Films Seen - December 2007

[Pre-'96 films not included.]

2 DAYS IN PARIS (48) (dir., Julie Delpy) Julie Delpy, Adam Goldberg, Marie Pillet, Albert Delpy I think the word here is "flaky", both because that's the texture it suggests - bits peeling off, never seems to coalesce - and because of the characters' behaviour (though the film doesn't seem to notice anything amiss, which is how you know the flakiness is unfeigned and personal). In a way it's interesting, showing up the conservatism of Delpy's Linklater films, inasmuch as the characters there were always sensible and easy to identify with whereas their behaviour here is often bizarre or off-putting - even Goldberg, in the Ethan Hawke role, starts off doing something quite mean (sending the Da Vinci tourists on a wild-goose chase so he can take their place in line) which the film seems perfectly fine with; Delpy's heroine claims she fell in love with him when he said that "kids are like rats, they carry diseases" (she thought that was sweet), and she also flies off the handle in a restaurant, has a massive fight with a taxi driver, suddenly thinks she's dying and demands he call 911, etc (her parents also seem more deranged than bohemian). The effect seems misjudged, neurosis indulged till it plays like actorly flamboyance, but gradually a portrait of Delpy (or her onscreen self) emerges as a kind of tormented idealist, complicated (implicitly) by having abandoned France for America, her oddness based on a constant fear of seeming bourgeois - her French friends are all "wonderful writers" and "interesting artists" though in fact they all act like assholes (which the film - again - either doesn't judge or doesn't notice), and she'll suddenly get depressed at the thought that women are harming the environment by using up too much toilet-paper - and again it doesn't feel like the film is making fun, more like Delpy's own outburst grafted onto the character. Not too enjoyable to watch (for me) but it's still unusual, seeming to exist in a moment where heroine and actress are still separate but the latter's neuroses start to overwhelm the former - not quite self-portrait, more an effulgence of the psyche - not to mention the paranoid American-in-Paris comedy of Goldberg straining shifty-eyed for politeness as he fields sarcastic parents and intrusive ex-boyfriends. The ending makes a point about the free spirit flitting from guy to guy - or girl to girl - till at last you reach a point in your life when "you know you can't recover from another break-up" - so you just stay with whoever you've got, not-quite-consciously viewing their flaws and bad habits as endearing quirks. It's as truthful as anything in Rohmer.

HAIRSPRAY (47) (dir., Adam Shankman) Nikki Blonsky, John Travolta, Michelle Pfeiffer, Christopher Walken, James Marsden, Amanda Bynes Who's the best audience for this movie? (a) 12-year-old Red Bull junkies with bad taste in music; (b) sententious high-school teachers who always say you can learn an empowering Lesson and have fun doing it too (though they won't like the digs at education, or the implication that detention is a "cool[er] scene" than the classroom); (c) bubbly, party-loving types who seldom think about politics but quite like the thought that everyone should be equal; (d) couch potatoes who've spent the past 5 years scarfing chips and ice-cream while watching "Pop Idol", "X-Factor" and the rest of the TV talent shows, thinking "That could totally be me up there" but only succeeding in making themselves morbidly fat and obese. Relentlessly bouncy, eventually stifling its brief heretical suggestions that Baltimore is actually quite sleazy (John Waters as the Flasher!) and Tracy's dream actually quite small-time ("And now here she is on local daytime TV!" marvels Papa). James Marsden is clearly having fun sending himself up - see also ENCHANTED - as a plastic heartthrob with a toothy smile, but a Cary Elwes-in-SAW meltdown is just around the corner.

HITMAN (44) (dir., Xavier Gens) Timothy Olyphant, Dougray Scott, Olga Kurylenko Never played the game, but descriptions make it sound unusually imaginative so it's odd that this movie version tries for so little. Neither Luc Besson-style macho comedy - except maybe the 4-way Mexican standoff that turns into a knife fight, combatants pulling out machetes from their back pockets - nor steely BOURNE-style procedural; mildly interesting for its damaged hero - even more hopeless than the Transporter when it comes to the ladies - but long before the end I'd basically tuned out the plot and was laughing at the crap moments. "Why would [Hitman] do that? Why?" ask the villains, and the TV news instantly supplies the answer ("Of course! The funeral!"). Surveillance footage allows our hero to click on people and get their details, but what he gets for each person is hilariously arbitrary, so e.g. clicking on the girl brings up her home address (that'll come in handy!) whereas clicking on the Russian PM gives "Political Stance: Moderate" (this is 5 minutes after a CNN report announces "Breaking News: [Russian PM]'s Moderate Approach", which doesn't sound like breaking news at all but whatever). Russian PM also has secret doubles, like Saddam Hussein, but doesn't it seem kind of risky for a double to attend an official function in Georgia on the same day that PM is attending another official function in London? Wouldn't that kind of give the game away? Speaking of which, a hitman with a prominent bar-code tattoo on the back of his shaved head - making him stand out in any crowd - should wear a wig, or at least a hat in my opinion. Being instantly-recognisable isn't really an asset in his line of work.  

THE KINGDOM (41) (dir., Peter Berg) Jamie Foxx, Chris Cooper, Jennifer Garner, Ashraf Barhom, Jason Bateman Any lingering suspicion that this might have something sophisticated to say about US-Saudi relations is erased by the climax, going from shoot-out ("Cut 'em off!" yells Foxx, only just refraining from adding "...at the pass!") to car-chase to terrorist showdown. "Which side of the door do you think Allah's on?" asks our hero, preparing to bash down the door to al-Qaida's secret lair; "I guess we're about to find out," replies his Saudi sidekick (somewhere, Osama bin-Laden is giggling so hard he's got low-alcohol beer coming out his nose). Earlier there are captions for everyone, even people who barely appear in the movie so their job descriptions - "Deputy National Security Advisor" - don't make much difference, the better to establish an air of clued-in seriousness and top-level access, though in fact there's little local colour in its depiction of Saudi Arabia (except the visual impression of Riyadh itself, box-like white buildings in the middle of the desert, halfway between planned suburb and secret research facility) and the local cop who gets very bothered by his guests saying "fuck" - "That bad word" - sounds less like a real Saudi cop and more like shorthand for 'religious conservative' for the folks back home. The Saudis generally don't come off very well, being brutally adept at torture but obviously useless at investigation till the FBI shows them how (they won't "get dirty", won't get down in the mud and sift for clues, which may be a visual metaphor for being too complacent and anti-democratic); American agents come off better, though not so much American filmmakers, mired in confusion - not just the decry-the-war / support-the-troops confusion of other War on Terror flicks but also confusion between showing the futility of using brute force to combat terrorism and paying the usual respect to America's military might. The sting in the tail - cutting between the two "Kill them all"s - seems initially quite brave, then you think back to the 20 minutes of action-movie bloodlust that precedes it and enquire: 'Are you fucking kidding?'.

DARKBLUEALMOSTBLACK (50) (dir., Daniel Sanchez Arevalo) Quim Gutierrez, Marta Etura, Antonio de la Torre Standard example of 30-something Euro-director making a bunch of award-winning shorts then embarking on his first feature, showing a good deal of talent but proving unable to sustain a story over 100 minutes. Too much stuff that's irrelevant or half-baked, esp. in the second half. What's the pay-off for hero's near-obsessive upward mobility (the title refers to a business suit he's got his eye on)? Why make such a big deal about the money if it's not really vital to the story? What's with the slacker best friend and his secretly gay father? Thought the theme might be how we're all in his/her own prison - the closeted father, the girl actually in prison, our hero in his unfulfilled life (hence e.g. the goldfish in a bowl) - but there's little to suggest that Sanchez Arevalo thinks so too. Not much auteurial voice in general, and you'd think a guy who's made award-winning shorts would've got past the notion that consecutive dissolves make good sex even better.  

A MIGHTY HEART (73) (dir., Michael Winterbottom) Angelina Jolie, Dan Futterman, Irfan Khan, Denis O'Hare "I like how you held yourself together," compliments a friend after Mariane Pearl's TV appearance, but the TV-station staff are unimpressed; "You'd never think her husband has been kidnapped for six days," one girl tells another after Mariane has left - and maybe if she'd done an Oprah, broken down and burst into tears, she'd have made a better impression, but she's not that kind of woman (the title is in some ways a misnomer; head mostly keeps heart in check, wryly acknowledged by the stray bit of dialogue on the dangers of "holding it in" re: pregnant peeing), and it's not that kind of film, LORENZO'S OIL-like in its emphasis on problem-solving and information-gathering over playing Victim. Information is everywhere, e-mails, Google and the frequent buzz of cellphones, and crisis is perceived as a lack of information, a break in the chain (being unable to trace Danny, or not getting through to his colleagues when they go off without saying where); it's the flipside to ZODIAC, where more information might've solved the problem - but it goes beyond Fincher's smug technophilia because the hi-tech deluge doesn't actually get results. The chart on the wall gets ridiculously complicated, and of course (as we know from the beginning) the ending is a sad one; even what little progress is made comes about by a combination of hi-tech (sourcing IP addresses and the like) and more primitive methods (notably torture), as if to say the West's fixation on hi-tech warfare won't necessarily work against militant Islam's medieval worldview. Winterbottom is himself a technocrat - prolific and protean, like a British Soderbergh - refusing to indulge Jolie's (reputation for) reckless emotion, breaking the chaotic situation down into brief comprehensible snippets, isolating all the heroine's rage into a single primal-scream moment when she finds out the sad news; he's self-consciously selfless, exactly like Mariane and her pointed, composed devotion to her husband's memory, a happy case of a filmmaker matching his material. The tale remains a bit tedious - esp. when Jolie disappears and it turns into an action thriller in the third quarter - but the telling is masterly.

ENCHANTED (67) (dir., Kevin Lima) Amy Adams, Patrick Dempsey, James Marsden, Timothy Spall "I don't know if you're being ironic," admits our hero when wide-eyed Giselle - a refugee from a Disney-cartoon fairyland - talks of princes, castles and spending the night in a hollow tree. It's all right; she isn't. Something of an anti-SHREK, from the hand-drawn animation to the straight-faced bid for enchantment, and it gets away with it partly because of an amiably square 80s vibe evoking the fish-out-of-water likes of SPLASH (set in an NYC of mouthy Brooklyn-voiced construction workers named Artie), because it knows just enough to avoid sliding into regressive (Giselle does become empowered, tasting the previously-unknown pleasures of sex and anger), and because Amy Adams is just super-delightful ("Welcome to New York," sneers a local when she tells of her troubles; "Thank you!" she immediately responds with a broad smile, looking genuinely touched by such kindness). "It's complicated," says our hero, speaking of marriage; "But it doesn't have to be!" replies Giselle, getting a divorcing couple to change their minds just by reminding the husband of the sparkle in his wife's eyes (no wonder the US divorce rate is at its lowest level since 1970, what with this and JUNO preaching against it) (*) - and maybe it's just asinine wish-fulfilment fantasy but flowers are indeed more romantic than e-mail cards, and little girls do indeed prefer fairytales to improving tomes on Rosa Parks and other "remarkable" women, and Adams scales Julie Andrews heights as she talks to chipmunks and makes a dress out of curtains. Not sure about the bathroom being a "magical room", though...

(*) Then again we also have the demonisation of marriage in KNOCKED UP, HEARTBREAK KID and LICENCE TO WED, so maybe it's just that fewer people are getting married in the first place. Or marriage is being deliberately demonised to discourage casual enterings-into. Or American culture is just violently polarised, as usual.    

ZOO (69) (dir., Robinson Devor) Key Line No. 1: "Humans are so conditioned to start categorising". Key Line No. 2: "I'm right on the edge of being able to understand it". We do categorise, whether the subject is sexuality (calling the outliers 'perverts') or documentary - calling the outliers 'weird hybrids of fact and fiction, or in this case tone-poem'. And of course we don't understand why any human being would want to be buggered by a stallion, but Devor brings us right to the edge of it, partly by giving glimpses of these people's lives - the dead man, "Mr. Hands", who thought getting married and having kids was going to be the high-point of his life, and of course it wasn't - but mostly by taking them at their word on the tenderness and beauty of their inter-species relationships: crystalline visuals and Philip Glass-like score create a lovely bubble, precisely the kind inhabited by those who called themselves "Zoo", Devor raising just enough suggestion of possible denial to avoid charges of complicity (it's startling when we learn one of our (unseen) narrators came across as "a child molester type" to those who've seen him - and can we really trust his story that he passed out minutes before the fatal act?), but mostly just trying to evoke the visual correlative of such 'perversion'. Editorialising is kept to a minimum, though it's there (mention of Republicans trying "to control the morality of the world"). It's supposed to be very beautiful, very unreal and very oppressive, and that's what it is. 

RESIDENT EVIL: EXTINCTION (53) (dir., Russell Mulcahy) Milla Jovovich, Oded Fehr, Iain Glen, Ali Larter Better than anyone had a right to expect, which admittedly isn't saying much. Very MAD MAX 2 for a while - convoy of cars in the desert, Bruce Spence type running over zombie corpse and chortling "That was a juicy one!" - very THE BIRDS with the zombie crows, very DAY OF THE DEAD apparently though I haven't seen that one. Still not very good, and e.g. neither the black comedy of domesticated zombies with cell phones nor the slow-burning tension of the guy gradually turning into a zombie gets developed into anything much, but surprisingly proficient and even thrilling. Two of the best moments involve human cloning - the pile of dead Millas and the final shot - making you wonder if it's really just 4 years since the 100 Agent Smiths in MATRIX RELOADED; though it'll take more than a cheerfully cheesy B-movie to use it as poetically as THE PRESTIGE.

WAITRESS (65) (dir., Adrienne Shelly) Keri Russell, Nathan Fillion, Jeremy Sisto, Adrienne Shelly, Andy Griffith A quirk-fest, for sure, but I wasn't prepared for how overtly comedic it is - i.e. as opposed to the deadpan sub-sub-Jarmusch naturalism of most indie 'comedies'; it has one-liners and gags and everything - and how skilfully Shelly negotiates the line between cutesy detail (all those pies!) and people being disgracefully cruel to each other, a tricky balancing-act some directors (hello Lasse Hallstrom) never get right, making films that see-saw from cosy to nasty. The secret is perhaps to view even the odious relationships - above all Sisto as the abusive husband - with a sense of humour, turning him into a memorable monster as he wheedles and belittles (he's a lot like Dwight, the pathetic stepdad in THIS BOY'S LIFE, bullying out of chronic inadequacy); Russell's expression as he makes her promise not to love her unborn child more than him is a kind of awestruck horrified wonder - "You're jealous of the baby?" - as if to say 'Just when I reconcile myself to how much of a total jerk you are, you somehow manage to outdo yourself'. Goes soft at the end, with motherhood magically melting the heroine's cynical shell, but of course Shelly herself came late to motherhood, and it's hard not to factor in real-life resonance when e.g. her pasty-skinned character ("pasty, pasty skin") longs for a man who'll love her "to death" ("Well, hopefully not to death," frowns our heroine). Speaking of which, it's hard to see how her stalker-suitor is really any different from heroine's control-freak spouse - aren't they both about smothering resistance? - but at least he's funny, his "spontaneous poetry" lining up with Russell's simmering froideur or Nathan Fillion's flustered obstetrician: "I have to go to St. Mary's now and deliver a baby ... (long pause) ... Because that's what I do."  

BEE MOVIE (52) (dir., Steve Hickner & Simon J. Smith) with the voices of Jerry Seinfeld, Renée Zellweger, John Goodman, Matthew Broderick I'll happily listen to anyone who claims this is really subverting talking-animal 'toons, but it seemed like the clearest possible case of falling between two stools - trying to fit Seinfeld's urbane persona in a kiddie template, finally satisfying neither constituency. On the one hand he bemuses Renee Zellweger by telling bee jokes - "'Watermelon'? I thought you said 'Guatemala'!" - and sues the entire human race for honey theft, on the other he's surrounded by the usual conventions: non-conformist in rigid society, jokes about suitably-modified urban signage (newspaper headline in Bee City: "Stings Seven, Then Self"), misfit hero and slightly goofy best friend, final Message re: teamwork and the importance of everyone pulling together. It's frustrating, because it contains just enough familiar plotting to point up how flimsy it is (how can bees talk to humans? apparently they always could, just chose not to! how does Barry leave the hive in the first place? he just does, hitching a ride with some "pollen jocks") whereas if it contained just a little less the truth would be obvious, viz. that it doesn't care about that stuff either way; as with other kids' cartoons - see e.g. the Spongebob Squarepants movie - one can feel an expansive sense of humour being shoehorned into market constraints, but it's worse because watered-down zaniness is still pretty zany whereas kid jokes ("A perfect report-card: all B's!") actively work against the urbanity. Blame the umbrella approach of SHREK, ICE AGE et al., jokes for kids alongside jokes for parents - but not when the latter implicitly scoff at the absurdity of a talking-bee movie. Oh, and a GRADUATE parody? Good luck with that.

SANGRE (47) (dir., Amat Escalante) Cirilio Recio Davila, Laura Saldaña Quintero, Claudia Orozco Carlos Reygadas is co-producer, and this does have some elements from BATTLE IN HEAVEN - the dispassionate glimpses of weird city life, the working-class couple who appear grotesque but are actually in the throes of a grand passion (at least in their own eyes) - plus the cryptic rural vibe of JAPON in its mysterious coda. Deadpan absurdism, the little-man hero stuck in an absurdly soul-destroying job, coming home to absurdly mechanical sex, all of it done without inflection, in deliberately static shots with some deliberately off framing and the deliberately stilted staging of a Kaurismaki (a quarrel is played as flat accusation followed by table being none-too-convincingly hurled at spouse's head). Trouble is, there's a subtle line where a film like this shades from 'watch how we undermine dramatic expectations to express the texture of lives without drama' to 'watch how we leach away drama because who knows what goes through working-class losers' minds anyway, and besides our non-professional actors can't exactly act' - basically the difference between a good joke and a formalist stunt, losing sight of actual people's lives in the quest to impress festival programmers, coming through in minor details like the three-minute indulgence of watching our hero eat breakfast (hard to say why this is different to e.g. the similarly observational scene of the girl's morning routine in UMBERTO D, merely a suspicion that this kind of scene in this kind of context is a mockery of humanism rather than the thing itself; one feels sorry for the actor, trying to look natural and clearly getting no help whatsoever); maybe it was just my mood, but compassion seemed to curdle into condescension. Line to quote: "Life is twisted."

C.R.A.Z.Y. (64) (dir., Jean-Marc Vallée) Michel Côté, Marc-André Grondin, Danielle Proulx French-Canadian magical realism + dysfunctional family = LEOLO, but this turns out to be something quite different, the fantastical touches (a Midnight Mass set to "Sympathy for the Devil", with levitating hero and chorus of choirboys going "oo-oo-oo!") giving way to family drama that's painful and un-quirkily raw. Also the rare pro-gay (or I guess pro-difference) film that's not mechanically anti-religion, Catholic guilt coming into it as our young hero, fuzzily aware of his sexuality, tormentedly prays "God, please don't let me be soft!" - no surprise he becomes an atheist by the time he's 16 - but his same-sex tendencies also equated with his touted ability to heal by the power of thought, his freakish singularity as an "instrument of God" (he refuses to accept either trait, which is why he has problems); also surprisingly generous to homophobic-but-loving parents, belying the narrator's claim that he was "at war with my father" since his "fairy" side became apparent - in fact, Dad gets numerous scenes (incl. a couple without Son) to establish his good intentions and win audience sympathy. More sentimental than it looks, more placatory and also more conservative; difference and rebellion give way to equivalence - Time passes; everyone grows older - and the power of long-standing bonds and shared experience; in a word, family (note the secret meaning behind the title, only revealed at the very end). Quite touching, really.

WHO'S CAMUS ANYWAY? (71) (dir., Mitsuo Yanagimachi) Shuuji Kashiwabara, Hinano Yoshikawa, Hideo Nakaizumi Slippery and compellingly odd - also rather eerie, tying in with the mention of invisible demons walking beside the old professor - set up so you start to wonder what's real and what's merely theatre (or even dream). A boy's exaggerated, woe-is-me response to a girl's rejection is a purely playful gesture, but are the various sideshows glimpsed along the way - a cello player, cheerleaders on the lawn, teenage horseplay behind a half-open door which is then pulled shut - entirely real? Is the old professor's youthful muse really married - or is that a kind of wish-fulfilment fantasy, brought on when the spell is broken by the way she slurps her soup? (And does her putative husband really have an "olfactory malfunction"?) No parallel dimension is actually suggested - that's the beauty of it - the point being rather how filmmaking, and a certain autistic cinemania (the cafe scene from MASCULINE FEMININE lasts 3 minutes, 17 seconds!), infects the air around it, creating a sense of double meaning and heightened unreality; maybe that's why it can never really understand (or even express) real life - as implied by the terrifying climax, and the figure of the killer in general - merely turning it into filmic signifiers, just as the unhappy stalker girlfriend 'becomes' Truffaut's Adele H. Slightly stiff and occasionally flat but still impressive, made with all the ambivalence of a man who's directed half-a-dozen films in 30 years.

SICKO (70) (dir., Michael Moore) A slam-dunk, mostly because Moore isn't (really) making a political point for once. Lots of people voted for George W. Bush and they're not (all) insane, but no-one's against free universal health-care, at least in principle; the world is merely divided between those who say 'Yes, it should happen' and those who respond 'Yes it should happen in theory, but in practice it's just too expensive' - a venal argument that shrivels and dies when confronted with tales of ordinary people's pain and suffering. Those horror-stories constitute one of Moore's two main weapons, the other being his sense of humour - see e.g. the clip from a Soviet musical used to illustrate 50s fears of "socialized medicine" then wittily extended to point out that many other services in America are in fact "socialized", also an example of Moore's peculiar brand of Lefty rhetoric: he's attracted to old socialist nostrums in the way white 60s radicals used to say "Black is beautiful", less as a thought-out philosophy than because it put them in touch with something exotic (see also the bizarre dig at Slovenian E.R. wards) and a little dangerous, as well as annoying the Establishment and establishing a somewhat bogus solidarity (Moore's vision of "we're all in the same boat" still has Michael Moore at the helm, just like those radicals' ideal society was still a predominantly white-led society). He comes across as what he probably is, a blue-collar fat man from Flint who's still a little awed by the thought of foreign places - and it's no surprise he does loutish things, like telling how a patient's threat of talking to Michael Moore prompted his insurance company to do a terrified U-turn and grant his daughter the ear-implants they'd previously denied (or showing off his donation to an anti-Moore website, or even talking to Che Guevara's daughter - oooh, Che Guevara - when he goes to Cuba); his stats often sound dodgy, his tangents (e.g. going on about French day-care) weaken his case, he often exaggerates - laying out superior health-care systems with the glib assurance of an infomercial - and his stunts are undeniably flashy. But he has a true attack-dog's nose for injustice, the film fits right in with the current US climate of feelbad pessimism and paranoia (even linking the health-care crisis with the Culture of Fear: a demoralised people are easier to govern), and human pain ultimately trumps everything; any system that leaves pain un-salved can, by definition, be improved. When his sick and lame - wretched, suffering Americans - weep with joy on being told treatment is free in Cuba, I admit I wept along.

ELECTION 2 (61) (dir., Johnny To) Louis Koo, Simon Yam, Nick Cheung ELECTION throbbed with barely-restrained violence, erupting in a single shock moment at the end, but this sequel is less restrained, more episodic and indeed more violent, veering into charnel-house horror in the torture scenes. The reason is because the first film showed the rules (more or less) being followed whereas this one shows the rules being challenged - gangster Chairman refuses to step down when his 2-year term is over - and it's certainly possible to see these movies as an affirmation of China's control system in Hong Kong: everyone co-operates to keep the peace (even the cops share a tip-off in the men's room, discreetly behind-the-scenes), business is the only ideology, loose cannons are discouraged and decisions are taken apparently democratically - a vote by "The Uncles" - but actually via a consensus arrived at by horse-trading and the threat of force. (That said, China itself has a destabilising role in the story, inciting our hero's leadership challenge and threatening to wreck the system in the open ending, so maybe the motherland's influence isn't as monolithic as it appears.) In itself, not as hypnotic as ELECTION but still potent, To raising his game for the violent highlights - the torture, the murder of a snitch aboard a garish-hued riverboat (hero's face in close-up as he heads back to shore, the boat receding behind him, implacably leaving his friend to his fate) - and adding humour when e.g. a kidnapping is interrupted by one of the henchmen getting a call from his girlfriend. That karaoke version of "House of the Rising Sun" is also pretty funny.

THE BRAVE ONE (55) (dir., Neil Jordan) Jodie Foster, Terrence Howard, Nicky Katt Don't know when I've seen a film with so many shimmers, reflections, dissolves, shallow-focus (see e.g. the massive ECU of the radio mike, with out-of-focus Jodie sitting inches behind it), NYC buzzing in night-time neon and high-angle tilted-cam, individual places (notably the Central Park tunnel where tragedy strikes) given an almost superstitious weight - a very Neil Jordan dream-surface for a very Neil Jordan broken narrative. Much of the second half is unconvincing verging on incoherent, verging on foolish when it starts flailing for Significance (talk of "the Iraqi debacle") and quoting Emily Dickinson - but the pro-vigilante Message has been overstated by its (many) critics, both because the heroine suffers, experiencing "the Stranger" inside her as a form of psychosis (Charles Bronson never suffered) and because it's all tied in with (twisted) New York nostalgia, the "imaginary city" we create when the real one - now "the safest big city in the world" - disappears before our eyes (in effect, Jodie creates an urban context to fit her bloodlust; the subway punks could've just been scared off - the film admits as much - and it's not even a case, like in DEATH WISH, of the System being flawed and villains getting off on a technicality); she kills because she won't live in fear, which may also connect with the mood of the times, a mass psychosis that spins one-off atrocities (do I have to spell it out?) into a morbidly hysterical, kill-or-be-killed scenario. Unless of course Jordan's being sincere, the title should be taken at face value and the Stranger Inside is in fact the voice of truth; that's the problem in films where reality blends into fantasy - you're never quite sure where you stand. Minor demerits for (a) Magical Negro neighbour lady and (b) breathtakingly tasteless juxtaposition of naked flesh in a lover's arms and a hospital gurney.

DANS PARIS (62) (dir., Christophe Honoré) Louis Garrel, Romain Duris, Guy Marchand, Joana Preiss Don't often check out DVD extras, but the Honoré interview on Artificial Eye's R2 disc is revelatory, not just showing the auteur to be super-bright (in a French-intellectual kind of way) but suggesting why the film is the way it is. Filmmakers of old were guided by the idea of "representing the world," he explains, whether they chose to do so realistically - thus e.g. when GERMANY YEAR ZERO came out there was very little other footage of Berlin in ruins - or more conceptually, but now the idea no longer holds because "we can't compete with television, which over-represents the world everywhere". Hence, today's directors can only make films about other films - and if you believe that you'll flip for the movie, which is curiously detached ("Every family has its great quality; ours is detachment") and aggressively playful, with Garrel (the Designated Imp of current French cinema) larking, prancing and not just breaking the fourth wall but breaking the fourth wall about the fact that he's breaking the fourth wall. Meanwhile, Duris looks moody and at one point is indulged grooving along for two minutes to Kim Wilde's "Cambodia" - the film is best experienced as a series of sketches, held together by a manic-depressive sensibility - Marie-France Pisier waltzes through as Maman, hugely more alluring than her stolid ex-husband (mothers seem to have a special place in the Honoré filmography), Nouvelle Vague lightness is all, and a sung finale looks forward to the more confident LOVE SONGS. Younger viewers should note, however - speaking of "representing the world" - that being irresponsible, owing money, thinking only of yourself and "always smell[ing] of sweat or piss" will not necessarily make you irresistible to women in real life.

LIONS FOR LAMBS (53) (dir., Robert Redford) Tom Cruise, Meryl Streep, Robert Redford, Andrew Garfield, Michael Pena On the one hand, a film that makes me ashamed to be (quasi-)European; granted, Iraq-Afghanistan wasn't 'our war', but I don't recall European filmmakers (or media in general) ever thinking deeply about both sides, instead taking refuge in glib appraisals - neo-imperialism, it's all about the oil, Bush is a cowboy, etc. On the other hand, one of the more excruciating filmgoing experiences of my life, sitting in a theatre filled (OK, not "filled") with paying Cypriot customers wondering why they'd shelled out their cash to be bombarded with another country's domestic politics and what percentage of American teens can't name the country that borders Minnesota (in a sense, the arrogance of beaming this out to the world's multiplexes - as if what concerns America automatically concerns the world - typifies the insular thinking that got the US in trouble in the first place). On the other hand (yes, I have three hands), a film you can't help but admire for practising what it preaches - namely "engagement", engaging with the issues without any allowance being made for the cynical, the uninformed, political agnostics, or those who just want to see a real movie; the talk is fair-minded, literate and thought-provoking, suggesting years of experience with legal briefs or op-ed pieces, though probably not dramatic fiction. The drama's so anaemic it runs out after about an hour, and indeed the film is best seen not as drama but AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH Part 2, with the same Celebrity Factor only US foreign policy instead of climate change; on those terms it's pretty good (better than TRUTH), invoking a civilised time of political debate instead of hard-sell and polarisation. "Rome is burning, son!" cries Redford, but he also finds room for Teddy Roosevelt: "If I must choose between righteousness and peace, I choose righteousness."