Guru

Reviewer: James van Maanen

A Raisin In The Sun: Rating (out of 5): **½

The Great Debaters: Rating (out of 5): ****

The recently filmed (for cable-TV) version of the famous Lorraine Hansberry play A Raisin In The Sun and last year's "Oscar Bait," Denzel Washington-helmed The Great Debaters were released to video on the same day. After watching both within hours of each other, a comparison seems in order. The former was generally greeted well by critics (and the public: the Broadway version was a rare "hot ticket" for a non-musical play, due no doubt to the casting of a certain Mr. Diddy). The latter, however, was given a shrug of indifference by the public and by quite a few critics. This is not the first time, nor will it be the last, that movie-goers missed out on something wonderful.

Reviewer: Maria Komodore
Rating (out of 5): ***½

Depressing as it may sound, Autism: The Musical is actually a most enjoyable, and moving, film. The documentary focuses on five different children diagnosed with autism that under the careful and optimistic instruction of Elaine Hall and her "Miracle Project" initiative set out to prepare a stage production.

Equipped by her personal experience (her son is also autistic), and determined to provide an alternative form of treatment for children facing this difficult condition, Hall puts great amounts of effort into the project making sure that all the participants find a way to express themselves though acting, singing, dancing, playing music, or just socializing with each other.

Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Rating (out of 5): **½

Mockumentaries must be fun to make, especially with an ensemble cast of capable comedians. You can practically set the actors loose and just film willy-nilly. But the trouble with most mockumentaries is that filmmakers tend to rely too heavily on plots, arcs, climaxes and resolutions. Consider the granddaddy of them all, This Is Spinal Tap (1984), which is just a series of events, one after the next, without much connecting them. It's the story of a rock tour, and it doesn't lead up to the big final show, or any other big final event. It's about everything that happens along the way, and the ending is almost insignificant.

The Grand, about a Las Vegas poker championship, starts promisingly by introducing us to its impressive and diverse cast, including Woody Harrelson, Cheryl Hines (Curb Your Enthusiasm), David Cross (Mr Show), Dennis Farina, Richard Kind, Chris Parnell and filmmaker Werner Herzog as the main card players; and Michael McKean (lending some Spinal Tap cred), Shannon Elizabeth, Mike Epps, Judy Greer, Hank Azaria, Gabe Kaplan, Ray Romano and many others appearing on the sidelines. Each character gets an instant personality, and each is ridiculous and endearing. Jack Faro (Harrelson) is trying to run his grandfather's casino, but keeps screwing it up due to drug and alcohol problems; he's been married some 70+ times and has even been thrown out of his own casino. The German (Herzog) likes to kill something -- often a small animal, but not always -- each and every day to make himself feel more alive. (He compares it to drinking coffee.) The mockumentary style works well, both ridiculing and copying the television spectacle that poker has become.

Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Rating (out of 5): **½

Michael Haneke's excruciating new Funny Games is a near shot-for-shot remake of his 1997 Austrian film. As with that one, the point of this new English-language film is elusive. Naomi Watts and Tim Roth star as a well-to-do couple that travels with their 12 year-old son (Devon Gearhart) to their summer lake house. Two seemingly polite fellows (Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet) wearing white gloves, shorts and polo shirts appear on their doorstep, first asking to borrow eggs and to try out some fancy golf clubs. But soon these visitors begin to torment the family, holding them hostage and threatening them. Eventually it's revealed that the two young thugs plan to murder their prey.

Every so often characters look at or talk to the camera, and a "rewind" gimmick is used late in the film that's better seen than described. Some may see Funny Games as a deconstruction of violent torture movies, but to my eyes it doesn't deconstruct anything. Haneke is himself too steeped in the violence and torture to step back from it or begin a discourse on it. (Brian De Palma, on the other hand, makes sadistic films, but he embraces the sadism as part of his own dark side. Haneke doesn't admit the connection.) Haneke deliberately plays on an audience's expectations for this type of genre: we demand and expect revenge, but he makes us regret doing so. He wants his film to affect us, but punishes us for being affected.

Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Rating (out of 5): ****½

The Thief of Bagdad usually gets lumped in with other films by director Michael Powell (I Know Where I'm Going, The Red Shoes, etc.). Die-hard Powell fans will recognize his unique rhythms in certain scenes, but Powell was only one of three credited directors and at least two more uncredited directors. No matter who filmed what footage, producer Alexander Korda would be the one to call final cut. The film has some sluggish spots, but despite the many cooks on this soup, the result is still dazzling enough to enchant entirely new generations of dreamy children.

Fourth-billed John Justin plays the film's hero, Ahmad, a king who is tricked and betrayed by his right-hand man Jaffar (Conrad Veidt). Unaware of the ways of the world, Ahmad falls in with a crafty young thief, Abu (Sabu, an Indian-born actor and a regular in Korda productions), who vows to help. June Duprez plays the princess who captures Ahmad's heart, but whom Jaffar wants for himself. The trouble is that Jaffar is a sort of wizard and uses black magic to turn the tables at the worst possible moments. Just as Ahmad is about to expose the villain, Jaffar strikes him blind and turns Abu into a seeing-eye dog. Fortunately, Abu later finds a genie (here spelled "djinn") in a bottle (played by bellowing American-born Rex Ingram), who eventually gives the heroes home court advantage. Ingram is spectacular, playing a bullying trickster rather than the grateful genie slave we see in other films and cartoons.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): *** (Overall)

The BBC has lately bestowed upon us several collections of work by England's current grand dames of entertainment: Maggie Smith, Helen Mirren and-—the Dame under consideration here--Judi Dench. This nicely boxed set, featuring many of her early appearances, includes--count 'em!--eight discs, each one packed with several hours of the actress' work, much of it prime and dating back to her Cherry Orchard of 1962.

Made for television and taken from the Royal Shakespeare Company version of Chekhov's masterpiece (staged by Michel Saint-Dennis and directed for TV by Michael Elliott), the play was shot in black-and-white and appears here in a surprisingly well-handled transfer to DVD. John Gielgud adapted this version and also plays Gaev, with Peggy Ashcroft as Madame Ranevsky, Dorothy Tutin as Varya, Ian Holm as Trofimov, Roy Dotrice as Firs, and Dench as daughter Anya. Gielgud's version is stately, as are the moving performances; it is a pleasure to see all these fine actors, many of whom are gone now, in top form.

Reviewer: Diana Slampyak

The Fire Within (Le Fou Follet)
Rating (out of 5): ****

In this early film from Louis Malle (one of two just released by Criterion), Alain Leroy (Maurice Ronet, so moodily good as the lover Julien Tavernier in Malle's Elevator to the Gallows), getting over an acute and chronic case of alcoholism, rather reluctantly must leave the alcohol treatment center in which he has been living for months, as the place needs space for those in more dire need of treatment. Leroy fears that the dismissal means he will relapse. But out into the unregulated world he goes.

Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Rating (out of 5): ***

Michael Winterbottom's 24 Hour Party People (2002) touched briefly on the brilliant tragic career of Ian Curtis and his band Joy Division, but it was always a powerful subject deserving of its own film. Now acclaimed music video director Anton Corbijn (Nirvana's "Heart Shaped Box," U2's "One," etc.) makes his feature debut with the two-hour biopic Control, and though he can't keep the film away from the usual biopic formula, Corbijn's stark, black-and-white widescreen visual scheme captures some of the story's unique power.

Sam Riley makes a commanding Curtis, a brooding, intelligent young Manchester man looking for some creative outlet. He's so passionate that, as a teen, he impulsively marries Debbie (Samantha Morton) and has a baby long before his music takes off (he toils daily at an employment agency throughout most of the film). His intense songs and frighteningly direct stage performances endear him to audiences, but money is still tight. On top of these troubles, he falls for another woman, Annik (Alexandra Maria Lara) and begins to suffer from occasional epileptic fits. After two great albums ("Unknown Pleasures," from 1979 and "Closer," from 1980) and a smattering of singles (including the iconic "Love Will Tear Us Apart"), Curtis hangs himself at age 23 just before the band's first U.S. tour.

Reviewer: James van Maanen

Otis: Rating (out of 5): **

The Cottage: Rating (out of 5): ***½

Mixing comedy and gore is usually a tricky thing. Shaun of the Dead got it right, but that was also a kind of satire of British middle class mores, in addition to the aforesaid c&g. Many slasher movies have their moments of humor but few are what you could call comedies. The two films reviewed here definitely attempt the mix -- one (The Cottage) more successfully than the other (Otis).

Reviewer: Walt Opie
Rating (out of 5): ***½

Classe Tous Risques ("The Big Risk") is a once underappreciated 1960 French film noir by director Claude Sautet (Un Coeur en Hiver), now finally out on DVD thanks to Criterion, that serves as something of a bridge between more conventional gangster pictures and the French New Wave, although it's much more a product of the former. Considering it was Sautet's true directorial debut, he gets a lot of things right, from terrific casting in even the small roles, including a memorable supporting part for the young Jean-Paul Belmondo at the peak of his Breathless powers, to convincing location shots in Milan, Nice and elsewhere. I especially appreciated his touch with filming some of the more violent scenes, which happen suddenly and end as quickly--as they do in real life.

The story, about a smart, burly gangster and family man named Abel Davos (Lino Ventura, a former champion wrestler) with a penchant for explosive bursts of violence as well as a more gentle side, might be an antecedent for Tony Soprano. It's certainly no shocker that modern action directors like John Woo and "Beat" Takeshi Kitano have sung the film's praises, although one wishes that Sautet had done more with the "family" theme he introduces to help develop Abel's humanity a little further. Still, you can't fault Ventura here--he displays just the right blend of menacing toughness and thoughtful vulnerability as he realizes this may be the end of the line for him. "You think you're clever," he says at one point. "And one day you're nothing."

Reviewer: Craig Phillips
Rating (out of 5):
Dirty Harry ****
Magnum Force ***
The Enforcer **½
Sudden Impact ***
The Dead Pool **½

If you watch enough Dirty Harry movies consecutively -- say, all five of them, as I did this past week, in viewing the newly remastered Dirty Harry Deluxe Collector's Edition from Warner Brothers -- you either go mad, or you start to spot a number of interesting patterns. Such as:

Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Rating (out of 5): ****

One of the things I love about Iranian cinema is that it seems to inspire itself. Even a decade after the first Iranian "New Wave" films began appearing in the United States in 1997, Iranian filmmakers have refused to "go Western" and use Hollywood methods in their films. Rather, they have continued to work with the original ideas and methods that made their cinema exciting in the first place. Fireworks Wednesday (released by Facets) was directed by a relative newcomer, Asghar Farhadi, and feels just as fresh as films by his predecessors, yet it also turns slightly inward, getting a little closer to the more turbulent human emotions, and it comes out the other side with a vivid, three-dimensional portrait of three characters over the course of one day.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ***½

Somebody at Warner Brothers goofed. This is no surprise, as the studio has long (perhaps since the 30s and 40s) been the worst when it comes to knowing or caring how to market a "small" movie. The goof here begins with the discarded theatrical release of Chaos Theory and continues through that of the video. If ever a film ought to have been pushed for Father's Day, it's this one. Instead it made its DVD debut the week after? And with no mention of Dad, parenting, paternity, love, marriage or the father/daughter bond? One has to wonder, after watching this surprising movie, whether anyone at Warners bothered to view it before they dumped it, or if they possess a single clue about movie marketing.

Three years back, director Marcos Siega (with writer Skander Halim) gave us one of the more interesting and quirky films about high school, Pretty Persuasion. Far from perfect (so is Chaos Theory) it was nonetheless though-provoking and intelligent and gave Evan Rachel Wood a breakout role, of which she made the most. With his new film, Siega, who continues to work mostly in television, has again produced an under-the-radar movie that is very much worth seeing, with a cleverly constructed screenplay by Daniel Taplitz, focusing on a hyper-organized man who, due to tiny change in schedule, suddenly becomes very un-organized.

Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson

Rating (out of 5): Come Drink with Me (1966) ****
Rating (out of 5): Heroes of the East (1979) *****

Experts consider King Hu's Come Drink with Me a benchmark in Hong Kong martial arts filmmaking, and it has been cited as one of the sources for Ang Lee's knockoff hit Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. And yet Come Drink with Me may come across as something of a disappointment, especially on first viewing. The action here is much slower and more careful than Hong Kong fans are used to, with combatants spending a great deal of time sizing each other up between blows, and because of this pace, the not-quite-logical plot comes a little too close to the forefront.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ****½

Shohei Imamura is not generally held in the same high esteem as other great Japanese filmmakers such as Ozu, Mizoguchi and Kurosawa. Even after viewing all of his later films--his segment of 11-09-01, Warm Water Under a Red Bridge, Dr. Akagi, The Eel and Black Rain, I would have agreed with that assessment. Now that I have also seen two of his earlier works--Vengeance Is Mine and the recently-released-to-disc Ballad of Narayama (from 1983), I'm inclined to hold him in similar, if not greater, regard. Narayama, I believe, is a classic film and should not be missed by anyone with a love for cinema or Japan.