Films Seen - October 2002

[Pre-'96 films not included.]

THE SUM OF ALL FEARS (65) (dir., Phil Alden Robinson) Ben Affleck, Morgan Freeman, James Cromwell, Alan Bates, Ron Rifkin, Liev Schreiber, Ciaran Hinds [Welcome to the post-9/11 action movie, taking full advantage of our newfound capacity to imagine acts of sudden, calamitous upheaval ; cleverly structured to evoke the disconnected feel of sudden disaster, a rip in the fabric, going from entertaining hokum to apocalyptic disaster movie and incidentally from a sense of cohesion - globe-trotting madly from Moscow to Washington and points in between, implication being that everything's connected ("The world is smaller now," observes arch-villain Bates) - to a sense of separation, all communications down and our hero trying to find the truth in one strand before the politicians blow up the world in another. Easy to mock the pompous Tom Clancy universe, purporting to take you deep inside the corridors of power - here's the Russian Prime Minister, gravely warning the Americans to stay out of Chechnya : "For you to get involved here would be like sleeping with another man's wife" - and Bates as the silky-voiced neo-Blofeld with stereotyped minions of various nationalities (the German is of course a thug, and kills the faint-hearted Frenchman when the latter tries to back out), but it's good fun in itself - snappy Paul Attanasio lines, splendid lineup of great character actors - and also acts as foil to the more intense level of the final third. All in all a grand Hollywood entertainment, though it seems awfully tame and trivial next to something like the mid-60s FAIL-SAFE (from which it borrows a pre-nuke montage of people and faces), or even THIRTEEN DAYS ; Clancy love of hi-tech gadgets present and correct, and it's nice to see the geeks ruling the world - or at least the CIA - though Affleck is a problem, a slack-faced vacuum at the centre of the movie, trying for fresh but coming off merely callow ; also, much as I like Ciaran Hinds, having a Belfast boy play Russian seems a bit perverse. Is there really no-one out there besides Oleg Menshikov?...]

DERRIDA (47) (dir., Kirby Dick / Amy Ziering Kofman) [Is this supposed to be so boring? Oddly, the answer is yes - at least if boring is defined as unresolved and unrevealing. Easy to see why Derrida became such a phenom with the restless campus crowds (and academe) : he deals in paradox and constant doubt, with Delphic sound-bites - "one can only forgive the unforgivable" - readily skewed to a skeptical, irony-driven culture (there's a great bit when a reporter asks the puzzled philosopher for his opinion on "Seinfeld"), but also deals explicitly in reader (or viewer) empowerment, claiming e.g. that true biography exists less in the biographer setting out facts about the subject, more in the informed reader interpreting even a tiny portion of the text in a "rigorous, powerfully deciphering" fashion. Much of the film therefore consists in proving the unimportance of facts ("anecdote" flung casually, rather desultorily at the viewer) and biographical information - which, beyond the basics, Derrida determinedly avoids or refuses to divulge : the idea is presumably an intellectual chess game between film-makers and subject, with the viewer "powerfully deciphering" between the lines, but it never really amounts to much - on a deeper level because Derrida's philosophy is subversive more than creative, adept at undermining other texts but not providing much of a text in itself (we learn that the process of filming is itself artificial, and the "secret self" impossible to reduce to a set of facts ; now what?), on a surface level because Kofman comes across as a rather hesitant interviewer and Derrida himself too much the contented - not to say complacent - academic, thoughtful and intelligent but rather too genteel as he wryly discusses the distinction between Who and What. Meant, ideally, as an interactive exercise, with the viewer deconstructing the validity of what's being presented, but this viewer's mind strayed increasingly to thoughts like 'How can he stay in pyjamas and robe all day long?' and 'Looks like this philosophy lark is a great way to pick up college chicks'. "We will wonder what he may have kept of his unconditional right to secrecy," concludes the voice-over (quoting Derrida himself), "while at the same time burning with desire to know the very things he concealed forever". Well, I wouldn't go that far...]

INSOMNIA (63) (dir., Christopher Nolan) Al Pacino, Robin Williams, Hilary Swank, Martin Donovan [Nolan's I-can-do-conventional-as-well follow-up isn't MEMENTO-level but still very classy, powered by fluid cutting, an insistent score and a feel for the actors, down to mannerism and physiognomy (marvellous extended two-shot of Pacino and Williams standing side-by-side, separated by a metal pole down the middle of the frame, the former's leathered skin and compressed, vertical face setting off the latter's baby-smoothness and angled, somehow horizontal features). Doesn't do enough with the midnight-sun angle (just a couple of shots of blinds being drawn), mental breakdown is rather dully illustrated via amplified sounds, flash-cuts, seeing a dead man in a crowd, etc, and the script seemed a little thin, motivations half-baked (excessive that our hero should stick his neck out so recklessly just to retrieve the gun from Randy's house, his promise to the widow muddies the waters, and the final discovery of the girl's dress - in full view, in an open drawer - comes across as Hollywood contrivance) ; then again, the same was broadly true of the much less coherent and compelling original. Maybe a bit too much the police procedural, not enough the psychological melodrama ; still generally solid, with one terrific action scene - the floating logs - and lots of nifty performer tricks (that Pacino basilisk-stare!). Conventional, and absolutely nothing to be ashamed of.]

LILO & STITCH (57) (dir., Chris Sanders / Dean DeBlois) With the voices of Daveigh Chase, Tia Carrere, Ving Rhames [Disney tries for "Calvin and Hobbes" - troublesome kid with wild imagination, gleefully anarchic (albeit not, in this case, imaginary) pet / companion / soulmate representing the untrammelled id, world of rules and strictures to negotiate - making for formidable quirkiness quotient in the first hour or so (favourite gratuitous detail : the books with titles like "Road Maps of Iowa" and "Fire Eating For Fun And Profit"). Then of course the id must be tamed, family values imposed where family = socialisation (adding a sinister ring to the film's own definition : "family means no-one gets left behind"), and the film becomes not awful but unmemorable, losing its edge. Not a huge amount to say, but it's nice to see the Mouse trying things out, down to the blotchier, deliberately naif look (and nice to see it's made by a pair of writer-directors, though I'm not sure what that means in the tightly corporate Disney structure). Anyone else think it's weird how Roswell seems to have become entrenched in kiddie culture, though (even a Saturday-morning cartoon show named after it, if I'm not mistaken)? Sounds like our young are being brainwashed into accepting full-scale alien infiltration in my opinion.]

MR. DEEDS (40) (dir., Steven Brill) Adam Sandler, Winona Ryder, John Turturro, Peter Gallagher, Jared Harris [Love it or hate it (hate it, probably), this is still highly personal film-making - and I'm not talking about Steven Brill. Sandler's persona (he also exec-produced) is disquietingly weird : laid-back, mellow, almost passive, yet prone to sudden explosive violence, a friend to all yet in fact making distinctions - singling out the needy misfits (who can forget the 'table of geeks' in THE WEDDING SINGER?), beating down the smart and successful - in a way that's either very sweet or somewhat fascist. His shtick is bringing people together - in the "Space Oddity" singalong here, in the mansion when he tests the echo, later when he rescues the cats, at the courtroom climax when he gets everyone recalling their childhood dreams, finally with the Hallmark card at the very end - a paternalistic populism with everyone equalised and himself as the leader, all the more troubling in the fact that the people he can't lead he generally wallops (if the ideologically dodgy original reflects the authoritarian politics of the mid-30s, one can only wonder what the much-upped violence quotient says about our own time). Film itself is kind of tedious, slogging through a plot that doesn't really work anymore - the small town feels more like a theme-park of Magical Quirkiness - weighed down with lame stuff like a plug for Wendy's or John McEnroe awkwardly Being Himself, crippled by the lack of chemistry between Sandler and Ryder and disposable blandness of their love scenes ("Your hair is very blond and pretty") ; but Sandler does stand for something (both in his persona and the film itself), something ingratiating and determinedly inoffensive on the surface, with alarming aggression and didacticism just beneath and some jaw-dropping stuff on the fringes. (All comedy stems from sublimated aggression, of course, but Sandler's seems almost in denial about it.) Old-fashioned values are plugged, excess discouraged, a mugger told to "get a job" ; Deeds' rival for the girl is a man who wears "too much cologne" and gets a totally gratuitous nude shot soaping his ass in the shower ; a foul-mouthed football player is chastised by his blue-collar Dad, who takes off his belt to "remind him where he came from". Capra himself might've blanched ; John Turturro is excellent, however...]

SIMONE (33) (dir., Andrew Niccol) Al Pacino, Catherine Keener, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Winona Ryder [Stillborn. Could only have worked as satire, given the unlikelihood of vacuous Simone ever becoming a star, and Niccol does play for laughs here and there (e.g. when she wins not one but two Oscars, tying with herself for Best Actress!) ; most of the time, though, he's more concerned with soaking the images in cold blue light and exploring weighty questions like "What is real anymore?". Painfully self-conscious, having people say stuff like "Wow! Unreal!" or "You're more authentic than the people who worship you", or wheeling a cardboard cut-out of a giant eye across the background of a scene (can we believe what we see, etc?) ; flimsy as Grand Statement, even flimsier as movie (flimsiest bit : computer-geek daughter saves the day in the nick of time by pressing 'Eject' and hitting a couple of keys). What with this and HOLLYWOOD ENDING, having your ex-wife as the studio exec in charge of your picture seems to be quite a common nightmare among today's film directors.]

HOLLYWOOD ENDING (50) (dir., Woody Allen) Woody Allen, Téa Leoni, George Hamilton, Treat Williams, Barney Cheng [Woody's such an institution now even the bad films - such as this one - brim with echoes and associations, adding unwarranted richness (he encourages it, of course) : the bimbo actress from BULLETS OVER BROADWAY, hatred of LA going all the way back to ANNIE HALL, blindness-as-metaphor from CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS - though of course also tying in with Woody's own notorious tendency to compartmentalise, not to say moral blindness ("You don't see what you don't want to see"), just as he's pushing familiar buttons in the film-maker with two Oscars and "the streets of New York in his marrow", and even milking real-life troubles for cheap pathos in the estranged son reunited in the final reel (are you watching, Satchel?). Seems almost irrelevant to add that the film itself is patchy, getting a fair bit of tension out of its (ridiculous) premise which it then intermittently wrecks via embarrassingly lame Hollywood satire (Haley Joel Osment gets Lifetime Achievement Award! chuckle!) and general senior-citizen crankiness ; more than ever, Woody seems to be making films as a kind of therapy, hardly bothering to set things up (our hero's affliction is wholly arbitrary, just comes and goes), slinking towards second childhood as he whines he's frightened to sleep alone and asks for someone to tuck him in ; something slightly creepy about an old man surrounding himself with people to roar with laughter at his ribald one-liners (on masturbation : "What I like is afterwards - the cuddling time"), though as usual the actors seem to be enjoying themselves. Special mention to Cheng as a seldom-seen type in the Woody universe - the sensible square with a good heart - and Leoni, who can rescue an exchange like "He's a raving incompetent psychotic" ; "He's not incompetent" just by playing earnest, finessing the joke and putting her stress on the "not". Is the angry Chinese DP to be seen as a veiled indication of creative differences with the now-departed Zhao Fei?...]

GROUP (60) (dir., Marilyn Freeman) Carrie Brownstein, Kari Filipi, S. Ann Hall, Lola Rock'n Rolla [Who'd try group therapy? Include me out - which is a problem, since this ensemble talk-piece builds towards an affirmation of the process (the group leader - caring, omniscient, 'empathetic' - is the cinematic equivalent of nails on a blackboard) ; what saves it is the sensible acknowledgment that the process works differently for different people - equal respect given to the touchy-feely types who drink deep from the "faucet of emotions" without a second thought and the more reserved types, like the woman who says "I don't want you feeling for me" and finally admits the group has helped her but she's glad to be leaving - and above all the form, reclaiming the split-screen movie from the lazy doodlings of TIMECODE. Emotions are predictably overwrought - it takes less than 10 minutes before someone breaks down in tears - but what we see is a person pouring out their troubles in one sixth of the screen, the other five-sixths taken up with reaction shots of other people, glimpses of the camera crew or generic wide-shots of the room as a whole - a natural distancing device, keeping melodrama at bay and (more importantly) privileging the group over the individual(s) : the result is a fascinating tension, because we're watching people open themselves up at their most vulnerable, daring us to offer anything but unstinting support (the best thing you can feel in the group is "supported" ; the worst, "judged"), yet we're also constantly judging them against each other from our God's-eye view, "focusing on difference" in the group leader's disapproving words (or more accurately choosing whether or not to focus on difference - just like the group members themselves). Unexpectedly absorbing for the tension and constantly shifting group dynamics, though it's not especially well-structured - each scene raises a new idea, interspersed with rather vapid interludes looking at each woman alone doing nothing very much - and the characters plateau after a while, ending disappointingly in various degrees of 'closure'. Typical line of the kind of film it wants to be (and sometimes achieves) : "I don't need to be treated as a fragile baby bird - just recognised as a human being". Typical line of the kind of film it threatens to be (and sometimes sinks to) : "Anyone got a Kleenex?".]

ME WITHOUT YOU (65) (dir., Sandra Goldbacher) Anna Friel, Michelle Williams, Oliver Milburn [Closer to BEACHES than HEAVENLY CREATURES, but don't let that put you off : builds in impact, getting lots of little things right - the middle-class Jewish family with its opera-loving ways and deep-seated insecurity (the mother dividing the world into "pretty people" and "clever people", with themselves firmly among the latter) ; the way teendom is a time of living on tenterhooks, waiting for the Big Break when Life will finally begin, building up a 'secret' house party in your mind till it's glamorous and scary (it is of course seedy and pathetic) ; the little in-jokes and non sequiturs of an intimate friendship, Heroine A accidentally crushing Heroine B's hair as she's lying in bed and Heroine B complaining "You always do that" ; the self-conscious seriousness of university, and still waiting to feel like an adult at 29, and parents' lives gradually becoming dry and denuded, a litany of who got married and who has bowel cancer ; the way friendships stagnate into role-playing, each reducing the other to a known quantity, however limiting or outdated (which is why being with friends is so comfortable, till it suddenly becomes frustrating). Biggest problem is the growing imbalance in the friendship, and how ungenerously Friel's character is treated in the final section - yet with hindsight it's actually quite clever, since she's always been seen as the free-spirited Other (nice girl Williams is the "me" for most of the movie), and it's only at the end that we realise it cuts both ways : "pretty people" are intimidated by "clever people" too, and yearn to control them (or even be like them, which is why the coda - Friel reverting to a variation on her own mother - carries a bittersweet charge). Inclusion of soundtrack-of-my-life 80s songs doubtless helped, though I only really knew I was in tune with it when a character mentioned Mike Leigh just seconds after I'd noted it seemed to be turning into a Mike Leigh movie. Quasi-lesbian angle is there, just not worth exploring ; that's HEAVENLY CREATURES you're thinking of...]

THE LADY AND THE DUKE (61) (dir., Eric Rohmer) Lucy Russell, Jean-Claude Dreyfus, Alain Libolt [A surprise : acclaim from French intellectuals notwithstanding (#2 on the "Cahiers du Cinéma" Top Ten for 2001), this is less a think-piece than a ripping French Revolution yarn in SCARLET PIMPERNEL mode, albeit with a tendency to fudge any payoff to its tense situations (the abrupt non-ending is especially bizarre). Hard to see much (intellectual) point to the titular duo, who pretty much remain what they seem on first acquaintance - staunch royalist struggling through dark times and enlightened (or more properly Enlightened) aristo impotently watching as his Revolution gets hijacked by the Jacobins, respectively - making their debates oddly tame and frictionless ; easier to add interesting glosses to the action - could it be her allegiance to the King is so blindly unswerving because she's not really French? could it be her disappointment with his actions has more to do with jealousy and lingering passion than political disagreements? - but they're merely implied (at best) by the movie ; meanwhile Russell is being spirited and likeable, Dreyfus spluttering and bulging like he always does, and the spare, rather arid painted backdrops giving the uncanny impression of a place where life has drained away - quite appropriate, in the circumstances. All very watchable but kind of thin for Rohmer, wry detachment never ripening (as in MARQUISE OF O, its closest equivalent) into arch absurdism, mostly through a lack of things to feed on : basically says there are differences between idealists and realists, some are one thing while others are the other, and one's 'betrayal' will often be the other's common sense - and doesn't even say that very clearly. And surely it doesn't count as revisionism - even among French intellectuals - to point out the glorious Revolution actually ended in bloody chaos?...]

THE 51st STATE (28) (dir., Ronny Yu) Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Carlyle, Emily Mortimer, Rhys Ifans, Ricky Tomlinson [It's a laugh, innit? "Football and drugs - a perfect Saturday afternoon!". "He fucked me! I am truly ass-invaded!". Comic props including fish-and-chips, haemorrhoids, English people dissing America ("like fuckin' Albania in neon") and vice versa, the mythical size of black people's dicks and a car-boot door slamming down repeatedly on the hand of a corpse. Samuel L. Jackson in a kilt, as a black master-chemist making the world's most powerful drug (he's a "chemical brother", geddit?) - except, after endless footage of happy ravers largin' it up, the drug is revealed to be a placebo, 'proving' the film can be ironic on the chemical lifestyle it otherwise wallows in (cinematic equivalent of the junkie who claims he can quit at any time) ; "Sight & Sound" reckons it's a metaphor for our hero's racial emancipation, which might make a little more sense if he wasn't at all times the suavest, least oppressed motherfucker in the room. Yu adds a couple of nifty touches, and at least it's unpretentious, never aiming to be more than a witless, yobbish, mostly repellent sub-Guy Ritchie orgy of comic violence - which it is. Best opening credit : "... and Meat Loaf as 'The Lizard'."]

MINORITY REPORT (56) (dir., Steven Spielberg) Tom Cruise, Colin Farrell, Max Von Sydow, Samantha Morton, Peter Stormare [Not to seem excessively geeky, but how exactly do the pre-cogs' psychic powers work in this flawed-but-interesting piece (albeit neither as flawed nor as interesting as A.I.)? Are they reading people's thoughts, catching 'vibes' from the ether, which would explain why we're told premeditated murders have all but disappeared in this society (our hero's "future murder" is indeed premeditated - just not by him) - but then how do they catch the opening crime of passion long before the perpetrator has had any murderous thoughts? Shouldn't they be catching these impulsive murders just seconds before they happen (and how do they sort murderous thoughts that'll come to nothing from those that will in fact lead to murder, anyway?)? Are they, on the other hand, not working by telepathy at all but actually getting previews of future events - in which case how on earth can they get a preview of a "future murder" which is not in fact going to happen until they see it, forcing our hero to run for his life and setting up the whole chain of events? (And what's with the scene in the mall, where Agatha's predictions seem directly sparked by the people she passes? Doesn't that reinforce the 'vibes' theory?) Sounds like pedantry but it's actually significant, because the film's flaws lie entirely in laziness and half-bakedness, never working through the questions it raises, whether narrative or moral : Cruise's climactic choice - will he shoot as predicted (predestination) or desist, changing his future (free will) - is pretty much irrelevant to the moral issue, which is the Pre-Crime system's thought-crime mentality (implication is that if he shoots he validates the system, but the point isn't that people might - or might not - change their minds if allowed to, but that they aren't in fact allowed to : the system would be just as wrong if every single prediction always resulted in murder) ; climax is the kind of silly twist where everything's a set-up - though it was only good fortune and random, unpredictable events that got our hero there in the first place - the film keeps going even after the plot has been wrapped up (Von Sydow's final 'choice' is so unnecessary), and the whole 'you'll go blind' routine is such blatant cheating you wonder when it was that Spielberg stopped trusting his audience to pay attention. Seems clear he was mostly interested in the visuals here, an extraordinary world that's the opposite of the usual CGI spotlessness - a blurry, grainy future (echoing the moral uncertainty driving the story) of lens-flares and flickering, holograms and degraded, hard-to-see images, whited-out backgrounds and floods of milky light (see e.g. the first Cruise - Von Sydow scene), motes of dust suspended in the stream. Thrilling look (and wry futuristic detail) gets it through the first hour or so, but it never really soars : sef-importance holds it back (why the classical music tolling in the background of the greenhouse scene?), ditto dark unaccountable undertows like the odd, flagellatory insistence on putting our hero through gratuitous physical pain (poison plants, mouldy sandwiches, a face-altering solution that'll "hurt worse than anything"). Spielberg's problem has always been knowing when to stop, and he hasn't really changed - too many police cars in SUGARLAND EXPRESS, too many heavenly choirs in EMPIRE OF THE SUN, too much downbeat chic in this one (it's his 'serious' phase) ; still fascinating, for the technical skill and many of the ideas, and the upheavals going on within the director (that Stormare scene is so bizarre - yet so half-baked) - and of course our hero is himself a director, manipulating images with the greatest of ease, yet unable to find the truth. Will the 'new' Spielberg now back down - or go all the way, to full-fledged, uncommercial arthouse? Talk about a cliff-hanger...]

DEATH TO SMOOCHY (34) (dir., Danny DeVito) Edward Norton, Robin Williams, Catherine Keener, Danny DeVito [A film I wanted to like, because it has pungent dialogue and demented characters, and is set in the world of kiddie-show hosts with names like Buggy Ding Dong ; except that it kept disappointing me, in the basic sense of not being as clever or inventive as it kept promising to be. Williams' flamboyant Rainbow Randolph, far from becoming the nemesis that seems his destiny, gets increasingly marginalised, finally neutered into sidekick mode ; his fiendish plan to unseat Smoochy turns out to be ... penis-shaped cookies, a cheap laugh at best (I thought they'd at least be spiked with hallucinogenics or something) ; the villains' own imaginations run only to killing him, or killing each other ; Keener gets little to do after her heartless-bitch facade is inevitably (but why inevitably?) revealed as a defence mechanism ; worst of all, it often - as e.g. with the whole neo-Nazi thing - seems to want to milk real emotion out of situations previously set up as cartoonish fun, and I don't think you can have it both ways. DeVito makes with the fisheye lenses and wacky montages, but the application of violent cynicism to an asinine milieu results only - as in SOAPDISH or AMERICA'S SWEETHEARTS - in a campy shrillness. So many side-gags everyone's bound to find something - I liked the kiddie-show Mafia talking appropriate tough-guy talk : "The rhino's up past his bedtime" - but the whole just doesn't cut it. I wish it did.]

THE BOURNE IDENTITY (53) (dir., Doug Liman) Matt Damon, Franka Potente, Chris Cooper, Clive Owen [Second level works, surface not so much. A thriller that doesn't thrill, both because we know the truth about our hero long before he does and because nothing really hinges on his finding out, beyond being able to say 'I'm a rogue CIA agent, how about that' (the original book seems to have had a whole conspiracy angle to be uncovered, hence the underdeveloped "Treadstone" sub-plot) ; the only minor question is why he botched the assassination, and that turns out to be the most banal scene in the movie (I blame John Woo and his sappy symbolic children). The real asset here is Liman's light touch and ever-so-subtle send-up of the Ludlum universe, tweaking ice-cold hitmen and ruthless secret agents to emphasise the human element, just as Bourne himself represents freedom (it's a tale of Innocence Recovered, a man rediscovering his humanity after a lifetime of programming) while the CIA, with its scarily Orwellian database, represents authority and systemisation : it's most obvious in the scene where Bourne makes elaborate preparations to access a hotel's records only to be trumped by the girl, who simply asks the receptionist what they want to know (having seen that he fancies her), but it's also in the way a spectacular car-chase is followed by a shot of Bourne and Marie just sitting in the car looking shell-shocked for a few seconds - because that's what you'd do if you'd just been through a car-chase - or the cool pop of Moby (as opposed to the usual portentous James Horner theme) over the closing credits, or the tongue-in-cheek montage of agents being summoned from various European cities, or just the casting of fresh-faced Damon in an action-hero role (he gets a great slacker moment in the middle of a car-chase : "So, okay, we got a bump coming up here..."). It's possible to do this plot in a light way and still kick ass - it's called THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT - but that's no reason to dismiss Liman's steely-retro views of Old Europe or the supple rhythms he brings to the milieu, as if viewing it through a quizzical smile of disbelief ; kind of dull to sit through, but it grows in the memory. Is that the first Mini in a car-chase scene since THE ITALIAN JOB?]

ONE DAY IN AUGUST (47) (dir., Constantine Giannaris) Costas Cotsianides, Eleni Kastani, Amalia Moutousi [Greek cinema seems to be improving, judging by my foolproof system of watching one, maybe two films a year - though this was by far te most acclaimed Greek film this year, and of course Giannaris isn't really part of the system at all, being based outside Greece. He certainly has an eye, mostly in a flashy music-video kind of way - heightened colours, purple skies and bottle-green seas, a tunnel transformed by a low-angle shot into a golden arc of winding light - but sometimes quite imaginative (a glass door closes, its edge running like a wipe across a character sitting behind it) ; the trouble is the turgid worldview behind the visuals, characters turned callous and grotesque, emphasis on cruelty and bad behaviour followed by final sentimental revelation that they're all just lost and lonely after all (think AMERICAN BEAUTY in MAGNOLIA shape, with long Author's Message speech at the climax). Hard not to feel Mr. Giannaris has a rather squalid view of humanity ; good to see a Greek auteur who seems to know what he's doing, though...]

THE NEW GUY (53) (dir., Ed Decter) DJ Qualls, Eliza Dushku, Eddie Griffin, Lyle Lovett [Seems like every year there's a teenpic about a loser who gets a makeover courtesy of some fairy godparent, suddenly becomes mega-popular, promptly forgets his/her old geeky friends but finally decides to use his/her newfound power as a source for Good ; last year was THE PRINCESS DIARIES, now this (superficially) very different, occasionally hilarious comedy - both films energised by wonderfully winning lead performances (Mr. Qualls is now officially on the long list of Actors I've Got My Eye On), let down by overly safe and conventional final sections. Likeably offbeat stuff before that, though, from the crazy-eyed - but Janet Jackson-loving - jailbird as narrator and main catalyst to the concept of badass cons and peace-loving geeks as brothers under the skin (quite a popular gag, that one) to Qualls himself as the goofiest, most eager-to-please geek since SIXTEEN CANDLES, the film delightedly pumping then puncturing his clownish bravado (Bystander 1 : "That boy's got the spirit!" ; Bystander 2 : "He's an idiot."). On the debit side : strain of sub-Farrelly humour (toilet gags, midget with a tuba), pointless parade of has-been guest stars (what, no Fabio?) and constant, implicit pandering to teens' blind conviction that their problems are the biggest, toughest problems in the world. "High-school popularity isn't a contest ; it's a war". Maybe - but it's still only high-school...]

LAST ORDERS (44) (dir., Fred Schepisi) Bob Hoskins, Michael Caine, Ray Winstone, David Hemmings, Tom Courtenay, Helen Mirren [Needed a Resnais, basically. Style is the problem in this staid, rather literal-minded character-piece, and Schepisi - an intelligent film-maker of limited vision - has a predictably efficient way of collecting the pieces of a man's life (cf. JE T'AIME JE T'AIME), with lines of dialogue acting as cues for visual illustration (someone will say, e.g., "Remember the old meat-van?", and we get a flashback to the old meat-van). Smooth and literate, but technique is sometimes over-fussy - a scene between Hoskins and his daughter is full of pointless cuts and changes of angle, for no better reason than to break it up a little - and it does feel like we've been here before, from the secrets-and-lies emerging from the past to the concept of past-their-prime geezers in a seaside town as old and faded as themselves (echoes of ATLANTIC CITY, to name but one). Strong performances, Hoskins and Winstone especially, and some nicely morbid touches, though tacky WW2 flashbacks betray the low budget. Not bad, just a little shopworn.]

THE ROOKIE (56) (dir., John Lee Hancock) Dennis Quaid, Rachel Griffiths, Jay Hernandez, Brian Cox [Why does this gosh-darned thing work so well, despite being corny and predictable and folksy as all heck, dagnabit? Because it has a Carter Burwell score (not among his best, but still)? Because Quaid, in his post-Meg Ryan days, radiates a sombre new gravitas borne of emotional suffering (and public humiliation)? Because director Hancock takes his time? Because he has a tendency to understatement, and a feel for small Texas towns and the big Texas sky, and an empathy for the little things people do on the fringes of the action (jug-eared coot singing "The Star-Spangled Banner", little kid impulsively pirouetting in delight)? Maybe because it steers away from cheap melodramatics, notably the device of the injured arm which you just know will flare up again when our hero starts pitching (maybe in the midst of the big game?) but in fact turns out to be a red herring : there's a respect for the character, being the story of a man granted a magical wish, a second chance in life (the super-fast pitching arm functions as a fantasy device, complete with cartoony sound effects - shazam! - each time he throws the ball), and having to decide how to handle it ; as in THE LEGEND OF BAGGER VANCE, external factors never realy come into it (his wife doesn't leave him ; his arm doesn't give out) - all the drama is existential, based on whether he'll be true to himself (or 'believe in his dreams', as the Disney people would undoubtedly put it). None of which quite redeems the slo-mo, or preponderance of father-son bonding (cf. A PERFECT WORLD, written by Hancock), or painful voice-over - "There's a story told in the town of Big Lake, Texas..." - or the scene where our hero is inspired to carry on by watching a Little League game ; but it's probably why the gosh-darned thing works as well as it does. Bonus points for the way it presents the opening back-story - hero as a kid - without signifiers (captions reading "1975" or whatever) so you don't realise it's a prologue and get into it like it was the main story, and it resonates throughout the movie ; though I guess I've spoiled it now...]