Continuing

LOST IN LA MANCHA

Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe’s documentary witnesses art in the un-making -- the disintegration and eventual collapse of Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, what was to have been his first production from his own script in over a decade. The production begins with a budget so tight nothing can go wrong, and then practically everything does: actors don’t show up, locations turn out to be uncomfortably close to NATO bombing ranges and Gilliam’s Quixote turns out to be too frail to ride a horse. Fulton and Pepe, former Temple grad students who filmed Gilliam’s production of Twelve Monkeys for their documentary The Hamster Factor, have what looks like unrestricted access, eavesdropping on conflicts, tantrums and moments of utter despair, and their detailed approach helps make the case that even an auteur as singular as Gilliam needs a team. Gilliam’s detractors might watch the film and see evidence of the mania for minutae that dooms all his films, but even those with a passing interest in things Gilliam will find this up-close look at the death of a dream tough to watch. In animated sequences by locals Chaim Bianco and Stefan Avalos, La Mancha points out that for all his out-of-control rep, Gilliam is "a responsible enfant terrible," and if it doesn’t exactly make its subject heroic, the film is certainly in his corner. The "Coming Soon" trailer for The Man Who Killed Don Quixote which follows Lost in La Mancha’s credits cements the symbiosis. --Sam Adams (Ritz at the Bourse)

MORVERN CALLAR

Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar, which she and Liana Dognini adapted from Alan Warner’s 1995 novel, doesn’t tell you much about Morvern Callar’s (Samantha Morton) thinking, after she finds her boyfriend dead on Christmas morning. Morvern is equal parts fragile and coarse; her eyes take in everything, and reveal a kind of rawness that’s hard to read. That evening, Christmas night, she opens her brightly wrapped presents, alone in the room with the body. Each object might say something about her dead boyfriend, maybe even about her. She dresses up and heads to a party with her vibrant friend, Lanna (Kathleen McDermott). When someone asks after Morvern’s "Dostoevsky," she says only that he’s home, in the kitchen, not exactly a lie. They dance, get high, exchange looks with pretty boys. Morvern resists her sense of abandonment by moving. She’s found a note on the computer: "Sorry Morvern. Don’t try to understand. It just seemed like the right thing to do." Whether or not she does try is hard to tell. She uses the money to take Lanna on a trip to Spain. On the road, the girls leave behind, for a short time anyway, their grinding jobs at a Glasgow supermarket. But while the trip -- including hotel rooms and sunny days poolside -- delights Lanna, it leaves Morvern cold. The girls are growing apart. Morvern’s not so much an enigma as a reflection, of a set of moments and desires.--C.F. (Ritz at the Bourse)

OLD SCHOOL

The premise has promise, in an I-love-the-’80s teen movie redux way: The near-campus house of newly single Mitch (Luke Wilson) is rezoned by the butthole dean (Jeremy Piven) for college-related use only after a housewarming party gets too raucous, so married but terminally juvenile best friends Frank (Will Ferrell) and Beanie (Vince Vaughn) convince Mitch to turn the house into a rule-flouting, cross-generational fraternity. What should follow, and what the trailer promises, are beer-soaked, increasingly transgressive shenanigans involving hazing, sex and that old-time rock ’n’ roll. What actually follows is anarchic only in the sense that it’s badly structured, arbitrary and -- despite Ferrell’s ample and omnipresent bare backside -- half-assed. Why, for example, does the dean threaten the frat’s charter by making them debate economic policy with James Carville and compete against the men’s gymnastics team, when he could just kick them out for being mostly nonstudents using school-controlled property? Because our lovable losers are "really good at paperwork." Why does a character have to die during K-Y Jelly wrestling? So Frank can sing "Dust in the Wind" at the funeral. Maybe this is all very funny if you’re wasted; without the benefit of chemical stupefication it’s nonsensical and even tame. Don’t expect Animal House -- it’s more like a big fat Greek petting zoo.--R.G. (Bridge)

THE PIANIST

A Polish Jew hiding from the Nazis in Warsaw, sometimes looked after by friendly non-Jews, Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody), the titular artist, is near starving, his hair hanging in clumps off his skull, his skin pale and gray. Commanded to play something by a German officer (Thomas Kretschmann), he’s playing for his life, but it’s difficult to know exactly what that life might mean now. Yet Szpilman will survive this encounter. You know this because Roman Polanski’s film is based on his memoirs (published in 1946). Opening in September 1939, The Pianist introduces the young artist as he is playing, refusing to acknowledge that life is already changed forever, that the Germans had invaded weeks before. Tragically, Szpilman and his family stay in their apartment; they can’t quite act. And so they wait, until they too are moved to a barracks, and then taken to a camp. The film mostly takes Szpilman’s view, showing the atrocities he sees; Polanksi and cinematographer Pawel Edelman hardly linger on any of these images. Finally forced to evacuate, Szpilman spends the rest of the film keeping out of sight. While the "action," such as it is, now decreases, the film becomes almost unbearably acute, approximating the man’s psychic state, his process of internalization. This attenuation -- Szpilman’s diminished view, his simultaneous dread of seeing and need to see -- is The Pianist’s most startling effect. Brody’s physical and emotional reduction is part of it, but even more extraordinary is the paring away of the film’s self-image, its presumed capacity to elucidate and illustrate. The Pianist attends to the senses in ways that grander pictures cannot.--C.F. (Bala; Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

PIGLET’S BIG MOVIE

(Not reviewed.) A haiku:

Pooh's porcine pal must

have some fun and save his friends.

Stars Sandra Bullock.

(AMC Orleans; UA Grant)

THE QUIET AMERICAN

Phillip Noyce’s adaptation of Graham Greene’s avowedly "anti-American" novel makes the political personal, collapsing a pivotal moment in the history of American involvement in Vietnam into the story of two men battling over a woman. Fowler (Michael Caine) is a British journalist who’s living the good life in 1952 Saigon until Alden Pyle (Brendan Fraser) walks into the picture. Fowler starts to see a darker side to Pyle when he introduces him to the beautiful Phuong (The Vertical Ray of the Sun’s Do Thi Hai Yen), who’s been Fowler’s girlfriend for the last two years. Pyle seizes on the fact that Fowler cannot get a divorce from his long-estranged English wife and begins to woo Phuong, always in the name of what’s best for her, but ruthlessly all the same. However, Greene’s love-triangle allegory is so overwhelming, however, that the film loses sight of the larger questions it makes signs of addressing. We’re stuck looking through Fowler’s eyes, never getting a sense of what life was like for the Vietnamese, any more than, for all the arguing Fowler and Pyle do over what’s best for Phuong, we get a chance to hear her own thoughts on the subject.--S.A. (Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)

SPACE STATION

Somewhere between the phantasmagorical revolving station of 2001: A Space Odyssey fame and the cramped quarters of a Volkswagen bug (and a major improvement over Mir -- the decrepit Soviet space home that deserved a tabloid headline of "Oy, Vey Is Mir") the International Space Station is lofty testament to the wonders of worldwide cooperation in the name of science. It also makes for some amazing cinematography. Space Station, the latest IMAX film, gives viewers the typical IMAXian bird’s-eye view of things -- in this case, life aboard a space station -- with a twist. The film, a co-production of IMAX and Lockheed Martin, was shot by astronauts, who not only master the elements of space travel, but do a very fine job taking pictures as well. As astronaut Brian Duffy explained at a press conference, he and his fellow space travelers spent nearly three years not just training for their mission, but they learned the intricacies of filmmaking as well. All in all, Space Station is one small step for man, one giant leap for audiences.--Howard Altman (Tuttleman Imax Theater, Franklin Institute)

SPIDER

Though we start out watching Spider (Ralph Fiennes), a shambling, mumbling madman, from the outside as he roams the deserted London streets, trying to recall his childhood past, it soon becomes clear that David Cronenberg means to merge the audience’s mind with his, in one of those messy processes that, in his movies, normally takes place on screen. We suppose Spider’s merely wandered, unobserved, up to the window of a modest house, but it turns out he’s watching his own past: his father (Gabriel Byrne), mother (Miranda Richardson) and even himself (Bradley Hall). In the present day, Spider is a filthy sight, his only possessions bits of string and metal, and also a notebook that he periodically fills with illegible scrawl, guarded as if it contains the secrets of the universe. But as a child, he’s a quiet, reactive boy, already silently constructing a world inside his head, just as he festoons his room with webs of ratty twine. The script, adapted from his own novel by Patrick McGrath, is full of allusions to puzzles. The pieces of Spider’s memory eventually fall into an archetypically Freudian pattern, embellished with tricks of light and multiple personalities -- but no matter how lurid the drama becomes, Peter Suschitzky’s camera stays at a cool resolve; we’re less inside his mind than right alongside him.--S.A. (Ritz at the Bourse)

TALK TO HER

It’s notable that Michael Cunningham’s The Hours shows up on a bedside table in Pedro Almodóvar’s newest movie, because in a way, it more fully seizes the notion of improbable emotional connections than the novel’s upcoming movie adaptation. The plot takes so many turns, it’s unfair to reveal too much, but its basis is the relationship that develops between two men -- Benigno (Javier Cámara) and Marco (Darío Grandinetti) -- who are both attached to comatose women, the former professionally, the latter romantically. In fact, they first connect while watching a dance performance, when Benigno notices Marco tearing up, and it’s a key clue to Almodóvar’s real subject: the way fictions, either those created for us or the ones we create ourselves, fill the gaps between people, for good or for ill. Repeatedly making nods to other types of art -- including a mesmerizing silent-film interlude, filmed by the director, which is transportingly beautiful but hides a sinister meaning -- Talk to Her perhaps spreads itself too thin, but it’s a movie about passions, so if they overrun, it’s almost appropriate.--S.A. (Ritz Five)

TEARS OF THE SUN

Bruce Willis doesn’t do much talking in Antoine Fuqua’s mostly somber action picture, set during a fictionalized Nigerian civil war. He’s a hardcore Navy SEAL Lieutenant assigned to extract American citizen/French-born physician Monica Bellucci from the jungle. When she says she won’t leave without "my people" (Nigerian refugees), he and his team (including Eamonn Walker and Cole Hauser) proceed to escort her and the refugees to Cameroon. Witnessing the rebels’ brutality, Willis is increasingly scrunch-faced, indicating conflict over his dedication to duty (embodied by captain Tom Skerritt back on an aircraft carrier) and sympathy for his new charges. His decision to go off-mission leads to combat scenes, in which the U.S. military is alternately thrillingly precise (though they arrive too late to save one village, they do punish the killers) and horribly outnumbered by very mean-looking rebels (led by Malick Bowens). It’s like Black Hawk Down with a "happier" ending: The U.S. troops do an obvious right thing, and are loved for it. Given the current moment, this moral lesson (help real people, rather than follow orders) reads like an endorsement of "preemptive" striking… if you leave out the bomb-dropping part.--C.F. (Cinemagic; UA Grant; UA Riverview)

VIEW FROM THE TOP

Bruno Barreto’s romantic romp puts Gwyneth Paltrow, Kelly Preston and Christina Applegate in tight, short flight attendant uniforms and then pitches the plane about so they scramble and skitter. Problems in the film start early: Paltrow’s cast as a Nevada trailer girl who aspires to the Paris--New York run, emulating celebrity author stew Candice Bergen and learning all she needs to know from cock-eyed stew trainer Mike Myers (whose rowdy, big-dimension performance looks like it’s in another movie). When Paltrow falls in love with perfect, sensitive lawyer Mark Ruffalo (who also has a loving and supportive family), she believes she can’t fly and commit at the same time. The movie pokes along until she figures out she has other options. She’s either really slow on the uptake or stuck in a time warp. Come to think of it, those plane pitches do resemble old Star Trek episodes.--Cindy Fuchs (Baederwood; Ritz 16; UA Grant)

WILLARD

The ghost of the original Willard looms literally over James Wong and Glen Morgan’s remake, in the form of a portrait of Bruce Davison, star of the 1971 original. Here, though, he’s only a painting of the deceased father of Willard Stiles (Crispin Glover), a hyperbolically maladjusted (not-so) young man with a fashion sense tending towards the funereal. Harangued by his mother, abused by his boss (R. Lee Ermey, with a James Traficant ’do), Willard has no one to turn to, until he strikes up a friendship with the rats in his basement, who repay his friendship by doing his bidding, with increasingly toothsome results. Morgan and Wong, the X-Files team who also helmed Final Destination, show real skill with details, from the red-rimmed, ratlike eyes of Willard’s decrepit mother to the determination with which Willard initially seeks out rat traps that won’t force him to confront their dead bodies. (If you think his unwillingness to get his hands dirty at this point is suggestive, just wait until he turns to "Tora Bora Rodent Destroya.") But if the details are right, the devil is elsewhere, namely with Glover, who starts off acting so crazy that you forget it’s supposed to mean something when his character actually does go nuts. The movie is heavy with references, from a massacre scored to the theme from Ben to several blatant lifts from Psycho -- so heavy, in fact, that it starts to occur to you that it’s never going to take off on its own. Hampered by a rushed and incoherent climax, Willard starts much more promisingly than you’d think, and ends just about as you’d expect.--S.A. (Cinemagic; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham)

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