Guru

Reviewer: Erin Donovan
Rating (out of 5): ****

Kamikaze Girls
There is such an absence of films about female friendships (that don't revolve around abusive marriages, competition or cancer) that I can't even find a citation to contextualize my angst on the matter. Seriously, where is my Deer Hunter, Good Will Hunting or Rio Bravo (I'd even show up for a Dudette, Where's My Car)? There was a quick spate of studio releases in the 80s and early 90s that fit the bill, but they were mostly mired in tragic circumstances (Foxes, The Legend of Billie Jean, Times Square, Ladies and Gentlemen the Fabulous Stains, Little Darlings, Heavenly Creatures, Foxfire, etc) and few of them are even available on DVD.

So it's very exciting to find Tetsuya Nakashima's Kamikaze Girls, an adaptation of a wildly popular graphic novel ("The Story of Shimotsuma") about two young women who have taken up very different methods of rebellion in the oppressively dull surroundings in very rural and style-free Shimotsuma (known primarily for its cabbage production). Momoko (Kyôko Fukada of Dolls, Ringu 2) is a frilly-dressing existentialist who daydreams of living in 18th century Vienna. Ichigo (Anna Tsuchiya of Taste of Tea) is a formerly shy girl now a member of the Ponytails, the toughest motorcycle gang in town. They form an oddball friendship, bonding over the clothes that make them stand out amongst the cabbage, keeping themselves entertained and helping each other out of scrapes in a style that is something akin to Amelie if it had been directed by Quentin Tarantino.

Reviewer: Walt Opie
Rating (out of 5): *****

Although not everyone will agree, to my mind few films yield as much satisfaction upon repeated viewings as recently departed Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni's 1960 existential masterpiece L'Avventura. It gains on second and third viewing, because at that point you already know that the alluring yet troubled Anna (Lea Massari), who has mysteriously disappeared in broad daylight on a tiny island off the coast of Italy, [[**spoiler alert**]] will never be seen again (not that the characters seem too concerned about this by the end), and you see there is no hope of redemption for Anna's wayward lover Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti).

In addition, you will have realized this film is really an epic visual love poem to both Monica Vitti, who plays Anna's close friend Claudia, and who also succumbs to Sandro's apparently irresistible charms--as well as to the pure joy of cinema itself, a medium Antonioni obviously relished more as a canvas for his art than merely a vehicle to tell a linear narrative. In this way he can be compared to his fellow countryman Fellini, as was often the case throughout his career, although such comparisons are somewhat hollow-both men were inspired originals and therefore irreplaceable in their own right.

Reviewer: Erin Donovan
Rating (out of 5): ****

Directed in 1982 by then NYU film student Susan Seidelman (Desperately Seeking Susan, Sex and the City), Smithereens is an inverse love story about a group of borderline homeless, fame-seekers in the wake of a punk rock scene that has just reached its high watermark. Wearing its French New Wave and Fellini influences on its sleeve, Smithereens was the first American film to be included in the Palme d'Or competition at the Cannes film festival.

Reviewer: Dylan de Thomas
Rating (out of 5): ****½

With Tony Blair stepping down as the long-time Prime Minister of Great Britain and his replacement, Gordon Brown, spending the weekend with W. at Camp David, I thought it would be a good time to recommend the excellent House of Cards trilogy of miniseries, starring veteran British actor Ian Richardson as the fictional Prime Minister Francis Urquhart.

House of Cards, the first of the three series (the other two are To Play the King and The Final Cut), with its perfect blend of Macbeth and Richard III, of humor and drama, is the best--though once you start watching, stopping is hardly an option. The most obvious influence on the character is the aforementioned Richard, with his gleeful, cool, perfectly-reasoned badness and regular catchy audience-addressing. One halfway expects Urquhart to start speaking of his winter of discontent at any moment.

Reviewer: James Van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ****

What constitutes a "sleeper"? I'd always thought a movie required at least a short theatrical release in major cities to qualify for this overused label. After viewing The Big Bad Swim, however, I'd have to say that any film this good--and this unheralded--is a shoo-in for sleeper status. A dramedy about a group of Connecticut adults (of all ages and professions) taking a swim class, this first full-length film from director Ishai Setton and writer Daniel Schechter simply sneaks up and knocks you--sweetly, quietly--off your feet. Granted, Setton and Schechter have not broken any new ground with their movie, yet neither a visual moment nor a line of dialogue rings false, is pushed to excess or wasted. Many longtime filmmakers, even some who’ve won major awards, don’t get this close to perfection when they try to create a batch of interesting, real human beings.

Reviewer: Erin Donovan
Rating (out of 5): ****

Parker Posey's Nora in Broken English exists further down the continuum of roles she played in the nineties in films like Daytrippers, Clockwatchers, Party Girl and Kicking and Screaming: neurotic, sarcastic, and sort of unambitious. But in your thirties these things are no longer cute (or "quirky", as Posey is so often called) but sort of annoying and self-defeating. In the new Broken English, she's single among married friends, working at a barely above entry-level (but "cool") job in a stable of trust fund-insulated successful artists. She's in crisis and the people in her life think crappy blind dates will lead to fairy tale solutions. But by now she's become so accustomed to isolation and condescension that she no longer trusts her own instincts and has become her own worst enemy. She meets a similarly burnt but far less cynical French dreamboat (Melvil Poupaud of Time to Leave) and they have a weekend romance before he leaves for Paris.

Reviewer: Elizabeth Hille
Rating (out of 5): ****½

Nicholas Roeg's 1973 supernatural thriller, based on the short story by Daphne du Maurier, Don't Look Now remains creepy. Set in wintertime Venice, the film slowly chronicles the dismantling of Laura (Julie Christie) and John's (Donald Sutherland) guilt in the aftermath of their young daughter's drowning. Without giving too much away, the bare bones of the plot is simple: The child drowns in her red raincoat in their backyard, the couple go to Venice because John has work there as an architect restoring an old church, Laura meets two elderly sisters—one has the gift of second sight—and begins spending time with them, which alleviates some of her grief. John's unhappy about this and it adds tension to their marriage.

While it's true that time might have tamed some of the film's eroticism and terror, time has not eroded Roeg's ability to create labyrinthine anxiety and atmospheric tension though his direction and editing. The decaying, claustrophobic streets of Venice provide the perfect setting for how guilt is disintegrating the couples' psyches, albeit in different ways. Critics of the film have complained about its pace, calling it plodding, but without the slowness, the actors wouldn't have been able to carefully reveal the cracks in how the shared grief affects Laura and John together, and separately. Roeg incrementally induces paranoia without the viewer realizing exactly why she's getting creeped out.

Reviewer: James Van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ***

It's relatively rare to find a low-budget sci-fi film that fires on all cylinders (the last one I can recall was Primer), and if Puzzlehead doesn't detonate the entire bunch, it does manage more than most science fiction. Taking an everyday locale and turning it into a strange, unpleasant and futuristic spot by mere association, filmmaker James Bai (who wrote, directed and produced) also keeps his cast to a minimum: His two lead characters are played by a single actor, and there is basically only one other major speaking part in the entire film.

Economy can't count for everything, however. Fortunately, Bai's story is an interesting one, conflating robots, doppelgangers, and what it means to be human. These are not new topics, but here they're given a pretty intelligent work-out. Specifics are often minimized (perhaps for economy's sake), and while this sometimes works in the film's favor, it also accounts for its inability to rise above the level of... an interesting, low-budget sci-fi film. Surprisingly, Bai has not done another movie since finishing Puzzlehead three years ago. A debut this assured would seem to demand an encore. We're waiting...

Reviewer: James Van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): **½ (add a star if you're an opera buff)

Not being an opera fan, I have seen Carmen maybe twice in my life (and the ballet version a couple more times), so I am not the best judge of this South African film version, in which the actors speak and sing (or are perhaps dubbed) in Xhosa. The time is now and the place a South African township where the women labor in that ubiquitous cigarette factory and the men are either townspeople or police. Some of this works quite well, and the transfer from Spain to South Africa is a perfectly good one.

Reviewer: Erin Donovan
Rating (out of 5): *½

For seven years the World Air Guitar training camp and championships existed in Finland as a meditative movement for peace focused on transforming the world through a communal perception change (no, really). Two American club promoters attended the camp in 2002 and upon realizing there was no American presence they spearheaded a US Air Guitar Championship to find the greatest to represent us on a world stage.

After the inaugural event was heavily plugged on the Howard Stern show, air guitar hopefuls (as well as people who just enjoy a good spectacle) came out in droves. And it's at this point when the brakes start squealing on any heady expectations of zen and the art of air guitar. This group consists of unemployed actors looking for non-traditional entrees into fame and disaffected, Brooklyn hipsters. In other words, the last people on Earth that need to be the focus of any 90 minute documentary that isn't about forcible organ donation. In Air Guitar Nation, their collective, ironic detachment is not helped by the fact that the film didn't secure licensing for most of the songs "played" so while we watch what would be pretty hilarious (after a few beers) performances we're only hearing voiceovers of these people trying to out-clever each other. And I probably don't need to tell you that if they had any gift for wit they wouldn't be there in the first place. A few choice nuggets: "Taking on a stage persona is a good way to create a barrier between you and the world, or you and your girlfriend." "Air guitar is probably less absurd than figure skating... if you think about it." Thanks for the share, guys.

Reviewer: Walt Opie
Rating (out of 5): ***

According to none other than acclaimed author Tom Wolfe (The Right Stuff) in Tom Thurman's documentary Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride: Hunter S. Thompson on Film, the gonzo journalist was one of the greatest comic writers of our time. It turns out that much of Hollywood made pilgrimages to visit Thompson at his home of many years in Woody Creek, Colorado, and many are interviewed in this engaging film, including John Cusack, Benicio Del Toro, Sean Penn, Gary Busey, Ed Bradley, Bill Murray and Johnny Depp (who lived in his basement for a while and described himself as a partner in crime with Thompson after they initially bonded over their mutual hometown of Louisville, Kentucky). "If you let Thompson into your psyche, he has this way of slipping in and out from time to time and continuing to inhabit you for the rest of your life." This was the cautionary advice Murray gave Depp over the phone just before Depp played a character based on Thompson (Raoul Duke) in the 1998 film Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Murray knew all too well, having already portrayed Thompson himself in the underrated 1980 cult movie Where the Buffalo Roam (which co-starred Peter Boyle and Bruno Kirby). Thompson died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in February of 2005, and his ashes have since been shot out of a large cannon shaped like a two-thumbed fist (paid for by Depp and envisioned by Thompson) on the property of his Owl Farm in Woody Creek. This film (originally produced for the Starz channel) has been made as a sort of love note back to Thompson, with plenty of rarely seen, candid footage of the wily man himself, often in his kitchen telling stories or elsewhere in private settings, although his actual words are sometimes garbled and nearly indiscernible. There is likewise a rather incomprehensible narration by none other than raspy, ravaged-sounding Nick Nolte.