NEW RELEASES
FACTORY FILMS The Light Factory film series presents “The Best of Full Frame,” featuring two Audience Award winners from this year’s Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. Movies will be shown June 3-4 at Spirit Square; call 704-333-9755 for schedule and other info.
* BORN INTO BROTHELS Between that title and the film’s topic — children who are the offspring of hookers living and working in Calcutta’s red light district — it’d be reasonable to expect a documentary that takes audience depression to a whole new level. Yet this powerful work from co-directors Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman isn’t merely a rapid downward spiral of a film; instead, it details Briski’s remarkable attempts to help these kids (especially the girls, who will inevitably follow their mothers and grandmothers into prostitution) out of their dire surroundings by teaching them photography and attempting to place them in respectable boarding schools. It’s a given that not all these children (most of them personable, talented and wise beyond their years) will be able to escape their lot in life — a heartrending coda reveals which ones were unable to make the break — yet there are numerous scenes of inspiration and uplift, and the efforts of Briski and her non-profit outfit Kids With Cameras (www.kids-with-cameras.org) continue to this day. 
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* WORD WARS The phenomenal documentary Spellbound focused on students doing their best to win the national spelling bee, and as audiences members, we were actively rooting for all of them to win. Word Wars holds the opposite effect: Watching these otherwise aimless adults pour all their efforts into winning Scrabble tournaments, we finds ourselves realizing that we don’t want any of them to emerge triumphant. That’s the strange appeal of this documentary that centers on four hardcore Scrabble players and follows them as they work their way toward participating in the ultimate Scrabble competition. These four men are largely presented as annoying, petty, whiny and unemployable, and it’s difficult to remain in their presence for long spells. Yet the particulars of how they prepare for the word matches — and the clever way in which directors Eric Chaiken and Julian Petrillo make the board games visually come alive on screen — help turn Word Wars into an entertaining peek at a cerebral subculture.
I’M NOT SCARED Or, It Takes a Village to Abduct a Child. On the outskirts of a rural Italian community in 1978, 10-year-old Michele (Giuseppe Cristiano) is startled to discover there’s a boy (Mattia Di Pierro) his age who’s chained in the cellar of an abandoned farmhouse. Blissfully naive (or simply wary?), he leaves the lad in his prison but befriends him and carts him food and water on a regular basis. But before long, he begins to pick up clues that the adults in his tiny town, including his own parents (Aitana Sanchez-Gijon and Dino Abbrescia), are responsible for the child’s incarceration, and he’s forced to race against time to devise an appropriate course of action. Based on the novel by Niccolo Ammaniti (who co-wrote the script), this material sounds like prime fodder for a fast-paced thriller, but the movie is actually something more special: a tender-hearted rumination on the loss of innocence among children once they’re confronted by the vices of the adult world. As he did in his previous film, the forgettable Oscar winner Mediterraneo, director Gabriele Salvatores uses plenty of film stock to capture the unsullied beauty of nature and the characters’ desire to lazily lounge around in its sun-soaked embrace. Yet here there’s a pointed dichotomy, as the splendor in the grass is in sharp contrast to the deceit, sorrow and broken trust that Michele experiences as he learns that childhood doesn’t last forever, parents aren’t perfect, and, in the film’s memorably staged finale, true friendship can flow from either direction.
SOUL PLANE This urban comedy might have been successful had it taken off in one of two distinct directions. It could either have been a gently rollicking comedy filled with endearing characters — a la Barbershop — or it could have been a balls-to-the-wall satire that came up with clever new ways to gross out an audience — like the original Scary Movie. Instead, it waffles between the two camps, resulting in an imbecilic film that’s about as punishing as a four-hour flight delay. Bland Kevin Hart stars as a young man who, after winning millions in a lawsuit against a major airline, decides to use the settlement to create his own afro-centric company, NWA Airlines. The maiden voyage (Flight 069 — how ingenious!) is packed with nothing but formulaic figures: a dope-smoking pilot (Snoop Dogg), a randy homosexual flight attendant (Gary Anthony Williams), a dope-smoking lavatory assistant (D.L. Hughley), a randy security guard (Mo’nique), and a white nerd (Tom Arnold) who’s actually named “Elvis Hunkee” (pronounced “honky,” of course). Writers Bo Zenga and Chuck Wilson should be ashamed of themselves, not only for a lazy script that staggers between brain dead crudity and cheap sentiment but also for reinforcing infinite stereotypes. And while I generally applaud a movie’s right to offend, a gag involving the harassment of a Middle Eastern passenger simply because he “looks” like he could be a terrorist seems in especially poor taste, and made me wonder if Donald Rumsfeld was one of this film’s financiers.
CURRENT RELEASES
BON VOYAGE Set during World War II, this French flick possesses the elan of those vintage all-star opuses like Grand Hotel, though its spirit clearly rests with Casablanca, another movie in which the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of — well, you know the routine. Gregori Derangere plays a writer who finds himself implicated in a murder committed by a spoiled actress (Isabelle Adjani), aiding a scientist (Jean-Marc Stehle) and his shapely assistant (Virginie Ledoyen) smuggle contraband material to England, mixing it up with a waffling government official (Gerard Depardieu) and a secretive journalist (Peter Coyote), and somehow still finding time to write his novel. It’s all about as believable as those comic shorts in which The Three Stooges smacked around Adolph Hitler — and no less entertaining.
MEAN GIRLS Like Heathers and Clueless, here’s that rare teen comedy that refuses to be pigeonholed as a teen comedy. Even more remarkably, it’s also that rare Saturday Night Live-sanctioned film that’s actually funny. Scripter Tina Fey elected to adapt Rosalind Wiseman’s Queen Bees and Wannabes, along the way turning a nonfiction book into a fictional story spiced up with her own pithy, piercing observations. Lindsay Lohan stars as a naive teen who, upon making her public school debut after a lifetime of home schooling, finds herself being courted by the “bitch-goddess” crowd. Director Mark Waters and Lohan previously worked together on the Freaky Friday remake; I’m not prepared to elevate them to the level of Kurosawa-Mifune or Scorsese-De Niro, but they’ve clearly got a good thing going.
RAISING HELEN Director Garry Marshall makes shiny, happy movies for shiny, happy people — even Exit to Eden, a film about S&M, turned out to be about as threatening as a butterfly with a
broken wing. Therefore, the plot of Raising Helen alone is enough to break even the most hardened of criminals and leave him blubbering in the
corner: It’s about a perky modeling agency executive who’s forced to change her fast-lane lifestyle after her sister dies and leaves her in charge of her three children. The film is the sort of sitcom-by-way-of-Hallmark material we can expect from Marshall, yet it’s marginally easier to take than one would expect from this reliably clumsy moviemaker — for that, he can thank Kate Hudson and especially Joan Cusack for contributing with conviction. 1/2
SHREK 2 While most sequels slide down that slippery slope of diminishing quality, the eagerly awaited Shrek 2 is on a par with its predecessor. In this outing, newlywed ogres Shrek (voiced by Mike Myers) and Fiona (Cameron Diaz), with the self-professed “annoying talking animal sidekick” Donkey (Eddie Murphy) in tow, travel to the Kingdom of Far, Far Away to receive the blessing of Fiona’s human parents, King Harold (John Cleese) and Queen Lillian (Julie Andrews). Little kids will enjoy the colorful characters, while older audiences will dig the inspired sight gags and sly references to other films. But the movie’s real ace is Puss In Boots (Antonio Banderas), a debonair swashbuckler — or at least when he’s not busy coughing up hairballs. In a movie filled with imaginative bits, he emerges as the cat’s meow.
TROY This liberal retelling of Homer’s The Iliad is a big, brawny movie that scores on a handful of
levels: as a rousing epic that puts its budget where its mouth is; as a thoughtful tale in which men struggle with issues involving honor, loyalty and bravery; and as a topical treatise on what
happens when soldiers blindly follow their leaders into war. Director Wolfgang Petersen never allows the epic to overwhelm the intimate: The battle sequences are staggering to behold, but the talky sequences are equally memorable. As Trojan hero Hector, Eric Bana delivers the best performance, followed by Peter O’Toole as his wise father, King Priam. By comparison, Brad Pitt is never wholly convincing in this ancient setting, but he exhibits enough charisma and resolve to make a passable Achilles. 1/2
VAN HELSING Never mind comparisons to the classic horror flicks: Watching this movie, you begin to wonder if anybody involved has ever actually held a book in their hands, let alone read one. The text of Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley is treated as nothing more than toilet paper in the outhouse of writer-director Stephen Sommers’ imagination, soiled and shredded beyond all recognition. Van Helsing, a movie whose contempt for its predecessors is matched by its condescension toward its audience, exclusively draws from modern touchstones of pop culture: It’s Indiana Jones and James Bond and Star Wars and Alien and so on, all presented as an endless video game with no human dimension but plenty of cheesy CGI effects. As monster killer Van Helsing, Hugh Jackman has been stripped of all charisma, while Richard Roxburgh may very well deliver the worst performance as Dracula in film history.
YOUNG ADAM Under the auspices of writer-director David Mackenzie, this adaptation of Alexander Trocchi’s novel feels like Roman Polanski’s Knife In the Water as told by Ken Loach or Lynne Ramsay, a grubby tale of working-class disillusionment enacted by the three empty souls aboard a cramped sea vessel. Joe (Ewan McGregor) is the young drifter who takes a job aboard the barge owned by Les (Peter Mullan) and Ella (Tilda Swinton); when he isn’t busy bonking the haggardly Ella behind her impotent husband’s back (the sight of McGregor’s fleshy lightsaber earned this an NC-17), he’s reflecting on the death (murder? suicide? accident?) of his former flame (Emily Mortimer). The movie’s bleak outlook is gripping to a point, but it never amounts to much more than surface grot. 1/2
This article appears in Jun 2-8, 2004.
