Guru

Reviewer: Craig Phillips
Ratings (out of 5): ***

Slacker Uprising
Movie: **½
DVD (with extras): ***½

Michael Moore is a filmmaker/personality at war with himself. He clearly has an outsized ego -- as is evident by this new documentary, Slacker Uprising chronicling his "get out the vote" tour pre-election 2004, in which he is front and center all the way -- but he is also pretty clearly someone with a huge heart and a much-needed sense of anger at the state of things in Bush's America. Moore is one of those people, like Bill Maher, whom I agree with politically more often than not, who, especially in Moore's case, have undeniably done important work in provoking and spotlighting important issues, and yet I just as often find myself worried that their message is lost in a certain off-putting smugness and obnoxiousness. Moore is a heartfelt provocateur. Watching Slacker Uprising it was also hard for this progressive-minded viewer not to feel at war with myself about the film.

Slacker Uprising premiered for free on the internet in addition to being available rather cheaply on DVD; Moore gave up on making a profit on the film, budgeted at $2 million, in favor of getting his message out to the largest possible audience. However much the film may veer into "look at me I'm Michael Moore" terrain, it does also capture an under-appreciated movement which may not have quite pushed the balance of the '04 election, but nearly did -- and might very well make an even bigger difference in this year's Presidential election. By helping to get college students re-engaged, or engaged for the first time, with the political process, working to convince them that their vote and their time really can matter, Moore and many other like-minded organizations undeniably helped these "slackers" stop slacking when it came to voting.

But is the film itself worth watching or is it more simply a document of a time and place?

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Ratings (out of 5): ****

The publication of Richard Adams' Watership Down in 1972 created a literary furor. An immediate and enormous best-seller in Britain and the U.S. (and, I imagine, everywhere else it was published), the novel was one of those rare publishing anomalies that captures the imagination of just about everybody: a 429-page children's book suited equally, if not better, to adults, with glossary, map (complete with references) and peppered throughout with quotes from everyone from Shakespeare to Robert Browning, Thomas Hardy and the Duke of Wellington. The story is full of the things that we look for in good, gripping novels -- excitement, adventure, suspense, love, death, joy, sacrifice and commitment, with the capper of being highly intelligent and beautifully written. The heroes? A group of rabbits that must relocate its warren.

At the close of my initial reading, the book left me in a profound state (not to mention a puddle of tears), feeling I had experienced something quite special. Upon learning that the film adaptation was to be animated, I was saddened. How could this do justice to the book? Movie technology of the time (1978) had not reached the heights of Babe, with that film’s lifelike talking animals, so we had to settle for what we could get. What we got, in Martin Rosen's Watership Down, was a remarkably able, though telescoped tale (those 429 pages were now 92 minutes), made with class, talent and respect for Adams' accomplishment.

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

On last Sunday's episode of This Week with George Stephanopoulos, reporter Katrina vanden Heuvel mentioned during the journalists' roundtable that a lack of polling place preparedness could sway the outcome of the 2008 presidential election and she was nearly laughed off the stage. I repeat, the very notion of compromised voting eight years after the supreme court appointed a president and just four years after the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (in a joint decision with Congress) deemed it necessary to send international observers to monitor our elections for the first time, was immediately discarded by a group of prominent political writers from the most widely read news sources in the country. It's possible there's never been a clearer illustration of the mainstream media's apathy to question status quo that has served us so well for the last several years. This void has left a public more primed than ever for the chaos and clumsiness of blogs, talk radio and agit prop documentaries.

A popular misnomer about documentaries is that they are objective, or somehow at their best when they are striving to be objective. But documentaries are meant to communicate ideas and that is most easily borne from a strong point of view (though preferably one with a curious mind). Or in the case of Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections, a very strong sense of outrage.

Reviewer: Tara Black
Ratings (out of 5): ***½

When They Cry

The set-up: Maebara Keiichi has just moved to a rural town in Hinamizawa (modeled on the real town of Shirakawa-go) in 1983. The school is for all grades since there are very few kids. Keichi very quickly finds himself accepted and befriended by other students, especially Rena, Mion, Rika and Satoko. But there's something off with the town and with his new friends' past.

The skinny: The very first episode of When They Cry treats you to a violent, disturbing scene that, at first, is reminiscent of Paranoia Agent: A boy with a baseball bat goes a little crazy, kills some cute girls. Only in Japan, right? (The show was at one point suspended in Japan after a teenaged girl killed her father with an axe.) Immediately after that shocking scene, you're treated to the half-creepy, half-cute theme that pretty much sets the tone for the series perfectly. Then it rewinds to several days before the incident, full of a kind of "slice of life" feel. Makes you think you just imagined crazed baseball bat boy.

The format this series follows is a little odd. You have five total arcs, though the last two tie in with the first two. The fourth arc completely explains what happened in the first, and is probably the most coherent, yet craziest, of them all. The fifth arc half-explans why there are multiple arcs to begin with. It can be a little confusing and annoying, but they all have a few basic facts in common. A mystery, if you will. And you know what happens in Japanese mysteries. A father sleeps with his daughter by mistake then cuts off...Wait, different story. At the beginning of the three main arcs, you're treated to a creepy, insane scene before you learn how it got to that point.

Reviewer: Craig Phillips
Ratings (out of 5): ***

You're Not Elected Charlie Brown, just released on DVD for the first time, followed A Charlie Brown Christmas, It's the Great Pumpkin and A Boy Named Charlie Brown (their first feature) but came before the also well-known Charlie Brown Thanksgiving (my personal favorite) and Easter Beagle. In this somewhat forgotten short, animated, as with the other classics, by Bill Melendez, Charlie Brown wants to run for class president but he has no hope of being elected (which Lucy, of course, makes abundantly clear), so he helps Linus run instead. His ambitious promises would seem to doom his candidacy, but like modern candidates his biggest worry is sticking his foot in his mouth. Here Charlie Brown actually takes a slight backseat to Linus but is still heavily involved. (Linus' opponent is a character who never appeared before or since, a nondescript blonde, curly haired kid, who doesn't seem to impress the student body much either.)

Lucy preps Linus on the campaign issues: "What about recess?" she prompts him. "Longer recess I say!" Linus retorts. "What about water fountains?" "I'm for them!" And in an amusing, and different for Peanuts, scene, Lucy even gets him on a radio talk show. Hey, no one ever said Peanuts was 100% realistic.

It's always a worrisome sign when a fairly high profile release arrives as a screener DVD in one's mailbox several months before the film's opening date. Still, I had some hopes for War, Inc., given my appreciation for all things Cusack and the potential for satire in its setting.

But, as War, Inc. now officially arrives on DVD after a short theatrical run, if it isn't a bomb, the film's about as messy as our own current situation in the Middle East.

Joshua Seftel, whose previous work included the hit and miss documentary Taking on the Kennedys, on that famous political clan, directs his first feature, and may be a little over his head here. This absurdist political farce has its moments but requires a deft touch for satire, and with Billy Wilder no longer available, perhaps no one could have made the uneven script (by Mark Leyner, Jeremy Pikser and its star John Cusack) work. It's ambitious, and while I don't know if some of the criticism it's received for being "already out of date" is quite fair (alas, the quagmire in Iraq is still current, even if the particulars tackled here would have been fresher a few years ago), but that's the least of its problems.

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

Gay liberation takes on a whole new meaning with A Very British Gangster, the documentary by Donal MacIntyre that explores the infamous Noonan family of Manchester, England. Initially appearing like a rowdy bunch of over-age high-schoolers, the Noonan clan, friends and hangers-on slowly morph into something far more complex -- and troubling. And so, too, does the film itself.

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

With W in theaters this weekend, the last face-to-face matchup of McCain and Obama in the rear view mirror behind us and Election Day less than three weeks ahead, there are few films as timely at this juncture as Jay Roach's terrific, peppy Recount.

By different measures, it's a contemporaneous horror film that if you think about too much, will give you screaming nightmares, yet another terrific HBO Films docudrama, and easily Kevin Spacey's best starring vehicle since American Beauty.

Recount is the story of the contentious end of the presidential election in 2000 told from the trenches of both Vice President Gore's and then-Governor Bush's post-election campaign headquarters in Florida. There's the expected numbers of hanging/dimpled/pregnant chads, the in-over-her-head Katherine Harris played with impressive self-possession by Laura Dern, and the same unbelievably depressing conclusion as in real life.

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

2007 was a terrific year for foreign language films, with titles like 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days, Persepolis, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, The Band's Visit, The Orphanage and others. So when the Academy came up with its five Best Foreign Language Film nominees, it was a little shocking and surprising that the list not only ignored the year's best films, but also that it was so obscure. A closer look revealed that all five of them were war films, which was not so surprising. And all five seemed ready-made for awards committees, none more so than the winner, the overrated Holocaust drama The Counterfeiters, and the brain-dead battle epic Mongol. (Nikita Mikhalkov's 12, from Russia and Andrzej Wajda's Katyn, from Poland, have yet to be released here.) Happily, of those nominees, Israeli director Joseph Cedar's Beaufort proved refreshingly different and markedly superior to its competition.

Set in 2000 near the Lebanese border, Beaufort tells the story of a band of Israeli soldiers stationed in an old fortress at the end of 18 years' worth of occupation. The Israeli army prepares to withdraw the troops and shut down the fort, but the process takes forever. Meanwhile, the troops suffer needless attacks, numbing boredom and helpless frustration. A bomb expert, played by Ohad Knoller -- a familiar face from Eytan Fox's films Yossi & Jagger and The Bubble, as well as Brian De Palma's Redacted -- arrives to help clear a deadly device from the road, and the troops' commanding officer (Oshri Cohen) questions his own effectiveness in battle. Cedar, who also directed the very interesting Campfire (2004), prefers to let his expansive set and hard-boiled characters tell the story from a ground level rather than implying a commentary about the bigger picture and the futile nature of war. It's as if a weight were lifted, and the 132-minute film moves like a breeze.

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

Most horror aficionados know by now how the British studio Hammer re-invented the genre by taking the classic monsters and filling them in with color (especially garish red) and a little suggested sex. All they had to do was make the monsters different enough from Universal's classic black-and-white creations to avoid lawsuits. But on the downside, Hammer spent most of the 1960s trying to cash in on their early successes, The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Horror of Dracula (1958), which meant "sequelizing" their own films and looking for more properties to "borrow." And so, though the studio has a large cult following today, not all of its sixty-plus horror films are really worth watching.

To prove it, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment has released a more-or-less random two-disc DVD collection of four movies from the Hammer vaults (and distributed in America by Columbia Pictures). Another thing the collection shows is that director Terence Fisher, probably the best of the Hammer contract players, was not infallible. His first contribution to this collection is arguably the least interesting, The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll (1960). For Hammer, this was the first of two attempts at adapting the Robert Louis Stevenson story; Fisher's version makes Jekyll a decrepit hermit and Hyde a smooth, seductive ladies' man. But after that, the movie pretty much follows the original story, without using its new twist in any interesting ways. (Jerry Lewis used the same idea to much better effect in The Nutty Professor three years later.) Paul Massie plays the two lead characters, with Dawn Addams as his devious wife and Hammer stalwart Christopher Lee as a backstabbing friend.

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

Appreciating Luchino Visconti's Ludwig (1972), just released by Koch-Lorber in its original four-hour version, will depend somewhat on one's understanding of the place of royalty -- particularly the King -- in the minds and hearts of the people being ruled. Americans may intellectually understand the concept of royalty and divine right, but have no direct connection to it. Italian director Visconti, himself an aristocrat, understood royalty's positives and negatives rather well, as demonstrated most by his film version of The Leopard, as well as by Senso and Ludwig.

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

Are you looking for something that might pick you up in these trying times, something that might lighten your load a little bit, take your mind off that pending foreclosure? It would be hard to imagine a movie more vacuous than this Hong Kong action/comedy/espionage flick.

Seoul Raiders is the sequel to the overseas hit Tokyo Raiders from 2000, stars the great Tony Leung as Lam, designed as a kind of Asian James Bond -- though really coming closer to an Asian Remo Williams. The comedy is broad, the action is deeply silly and the sets exotic for those among us who haven't spent time in Seoul's financial district and its attendant tony condos.

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

Director Stuart Gordon (Re-Animator, From Beyond, Edmond) returns with another amazing, comical, exploitation shocker, this one supposedly "based on a true story" (though Gordon himself takes the "story by" credit). Stuck's terrific opening introduces us to Brandi (Mena Suvari), a nurse at an assisted living home; she cheerfully makes her rounds among the old folks as hardcore hip-hop plays on the soundtrack, drowning out all other sound. At the same time, we meet Tom (Stephen Rea), an out of work sad sack no longer able to afford rent on his crummy apartment. A failed job interview later and he's on the street.

Reviewer: Bryan Thornally
Rating (out of 5): ***½

Gus Van Sant's newest film, Paranoid Park, dives deep into modern teenage life with a stylized look beyond any of his earlier works. It most directly feels like an outgrowth from his 2003 film about a school shooting, Elephant, as they both take an unconventional look at the everyday life of American youth and its collision with brutal violence.

Much like Elephant, Paranoid Park uses non-linear storytelling and a meandering plot to flesh out its characters; to the film's benefit, our attention is focused primarily on just one character this time, an alienated teenager named Alex infatuated with skateboarding.

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

The Greek-born director Constantin Costa-Gavras usually signs his films with only "Costa-Gavras," as if he were creating a brand name for political thrillers. The thriller part invites audiences to have fun at the movies, while the political part makes them think they're seeing something more than "just" a thriller. Costa-Gavras first broke out in 1969 with Z, which earned him a Best Director nomination and won two other Oscars, and in 1981, he was invited to make his first American film, Missing (now out in a Criterion DVD), with Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek.

Missing takes place in an unnamed country, presumably Chile, in the early 1970s, when a military coup toppled the reigning government (presumably Allende's). A happy, liberal American couple, Charlie Horman (John Shea) and his wife Beth (Spacek) live there, keeping a pet duck, drawing cartoons and occasionally translating articles for left-wing newspapers. They find life increasingly difficult under the new military rule -- with its strict curfews -- and begin to wonder if Charlie's habit of keeping notes on everything is very safe. Soon, Charlie has disappeared and his right-wing, Christian Scientist father Ed (Lemmon) flies down to help investigate. Ed can't understand his son's way of life and believes that Charlie must have created his own trouble; he can't believe that people would be arrested for no good reason. But of course, the major arc of Missing is Ed's awakening and realization that black-and-white thinking just doesn't apply to the real world.

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

Craig Lucas is one of my favorite writers for theatre and film. From his mid-1980s off-Broadway success Blue Window-- still one of the most poetic and original ensembles pieces ever created for the stage -- to Prelude to a Kiss and The Dying Gaul (both the film and stage versions), and the much-maligned but prescient and challenging God's Heart, Lucas has given us a fertile and intense body of work. (His screenplay for The Secret Lives of Dentists helped enable director Alan Rudolph to make one of his best films in a long while.) So it is with some pain that I have to report being gravely disappointed in Lucas' new film Birds of America, which, like The Dying Gaul, he both wrote and directed.

Reviewer: Tara Black
Rating (out of 5): *****

Mushi-Shi opens up with an Oba-san (a Japanese woman of mature years) explaining that there are creatures beyond our world, creatures respected and feared by people. They are called Mushi. The Mushi, also known as Green Things, are closest to life itself. Most people cannot see or hear them, but can be affected by them. This is where Ginko comes in. He is a Mushi-shi, basically a medicine man who specializes in problems caused by the Mushi. There are as many Mushi in the world as there are other organisms. Most are benign, a few are parasitic in nature, others simply harmful by their very presence. Much of their effect is almost mystical in nature, such as stealing sound from their host. Others have varying levels of sentience that bring an almost god-like, spiritual quality to the story. Ultimately, however, Mushi are living creatures like any other.

The main character, Ginko, is mysterious and kind. Through his eyes, we see the people he encounters sympathetically and often more generously than it'd otherwise be. While he is not the narrator, he does give a tone and voice to the series as a whole and a more balanced view of Mushi, often more balanced than the people he encounters. Different episodes have different moods. Some are sweet or amusing with slight, understated humor while others are tragic or grim. Either way, the people Ginko meet all have unique stories that never leave you untouched.

Mushi-Shi is a gorgeous series in every respect. All elements of the series mesh well, complementing each other. From the theme, you quickly get a feel for Mushi-Shi. The song is folksy and happy, set to a backdrop of what is largely nature artwork. The character drawings are very plain, with people looking like human beings and not some nebulous anime idea of people, and the backgrounds are often given more detail than you'd find in any other series. There are no reproductions of backgrounds that I could tell, no bland buildings. And since much of the series occurs in the forested mountains of Japan, there's a lot of gorgeous scenery.

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

Anthology films are always a good idea, but for some mysterious reason, they very rarely ever work out. The French New Wave film Six in Paris, directed by superstar filmmakers Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard and the lesser-known Jean Rouch, Jean Douchet and Jean-Danile Pollet, is no exception. Each of the six was assigned a different Paris neighborhood, not unlike last year's Paris je t'aime, though with more detailed results. Douchet, best known as a Cahiers du Cinema critic, kicks things off with a pretty traditional short, complete with an obligatory O. Henry-type twist. A girl sleeps with a handsome young man, and then discovers that he wasn't who she thought he was.

Rouch's segment was the only one to be singled out on the year-end Cahiers du Cinema top ten list. Rouch was better known as a documentary filmmaker, and he films his little sketch in perhaps two or three shots. A man (played by future director Barbet Schroeder) and a woman (Nadine Ballot) fight during their morning routine. The woman wants more than the man has resigned himself to. She storms out and takes the elevator down (Rouch may have cut once during this dark sequence). On the street, she meets a stranger (Gilles Quéant), who seems to want the same things she does, but with a price.