NEW RELEASES
FEMME FATALE Director Brian De Palma has spent most of his career courting controversy, so why expect different results from his latest release? Already running the gamut of critical opinion since its opening (from an F by Entertainment Weekly to four stars from Roger Ebert), this deliriously over-the-top thriller features both the best and worst of De Palma. A convoluted, twisty yarn about a shapely thief (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, channeling Sharon Stone) who double-crosses her criminal cohorts, assumes a new identity and makes a patsy out of a tabloid photographer (Antonio Banderas), Femme Fatale includes some terrific set pieces that remind me why I revere his style so much — yet ultimately becomes burdened with several embarrassingly self-conscious sequences that make me wince at how he’s frittered away much of his latter-day career. Woe to the audience member who approaches this with a straight face — the writer-director is clearly in a playful mood here (love that blood-stained shirt, “seven years later”) — but even accepting this in the right frame of mind can only provide it with so much leniency. 
1/2
I SPY This tepid studio product is supposedly based on the same-named 60s TV show starring Robert Culp and Bill Cosby, but its relationship to that series is so tenuous, they could easily have called this thing Petticoat Junction or My Mother the Car and gotten away with it. Owen Wilson, charming when the role is just right (rare, indeed), is warmly relaxed as a second-tier secret agent, while Eddie Murphy, in his patented motor-mouth mode, darts all over the screen as his civilian partner, a boxing champ whose ego is larger than Brazil and Argentina combined. This sort of “buddy comedy” is long passe, so the real surprise is that Murphy and Wilson actually make a pretty good team, each actor playing off the other’s strengths. But the project surrounding them is distressingly rote, a true snoozer that finds the pair trying to stop the usual Eurobaddie (Malcolm McDowell) from selling a stolen government aircraft to the highest international bidder. The plane, incidentally, is invisible, though viewers hoping for a Wonder Woman cameo will be sorely disappointed.
CURRENT RELEASES
AUTO FOCUS Director Paul Schrader moves from Affliction to addiction with Auto Focus, a distant, even sterile, yet compulsively watchable look at the sordid life of Hogan’s Heroes star Bob Crane. Played by Greg Kinnear with the right mixture of frat-boy exuberance and lounge lizard unctuousness, Crane emerges as an affable chap whose newfound success allows him to stray from his wife (Rita Wilson) and get a taste of the women lining up to bed a bonafide celebrity. Working in tandem with a video production geek named John Carpenter (Willem Dafoe), Crane eventually gets hooked on the easy sex; what follows is an expected divorce, a post-Hogan career in dinner theater, endless hours of taped sexual marathons, and the actor’s unsolved murder in 1978. Despite the intense focus on Crane, calling Auto Focus a character study wouldn’t exactly be accurate, since the movie doesn’t get inside his head as much as it watches his increasingly self-destructive actions from a detached distance. This approach mutes the film’s emotional pull and makes the climactic killing seem almost like an afterthought, yet it also allows viewers to better study the signs that eventually lead Crane to his doom. The sex itself isn’t the problem, Schrader seems to suggest; rather, it’s any obsession that reduces a man to an unfeeling automaton merely going through the motions.
THE BELIEVER The winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival (beating out, among others, Memento, In the Bedroom and Hedwig and the Angry Inch), this absorbing drama quickly found itself swept under the carpet after no studio proved brave enough to release it. Acquired by Showtime, the film finally premiered on cable before being screened in a smattering of cities here and there — kudos, to the Charlotte Film Society for bringing it to town. Like Edward Norton in American History X, Ryan Gosling (Murder By Numbers) delivers a magnetic performance — too magnetic, some might argue — as a self-loathing Jew who becomes a persuasive speaker for the Neo-Nazi movement even as he still finds himself struggling against his upbringing. Loosely based on a true story, The Believer isn’t about the banality of evil as much as the personality of evil, and how it merely takes one measured (if misguided) voice to sway mindless multitudes. 1/2
BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE God bless America. And God bless Michael Moore for caring so much about America. The scruffy guerilla filmmaker who’s made a career out of sticking it to the nation’s corporate guard on behalf of the little people this time sets his sights on the country’s thorny firearm issue. The result is a hard-hitting treatise that offers almost as many laughs as his previous pictures Roger & Me and The Big One but also (and here’s the telling detail) emerges as a much sadder, wiser piece of filmmaking than its predecessors. Detractors will claim that this film, so skewed that Marilyn Manson ends up coming across as the most logical of all the interviewees, is nothing more than a typical liberal diatribe taking pot shots at easy targets, and they’d probably be right except for one thing. Sure, it’s easy for Moore to note that those countries without easy access to firearms don’t have our absurdly high murder rate, yet this film muddies the waters by pointing out that Canada, a country also swimming in firearms, has an enviably low murder rate despite the prevalence of weapons, thereby leading Moore (and us) to question whether gun control isn’t the issue as much as an arrogant American mindset that feels everything is for the taking for anyone with the means to do so. Bowling for Columbine isn’t a subtle film; instead, it makes its case with Magnum force. 1/2
PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE After the grandiosity of both Boogie Nights and Magnolia, writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson works on a decidedly smaller scale with Punch-Drunk Love. Yet while his canvas (and running time) may be significantly lessened, his imagination runs unfettered, resulting in a romantic comedy that operates by the rules of its own self-contained universe. Adam Sandler, stretching about as far here as Jim Carrey did in The Truman Show (in other words, both comedians didn’t reinvent their screen personas as much as they simply toned down the expected schtick), delivers an interestingly off-center performance as Barry Egan, a toilet-plunger business owner whose lifelong mental abuse at the hands of his six sisters would seem to go a long way toward explaining his delicate emotional state and his social ineptitude. He falls for his sister’s co-worker (Emily Watson), but matters get messy once he starts getting harassed by members of a phone sex service. Sandler’s character, an insecure introvert prone to destructive outbursts, isn’t exactly cut from the Cary Grant mold, and if the film fails to use its exemplary supporting players (Watson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Luis Guzman) to their fullest potential, it still scores points for displaying how the redemptive power of love could transform even a seeming lost cause like Barry Egan.
THE RING An American remake of a 1998 Japanese smash that spawned a pair of sequels, a TV series and a cult following, The Ring centers around the existence of a videocassette that causes death to anyone who dares watch it. So what exactly is on this terrible tape? Outtakes from The Anna Nicole Show? Footage of the Liza Minnelli-David Gest wedding? The torturous Vanilla Ice bomb Cool As Ice? Actually, none of the above; instead, it turns out to be a series of grainy, bizarre images that would be right at home in a music video by, say, Nine Inch Nails or Metallica. In his short movie career, director Gore Verbinski has certainly been someone to watch, having helmed Mouse Hunt and The Mexican. Yet the quirky light touch that served him well on those projects has hampered him here: For a movie built around a piece of film containing unsettling images, The Ring is itself a rather tame undertaking, never building the finger-curling sense of dread that’s demanded by the material. At the same time, Verbinski clearly takes the genre seriously (overall, the movie’s on a par with the ’98 original), and he scored a casting coup by landing Naomi Watts (as the reporter on the case) in her first appearance since her amazing breakthrough performance in last year’s Mulholland Drive. 1/2
SPIRITED AWAY If there’s a film genre that qualifies as an open invitation for moviemakers to let it all artistically hang out, it would be the animated field, where writers and directors don’t have to worry about special effects proving too costly or stars turning too temperamental. In the animated kingdom, the imagination is truly king, and it’s depressing to note just how small-minded most of its product has turned out over the years. A wonderful exception, however, is Spirited Away, Japan’s all-time top moneymaker and the best animated feature since Beauty and the Beast 11 years ago. Creative beyond all reason or expectation, this latest effort from the revered Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki is a phenomenal achievement, a gorgeous-looking piece of cinema that stirs memories of everything from Alice In Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz to Where the Wild Things Are and Yellow Submarine. Featuring visions more suited to a hallucinatory dream than a movie screen, this picture, about a young girl who’s forced to work in a bathhouse that caters to spirits, takes particular delight in confounding our expectations every step of the way — not since Being John Malkovich has a movie proven to be so gloriously unpredictable.
THE TRUTH ABOUT CHARLIE It’s easy to appreciate what Jonathan Demme was trying to do with this remake of Charade without actually enjoying any part of it. Stanley Donen’s effervescent effort from 1963 isn’t exactly a classic, but with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn breezing through an engaging mystery-romance set in Paris, it’s awfully enjoyable stuff. Demme probably figured a straight retelling couldn’t compete, so he used the occasion as an opportunity to pay homage to the French New Wave of the 60s, get back to the hipster style of filmmaking he employed in Something Wild and Married to the Mob, and hand his Beloved star Thandie Newton a potential star-making role. His ambition should be applauded but his creation should be avoided, as the truth about Charlie is that it’s a brazenly misguided project. Full of schizophrenic edits, shot in a frequently warped style, and full of maddening asides and non sequiturs, this yarn about a widow pursued by various shady characters who were all involved with her late husband never locates an appropriate wavelength. Newton acquits herself well enough, but Mark Wahlberg, in Grant’s old role of the mysterious suitor, seems more a schoolboy than a sophisticate. 1/2
This article appears in Nov 13-19, 2002.
