Hero

Upon its release two years ago, Hero became a Chinese pop culture phenomenon. With a budget of $30 million, it was the most expensive movie ever made in that county, and it became China’s biggest domestic hit to date. Impressed by all the hype and certain he’d nabbed the next Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Miramax’s Harvey Weinstein paid a monumental $20 million for US and other distribution rights. Yet this movie almost didn’t make it into American theaters.

Weinstein kept stalling Hero’s release, apparently fearful that it wouldn’t appeal to American audiences after all. Meanwhile, he chopped about 20 minutes from a version that got a limited European run. But he finally released the US version, uncut, after Quentin Tarantino urged him to – and agreed to let Weinstein advertise it as a Tarantino “presentation.”

That explains why Tarantino’s name appears at the beginning of the credits, but chances are you’d be thinking about him even if it didn’t. Like Tarantino’s Kill Bill two-parter, Hero is an art house version of a “grind house” martial arts movie.

Director Zhang Yimou started as a still photographer, and it shows. Like Zhang’s first feature, Red Sorghum (1987) – and like the first part of Tarantino’s double feature, which loaded most of its character development into Volume 2 – Hero is light on plot, heavy on atmosphere, and a Chinese wedding feast for the eyes.

The movie, set over 2,000 years ago, begins as a sword fighter so anonymous his name is Nameless (nicely underplayed by martial arts superstar Jet Li) is ushered in to see the king of Qin, one of seven warring provinces that made up what is now China. It seems that Nameless has killed the three assassins who were trying to kill the king, and now he’s claiming his reward. We see the story play out as Nameless tells the tale of how he killed the killers, Long Sky (Donnie Yen), Broken Sword (Tony Leung Chiu Wai) and Flying Snow (Maggie Cheung) – and then, challenged by the king, retells it. In the process, we see the fairy-tale romance between the sad-eyed Broken Sword and the defiant Flying Snow come to not one but three tragic ends. We also get an earnest message about giving peace a chance.

Hero has been compared to Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, since it uses that movie’s copiously copied device of telling different versions of the same story. But what’s more impressive is the way its meticulous compositions and painterly use of color echo the Japanese master’s visuals.

Hero borrows one of Kurosawa’s favorite set-ups, shooting long shots with long lenses against spectacular backgrounds to capture the pageantry and power of a platoon of cavalrymen on the gallop or an army of foot soldiers massing at a gate. Those majestic landscapes and expertly choreographed crowd scenes give his sparingly used close-ups that much more impact, as our eyes, coaxed wide open by the sumptuous visuals, search the actors’ faces for signs of the emotions their characters are often trying to hide. His use of color also wakes up the senses as each of the three versions of the story plays out in a different hue.

The fight scenes are magnificent, starting with the contrast between the actors’ lethal-looking moves and the serenity of their flowing hair and clothes. That contrast is magnified by camera tricks like the mix of stop-motion and slow-motion photography moves that were pioneered in Hong Kong martial arts movies and popularized in this country in The Matrix (think water droplets suspended in mid-descent until they’re dispelled by the slow-motion thrust of a sword), and by gravity-defying wire fighting that lets combatants run through the air or literally walk on water. Zhang and director of photography Christopher Doyle film it all against stunning backdrops, orchestrating gorgeous gusts of falling yellow leaves in one scene and sending Nameless and Broken Sword back and forth above the placid surface of a mountain-fringed lake in another.

Japanese kodo drummers and haunting, steel-guitar-like ancient lute give a timeless feel to a soundtrack that features violin music by Itzhak Perlman and a score by Tan Dun, who composed the music for Crouching Tiger.

Zhang, one of the best-known of China’s Fifth Generation of filmmakers (so called because they were in the fifth graduating class of the Beijing Film Academy), is also one of the most versatile, constantly trying new genres and visual styles. His first few films, which included Judou and Raise the Red Lantern, were historical dramas. His next three were about life in contemporary China. As he told Asia Connections shortly after completing that series: “they all come with different styles. Not One Less is like a documentary. The Road Home is like a poetic essay, while Happy Times is a comedy. So for me, I'm satisfied with this trilogy, but it's time for me to move on. That's why I'm starting to make martial arts films.”

Zhang hit the ground running with his first martial arts movie, creating a story as evanescent but lovely to watch as Nameless and Broken Sword’s duel on the lake.

Written for TimeOff

Intimate Strangers and Open Water

By Elise Nakhnikian

Practically everyone agrees that there aren’t enough good film scripts these days. But what does that mean, exactly? I’ve been thinking about that since watching Open Water and Intimate Strangers last weekend.

Open Water should have been a stone cold summer chiller. Loosely based on the story of two people who were left behind by their dive boat off Australia’s Great Barrier Reef and never found, it takes us into the ocean with our couple as they to see what will get them first: the bloodthirsty sharks circling them or the rescue boats that they’re slowly losing faith in. Yet Intimate Strangers, whose story is far less dramatic, is a more interesting movie.

Intimate Strangers is a variation on a theme seen in countless other movies: A repressed man and an unhappy, perhaps unreliable beauty free one another by falling in love. But inventive touches and deft handling orchestrated by director Patrice LeConte keep things unpredictable and intriguing.

Anna (Sandrine Bonnaire) and William (Fabrice Luchini) meet when Anna knocks on the wrong door on her first visit to a psychoanalyst, ending up with the tax analyst next door. William, the tax analyst, listens sympathetically to Anna’s marital woes, taking her for a new client in need of help with a divorce. When he realizes her mistake, he’s too rattled and she’s too rushed to get things straight. The confusion continues for a session or two, and by the time it gets sorted out Anna and William have come to depend on their talks.

They keep meeting, and Anna gains confidence as she sees the effect she is having on William, growing more light-hearted and seductive. William lightens up a bit too, even doing an ecstatic little shimmy one night to Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour.” Bonnaire and Luchini make us care about these two and believe in their growing attraction, but there’s more to the movie than the self-effacing charisma of its stars.

A few well-drawn minor characters, including William’s meddlesome secretary, his sad-eyed ex-lover, and the psychoanalyst down the hall, who William consults about how to “treat” Anna, keep popping up, taking on new shadings each time. His interactions with these other people tell us a lot about William – and provide some wry comic relief.

In contrast, Open Water focuses relentlessly on Susan (Blanchard Ryan) and Daniel (Daniel Travis). The only other character who gets more than a few seconds’ screen time is a boorish passenger aboard their dive boat who’s featured in an overlong sequence illustrating the confusion that allowed Susan and Daniel to be left behind.

Ironically, that sequence is more dramatic than most of what happens after Susan and Daniel are abandoned at sea. Except for the occasional outburst, the two seem remarkably nonplussed, alternately bickering and nurturing each other just as they did at home or in their hotel. As they argue over whether to swim for a distant boat, their lack of affect borders on bizarre: It’s the bland leading the bland.

The married couple the movie was based on disappeared sometime after their dive boat departed. (Nobody knows when, since it took a couple of days for anyone to realize they were missing and mount a search, by which time they were nowhere to be found). That lack of knowledge gave director/writer Chris Kentis a blank slate. He chose to fill it by creating banal characters, making them react to the crisis largely as if it weren’t happening, and shooting in aggressively lackluster digital video. His purpose may have been to make us feel like we’re watching a home movie as it unspools (he likes to call the movie “Blair Witch meets Jaws,”), but he succeeded only in draining most of the thrill from an inherently suspenseful subject.

The most interesting thing about Open Water is the fact that the sharks you see circling the actors were all real – and really in the water with Ryan and Travis – but you can’t tell that by watching the movie. With computer-generated special effects as good as they are these days, using real sharks has the feel of a publicity stunt – or a cost-saving measure, since the movie was made for less than half a million.

If Open Water is Blair Witch meets Jaws, then Intimate Strangers is Vertigo meets Sex, Lies and Videotape, with its copious sex talk, fascinating female lead, and besotted leading man. I thought of Vertigo during an unexplained scene in a train station where Anna faints, and during the frequent close-ups of just part of her face or body, which deliver her to us in shards that echo the disjointed stories she tells William about her life.

Open Water favors low-angle shots too, but the reason is more prosaic: surface-level shots of the ocean help us assume Susan and Daniel’s vantage point – which leaves us struggling to see clearly, our line of sight broken up by waves so small they’d be almost invisible if viewed from above.

In movies as in every other kind of storytelling, what ultimately matters most is not what story you choose to tell but how you tell it. And that’s why Intimate Strangers teases while Open Water tanks.

Before Sunset

Before Sunrise went quickly to video after its release nine years ago, written off by many critics and most moviegoers as a talk-heavy, anachronistic chick flick. So when they released their sequel, Before Sunset, director Richard Linklater and his stars and cowriters, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, must have been braced for another brush-off.

Maybe that’s why Hawke’s character Jesse, defends love stories at the start of this film. Jesse is in Paris at the end of a tour to promote his new novel, the story of a young American man and a young Frenchwoman who meet on a train, fall in love, and spend a day and night in Vienna before parting. He wrote a love story, he tells a group of journalists, because one of the most dramatic things that ever happened to him was “to meet somebody, to make that connection.”

That’s true of a lot of us, of course, which explains why we love movie romances – and why this seamlessly constructed little beauty is so emotionally resonant.

The affair Jesse fictionalized in his book was also the subject of Before Sunrise. That movie ends with Jesse and Delpy’s Celine continuing on their separate journeys after promising to meet again in Vienna in six months. But, as we learn in the sequel, one of them failed to show up. So when Celine shows up in this sequel nine years later, just as Jesse’s interview is ending, the two have a lot to catch up on – and only about an hour before Jesse has to catch a plane home to the States.

Born talkers, the two rely mainly on words to connect, yet their torrent of talk hardly ever feels scripted or stiff. That’s partly because they joke and tease easily, but it’s mostly because of how deftly Linklater and his stars translate talk into action. Speech is a form of recreation for them, and they bat words back and forth like pros.

The combination of sweetness and wit in the intelligent but unguarded Delpy, who has an emotional transparency that seems more American than French, warms up the sometimes off-puttingly cool Hawke, whose Jesse gazes at Celine with pure adoration. Jesse may have a wife and son across the ocean and Celine may have a boyfriend and a comfortable life in Paris, but they’re so clearly right for each other that we root for their reunion.

The will-they-or-won’t-they tension grows as Celine and Jesse shed layers of defenses and acknowledge their attraction to each other. When they first met, as Celine points out, they were too young to realize how rare a thing the connection between them was, but now they’re old enough to appreciate it – and so do we. “It seems like we've seen this a million times: First, youthful romanticism and ideas, and then adult disappointments,” Linklater told Salon. “But what about adult growth and adult passion? You take passionate, intelligent people, and you add age -- that's a nice formula.”

There are other nice formulas at work in this movie, like having the time that passed in the story match the time that has passed between movies, so we can search the actors’ faces as closely as they examine each others’ for signs of age. It’s also a nice idea to give Julie and Jesse only as much time with each other as is left in the movie, so we don’t miss a single gesture or word.

Linklater and cinematographer Lee Daniel, who shot Linklater’s first feature film and several others since, change the picturesque backgrounds frequently enough so you don’t feel as if you’re watching a monologue. Yet they don’t play up the glamour of Paris as much as they might, leaving the klieg lights and cranes back in Hollywood. Linklater told Salon that his aim was to make it “seem like a documentary, like we're just following these people.”

Ten or twenty years ago ago, a movie like this would probably have been made by a European director, but Linklater is part of a new generation or two of inventive American directors with distinctive styles, a diverse group that includes Quentin Tarantino, David O. Russell, and Sofia Coppola. Of his peers, he may be closest in sensibility to Alexander Payne, the director of Citizen Ruth and Election, whose work as grounded in Omaha as Linklater’s usually is in Austin.

Linklater has a more benevolent world view than Payne, and he tends to be fonder of his characters, but the real hallmark of his style is the delight he takes in listening to people talk. Whoever ambles into range of his bemused gaze, you can be sure Linklater will hear him out, whether out of curiosity, for the sheer fun of it, or just to be polite. He’s a quintessentially American type: the artist as regular guy. And with Before Sunset, he has presented us with a deceptively simple gift – a love story that he calls “a romance for realists.”

Written for TimeOFF

Osama

The first movie made in Afghanistan since the Taliban came into power in 1996, the first feature-length film by director/screenwriter/editor Siddiq Barmak, and the winner of this year’s Golden Globe award for best foreign-language film, Osama catapults its director into the first rank of filmmakers. In just 82 minutes he conveys the helplessness and corrosive fear of life under a totalitarian regime — with a minimum of dialogue and without the wall-to-wall mood music that carpets so many movies these days. Instead, Barmak simply and unhurriedly tells an elegantly constructed story, letting us share his characters’ trepidation and horror as it unfolds.

As the movie opens, a group of women swathed in burkas gather to demonstrate for the right to work. They’re chased off the street by Taliban with cudgels, guns, and high-pressure hoses, and those who don’t escape are herded into cages. Later on, we see the “infidel” journalist who was filming the demonstration sentenced to death for his transgression while another Westerner is sentenced to be stoned to death for “advocating profanity,” a trumped-up charge apparently aimed at getting rid of a woman who doesn’t know her place.

Meanwhile our heroine, a 12-year-old girl (Marina Golbahari) who lives with her mother and grandmother, starts out as a virtual prisoner in her one-room house. The men in the family have all died in the warfare that has been decimating the country for decades, and the Taliban forbids women to attend school, to work, or even to go out in public without a male escort.

With no money left and no way to earn more, the women of this shrunken family are reduced to disguising their beloved child as a boy and sending her out to work, although she’s terrified of what will happen if her secret is discovered. We see enough of how the Taliban operate to understand something of the risk she takes every time she sets foot outside her door — especially once she winds up in a madrassa under the watchful gaze of a black-bearded Talib.

What we can’t imagine from the comfort of our easy chairs we can read in the actors’ faces and body language. Filming began less than a year after the fall of the Taliban, and “the shadow of the Taliban was still in their own minds and their hearts,” Barmak says of his cast on his DVD commentary. The director spotted Golbahari, who was 12 at the time, when she was begging on the streets of Kabul. “I was so moved by her eyes,” he says. “I was sure she had seen a lot of suffering.” He later learned that her father was arrested several times for selling music, which was forbidden by the fundamentalist regime. The trauma Golbahari lived through is expressed in her gravity and stillness as Osama, who smiles only once, and then only briefly. It’s also in the hopeless sound of her crying and the wariness with which she moves through the world.

If you’re getting the impression that this is a dirge of a movie, you’re right. But there’s too much life in here to leave viewers totally deflated. For one thing, there’s the poetry of cinematographer Ebrahim Ghafuri’s work, from the opening scene in which a cloud of incense released by a lively street kid wafts over the women streaming past on their way to the demonstration, their blue burkas bright against a cartload of deep orange pumpkins.

For another, there’s the porthole offered by fantasy. When things are at their bleakest, Osama sometimes pictures herself skipping rope. There’s an elegiac tone to the slow-motion footage, since conjuring up her lost childhood makes her sad, but her memories also offer her a means of escape.

Then there are moments of black-comic relief, like when the potbellied mullah at the madrassa teaches the boys how to do their ritual baths, enjoying himself a little too much. Or when Osama plants one of her newly cut braids in a pot of dirt, watering it with an IV tube her mother brought home from the hospital where she used to work.

A wide and welcome streak of kindness also runs through the story. The Afghanistan of Osama is a deeply civilized nation temporarily under the thumb of barbarian invaders. The boys at the madrassa can be mindlessly cruel, but almost everyone else helps one another, even at great personal risk. That gives us reason to feel hopeful, since we know, as Osama does not, that the Taliban’s days in her country are numbered.

Update: Just read this September 2010 New York Times story and learned that the practice of girls dressing as boys has a long history in Afghanistan.

Kill Bill Vol. 2

By Elise Nakhnikian

Writer/director Quentin Tarantino has been playing elaborate riffs on what makes homicidal people tick ever since Reservoir Dogs, but he’s never been better than in Kill Bill Vol. 2.

If the luscious eye candy of Vol. 1 was an exhilarating swoosh down a water park ride, Vol. 2 is a tidal wave that sweeps you up as it gathers momentum. Both halves (it was originally shot as one movie) are gorgeous to look at, often funny, and jam-packed with striking-looking people doing or discussing campily cool things, like “the five-point palm exploding-heart technique,” a fatal martial arts move introduced in Vol. 2. Both have vibrant, visceral soundtracks. But Vol. 1 devoted all that creativity simply to showing a killer at work, leaving audiences wanting a little more substance. Vol. 2 slakes that thirst, letting us see what was behind its heroine’s “roaring rampage of revenge,” as she sardonically describes it. In the process, it casts her — and Vol. 1 — in a whole new light.

Kill Bill is the story of The Bride (Uma Thurman), a creation of Tarantino and Thurman, who came up with the idea for the character while working together on Pulp Fiction. In Vol. 1, she’s a female version of the archetypal “man with no name” played by Clint Eastwood in his Sergio Leone Westerns, as two-dimensional as the silhouettes Tarantino likes to shoot against brightly colored backgrounds, in a nod to Hong Kong chop-socky movie credit sequences.

In Vol. 2, the silhouette gets fleshed out. We see The Bride as a vulnerable young woman in wide-eyed thrall to Bill (David Carradine). We learn her name (Beatrix Kiddo). We find out what made her reject the life that the pimp-like Bill trained her for, as the most talented and most favored member of Bill’s professional hit squad. And we learn why she’s determined to dispatch the remaining members of the squad, who left her for dead about five years earlier — especially Bill, who also happens to be the father of her child and maybe the love of her life.

Vol. 2 revives one of Tarantino’s signature techniques, using artfully indirect talk as a counterpoint to brutal, bloody action. In one creepily compelling domestic scene, Bill makes sandwiches in his kitchen, telling a story about how his five-year-old daughter learned about death while trimming the crusts with a butcher’s knife.

Like the wink from Beatrix that ends Vol. 2, these quirky conversations remind us that we’re safe inside what the director likes to call “Quentin Tarantino world.” At the same time, because they’re usually so firmly grounded in the mundane details of consumer culture, they blur the line between Tarantino’s world and ours, making his sociopaths and professional killers feel unsettlingly familiar.

Also familiar is the multicultural texture of Tarantino’s world, which looks a lot like America. A hybrid inspired by spaghetti Westerns and Chinese and Japanese martial arts movies, Kill Bill is part of an emerging international cinema that emulates and adapts movie traditions from Asia as well as Europe and the Americas.

Tarantino is at the top of his form here, and Tarantino in top form is one of the best moviemakers working today. From the beautiful, high-energy camera work to the side-winding dialogue to the slyly referential songs to the old-style characters filling out small parts (look for a deliciously oily cameo by Tarantino favorite Michael Parks as a Mexican pimp), he knows just how to construct what he calls “a movie-movie,” layer by juicy layer.

As in Vol. 1, the fights are lovingly choreographed. There’s less fighting and a lot less blood this time around, but when people do battle they clash like bull elephants.

Sound is also chosen for maximum impact, heightening if not creating a scene’s emotional heft. When Beatrix is captured and tortured by Bill’s brother Budd (Michael Madsen), for instance, Tarantino and his sound crew convey her panic by letting the screen go black as they crank up the ragged sound of her breathing, the taunting laughter of her captors, and the sound of their horrible work.

You don’t have to have seen Vol. 1 to enjoy Vol. 2, but it’s worth renting one of these days if you haven’t caught it yet. In the meantime, if you love movies and don’t mind stylized violence, treat yourself to Vol. 2 while it’s still in theaters. Movie-movies this engrossing don’t come along often.

Touching the Void

In 1985 two young Englishmen, Simon Yates and Joe Simpson, scaled a 21,000-foot peak in the Peruvian Andes. Their climb had never been attempted before and it hasn’t been done since, but they crested the mountain without much difficulty. Then they began their descent.

What happened next has caused a lot of people to vilify Yates or glorify Simpson, but the story dramatized in Simpson’s 1988 book, Touching the Void, and in Kevin MacDonald’s documentary of the same name is much more interesting. These two are neither heroes nor villains; they’re just ordinary guys who survived an extraordinary ordeal.

Well, okay, not entirely ordinary. Simpson and Yates are climbers, which means they’re unusually fit, unusually self-reliant people whose idea of a party is playing Spiderman at altitudes too high to support indigenous life forms. “We climbed because it was fun,” says Simpson. “And every now and then it went wildly wrong, and then it wasn’t.”

Things went wrong on this trip when Simpson fell, shattering his right leg. His first thought, he says, was: “If I broke my leg, I’m dead,” but Yates didn’t leave him to die. Instead, he spliced two ropes into one 300-foot length and began lowering his partner down the mountainside in stages. “What he did was quite extraordinary,” Simpson says, and it almost worked. But just before they reached the bottom of the slope, Yates lowered Simpson over a yawning chasm.

For about an hour and a half, the two sat in suspended animation, Simpson dangling helplessly while Yates sat in the snow bucket he had carved to hold his weight. Separated by 150 feet and a blinding snowstorm, they had no way of knowing what was happening to each other and no way to pull Simpson back up. Meanwhile, Yates’ seat was gradually shifting out from beneath him. To save himself, he finally cut the rope and found his way back to base camp, where he hunkered down to recover.

Amazingly, Simpson survived the fall after Yates cut the rope, but he landed in a crevasse with no apparent way out. After a night of horror (crevasses, he says. “have a dread feel. Not a place for living”), he gathered the courage to drop even deeper into the abyss, gambling that he’d find something other than empty space before reaching the end of his rope. The bet paid off, but now he faced a new dilemma: How could he travel the miles to base camp, over rough terrain, with no food or water and a badly broken leg?

The physical hardships undergone by the two were almost unimaginable. Yates was unrecognizable by the time he reached base camp, his fingertips blackened by frostbite and his face discolored and raw from exposure and dehydration. The pain was exponentially worse for Simpson, who lost a third of his body weight as he dragged himself back to base camp. At one point, he hopped over a stretch of broken rocks so uneven that he fell on almost every hop. “It was like having your leg broken again every time,” he says.

But their psychological ordeal is even more grueling. Although Yates plays only a supporting role in this drama, it’s clear that he suffered deeply for the Hobson’s choice that led him to abandon his partner. As for Simpson, his long dance with death has a terrible vicarious fascination. “It was a slow, steady reduction of you, really,” he says. “You didn’t have any dignity, care if you were brave or weak.”

The story is told by the three survivors: Yates, Simpson, and Richard Hawking, who manned the base camp. All three share a plain but eloquent style of speaking, a good memory for details, and a typically British aversion to self-glorification. Yates admits, for instance, that he thought about creating “a decent story that would make me look better” to explain Simpson’s presumed death, and Hawking says he was afraid to rescue Simpson from the darkness the night he made it back to base camp because “if he was out there, he was going to be a horrible thing.”

Sometimes the narrators speak to the camera, but often they provide a voice-over while actors play out their story. It may take a little while to get used to this technique, which is used more in cheesy History Channel movies than blue-chip documentaries, but MacDonald, a seasoned filmmaker who won an Oscar for his documentary about the Israeli athletes killed at the 1972 Olympics, was smart not to let that stop him. The narration in Touching the Void tells the story, but the reenactments put us right on that mountain, turning us from listeners into observers.

MacDonald hired actors who can climb, even using Yates and Simpson themselves in some of the long shots. The performances are mainly physical, and they’re painfully convincing: I winced every time the actor playing Simpson landed on his bad leg. Aside from the talking head segments, which were shot in a studio, the movie is filmed in the Alps and the Andes, and after a while you can see the terror in that beauty and the benevolence in a sunny day.

Even close to two decades later, Simpson was unnerved by the mountain where he had felt his personality disintegrate. “I wasn't shaking, but I felt like I was,” he says. “I had forgotten just how appalling it was being reduced to almost nothing."

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