[postlink]http://www.moviesthe.com/2004/12/phantom-of-opera-new-and-unimproved.html[/postlink]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ej1zMxbhOO0endofvid
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The inevitable but not-long-enough-delayed movie version of Andrew Lloyd Webber's "The Phantom of the Opera" can best be described as explosively dull. I'm told that this celebrated musical actually does work onstage, or at least did when original stars Michael Crawford and Sarah Brightman were headlining. But even though it's been running in London since 1986, and has been sucking in tourists on Broadway since 1988, I've never gone to see it. I have heard the music, though. Which is why I've never gone to see it.

The story, based on a 1911 novel by French mystery writer Gaston Leroux, is a horror romance. (The famous 1925 silent film version of the tale, starring Lon Chaney, emphasized the horror; this new one, like the theatrical production, I assume, is floridly romantic. Or at least florid.) The year is 1870, and a Paris opera house is haunted by a mysterious, masked Phantom. Why he's so mysterious is hard to say, since the theater's owners pay him a monthly retainer and have acceded to his demand that they reserve Box Five for his personal use on a nightly basis. Anyway, the Phantom (Gerard Butler, of "Dracula 2000" and the second "Lara Croft Tomb Raider" movie) is a musical genius, and something of a critic, too. He is offended by the caterwauling of the company's current diva, the operatically Italian La Carlotta (Minnie Driver), and decides to engineer the ascendance of the ingénue Christine (Emmy Rossum) to star status. The Phantom is in love with Christine, but so is the opera company's dashing young financial benefactor, the Vicomte Raoul de Chagny (Patrick Wilson, of the HBO production of "Angels in America"). You can roughly imagine the rest.

Director Joel Schumacher has lavished more visual invention on all of this than the material deserves. The settings — from a rooftop overlooking Paris to the subterranean canals where the Phantom holds sway, poling about in a Venetian-style gondola — are beautifully shot (by cinematographer John Mathieson), and the many backstage scenes are convincingly cramped and bustling. Emmy Rossum ("Mystic River") is sweetly appealing, and, having trained at New York's Metropolitan Opera, can really sing. Minnie Driver, who actually moonlights as a pop singer these days (she released an album of her own songs a few months back), doesn't sing here (her voice is dubbed by English soprano Margaret Preece); but her over-the-top-and-into-the-woods performance as Carlotta is the most entertaining thing in the movie. ("I veel not be seenging!" she announces during one tantrum. "Bring my doggie — I leaving!")

These modest assets, however, are completely scuttled by the film's three insurmountable flaws. As the Phantom, Gerard Butler's singing voice is a spectacularly grating bray — with his slick good looks, he might be fronting a bad '70s rock band. As Raoul, Patrick Wilson is merely uninteresting, both as a singer and as a romantic lead. (He has zero chemistry with Emmy Rossum.) And then there's the music, which is the most insurmountable element of all. I know millions of people have thrilled to Andrew Lloyd Webber's score, and I marvel at their musical tolerance. His melodies, with few exceptions, are generic and pretty much interchangeable, and they're immovably anchored in the glossy and long-gone pop-rock period in which they were confected. (The choogling synth rhythms he deploys at one point — complete with vintage electro-handclaps! — are startlingly tacky.) Webber puts this stuff across by infusing it with pure, bellowing bombast — you know one of his songs is peaking when the singer opens his mouth extra-wide. The effect is sort of like being at a Meat Loaf concert back in 1977. Only Meat Loaf had much better tunes.
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'Phantom Of The Opera' New And Unimproved

[postlink]http://www.moviesthe.com/2004/11/httpwww.html[/postlink]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coiJThHAcb8endofvid
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There are many worthwhile things that might be done with $150 million; making a movie like this isn't one of them. (And I doubt that the director, Oliver Stone, will be entrusted with that kind of budget again anytime in the near future.) Back in the 4th Century BC, Alexander the Great took eight years to conquer the known world of his time. The best that can be said about "Alexander," the movie, is that it isn't quite that long. (It runs nearly three hours.) The picture is so thoroughly ridiculous, it's hard to know where to begin in listing its infelicities. But I'll try.

First of all, just totally at random, Colin Farrell, who plays Alexander (with a blond dye-job), is 28 years old; Angelina Jolie, who plays his mother, Olympias, is 29. Olympias has a thing for snakes — she purrs through the movie with vipers thrown over her shoulder or wrapped around her leg or just left lying all a-squirm on the floor of her palace boudoir. Why? Dunno. She also speaks in some sort of indeterminate Carpathian accent, for reasons that eluded me, if they even exist.

The movie is narrated — and narrated and narrated — by Alexander's boyhood friend, Ptolemy (Anthony Hopkins). At a point many years after Alexander's death, we see Ptolemy, now old and tiresome, doddering about his palace recounting the Great's many exploits and trying to shovel in as much ancient historical context as possible, in vain hope of giving the audience some faint idea of what's going on. His incessant drone, clotted with phrases like "the loins of war," is the picture's overriding annoyance. Although you do kind of chuckle when he lets rip with, "It is said that Alexander was never defeated, except by Hephaistion's thighs." Hephaistion is another of Alexander's childhood chums, although in this case, one with whom he has a sexual relationship. We're not about to actually see these two men having sex, of course — not in a $150 million Hollywood movie — so we're treated instead to many sultry looks and steamy comments, all of them hilarious. ("You have eyes like no other," Hephaistion murmurs at one point.) The director appears to be aiming for a tone of bold homoeroticism — who knew that ancient armies traveled with contingents of simpering (it's the only word) young sex slaves, and that these ill-used boys apparently pioneered the art of mascara-application? But since Stone has no knack for eroticism of any sort, the result is a procession of increasingly silly scenes. For example, after Alexander marries a woman named Roxane (played by Rosario Dawson, lumbered with another vaguely "foreign" accent), she catches him in their bedroom trading smoldery confidences with Hephaistion. "You luff heem?" she asks, with understandable pique. "There are many different ways to love," Alexander replies suavely, as Roxane backs away, possibly not wanting to see any of them demonstrated. (Dawson later features nakedly in the movie's only unabashedly heterosexual interlude.)

There are two big, expensively staged battles in "Alexander," but their action is largely a function of blurry camera work and whip-bang editing; they're otherwise incoherent. Somebody shouts "Prepare to repel chariots!" Then there's a bunch of leaping and grunting and clanging. Then Alexander, riding ahead of his men into battle, yells over his shoulder, "Left turn!" And then ... no, I can't go on. Or wait, yes I can: The soundtrack score of this movie, by the Greek synth virtuoso Vangelis, is an abomination in itself, an ugly mush of oozing string washes, pounding tympanis, swooning chorales and tiny tinkling chimes. There's no one up on the screen at any point suffering as much abuse as the audience that's forced to endure this aural assault.

Colin Farrell is a good actor, and his career will survive this movie. So will Angelina Jolie's. And of course Anthony Hopkins, having previously lent his presence to the execrable "Hannibal," obviously has no serious concerns about his own professional future. But Oliver Stone hasn't directed a movie that anyone took seriously since the 1994 "Natural Born Killers" (and why anybody took that film seriously remains a mystery). To say that his career was in disarray before "Alexander" is an understatement. To say that it's in trouble now is unavoidable.
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'Alexander': Welcome To My Life

[postlink]http://www.moviesthe.com/2004/11/alfie-exuberant-remake.html[/postlink]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0Aqq_xbo80endofvid
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"Alfie": Sex, Lies and Limousines

Alfie Elkins is an incredible lout. A 30-something Englishman transplanted to New York, he works as a limo-driver mainly to finance his real vocation, which is to bed, or at least to backseat, as many women as he can — and to move on as quickly as possible. "We all have an expiration date," he says, "and women have a shorter shelf life than men, don't they?" Alfie has no real interest in women; they're scenery. He plucks them like flowers and then drops them the moment they begin to wilt — or, as he says, to "want more than I can give." Lying in a reluctant post-coital embrace in the back of his limo, he looks out at us and says, with a weary sigh, "Obligatory cuddling — thousand-one, thousand-two ..." He has no morals, only standards: "I'll give her my highest grade," he says, surveying one particularly hot number. "A-minus."

As Alfie, in this re-tooling of the 1966 movie that made Michael Caine an overnight star, Jude Law gives a virtuoso performance — not his first, but possibly his most captivating. He's in every scene, and he narrates the action with a stream of tart aphorisms delivered directly to the camera (a tricky thing to pull off without breaking the story's spell). His buoyant charm is dazzling. Alfie is jiving all the women he comes on to, but to us he talks straight. "My priorities," he confides, "lean toward wine, women ... well, that's about it for me." He's an innocent, in a way: It would never occur to him to think that he might be behaving badly, because it would never occur to him to think about such things at all. He's not a predator, exactly, just a heedless seducer — and we can't help it: We're seduced.

Alfie wants sex without complications — which is to say, without connection. When sweet-natured Julie (Marisa Tomei), the young single mom he's been semi-shacking up with, starts making relationship noises, he instantly recoils. ("Julie," he turns to tell us, "hasn't got enough of the superficial things that really matter.") Tall, blond, modelesque Nikki (Sienna Miller) seems an altogether snazzier prospect. But after installing her in his apartment, he begins to notice lamentable imperfections. (She's something of a pothead, and she gets a little sloppy when she drinks.) It reminds him of the time, when he was a boy, that he saw a statue of Aphrodite in a museum, and was transfixed by its exquisite female form — until he noticed small cracks in the stone. "Ruined it for me," he says. "Beautiful, but damaged."

It's tempting to keep quoting lines and noting witty incidents from this sleekly crafted film. Although the story takes its structure from the same Bill Naughton screenplay that provided the basis for the 1966 "Alfie" (which was nominated for five Academy Awards), director Charles Shyer and his co-writer, Elaine Pope, have created an exuberant update of the original material; and by relocating the action from London to New York, they've opened it up in ravishing ways — dreamscape Manhattan, from its sparkling SoHo cafes to the glittering lights of Central Park in the snow, has not often been more resplendently presented. And the story still ends with symmetrical justice, meted out this time by a wealthy and beautiful older woman named Liz (Susan Sarandon), who's known many an Alfie in her day, and who has this one's number the moment he opens his mouth. Like us, though, she can hardly wait to hear what he has to say anyway.

("Alfie" is a Paramount Pictures release. Paramount and MTV are both subsidiaries of Viacom.)

"Enduring Love": Crazy for You

"Enduring Love" gives you a queasy case of the creeps. It's a stalker movie sprung from a philosophical premise. Its protagonist, a self-involved English university professor, is an intellectual who doesn't believe in much, least of all love; and very least of all, love that endures. Then one day true love comes wheeling his way, all damp and panting and out of control, and he finds that he can't endure it.

Joe Rose (Daniel Craig) is almost a caricature of the modern man of reason. He tells his students that nothing in life has a meaning beyond whatever arbitrary one we may assign to it, and that love, especially, is an illusion — a raw biological imperative obscured by meaningless emotional turmoil. Nevertheless, Joe has strong meaningless feelings for his girlfriend, a successful sculptor named Claire (Samantha Morton), and he has decided, rather arbitrarily, to ask her to marry him. One perfect sunny day, he takes her out into the rolling green countryside around Oxford for a champagne picnic, during the course of which he plans to propose. Before he can do so, though, a big hot-air balloon comes crashing down out of the sky and goes scudding across a field, its bright red silk puffed out by the wind, a frightened boy in its passenger basket. Daniel and a few other bystanders come running to assist, each of them grabbing one of the balloon's mooring ropes and struggling to pull it to a halt. But the wind gusts up again, and the balloon begins to ascend, lifting the four men by the ropes they're grasping. Daniel and two of the other would-be rescuers let go before the balloon rises too far, and they fall a short way back to the ground unharmed. A fourth man, however, holds on as the vessel drifts upward, and he's very high above the field when his hands finally slip from the rope. He goes plummeting to his death.

This startling shot — from an overhead angle that clearly shows the terrified man falling away from us, practically all the way down to the ground — seems so real and unmediated by computers that you may actually wonder how it was done. It's followed by an equally horrific view of the dead man's crumpled body, which has been pounded into the ground, its cracked bones leering out through ripped skin and its glistening viscera plopped out like sausages on the sunny turf. Not too much is made of these shots — the director, Roger Michell ("Notting Hill"), doesn't milk them. But they burrow in your mind as the film's disturbing air of claustrophobic dread begins to build.

Contemplating the torn body on the grass, Daniel is approached by one of his fellow rescuers, a tall, blond, gangly man named Jed Parry (Rhys Ifans). Jed, who looks like a stick figure wrapped in shapeless clothes that might've been plucked out of a Dumpster, is clearly a bit off: He wants Daniel to kneel with him in prayer. ("I find it helps at times like these," he says, with gooey obsequiousness.) Daniel sinks to his knees with an obvious lack of enthusiasm.

In the days that follow, Daniel, a man already inclined to heavy rumination, becomes obsessed with the meaning — might there actually be one? — of the balloon man's death. (Since the boy in the passenger basket ultimately managed to land the vessel a few miles away, the man who fell died entirely in vain.) Then, out of the blue, love comes calling. One night, in the apartment he shares with Claire, he gets a phone call. It's Jed. Daniel can't imagine what he wants or, more important, how he got his number. "Where are you?" he asks suspiciously. "I'm in the park across the street," Jed says in a soft, disquieting purr. And sure enough, there he is. "God's love passed between us," the spindly drifter says of their brief encounter after the accident. And then: "Isn't there something you want to say to me?" Daniel can't imagine what he's talking about. But in the days that follow, Jed keeps pressing for an answer as he insinuates himself into Daniel's daily routines. Daniel goes to a restaurant: Jed is there. He goes to a bookstore: Jed is there among the stacks, grinning and snapping his picture. He seems to know all about Daniel, and, more worryingly, he knows about Claire, too. With his unspecified and increasingly ominous needs, Jed starts to drive Daniel over the edge of his forbearance; and Daniel, consumed by mounting anger, begins to drive away Claire (who has in any case grown weary of her boyfriend's anti-romance rants). Finally, in search of an explanation for all this, Daniel goes to see the widow of the man who fell from the balloon. She tells him she thinks there was someone with her husband when he drove away from the house that morning — someone she couldn't identify.

"Enduring Love"'s symbolism is sometimes a little ostentatious. (The billowing red balloon is echoed by a blood-colored pomegranate in a fruit bowl, and later by the sculpted apples in a museum exhibition.) And the sterile cityscape in which the story is set becomes visually oppressive after a while. (The movie was presumably filmed in London, but famous landmarks have been avoided, so it could be any old nowhere in the world.) But Daniel Craig (he played gang boss Paul Newman's crazy son in the 2002 "Road to Perdition") is tautly convincing as a smug, upscale academic whose encounter with the irrational nearly drives him mad. Samantha Morton, intriguingly placid as always, conveys a thoughtful ambivalence here. And as Jed, the Welsh actor Rhys Ifans (in his second balloon-related role — he also starred in the airborne Australian comedy "Danny Deckchair") brings an odd, shlumpy malevolence to the picture. You feel an uneasy twinge whenever he sidles into a scene.

The movie is so tamped-down and ambiguous that certain viewers may experience it as something not unlike a low-grade headache. But with its pervasive sense of unease and senseless threat, it does lodge in your head. Which probably can't be said of whatever more standard piece of cinematic product you may have endured lately.
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'Alfie' An Exuberant Remake

[postlink]http://www.moviesthe.com/2004/10/saw-bad-to-bone.html[/postlink]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlJ_3T8r0-Mendofvid
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Two men wake up — or come to, actually — in what looks like Hell's Bathroom, a big wet grotty space filled with rusty sinks, dangling pipes and shattered glass. Each is leg-shackled to a wall opposite the other. Soon they discover a grimy bundle containing a pair of hacksaws. The saws are too flimsy to cut through the thick chains around their ankles, but as one of the men, who happens to be a surgeon, quickly realizes, they're entirely adequate for carving through flesh and bone.

Oh, and there's a blood-spattered body laid out in the middle of the room, beyond either man's reach, with a pistol clutched in one hand and a little cassette player in the other. Hmm. And what have we here — each of the men has been given a tape.

"Saw" has a clever, how-about-this plot, and it must have been fun for the fledgling filmmakers — director James Wan and co-star Leigh Whannell — to write. The two kidnapped men are being tormented by a mysterious creep called the Jigsaw Killer, a virtuoso hack-and-slasher who just wants people to appreciate the beauty of life a little more. This character's alter ego, a big weird puppet head, is serviceably spooky, in the devil-doll movie tradition of "Dead of Night" (1945) and "Magic" (1978), and of course the still-at-large Chucky, of the "Child's Play" pictures. "Saw" can't avoid some of the flat-footed implausibilities of the fright-flick genre, like the scary dark room that nobody in his right mind would enter, but which is about to be entered anyway. However, Wan and Whannell are trying, within their limited means, to be inventive, and you admire their desire to do so.

The movie looks like it was made for about 50 cents; but as was the case with the now-classic "Night of the Living Dead," the cruddy no-budget sets add a sort of dismal frisson to the proceedings. However, while it's interesting that the filmmakers were able to attract such name players as Cary Elwes, Danny Glover and Monica Potter (and, for the electro soundtrack, to secure the aid of Helmet guitarist Page Hamilton and Nine Inch Nails vets Danny Lohner and Charlie Clouser), the actors aren't really given much to do beyond bicker and bleed, and the picture lacks the sort of evocative atmosphere that makes great horror movies memorable. This one does its bloody job fairly well, but it'll be interesting to see what Wan and Whannell are able to achieve when they get a bigger budget. Given the shrewdly revved-up Internet hype that's preceded the release of this film, I'd imagine that check is already in the mail.

"Birth": Be My Baby

I admit the scene where the 10-year-old boy strips off his clothes and hops into the bathtub with the naked and waiting Nicole Kidman kind of icked me out, especially when he fixed her with a strange, sultry stare and addressed her as his "wife." That and the scene where Kidman asks him if he's ever made love to a girl and he says, "You'll be my first." I didn't know whether to laugh or leave.

I stuck with it, though. And I learned that Kidman and her little man actually don't have sex in the new Jonathan Glazer movie, "Birth," which at least is one thing to recommend it. The film is beautiful, but it's baffling. You wonder what on earth it's trying to say. Then you wonder if it even knows. Kidman — excellent as always — plays Anna, a well-to-do Manhattan widow who's been mourning the death of her husband, Sean, for the last 10 years. She's finally decided to stop moping around and remarry. But then, on the night of her engagement party at her mother's huge Upper East Side apartment, the aforementioned 10-year-old boy (moonfaced Cameron Bright) slips in, takes her aside and tells her that he is Sean — her Sean, the reincarnation of her dead husband. Anna finds this preposterous, as who wouldn't, and so do her mother (Lauren Bacall), her pompous fiancee (Danny Huston), and the rest of the party guests. But the child won't be put off, and over the ensuing days he demonstrates an unsettling knowledge of things that it seems only Anna's dead husband could have known. Nobody is buying this — except, bizarrely, Anna herself. Slowly, she comes to believe that the boy is telling the truth, that he really is her Sean.

Since Jonathan Glazer's first movie was the grippingly acidulous "Sexy Beast," and since "Birth" is so elegantly photographed and so bravely, unhastily paced (its wintry rhythms are a little reminiscent of old Ingmar Bergman films), I kept waiting to see where he was going with this story. And when Anna told little Sean that she'd happily wait 11 years until he turned 21, and they could get married — well, I realized where he was going. He was going over a cliff. Slowly, beautifully, trailing great clouds of befuddlement. I waved goodbye.
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'Saw': Bad To The Bone

[postlink]http://www.moviesthe.com/2004/10/sideways-little-jewel-final-cut-makes.html[/postlink]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YS9ocP6FNvMendofvid
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"Sideways": Punch-Drunk Love

Miles Raymond (Paul Giamatti) is a wine geek, the kind of guy who can lower his nose into a glass of red and discern overtones of "asparagus and ..." — sniff, sniff — "... just the slightest hint of Edam cheese." He can take a sip of the stuff and slosh it around in his mouth and pronounce it subtly tainted by "too much oak and secondary malolactic aeration." He's a short, fussy man in search of the perfect pinot noir. His friend, Jack Lopate (Thomas Haden Church), has less stringent standards: Jack will drink anything that's wet. He's a big, beefy man who's mainly in search of one-night women.

Miles and Jack have been friends since high school, in San Diego, but that was a long time ago. Now middle-aged, they're both watching the dreams of their youth slowly blow away. Miles has failed to become a published novelist, and Jack has failed to amount to much as an actor. Miles is also unhappily divorced; but Jack is about to get married for the first time, and so, to celebrate, Miles persuades his friend to join him on a prenuptial road trip from Los Angeles up into the Santa Barbara wine country. They'll play a little golf, drink a lot of wine and live it up ... maybe — who knows? — for the last time.

From this whimsical premise, director Alexander Payne's new film, "Sideways," opens up — like an uncorked fine wine, you might say — into a resonant essay on the vagaries of love and friendship, the human need for joy and sharing, and, not least, the sun-swept beauty of the Santa Ynez Valley vineyards among which it's set. It's a little jewel of a movie.

Miles and Jack could not be less alike, as is apparent the minute they hit the highway. Miles, who's driving, has brought along a choice bottle of 1992 champagne to be imbibed later in the trip. Jack, a stranger to the concept of delayed gratification, grabs the bottle, rips off the foil, yanks out the cork and, in the process of up-ending it over his mouth, spills half of it down the front of his shirt. Miles is appalled. Pulling in at various vineyards along the way to sample the local wines, Jack looks on in puzzlement as Miles passes high-toned judgments on the wines they try, saying things like "quaffable, but far from transcendent." He fidgets while Miles swirls the wine in his glass, then holds it up to the light, then slides it under his nose, fiddling and dithering with it until Jack has to ask, "When are we gonna drink it?" When Miles finally does take a sip, Jack knocks his back in a gulp. Miles, turning to him with an expression of suspicion and then horror on his face, says, "Are you chewing gum?"

Jack sees this weeklong getaway as his last chance to have lots of random sex before getting hitched. He soon hooks up with Stephanie (Sandra Oh), a wine-pourer at a vineyard tasting room. Stephanie is a live wire and a sexual enthusiast, too, and before long she and Jack are contorting themselves nakedly all over the small motel room he and Miles have rented. Miles finds this distasteful. Although it's been two womanless years since his divorce, he's not so much sex-starved as just plain lonely. Fortunately, he runs into Maya (Virginia Madsen), a waitress at a restaurant he's visited before on previous trips. Maya is bright and pretty and she knows a lot about wine — a subject that has metaphorical overtones in both of their lives. She asks Miles why he's so obsessed with pinot noir. "Because it needs to be protected," he says. "It's not a survivor, like cabernet." Maya, who is also divorced, says she thinks a lot about wine's cycle of life, which mirrors our own: "It's constantly evolving, until it peaks; until it begins its steady, inevitable decline." (On the other hand, she says, she mainly loves it because "it tastes so f---ing good.") Clearly, these two were meant for each other. But oddball complications arise to test their nascent relationship. Will love prevail? The answer, in the movie as in real life, is: maybe.

"Undertow": Barbed With Murder and Mayhem

The 29-year-old writer and director David Gordon Green is a Southerner with a distinctively unhurried sense of pace and a warm regard for his characters. His second movie, the splendid "All the Real Girls," released last year, opened with an uncut, six-minute shot of a young man and woman quietly talking. It was an audacious move and, as slowly became clear, an entirely appropriate beginning for a quirkily detailed small-town love story that unfolded with the unpredictable rhythms of new love itself. His third movie, "Undertow," is a sharp departure: a backwoods chase film barbed with murder and mayhem. It couldn't be more different from "All the Real Girls," and yet it's hard to imagine anyone else but Green having made it.

The story centers on Chris Munn (the English actor Jamie Bell, who played the working-class ballet student in the 2000 film "Billy Elliot," and who here speaks with an unshowy but flawless American accent). Chris is 17 years old, and his life consists almost entirely of hard, dirty work on the remote Georgia hog farm where he lives with his dispirited father, John (Dermot Mulroney), and his sickly little brother, Tim (Devon Alan). John took the boys out of school after their mother died and moved with them into the backwoods to nurse an unspecified sorrow. So far, obviously, this is not an action movie.

The picture comes alive with a jolt, though, when John's sly, strutting brother, Deel (Josh Lucas), walks in the door one day, fresh out of prison. John and Deel have been estranged for years, ever since John took up with Deel's girlfriend and later married her and had the two boys with her. Deel intimates that Chris is in fact his son, not John's; but what he's really come back for is a small sack of rare gold coins that were handed down by their father. John thinks the coins are a curse to whoever has them, but Deel doesn't care, and in a spasm of bloody violence he wrests them away. Then he goes after the boys — but Chris eludes him, barely, and with both Tim and the sack of coins in tow, he bolts into the countryside.

The rest of the movie bears a strong, unmistakable resemblance to the celebrated 1955 film "The Night of the Hunter," which also depicted the helpless terror of two children in flight from a crazed older man. "Undertow" doesn't attempt the self-consciously magical imagery of that earlier picture, but Green has his own poetic approach to the back-country landscape through which Chris and Tim flee — the rickety farm houses, the cluttered junkyards, the drifting clumps of parentless kids making their way through a world that doesn't seem even to see them. Chris refuses to give up hope; he has to protect his brother. But Deel is determined to track them down; and when he does, and he has the coins back, it's clear that he'll kill them.

As a Southerner himself, Green is able to present the South without caricature; there are no simpleminded rednecks in evidence, and the native kindness he finds in his rural characters is presented without emphasis, as a quiet fact of life in a way of life that's rarely captured in movies. The director has elicited fine, carefully calibrated performances from his actors — particularly Josh Lucas, whose slick viciousness as Deel is most unsettling. But the dominant presence in the film is a sensibility — one that values primary human virtues, and flinches with dismay whenever they're violated.



"Final Cut": Nowhere Man

The most striking thing about "Final Cut," a somber new sci-fi movie starring Robin Williams, is that it's the first feature by a 26-year-old filmmaker, the precociously talented writer/director Omar Naïm. It's a polished piece of work, and the story has some of the twisty kick of vintage Philip K. Dick. In the near-but-unspecified future, well-to-do families can arrange to have their children accessorized at birth with an expensive Zoë Chip, an implant that will record every waking moment of their existence. Later, when the children reach the end of their lives and die, the contents of the chip can be downloaded and assembled into a "Rememory" — a carefully edited documentary tribute to be screened at the decedent's memorial service.

Williams plays Alan Hakman, a much-in-demand Rememory editor, or "cutter." Wracked with guilt over an awful event in his own past, Alan is the perfect, non-judgmental auditor of other people's lives, passing over their most repellent memories — a wife-beating scene, or much worse — with a simple click of the "delete" and "splice" buttons. Then one day Alan is called upon to work up a Rememory for Charles Bannister, a recently deceased executive of the company that manufactures the Zoë Chips. Accepting this commission, he is soon targeted by a group of anti-implant protestors, whose leader, Fletcher (Jim Caviezel), angrily tells Alan, "You take people's lives and make lies out of them." Suspecting that Bannister's chip might contain scandalous scenes that could bring down the implant industry, Fletcher offers Alan $500,000 to turn the footage over to him. Alan glumly refuses.

Despite his celebrated skills, Alan doesn't have much of a life. (He barely has a pulse.) Slouching into an antique bookstore, he approaches the owner and asks, "Is 'suicide' under 'self-help'?" The owner, a woman named Delilah (Mira Sorvino), apparently finds this to be an intriguing conversational gambit, and in surprisingly short order she agrees to accompany Alan back to his house. There, flicking on his elaborate editing console, he demonstrates for her what it is he does. She looks at him and says, "You're like a mortician, or a priest, or a taxidermist." Then they go to bed.

The story soldiers on. Fast-forwarding through the Bannister footage, Alan comes upon one scene so disturbing, it strikes a vestigial human nerve and actually gives him pause. Another throws a startling new light on his old childhood trauma, and sends him shuffling off into the anti-implant underground in search of his own true memories. By this point, however, the viewer may be preoccupied by at least one distracting question: How could a woman who looks like Mira Sorvino —or a woman of any kind, for that matter — be attracted to the fusty and recessive Alan Hakman? It's a question made pressing by Robin Williams' slumped and woebegone performance. Williams has been lauded for his comedy-free portrayals of dead-eyed creeps in films like "One Hour Photo" and "Insomnia." But the congealed passivity in which he marinates these characters is becoming tiresome. Alan Hakman's inscrutable anguish is so tediously unrelieved that you weary of watching him whimper. You want to slap him, tell him to snap out of it. Or slip him a self-help book, maybe.
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'Sideways' A Little Jewel, 'Final Cut' Makes You Want To Slap Its Star

[postlink]http://www.moviesthe.com/2004/10/team-america-pretty-hot-for-puppets.html[/postlink]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ce8CgJRkr_Iendofvid
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The first thing to be said about "Team America: World Police," before we get to the good stuff, is what an extraordinarily well-made movie it is. Although it is cast entirely with marionettes (save for a clutch of black housecats impersonating panthers), once you get past the strings appended to the puppets' extremities, the picture plays out as a classic action-adventure spy movie, complete with underground lairs, wheel-squealing car chases and exotic foreign locales. And although the scale of the characters is one-third life-size, the eccentrically detailed world they inhabit — replete with puppet barrooms, puppet casbahs, puppet limos, even puppet barfing — is psychologically convincing; it's not a whole lot less "real" than the outré environments of the early James Bond films (which "Team America" affectionately references). This visual sophistication is a tribute to the underestimated ambitions of the filmmakers, "South Park" creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, and to their top-shelf taste in collaborators, most notably cinematographer Bill Pope, who previously shot all three "Matrix" movies, as well as "Spider-Man 2."

As the title announces, "Team America" is a satire of the current international political situation, and of the conviction, on the part of the Bush administration and its supporters, that the United States, as the world's sole remaining superpower, must act as a sort of global police force, rooting out noxious tyrants and terrorist cabals wherever they may fester. Parker and Stone have satirized George W. Bush before, in their parody sit-com "That's My Bush!" ("He stole the election, now he'll steal your hearts.") And of course Bush not infrequently satirizes himself. But the president has no puppetized presence in "Team America." Instead, Parker and Stone have shifted their gaze to the left, and discerned on the other side of the current ideological divide a subject even more ripe for lampoon and ridicule: the out-of-control culture of celebrity political pontification.

The famous names and the irksome faces are all here, with strings fetchingly affixed to their little wooden heads: Alec Baldwin, Tim Robbins, Janeane Garofalo, Martin Sheen, Susan Sarandon and of course the sublimely clueless Sean Penn. And the story in which they play so comical a part has a familiar shape as well. A brotherhood of murderous Arab terrorists is discovered to be in league with a lunatic dictator, who is selling them weapons of mass destruction. Only Team America can stop them. The Team is a group of five special operatives trained in martial arts, psychology, foreign languages and so forth. Along with their controller, a suave, cocktail-wielding character called Spottswoode, they are headquartered in a swank subterranean hideout in the bowels of Mount Rushmore. Charged with their new mission, and all a-clank with heavy weaponry, they jet off to Paris, a naturally suspicious place. There they make their way to a crowded plaza and begin carefully scrutinizing its colorful inhabitants. They quickly zero in on a group of bearded, turban-topped men bearing an odd-looking metal case and murmuring among themselves in Arabic. (Well, it's supposed to be Arabic; actually, it's pure gibberish.) One of the Team barks out, "You in the robes! Put down the weapon of mass destruction!" Gunfire breaks out, and soon blood-pocked puppet bodies are sailing through the air. Team America gets a little carried away, though, and also blows up both the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre. Looking around at the wreckage afterwards, one of them pipes up to the stunned Parisian onlookers, "Bonjour! It's okay — we got the terrorists!"

The Team moves on to Egypt, where they off more terrorists, but also accidentally blow up some pyramids and — oops — the Sphinx, too. Meanwhile, back in the States, ABC News anchor Peter Jennings is sourly reporting that Team America has once again put the rest of the world into a serious pout. To clarify the situation for viewers, he solicits the moral expertise of Alec Baldwin, who explains that the terrible things that are happening aren't the terrorists' fault, they're Team America's. Cut to Mount Rushmore, where a raucous demonstration is under way outside the Team's headquarters, led by the lovably corpulent Michael Moore, who is managing to be totally outraged while at the same time gobbling down ketchup-slathered hotdogs with both hands. Then cut to Pyongyang, North Korea, where the delusional dictator Kim Jong Il has been observing all this celebrity indignation, from afar, with great interest.

Kim, of course, is the mad despot who has been arming the Arab terrorists. His lunatic machinations have become so obvious, they've drawn the attention of the United Nations, which has dispatched mild-mannered weapons inspector Hans Blix to accost the diminutive despot in his vast palace. Blix tells Kim he must turn over his weapons of mass destruction "or else we will be very, very angry with you, and we will write a letter telling you how angry we are." Kim throws him into a pool full of pet sharks, then returns to his plotting. Since both he and the nattering Hollywood film stars want pretty much the same thing — to put an end to the galumphing anti-terrorist forays of Team America — Kim decides to join forces with them and invites them to co-host a world peace conference. The activist actors take the bait, and are soon gathered in Pyongyang, where they grow almost misty-eyed imagining a shiny new world in which people of all nations will see things their way. "We will persuade everyone to drive hybrid cars," says Tim Robbins, "and stop smoking." "We will handle dangerous people with talk," says Baldwin. Sean Penn, for the most part, wanders around muttering, "I went to Iraq, you know." (He eventually has his throat ripped out by a panther.) Unfortunately, in the end, the moral of this story turns out to be decidedly ambivalent. "I know you don't like Americans right now," one of the Team members shouts. "But Kim Jong Il is a lot worse!"

It may be best that we pass over "Team America"'s big sex scene, which is ... pretty hot, actually, for puppets. And let us not dwell on the exquisitely insensitive sequence in which Kim Jong Il laments his friendless solitude in a lilting ballad called "I'm So Ronery." And definitely let us not contemplate too closely the fact that "Team America" is opening on the very first day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. These are deplorable things — deplorable. Although not as deplorable as several other things I've left discreetly unmentioned. Parker and Stone are virtuosos of insult and ethnic abuse; their wild, what-the-hell comic malice can be thrilling. But it's the pure, focused contempt with which they pile onto the showbiz windbags of stage and screen that's most bracing here. In "Team America," these posturing savants are so wickedly knee-capped that, in socio-cultural terms, they may never walk again. In which case, I doubt they'll be offered many rides, either.
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'Team America': Pretty Hot For Puppets

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