composer Carter Burwell, who went on to score more than 50 movies in addition to every Coen brothers film since Blood Simple, and their first director of photography was Barry Sonnenfeld, who later shot movies like When Harry Met Sally and Big and then became a director of his own quirky hits

The brothers have a lot in common with Quentin Tarantino, another meta moviemaker whose gorgeously shot, lit, and art-directed movies plunder old genres but have a distinctive tone all their own, not to mention a smart sense of humor and a brilliant way of using popular music to help tell the story (the soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou? won a Grammy for Album of the Year).

But while Tarantino always seems to like his main characters, the Minnesota twins often seem to feel contempt for theirs. Their smart movies about dumb people, like O Brother and The Big Lebowski, can feel coldly condescending toward what Barton Fink would call “the common man.” It’s hard to care about a story when you feel no warmth for any of the characters, and it’s no coincidence that their best movies all have sympathetic characters, like McDormand’s pregnant policewoman in Fargo or Holly Hunter’s baby-craving cop and her sweetly devoted ex-con husband in Raising Arizona.

Even the snarky Coen brothers movies contained images I still remember, even if I saw them only once and years ago. Considering how fast most movies fade from memory, that’s saying a lot. But it’s not enough: Movies should be moving images in both senses of the word.

The brothers are just 46 and they’ve been averaging about one movie every two years since Blood Simple came out, so they should make a lot more before they start slowing down. That will be good news if they keep making stylish, funny, flyaway confections like Intolerable Cruelty. And if they mine more gems like Miller’s Crossing, it’ll be more than just good. It will be great.

Kill Bill—Vol. 1

By Elise Nakhnikian

Director Quentin Tarentino’s kung fu cliffhanger opens with white letters on a black screen: “Revenge is a dish best served cold.” The shopworn phrase hangs there for a beat. Then it’s redeemed by the attribution: “Old Klingon proverb.”

A few people are still giggling when the panting begins, loud and desperate. The credit sequence soon gives way to black and white footage of Uma Thurman’s battered face. She’s the one panting, and she looks panicked as two feet in pointy-toed cowboy boots stride toward her. We’re less than two minutes into the movie, and we’re already no place but Tarantino’s world.

Tarantino works by rummaging through the detritus of late 20th century, pulling out ideas here and there, adding a little connective tissue, and stitching it all together into a movie. You might think his pop-culture pastiches would feel like awkward patch jobs, but each one’s an original, as improbably light on its feet as Peter Boyle’s monster in Young Frankenstein.

Maybe that’s because Tarantino’s tongue is nowhere near his cheek. He genuinely adores the movie stars, genres, TV shows, and other pop cultural markers he resurrects in the movies he writes and directs. The songs on his soundtracks are usually handpicked personal favorites. He writes roles for his favorite actors — many of whom he has worshipped for years — just for the joy of working with them, and he doesn’t care if everyone else sneers at one of his favorites. In fact, he often makes the rest of us see what he loves about a performer, famously reviving John Travolta’s career with Pulp Fiction and briefly resurrecting Pam Grier’s with Jackie Brown.

Not all of Tarantino’s darlings are down on their luck. He wrote the starring role in Kill Bill for Thurman, who he has called “my actress.” A female version of the terse Clint Eastwood part in Sergio Leone’s westerns, the character is unlike anything else the actress has played before, but Thurman’s impressive athleticism and intensity justifies the director’s faith in her.

Like Eastwood’s in Leone’s movies, Thurman’s character is nameless, though the script calls her The Bride. She got the nickname when she was left for dead on her wedding day by The Deadly Viper Assassination Squad after they had murdered her groom and the rest of the wedding party. Four years after the massacre, she wakes up from a coma and sets out to kill every member of the squad. She gets to two of them in Vol. 1 but leaves three more — including Bill, the group’s leader — for the sequel. Along the way, she inflicts a lot of what the Army calls collateral damage.

It’s not much of a plot, and some people will be turned off by the stylized but copious violence. But for those who are not, the movie is exhilarating.

Like the syringe of adrenaline straight to the heart that revived Thurman’s character in Pulp Fiction, Tarantino’s storytelling wakes up the senses. Even the soundtrack commands your attention: A pistol fired in the opening sequence goes off with a tremendous BANG. Constant zigzags through time and space as we learn the main characters’ back stories keep things interesting, as do frequent switches between color, black and white, and sepia; silhouette shots; and other attention-getting visuals.

Tarantino says his movies usually take place in two worlds. “One of them is the ‘Quentin Universe’ of Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown — it’s heightened but more or less realistic,” he says in the press kit. “The other is the Movie World. When characters in the Quentin Universe go to the movies, the stuff they see takes place in the Movie World. Kill Bill is the first film I’ve made that takes place in the Movie World.”

The director spent his childhood watching kung fu movies at the theater and a ninja detective series on TV, and he steeped himself in Hong Kong martial arts movies and Japanese samurai and anime movies for a year before making Kill Bill. The movie features several Asian cinema stars and some equally famous behind-the-camera talent: The climactic fight scene was staged by the Chinese martial arts expert and direct who choreographed the gravity-defying action scenes in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The Matrix. The good news is, those references undoubtedly heighten the enjoyment of Tarantino and his fellow ninja buffs. The better news is, they don’t get in the way for the rest of us.

You don’t have to be a connoisseur of anime to appreciate the emotionally powerful segment done in that style by one of Japan’s leading animation studios. And you don’t have to know the yellow jump suit Thurman wears for much of the movie is an exact replica of a suit Bruce Lee wore in Game of Death to appreciate the duel she fights in a snow-covered courtyard while wearing it.

In that scene, two implacable women warriors clash in an idyllic setting, in a fight that culminates in a highly stylized death. It’s memorable stuff, and you’ll only find it in Quentin Tarentino’s Movie World.

My review of Vol. 2

American Splendor

Midway through American Splendor the movie’s subject, Harvey Pekar, runs into a woman he went to college with. He tells her about the book he’s reading and she says it’s one of her favorites. “It’s pretty truthful,” she says. “Which is rare these days.” She’s talking about something by Theodore Dreiser, but she could just as well be talking about Harvey’s own work.

Harvey — after reading his comics, it’s impossible to call him Mr. Pekar — introduced blue-collar realism to comics in the ’70s. His adult comic books come, as their tagline declares, “from off the streets of Cleveland,” and he’s not talking Shaker Heights.

A working-class Woody Allen, Harvey’s main subject is himself. He’s prickly and sardonic, whiny and defensive, obsessive-compulsive and congenitally unhappy. He often behaves badly. Yet he’s likeable in spite of himself, and he has a gift for turning his dyspeptic life into art. He’s funny, too.

His characters would barely make it into the background of most American stories, though they’re as typical as anyone can be (one thing this movie makes you think about is how there’s really no such thing as an “ordinary” person.) Like Harvey, who’s a file clerk at a VA hospital, they have dead-end, low-paying jobs, and they spend a lot of time just getting by: selling stuff for a few bucks, coaxing ailing cars back to life, waiting at bus stops.

Harvey may be easily annoyed, but he’s no misanthrope. He listens when people talk, and when he repeats their words they have a way of reverberating. He never condescends to anyone or writes anyone off, even people like Toby, a coworker who has an almost robotic way of speaking. Harvey’s wife may see Toby as “borderline autistic,” but Harvey just sees him as Toby, and their relationship — at least, as depicted in the movie — is a friendship between equals.

Harvey has been famous among the comic cognoscenti for years. He’s made a few inroads into the mainstream too, thanks to endorsements by what he calls “all the important media that tell people how to think,” but this movie will presumably introduce him to a much wider audience. He couldn’t have asked for a better calling card.

The format is as inventive as Pekar’s own work, shifting between scenes played by actors, panels from Harvey’s comics, and interviews with the real Harvey and his wife, Joyce Babner. Filmed action is often combined with comic-book techniques, like the hand-lettered descriptions in panels at the top of the screen that introduce many of the scenes. A voice-over read by the real Harvey has the same deadpan tone as his comics, though it was written by husband-wife writer/director team Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini.

This is the ultimate meta movie. First we see something happen to Harvey, then we see him turn it into a comic strip, and then we see the comic strip made into the movie we’re watching. Every now and then, the real people show up in the same scene as the people who play them, behaving just like the actors only more so. At one point, the actors playing Harvey and Joyce even watch other actors playing Harvey and Joyce reenact a scene from a play adapted from Harvey’s comics.

If all that were just a gimmick it might get tiresome, but it’s an integral part of the story. The stories Harvey writes are illustrated by a series of comic artists, each of whom draws him and his regular characters differently, so seeing different versions of them in the movie makes a kind of sense. And seeing different versions of his stories makes you think — as Harvey often does in his comics — about how stories are told and what makes the good ones work.

The movie is as episodic as the comic book, but the writers fit their scenes together like dominoes, creating seamless transitions from one to the next. A lot happens: Harvey finds his soulmate in Joyce and his life work in his comics, gets cancer and goes through a year’s worth of grueling treatments, and he and Joyce adopt the daughter of a friend who’s unable to care for her. But this movie isn’t really about any of that.

American Splendor is about the sad sweetness of life, the importance of being true to yourself, and the difficulty of being an artist and a self-taught intellectual in a country that doesn’t have much use for either. It’s about what “family values” really means and about how tales get changed in the telling. And, as Berman says in the press kit, it’s about “a man who found his life through comic books.”

If that sounds like a lot to pack into the musings of “a nobody flunky selling records on the side for a buck,” it shouldn’t. After all, as Harvey says, “ordinary life is pretty complex stuff.”

Swimming Pool

With her watchful, slanted eyes and sliver of a smirk, Charlotte Rampling has a feline edge of mystery and barely suppressed ferocity that few directors have known how to tap into. But for French director Francois Ozon, who wrote the lead in Swimming Pool for her, the 58-year-old actress is an inspiration. “Swimming Pool, like Under the Sand, is the fruit of a true collaboration between Charlotte and me,” he told Cinema magazine. “We’ve found one another, and we’re not about to let each other go.”

Under the Sand, the unsettling story of a devoted wife who slowly goes mad after her husband’s sudden disappearance, became an art-house hit in this country and did well in France largely on the strength of Rampling’s powerful performance. She’s also onscreen for almost every scene in Swimming Pool, the story of a woman who quite deliberately creates her own reality, but this time she dances a compelling tango with an equally strong young actress.

Bad Boys II

Bad Boys, which made a movie star of Will Smith, was a $10 million sleeper that the studio almost pulled the plug on. Smith, who played too-cool-to-care Miami cop Mike Lowry, and Martin Lawrence, who played his perpetually frustrated partner, Marcus Burnett, were brought in after Dana Carvey and Jon Lovitz, for whom the script was developed, dropped out. Director Michael Bay, a 28-year-old who had directed only music videos and ads, had only a pittance for rewrites, so his lead actors improvised heavily to make the script work for them. In the process, they came up with the banter that was one of the loose-limbed movie’s greatest charms. Bay and producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson did the rest, giving the movie their signature polished look, high-voltage energy, and copious explosions.

Bad Boys II, the sequel the studio was panting for, cost more than seven times as much, which makes you appreciate the slick look of the original. It also makes you wonder what all the extra millions were spent on. A lot must have gone to salaries, since both stars are now hot and Bay has since upped his salary by directing hits like Pearl Harbor and Armageddon. But a lot must have literally gone up in flames. Bad Boys II is Bad Boys on steroids, with more and bigger explosions, a much larger and classier fleet of vehicles to trash, and a tendency to take things too far.

Once again, Mike and Marcus are trying to keep a big drug deal from going through. Complicating the bust this time is Syd (Gabrielle Union), Marcus’s sister and Mike’s girlfriend, who gets abducted by the dealer in the course of her work. Syd, it seems, is a gun-toting, stunt-driving, bad guy-seducing undercover DEA agent — a twist that the talented but sweet Union can’t quite pull off.

Syd’s romance with Mike does not convince either, though Union is easy to buy as a love interest. The damp head of that match seems to be Smith, who has yet to pull off a convincing onscreen romance. But the lack of chemistry between Mike and Syd doesn’t detract from the fun as much as the chill between Mike and Marcus.

Smith is a bona-fide movie star, and he always plays smooth-talking ladies’ men. He’s a man’s man as well, though, and his characters tend to do their real bonding with their buddies. In Bad Boys, his Mike played Oscar to Marcus’s Felix: the two squabbled constantly, but the affection between them was palpable. In the sequel, Marcus seems truly fed up with Mike, which makes his complaints a lot less fun to listen to. Their relationship may be more realistic, but it’s not nearly as funny — and who wants realism in a movie like this?

Bruckheimer and Simpson (who gets a co-producer credit on Bad Boys II although he died in 1996) pretty much invented the blow-’em-ups that dominate our summers. From their first effort, 1983’s Flashdance, the producers of Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop, and Days of Thunder knew how to tap into our lizard brains.

Their short attention span theater always features underdogs and rebels who triumph by breaking the rules, but the plot is not the point. The real appeal lies in watching self-assured young men and clothing-averse young women fret, flirt, zip around in glistening machines and generally act cool, burnished by picture-postcard-perfect camerawork and lighting and backed by pounding soundtracks. And, of course, to watch stuff get blown up.

But that golden formula may be losing its sheen. Like junkies upping the dose to maintain the same high, Bruckheimer and his imitators have to keep giving us more bang for the buck just to keep our adrenaline flowing at the same rate, and you can only do so much of that before you OD. Even Marcus seems to think things have gone too far in Bad Boys II. “You’re gonna break a world record for gunfights in a week!” he tells Mike.

There are at least seven ferocious gun battles in this movie, plus five drawn-out chases, including one stunner on a bridge, where cars on a fleeing transport truck are let loose one by one to somersault into the cop cars speeding in pursuit. There’s also an infestation of rats; a sawn-apart body whose gory parts are crammed into a barrel; a severed finger; embalmed bodies that tumble out of a mortuary truck into heavy traffic, where some get run over; and a scene inside a mortuary where Mike roots around inside corpses in search of evidence.

Are we having fun yet?

Today I Vote for My Joey

As stagebound and talky as a sitcom and starring a feisty group of card-carrying AARP members, Today I Vote for My Joey plays like a Yiddish version of The Golden Girls, but producer-writer-director Aviva Kempner has more on her mind than geriatric sex jokes. The subject of this 20-minute short is the Florida voting fiasco of the last presidential election, and Kempner wastes no time on subtleties in driving home her point. As one character puts it: “They stole the election from us!”

The movie is playing this week at the New Jersey International Film Festival, where it was named this year’s Best Short Narrative Film/Video. It opens on the day of the 2000 presidential election in Palm Beach, where a group of elderly Jewish friends and the Haitian home health nurse who tends to one of them are all raring to cast their votes for Al Gore and that nice Jewish boy, “Joey” Lieberman.

The old friends kvell at the prospect of voting for the first Jewish vice presidential candidate ever while the nurse talks about how proud she’ll be to participate in a free election after the political repression she experienced in Haiti. But when it comes time to vote, the nurse is shocked to hear that her relatives have been turned away from the polls and the Jews are horrified to learn that, confused by their butterfly ballots, they voted for “that anti-Semite [Pat] Buchanan.”

There are no gray areas in this brightly lit film, which makes no effort to appeal to those who don’t share its politics. “It’s a real Democratic revenge film,” Kempner said in a phone interview from her Washington, D.C. home. “There’s no doubt about that.” Paired at the festival with Unprecedented, a documentary about the 2000 election that its website describes as “a disturbing picture of an election marred by suspicious irregularities, electoral injustices, and sinister voter purges in a state governed by the winning candidate's brother,” Kempner’s short is a celluloid call to action for people who think the wrong man won. When the two films played together recently in DC, she says, “People were laughing during my movie, and during Unprecedented there was a lot of booing. I think the two films together are a real catharsis for people.”

Though new to fiction films, Kempner is an old hand at documentaries. Her first movie, which she produced and co-wrote, was Partisans of Vilna, an account of the Jewish resistance against the Nazis. Promises to Keep, a documentary on the homeless whose narration she wrote, was nominated for an Academy Award, and The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg, a film about the Jewish baseball star of the 1930s and ’40s that she wrote, produced and directed, was nominated for an Emmy.

Kempner’s movies reflect her passions, which tend to center around what she calls “Jewish heroes.” The daughter of a Jewish-American soldier and a Polish Jew who survived a German labor camp by passing for Catholic, she was born in Berlin shortly after World War II. She grew up in Detroit, under the shadow of her parents’ memories of the Holocaust that killed three of her grandparents and one of her aunts. (Full disclosure: Her stepfather and my dad were good friends, so I have vivid childhood memories of her family -- and of seeing her as a comically full-throated, fur-coated mother in her high school's production of Bye Bye Birdie.)

After getting a masters degree in urban planning and a law degree, Kempner practiced law for a while, but she was soon drawn to moviemaking, inspired by seeing Roots and Holocaust on TV and by obsessive re-readings of Leon Uris' Mila 18, a book about the uprising of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. “Being a child of survivors, I have this feeling that I have a responsibility for telling these under-known stories,” she says. “That Jews did resist the Nazis, or what an amazing player Hank Greenberg was, or how devastating it was for these Jews to inadvertently vote for Pat Buchanan.” Even her production company bears witness, named for the maternal grandparents who died in Auschwitz.

Kempner made Joey under the auspices of the American Film Institute’s Directing Workshop for Women. She decided to focus on the 2000 election because it was “the thing that I felt the most upset about,” she says. “What was so awful was that the butterfly ballot was an innocent mistake, but why not have one consistent system for voting? I think we need voting reform in this country.”

“This is a good time to be thinking about that,” she adds, “since the politicians are already campaigning for the next election.”

The Italian Job

The Italian Job, an American remake of an English cult classic, is as stripped down and efficient as its Mini Cooper costars, and almost as quirkily cool.

Even if you didn’t see the original, you’ve seen variations on the theme: A motley collection of criminals, each with a different area of expertise, gets together to do the ultimate heist. After a lot of planning and preparation, they start a chain of events as elaborate, improbable, and beautiful to watch as a Rube Goldberg machine.

This gang consists of Charlie (Mark Wahlberg), the mellow mastermind; Handsome Rob (Jason Statham), the suave driver; Left Ear (Mos Def), the wry demolitions expert; Lyle (Seth Green), the geeky computer genius; and Stella (Charlize Theron), the gorgeous “professional safe and vault technician.”

Norton is monodimensional as the bad guy, coasting on bad-guy cruise control as a thief who robbed and killed Stella’s master-thief father. What’s worse, the pivotal role of Charlie is miscast. Wahlberg’s guarded passivity worked well in movies like Boogie Nights, Rock Star, and Three Kings, where he played naïve kids who stumble into strange new worlds, but his stillness and lack of range look more like stagnation when he takes on a quick-witted charmer like Charlie.

But not even putting a stiff at the wheel can slow down this joyride. Unlike the too-cool crooks in the recent Ocean’s Eleven remake, who smirked through their carefully programmed moves like a troop of department store dummies, this crew has real energy and a few endearingly rough edges. Theron is particularly impressive, investing what might have been a throwaway part with dignity and making us feel Stella’s pain.

Some of the supporting players are real characters, too, the kinds you rarely see these days outside of Quentin Tarantino movies. Like Skinny Pete, a colossus of flesh with long black braids whose petite girlfriend nestles up against him like a lapdog, or the Ukrainian fence who never seems to stop talking — until his mouth gets him into trouble.

Most of the dialogue is more functional than flashy, but now and now and then something glints enough to be noticed. (“If there’s one thing I know,” says Skinny Pete, “it’s never to mess with Mother Nature, mother-in-laws, or mother-freakin’ Ukrainians.”) The pulse-pounding music is expertly integrated with the action, maybe because first-time director F. Gary Gray cut his teeth on hip-hop videos. Best of all, the chase scenes feel fresh.

The one that opens the movie gooses tired conventions like tearing through a vegetable stand or nearly colliding with another vehicle at a crossroads by using the canals of Venice in place of roads and motorboats instead of cars, and the second features those Mini Coopers. Perky in patriotic red, white, and blue, the little cars bump down stairs and through underground passages like the coolest toys FAO Schwartz ever dreamed of.

And what a treat to see a movie that treats killings as not just morally bankrupt but uncool. Charlie prides himself on never using violence, and the worst his crew doles out is a couple of punches and a few minor traffic accidents. Only Steve uses a gun: That’s what makes him the bad guy. Charlie ends his first showdown with Steve by decking him, but first he lands a sucker punch to the ego. “You’ve got no imagination,” he says with contempt.

Ararat

Addressing his generals in 1939, Hitler reportedly assured them that the world would not object to the Final Solution. “Who remembers the extermination of the Armenians?” he supposedly asked.

That story may be apocryphal, but it’s certainly true that not many people remembered even then, less than a quarter of a century after the Turkish government implemented a systematic campaign against its Armenian citizens that resulted in the deaths of perhaps as many as 1.5 million people—more than two-thirds of Turkey’s Armenian population. And not many people know about that genocide still, thanks to the Turkish government’s steadfast denial that it ever happened. (Turkey’s official story is that the number of Armenian civilians killed numbered far less than a million, and that their deportations and deaths were reprisals the Turkish army was forced to take when its Armenian citizens collaborated with Russia, Turkey’s enemy in World War I. Turkish citizens who dispute this view of history risk being tried and imprisoned for “publicly denigrating Turkish identity.”)

Writers and filmmakers who tell stories about any genocide face an awesome challenge: How do you portray such an enormous, almost unimaginable evil without lapsing into kitschy sentimentality or self-righteous posturing? The Armenian genocide adds another challenge to that one: How do you describe a genocide that never officially happened?

Atom Egoyan, the writer and director of Ararat, has responded to that challenge by making his movie not just about the genocide but about Turkey’s denial as well. A Canadian-Armenian director whose best-known film in the U.S. is probably The Sweet Hereafter, Egoyan makes coolly thoughtful movies with multiple storylines that crisscross in unpredictable ways. Like Raffi, one of Ararat’s main characters, he seems to instinctively mistrust attempts to tug at the heartstrings. The emotions in his movies are nearly always underplayed, even when a catastrophic event—the death of a busload of children, the dissolution of a family, the Armenian genocide—lies at their core. Ararat is his most heartfelt work yet. At the same time, it’s vintage Egoyan, as much about the difficulty of determining the truth and the crippling effects of violence and denial as it is about the genocide itself.

Two main sets of characters intersect in Ararat. The first is Ani (Egoyan’s wife and frequent star Arsinée Khanjian), a nervously motor-mouthed professor of art history; her son Raffi (David Alpay); and Celia (Marie-Josee Croze), Ani’s stepdaughter and Raffi’s lover. The second is a group of filmmakers, led by director Edward Saroyan (Charles Aznavour) and his assistant Rouben (Eric Bogosian), who are making a movie about an April 1915 showdown between Turkish soldiers and an Armenian community under the protection of an American missionary in Van. The filmmakers enlist Ani to serve as a technical advisor because she’s an expert on the Armenian artist Arshile Gorky, a survivor of Van.

The main characters are all intent on surfacing some truth. Ani studies Armenian artist Arshile Gorky obsessively, convinced that his painting of himself and his mother is “a repository of our [Armenians’] sacred code,” explaining “who we are, and why, and how we got here.” Celia keeps showing up at Ani’s lectures to badger her, convinced that Ani is responsible for her father’s death. Raffi, whose own father was killed while attempting to assassinate a Turkish diplomat, travels to Turkey to try to understand the roots of his father’s rage against the Turks.

Meanwhile, the filmmakers do their best to convey the truth of the genocide, which often means creating characters are scenes that are factually inaccurate but “true in spirit,” as Rouben puts it. Egoyan gently mocks their conventional-looking, often sentimentalized feature, which shows the Armenian quarter as an idyllic haven, at the same time that he uses it to convey most of the facts we learn about the genocide.

Egoyan pieces together his movie in his usual nonlinear fashion, interrupting the flow of his contemporary story to address the protests of the genocide deniers or cutting from a fictional scene in the film-within-a-film to a “real” one showing its creators at work. His insistence on showing us the gears of his story-making machinery generally appeals to our heads, reminding us that everything we’re watching has been filtered through someone’s perspective and that we can never know the ultimate truth about history.

But every now and then, he bypasses the head and aims straight for the heart. In one pivotal scene, Ani ruins an emotional take in Saroyan’s movie by walking through the set as he’s shooting. An actor playing a missionary in charge of the group being filmed takes offense and berates her for her thoughtlessness. Speaking of his fellow actors as if they were the people they portray, he describes the horrors that have just befallen them and the near-hopeless situation they’re in now. A stark reminder of the very real horrors behind the fiction, his words leave even Ani speechless.

Written for TimeOFF

Comedian

Last March, Jerry Seinfeld appeared on Letterman’s Late Show to deliver one of his singsong monologues. “The question is this,” he said: “What have I been doing?” The answer, he added, was: “Nothing.”

Like most of Seinfeld’s material, the joke worked because it seemed true. After all, it had been more than two years since the comedian had pulled the plug on his sitcom. He’d done no other TV shows and no movies, and how hard could it have been for him to cook up a comedy routine? You could picture him knocking it out in a day from his house in the Hamptons. But you’d be wrong.

That monologue was part of a routine Seinfeld had been developing for more than a year. During that time, director Christian Charles and producer Gary Streiner, the team behind Seinfeld’s American Express ads, followed him in and out of comedy clubs as he tested his new material and schmoozed other comedians. The result is Comedian, an entertaining tribute to the work that goes into making comedy look easy.

Charles and Streiner alternate Seinfeld’s story with that of a rising young comic named Orny Adams. Arrogant, starved for fame, and perpetually frustrated, Adams is pure id to Seinfeld’s superego. While Seinfeld seems as unflappable offstage as on, Adams rails against everything, including his gently supportive manager, his audiences, and any comedian who gets more laughs than he does.

But, as this movie shows, the two have a lot in common with one another -- and with the rest of their fellow comedians, all of whom love nothing more than being onstage, yet rarely feel at ease while they’re performing. “You’re never really comfortable [onstage],” Seinfeld tells Adams. “Even when you think you are, you never really are.” The comedians in Comedian are almost never satisfied with their work, obsessing about the jokes before a performance and about the weak spots afterward. You wonder whether all share every ignoble emotion that Adams blurts out (“the jealousy in this business is ridiculous,” he says), but most have just learned to keep their neuroses more or less hidden.

Practically the whole country is on a first-name basis with Seinfeld (that’s Jerry to you). On his show and in his stand-up routines, he portrays the sane center, a regular Joe dedicated to the pursuit of stimulation and comfort in precisely the right proportions. The only difference between him and us, it would seem, is that he’s neater, richer, and better at locating the humor in everyday life.

Seinfeld drops that pretense in Comedian. When Adams regrets having become a comedian while some of his friends got rich on Wall Street, Seinfeld wrinkles his nose at the thought of aspiring to a conventional career. Instead, he offers what he describes as his favorite story about show business. One winter, he says, Glenn Miller’s orchestra got stranded in the middle of nowhere. Trudging through the snow, carrying their instruments and luggage, they came upon a cozy little house. The musicians, says Seinfeld, looked in the window to see a family gathered by a fire, talking and laughing. “And one guy turns to the other guy and says: ‘How can people live like that?’”

Comedian's tagline is “Where does comedy come from?” It makes a few feints at that question, but it never gets far. When one of the filmmakers asks Seinfeld if he was funny as a kid, for instance, he says no, not particularly. “When you were growing up,” he muses, “everybody was funny. And then at some point, everyone grew up and got jobs.” Ba-dum-dum: hearty laugh; end of discussion.

The movie often makes the point that Seinfeld’s schlep through the comedy club circuit, where most comedians start out, is a reverse career move for the star. (“I’m flying in from LA to work in West Orange, New Jersey,” he faux-marvels.) But returning to his roots was a smart move. Like Jay Leno, Bill Cosby, and other established comics, Seinfeld keeps doing stand-up because he’s gifted at it and he loves doing it. And, though he may not need any more money or fame, he still needs a challenge.

Seinfeld never displays any serious doubts in Comedian—he never even seems to be in a bad mood—but his onstage energy increases as his routine grows longer and stronger. By the time he appears on Late Show, he strides out like an athlete. And when Leno claims that he’s still motivated by fear of failure and boasts that he’s “never touched a dime of [his] Tonight Show money,” Seinfeld snorts. It’s absurd, he says, for Leno to think he still might “wind up as a garbage man.”

At times like that, Comedian reminds you why Seinfeld won those acting Emmys. He may play a regular guy on TV, but he’s not one. Not really. He’s out there in the snow with the other performers, peering through our windows, marveling at what he sees.

Simone

Viktor Taransky (Al Pacino) is a struggling Hollywood director whose spoiled star has just walked off his movie. The studio, convinced that he’ll never get another big name to replace her, pressures him to shelve the picture and tells him it’ll be his last. But Taransky stumbles onto another option: a computer-synthesized actress who looks and sounds however he wants her to, does whatever he asks, and makes no demands of her own. He names her Simone (short for Simulation One) and shoehorns her into his movie in place of the departed diva. A star is born.

Let’s take a moment to daydream about what a writer and director with a light touch and a gift for social satire—Preston Sturges, say, or Howard Hawks—might have done with a premise like that.

Now wake up and brace yourself for Simone.

Writer/director Andrew Niccol’s earlier movies, Gattaca and The Truman Show, both featured clever premises, interesting lead roles, and good acting. Truman also benefited from the guidance of director Peter Weir, a master at capturing life's mysteries on celluloid. But the worlds Niccol created were as one-dimensional as painted backdrops, and his scripts skittered over the surface of the Big Questions they raised (genetic engineering and our unhealthy fascination with “reality” TV, respectively) like those bugs that walk on water.

Simone makes those two look deep. A screed against fakery that founders on its own lack of conviction, it lurches from serious slapstick to broadly satirical, with a jog in the direction of Hitchcockian mistaken-identity chills toward the end. And the love story it tosses into the mix, a stop-and-start romance between Taransky and his ex-wife Elaine (Catherine Keener), is simply preposterous.

As the blithely materialistic studio head who fired Taransky, Keener plays her part for laughs, creating a likeable villain who made it on looks, unshakeable self-confidence, and a cheerily coldblooded commitment to success. Her character is fun to watch, but she doesn’t belong in the same movie, let alone the same love scenes, as Pacino, who plays his part with barely a glint of humor. Now and then he emotes, in hammy Scent of a Woman style, and there’s a nice sense of play in the way he mimes Simone’s expressions and gestures. But most of the time he just plods through the movie, looking exhausted and occasionally perplexed by the goings-on around him.

The movie’s internal logic is inconsistent, too. If Taransky doesn’t know anything about computers, how does he figure out how to make movies with a simulated actress—and later turn her into a hugely popular recording star—without any help? Considering all the people who work on a studio film and all the gossip that leaks from the set during a shoot, how is it that no one so much as suspects that Simone isn’t real?

Simone does get in a few jabs at show business. Viktor’s movies look familiarly pretentious with their yellow- or blue-toned scenes, portentous dialogue, and symbolic imagery. The uncredited actress who plays Simone projects a glossy perfection and perpetual perkiness that evokes hyphenate personalities like Jennifer Lopez. And it’s mildly amusing to hear about Simone’s “goodwill tour of the Third World” or to see her, holographically projected onto a concert stage, singing “Natural Woman” to a stadium of adoring fans.

But most of the time, Simone tries to flatter us into feeling like savvy insiders with tired stuff like a star’s tantrums over the size of her trailer or the rant of a tabloid editor who brags that he “had something on Mother Theresa once, but then she died.”

What’s worse, the movie has almost nothing to say about the dilemma it poses—the fact that, as Viktor puts it, “our ability to manufacture fraud now exceeds our ability to detect it.” Instead, it degenerates into the story of a midlife crisis. When financial success doesn’t make him happy, Viktor realizes that he feels overshadowed by his own creation. He made a star of Simone, he decides, “to convince the world that I exist”—but fame and fortune aren’t important. What really matters is the love of his flesh-and-blood ex-wife and daughter.

That’s an awfully flabby wrap-up for a promising premise. Never mind Sturges and Hawkes; even Viktor Taransky could do better.

Written for TimeOFF

Kissing Jessica Stein

Like the heroine of its title, Kissing Jessica Stein is slight but (slightly) charming.

Think of it as When Harry Met Sally in reverse, a sugar-coated rom-com about two people who try to find true love together and wind up as true friends instead. The twist, as you probably know by now, is that the two are women.