THE COUNTERFEITER (Dir. Stefan Ruzowitzky)

 
Finally, a Holocaust film that manages to be intelligently engaging without making every victim a saint & relying on overly-established cinematic views of the Nazi concentration camps. Director Ruzowitzky (who also helmed the fine German horror film, Anatomy, 2000) even manages to let humor seep in naturally, as a mere consequence of life, not as a defilement of historic reverence...

The true story of Operation Berhard, in which a team of incarcerated counterfeiters were "employed" by the Third Reich for the purpose of devaluing British & U.S. currency by flooding the market with fake pounds & dollars, The Counterfeiter centers on the life of Salomon "Sally" Sorowitsch (Austrian actor Karl Markovics), a Jewish gangster & loan shark, who was also known to be the finest counterfeiter in all of Europe. Of course Sorowitsch's days as Berlin underworld kingpin are numbered at the film's outset & in short order he's arrested. At first, it's his counterfeiting that's the issue & Sally reconciles himself to years in prison, sketching his Schiele-like portraits at the window of his cell. As the German penal system adapts itself to new, insidious purposes, Sally is packed off to a series of camps in which he often receives inordinate privileges for his skill -- first, as a portrait artist for camp commandants & their families, then for his most marketable skill, counterfeiting. For the duration of The Counterfeiters, Sally rarely encounters the full brunt of the Final Solution. There are sudden bursts of gunfire on the other side of walls, piles of clothing & passports, the rare glimpse of sunken eyes from a skeletal face, but to him & the others involved in the project, the true horrors are mostly a rumor. Although the threat of extermination is always possible & these fears are never allayed by camp commanders, the counterfeiters are well-fed, clean (although one shower scene is harrowing), allowed to sleep on feather beds, supplied with cigarettes & dressed warmly.

Still, all this relative comfort allows them clearer heads & more time to consider the role they're playing in the Nazi war machine. While Sally falls on the side of survival being the best revenge, his colleague Zilinski spends his days sabotaging the plates used to make the currency. The friction between these two camps, and the truly narrow-minded souls who don't want to work with Jews or criminals at all, provide the film with palpable tension.

Karl Markovics turns in a marvel of a performance in the movie. Just when you begin to detest his opportunism, the coyote wile that keeps him alive, those sharp, angular features, he reverts to his artistic side & his face transforms, illuminates subtly from the inside, softens. Unlike Zilinski, Sally knows enough to wait for an opportunity & he's just optimistic enough to know the opportunity WILL come. This from a character who probably spent the better part of a day in his youth on the station platforms of Weimar Berlin, waiting for just one traveler's wallet to be budged just so from his coat pocket. Of course he also knows that if the opportunity never presents itself, he's damned for all time.

It's a devil of a performance & it really gets under your skin, giving the bookends of the story -- Sally gambling away a fortune at casinos along a strangely wintry French Riviera -- a haunting, existential resonance. The Counterfeiters is a darkly comic, fiercely ironic, deftly tense & precisely human film. Most Highly Recommended.

Art of War: The Betrayal (Dir. Josef Rusnak)

Despite a relatively relaxed performance from Wesley Snipes (he's not exuding all 'tude this time around...), there's not a lot to recommend this sequel to 2000's martial arts spy actioner, unless cartoonishly sped-up fight scenes & watching Snipes do some truly masterful nunchuck moves with a dish towel is your particular cup of chop socky. Snipes returns as special agent Neil Shaw to avenge the death of his mentor, the cross-dressing sensei Mother, with the help of the master's daughter, Geena. Of course, he's being used as bait & the whole thing is saddled with a downbeat ending this too-little/too-late sequel didn't need. And while the original Art of War paired our hero with some real B-movie firepower (Donald Sutherland, Maury Chaykin, Michael Biehn, Anne Archer), the lack of comfort actors here make telling one evil dude from the other a real chore.

Assembly (Dir. Xiaogang Feng)

It's strange & really enlightening to watch a war movie where you're not sure which side you're supposed to be on from the get-go. I mean, while I think I have some grasp of modern history, I admit that, if choosing sides between the People's Liberation Army & the Nationalist Army in the 1948 Chinese Civil War, I'd probably side with the Nationalist Army, assuming the victory of the PLA led to the Totalitarian miseries of late-20th Century China. Still, in movie land, you go with the perspective you're given & while it took about 20 minutes of confusion, abetted substantially by the surfeit of flying body parts & head-shot blood splatters which hung suspended in the air just a moment too long (like jagged strokes from Jackson Pollock), to suss out characters with whom to empathize, once the cultural disorientation passed, Assembly turned out to be a rewarding & masterful war story, with the moral compass & high-tech mayhem of Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan & the go-for-broke trench pathos of Sam Fuller's war films (Steel Helmet, Fixed Bayonets!).

Assembly follows several weeks in the lives of the Ninth Company during the notoriously bloody Huaihai Campaign of 1948. The unit is commanded by the sturdy, obedient Captain Guzidi (beautifully controlled desperation from actor Hanyu Zhang), one of those rare soldiers who has the total trust of his men & of the generals. The Ninth Company has been whittled down from 200 men to just over 40 & are still deployed for ever-more dangerous missions, with lethally depleted reserves of men, food, ammunition & cannon. Guzidi's orders are to fight on until he hears The Assembly, a bugle call used to call an end to a particular battle. While what's left of his soldiers assure him they've heard the bugle call & Gu desperately wants to believe them, he continues to fight to defend the mouth of a valuable coal mine until nearly all of his men are dead or wounded, entombed in the mine so they won't be picked over by carrion. Gu, like a warrior Lear, wanders half-mad from guilt (Did he simply miss the Assembly call?), right into the enemy trenches & his miraculously spared, only to be interrogated remorselessly by post-war bureaucrats who can find no evidence of the Ninth Company's last stand.

While Gu's attempts to find the bodies buried in the mine & ascertain whether or not the Assembly had been blown are obviously less riveting than the gut-wrenchingly violent & intimate battle sequences, the last half of the film gets by on the strangeness of watching Gu quite carefully navigate impervious Communist bureaucracy to prove the Ninth Company's bravery & sacrifice. While an American movie would allow plenty of time for long, glorious speeches on behalf of Gu & his unit, there is a sleepwalking subtlety to Gu's quest here, because he knows that renegade individuality is not a trait The Party cherishes. When the Captain finally finds out the truth about the bugle call, the scene is subdued by western standards & Gu's reaction is an internalized maelstrom, a tour-de-force performance from Zhang. Highly Recommended. 

Belly 2: Millionaire Boyz Club (Dir. Ivan Frank)

Wow, if this had actually achieved wide release, instead of being junked around Hollywood like a fake Tiffany billiard room lamp, this might have set race relations back a good 50 years with its portrayal of cracked-out, 40-swilling, Kool-Aid mustached, gun-happy gangstas whom, um, I think, we're, uh, supposed to empathize with on some level. As it stands, even attempting to find information on this unholy shit-stain of a movie, is difficult. There was, indeed, a planned sequel to music director Hype Williams' 1998 cult hit Belly (starring Nas & DMX), but this project never saw the light of day. So, what we have here is an unrelated project, originally titled Millionaire Boyz Club & pitched as a slightly-fictionalized bio of rapper The Game. For one thing, always beware a slightly-fictionalized bio-pic starring the subject. Evidence: Monte Hellman/Tom Gries Muhammad Ali debacle, The Greatest (1977) & Gordon Douglas' Viva Knievel (1977 -- apparently a banner year for such cinematic short cons). The Game (the rapper, not the David Fincher movie) is released from federal prison after an 8-year stint & vows to go straight, which lasts all of five minutes (I think someone kicks over the bicycle he has to ride to work or something...I forget). It's not long (I'd say fifteen or twenty minutes of film time) before he's king of Compton & his only real problem is he's too dense to realize he's bedding down with a DEA agent (Shari Headley from Coming to America). He offers her sweetened Kool-Aid & she takes her clothes off -- what's more natural than that. The worst part of this is that great, essentially Emmy-proof actors from HBO's brilliant The Wire are caught up in this grim affair. The appearance of both The Wire's Michael K. Little (Omar Little) & Felicia Pearson (Snoop) made me want to mail off anthrax to the Emmy selection committee every time they had to utter a line in Belly 2. Who's to blame, you ask? Well, according to Wikipedia this film was directed by Cess Silvera, but the movie doesn't appear under his IMDB credits. According to the Hollywood Video website, the movie's helmed by Ivan Frank, whose name doesn't even appear on IMDB. I know, I know, I coudl just watch the credits of the movie again to find out who the real director is, but, man, that's SOOO playing into their hands.

For a more objective stance on this, I scoured the web & found these pithy mentions on various message boards:

From Yahoo! Answers:

"i aint no they had a belly 2. the first one is a street classic. why'd they have to put a slob like game in the sequel. id still probably buy it if i had a lil extra money to throw around."

And from the Slumz website:

"I got this Belly 2 shyt on bootleg...that nukka Game does some terrible azz acting in this shyt...hell even Omar is terrible...the dialogue is terrible...the damn story just doesnt make sense...its garbage straight up...the only "good" scene was when ****SPOILER*** Game fukked the shawdii who starred in Coming to America....that was the best acting scene in the damn movie....shyt the nukka WC was the best actor in the damn movie..."

I hope those were helpful. 

Belphegor: Phantom of the Louvre (Dir. Claude Barma)

Belphegor is sacred in France. Originally it was a very popular 1927 French horror novel by Arthur Bernède, which was simultaneously made into a popular film serial by Henri Desfontaines. Bernede also created the characters of Judex, immortalized by the sainted French director, Louis Feuillade (1916) & Nouvelle Vague iconoclast Georges Franju (1963), and Vidocq, filmed no less than six times from 1911 to 2001. But what truly gives Belphegor its cache in French culture is the 1965 television series based on the story, which involves a "ghost" that roams the halls of the great museum in search of alchemical writings hidden inside the statue of the god Belphegor. The "ghost" is really a medium controlled by an evil secret society & pursued diligently by a student & his girlfriend, the daughter of the Parisian police commissioner. The series was mounted in high style, an obvious tribute to the Les Vampires & Fantomas serials of Louis Feuillade. It is one of the greatest television series ever produced, but remains widely unseen in the U.S.

This 2001 remake attempts to do with the Belphegor tale what Stephen Sommers (The Mummy, The Mummy Returns, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor) did with the Universal Mummy horror franchise from 1999 to the present, that is, turn it into a series of puerile, CGI-heavy adventure films that would've been harmless -- even charming -- as 70s matinee fodder, but just seem cynical in today's hyper-marketed movie climate. Starring French national treasure Sophie Marceau, the ubiquitous & reliable Michel Serrault (Diabolique, Get Out Your Handkerchiefs, La Cage aux folles) & (sigh) Julie Christie, Belphegor just can't get up the giddy head of steam afforded by these Mummy remakes & the overall corniness & lack of fresh action set-piece ideas really sink the film. Gone is the shadowy, but often rococo, atmosphere of the television series, replaced by confusing, haunted goings-on in the surprisingly sterile corridors of the museum & overblown reaction shots to shoddy special FX. It's pertinent to note that the actual demon Belphegor seduced people by suggesting to them novel inventions by which they could get rich quickly, unfortunately he was also the patron demon of laziness, so nothing much came of these schemes...

Belphegor: Phantom of the Movie Studio???

Pick of the Week -

Boxboarders (Dir. Rob Hedden)

Bored O.C. surfers James James (American Zombie's Austin Basis) & Ty Neptune (frequent TV actor James Immekus), low on girls, popularity & scholastic wherewithal, strap a cardboard box to the top of a skateboard & go downhill, fast. This being the O.C., the stunt catches on & pretty soon it's a trend. Only problem is, the popular bullies would like to claim they invented it & the popular girls want a piece of the action, especially when MTV takes notice.

Boxboarders is a total surprise, a great, very funny youth cult film that doesn't try too hard to be THE META-TEEN COMEDY & arrives on DVD joyfully under the radar. Director Hedden has his own off-kilter vision which doesn't borrow too heavily from the ones who came before & a leisurely, sunny pacing that gets the audience where it's obviously going without forcing the issue. There are no blatant John Hughes or Revenge of the Nerds rips & one gets the feeling this could have been released 20 years ago & run neck & neck with the teen classics of the 1980s, before the term "post-modern" could be applied to boob & fart jokes. It doesn't hurt that the supporting cast is made up of venerables like "Downtown" Julie Brown, Stephen Tobolowsky (Memento, Wild Hogs), and that oddball Brit, Ezra Buzzington (The Prestige, The Hills Have Eyes, Art School Confidential). So what if boxboarding is basically soap box derby with smaller wheels. Highly Recommended. 

CJ7 (Dir. Stephen Chow)

If you can get your kids to watch movies with subtitles -- and if not, why'd you fork out 30 grand for that special pre-school? -- you could do worse than to plop them down in front of Stephen Chow's (Shaolin Soccer, Kung Fu Hustle) cuddly-alien-to-nice-family flick, CJ7. As with all films Asian, this is a funhouse mirror held up to what passes for child's fare in the U.S., that is to say, the movie's a little more icky (snot jokes are more, um, vivid) & slightly more cruel (while the class fat girl is defended, when she walks down the hall the school quakes) than what American adults are used to, but hey, stop micro-managing & balance your checkbook, secure in the knowledge that good wins over evil in CJ7 & nobody is seriously injured in the process.

Dicky (the fittingly adorable Jiao Xu) is a smudge-faced ragamuffin living with his nearly destitute widowed father Ti (Stephen Chow), who apparently works 18 hours a day to pay rent, keep Dicky in bowls of fish-flavored rice & pay the boy's tuition to an elite school. Dicky must settle for clothing & shoes pilfered from the garbage dump & he spends most evenings squashing armies of cockroaches on the kitchen wall with his father. The things you do when there's no TV. At the school, Dicky is a cheerful outcast, marveling at the incredible robotic toys the overachieving, equally robotic privileged students own. Dicky's frustration with his lot in life grows the more he's confronted with the shiny, happy lives of the other children. Unlike other put-upon children in cinema, Dicky is NOT long-suffering, and this is a welcome realistic touch in CJ7. He wants what every other child has & he can't be expected to sort out the vagaries of existence that make this impossible, especially when he's faced with these inequities every freaking day. That Dicky can become demanding & inflexible without becoming an odious brat is testament to Jiao Xu's preternatural acting skills.

While scavenging rubbish for a pair of P.E. shoes for his son, Ti comes upon an unusual glowing green bag, like a water balloon with thicker skin & capable of some indepedent motion. After making the best of this limited toy for a day or two, the toy begins to adapt to Dicky's needs, develops nipples, full-fledged tentacles & finally changes into glow-green goop with the head of a baby chicken & the temperament of a spoiled puppy. As special FX aliens go, CJ7 is no E.T., but it has its charms & serves to make Dicky popular for the right reasons, organize his priorities & find his father much-deserved love, in the form of the lovely teacher, Miss Yuen.

All in all, a pretty exciting, colorful kid's pic. Recommended. 

Crows Zero (Dir. Takashi Miike)

A strangely tame manga adaptation from the most stylistically impulsive Japanese director since Seijun Suzuki, Crows Zero is still a pretty kick-ass Asian J.D. film.

A yakuza boss' son is told to take over Suzuran High School to show his mettle. Unfortunately another student has similar ideas & the two would-be delinquent kingpins fight their way through assorted bullies, numbskulls & unprepared High School Caesars until a showdown is inevitable. This is, by far, the most linear Miike film I've ever seen & even the violence seems controlled & less perverse than in his previous work. This is not to say that Crows Zero isn't a nutcruncher when it has to be, but all of the fights have a purpose & they actually advance the admittedly single-minded plot & contribute to the suspense, instead of relieving the trajectory of its momentum by heightening the gore or resorting to genre satire or slapstick.

If you don't think you like Miike you may be surprised by the enjoyability of Crows Zero, which shows off the filmmaker's innate intelligence & his flare for classic storytelling without squirting breastmilk all over the lens or allowing a talking vagina to narrate the tale. All in all, a pretty cool teenage Yakuza flick directed by a master who knows that even unpredictability can become predictable in time. Recommended.

Felon (Dir. Ric Roman Waugh)

Felon plays out like a protracted episode of Fox's Prison Break, minus the plot convolutions that sometimes make that show mildly interesting. Stephen Dorff, who has the honor of also being the POOR MAN'S Stephen Dorff, stars as Wade Porter, a mild-mannered construction worker who's just signed the small business loan papers on his own contracting firm, kills a wee-hour home intruder, but makes the big mistake of doing it on the front lawn instead of in the living room, thus lowering property values, and breaking several neighborhood covenants & zoning laws, for which Wade is sent up the river for three years at Corcoran State Prison (a troubled real-life California prison distinguished by its officials having shot & killed more inmates than any other prison in the country).

Leaving behind a wife & small child, Wade has some trouble adjusting to the ins & outs of Corcoran, especially the gladiator battles staged by Lt. Jackson (Lost's Harold Perrineau). In order to cope, Dorff is mentored by serial murderer Val Kilmer (who spouts the kind of bullshit prison Zen that would seem psychotic outside of cell block #9, but seems pretty practical on the inside), and pretty soon he can hold his own in the brutal human cockfights. Felon is filmed inside a unused portion of the labyrinthine California prison system & it's grittier for it, but the plot is pure potboiler through & through & won't make you forget about Stuart Rosenberg's Brubaker (1980) or Jamaa Fanaka's cult classic, Penitentiary (1979). Felon's too soft-headed to rank with the former & too faux-humanist to even touch the latter.

Really, this would have been better off as a TV Movie of the Week & better still if they'd found a true story on which to base it, instead of a series of hunches & lurid L.A. Times headlines, but then the director, famous stunt man Ric Waugh (They Live, Hard Target, Leonard, Part 6), wouldn't have been able to push the fisticuffs into the deep red & make all this talk about prison reform seem like a polite reach-around during non-concensual prison sodomy. Felon does have its cheap thrills & Kilmer's kind of a hoot, even though one senses he's aiming for gravitas here & with a little less hand-wringing & extra-penal bathos, I might even recommend it, but as it stands it's a bust both as an issue film AND as knuckle-bruising slammer porn.

The Films of Lech Majewski: Glass Lips (Dir. Lech Majewski)

This experimental feature by Lech Majewski (best known in the U.S. as co-writer for Julian Schnabel's Basquiat, 1996) seems more like the work of a precocious undergraduate literature major than the last finished work of a filmmaker who's been working in Poland since 1978. That its original Polish title translates as Blood of a Poet, the title of Jean Cocteau's surrealist masterwork from 1930, make it feasible that some viewers might take umbrage & charge the filmmaker with delusions of grandeur. I, however, will simply charge Majewski with run-of-the-mill pretentiousness.

Had this film been made when the literary/art/music/film movement known as Modernism was in full flourish, Glass Lips (a hopelessly unevocative U.S. title), with all of its Freudian imagery clashing so dissonantly with its tired religious symbolism & erotic posturings, most of its blithe excesses could be forgiven, but now that Modernism has passed & only freshman writing classes allow imitations to slide (mostly to allow beginning writers to follow the steps of great writers to the fruitiion of a unique personal style), there's no reason to give the film any leeway whatsoever.

Because we, as viewers, are so used to certain types of symbolism in movies (Christ symbols are so rife most students of film are forced to avert their eyes to avoid processing their turgid mis-use), in order to maintain a certain cinematic mystery it takes a new language of signs to convey psychology through images, something of which visionaries like David Lynch, Alejandro Jodorowsky & even an antiquist like Guy Maddin are well aware. Images of crucifixion, madonna/whore figures & sexual fetishism brought on by childhood discipline & transference, no longer hold the imagistic weight they once did, to say the least. Majewski revels in this exhausted symbological universe & his film is exhausted as a result. Because the symbols are so instantly familiar, Glass Lips reads almost literally from start to finish. And translated so literally, so immediately, these images lose all their psychological mystery, all relation to the dream language of the surrealists the filmmaker so obviously reveres: The main character has a cruel father who keeps an exotic mistress, a mother who would not protect him & turned to television as an escape (a scene where she's fed intravenously from a rooftop TV antenna is like something from a Van Halen video), was raised under the sexual repression of Catholicism, transferred his erotic fixations onto religious imagery, and is eventually driven to the madhouse where he struggles to provide motivations for his rather standard Modernist family romance.

If this were filmed as floridly as a Kenneth Anger film or imbued with the keen wit of Mark Rappaport, perhaps this parade of ho-hum images might provide a lovely tribute to surrealism, a charming bauble to remind the viewer of arguably simpler times, but the video talbeaux here just can't make the pictures pretty enough to camouflage the scarcity of imagination at work.

Inglorious Bastards (Dir. Enzo Castellari, 1978)

Critics have been frothing at the mouth about the re-release of this Italian war film on DVD, but it's a little underwhelming when it comes right down to it. Produced in 1978, a little late to cash-in on its obvious influences, The Dirty Dozen (1967) & Kelly's Heroes (1970), Inglorious Bastards is a favorite of Quentin Tarantino, who's remaking it as we speak, starring Brad Pitt, Simon Pegg & Eli Roth. While the movie's colorful, sometimes rousing & benefits from a decent budget, if you've seen a few irreverent war films of the late 60s & early 70s, there's nothing here that wasn't done much, much better in, say, The Dirty Dozen & Kelly's Heroes (you can throw in Where Eagles Dare & The Great Escape, if you need more evidence).

Most of Inglorious Bastards' gags are nimble as lead, the characterizations are mostly impoverished borrowings from other films (especially Nick, the anachronistic hippie thief obviously modeled on Donald Sutherland's Sgt. Oddball in Kelly's Heroes) & the action set-pieces in the first 45 minutes are about as kinetic as action sequences from 1970s TV shows. These shortfalls are somewhat mitigated by likable performances from Fred Williamson (MASH, Black Caesar) & Bo Svenson (Walking Tall, Part 2 & Kill Bill, Vol. 2), a bucolic lake filled with naked, machine-gun toting bathing beauties, a weird B-Movie performance by Peter Hooten (coming off, for all the world, like a flaming homosexual, but voicing lines you'd expect from Telly Savalas), some cool slow-motion Peckinpah-style shootouts & a batshit crazy train crash in the final quarter & Bo Svenson disarming a V2 rocket with a pencil.

As for the plot itself -- bound for prison, unorthodox renegade soldiers escape from custody & somehow wind up winning WWII for the allies -- the intrigue pretty much boils down to one line, uttered by Svenson: "Nick, Tony, Berle...Dress up like Germans & let's get out of here!"  So the trick to viewing Inglorious Bastards? Stick with it, or liberally implement your Fast Forward device. 

Pick of the Week - 

Mad Detective (Dir. Johnny To/Ka-Fai Wai)

"Hello. I’m Dr. Sammy, Beverly Hills psycho-actualist and author of the book, 'Old Lady, Biker, Gay Guy, Japanese Man: The Four Voices Within.' You see, within each of us are four distinct drives, or 'voices.' Our old lady is our short-sighted, impatient, doddering, old fool--prone to violence and rash decision making. Our biker backs her up every step of the way. Our gay guy takes it personal and makes it personal with the velveteen touch of a dandy fop. And lastly, our Japanese man utters nonsensical advice which only our biker can translate and transcend. My program is designed to wrangle these four. I’ll be at the Holiday Center Spot in Nashua, New Hampshire in Room 39 all weekend."

Remember that Mr. Show sketch from Season Two? Well, Hong Kong action auteur Johnny To ups the ante here, introducing us to completely unhinged detective Chan Kwai Bun (a really magnificent performance from Lau Ching Wan), a man who solves crimes by stabbing pig carcasses, being thrown down stairs zipped into a piece of luggage & following the different personalities (a glutton, a sexy woman, etc.) who reside inside most murderers. Bun's madness is accepted because he solves nearly all of his cases, but after carving off his ear at a superior's retirement party, Bun is left to hole up in his apartment & chat genially to the dead, including his deceased wife. To doesn't always let us on to what is delusion & hallucination in Bun's life, and what is real, but this isn't achieved in any gimmicky fashion & we're always aware of the sadness & beauty inherent in the detective's debilitating psychosis.

A young detective, Ho (Andy On), who sees the efficacy in Bun's strange methods, searches out the crazy hermit & lures him back into the case of a cop who may have been killed by his own partner while on a stake-out. The partner has left no evidence trail, but who needs an evidence trail when Bun can see all of the perp's personalities conspiring around him? The relationship between Ho & Bun is devastatingly poignant & there's a dinner sequence where Ho & his wife have a dinner date with Bun & his dead wife that is still giving me goosebumps. In the hands of someone like, say, M. Night Shamalamadingdong, this would've been chintzy stuff, but Johnny To keeps the mood even & lets the actors work their magic, never leading us into dead-ends with showy camera moves or telegraphing emotion or suspense with soundtrack music. It's a fine film, even if the actual case at hand isn't really much of a puzzle. As a character study Mad Detective is a little Hong Kong classic & grade-A film noir. Recommended. 

Miss Conception (Dir. Eric Styles)

Due to her family's history of premature menopause, winsome thirty-ish Brit Georgina (a frantic Heather Graham) only has four days to have her lone surviving egg fertilized & conceive a child, which she desires with the kind of barely concealed hysteria with which small boys desire robots or tennis shoes with tail lights. Though she owns a construction company (I suppose we're to think her behavior isn't TOO crazy girly since she engages in a predominately male profession) & has a classy filmmaker boyfriend, it's really a baby she needs, above all else. Turns out her boyfriend doesn't know if he wants a baby or not & of course the plot contrivance doesn't give him the weekend to think about it, so Graham & her best friend, the anti-mommy Mia Kirshner (Showtime's The L Word), set out a four-day course of action that doesn't, because this is, ostensibly, a comedy, include one reasonable response to her dilemma.

The first day she'll sleep with one of the strangers who stop by to view her new model home, the second day she'll go to a nightclub & pick up some strange, etc. And if none of these strategies pay off with some viable spermatazoa, she'll sleep with Kirshner's gay friend, who doesn't -- reasonably, I think -- seem to relish the concept. What on earth did women do before heaven granted each & every one of them an insouciant gay friend?

Miss Conception's plot is just too deranged & distasteful to really click & the undercurrents of anti-feminism are so trenchant they're difficult even for a male to ignore.

Mia Kirshner is the true star here, playing a wicked variation on the kind of role once reserved for snooty males like Noel Coward & George Sanders, but its an uphill battle & doesn't really make up for the strained hijinx perpetrated around her.

Outside Sales (Dir. Blayne Weaver)

A cast of mostly unknown comic actors have a go at an Office Space-type romantic comedy/satire with a shoe-string budget & a whole lotta sad-sack enthusiasm & damned if they don't actually wring some comic paydirt out of it. Lucas Fleischer (State of Grace) stars as Paul Wells, a cocky, successful salesman at a company selling payroll services, whose career hits the skids when he comes home to find his wife in bed with his co-worker (director Weaver). Soon the co-worker not only has his wife but gets promoted over him as sales manager, leaving Paul in the kind of slump which traditionally leads to salesmen huffing car exhaust in their two-car garages. Just ask Willie Loman. As a final insult to Paul's already shattered ego, in walks the new girl, Dagny (Tricia O'Kelley, from The New Adventures of Old Christine), with whom he's immediately smitten. Unfortunately she's there to take his job, but before they can even get through a cinematic meet-cute, they're pitted against each other in a Battle Royale in which the winner gets the brass ring & the loser doesn't even get a set of steak knives.

Both Fleischer & O'Kelley bounce from loathing one another, to nervous attraction, to self-loathing, to head over heels in the space of a sentence & pull laughs from material we've seen many a big-name comedian mangle. The large support cast all turn in skit-worthy bits here & there just so the stakes of it all don't get too dire & they capture perfectly this world where desperation, defeat & momentary victory can all coalesce in one jittery caffeinated moment. Recommended.

A Raisin in the Sun (Dir. Kenny Leon)

 



This TV remake of Lorraine Hansberry's 1959 play & the 1961 Sidney Poitier film it inspired, suffers from a glossy staginess & the kind of old-fashioned black theater performances that seem stilted & melodramatic today. And it's not the performances themselves that seem creaky, but the lines, which almost require excessively monumental readings, as if types are being voiced instead of characters. Not that the lives of black people in the 1950s didn't allow for some tumult, some chest-pounding in the name of justice, but Raisin in the Sun simply hasn't aged well & its characters seem stiff when they're not railing against the cosmos, at which time they seem unbearably shrill.

I'm sure there are actors out there who could open Raisin up for new audiences, scrape the rust off it with some Method acid & retool it from the inside, gutting some of the more hackneyed conventions of its staging, but this isn't the ensemble to do it. Headed by Sean 'P. Diddy' Combs as the voice of frustrated black yearning, the chauffeur Walter Lee Younger, Phylicia Rashad (famous mainly for her role as Bill Cosby's wife on both The Cosby Show & Cosby TV series, though her live theater credits run much, much deeper), as his wise, long-suffering mother Lena & Audra McDonald as Walter's wife, Ruth, a quivering wreck of a woman, exhausted from an unwanted pregnancy, work & managing the stormy discontents of her husband.

With these three launching every ten minutes or so into windy, grim-as-death monologues on personal pride, religion, economic injustice, social injustice & all other affronts to justice, it's easy to grasp for the traces of wit in the carefree social climbing of Walter's sister, Beneatha (Sanaa Lathan), a character with the difficult job of seeming a little ditzy and, at the same time, the right stuff for Medical school. Beneatha has the leisure time to explore fads, date without conviction & dream big dreams, a luxury not afforded anyone else in the Younger household. Combs is efficient in a role that mostly requires attitude & its adjunct, indignation, characteristics he apparently exemplifies in real life anyway.   

What sets this story ticking is the $10,000 insurance settlement Lena finally receives (one can only imagine the kind of hoops a black woman in 1959 had to jump through in order to be handed $10,000) in response to her husband's death. Walter wants the money to open a liquor store, Ruth for expenses, Beneatha for her medical school. The disappointments & discouraging realities brought to the surface by this divine windfall can't help but put a lump in your throat, but that doesn't stop Raisin in the Sun from being a bit of a museum piece. Of course, if a decent cast can somehow breathe some life into Thornton Wilder's Our Town, maybe anything's possible..

Oh, and it should be mentioned that John Stamos is in this and, for the most part, he doesn't embarrass himself.  

The Secret (Dir. Vincent Perez)

 
Ever wonder what Disney's Freaky Friday might've been like had it been directed by M. Night Shyamalan? Well, this is it. Directed by French arthouse actor Vincent Perez, The Secret stars David Duchovny (HBO's Californication, Things We Lost in the Fire) as Benjamin Marris, a deliriously happy eye doctor married to deliriously happy, but slightly out-to-lunch Hannah (Lili Taylor - Factotum, The Notorious Bettie Page), who both show deliriously unreasonable patience for their glum goth sexpot daughter Sam (Juno's Olivia Thirlby). When Hannah & Sam are hospitalized following a car crash that occurs mercifully during a rather tedious mother-daughter spat, Mom awakens momentarily, flatlines & finally dies, while the daughter gradually recovers. Here's the rub, though: while it's undeniably Thirlby's vivacious body that survives, it's Lili Taylor hidden inside. 

Dr. Marris & Hannah agree that she should go on living the daughter's life, just in case she's inside there somewhere too, maybe tucked behind the left lung or in a ventricle of her hard teenage heart. Surprise! Hannah finds out things about Sam she never knew, for instance, her daughter was a promiscuous complainer who liked to drink & do drugs. Turns out there's a little of that in Mom, too, because she fall into Sam's routine without much of resistance, leaving Dr. Marris pretty lonely & at wit's end.

There's a moment here when Sam's body puts the moves on Pops, declaring that most men his age would give anything to have their wives suddenly inherit the nubile body of a teenager & the whole thing threatens to become rather, um, French, in that queasy kind of way. I breathed a sigh of relief when Marris turned out to be a relatively normal guy who didn't want to bed down his daughter, even with his wife inside her, but then I realized that was about the only tension to be had from this tame, glacially-paced meditation on something or other. Suddenly I so wanted The Secret to at least live up to his creepy premise, but it was too late & blandness had already won out. Even the Rewind function on my remote control couldn't fix that. Damn.

Smart People (Dir. Noam Murro)

Burned-out, emotionally shut-down, blowhard college professor & widower Dennis Quaid, finally perfecting his not entirely unwelcome Jack Nicholson lite, plays Professor Wetherhold (wow, is that Dickensian, or what?), who begins to arise from his sepulchre of a life upon meeting a pretty doctor & former student played by Sarah Jessica Parker. Of course, this cut rate Butley has a lot of barnacles on him & his transformation from self-centered jerk to open vessel takes some time. And Parker's not exactly a catch, her neorosis (perhaps brought on by the bad grades she received from Wetherhold) being that she can't really commit to any club that would have her as a member.

This is a typical plot, really -- emotionally cut-off, cerebral curmudgeon has life shaken up by the fickle contingencies of existence (family, coincidence, fate...) & winds up a better man for it, but Smart People works, for the most part. There's not a soul here doing whit more than the film requires of him or her, from the director to Man in the Hospital Waiting Room #3, and that's kind of comforting. Thomas Haden Church, as Wetherhold's black sheep brother, plays a slightly less annoying variation on the character he played in Sideways, Juno star Ellen Page -- as Wetherhold's alpha daughter -- seems to be making a career of playing girls not immediately recognizable as human beings & Quaid & Parker don't make their transformations from dysfunctional subhumans so circuitous you tire of their resistance to positive progress. In fact I really like that these two characters acknowledge there are better ways to live & simply need the right petri dish in which to experiment with new ways of behaving.

First-time director Noam Murro has an easy way with characters & his camera, like Alexander Payne (Citizen Ruth, Election, Sideways) without the gags & there are clever nuances to spare throughout Smart People, my favorite being the big publishing company's decision to publish Wetherhold's book because it will infuriate people with its rampant snobbery.

There's nothing in Smart People to drag you in if you have any resistance whatsoever to a movie featuring a bunch of rather lackluster characters desperately in need of makeovers inside & out, but if you like quiet autumnal mood pieces with veins of intelligent good humor running through them like indian summer breezes, this might be the movie for you. I have to admit, it worked on me. But maybe I'm just sick to death of summer. Mildly Recommended.