February 23-March 1, 2006

movie shorts

Continuing Movie Shorts

A haiku:

Fat woman fights crime.
Wait! It's Martin in disguise.
We smell an Oscar.

(Not reviewed.) (AMC Orleans; Bridge; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview; UA 69th St.)

Ang Lee's burnished, melancholy adaptation of E. Annie Proulx's laconic tale of weather-worn sheep-tenders in the Wyoming countryside is more of a post-Western than a genuine oater, an elegy for cowboys who've run out of trail. It's John Wayne at the end of Stagecoach with no sunset to ride off into, no way to free himself from "the blessings of civilization." It's hardly the first movie to hint at what trail hands get up to on those long, cold nights, but it's the first time we've seen one cowboy flip the other over and spit into his palm. Unspoken heartbreak is Lee's stock in trade, and Brokeback milks the sentiment for all it's worth, although its placid pacing more often takes you to the verge of tears than past it. Ultimately, Brokeback Mountain isn't a Western. It's a weepie. --S.A. (Bryn Mawr; Ritz East; UA Grant; UA Main St.)

At first, it's not clear what you're looking at: A camera holds steady on a quiet Parisian street. But when the video fast-forwards, you realize you're looking at a TV screen, watching along with Georges (Daniel Auteuil) and Anne (Juliette Binoche). The tape shows their home, shot from across the street, surveillance-style. It has arrived at their doorstep without explanation, an indication that they're being watched. By whom, they don't know. Figuring out the answer to this question becomes Georges' focus throughout Caché, Michael Haneke's latest unsettling look at the shaky foundations of bourgeois security. As more tapes arrive accompanied by childlike drawings of bland figures in duress, Georges suspects the tapes might be related to a childhood incident involving himself and a young Algerian boy, Majid. Tracking down the adult Majid (Maurice Bénichou), Georges threatens him with violence. "Kicking my ass won't leave you any wiser about me," Majid retorts. "You have too much to lose." In a final, cryptic image, Caché connects fathers and sons, histories and responsibilities, fears and accusations. And you're left to do your own reading. --C.F. (Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)

It's a role so juicy any actor could drown in it: Truman Capote, the defiantly swishy, endlessly quotable author of Breakfast at Tiffany's and In Cold Blood, who in his day was the most famous writer in America. But Capote comes not to praise its subject, nor to bury him—rather, to dig him up just long enough to drag his name through the mud. Sketched in Stygian hues without wit or insight, it's a portrait of a man so hollow you can barely stand to look at him. As played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, Capote is a smug, tone-deaf exploiter who sees the horrific murder of a Kansas family at the heart of In Cold Blood as the ideal opportunity for career advancement. --S.A. (Ritz at the Bourse)

Despite the trailers playing up Casanova as a blissed-out romance á la Chocolat, Heath Ledger is reduced to playing the pretty face at the center of an old-fashioned farce. Romance is present, of course, in the form of Sienna Miller's proto-feminist, whose very disgust at Casanova's libertine methods makes her the only woman who can inspire him to settle down, but Lasse Hallstrom is content to play lip service to his title character's exploits. --S.B. (Ritz 16)

As played by David Strathairn in Good Night, And Good Luck., Edward R. Murrow isn't so much galvanizing as iron-clad. Most of Good Night focuses on Murrow's 1954 dogfight with red-baiting Sen. Joseph McCarthy and the responsibility of journalism—or, more pointedly, journalists—to make their voices heard in a climate of fear. Murrow's See It Now turned the tables on McCarthy by presenting the senator "in his own words," a strategy Good Night echoes. In retrospect, the most important confrontation in Good Night is not the Murrow-McCarthy showdown, but the face-off between Murrow and CBS head William S. Paley (Frank Langella). Although Paley respects Murrow's work, the broadcasts sell poorly and alienate advertisers. When an uncompromising Murrow tells Paley that the news is supposed to lose money, Paley responds, "People want to enjoy themselves. They don't want a civics lesson." The trouble with Good Night, And Good Luck. is its assumption that the two are incompatible. --S.A. (Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)

Lifting liberally from (and watering down) the superior Grosse Pointe Blank and The Tailor of Panama, this lukewarm satire throws Pierce Brosnan's washed-up hit man and Greg Kinnear's down-on-his-luck businessman into each others' orbits, with male bonding and meditation on middle-aged failure to follow. Writer-director Richard Shepard, a one-time wunderkind (The Linguini Incident) who's been toiling in the salt mines for the better part of a decade, lacks the requisite flair for genre subversion, substituting men's-group melodrama and half-hearted set pieces for any real dissection of masculine archetypes. --S.A. (AMC Orleans; Bala; Ritz Five; Ritz 16; UA Grant)

"What I am is sexy." When Nola (Scarlett Johansson) makes this observation over drinks with Irish tennis pro Chris (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), he's briefly taken aback. "You are aware of your effect on men," he says, leaning back. She is, of course, because she's a woman in a Woody Allen movie. This one is set in London rather than New York, and its murder plot unfolds more slowly than his comedies, but its thematic focus is unmistakable. Because Chris is the indecisive, unhappy, inarticulate protagonist in a Woody Allen movie, you can pretty much guess what happens next. --C.F. (Bala; Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

Doubtless hoping to recapture Oscar gold, Judi Dench reprises her Shakespeare in Love performance as the titular widow, a wealthy ex-colonial who returns to England bereft of ritual propriety. Engaging Bob Hoskins' music-hall impresario to revive a shuttered theater, she finds the between-the-wars crowds difficult to impress, but Mrs. H. knows how to woo the locals: boobies, and lots of them. A little seductive bullying of Christopher Guest's jelly-spined minister, and they've got a license to stage tableaux vivants rife with unclad country girls. --S.A. (Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)

Spielberg's film tracks (and fictionalizes) the assassinations that follow the 1972 Olympic Games murders, carried out by an Israeli counterterrorist team led by Avner (Eric Bana), a Mossad agent and bodyguard to the Israeli Prime Minister. His primary Israeli contact is Ephraim (Geoffrey Rush), who is dedicated to revenge as a declaration of selfhood. Avner comes to question this imperative as his icy resolve gives way to guilt and angst. Home, tribe and family—these are the values by which Avner measures his duty and yet, Munich contends, the efforts to define home by endless cycles of aggression can never succeed. --C.F. (Ritz Five; Ritz 16; UA Grant)

Paradise Now, the second fiction feature from Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad, has regained the national spotlight on its way to becoming the most financially successful Arab-language film ever released in the United States. It dumps self-awareness for straightforward drama, and shifts its focus from the quotidian to the sensational: The movie's main characters are two young Palestinians who are recruited for a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv. But as the deadly hour draws near, Paradise Now starts to unravel, its will-they-or-won't-they machinations growing increasingly contrived and remote. --S.A. (Bryn Mawr)

Maybe we need another Pride and Prejudice like Jane Austen needs the royalty checks, but Joe Wright's fluid, graceful adaptation at least avoids drowning in its own redundancy. Matthew MacFayden makes a somewhat dull Darcy, and as the sharp-tongued, headstrong Elizabeth Bennet, the shallowness of Keira Knightley's gifts has never been more apparent. But their callowness somehow works in the movie's favor—rather than an anachronistic you-go girl, Elizabeth comes off as a petulant, strong-willed not-quite-woman whose independence is more a matter of instinct than principle, while Darcy's irritable mystery reads as twentysomething self-seriousness. --S.A. (Bryn Mawr)

When it comes to guns, oil and drugs—the means by which money moves in the world — you only maintain relationships as long as they're useful. Working through multiple and complex storylines, Syriana argues that such transience is never as manageable as power brokers imagine. Inspired by See No Evil, a 2002 memoir by former CIA operative Robert Baer, Syriana recalls 1970s political thrillers where the good man must beat his evil government employers at their own game, but Bob Barnes' (George Clooney) moral dilemma is not so easily sorted. --C.F. (Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

Learning that she has a 17-year-old son named Toby (Kevin Zegers) from her days as Stanley, pre-op transsexual Bree (Felicity Huffman) must come to terms with her past before stepping into her future. This takes the form of a cross-country road trip, during which she pretends to be a Christian missionary and learns of his abusive stepfather, prostitution and tendency to lie and cheat. The episodic structure is less tedious than its conventional efforts to make Bree's situation affecting for an imagined mainstream audience. This means the conflict between parent and child must accommodate or reflect the sorts of anxieties that such viewers recognize and smile at, tiffs that don't quite reach crisis points but instead allow the free-to-be-you-and-me vibe to permeate the film. --C.F. (Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)

A movie about the making of a movie based on a book about the writing of a book, Tristram Shandy is a fiendishly clever puzzle, twisting itself in knots until the tension is almost too much to bear. There's the frame story, in which Steve Coogan, who plays Tristram as well as his father Walter, and Rob Brydon, cast as Tristram's uncle Toby, play "Steve Coogan" and "Rob Brydon," feuding co-stars whose passive-aggressive battles for screen dominance furnish some of the movie's most wickedly funny exchanges. But there's more at stake than kidding movie-star vanity or the chaos of on-set life. Chances are you're not intended to keep all this straight but Tristram Shandy is only confusing when it means to be, which is to say that, although Coogan quips that the novel "was postmodern before there was any modernism to be post- about," the movie's underlying structure is ultimately traditional, almost classical. It's a searching, poignant story about the way that little things distract us from the things that really matter: love, family, creativity and self-knowledge. It's also very, very funny. —S.A. (Ritz 5; Ritz 16)

John R. Cash (Joaquin Phoenix) was a hard-drinking, drug-abusing, soul-searching, black-wearing, June-Carter-loving man. Yet, he was persistently vulnerable and eager to impress. James Mangold's much-anticipated biopic predictably showcases high and low points, and draws direct lines between tragedies and emotional fallouts. The problem is that biopics need beginnings and endings, and this one wrestles the man's contradictions and passions into typical shape. The film focuses on the volatile relationship between Cash and the generous, God-fearing, self-judging June and paints a good-woman-behind-a-great-man portrait, such that June (played by Reese Witherspoon) appears only as he knows her, without a life of her own. It's a familiar story, and it makes you think that the true innovation might lie in her. --C.F. (UA Riverview)

Set in 1930s Shanghai just before the Japanese invasion, Countess stars Ralph Fiennes as a blind American ex-diplomat obsessed with opening "the bar of my dreams," a sticky trinket that ought to embarrass anybody, let alone screenwriter Kazuo Ishiguro. The countess in question is both Fiennes' bar and Natasha Richardson's displaced Russian aristocrat, reduced to whoring herself to support her daughter and ungrateful family (Lynn and Vanessa Redgrave, underused and barely present). In case Fiennes' metaphorical blindness isn't strong enough, Ishiguro gives him a thousand variations on the verb "to see," and having a spike pounded into your head is no more pleasant if it's decked with jewels. Like any Merchant-Ivory film, Countess has production values out the wazoo, but it lacks even the faintest spark of life. --S.A. (Ritz Five; Ritz 16)