"ABOUT A BOY"

The transformation of Scrooge in Dickens' "Christmas Carol" resonates with me no matter how many times I read that classic ghost story. Not so many of its illegitimate offspring, which often leave me rooting for Scrooge against the army of weak-minded do-gooders whose moral authority goes no deeper than a commitment to conformity.

Hugh Grant's character may have been shallow, self-centered and disconnected in "About a Boy," but at least he stood apart from the smarmy sentimentality, thinly cloaked in the outward accoutrements of hipness, that eventually drags him to a feel-god fate. Yuck!

"ABOUT SCHMIDT"

"About Schmidt" opens with a shot of Jack Nicholson sitting in a chair in his office, watching a clock tick away the last seconds of his last day at work and, metaphorically, the end of his useful life. We see no hint of cognition, only the logical conclusion of a routine, an unawareness that marks most of the male characters. At several points in the movie, men rise to offer formal remarks that should be centered on another person but which instead center on themselves, repeated examples of self-absorption without self-reflection of the sort that would ask, "What difference has my life made in the world?"

Warren Schmidt finally does ask this question after the death of his wife, a woman who had served as an anchor for his daily existence even though he detested her. His answer to the question is to take off in the Winnebago, purchased in anticipation of a retirement journey, to try to talk his daughter out of marrying a waterbed salesman, who dabbles in illegal pyramid schemes and whose greatest awards, lovingly preserved by his mother, have been for participation or perfect attendance. His daughter not surprisingly rejects his counsel: Schmidt has never taken any interest in her life up to this point, and the wedding is scheduled to take place in two days.

If this seems like a pretty sad movie, it is, but you don't notice until after leaving the theatre because Jack Nicholson gives such a fascinating account of the character he plays. Every movement of his eyes conveys another detail of his coming to grips with his own existence. The audience welcomes opportunities for comic relief, as in the wildly inappropriate letters that Schmidt sends to Ngudu, a six-year-old Tanzanian boy whom he has begun to support, more or less on a whim, through an international relief organization. Other memorable images include Schmidt wrestling unsuccessfully with a waterbed, or Schmidt confined in bed with a stick neck and a copy of Awaken the Giant Within, or Schmidt in a hot tub and his horror when the mother of the groom (Kathy Bates) doffs her robe and joins him.

At no point does the film give the slightest intention of being a moral lesson, yet appearing as it does in the days just before Christmas, it invites comparison with the classic curmudgeon Ebenezer Scrooge. Both stories invite one to reconsider one's values, preferably at a point when one can still alter the course of one's life. We celebrate Scrooge's repentance and wish him many long years of keeping Christmas well. For Schmidt, we are left with the chilling image of his cartons and cartons of insurance files, waiting beside the company dumpster.

“ACROSS THE UNIVERSE”

          How do you explain the Sixties to someone who didn’t live through this remarkable, contradictory era?  You could talk about the civil rights movement, about the hopes raised in John F. Kennedy’s inaugural speech, about the Peace Corps, about the Viet Nam war and how engaging in it, avoiding service in it, or engaging to end it affected virtually every young person in the States, about the disillusion accompanying the assassinations of Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and then Robert Kennedy, about campus demonstrations and the Kent State massacre, about drugs, hippies, coffee shops, folk music, Peter Max posters.  But could any such talk really capture the experience of those heady times?

          You could talk about your personal experience, to show how this decade changed lives, in my case from a high school student who defended Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative to a would-be college professor trying to apply the radical ideas of Summerhill and the examples of John Holt, Jonathan Kozol, Neil Postman, et al, along the way becoming involved in a study group on racism and then serving as secretary-coordinator for the first student-run university course, then going to Washington to demonstrate against the war in Cambodia.  But I passed up an opportunity to go to Woodstock, not really being into that kind of music (or the style of prose that would use the word “into” in that sense).

          In “Across the Universe” Julie Taymor takes another tack, using the music of the Beatles to evoke an era through a series of what are essentially music videos of individual songs, loosely connected by a plot, but photographed in styles tracing the Beatles’ musical journey from the conventional to the psychedelic.  One delightful scene looks as if it came right out of A Hard Day’s Night.  Another phantasmagorical episode features Eddie Izzard playing Mr. Kite.  With main characters named Jude, Lucy and Maxwell you have some idea of what’s coming, although “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” finally arrives only with the closing credits and we see a silver hammer without ever hearing the actual music.  As the movie progresses Taymor allows her creative imagination ever greater freedom, leading to some glorious underwater sequences and psychedelic colours that are enough for you to want to bring back your old bell bottoms and bandanas.

          I don’t know what the younger generation will make of this film, but if you want to encapsulate the spirit of an era in two hours—not just historical footage but the way music really made a difference in people’s lives—I can’t think of a better plan than going to see this movie.

“ACT OF GOD”

          Stories of people who have lost loved ones to lightning, for all the imaginative musical accompaniment or artistic camera work, remain essentially a matter of “I was standing here, he was standing there, and the lightning was all around us.”  As the end of the film, one person in the theatre applauded.  It wasn’t I.

"ADAPTATION"

The trick in postmodernist writing is not making it clever: a story about a story about a story can be generated like an Escher drawing if you know the technique which, if exercised well, can be quite dazzling. No, the trick in post-modern writing is making one care. In a movie, this calls for talented actors, which is why "Adaptation" has assembled such a strong cast.

The act of writing has always proved an almost insurmountable challenge for Hollywood. We’ve all seen the clichés: writer stares at blank page in typewriter, types a few lines, looks at the result, tears the paper from the machine, crumples it and tosses it on the floor where it joins dozens of other rejected efforts. Thus the novelty of "Adaptation" seems particularly welcome.

Briefly, a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine does a piece on a Florida orchid hunter and, in the manner of New Yorker writers, draws the reader into a fascinating world of 30,000 species of orchids and the people who go to extraordinary lengths to acquire a rare breed. The article eventually becomes a book. This much is factual.

Now enters Charles Kaufman, a factual screenwriter, played by Nicholas Cage, charged with transforming this unpromising material into a screenplay. Next enters his identical brother Donald, also played by Cage, who manages to keep the two characters quite distinct just with body language—an impressive bit of acting. Charles takes life very seriously, both in his unsuccessful relationships and in his unsuccessful efforts to create a screenplay while maintaining the artistic integrity of his source. Donald, by contrast, enjoys an irritating success both with women and with writing escapist literature.

The protagonists of the story within the story display similar traits. The New Yorker writer, played by Meryl Streep, dreams of having a passionate life but cannot embrace one. The subject of her story, played by Chris Cooper, moves abruptly from one passion to the next without apparent inhibition.

These actors, along with a fine supporting cast, succeed in engaging us in their delights and frustrations even as we wonder what fictive level they inhabit. The ending didn’t work for me but I don’t know quite how you could end a movie like this. Forget the ending: just come along for a delectable postmodernist ride.

“ADORATION”

          What is the effect of repeated images on our understanding?  An apt question for a film-maker to pose.  It may seem to be splitting hairs:  if we see a picture of someone talking, isn’t it the words that affect us most?  Atom Egoyan understands the nature of communication better than this:  words in themselves make up the smallest part of communication:  tone of voice and body language carry far more influence.  “Adoration” begins as a tale of duplicity:  a French teacher assigns an adolescent student to portray as a first-person narrative a fictional tale in which his father, a Lebanese immigrant, supposedly sends his wife, a pregnant white Canadian woman, on a flight to Israel, having planted a bomb in her luggage.  The boy not only carries out the assignment but extends the fabrication to an Internet chat-room of other adolescents, from which it spreads to adult chat-rooms, a series of circumstances that brings about the teacher’s dismissal from the school.  Throughout the film we see repeated images of the boy’s violinist mother playing on a dock at their lakeside home—presumably the boy’s actual memory—images of the mother being stopped by airport security agents—the boy’s imaginative account—and love scenes early in the woman’s pregnancy—images known only to the director.

          Thus far the film has been intriguing but reasonably straightforward.  In the second half, Egoyan reveals one secret after another.  The boy knows that his parents died in a car crash but details of the circumstances of the event confuse his image of his parents’ identities, a confusion compounded by the dying words of his grandfather which he has recorded, along with other key details of his life, on his cell-phone camera.  Themes of anger, hatred, failure of communication, and loyalty run through this richly layered story, producing a film that begs to be watched repeatedly.  This kind of film-making, like theatre, asks much of its viewers and richly rewards their concentration.

“ADRENALINE RUSH”  (Ontario Science Centre)

          The notebooks of Leonardo DaVinci chronicle the workings of one of the most inventive minds in history.  DaVinci anticipated modern devices ranging from the submarine to the helicopter.  But it turns out that no one had actually tested his proposal for a parachute.  Experts had evidently dismissed the design as unworkable and there it had ended.  Of course, how would you test a parachute except to build it and then drop at altitude wearing it, and who would do that except a daredevil?  But combine a pair of daredevils and a team of university scholars and you have a test of Leonardo’s design that forms the framing episode for this film of the science of extreme sport, everything from skydiving to “base-jumping”—climbing to the top of a very high cliff in Norway and jumping off, hoping that your parachute would open in time.  A message at the start of the film warns you not to try these stunts on your own.  No problem.

"AGENT CODY BANKS 2"

Another G-rated kids movie—have you guessed that it’s March Break?

As in the first Cody Banks movie, all adults display various degrees of cluelessness, which probably corresponds to an adolescent’s view of the world. Cody Banks has turned 16, and seems to be getting a little old for this part, but he’s still secretly a CIA agent, this time assigned to London to investigate a nefarious plot. The villains have invented a microchip which, implanted as a replacement tooth, gives them complete control over a subject’s brain. The demonstration of the device has a dog pouring whiskey from a decanter and then performing at the piano. A coming G-7 meeting will give them the opportunity to implant the device in the President of the United States, giving the villains control of the world. (A jaded adult, watching the film, may welcome this novel explanation of George W’s bizarre behaviour.) Cody’s cover for the mission has him playing clarinet in an international youth orchestra—never mind that he doesn’t know how to play a note. I particularly liked the opening scene, in which a secret CIA camp for kids is quickly transformed into an ordinary-looking summer camp for Parents Day. As for the mind-controlling device, most teenage girls have already figured out how control their fathers’ behaviour, so one can look upon the film as an externalization of filial relationships, though I suspect that the target audience will have a different take on it.

“AGORA”

          This must be the first time in a feature film that I have seen demonstrated the construction of an ellipse by attaching the ends of a rope to two fixed points (foci) and tracing the outline of the curve using a stick maintaining constant tension with the rope.  This unfortunately impressed me as the only believable part of the film.  Can you for even a single moment credit Rachel Weisz, looking glamorous every minute, as a 5^th-century mathematician and philosopher?  Christians, Jews, Romans and miscellaneous pagans strike heroic poses and deliver heroic speeches, while Hypatia, constantly gazing at the heavens, speculates on elliptical orbits of the planets fully 1200 years before Kepler.  Save your money (but don’t fail to carry out the lovely construction of the ellipse).

“AIN’T MISBEHAVIN’”

          I should start by saying that virtually everyone at the Bluma Theatre seemed to be having a terrific time at “Ain’t Misbehavin’”, a revue of Fats Waller songs produced by the Canadian Stage Company, so the curmudgeonly remarks that follow must be considered strictly a minority report.  The music from Harlem’s golden age, roughly 1920-1935, remains within the memory of living souls, and the tradition of Dixieland jazz has been faithfully preserved, so that one should be able to listen to the solo instrumental pieces during the show and have a sense of being in touch with an earlier era.  Alas, the rock era has changed audience expectations for the worse.  Nowadays, people expect music to be amplified to the level of a rock concert.  Never mind that a Dixieland ensemble can perfectly well fill a small theatre the size of this.  It has to sound like rock, so we hear a distorted version of the great traditional band.

          The songs of Fats Waller can be described as earthy, full of innuendo and double entendre.  Fair enough.  But the ensemble of (highly amplified) singers are so afraid that the audience might not “get it,” that they have to give exaggerated sexual gestures for every reference, beating us over the head with what was supposed to be suggestive (cf. the Monty Python, “Nudge, nudge, wink, wink” routine).  So if you don’t mind being your ears assaulted by amplified sound and your eyes assailed by unsubtle bumps and grinds, in short, if you like everything spelled out and explained VERY LOUD, you may join the enthusiastic crowds for this show and ignore my curmudgeonly cavils.

“ALATRISTE”  (Toronto International Film Festival)

Imagine trying to maintain some personal sense of honour as a sword-for-hire in 17^th-century Spain, where one’s powerful employers in Church and State embody deceit, treachery and corruption.  One lives for the moment, fights the good fight on battlefield or courtyard and tries not to reflect too much on higher motives beyond one’s ken.  Agustin Dias Yanes has lovingly recreated Spain toward the end of its Golden Age, an era in which ideals of individual courage and loyalty seem to have become almost irrelevant.  This is ultimately a sad but engaging swashbuckler.  (I need to register my perennial complaint at the incongruity of spending a small fortune on period costumes and authentic sets and then allowing the composer to write stylelessly anachronistic movie music to accompany the action.)

“ALEX RYDER:  OPERATION STORMBREAKER”

          Nothing seems real in this Bond-like adventure starring a supposedly fourteen-year-old hero, incredibly good-looking, resourceful, skilful and boring.  The only note of reality comes in the performance of Alicia Silverstone as his, well, baby-sitter (she’s named Jack in the movie, presumably to deflect thoughts of any potential sexual relationship between the two), who spends the film pleading with people in power to do something rescue Alex, who invariably succeeds in rescuing himself.  Mickey Rourke chews up the scenery at the evil villain who plans to use computers to introduce not a computer virus but a real virus to murder all the schoolchildren in Great Britain.  The cameo appearance of Robbie Coltrane delights young viewers accustomed to seeing him as the oversized Hagrid in the Harry Potter movies.  Adriana, presumably a member of the target audience, thoroughly enjoyed the film, so who am I to cavil?

“ALEXANDRA’A PROJECT”

·                              Imagine a videotape such that when you watch it, it completely ruins your life.  No, it’s not “The Ring” this time but “Alexandra’s Project,” in which a woman’s rage and frustration, pent up for a dozen years, finally find expression in a home video intended for an audience of one, her husband on his birthday.  Steve, the husband, has the good looks and easy charm of a TV anchorman.  As the film opens we see him sleeping peacefully while his wife looks at him.  It is not a loving look.  The tension builds through the use of music and editing techniques associated with horror films, and one shudders a bit with the husband when he discovers himself locked into his own house, and one shivers with him when he finds the remote no longer functions, compelling him to pay attention to his wife on tape as he never did during their marriage.  On the videotape Alexandra recounts how she has been degraded and dehumanized in this marriage, describing in clinical detail how Steve’s insensitivity has made her feel like an object rather than a person.  Men in the audience, tempted to regard the punishment as somewhat extreme, might ask a woman’s opinion on the question.  We watch this film in voyeuristic fascination, no more able to tear our attention away than Steve is, but troubled just the same.  Be prepared for some uncomfortable conversations if you see this film with a partner.

“ALIAS GODOT” (Tarragon Theatre)

          One afternoon in college I saw a group of students, impressed by Jackson Pollock, dribbling paint upon a canvas, convinced that it couldn’t be that hard.  I hope they learned something from the failure of that experiment.  Similarly, someone who experienced the Theatre of the Absurd, say a play by Ionesco or Beckett, and possessed of a gifted ear, a well-developed sense of irony and delight in the power of language, could hardly be expected to resist the temptation to try his hand at it, as it were.  Brendan Gall offers us a brilliant, inventive and highly entertaining first act in “Alias Godot,” a post—9/11 drama set in a tiny detention cell in a New York police station.  Godot, a top-hatted Frenchman, has been brought in, though not formally arrested, by a couple of cops.  The dialogue riffs inventively on the conventions of police dramas, with lots of good one-liners, double entendres, wordplay and wildly offbeat repartee—in short, great theatre.  Then, in the second act, the play runs out of steam, and we realize just how difficult it is to do Ionesco or Beckett.  But what a worthy failed effort!  For all its flaws, I would happily see this play again.

“ALICE’S AFFAIR” (Tarragon Theatre)

          Susan Coyne’s previous book, “Kingfisher Days,” prepares us for the intervention of the supernatural, and an aura of magic hovers over the production of “Alice’s Affair,” beginning with the appearance of the eponymous character through a hole in the wall like another Alice emerging from a rabbit hole into wonderland.  Alice is a writer, a playwright, who begins the play in complete control of her material, calling in a helpful prop or revising the script when her characters threaten to get out of hand.  But as the play progresses the characters seem to take over, as Alice the strong playwright yields to Alice the somewhat timorous person and we see illustrated Yeats’s dictum, cited several times during the play, that the writer must choose between perfection of art and perfection of life. 

          The role of the Cheshire Cat, continually changing identity, turning up unexpectedly like an apparition, belongs to Gregory, a charismatic writing teacher who appears at full throttle early on, where he addresses the audience as if we were his writing seminar.  The bulk of the one-act play takes the form of a memorial and wake for Gregory as former students gather to recount his huge influence on their lives, for good or ill.  They end up in a cottage owned by Alice’s grandmother, a spiritualist and consort of Harry Houdini.  A contemporary medium joins the group, displaying an unflappable self-confidence that deflects all doubt.  Imaginative stagecraft, impeccable ensemble acting, and a cracklingly good script:  “Alice’s Affair” has it all.  A first-rate theatrical experience.

"ALIEN: THE DIRECTOR'S CUT"

I chickened out of seeing this movie when it first appeared. The idea of having a monster jump out of someone's chest just turned me off. Now that this has become more or less commonplace, I thought it appropriate, on this Hallowe'en weekend, to see why this film attained four stars in the Halliwell guide. It turns out to be a great flick. There's something immensely satisfying about watching a film in which, from the very start, you know that the director knows exactly what he or she is about. "Alien" opens aboard an intergalactic barge and spends an extended period exploring the interior of the vehicle. Before long, under the influence of Jerry Goldsmith's spooky score (which owes many of its best effects to Bela Bartok), we become quite uneasy: where are the people? Turns out they're in suspension during the long voyage, and both irritated and apprehensive when they're awakened before the final approach to earth. Evidently there's a signal beacon out there in space which company law requires them to investigate. During the investigation an alien attacks one of the crew members and the chief scientist blithely suspends quarantine regulations by admitting the crew member (with the alien attached to his face) into the ship's sick bay. After that, the film follows the course of teen scare movies but with a difference. In place of unspeakable gore we get mostly suggestion and in place of the conventional "Don't open that door", we get a sustained level of suspense in which virtually any corner of the ship may prove deadly as the alien knocks off the crew members one by one. Not having seen the original, I can't tell exactly what changes have been made in this "director's cut," but the leisurely pace of this nearly two-hour movie probably comes about through the restoration of deleted material. I found the film thoroughly classy.

"ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS"

I suppose it can be considered some mark of social progress when the heroes of a stereotypical thriller, full of stolen diamonds, car chases, inept police, gratuitous violence, and vast collateral damage to white people's property can be a black rapper and his friend. 'Course my being the only white person in the theatre could be considered a sign that social progress has a good ways still to go.

"AMADEUS" (Canadian Stage Company)

Peter Schaffer’s play might be subtitled "Death by Irony," as we see Antonio Salieri protest the circumstances in which God has evidently passed over the faithful and devout Salieri to bestow His gifts on the childish Mozart. Moreover, Salieri, the most esteemed European composer of his time, seems virtually alone in recognizing Mozart’s talent, which so threatens him that he does everything in his considerable power as official court composer to thwart the younger man and help drive him to an early death. Despite the playwright’s liberty’s with historical fact, "Amadeus" has helped us understand how the composer of some of the most glorious operas, concertos and symphonies ever composed could have died a pauper at 35.

The spare, elegant revival of Schaffer’s play at the Canadian Stage Company places a considerable burden on the two main protagonists. This is a very talky play and one misses the weight that F. Murray Abraham brought to the screen version of the title role. Yet it remains something of a shock to be shown that masterpieces like "The Marriage of Figaro" and "The Magic Flute" could have been controversial at the time of their creation, or that a Mozart concert could have been performed once then consigned to oblivion. The Austrian emperor has a fine comic presence even as we shudder at the realization of how one man’s ignorant whim could shape another’s fate.

“AMAZING GRACE”

          Just in time for the celebration of the two hundredth anniversary of the end of the British slave trade comes this elegant film, based on the career of William Wilberforce, who spent his life trying to persuade Parliament to eliminate a practice which virtually all of its members had a vested interest in preserving.  The film contains some of the finest acting (by some of Great Britain’s best actors, both familiar and new) that you’ll see on the screen, including a larger-than-life appearance by Albert Finney, playing the part of a contrite slave-ship captain whose efforts to turn public opinion against the trade included penning the words to the hymn Amazing Grace.

          At the end of the film we see a lone piper playing the tune in front of Westminster Abbey.  Then the camera pulls back and we see the line of drummers who join the song.  The camera pulls back further to show us an entire band that joins the swelling chorus.   This is very classy movie-making.  Heartily recommended. 

AMERICAN SPLENDOR

When you think of movies made from comic books you’re likely to name superheroes: Superman, Batman, Spiderman, et al. But a fine recent film, "Ghost World," emerged from the underground comic of that title and now we have "American Splendor," in which comic book, film and real life weirdly fuse. Harvey Pekar, the creative force behind both the comic book and film, seems like an anomaly—a cartoonist who can’t draw. Other illustrators turn his stick figures into fully-developed cartoons, with the result that Harvey Pekar the cartoon character varies in appearance depending upon who has drawn him. The movie character named Harvey Pekar is portrayed both by Harvey Pekar, the real person, and by Paul Giamatti, the actor, and given the nature of star quality, the acted Harvey Pekar seems even more real than the real Harvey Pekar.

I’ve long believed that a person’s physical language and mental state are closely linked. As an experiment, I invite you to lower your head into your neck then project it a bit forward, squint your eyes, frown, lift one corner of your lip, then walk around a bit with a slouch. Suddenly the world looks like a different place, doesn’t it? You begin to feel a mixture of anger, frustration, and disappointment in an attitude that combines a chip on the shoulder attitude with a sense of defeatism. This much Paul Giamatti conveys just by the way he moves.

It may be difficult to imagine anybody marrying such a person. The woman in question enters his filthy apartment after dinner, retires to the bathroom to vomit, then tries to clear the air with the only aerosol that presents itself, a can of WD-40. You get the idea.

We remain fascinated as the film moves back and forth between panels of the "American Splendor’ cartoon, interviews with the real Harvey Pekar, and the reenactment of his existence, both cartoon and real, by actor Giamatti. But as fame brought about by appearances on the Letterman show transforms Pekar from an underground figure to a media darling, we begin to suspect that the process of his being co-opted by the mainstream includes even our presence in the theatre watching this film, and it becomes a little less clear just who is being exploited by whom. The film is full of style, but trying to define its substance leads one into a quagmire of aesthetic and political questions. Definitely worth seeing.

"THE ANCHORMAN"

Can you have fun at a stupid movie? Of course; the SAC Film Society offers biweekly proof. The reviews said that "The Anchorman" was dumb but fun. Unfortunately, they were only half right. The film presents two hours of raw sexism and little else. In "Annie Hall" the Woody Allen character is appalled at the way the Tony Roberts character adds recorded laughter to a basically humorless television sitcom. "The Anchorman" requires women to adulate Will Ferrell, asks bikers to love his news show, and demands mass approbation for his flute-playing: but Ferrell himself wrote the script! Are there no limits to shameless self-indulgence? A real comedian delivers the goods and lets the audience furnish the applause on its own. Much has been made of cameo appearances by Tim Robbins and Ben Stiller, but to my eyes both actors seemed obviously embarrassed by the whole affair.

Will Ferrell displayed strong comic gifts in "Elf," and I understand he delighted audiences in "Saturday Night Live." In interviews Ferrell talks about playing a self-important character straight for laughs. But you have to have to material to begin with. "The Anchorman" is the most impoverished comedy I’ve seen in some time.

“ANGELS AND DEMONS”

I found this movie to be great fun, despite what some reviewers have said.  Of course I should offer the disclaimer that I enjoy treasure hunts, where one clue leads to the next, and have myself laid a seven-hour path through Boston with phony books in libraries, phony index cards in card catalogues (yes, it was that long ago), and clues hidden in the Yellow Pages of telephone books.  So when Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon, (Tom Hanks) follows a series of clues laid down by Galileo in an ancient text for members of the Illuminati, an ancient secret society defending science against church persecution, I’m with him all the way.  The clues all turn up in churches, and since Rome sometimes seems to be populated entirely by churches, there’s room for ambiguity.  In this case, the margin of error is quite slender, since a contemporary member of the Illuminati has kidnapped the four cardinals most likely to succeed the recently-deceased Pope, and threatens to execute one each hour.  The Harvard symbologist receives assistance from a woman scientist from CERN (the European super-collider), in Rome because someone (evidently another member of the Illuminati) has stolen a contain of anti-matter and threatens to blow up the Sistine Chapel, where the cardinals have gathered in conclave to elect the next Pope (and with it most of Rome—this anti-matter is pretty powerful stuff). 

          Movies have the ability to show us things not as they necessarily are but as they ought to be.  I doubt very much that the CERN laboratory in Switzerland has an impersonal English-speaking voice announcing over loudspeakers each step of the activation of the supercollider, or computer screens representing each phase of the operation in colourful graphics, but surely things should be that way, as depicted in the film, which also contains marvellous scenes of the Vatican archives.  The professor and the scientist are assisted by the camerlengo, the acting Pope until a new prelate can be elected, played by Ewan McGregor (“Big Fish,” “Cassandra’s Dream”) as the kind of young, fervid priest that might persuade anyone to join the Catholic Church.  And as if the action itself doesn’t move rapidly enough, Hans Zimmer’s larger-than-life musical score propels the audience along.  All in all, there’s a lot of hokum, but I found it to be thoroughly engaging hokum.

“ANOTHER HOME INVASION” (Tarragon Theatre)

          A woman in her eighties is sitting in an easy chair on stage when the lights go up.  She seems eager to have an audience, the way old people sometimes do, and begins her story without hesitation.  She soon has us laughing with her observations on the differences between the way things should be and the way they unfortunately are.  We learn about her husband Alec, whose habit of getting up in the middle of the night and looking for their departed children deprives her of sleep.  We learn about the retirement facility they would like to live in, and the social worker in charge of making selections who keeps thwarting their desire.  The monologue continues for seventy-five minutes, and few moments go by without an opportunity to laugh.  But by the time the play ends one feels the immense sadness of a woman’s life in which, it appears, not a single soul loves and appreciates her for who she is.  Daughter, grand-daughter, social worker, even the AquaFit instructor:  all seem to regard her as no more than a nuisance to be tolerated.  The old woman lives in a society that has little patience for the elderly.  As Patti observes, we build institutions, make rules, and expect the residents to obey them, instead of listening to their needs and attempting to respond appropriately.  Playwright Joan MacLeod had the voice of actress Nicola Lipman in mind as she composed the dialogue, and the words fit so well that you remain unaware of the presence of an author until you leave the theatre.  This is a powerful one-woman show.

"ANYTHING ELSE"

Woody Allen began his career as a standup comic and the protagonists of his early films transferred his stage persona to the screen: the nervous, paranoid writer who has trouble meeting women and who turns off those he does meet with his preoccupation with death and the meaninglessness of life. The routine continued despite the passage of years, so that in "Manhattan" the 43-year-old Allen played a writer having an affair with Mariel Hemingway, playing a high-school student.

Now nearing seventy, Allen has bowed to time by casting Jason Biggs in the "Woody Allen" role of a young comedy writer trying to make sense of his existence, and casting himself as a veteran jokesmith giving the lad advice as they walk in Central Park. The movie has a lot of laughs as Woody Allen makes fun of his well-documented foibles. The trouble is that Woody’s Allen’s screenplays demand a gifted standup comic to play the protagonist, a natural when Allen himself was young enough to play the parts but which require more than Jason Biggs can deliver. You keep hearing the way a younger Allen would have delivered the lines. The supporting cast, including Danny DeVito, Stockard Channing and Christina Ricci, do their best, but without a Woody Allen in the central role, their timing seems off: we laugh aloud at individual lines but we don’t enjoy that sustained giddy hilarity that a comic like Allen or Robin Williams can arouse and maintain. So while the movie is several cuts above Woody Allen’s movies from the past several years, it finally disappoints.

“APPALOOSA”

          After two films about complicated relationships one welcomes a western where problems can be settled by simply shooting a sufficient number of bad guys.  But dang it if a women doesn’t intrude here too, in the person of Renee Zellweger, a woman who, like Ado Annie in “Oklahoma!”, prefers whichever man she’s with.  (“She goes for the stallion of the herd,” observe the hotel whore.)  Feelings are gonna fly in a situation like that though, as the male lead (Ed Harris) remarks, “Feelings can get a guy killed.”

          Harris, with sidekick Viggo Mortensen, has made a career as an itinerant lawman, available for hire to towns in need of cleaning up.  Appaloosa calls on the pair to rid itself of a well-connected bad man named Bragg (Jeremy Irons), who shot a sheriff and two deputies in cold blood and got away with it.  Harris and Mortensen spend the bulk of the film tracking down Irons, whose unusual connections appear to put him out of reach.  What’s a simple gunslinger to do?  The answer to that question casts a shadow of moral ambiguity over the denouement.

"ARARAT"

An undeveloped reel of film cannot be opened--the light will destroy its contents. Atom Egoyan uses several reels of exposed film as a framing device for his remarkable investigation of the Armenian massacre of 1915, with Christopher Plummer playing a customs officer demanding that the boy bringing them back to Toronto explain their presence. No physical evidence remains to confirm the extermination of an entire village by Turkish forces. We have only the memories of the children of the few survivors and a book by an American doctor working in the village at the time. There is also an intriguing painting by Arshile Gorky based on a photograph of himself and his mother taken not long before the massacre. Egoyan weaves the themes of memory and art into the troubled question of cinematic recreation. Suppose a director, Egoyan in real life, the actor Charles Asvanour in the film, wants to make a film about the Armenian massacre, based on the account of the American doctor. What would it be like to be an actor in such a film, if you were Turkish or Armenian? Instead of simply offering us a film about an historical event, which might engage our emotions as we identify with one side or the other, Egoyan has given us a richly layered approach that draws our intellects into the battle, leaving us totally engaged, as were the members of the sold-out shows at the Cumberland Theatre last night who spontaneously applauded at the end of the film. This is a remarkable piece of film-making.

Yet, for all the suggestions that Egoyan is examining the story from multiple perspectives, he glosses over the historical context of the massacre, which the Turkish government has never acknowledged. In 1915, as the rest of the world chose up sides in the first World War, Turkey pretended to be neutral while actually siding with Germany against the Russians. By the time of the incident in question, Turkey was at war with Russia and suspected the Armenian village of Van of giving assistance to the Russians. The village held on against a vastly superior Turkish force until relieved by the arrival of the Russian army. During this interval, the Turks killed all the women and children from the village, and subsequently succeeded in driving the Russians out. The film portrays the incident outside of its military context, as a simple act of genocide by the Turkish government against its own citizens. The atrocity remains horrific but Egoyan's one-sided approach deprives the film of an additional layer of complexity.

"ARCHÉ BRAZIL."

When I was growing up, multiculturalism meant seeing The Bolshoi Ballet on Ed Sullivan or watching footage from the Mardi Gras in Rio. Now there's such a market for folk-based entertainment that a remarkable troupe like Arché Brasil, which on technical merit should be filling the Hummingbird Centre, plays before an audience of several hundred at the Young People's Theatre. This incredible ensemble of seven young dances and musicians manipulates time in heart stopping ways, from a more rapid succession of flips than one would have thought humanly possible, to cartwheels, back somersaults, leapfrogs, and other gyrations that pause impossibly in the middle, all to the accompaniment of a vast variety of percussion instruments. The program highlighted the Brazilian martial-arts dance Capoeira, accurately described in the program as "an astonishing display of acrobatics, breathtaking kicks and deadly self-defense tactics, performed to the rhythm of the Berimbau." If you ever have a chance to see this group, leap at it.

"ARTURO BRACHETTI"

Those who long for the old "Ed Sullivan Show" should hasten to the Canon Theatre (formerly the Pantages, a story in itself) to see Arturo Brachetti's one-man show. For this is the kind of entertainment you haven't seen since the Fifties: a quick-change artist who claims to portray eighty (count em, 80!) characters in one two-hour show. He puts on an old-fashioned Western that will make you swear you’re seeing six different characters at nearly the same time. And did I tell you that he also makes shadow animals with his hands? And that's all before the intermission. In the second half, Brachetti captures iconic moments from Hollywood classics, from "Gone With the Wind" to "The Sound of Music" and "Snow White" to "King Kong." We hear the sound-track of "Casablanca’s climax and there's Humphrey Bogart, standing in profile, delivering his immortal lines. Then Brachetti turns to face the other way and the audience gasps: it's Ingrid Bergman.

It takes a particular kind of theatre-goer to love this kind of illusion, and if you are such a one, I can't think of anyplace else where you could possibly satisfy the craving for this particular brand of show business.

"AS YOU LIKE IT" (High Park)

If you adore this play or if you’ve never seen it before; if you want an example of ensemble acting at its finest; if you enjoy the idea of seeing a play set in a forest while actually sitting in a forest; if you love the English language; if true wit can make you wriggle with delight; if, like Harold Bloom, you regard Rosalind as Shakespeare’s clearest embodiment of human perfection, or if you’re prepared to fall in love with the COC’s choice for this most remarkable heroine; if you’d like to experience the palpable love of this company for acting, and particularly for acting this play; if you like music from the do-wop era; if the current cinematic choices of mayhem, cynicism, betrayal, humiliation and exploitation leave you ready for a comedy that ennobles while it entertains: then hurry down to High Park before September 4 for an evening that will leave your spirit singing.

“ATONEMENT”

          Children see the moral world in black and white.  The nuanced view that allows for people’s strengths and weaknesses comes only later in life.  A child’s world resembles the storybook land of heroes and villains.  Moreover, a child observing sex tends to perceive it as an act of violence.  These psychological principles receive a brilliant cinematic treatment in “Atonement,” adapted from Ian McEwan’s 2001 novel of the same title.  In the film, as in the novel, a young girl Briony Tallis observes her older sister Cecilia in several ambiguous situations which lead her to the conclusion that Cecilia’s boyfriend Robbie is a sex maniac.  When Briony’s cousin is raped, Briony observes the assailant’s departure and falsely names Robbie as the perpetrator, sending him to jail and destroying the lovers’ future.

          In the novel Briony is 13 years old; in the screen version she seems around 11.  In either case one may argue that she is hardly a child, but among the upper classes in the Great Britain of the 1930s, childhood lasted a long time.  The moral rectitude of the precocious Briony comes across in the military precision with which she marches about the twisting corridors of the house and in her demands for complete approval of her literary endeavours.  The film-maker offers us fragmentary scenes from Briony’s point of view followed by more leisurely repetitions showing the same actions in an adult context. 

          Jail-bound Robbie accepts the opportunity to serve in the army as an alternative to his cell; Cecilia and Briony both become nurses, and we see a sequence in which Briony marches about the hospital corridors with the same sharp turns that marked her manner of stalking about the house.  The scene moves to the Dunkirk evacuation of 1940, with a uniformed Robbie finding his way to the beach.  Late in the film we skip forward to 1999 when the adult Briony, dying of vascular dementia, talks about the novel, “Atonement,” that she has written about this childhood incident and its repercussions.

          Both the novel and the movie can be considered as tributes to the power of words.  The sound of a typewriter provides a recurring motif, with the amplified impact of the keys underlining the importance that a single word can have in a written letter.  One word in a note sent from Robbie to Cecilia, and surreptitiously read by Briony, serves to crystallize her black perspective of her sister’s boyfriend.  Cecilia and Robbie have only letters to connect them during the war.  At the conclusion of the film, the dying writer, brilliantly portrayed by Vanessa Redgrave, suggests that the gentle lies of literary license might atone for the damage done by a lie in real life.

          Water serves as a recurring theme:  Briony dives into dangerous water, counting on Robbie to save her; Cecilia dives into a large fountain to retrieve a piece of porcelain and later into a pool to evade the questions of some male guests; the evacuation at Dunkirk takes place by the sea, as does the movie’s concluding scene; Robbie’s search for drinking water foreshadows his death.

          Negative reviews led me to miss this film when it first appeared.  I hope these words will lead you to see it.

L’AUBERGE ESPAGNOLE

Imagine half a dozen students in their early twenties sharing an apartment in Barcelona. Imagine further that, coming from England, France, Germany, Spain and Italy they have no single common language so make do as best they can. Into this community comes a young French lad, uncertain about his future but eager to learn. The bulk of the film treats the interpersonal dynamics of a group whose sharing goes beyond kitchen and bathroom arrangements to respect for personal and cultural differences and looking out for each other’s welfare. On the wall beside the telephone are posted phrases in several languages for informing a caller of the inmates’ whereabouts, which those answering the phone pronounce with varying degrees of comprehensibility. The students share the problem of maintaining long-distance relationships concurrently with local romances. At one point the entire household bands together to protect the English girl when her boyfriend from back home turns up unexpectedly.

The laid-back atmosphere of Barcelona gives the protagonist the opportunity to do a lot of growing up—separating himself from a stifling mother, giving up an immature relationship with a girl back home, developing a more mature take on female sexuality with the help of a lesbian housemate, working out the conflict between a projected career in business and his lifelong desire to be a writer.

The film has a few cute narrative tricks, such as fast-forwarding through the mundane details or a brief divided screen sequence as several people converge on the apartment simultaneously. But mostly the camera remains an inconspicuous witness to life in this caring community. The subtle accommodations of tolerance become clearer during the visit of the British girl’s brother, a young man whose total lack of sensitivity and tact makes the viewer winds and puts the bonds of community to the test.

I hated to see this genial film come to an end but could appreciate that the ending was exactly right. This is one of the best films I’ve seen all year.

“AUSTRALIA”

            I encourage all those who love movies not to miss this one, a grand epic story of the sort that “they don’t make anymore.”  The sudden death of her husband on a ranch in the Australian outback leads an English aristocratic lady (Nicole Kidman) to visit the subcontinent in 1939, intending to sell the property.  When she learns of the corrupt activities of the largest landowner in the region, who covets her farm to complete his monopoly, she decides instead to stay and fight, enlisting the aid of a local drover (Hugh Jackman).  The first section of the film recalls “The African Queen” in the Kidman character’s insistence on maintaining proper British customs and costumes in circumstances ill-suited for either.  A story that seemed headed for a plotline familiar from American westerns—the plucky small landowner and her foreman arrayed against the wealth and power of a corrupt syndicate—takes a peculiarly Australian turn with the presence of a young boy Nala, half-white, half-aboriginal, in danger of being rounded up as part of a government eugenics program to “breed the black out of them” by removing all such children from their natural environment and training them for service to rich white folk.  The introduction of aboriginal magic, with its insistence on song and story as the basis of human existence, captures the fundamental excitement of movie-making.  “The Wizard of Oz” keeps threading through the movie, as a story, as a song, and in actual clips.  “Australia” also plays homage to the burning of Atlanta sequences from “Gone With the Wind” (with World War II as the background in place of the Civil War).  These references never seem like a pastiche but serve as our movie-going equivalent of aboriginal lore.

            “Australia” has a number of iconic moments—events that seems banal in the description but can take your breath away on the screen.  I shall remember Hugh Jackman—whom we have seen to this point dressed only in roundup gear—turning up at an aristocratic dance in black tie; “King George,” the boy Nala’s aboriginal grandfather, poised on one leg, the other leg tucked up, his spear serving for balance, waiting to take the lad on walkabout; a sailboat emerging from the fog with Nala playing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” on the harmonica, accompanied by a boy choir singing in harmony.  See the film and decide for yourself, but if you really love movies, don’t miss it.

"AUTOFOCUS"

A good morality play allows its audience no room for smug self-satisfaction. Rather the spectators leave the theatre humbled, even shaken, by their vicarious experience, concluding that, "There, but for the grace of God, go I." One might have expected a film chronicling the downfall of Bob Crane, leading actor in the popular 60’s sit-com "Hogan's Heroes," to be a titillating experience. Not only did Crane take full advantage of the sexual opportunities that inevitably accompany stardom, he exploited the developing technology of videotape to record his adventures. Or one might have anticipated a social commentary on sexual permissiveness during that strange era between the invention of the birth-control pill and the onslaught of AIDS. Instead, one marvels that the amount of nudity in "Autofocus" could be so anerotic and that the passing social scene should seem so uninviting. Rather our attention remains fixed on the moral disintegration of a weak man open to temptation and on his relationship with the procurer who panders to his tastes, providing technology along with sexual partners. Greg Kinnear plays Bob Crane as a kind of Everyman, with no strong personality traits except likeability. Willem Defoe plays John Carpenter as a seedy devil figure, accommodating but unthreatening. A vast number of women appear in unflattering roles, rubbing up against celebrity in one-night stands or misguidedly imagining that a man who has betrayed his wife will not do the same to them. The very blandness that prevents us from seeing the story as the downfall of a tragic figure serves to draw us in. We cannot maintain our distance as spectators but feel the full horror of the moral consequences of a long succession of bad decisions. With no glimpse of redemption anywhere in the film, we leave the theatre with the kind of admixture of guilt and relief that accompanies waking from a particularly troubling nightmare.

“AWAY FROM HER”

Sarah Polley, in an auspicious directorial debut, has demonstrated a clear understanding of the power of pure cinema.  “Away From Her” is based on a short story by Alice Munro, a skilled craftsman of the language of literature.  Yet “Away From Her” relies not so much on dialogue as images—the language of cinema—specifically close-ups of the expressive faces of Fiona (Julie Christie) and Grant (Gordon Pinsent), whose eloquent eyes you will remember long after you’re forgotten the script.

The film portrays a woman’s painful journey into Alzheimer’s disease and her husband’s valiant efforts to forestall the loss of their forty-year partnership.  The film opens with cross-country ski tracks across a lake, conveying a metaphorical image of the last time the wife was on track.  On a subsequent trek she becomes disoriented and ends up, in the dark, on a bridge.  The time has evidently come to bring her to a care facility capable of keeping her safe.  Institutional policy forbids her husband from visiting her for the first thirty days.  When he finally sees his wife he discovers that she taken on the role of caretaker for a severely depressed man (Michael Murphy).  Grant, trying to deal with multiple frustrations, turns for understanding to the man’s wife (Olympia Dukakis) and to a sympathetic attendant (Kristen Thomson).  Wherever possible Sarah Polley has tried to tell the story through images rather than words, rearranging the narrative flow a bit so that the film does not follow a single descending line.  Moments of humour occur in the person of a retired sports announcer (Thomas Hauff) who insists on giving play-by-play accounts of life in the care facility.

Polley’s only misstep, to my mind, was using another actress for the face of the young Fiona rather than period stills of Julie Christie, whose luminous face in 2007 makes vivid our recollection of her work in the 60’s and 70’s.  Don’t miss this film.

“BABEL”

          I’d been prepared for a film of remarkable beauty if weak on narrative.  Reviewers complained about the way the film jumped around among three apparently unconnected story lines.  Parts of the film are indeed lovely to watch, with earth tones for the scenes in Morocco, blue for Tokyo, red for Mexico.  For my money the fault lies not in the story but in the editing that permitted this film to drag on sloppily for more than two hours.

          You’ve heard of the Butterfly Effect, “the idea that a butterfly's wings might create tiny changes in the atmosphere that ultimately cause a tornado to appear (or, for that matter, prevent a tornado from appearing).[See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_Effect]  A belief in the principle informs the conjoined plots of “Babel.”  The previews make much of the parallels with the biblical story of Babel, implying that an inability to understand one another’s languages lies behind the problems encountered by the characters in the story.  Let me suggest that the problem lies in the situations:  a Moroccan peasant gives his young sons a high-powered rifle; a self-loathing deaf-mute Japanese girl seeks affection through promiscuity; an illegal Mexican nanny takes two American youngsters across the border to a wedding and attempts to return in a car driven by her thoroughly intoxicated nephew.  Can we be surprised at the misfortune that ensues?  For all that, the film is well acted except for “name” actors Cate Blanchett and Brad Pitt, who do little to enhance their careers with their work here.

          Despite, or perhaps on account of, all the high concept elements I’d characterize the film as a self-indulgent mess.

"BAD SANTA"

Dickens’ "A Christmas Carol" established the model of the non-believer eventually won over by the spirit of Christmas in a manner designed to entertain and edify. This theme can be traced through the great Christmas movies that we watch every year. The trouble is, while we delight in the story of "It’s a Wonderful Life," its message of optimism is a tough sell in this increasingly cynical world. So each time "A Christmas Carol," or one of its variants, is re-made, the negative characteristics of the protagonist are further underscored, the likelihood of redemption diminished, and the inevitable act of redemption postponed later and later until it seems as if the film-makers tacked it on as a necessary but essentially unwelcome appendage. (Take a look at Bill Murray in "Scrooged".)

"Bad Santa" seems to have been a deliberate attempt to find the absolute limit of this trend, and one can imagine a team of writers working on the problem. "Let’s take a department store Santa and make him swear occasionally." "No, let’s make him swear all the time." "No, let’s make his every speech a constant stream of obscenities." Done. "Let’s make him come to work drunk." "No, let’s make him so drunk that he pees in his suit." "No, let’s actually show the urine dripping from his suit." Done. "Let’s make him a sexual predator." "No, let’s make him prefer a sexual act defined as sodomy in most states." "No, let’s actually show him engaged in the act." Done.

For a time this kind of iconoclasm entertains. Especially after sitting through two Parents Nights, one welcomes a bit of misanthropy to cut through the saccharine sentiments of the season and to help get rid of that forced smile you’ve glued on your face for too many hours at a stretch. But eventually the unrelieved bitterness palls and you don’t even care about redemption—you just want to go home.

"THE BANGER SISTERS"

Ensemble acting in the movies scarcely resembles its theatrical counterpart, mostly on account of the nature of movie-making. Actors sit in their trailers, after putting in their time in makeup, and wait for the next shot to be set up. Then they appear, do their take, repeat it, perhaps dozens of times if necessary, then retire to their trailer to await the next set-up. A film shoots roughly three minutes a day, so you can appreciate the proportion of waiting to actually acting.

Given these limitations, films like "Wag the Dog," which brought Dustin Hoffman and Robert DeNiro together for the first time, or "The Sting," a second outing for Paul Newman and Robert Redford, bring us special delight, allowing us not only to see the stars we admire, but also to share in their evident pleasure in working together. This is why we feel cheated when the "chemistry" between actors doesn't work.

"The Banger Sisters" gives pleasure not only for the fine acting by its leads but also for the obvious fun they're having together. The movie starts slowly as Suzette (Goldie Hawn) loses her job in California and makes her way to Phoenix in the hope of borrowing money from a friend she hasn't seen in twenty years, played by Susan Sarandon. The fun begins when we see the Susan Sarandon character trying to disavow her past as a notorious groupie, indeed, trying to disavow Suzette's very presence in her house. Easier said than done, for the flamboyant Suzette takes up a lot of space in her environment (to use the kind of language favoured by the film). Sarandon's lawyer husband and teenage girls know nothing of her past, an ignorance she would like to sustain and Suzette can't avoid destroying. Sarandon has the better role, for she undergoes a massive transformation from a woman whose entire wardrobe is the same colour as the walls in the Department of Motor Vehicles to a reincarnation of her role as one of the Banger sisters. A witty screenplay gives the two actresses plenty of good material to work with, and the rest of the cast plays collective straightman with aplomb, not an easy task. I had a terrific time at this film. I hope you do, too.

“THE BANK JOB”

          Typically, a film based on a true story is so farfetched that you’d never believe it were it presented as fiction.  Here’s the set-up:  one of Great Britain’s secret service agencies, charged with recovering compromising photographs of a royal personage, stored in a safety deposit box of a London bank, sub-contracts the job of breaking into the bank.  It turns out that this particular bank also holds more than one set of secrets, including covert photos of MPs cavorting at a high-class whore-house and the account book of a porn king’s dealings with a troop of crooked cops.  So when a team of amateurs actually brings off the robbery, their deed attracts not only the metropolitan police but also the underworld and the British secret service, which succeeds in simply shutting the story down in the name of national security.  The film provides rattling good entertainment until things turn nasty, leaving a rather sour taste in one’s mouth.

"BARAN"

Since news of Afghanistan began occupying a position of prominence on the front pages of the New York Times, the newspaper has frequently included colour photographs of the region: women doing laundry at the river; a refugee family transporting all their worldly goods in a decrepit truck. Even in situations of desperate poverty of human conflict, the Times photographers capture images of beauty whose aesthetic force only amplifies the poignancy of the images.

Now imagine an entire film with this same sense of beauty and squalor and you'll have some idea of "Baran." I cannot recall a more visually striking film: every set-up offers a scene of remarkable, and sometimes breathtaking, beauty. The film draws on one of the most ancient plots--redemption by love--to tell the story of Afghan immigrants working illegally in Iran. Ironically, the film played on a double bill with "The Importance of Being Earnest," another story in which a leading character has one identity in the country and another in the city, a lovely parallel which probably never occurred to the managers of The Bayview Cinema in pairing the films. If you were moved by "A Time For Drunken Horses" and "Kandahar," or if you would like a ravishingly beautiful cinematic experience, this film is not to be missed.

"THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS"

Once in a decade comes a film that can’t be described like other films because instead of just being admirable or provocative it has the power to be life-changing. The latest film of Denys Arcand, who brought us "The Decline of the American Empire" and "Jesus of Montreal," is such a work. Just as words cannot capture a masterpiece of music whose meaning finally resides in its own language, so words are inadequate to embrace the experience of this remarkable piece of cinema. I only hope to be able to inspire you to see it for yourself.

For an intelligent person, can death outside the context of a loving God be anything other than fearful? A college professor, estranged from his wife and son and separated by insuperable geographical barriers from his daughter, enters the final days of his life. His wife begs his son to return to Montreal from London to see his father through this last ordeal. The son returns reluctantly, out of a sense of duty, remembering the extreme unpleasantness of his most recent encounters with his father. Yet he throws himself into the task of easing his father’s pain with the same resourcefulness that has made him a remarkably successful financier.

The dying man’s oldest friends gather to see his end and speculate on the nature of life and death. The incidents of 9/11 are seen as "barbarian invasions" into the American hegemony, as is the disease of the drug culture. The church brings solace to the faithful, but many have departed the faith, leaving vast warehouses of religious art with no commercial value. The dying man has been dismissed in disgrace from his post, has contributed no scholarly work of any value, and his former students have to be bribed to visit him in hospital. He looks upon his own life as a failure.

We see otherwise. The son is drawn closer to his father in spite of himself; a heroin addict who obtains the drugs to relieve the old man’s pain eventually turns to kick the habit. The reunited old friends do not merely remember but actually rekindle the communion of shared affection with such passion of intellect and caring that we may actually come to envy the dying man.

In the context of death, old estrangements and resentments lose significance and life becomes more precious. These words of description seem trite, but the spiritual reality communicated by this remarkable film remains deeply valid.

"BASIC"

"What is truth?" Pilate’s fundamental question has been somewhat devalued in recent times when current cant would have us believe that truth is simply perception. The question "What really happened?" confounds not only historians but even investigators of the present. "What really happened" when two U.S. pilots dropped bombs on Canadian troops in Afghanistan? Once you get past the release mechanisms on the bomb bays of the airplanes, everything gets murky and even the U.S. military investigation of the incident didn’t answer the question completely.

Answering these questions becomes even more difficult when the respondents lie. Any successful lie must be wrapped in layers of truth but distinguishing one from the other requires special skills. The exercise of these skills forms the subject of "Basic," starring John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson. A special forces team led by the sergeant Samuel Jackson has conducted an exercise in the Panama jungle but something has gone terribly wrong. A search helicopter sent out when the team fails to reconnoiter on schedule discovers members of the team shooting at each other. Two men are recovered, one wounded, the other exhausted. The latter soldier refuses to communicate with anyone except another Ranger, so former Ranger John Travolta is brought in to conduct the interrogation. Eventually the injured man recovers sufficiently to give another version of the story.

The two soldiers generate multiple versions of the incident, each displayed in flashback. We quickly realize that the versions cannot be consistent with each other but, like Travolta, we have difficulty separating the truth from the lies. As he continues his investigation, the two soldiers each alter their stories in important details. Just as we think we can trust the common elements from the versions, the story takes another surprising turn.

I enjoyed this film but I recommend seeing it with a group of people with time to spare afterwards for conversations along the lines of "But if he was really… then what about …?" The film seems to come to an end several times only to make another plot twist, the last of which may strike some viewers as over-the-top. I confess I saw this film as a reward after a very long run and since Travolta was clearly having a good time, I had a good time with him. I should warn you that the reviews have been fairly lukewarm.

My only reservation came with the female lead, Connie Nielsen, whose casting as an Army lieutenant strikes me as yet another example of a role that would have been given to a man in the past but which has been cast as a woman for mostly token reasons. Given a stronger actress in the part, who would have made us believe that she could be lieutenant on the basis of merit rather than just casting, there could have been a richer relationship between the two investigating officers. As it is, she’s just a foil for sexist remarks instead of making a real contribution.

"THE BEARD OF AVON" (Canadian Stage Company)

What does it take to make theatre? A set, a script, and actors capable of making us care. Though millions of dollars may be spent to mount a production, the basic elements remain quite simple, and often that simplicity itself can contribute to a satisfying theatrical experience.

Simplicity marked the theatrical enterprise in Shakespeare's day. Traveling actors had to perform multiple roles on rudimentary portable stages. Amy Freed's "The Beard of Avon" embraces the whole gamut of Shakespearean theatre, from unruly spectators to an appreciation for the well-turned phrase. But the William Shakespeare of this play is a barely literate country bumpkin who comes to London to escape a shrewish wife and seek his fortune as a bit player (a "spear-shaker" from which his nom de plume supposedly derives). Edward DeVere, Earl of Oxford, has composed a thankful of plays and needs a "beard," or front-man, since a nobleman could not besmirch his name by associating with theatrical low-lifes.

What seems like a one-joke farce by the end of act one opens up onto several interrelated themes in the second act; Anne Hathaway comes to London, disguises herself as a whore, and seduces her straying husband; Francis Bacon, the Earl of Derby, Christopher Marlowe and a host of others seek Shakespeare's name for their plays; Shakespeare himself obtains a concentrated classical education under Edward DeVere's tutelage and soon begins collaborating on sonnets with the earl; and Elizabeth I takes an increasingly active role in the proceedings.

Playwright Amy Freed puts together a clever pastiche of actual Shakespeare, pseudo-Shakespeare, and amusing anachronisms (e.g., "I'm just a maid who can't say nay"). Set designer Peter Hartwell conjures up a great variety of settings by ingeniously rearranging a few basic materials. And a versatile cast, most of them doubling roles, put on an energetic performance.

"BEA’S NIECE" (Tarragon Theatre)

The most striking visual feature of the film "A Beautiful Mind"—the personification of schizophrenic hallucinations—carried even greater force when one discovered the absence of these figures from the book on which the film was based. The compelling characters of the spymaster and the little girl had been invented in order to provide a cinematic expression for a tortured mental state.

A similar device informs "Bea’s Niece," the story of a writer confined to a mental hospital because her inability to deal with her psychotic visions often led to inappropriate behaviour. Seeing hallucinatory personages on the stage carries even greater force than on the screen, especially when the character of Bea, played by Patricia Hamilton, is such a tall, strong, confident (even brash) woman. How could anyone so full of life energy be an invention? The writer’s late husband also appears onstage, and again seems more fully human than the actual psychologist assigned to deal with the case.

As an additional piece of stagecraft, designed to make us doubt our own senses a bit, a "magic consultant" was brought in to teach the actors some basic sleight of hand and to supply some ingenious props. Thus, in the second act, when we see one of the characters point a gun at the writer, it changes so quickly into a hypodermic needle that we wonder whether we have really seen what we thought we saw. When the German-accented Paul Stern turns out to be Aunt Bea in disguise, the cloud of confusion thickens.

The conclusion of the play proves to be even more disturbing than the disorienting main action. The writer, in order to gain freedom from her confinement, must feign sanity by filtering her own experience through the censor of societal expectations.

I recommend this compelling investigation of what it means to be sane or mentally ill.

"A BEAUTIFUL MIND"

Creativity and madness remain two of the most difficult subjects to represent cinematically. Think of the number of movies you've seen in which writers have torn a sheet off a pad and crumpled it into a ball, or the number of films in which noted actors have acted out varieties of mental illness. "A Beautiful Mind" has been criticized for completely suppressing the less savory aspects of John Nash's dementia, creating a largely fictitious story and presenting it as fact (so what else is new in Hollywood?) But judged solely as a movie, it creates a thoroughly satisfactory, thoroughly disturbing portrait of schizophrenic delusion. I'd have to go back to George C. Scott in "They Might be Giants" to equal Russell Crowe's portrayal of paranoia. John Nash's madness has been so convincingly represented that the closing text summarizing the importance of his achievements doesn't carry enough impact, yet we become convinced of a man whose life has been devoted to seeing patterns, even where they don't exist. If you suspect that anyone with the right physical characteristics could have played the lead in "Gladiator," Russell Crowe's rendition of John Nash should convince you of his stature as an actor.

[Postscript: The movie has taken substantial liberties with the book. John Nash's actual dementia took the form of imagining that he saw aliens from outer space. Would you have had the same sympathetic response if the movie had made that its premise?]

"BEAUTY AND THE BEAST"

Adriana, too young to see "Beauty and the Beast" at its theatrical release ten years ago, at age two watched the video version until she had memorized it, which meant that I heard snatches of the movie several dozen times, but never saw it without interruption, start to finish, until this weekend when we watched it together on the giant IMAX screen. What Adriana liked best--the laser show preceding the screening and the added production number two-thirds of the way through the movie--I liked least: the "Being Human Again" add-on recalled the uniformly mediocre numbers that Rogers and Hammerstein added to the movie versions of their musicals. And for anyone who grew up with the multi-plane camera animation of "Snow White," that Cadillac of cartooning that finally became too expensive even for Disney, the flat backdrops of contemporary animation seem tacky. But the score of "Beauty and the Beast" remains as strong as ever and the gigantic screen really does have the effect of putting you in the centre of the action. Of course, after IMAX you'll never be able to watch the video again.

“BECOMING JANE”

          Little is known of the life of Jane Austin, save that she never married.  Those who have seen any of the several film adaptations of “Pride and Prejudice,” or better yet, read the novel, will consider that given her historical context there must be a story behind this bare fact, a story that the authors of “Becoming Jane” have created.  The writers take the premise the Jane Austin brings to her fictional heroines the happiness (defined, of course, as a suitable marriage) that she herself did not enjoy.  For the limitations on women’s choices in the early 19^th century were restrictive in the extreme.  Intellect in a woman remained suspect and the lady novelist depicted in the film receives mostly opprobrium.  (When a wealthy dowager, in a gratifyingly sour characterization by Maggie Smith, learns that Jane is writing, she asks, “Can’t something be done about it?”) 

          The authors imagine that Mr. Darcy, in “Pride and Prejudice,” must have had some real-life counterpart, whom they supply in the form of Tom Lefroy (James McAvoy) who brings genuine romance into Jane’s life.  Sensible, yet true to her beliefs, the Jane of the film (Anne Hathaway) turns down both a life of wealth with a man she does not love and a life of poverty with the man she does.

          The film offers images of remarkable beauty, particularly in the several ball scenes and the concluding musicale.  The musical score respects the historical context without being restricted to it.  An engaging, even touching film.

“BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU’RE DEAD”

          The title comes from the expression, “May you enjoy thirty minutes in heaven before the devil knows you’re dead.”  Two brothers find themselves in financial trouble, one (Philip Seymour Hoffman) because of an expensive drug habit, the other (Ethan Hawkes) from sheer ineptitude.  In desperation they decide on a single, quick heist to solve their problems.  It will be a piece of cake—rob a jewellery store in a suburban mall.  The stuff is all insured, so it’s kind of a victimless crime, right?  That the jewellery store in question belongs to their parents probably tells you a fair bit about the family dynamics, but let that pass.  What can go wrong?

          More than you can imagine, in this film by Sidney Lumet, who conveys the complete disruption of the lives of everyone associated with the botched caper by chopping up and shuffling the narrative structure.  (Don’t worry:  a subtitled chronology keeps things straight for less attentive members of the audience.  In my opinion the film would have been better without the hand-holding, but let that pass, too.)

          One beautiful lingering image conveys the whole downward spiral of the story, when the Philip Seymour Hoffman character picks up a bowl full of polished pebbles and slowly empties it, from a height, onto the surface of a glass coffee table.  This film, co-starring Marisa Tomei and Albert Finney, never makes a misstep, but what a downer of a story!

"BEHIND ENEMY LINES"

The conflict between love and duty, which has furnished opera plots for several hundred years, continues to be a potent premise for a story. This time Gene Hackman plays a U.S. Navy admiral, ordered not to rescue his pilot, shot down behind enemy lines, lest he irreparably damage "the peace process." While Hackman wrestles with conflicting loyalties, Owen Wilson manages to avoid capture by the Serbian army until a helicopter cavalry rescues him (thrillingly) in the last reel. Sounds formulaic in the retelling, but in "Behind Enemy Lines," familiar plot elements produce a stirring adventure, starting with the extreme maneuvers of an F-18 fighter jet attempting to evade Sidewinder missile (it's remarkable what a film-maker can achieve when he's got the U.S. Navy on his side) and ending with the aforementioned helicopters. Between these high-tech bookends is a straight fugitive story, all the more gripping for its timeliness.

"BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM"

The past generation has seen a revolution in attitudes toward women in sports. In 1967 Kathy Switzer, registered only as "K. Switzer," was the first woman to run in the Boston Marathon. In 1972 the passage of Title IX in the United States, legislating equality of funding for women’s intercollegiate sports, transformed the world for girls interested in pursuing athletic activities past high school. A song by the "Righteous Mothers," celebrating the liberation of "girl jocks," ended with the refrain, "Don’t make me play with Barbies." Since 2000 the sensational successes of the UConn women’s basketball team have made front-page headlines in the sports section and filled once-sparsely-attended arenas.

"Bend It Like Beckham" contains the most exuberant account I have ever seen of women’s soccer, from warm-up drills to practices to international competition. Girls on a British club team look with admiration and envy at television clips of Mia Hamm and the opportunities enjoyed by women soccer players in the U.S. One player must defy the traditions of her Sikh Indian family even to participate. (The sequences dealing with her sister’s upcoming nuptials could be called "My Big Fat Sikh Wedding.")

The title of the film derives from the skills of British soccer superstar David Beckham who, when making a penalty kick, almost seems able to bend the trajectory of the ball to foil the defending goalkeeper. The protagonist Jess at one point fails to make a penalty kick by attacking the goal head-on. Later, after bending the rules and deceiving her parents, she manages to kick the game-winning goal (come on, you knew that was coming) in the style of Beckham.

The camaraderie, the physical satisfaction of skilled athleticism, the comic portrayal of culture clash all make this one of the most infectiously joyful films I’ve seen in a long time. Don’t miss it.

“BENEVOLENCE” (Tarragon Theatre)

Morris Panych has written a number of first-rate plays, including “The Dishwashers,” the memory of which increases our disappointment when “Benevolence” doesn’t come up to the mark.  The play begins with a neat premise:  a businessman, insecure in every aspect of his life, encountering and ignoring the same panhandler outside his building twice a day, becomes carried away with the notion that if he gives the man an outrageously large handout--$100—perhaps he’ll just disappear and bother the businessman’s liberal conscience no more.  Predictably, the reverse happens.  The panhandler, who turns out to be an articulate street philosopher, insinuates his way into the man’s life, with disastrous consequences.

          The entire action takes place within a porn palace, with rows of broken-down theatre seats facing the Tarragon Theatre audience, a brilliant and unexpected set.  Just as the businessman recoils as the panhandler ignores his physical and psychological boundaries, so the audience squirms at the sight of a derelict masturbating in a back row or a prostitute (having heard about the businessman’s extraordinary generosity) giving him a lap dance.  All runs well for the first act, but stretching this idea into a full evening exceeds even Panych’s powers.

"BETTY FISHER AND OTHER STORIES."

The film opens with a series of landscapes shot from a moving train, with the opening credits appearing and disappearing among the trees as if to announce the fragmentary, episodic nature of the scenes to follow. We get a succession of cinematic anecdotes, some very brief, each pair joined by a common character, a chain-link structure masterfully exploited by Luis Bunuel in "Le Fantôme de la Liberté" (1974). Briefly, a woman whose writer daughter's four-year-old son dies accidentally, "replaces" him my kidnapping a similar child from "the projects." Only an insensitive nut case could do such a thing, you will object, but the mother has already been shown as a completely self-absorbed, mentally precarious woman, a self-confessed failure as a mother. The repercussions of the act draw a diverse crew of characters into plot complications including larceny and blackmail. Betty Fisher, the young writer, retains our sympathy amid the cast of grotesques and her situation keeps the film grounded in humanity.

"BIG FAT LIAR"

The theme of a young person triumphing over unfair treatment by adults has been dramatized many times, but when the adult in question turns out to be an arrogant movie producer and virtually the entire action can occur on a Hollywood back lot, the familiar plotline can be clothed in the magic of moviemaking. For once, a teenage boy and girl are shown to be buddies and allies rather than sexual partners, which may or may not be realistic, but comes across as refreshingly old-fashioned. I could take my 11-year-old daughter to see this one, not something that can be said of the majority of teen flicks.

"BLACK HAWK DOWN"

People on the home front have always had a difficult time learning about the conditions of war. Sometimes the withholding of information has been self-imposed. When Pierre Berton, researching his book "Vimy," asked survivors of that great campaign why their letters home had failed to communicate the information the soldiers were now sharing with him, he was told that people back home would have found the truth demoralizing and, more simply, they just would not have believed it. Berton's book offers non-combatants a vivid description of the horrors of life in the trenches and the callousness of commanders ordering waves of troops into certain slaughter.

At other times governments have tried to control the flow information to their own advantage. Journalists complained that the U.S. military prevented them from properly covering the Gulf War, and similar criticisms have attended every American military engagement since Vietnam.

For many of us, the opening half hour of "Saving Private Ryan" provided the first real appreciation of the difficulty of the Normandy invasion. The sight of soldiers being killed before they even left the landing craft cast a sobering shadow over an operation that heretofore we had thought of only as a great military success.

Now "Black Hawk Down" offers a harrowing picture of an attack on an enemy within a city, an account that gives us a new appreciation not only of the American operation in Somalia that the film depicts, but also the conflict between Russian and Chechen forces, between Russian and Afghan forces, and generally the difficulties faced by an invading army against an enemy on their home ground, able to disappear within a civilian population.

In retrospect, one appreciates the miscalculations on the part of the United States, failing to see that an opponent primitive in its regard for human life may yet be quite sophisticated in its weaponry. And not for the first time we see the peril of ground troops denied adequate support for political reasons. The United States claims to have a policy of unleashing overwhelmingly superior force as a basic principle of military engagement. "Black Hawk Down" gives a painful picture of what may happen when that principle is ignored. "Surgical strikes," in the interest of avoiding American casualties, often underestimate the potential resistance. "Black Hawk Down" displays the ease with which a supposedly inferior enemy can pin down an advancing convoy of vehicles (it finally took tanks, not just armored vehicles, to clean up after the failed mission), and the vulnerability of hovering helicopters to simple missile launchers.

The film is not for the weak of stomach, but neither is the war it depicts.

“THE BLIND SIDE”

          Forget “Miss Congeniality.”  For once Sandra Bullock has been given a role that allows her to demonstrate her true abilities as an actress, in this case a tough no-nonsense southern shaker-and-mover.  Seeing Big Mike, an oversize, overage student, walking on the street with no apparent place to stay, she brings him home, then begins tackling the academic obstacles that prevent him from participating in sports.  I experienced a visceral vicarious satisfaction in watching her take on administrators and bureaucrats but felt a measure of alarm when she ventured into a ghetto neighbourhood and, instead of letting a sexist remark pass, stormed up to the young man who uttered it and told him off.  In the simple act of walking down the upstairs hallway of her home, she conveys an almost aristocratic bearing, the result of generations of genteel breeding combined with steely determination.

          The outcome of a movie like this is more or less preordained—the black youth in question becomes a star athlete in high school, college, and the NFL—but within these limits “The Blind Side” offers humour in unexpected places, which helps prevent the story from becoming sentimental.  This film took me by surprise.

"BLIND SPOT: HITLER’S SECRETARY"

In 1941 a series of circumstances brought young Traudl Junge to work first as a typist in the Chancery Officers of the German high command and then as one of several private secretaries to Hitler himself. After the war she refused all requests to tell her story but in 2001 director André Heller persuaded the 81-year-old woman to grant several filmed interviews. Frau Junge died shortly after the film’s premiere at the Berlin Film Festival in 2001.

Essentially we see a woman speaking directly into the camera for an hour and a half. Reading subtitles for this long, with no action to break the flow of words, can become tedious, especially because Frau Junge releases such a torrent of words, as though her self-imposed silence had dammed a vast reservoir that finally found an outlet. Yet the topic exerts a hypnotic hold on the viewer. She begins by speculating on the reasons for her naïveté but soon moves into the heart of the narrative, a detailed account of life in the Führerbunker during the final months, weeks and days of Hitler’s life.

Among her more striking observations was the sense of betrayal felt by members of the high command when Hitler, having created a movement that depended entirely on his personal leadership, by taking his own life left them to their own devices. North Americans may not sufficiently appreciate the fear felt by Germans at the approach of the Russian army late in the war, a fear that led Goebbels’ wife to take the lives of their six children. This is a most remarkable cinematic document.

“BLOOD DIAMOND”

          This movie has all the makings of a good yarn—a tangible goal, in the form of a large uncut diamond, and a number of equally ruthless parties bent on possessing it.  If the story stopped there, we’d have a tale on the order of “Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark.”  Leonard di Caprio does a convincing job playing a Rhodesian soldier of fortune, complete with a white African accent.

          But unlike the Harrison Ford adventure flicks, set in the 1930’s, “Blood Diamond” takes place against the backdrop of civil war in Sierra Leone and the cinematic depiction of warring indigenous forces and the forced recruitment of child soldiers has greater visceral impact than radio or newspaper accounts of these atrocities.  Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou), the man who discovers the diamond, wants only to reunite his family, sundered by civil war.  Such a goal comes at a considerable price.

          Jennifer Connelly, playing a journalist specializing in the world’s hot spots, doesn’t come across as well as the male actors, whose single objectives make their characters better defined.  By contract, Connelly’s character seems somewhat blurry—sometimes naïve, sometimes worldly, sometimes manipulative, sometimes vulnerable.

          The film’s supposed exposé of the trade in conflict diamonds doesn’t seem as convincing as its desire to tell a good yarn, but one cannot remain unmoved by scenes of cruelty and suffering that mark too many countries on the African continent.

"BLOOD WORK"

During the summer I discovered the oeuvre of Michael Connelly and read more than half a dozen of his books including "Blood Work." Knowing that Clint Eastwood would portray Terry McCaleb, the retired FBI agent recently recovering from a heart transplant, gave me a particularly vivid mental picture and I went to the theatre with high expectations. Alas, the movie, "based on" the novel, retains little more than its premise. The complications have been omitted and the identity of the culprit altered, resulting in a narrative that the New York Times reviewer called relentlessly linear. If you’d like a first-class thriller with some real thought behind the investigation, read the book.

"BLUE CAR"

The plot summaries in reviews of "Blue Car" prepare you for a familiar story: a high-school English teacher recognizes the talent of one of his students, a beautiful girl deeply troubled by the absence of her father, encourages her efforts to turn her pain into poetry, and then falls in love with her. A conventional treatment of this story would bring in big stars to play the leads and your job as a viewer would be to enjoy their confident portrayal of these characters. "Blue Car" takes a different road, whose rewards involve a fair amount of vicarious suffering on the part of the audience. With her mother going to school as well as working, the student must take responsibility for her younger sister, a severely disturbed child whose needs far exceed her ability to meet them. The English teacher deals with the frustrations of a depressive wife and a failed career as a writer. We see decent, imperfect human beings endeavouring to cope with situations that demand more of them than they are able to give, and that gap between the necessary and the available produces a good deal of pain. The unlikely presence of creativity within that context and its nurture by one attuned to its music, though unable to produce it himself, offers a positive note that prevails through a succession of unhappy circumstances. The movie avoids the predictable, making choices that seem right only in retrospect. I found many scenes difficult to watch, including the self-mutilation of the girl’s younger sister and the attempted seduction by the teacher. Yet the affirmation of art gives voice to hope in a situation that scarcely seems to engender it. This is a film well worth seeing.

"BLUE CRUSH"

One time on Lake Michigan, with a high tide enhanced by substantial winds, I decided to throw my puny strength against the power of the waves, just to experience the force of nature. Nature knocked me flat without even trying. And these waves weren’t even as tall as I was. Seeing people surf, or be wrecked by, twenty-foot waves—and we’re talking genuine ocean waves here, not blue-matte-process stand-ins—made me shake my head in disbelief. You’ll shake your head in disbelief at the plot of "Blue Crush," but never mind that: the surfing footage provides ample incentive to overlook the acting, such as it is, and hold on to the glorious images of surfers attempting to glide through the "pipe" (and the horrifying images of what happens when you don’t make it).

“BORN INTO BROTHELS”

Photographs permit us to appreciate aspects of human experience that most of us can apprehend in no other way.  A documentary movie can not only inform but also move us.  “Born into Brothels,” a portrait of children of Indian sex trade workers, takes the process one step further.  Photographer Zana Brishi saw the camera as a means of not only recording the story of these children’s lives but also of potentially altering them.  She arranged for eight of the kids to have cameras and set about instructing them in their use.  “Born into Brothels” incorporates both the kids’ stories and their artwork:  achingly beautiful photographs of life that most of us will never see first-hand.

          The film then becomes an account of the efforts of “Zana Auntie” to rescue these pre-adolescent children before they are forced into “the line.”  Zana wrestles with an entrenched bureaucracy, with rules intended to keep marginalized people in their places, and with parents and relatives who look on children in solely monetary terms.  We learn that “Suchita’s aunt will put her in the line because she can make money off her.”  One girl tells Zana, “I worry that I might become like them.  My father tried to sell me.  If my sister hadn’t come to get me, he would have sold me.”  Another child says, “In the past my father was a good man.  Then another man got him addicted to hash.  He smokes all day.  Now nobody pays attention to my father.”  When Zana arranges for the kids to visit the zoo for the first time, she needs no commentary for us to draw the connection between the children and the animals trapped in their cages.

          Zana’s instruction goes well beyond the technical operation of the camera.  She teaches her charges how to evaluate their pictures in terms of composition, form, texture, and the like, so that they end up producing photographs that affect our aesthetic as well as our humanitarian impulses.  At the end, when we learn the outcome of her labours, we cannot avoid reflecting on the number of children in similar circumstances and the heroism of trying to save lives, one at a time.

"BON VOYAGE"

This is one lush movie. If you liked "Gosford Park" but thought it was too slow, this is the film for you. Isabelle Adjani, cinema’s best liar, plays a 1930’s movie star who shoots a man, for reasons not entirely clear to me. (She gives several explanations, but since she utters scarcely a single truthful word in the entire film, one keeps wondering.) She always manages to find a man to help her out of a jam. The ubiquitous Gérard Dépardieu plays the French Minister of the Interior, fully occupied with the imminent fall of the French government, but not too occupied to succumb to Mlle Adjani’s wiles. Add a physics professor and his attractive assistant, determined to get a half dozen containers of heavy water to England before they fall into German hands, a coven of German spies, and a cadre of "beautiful people," confident that they can ride out a war unscathed just as they have ridden out any other adversity.

In the midst of this turmoil we find a young writer, childhood friend of the movie star, who spends the movie being buffeted by circumstances more or less beyond his control, though as the hero of the tale he manages to bring all the threads of the story to a satisfactory conclusion. The film alternates between fast-paced action, usually a chase, and beautifully-photographed tableaux accompanied by a rich, symphonic score. Throughout, the film is marked by elegance and style—a sheer delight to watch.

“BORAT: CULTURAL LEARNINGS OF AMERICA FOR MAKE BENEFIT GLORIOUS NATION OF KAZAKHSTAN”

          Sacha Baron Cohen has perfected a second-generation style of confrontational comedy which traces its roots to Allan Funt’s “Candid Camera.”  So blasé has the world become about the pervasiveness of movies that the camera no longer has to be concealed.  But the subjects are victims nonetheless.  Borat purports to be filming a documentary about the United States for the benefit of his homeland of Kazakhstan, and pity the poor suckers who accept the bait.  Borat releases chickens in a New York subway, invites a black hooker into a genteel white southern home, and gets the crowd at a Texas rodeo to roar its approval at his wish that “President Bush drink the blood of every man, woman and child in Iraq.”  He gets a gun dealer to recommend a weapon for killing Jews, frightens schoolchildren with a real bear in the back of a Mister Softee truck and defecates in front of Manhattan’s Trump Tower. 

          Overall, the film resembles the “not” joke that Borat pretends to be incapable of learning from a comedy coach.  While watching racists and sexists and anti-Semites being exposed can be somewhat cathartic, one looks back on the Jewish owners of a bed-and-breakfast whose hospitality is made to seem pernicious, or poor Pamela Anderson who doesn’t know she’s a running joke in the film.  Eventually one comes to feel a certain sympathy for some of the victims.  Anyhow—go see it, if only for the sort of outrageous humour that hasn’t appeared in theatres since “Kentucky Fried Movie.”

“BOTTLE SHOCK”

          In 1976, Steve Spurrier, a British wine merchant operating in Paris, conceived the notion of a blind taste test matching the best French wines against their untouted upstart California competitors.  The resulting Judgement of Paris, in which California wines placed first in both the red and white categories, confounded the French and inaugurated a new era of estimable wines grown all over the world.  You may wonder whether this historical tidbit, fascinating though it may be, supplies enough material for a two-hour film, even one starring Alan Rickman.  Not to leave you in suspense, it doesn’t.  So we have to throw in a lot of subplots and other filler to try to fill in the supposed human interest story behind the bare facts.  Disenchanted with the filler, I reflected on the great things about the 70s—the clothes and long hair, the freedom to dare new things--but had to weigh them against the downside—the tendency of the youth movement to denigrate ambition and devalue women.  If you’re really keen on seeing a film about winemaking, go rent “Sideways.”

"THE BOURNE IDENTITY"

What could have been done to make this a really good movie? After all, the basic premise sounds like a great start: a CIA-trained assassin loses his memory in the course of a mission (when the cause of the memory loss is eventually revealed, you'll roll your eyes in dismay, but it's still a great premise) and seeks to find out who he is. Meanwhile, the CIA, who knows perfectly well who he is and doesn't want the rest of the world to find out, is trying to kill him. What should the film-makers do?

1. Get a grittier leading man. Matt Damon, with his baby-faced innocence, just seems wrong for the part. You care about his avoiding extinction, but he seems too naive about the CIA and its workings (well duh, man, don't you ever go to the movies?)

2. Get a better script-writer. The film is full of funny lines that weren't meant to be funny. Matt Damon and the girl are standing in his Paris apartment when a trio of agents crash through the window and nearly kill them. "We've got to get away from here. It isn't safe," he explains to her. Then two police cars and two police motorcycles chase the two around Paris for awhile, including the bouncing-down-the-stairway routine you saw in the previews, and a driving-the-wrong-way sequence that you've already seen in half a dozen other movies and is getting a bit stale. They manage to sneak into a parking garage and Matt Damon explains to the girl, "You can never come back to this car again."

3. Get a stronger adversary. Mostly Matt Damon has to fight off a cadre of nameless, expressionless assassins. But at least the head of the CIA should be a stronger antagonist than the shrill, whining actor cast here.

4. Find a more original way to generate excitement. Do you recall "Foxbat," the film Clint Eastwood made from a Craig Thomas thriller? The book was exciting, but in the movie, the plan was so beautifully crafted and so accurately executed that Clint Eastwood seemed to walk through the action without ever getting his hair mussed. Now Matt Damon does have one sequence with some peculiar martial arts tactics, but mostly the action is so machine-like that what should look like ingenuity and seize our interest, comes out as "Ho hum, an accurately placed rifle shot blows up a car." He does the right moves, but since the outcome is never placed in the slightest doubt, we have trouble getting engaged in what properly should be a thrillingly engaging film.

5. Pick a different leading lady, or at least a man-woman pair between whom there's a little chemistry. Half-way through the film they finally kiss, and you can almost see Matt Damon looking at the director and asking "Do I really have to do this? Can't you use the stunt double?" Now personally I didn't find the girl all that attractive, but I'm just sitting in the audience. At least the leading man should pretend to be interested, otherwise what's the point?

6. Make the CIA end of things more credible. The movie is particularly hard to believe in light of recent events showing the CIA to be a fairly bumbling operation. I'm happy to see gee-whiz technology in action--"Enemy of the State" not only showed amazing stuff but made us feel amazed--but here, the CIA is portrayed as not only omniscient, but omniscient without even working up a sweat. There's no need for thought on their end--they just punch in a few numbers and all the answers come leaping out at them. The film takes the same attitude toward technology that many SAC students display toward the TI-83+: you don't need to think; the calculator will do it all.

What I'm suggesting by all this is that "The Bourne Identity" could have been a much better movie. The problem doesn't lie in the premise but in the directorial choices. (Or maybe it was the producer's choices.) In any event, given the movie they actually produced, you're much better off renting "Three Days of the Condor" and seeing how such films ought to be made.

"THE BOURNE SUPREMACY"

This film, like "Paycheck," is fun for its ingenuity but deficient in its acting. Matt Damon, like his friend Ben Affleck, seems lifelessly methodical in his quest to destroy those who are attempting to destroy him. One can argue that he’s doing what he’s supposed to do as a CIA killing machine with partial amnesia. I’m just saying that it’s difficult to feel much sympathy for the guy, in contrast, let’s say, to Harrison Ford in "The Fugitive," essentially the same kind of film. Joan Allen acquits herself well as an intelligence director trying to make sense of an intra-agency plot, but otherwise the film’s interest lies in its technology. Happily, there are some pretty nifty moments, including a lesson on how to blow up a house without killing yourself, and the single nastiest car chase I’ve ever seen. The simplicity of creating a busy signal as a strategic device also caught my imagination. So I found the film entertaining; with a stronger lead, it might have been engaging.

“THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM”

          Reading a plot summary—a CIA agent recalls previously hidden memories of being hooded, waterboarded, and otherwise tortured in an effort to break down his will and erase his memory, while the CIA chief uses surveillance cameras, satellite transmissions, and massive taps of cell phones and landlines to track him down—a reader may think that this is all very entertaining but not realistic.  But last night I learned of a woman acquaintance compelled to pull off the highway by a flood of memories—not vague recollections but horrific detailed images of sexual abuse at age five—repressed in her unconscious mind until several years of therapy had helped her unconscious feel safe enough to release them.  And in Monday’s New York Times, in an article headlined “Bush signs law to widen reach for wiretapping,” we read that the legislation “gave the administration greater power to force telecommunications companies to cooperate with spying operations,” including plugging into the giant fiber optic switches rather than having to bug individual lines. 

A brilliant piece of casting gives us David Strathairn as the CIA chief:  recalling his performance as Edward R. Murrow in “Good Night, and Good Luck,” we assume he’s one of the good guys.  Guess again.  Joan Allen expresses the moderate view that there should be limits in the war on terror.  “If we start down the slippery slope of shooting our own agents, where will it end?” she asks.  “When we’ve won!” comes the barked response.  Cynics will find this the least believable part of the film:  in real life a person with her views would never rise to such a prominent position in the agency.  Matt Damon gives another convincing performance, quickly disabling most of his opponents.  The most difficult scene to watch comes when he engages in a fight to the death with another agent with the same training as himself. 

In 1983 Paul Johnson, in Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties, wrote “Throughout these years, the power of the State to do evil expanded with awesome speed.  Its power to do good grew slowly and ambiguously.”  When I first read those words I smugly considered that they applied only to totalitarian states, never to the United States.  I can’t be smug anymore.

"BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE"

Michael Moore makes irreverent films calculated to embarrass people in people, to the amusement of ordinary filmgoers. Attending this film at Toronto's Cumberland Theatre was a lot of fun--like-minded Canadians laughing at America's lethal passion for guns and applauding at the end of the movie.

Moore likes to publicize connections not widely known, for example, that Lockheed, America's largest arms manufacturer, is also the country's leader in administering programs that force welfare recipients to work for their benefits, a scheme that often results in single parents spending hours every day on buses from their inner-city homes to menial jobs in affluent suburbs.

In the film, Moore brings to survivors of the Columbine massage in Littleton, Colorado to the K-Mart corporate headquarters in Michigan where, with the assistance of considerable media coverage, he manages to embarrass K-Mart into discontinuing sales of ammunition (the bullets that still reside in the boys' bodies were purchased at a K-Mart store).

Amazed by the claim that many Torontonians don't lock their doors, Moore, accompanied by his ever-present cameraman, walks around various neighborhoods of the city, actually trying doors, to the surprise of the residents on whom he briefly intrudes.

The film leavens its dreary message with a good deal of humor, but when you see President Bush telling his audience that America's number one priority must be to increase the country's military spending, you don't know whether to laugh or to cry. According to a friend of mine, the Office of the Management of the Budget website shows Federal spending in the form of a pie graph, so you can compare the amounts devoted to education, social assistance, the environment, etc. But nowhere on the pie does military spending appear. Were it shown, all the other programs would virtually disappear.

Canadians can watch Michael Moore's film and leave the theatre content to be living on this side of the border. For those living in the States, the climate of violence is no laughing matter.

“THE BOY FRIEND”

If you love the rhythm of ragtime and the two-step, if you find the energetic movements of the Charleston irresistible, then make tracks to the Royal Alexandra while “The Boy Friend” is still in town.  This delightful bonbon of a musical, originally intended as a gentle parody of shows from the 1920s, seems like a period-piece in many respects:  do any girls still go to finishing school?  Recalling a carefree era when the purpose of entertainment was to entertain, “The Boyfriend” mounts easily-remembered tunes, likeable characters, and a bunch of enthusiastic dance numbers on a slender plot whose main question is whether the ingénue will have anyone to dance with at a costume ball.  With a single exception, the singers in this youthful cast surpass those in the original Broadway production.  That single exception is the ingénue, first played by Julie Andrews at age 19, in the show that launched her career.  Now she has returned, fifty years later, to direct the current production, and does so competently, though one still misses that distinctive voice.  Every member of the ensemble cast has put the success of the show ahead of individual ego so that the whole operation unfolds with the precision of a charming, delicate piece of clockwork. 

"BOY GETS GIRL" (Canadian Stage Company)

Stalking is no laughing matter. The victim suffers an invasion of her existence by mail, telephone, or even physical assault. In order to protect her life, she may be compelled to change her phone number, her address, or even her identity, taking a new name and moving to another city, all to escape the stalker’s morbid attraction.

Yet playwright Rebecca Gilman manages to keep us laughing virtually throughout the play as she explores what might be described as the psychosis of man-woman relationships. Rape has been described as a power issue, not a sex issue. Gilman makes the case (but seldom preachily) that any interaction that treats women as objects may be viewed as basically pathological. Yet she shows a genius for treating serious subjects with a light touch.

The protagonist, Theresa Bedell, works as a staff writer for cultural magazine. A friend has set her up with a blind date who begins to make her life miserable when she calls off the relationship after a couple of encounters. The attending characters—her male supervisor, a sympathetic male colleague, the policewoman summoned when the stalker’s actions turn alarming, an exploitative movie director Theresa has been assigned to interview—serve mostly as foils for the author’s feminist arguments. Only the movie director comes off as a complete character—incredible offensive, but unapologetic and very funny. He easily deflects the reporter’s objections to his career, and when her unsympathetic portrait appears in print he hails it as the best thing ever written about him.

Gilman raises important, sensitive issues and explores them in a way that entertains as well as educates.

“THE BOY IN STRIPED PAJAMAS”

          The film opens in a five-story mansion in Berlin of the sort that would clearly delight any child, with corridors for running, banisters for sliding, odd-shaped rooms to hide in and indulgent servants to supervise without interfering.  Then eight-year-old Bruno and his twelve-year-old sister Gretel receive bad news:  their father, a high-ranking Nazi officer, has been assigned to a post in the country.  Their new home lies but a quick run through the woods from an installation that Bruno mistakes for a farm, except that all the farmers are wearing pajamas.  He befriends an eight-year-old inmate named Schmuel and the two improvise games while occupying opposite sides of a barbed-wire fence. 

          Bruno’s naïveté is only compounded by the lies his parents tell him in response to each of his many questions, and further confused by a propaganda film he sees depicting the prison camp as overflowing with amenities.  A tutor engaged to manage the children’s education fills their heads with anti-Jewish sentiments, leading Bruno to further confusion and Gretel to dreams of participation in the Hitler Youth. 

          Some have criticized the use of English throughout the film rather than German with English subtitles, but the device has a powerful emotional effect in engaging the audience’s participation.  The opening scenes of small boys play-acting with pretend machine guns, and a girl offering her prayers to Jesus, have a disturbing effect when you realize that the victims of the boys’ play would be Allied soldiers, who would be praying to the same God as the German girl.

          Little by little the commandant’s wife goes to pieces as she comes to a full understanding of activities at the camp--for example, the occasional black smoke and awful stench—and her complicity.  The O’Henry twist at the end of the movie comes with cold, one might say Teutonic, logic.

“THE BOYS AND GIRL OF COUNTY CLARE”

          Do you tap your feet at the sound of a jig?  Do you know the words to “McNamera’s Band”?  In your mind, does the adjective “Irish” modify whiskey, harp, and dancing?  If so, then you’ll warm your heart at this tale of music and luv.  (If, on the other hand, Ireland to you means Sinn Fein, religious intolerance, and The Troubles, you’ll find none of that here; in fact, you might as well skip the rest of this review.)  “When you’ve got the music,” says one of the main characters, “you’ve got friends for life.  That’s why I’m never alone.”  The speaker leads a ceili band from County Clare, entered in the traditional music festival, which they’ve won for the past two years.  But this year there’s a bit of competition from abroad.  Indeed, it’s the speaker’s own brother, absent these twenty years or more, come back with a band from Liverpool, and determined to take the trophy. 

          What about luv, you ask?  Ah, and if there isn’t a colleen to make you melt, the lead fiddler from County Clare, who falls in love with the Liverpudlian piper.  He gets his warning:  “Behind every Irish girl is a mother who’ll put your balls in a mangle if you get too close.”  But when did two young people in love ever listen to their elders?  If you feel you didn’t do justice by St. Patrick’s Day this year, hie yourself to a theatre showing “The Boys and Girl of County Clare” and do your heart good.

"BRAZIL"

If you have difficulty remembering which movie was "State of Siege" and which was "Enemy of the State," go see "Brazil" (playing on the big screen in several of the Festival theatres), which is unlike any other film you've ever seen. It first appeared in 1985 but is set in the future as imagined in 1943. Now nothing is more amusing than old-fashioned futuristic sets, and this film owes a lot to old movies like "The Shape of Things to Come" as well as to German Expressionist films. It also calls to mind a fascinating book I'm reading called "From Paris to the Moon," an account of a five-year sojourn in Paris by New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik and his family. Gopnik maintains that the French love of abstraction leads to situations like trying to buy a fax ribbon in a department store: the ribbon is sitting right there on the counter, but the clerk won't sell it to you because she can't find it listed in her computer inventory--the document is considered more real than the actual object. "Brazil" depicts a nightmarish world in which the Ministry of Information ranks highest among the bureaucracies, where police arrive to arrest a man for questioning (after cutting a circular hole in the ceiling, inserting a railing, and sliding down it), and force his wife to sign a receipt. Robert de Niro has a terrific role as a subversive heating engineer. The word "Kafkaesque" will probably cross your mind in watching the film, but Kafka never had the benefit of belonging to the Monty Python troupe. You won't confuse this film with any others.

“BREACH”

          For more than two decades Robert Hanssen passed classified materials to the Russians in the most serious security breach in U.S. history.  His actions cost the lives of at least three agents (or double agents); the full extent of the damage remains classified.  At one point the Federal Bureau of Investigation, suspecting a mole in its midst, appointed its top agent to head the search:  Robert Hanssen.  Why did he betray his country?  The film “Breach” raises the question without providing direct answers, but offers enough clues to invite viewers to form their own opinions.  Hanssen (played by Chris Cooper), though himself a superb marksman, remained contemptuous of the FBI’s “gun culture” that consistently drew its leaders from the law enforcement rather than the intelligence side.  His suggestions for improvements were regularly derailed by politics, turf wars, and inter-agency competition.  Though a Lutheran by birth, he converted to Roman Catholicism and attended Mass daily.  It appears that he admired the superior intelligence capabilities of the Soviet Union.  While well paid for delivering U.S. secrets, he betrayed no signs of wealth.  My guess is that he started out as a double agent simply to show that he could do it, the way that hackers delight in breaking into a security system, and continued as a kind of mental challenge to enliven an unrewarding job.

          Support for this surmise comes in the way Hanssen was eventually caught, just six years ago.  When the FBI, finally suspecting that Hanssen might be the cause of its security breaches, began to investigate him, they set up a phoney branch outside the mainstream, placed him at its head, gave him an assistant in the charge of Kate Burroughs (Laura Linney), bugged his office and placed a homing device in his car.  Hanssen was aware of all of this.  Months away from mandatory retirement, he had the option of laying low, in which case he probably would have escaped altogether.  It seems to me that self-confidence turned to arrogance, pride to recklessness.  Why else would a man disregard all his instincts of spy craft and deliberately go for one last “drop” of information?

          “Breach” has been described as a grey movie, not only for the muted tones of its interior and exterior scenes but for its single-minded pursuit of the bureaucratic aspects of the investigation.  The film has no car chases, no balls of flame, no armed combat, no glamorous love interest, yet I found the pursuit and evasion gripping and occasionally scary.  Of all the people in the world who I would not like to have angry with me, Chris Cooper ranks high on the list.  No other actor cuts off his emotions with such emotional force.  You can understand why the young Eric O’Neill (Ryan Philippe) felt overmatched and why Kate Burroughs viewed the affair with such frustration:  “I might as well not have had a career,” she says.  “Everything we did for twenty years, he undid.”  This is a gem of a film.

“BRIDE OF THE WIND” (Cinema Cartier, Quebec)

          This biography of Alma Mahler may be the most beautiful bad movie I’ve ever seen.  The film portrays the contrast between repression and licentiousness in turn-of-the-20^th-century Vienna in vivid detail, with gossips clothed from neck to toe juxtaposed with full nudity in Gustav Klimt’s studio and semi-public semi-nudity at risqué balls.  Alma Mahler was known to have had sex with every major intellectual and artistic figure of her time, and now we can see the acts amply displayed on the screen (although the twenty-four second interval between embrace and penetration presumably reflects a male conception of female sexuality.)

          My objection to the film lies in the paint-by-numbers approach to biography, with a predictable cliché provided for every detail:  a doctor visits a bed-ridden child, the mother urges her to breathe in steam, moments later a hand gently draws a blanket over the child’s head; a couple interrupts a carriage ride at the sight of people holding up newspapers:  “The Archduke has been assassinated,” shouts one.  “This means war,” asserts another, and soon we see a parade of Austrian cavalry in perfect period uniforms clearly unworn since emerging from the costume department.  Someone introduces Alma to a young man, we cut to a worried look from her current husband or lover, and soon we find her in bed with the new lover.  Such a formulaic approach seems surprising coming from Bruce Beresford, who has given us “The Getting of Wisdom,” “Driving Miss Daisy,” “Tender Mercies” and “Crimes of the Heart.”

          Acoustic anomalies in movies continually irritate me, but in a film with music as its central theme, surely someone could have pointed out that the sound of a character ceasing to play the piano when someone enters the room is not at all the same as the sound of a recording being cut off; that the sound of a character at a party breaking into song is not the same as the sound of a Verdi aria dubbed from an opera recording, no matter how good the lip-synch; that an actor conducting an orchestra should at least keep the same beat as the musicians under his direction.   The one truly gratifying musical moment occurs at the end of the film when actual opera star Renée Fleming actually performs one of Alma Mahler’s seldom-heard songs.  A disclaimer at the end of the movie says that the words uttered by the characters have been created to fit the needs of film, but can we, in our wildest imaginations, really hear Alma Mahler telling artist Oscar Kokoschka that she attacks the genitals of men who assaults her?

“THE BUCKET LIST”

          Let’s imagine that you find yourself in the same hospital ward with a rich and generous Jack Nicholson, that that both of you have been diagnosed with terminal cancer and given less than six months to live, but that other than the downer of knowing that you’re going to die soon, you feel just great.  (I know that may take a lot of imagining, and may be considered insulting to anyone who has suffered the actual experience of cancer, but you need to make the effort or the film won’t work at all.)  Let’s imagine still further that you’re Morgan Freeman, that you’ve always wanted to be a history teacher, and know more history than most teachers, but you’ve actually spent your career as an auto mechanic.  (That may or may not be easier to imagine than the first condition.)  So the question is:  would you go sky-diving with the Jack Nicholson character, if he’s willing to pick up the tab?  (Don’t spend too long pondering; the correct answer is “of course.”)  But then, as you travel around the world accomplishing all the things you want to do before kicking the bucket (hence the title), would you feel any guilt toward the wife and family back home who believe you should spend your dying days with them?  In other words, how much fun are you allowed to have at the end of your life if you’ve never had any fun before?  (‘Fraid that counts for a deep philosophical question in Hollywood, so deal with it.)  Depending upon the strength of your imagination, as summoned above, and your willingness to suspend disbelief, you could have quite a good time at this movie. 

“BUGS” (Ontario Science Centre)

Nature lovers have long celebrated the camera for providing entry to otherwise inaccessible scenes, either by taking us to remote parts of the world or by enabling us to witness natural processes unfold through time-lapse photography.  (Many of us grew up on Disney’s True-Life Adventures.)  More recent advances in cinematography have added another dimension:  blowing up the very small to colossal proportions.  “Bugs” takes us to the rainforest of Borneo to trace the life histories of a female caterpillar and a male preying mantis (with occasional diversions such as a titanic battle between two male rhinoceros beetles for the privilege of mating with an available female).  The incomparable speaking voice of Dame Judi Dench provides narration but the jaw-dropping experience relies primarily on the enlargement of tiny creatures to Brobdinagian sizes on the IMAX screen.  The musical score is the best I’ve heard at one of these films at the Ontario Science Centre.  Highly recommended.

“BURN AFTER READING”

          All right.  You saw “No Country for Old Men.”  Did you really think for a moment that a comedy by the Coen brothers was going to be ha-ha funny?  Actors playing against the grain keep the movie afloat:  Brad Pitt as an air-head, Frances McDormand as a gym coach obsessed with her body image, George Clooney as a womanizing jerk.  Ineptitude among intelligence agencies provokes a bit of humour, but we’ve seen it done before and better.  John Malkovich stalking the streets of Georgetown in a bathrobe provokes a small chuckle, but really, this film comes across as a person telling a not-so-funny story not very well. 

"THE BUSINESS OF STRANGERS"

Totalitarianism or anarchy: an unpleasant choice of social alternatives. Translate it to the personal level and you have the framework for "The Business of Strangers," a theatrical tour de force for actresses Stockard Channing and Julie Stiles: the former a newly-named CEO who has subsumed every other human instinct beneath her controlling ambition; the latter a young office assistant, amoral and reckless, utterly heedless of others or even herself. After a night of drinking, conspiring and spatting in an anonymous airport hotel, the two end up at opposite ends of the waiting area, one, in a moment of self-awareness, muttering "Take away the job and what do you have left?", the other, in a headset in a world of her own, completely opaque behind the screen of unscrupulousness and deceit. It sounds distasteful but the film is no less fascinating for that.

“CACHÉ” (Hidden)

          Don’t plan to see this film alone.  You will come out of the theatre amazed at the story but full of questions.  The movie opens with a prolonged shot of a Paris residence.  Nothing much happens:  you see a car go by, a cyclist, a passer-by, but you wait in vain for the conventional signals that a main character is entering the scene.  Then you discover that this isn’t the movie at all—it’s a videotape, being watched by the inhabitants of the house, played by Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche.  While there’s nothing threatening to be seen on the video, they find it unsettling to realize that they’re under surveillance and try unsuccessfully to figure out where the camera could have been concealed—it doesn’t look as if were shot through a car windshield.  More tapes arrive, accompanied by childish black-and-white drawings of a head with red blood emerging from the neck.

          Now the audience is unsettled, too.  Every time we see a prolonged shot, we wonder whether we’re seeing the movie or another anonymous video.  Eventually the videos start showing other places having to do with the childhood of the Daniel Auteuil character.  Does he have some horrifying secret in his past?  He hosts a television book discussion program and his home is lined with books; his twelve-year-old son seems like any other twelve-year-old; his marriage isn’t very good, but isn’t very bad either.  Seems like an safe, privileged existence, and yet—what are these videotapes about?  The couple consults the police, who refuse to act unless some actual damage is perpetrated against property or person.

          Eventually the picture becomes clearer, but each detail revealed raises new questions.  Their friends, informed about the situation, try to be helpful.  Was the male friend a lover of the Juliette Binoche character?  Their son seems to think so.  But no one acknowledges making the videos, and the final shot just increases the mystery.  This is a compelling piece of cinema, but be sure to take a friend.

“CANNES LIONS ADVERTISING FESTIVAL”  (Bloor Cinema)

          You know the complaint about Chinese food:  it tastes great but an hour later you’re hungry; but that doesn’t keep us from enjoying it.  Same thing with the annual festival of advertisements—they’re diverting and quickly forgotten, but titillating while you’re watching them.  Among my favourites this year:

·        The Anheiser-Busch commercials in which someone says all the politically incorrect things that are on his mind, such as looking forward to inheriting his wife’s parents’ home;

·        The little boy in India who using Pepsi as a carrot teaches elephants to build pyramids five elephants high;

·        A birthday party at which all the little kids are talking to absent friends on cellphones;

·        A holiday party, accompanied by the song “Let It Snow,” with snow produced by corporate shredding machines destroying damning documents;

·        a clothed streaker at a nude soccer game (with naked players, refs and spectators);

·        an exhibition of how hard it will be to please your wife if you ever win the lottery;

·        Martin Scorsese criticizing photos he’s taken of his child’s birthday party, and concluding that they’ll have to re-shoot the entire affair;

·        A horrendous tantrum staged by a little boy in a supermarket in front of his hapless father, with the concluding line “Use condoms”;

·        A series of unlikely vignettes with the refrain “The more hockey you watch, the tougher you get”;

·        A wonderful series of Canadian ads with the refrain, “What if kids pressured us the way we pressure them?”

·        A series of unlikely greeting cards (such as “Happy Belated Anniversary” and “Suppose we make February 15 Our Valentine’s Day”)

·        Terry Taylor, the office linebacker, who delivers brutal tackles when office workers misbehave.

CAPITALISM, A LOVE STORY

          I found this to be a very annoying film.  No surprises here—by now we’re all accustomed to Michael Moore’s unapologetic manipulations:  facts or statistics given out of context, irrelevant figures (in this case actor/playwright Wallace Shawn talking about the economy), old movie footage to recall bygone days, emotional interviews with individual victims.  Then there’s Michael Moore and his usual shenanigans:  I thought wrapping Wall Street office buildings in crime scene tape provided good theatre but found backing an armored truck up to bank offices and asking for the return of bailout money, or attempting to make a citizen’s arrest of a board of directors rather lame.  The prolonged cheering and weeping at the election of Barack Obama seemed like premature celebration in light of the current government’s absence of actual accomplishments. 

          Moore does provide the service of making one think about the difference between capitalism and democracy, but the heavy-handed clownish treatment tends to weaken the case, in my opinion.  You learn a good deal more about the causes of the precarious financial position of the United States in “I.O.U.S.A,” a documentary with less circus and more substance.

"CAPTURE ME" (Tarragon Theatre)

This is a terrific play for those who love theatre: a beautiful elliptical stage (matched with a projection of an ellipse on the back wall); five characters (three women, two men); minimal scenery (a stylized tree on one side of the stage; a clothesline used to hang children’s schoolwork on the other). This kind of play can be represented structurally by two funnels with the fat ends facing each other. The first act begins with virtually nothing and through the use of witty dialogue leaves us with five characters whom we know and enjoy knowing, as well as a stage that no longer seems bare: that tree sometimes serves as a telephone booth; the clothesline has become part of a classroom full of kindergartners. The second act begins with this rich environment and gradually focuses on a conclusion.

The conclusion cannot be a mystery to us: from the outset we learn that we are attending a memorial gathering for a vibrant young woman who has predicted that she will be murdered by her ex-husband. And indeed, regrettably, this comes to pass. In the course of the first act, four of the characters display life-changing problems: the central character has a troubled emotional past; her biological mother is dying of cancer; the ex-husband, though threatening, shows a good deal of charm in trying to teach young offenders to control their inner demons; an Iranian single-father who falls in love with the schoolteacher has fixed ideas about the nature of relationships and unfinished business back home. In the midst of all this unbalance, the teacher’s wisecracking colleague serves as an anchor for the play (she’s the only one she knows who isn’t drowning in problems) as well as the master of ceremonies for the memorial service.

The playwright asks a good deal of us. In addition to that telephone booth tree we have to imagine the car that carries the teacher to visit her birth mother, the kindergarten class, the penitentiary inmates, the seagulls that interfere with a picnic. There were a number of details in the mother’s account of the girl’s out-of-wedlock birth that seemed fuzzy. But the overall theme of people trying to deal with the problems confronting them, and how their efforts affect other people similarly engaged, though somewhat sterile as an abstract concept, becomes exceedingly fertile in Judith Thomson’s ambitious and entertaining play.

"CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS"

The details of pedophilia lie far enough outside our experience that we may not even have a mental framework for understanding them. The wife of convicted pedophile Arnold Friedman says that when shown a photograph of child pornography she didn’t even see what was going on: her eyes were directed to the picture but her mind couldn’t process what it perceived. The details of pedophilia are so distasteful that we welcome protestations of innocence: we would prefer not to believe that such things could happen, and viewers may be convinced by the claims of Friedman’s sons that nothing happened at all.

"Capturing the Friedmans" portrays not the details of pedophilia but the effect of a pedophile’s trial and conviction on his family. We see home movies of the Friedmans in happier times juxtaposed with videotapes of the family’s ordeal as one of Arnold’s sons insisted on documenting their most trying moments. We also see interviews with the police investigator in charge of the case, the judge, the defense attorney, an investigative report researching cases of pedophilia, parents of the young victims, several of the alleged victims a number of years later, and Arnold Friedman’s wife and sons. (Friedman himself committed suicide while in jail.)

Despite this surfeit of information, we have difficulty deciding just what happened. As for physical evidence, we have only a large quantity of child pornography discovered in the home of Arnold Friedman, a prize-winning high school teacher in the affluent community of Great Neck, Long Island. Beyond that, we have words corrupted by self-interest, faulty memory, the passage of time, suppressed recollection, and mob psychology influencing the parents of the alleged victims. Arnold claims as a teenager to have had sexual relations with his younger brother (who claims no memory of the incidents) and improper relations as an adult with two male children, but not in Great Neck. He may or may not have abused his own sons, depending on which version you believe. He may or may not have sodomized children attending computer classes in his home. He pleaded guilty in court but may have been trying to protect his youngest son, tried and convicted of participating in the offenses. His sons vehemently and tearfully defend their father and find incredible the accusations that for several years children enrolled and re-enrolled in these computer classes with no complaint ever coming forth before the police began their investigation. This is a remarkable and disturbing film about a difficult subject.

"CASA DE LOS BABYS"

Without humor, the intolerable would be unbearable. The background scenes in "Casa de los Babys" hold no surprises, but the humor helps us watch, and even laugh at, situations we prefer not to think about too often: the enormous disparity in wealth between rich countries and poor; the ethical implications of letting women from rich countries adopt children from poor countries; the various opportunities for profiting from such a situation. The film preaches no message: the script is all about the relationships among half a dozen American women (including Mary Steenbergen, Marcia Gay Harden, and Darryl Hannah), waiting out a residency requirement in Acapulco in order to adopt a child. We learn about the circumstances of their lives that have brought them to this point and the different ways in which they deal with the tedium of waiting. But scenes of poverty, homeless street children and unemployed adults contrast with the self-absorbed mothers-to-be. Director John Sayles focuses on a single point at which two worlds touch and leavens the story with laughter, but when the laughter ends we are left with troubling questions that won't go away.

"THE CAT'S MEOW"

Ships have provided the setting for many a memorable film, including "The Last of Sheila" (1973), Fellini's "And The Ship Sails On" (1983) and a major portion of the classic Marx Brothers comedy "A Night at the Opera" (1935), not to mention disaster films such as "The Poseidon Adventure" (1972) and "Titanic" (1997) in which the ship itself is the story.

Now Peter Bogdanovich takes us on a voyage on a 220-foot yacht with owner William Randolph Hearst and a guest list that includes his mistress Marion Davies, film star Charlie Chaplin, gossip columnist Louella Parsons, and director Thomas Ince, of whom Halliwell's "Who's Who in the Movies" writes:

"Died suddenly at the end of a weekend aboard William Randolph Hearst's yacht, officially of a heart attack brought on by acute indigestion. There were rumors that he had been shot by Hearst, who suspected that Ince had seduced his mistress Marion Davies, that he died accidentally, hit by a shot intended for Charlie Chaplin, and the Louella Parsons owed her position as a columnist for Hearst's papers to not revealing the truth about the incident."

So there you have the plot, a juicy tidbit ripe for plucking. The film has been adapted from a stage play, which may account for the unusually sharp dialogue. The narrator begins, "Welcome to Hollywood, a land just off the coast of the planet Earth," and continues, "I'm not quite sure if I'm visiting the zoo or if I'm one of the animals in a cage." One guest, impressed with the size of Hearst's yacht, exclaims, "He owns that?", to which the response comes, "And the ocean it sits in and the sky above it."

W. R., played by Edward Hermann, comes across as a figure both sympathetic and simply pathetic, as he bugs his entire ship and spies on his guests through peepholes, and sounds entirely sincere when he says, "I'm just a man asking everyone to behave according to his wishes." Marion Davies, convincingly portrayed by Kirsten Dunst, seems devoted to making people happy, and seems to have a genuine affection for Hearst, despite the limits inherent in the relationship (he is married and, it is hinted, impotent). Charlie Chaplin, played by Eddie Izzard, comes off the worst of the lot. When he declares himself to be in love with Marion, she tells him, "Not as much as you are with you."

The excesses of the rich during the 1920's, before the imposition of a personal income tax began to limit the acquisition of extreme wealth, can be summed up in a brief scene depicting two women playing ping-pong, badly, while two uniformed servants retrieve the balls.

Now it's impossible to see this stylish rendition of life in the gilded age, or to hear Tom Ince say, "I used to be a power in this town," without hearing echoes of irony. Peter Bogdanovich showed himself to be a skilled young director in "Targets" (1968) and a force to be reckoned with in "The Last Picture Show" (1971) and the charming "Paper Moon" (1973). But he and Cybill Shepherd crowned their success with arrogance, a trait not appreciated in tinsel town, and his subsequent failures led to rejoicing in many quarters. As Billy Wilder said, "It isn't true that Hollywood is a bitter place, divided by hatred, greed and jealousy. All it takes to bring the community together is a flop by Peter Bogdanovich."

I loved the film, from the opening Al Jolson song "Avalon" to his "California, Here I Come," during the closing credits. I hated to leave the theater, and went home to put on my Al Jolson CD. There were only five of us in the theatre when I saw the film. It deserves better. Go see it.

“CASINO ROYALE”

          I can’t claim to have seen all the James Bond films, but I’ve seen the vast majority of them.  Along the way have been some embarrassing moments:  Roger Moore sticking his nose in other people’s business in Harlem and acting surprised when he gets mugged; all those soldiers in “Goldfinger” dropping to the ground when the nerve gas passes them; Sean Connery, in a rare un-cool moment, trying to make us believe that a lesbian is just a woman who hasn’t been properly laid; the silliness of an invisible car in one of the most recent films.  There have also been chilling moments:  in “Goldfinger,” when we learn that being gilded in gold paint is fatal if the spinal column is completely covered; the interchange, “I suppose you want me to talk,” answered by, “No, Mr. Bond; I want you to die;” or the terrifying shoes of Rosa Klebb (played by Lotte Lenya) in “From Russia With Love.”

          But coming out of a James Bond film I’ve never felt the way I did after “Casino Royale.”  Don’t get me wrong—in many ways this is an amazing film.  The pursuit on foot that leads to a construction site and from there to dizzying heights is one of the most remarkable set pieces I’ve ever seen.  And some of the physical mayhem recalls the sequence in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Torn Curtain” in which Paul Newman spends a considerable time killing a man with his bare hands, because Hitchcock wanted the audience to appreciate just how difficult it was to carry out such a task.  Judi Dench has a more extended part than usual as “M,” and this must be considered a strength.  But by the end, I felt no exhilaration, only a dead bleakness that comes from watching cold cruelty up close.  Never has death been presented more physically.  I found this to be one truly nasty film.  Some may consider that a recommendation.

“CASSANDRA’S DREAM”

          Woody Allen maintains a single-minded devotion to film-making.  For decades he has written and directed (and often appeared in) one film every year.  For many years the annual appearance of a Woody Allen film brought cause for celebration:  Love and Death; The Front; Annie Hall; Interiors; Manhattan; Zelig; The Purple Rose of Cairo; Hannah and Her Sisters; Radio Days; Crimes and Misdemeanors.  Then came a fallow period in which loyalists tried to conceal their disappointment with films like Manhattan Murder Mystery; Small Time Crooks; The Curse of the Jade Scorpion; Hollywood Ending; Anything Else.  Most recently, with Match Point and Scoop, Woody Allen seems to have regained his form by stepping in a new direction—the suspense drama.  Now comes “Cassandra’s Dream,” a film that fills you with apprehension during and admiration after the screening.

          The film seems Hitchcockian both in the ways it implicates the audience in guilty actions and in its amazing economy:  not a single superfluous frame.  Woody Allen has always taken special pains in assembling a musical score, often relying on jazz standards.  This time he has commissioned a score from Philip Glass that maintains the dramatic tension, highlights the lyrical moments, and generally propels the forward movement with its incessant pulsations.

          Colin McFarrell and Ewan McGregor portray brothers, born into a working-class family, who hope their rich uncle, played by Tom Wilkinson, will provide them with entry into a more glamorous life.  Instead, he makes a request of his own that leads the lads into a psychological prison of ever narrower dimensions.  Scene after scene of good weather and good fortune lead us to the turning point—a sudden shower that brings the phrase “don’t rain on my parade” unbidden to mind.  While the sun may come out again for other characters, the brothers’ good times have ended.

          One delights in the beauty of individual shots, in the smoldering eroticism, and the faces expressive of ambition, bluff, doubt and despair.  A masterful piece of film-making.

"CATCH ME IF YOU CAN"

I love a good con movie. Scripts by David Mamet fill me with delight. I spent hours with a friend trying to figure out "The Usual Suspects." So I went to see "Catch Me If You Can" positively inclined toward the film. I looked forward to seeing Tom Hanks, who had done such a fine job as the flaky, hippy police officer in "Dragnet," with Dan Ackroyd as straight man, reversing roles and playing the straight FBI man. I looked forward to this evocation of the Sixties, when Abbie Hoffman could write in Steal This Book that he regularly flew around the country for free by exploiting holes in the system that he regretted not being able to mention in print lest the airlines close them.

The movie tells the tale of Frank Abagnale, Jr. (Leonardo diCaprio) who, before reaching the age of nineteen, had flown two million miles as a pilot for Pan American Airlines (now defunct, but that wasn't his fault), served as an emergency room medical officer in a hospital in Atlanta, passed the Louisiana State Bar exam and served as assistant district attorney in that state, as well as kiting fraudulent checks worth several million dollars all, needless to say, without ever having completed high school.

I'm sorry to report that I didn't find a single scene that rang true. Actors, costumes, sets and script all screamed "Fake! Fake! Fake!" Now this isn't the way a con movie is supposed to work, and the fact that the film is based on a true story has no bearing on the situation. We go to the movies to be caught up in a tale which assists us in the suspension of disbelief. This film perversely insists on continually reinstating our disbelief. You leave the theatre wishing you could go to a movie.

“THE CHANGELING”

            “A true story” the film announces:  not “based on a true story” or “inspired by a true story.”  This makes a heavy claim.  In Los Angeles in 1928 a nine-year-old boy goes missing.  His mother (Angelina Jolie) appeals to the police for help but must wait several months before a lad answering the description turns up in Wisconsin.  The police bring him back to Los Angeles and, amid much fanfare, reunite him with his mother.  The problem is, she says they have the wrong boy.  Incredible as it may sound, the L.A. police refuse to admit an error and, when the mother persists, they lock her up in a psychiatric prison.  Then the story becomes truly strange, as in stranger than fiction, since no scriptwriter would get away with the plotline that follows.  John Malkovich plays a minister who helps the mother fight the police force and win, compelling them to admit their error and release other women locked up under similar circumstances.

            The film works well on all counts except the lead, in my estimation.  Everyone else disappears into a role; Angelina Jolie appears constantly in italics.  She conscientiously displays every emotion that the script requires, but you’re not supposed to notice an actor doing that.  When she roller-skates down the aisles in her job as a supervisor, you can’t for a minute believe that Angelina Jolie should be on roller-skates.  In close-ups, her lips don’t look like anything you’ve seen on another human woman.  Perhaps such details don’t bother her fans, but I found the performance highly distracting.

            Watch for a sly political statement.  The film with a beautiful sequences revolving about an electric streetcar, and director Clint Eastwood lovingly portrays the streetcar system throughout the film, even though it never appears as part of the plot.  You see 1928 Los Angeles, completely unified by an efficient public transportation system, and wonder what happened; then you remember how General Electric, currently appealing for a financial bail-out, bought up the then-private system and trashed it in order to remove any possible competition for the sale of automobiles.

"CHANGING LANES"

I have always thought of driving, better than sports, as a metaphor for life and a reflection of one's character. We've seen all sorts on the road: the timid, who stops in the acceleration lane; the conservative, who insists on driving in the middle lane of the 404 at 100 kph; the dithering, who signals one way and turns the other; the aggressive, who treats all other cars as obstacles to be removed. For me, driving represents an expression of the human community in which each participant should foster the flow.

A rupture in the flow can have far-reaching effect. You've all experienced the "phantom" accident, a crash which may have happened hours before, and for which no physical evidence remains, but whose disruption of the flow has forced you to slow down or even stop.

Changing lanes alters the flow. Ideally, no one else has to undertake corrective (or worse, defensive) behavior when you decide to move from one lane to another. "Changing Lanes" tells what happens when an aggressive driver violates the tacit agreement to community, abandons the person he has wronged, and suffers the consequences.

Driving errors have clear-cut penalties: each offense costs a certain number of points. Cross the threshold and you lose your license. Errors in life remain more ambiguous. How many times does a woman forgive a man who has mistreated her? At what point does she end the marriage?

Samuel L. Jackson plays a recently recovering alcoholic trying to hold onto his family. At least he's joined AA--we don't know whether he's going to make it or not. William Hurt offers the kind of tough love I think I'd want in an AA colleague. Ben Affleck plays a highly-paid, weak-willed lawyer, working in his father-in-law's firm, unsure of his footing in the murky ethical area where the firm does its business. Sidney Pollack portrays the rapacious owner of the firm so convincingly that you almost accept his philosophy that "at the end of the day I feel I've done more good than harm" until you recall that his entire value system is based on replacing his current yacht with a bigger yacht.

The Affleck character has been taught to use money and power to get his way. The Jackson character, powerless and at one point penniless, must resort to other means. The film asks whether these two men, brought together by a traffic accident, can change the lanes of their lives in a constructive fashion. The resolution may appear too neat (this is a Hollywood movie, after all) but the questions remain valid. And if I ever hit rock-bottom in my own life, I hope I can retain the dignity that Samuel L. Jackson depicts here.

“CHARLIE WILSON’S WAR”

          In the 1980’s the United States was supporting the Afghan freedom fighters against the Soviet Red Army.  Well, “supporting” might not be the best word.  Perhaps “rooting for” might better convey the level of assistance.  Then an obscure Texas Congressman named Charlie Wilson learned about the plight of the Afghanis and decided to do something about it.  Wilson loved booze and he loved women, but he knew how Congress worked and holding more IOUs than anyone else in the House of Representatives he more or less singlehandedly arranged for enough covert military support for the Afghanis to drive the Red Army out of their country.  (That these same freedom fighters, armed by the U.S., became the Taliban, is another story.)

          In “Charlie Wilson’s War” Tom Hanks plays the eponymous hero with an almost palpable delight in embodying the man’s vices as well as his strengths.  An alarmingly skinny Julia Roberts plays a bitchy right-wing Texas heiress whose political connections prove to be essential to the operation’s success, and Philip Seymour Hoffman plays a rogue CIA officer who takes pleasure in afflicting the comfortable.  The result is the most delightful political comedy I’ve seen since Dustin Hoffman and Robert DeNiro teamed up in “Wag the Dog.”  Added seasonal bonus:  we see the newly armed Afghanis shooting Soviet aircraft out of the sky to the accompaniment of Handel’s “And He Shall Purify” from Messiah.  Don’t miss this one!

"CHARLIE’S ANGELS 2"

I confess a fondness for Drew Barrymore ever since "E.T.," and for Cameron Diaz since "My Best Friend’s Wedding." Both have appeared in some pretty dreadful films but have shown themselves to be skilled comediennes given the right material. "Charlie’s Angels 2" has a few endearing moments, such as the three girls performing an impromptu dance in the living room, but for the most part the film just illustrates the current trend of downright nastiness in action films. Some people have admired Demi Moore’s performance as the villain of the piece and if you like what she does, you’ll find a lot to like. I was just turned off by the entire experience.

"CHICAGO"

It doesn't pay to underestimate the power of music. When used to comic effect, it may leave you mildly confused, as in "H.M.S. Pinafore" where a stirring patriotic tune leaves you believing, for a few moments, that indeed there could be nothing finer than to be an Englishman. For a more sinister application, recall the shiver you felt the first time you saw "Cabaret," in the scene where a handsome blond youth sings "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" in a clear tenor voice, thrilling you with his ingenuous performance until the camera pulls back to reveal the swastika on his arm identifying a member of the Hitlerjugend.

I promise you will be seduced by "Chicago," the most blatantly cynical film I have ever seen. Most of us would disavow bald statements that the criminal justice system is corrupt and that murder and the resulting trial merely provide entertainment for the masses. But set it to music, add a jazzy orchestral accompaniment, back-up dancers and astonishingly strong performances by Renée Zellweger, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Richard Gere, who takes greater delight in his amorality than any screen performer since Joel Grey in "Cabaret," and you will find yourself leaving the theatre amazed at the way you've been manipulated. Depravity has never displayed such style.

“CHILDREN OF MEN”

          Utopian literature, prior to the 20^th century, usually presented ideal worlds based on economic, social or religious grounds.  Negative utopias, or dystopias, featured in Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World.  To this latter tradition belongs P.D. James’s Children of Men, set in 2027, a period beset by the consequences of today’s negative trends in pollution, xenophobia and political repression.  “Children of Men,” directed by Alfonso Cuarón, has been filmed almost entirely on overcast days on sets decorated with grays, blacks and browns, creating a bleak tone in a world full of polluted streams, garbage-strewn streets, and trains whose windows have been fitted with bars for protection against rocks thrown by disaffected poor people, which seems to include most of the citizenry.  Armed policemen appear on virtually every corner, with a mandate to round up and ship out all immigrants. 

          The world seems doomed by a mysterious blight of infertility.  Public mourning takes place at the death of the youngest person on the planet, an eighteen-year-old.  Pets have replaced children, and old people are encouraged to end their lives with a product called Quietus.  An insurgent element, called the Fish, is preparing for a general uprising, which army and police forces are committed to quelling.  In this midst of all this hopelessness Theo (Clive Owen) is called upon by his ex-wife (Julianne Moore) to escort a young refugee to a safe exit from the country.  Theo draws on the help of on an old friend, an unregenerate hippie delightfully portrayed by Michael Caine. 

What makes the mission so urgent is that the refugee is a young woman in an advanced stage of pregnancy, evidently the first pregnant woman in the world in nearly a generation.  Don’t let the news that the film has a happy ending mislead you:  this is one dark story, but brilliantly told with first-rate acting.  Lest the viewer take refuge in the notion that this is just science fiction, imagine contemporary life in Darfur, Baghdad, Paris during the recent riots, or half a dozen other of our world’s “trouble spots.” 

          The release of the film at Christmastime, a man and a young pregnant woman being guided by a lantern to a makeshift bed where she gives birth:  the filmmakers must have decided this was too subtle for contemporary audiences, so we twice hear “Jesus Christ” uttered (as an oath) to beat us over the head with the symbolism.  Nonetheless, this is a remarkable piece of film-making.

“CHIMERA”  (Tarragon Theatre)

The mythological chimera took the form of a composite beast, a combination of lion, goat and serpent.  In genetic modification, as defined in Canada’s Assisted Human Reproduction Act, a chimera refers to “a human embryo into which a cell of any non-human life form has been introduced.”  Such a practice is banned by the act.  In “Chimera” the play by Wendy Lill currently playing at the Tarragon Theatre, the issue centres on the reverse process:  introducing human cells into non-human embryos, a practice not prohibited under Canadian law.  A scientist defends the practice as offering the possibility of a cure for autism.  A creationist attacks the research as tampering with God’s will.  The new Minister of Justice, into whose portfolio the issue falls, tries to make her way through this political minefield.  And a reporter seizes the issue as a potential salvation for a stalled career.  The play carries us rapidly back and forth between the minister’s office, the floor of parliament, the bar that serves as the reporter’s office, and the garden into which the scientist, appalled by the misunderstanding of her work, retreats.  Such is the magic of theatre that a few meagre props suffice to establish each of these locales.  Yet if the play were simply about the issue of reproductive technology, it would merit the criticism it received in The Toronto Star as talky and devoid of drama.

          Rather, the subject of this play is connectivity, that aspect of Darwin’s work often neglected in favour of the more rugged “survival of the fittest.”  Connectivity, in Darwin’s sense, commonly finds expression nowadays as ecology, the notion that a change in any element within an ecosystem can have a profound effect on the entire system.  Connectivity takes two forms in the play.  One, the more sinister, shows how apparently independent actions and decisions by individuals actually belong to a larger scheme controlled by a corporation that manipulates reporters, politicians and scientists to suit its interests. 

          One summer when I was in graduate school, I received an unexpected invitation to join a study group on racism.  I’d never given much thought to racism but, flattered by the invitation, I joined the group.  We read a different book each week, covering various aspects of the black experience, the history of slavery, and so forth, taking turns being discussion leader and evaluator.  In the fall our study led us to put together the university’s first student-run course, which we offered to several hundred students in the spring.  It was a heady experience, and I found myself serving as secretary-coordinator of the whole enterprise.  Only later did I learn that what we thought was student activism on a critical issue of the day was actually a project by a doctoral candidate in education, for whom we were simply unwitting laboratory subjects.  In this fashion the characters in Wendy Lill’s play act as unconscious agents of a larger corporate scheme.

          A second, more humane, aspect of connectivity becomes apparent in the play’s second act, where we learn that the issue at hand touches each of the characters in some directly personal fashion.  Their interactions offer the characters the opportunity to move from the abstract to the immediate, to explore personal connections in place of political jousting.  Without ever falling into sentimentality by actually stating the fact, Wendy Lill shows us that as members of the human community, if we only cared more for each other on a personal level we wouldn’t be obliged to oppose each other so vigorously and so uselessly on the political.  Alas, for the most part we see the characters refuse to make these connections.  One reaches out and the other rebuffs the gesture.  But for me this is where the power of the play lies.  Its dramatic success arises from the strength of characterizations, both as written and as acted, that makes us care enough about the individuals to wish that they were better able to connect.

“CHLOE”

          A woman gynecologist, suspicious of her university professor husband’s possible infidelity, hires a young prostitute to tempt him, with unexpected results.   Okay, so you’ve got a plotline, but the story as fleshed out by screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson becomes subtle and mysterious, while the filming by Atom Egoyan becomes a beautiful valentine to the city of Toronto.  In the Q&A, after the screening before 1500 adoring fans in the “Elgin Theatre, Egoyan explained how Liam Neeson initially turned down the part of the husband as not being large enough.  Through collaboration in a theatre project, Egoyan was able to persuade him to do “Chloe,” where his acting ability brings real weight to the role.  But the picture really belongs to Julianne Moore, as the suspicious wife, and Amanda Seyfried, as the call girl.  Sorting out who is “good” and “bad” evokes a complicated discussion, as the screenwriter indicated in the Q&A.  Without revealing too much of the story, let me leave you with a few questions for when you see it:  How does your opinion of the main characters change when you learn what really happens?  What do you consider to be the significance of the hair ornament in the final scene?  Do you consider it to be happy ending and why?  During the Q&A I pointed out that when Egoyan directed an opera production for the Canadian Opera Company everyone commented on the influence of his filmmaking on the opera.  I wondered whether directing opera had influenced his filmmaking.  Egoyan replied that directing opera had given him a new appreciation for the power of music and in his recent films he had exploited that power.  I found the lush, romantic score of “Chloe” underscored the film’s sensuality and erotic charge.  Don’t miss this one!

"CHRISTMAS WITH THE KRANKS"

What do Jamie Lee Curtis, Dan Ackroyd, Tim Allen and Austin Pendleton have in common? Among other things, these actors share the ability to create memorable scenes despite weak scripts or negligent direction. When you go, pre-warned, to a silly movie like "Christmas With the Kranks," you may find that the film is far worse than you’d feared or, in this case, full of amusing, even entertaining moments, mostly the result of the abilities of these actors to make much out of very little.

It’s a one-joke film: the Kranks, their daughter having joined the Peace Corps, decide to skip Christmas and put the money into a cruise. Their neighbours, refusing to accept this gross dereliction of long-standing tradition, make their lives living hell. Then the daughter announces that she’s coming home after all and the Kranks have to call on these same neighbours for a last-minute transformation of their house. Tim Allen has made a career of Christmas movies and an art form of falling off roofs. He also has a memorable Botox scene. Jamie Lee Curtis has a fine time with sudden changes of emotion. Dan Ackroyd has a special genius for "playing it straight for laughs." Austin Pendleton manages to make you laugh just looking at him. So you can take the kids to see this film and still have fun.

"CINEFRANCO FESTIVAL" 2004

When we think of the 120 ethnic groups represented in Toronto, the most ethnically diverse city in the world according to the United Nations, we tend to think of immigrant communities from the Mideast, Far East, West Indies or Africa, but the Toronto also boasts a substantial francophone population, many of whom turn out for the Cinéfranco Festival. Unable to get any information over the telephone, I headed down to the Royal Cinema where the thirty-seven films are being shown, and asked for tickets for the next two shows. With an hour and a half to wait, I headed to the nearest Starbucks, notebook in hand. Say what you will about the politics of the operation, Starbucks has provided the local equivalent of a European café, someplace where you can sit, read a newspaper, meet friends, drink hot chocolate, eat pastries, and savor life.

"MES ENFANTS NE SONT PAS COMME LES AUTRES" (My Children are Different). How far do you push a musical prodigy? To achieve world-class excellence in music requires starting young, having good teachers, and sacrificing virtually everything else to the cause. (The same could probably be said of achieving world-class excellence in skating.) In this film, an orchestral cellist, who never had the right combination of elements to achieve a solo career, is determined that his children will reach the highest level. His eleven-year-old son accepts the regimen but his adolescent daughter, a cellist, rebels.

Throughout the film we are reminded of how much we miss in a cinematic diet made up almost exclusively of American films. "Mes Enfants" doesn’t shrink from the technical aspects of music-making, nor does it cut off musical excerpts after a few measures. Instead, we hear long stretches of orchestral music, chamber music, and solo music, as well as seeing the intimate details of life in a conservatory and the procedures of international competitions. In particular, the cello-playing of the adolescent girl was astonishingly realistic.

In the question period after the screening, in which both the writer/director Denis Dercourt and the female lead Elodie Peudepièce talked about the film, we learned why. Dercourt, in addition to being a filmmaker, is a professor at the conservatory in Strasbourg, and Mlle. Peudepièce joined the production after an audition of more than one hundred young cellists. Though professionals dubbed the final soundtrack, she was actually playing every note. When I commented on the technical musical details of the film, Dercourt explained his belief in showing a métier from the inside. I can hardly describe the warmth of the reception given these two visitors and the genuine appreciation of the film-making art as perhaps the highest possible artistic calling: spending time in a theatre full of true cineastes was a remarkable experience.

"FRANCE BOUTIQUE"

An exuberant satire on television and consumerism, "France Boutique" offers a behind-the-scenes look at an enterprise created by a man and his wife--complete with a bevy of models, sets, and production crew--devoted to selling silly gadgets over the airwaves. A rival, determined to take over the successful program, introduces a gigolo into the works in an effort both to break up the marriage and to destroy the company. If you can recall the fellow from the early days of television who used to display the wonders of a kitchen gizmo, and then imagine the same program with the kind of budget generally associated with a movie, you might get the idea. I was pleased to recognize that the actor who played the cameraman for the television show had the same role thirty years ago in François Truffaut’s "Day for Night."

“CIRQUE DU SOLEIL—DELIRIUM”

          This film made me reflect on the nature of time and how vastly our conception of time has altered over, say, the past hundred and fifty years.  In Abraham Lincoln’s day, a speech lasting two hours did not appear uncommonly long, and gave rise to serious discussion among its auditors.  In the early decades of the twentieth century a crowd might wait patiently for half a day or more while a daredevil prepared to be fired from cannon, and audiences for Harry Houdini’s escapes sometimes waited for more than an hour for him to reappear after being shackled in some restraint.  Today such a treatment of time strikes us as nearly unimaginable.  When I was a boy, Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus presented acts in three rings simultaneously, a real challenge to take in.  The early days of the Cirque du Soleil represented a step in the direction of simplicity, an act without animals taking place in a single ring in a modestly-sized tent. 

          But times have changed, and with them our conception of time.  Current Cirque du Soleil shows take place on a vast stage between vast screens with outsized projections dwarfing the human scale of the performers with rapid changes in the manner of a music video.  “Delirium” cuts time intervals even more finely.  Even a music video contains a series of gestures.  The filmed version of this circus show fragments these gestures so that you never see one completed.  Presumably this approach to time responds to popular taste, and my reluctance to embrace it testifies to my outdated tastes.  Contemporary atomization of time leaves one incapable of finishing a thought, but such a sentiment misses the point:  the show aims not at thought but image, and contains strikingly beautiful and occasionally fantastic images that delight until they weary the mind. 

"COFFEE AND CIGARETTES"

I suppose the reviews that described the sketches that comprise "Coffee and Cigarettes" as "uneven" should have given me a clue: in my opinion they range from the merely bad to the truly awful. Half the time they sound like improvisations by actors uncomfortable with improvisation. The rest of the time they sound like written scripts read by celebrities uncomfortable with written scripts. You’ll recognize a lot of familiar faces in this film—probably a lot more than I recognized—some of whom have shown talent in other movies, but not here. The sketches revolve around the theme of coffee and cigarettes, a mantra to which the actors cling as a kind of buoy when their dialogue threatens to sink. And if the acting is bad, the editing is worse. In every case, you’re aware of the camera running on too long. This is one embarrassing movie.

"COLD MOUNTAIN"

The Civil War and the First World War distinguish themselves by their enormous cost in lives and the number of deaths in close combat. When I told Adriana the story of how, one Christmas Eve during World War I, Allied and German soldiers stopped shooting at each other and sang Christmas carols, she asked me why. I tried to explain the effect of Christmas on men far from home, a shared sentiment that transcended the political conflict separating them. Then she asked why they resumed fighting. I had more difficulty explaining that.

"Cold Mountain" depicts the power of love to sustain the spirits of a soldier and his sweetheart through years of dispiriting separation during a war that altered the lives of non-combatants as much as soldiers. Nicole Kidman plays a city girl trained to play the piano, read Latin, and embroider, in other words, a woman totally unequipped to survive on a farm. Just when she is about to succumb (and the audience to lose patience with her helplessness), along comes Renee Zellweger to save the farm and the film. Meanwhile, Jude Law, injured in battle, deserts the army and begins an odyssey back to Cold Mountain over hundreds of miles of Romanian wilderness, standing in for the American South, surviving attacks by both Confederate and Union troops and enjoying the assistance of sympathetic women along the way.

An excellent supporting cast helps to carry the movie over its two-and-a-half hour length and to make us deplore the cruel human cost of war. The film is beautifully photographed, if you don’t mind the convention that Nicole Kidman spends three years farming without ever getting so much as a smudge on her face.

"COLLATERAL"

If you analyze this movie according to the classical rules of dramatic structure, in which the hero undergoes a life-altering experience, the hero of the film is Jamie Foxx. Tom Cruise, as a professional assassin, functions as the straight man—an elegantly dressed, frighteningly skilled professional—who serves as Jamie Foxx’s experience during one long Los Angeles night. Foxx plays a cabbie who claims to have higher ambitions; Cruise plays his unusual fare, who offers him $600 to be his chauffeur for the evening. It doesn’t take Foxx long to see what’s happening—Cruise’s first victim lands jarringly on top of the cab after a fall from an apartment window—but it takes him longer to understand that he doesn’t have any choice in the arrangement, whatever his moral compunctions. The film traces Foxx’s growth in courage and self-awareness while acting as Cruise’s slave. For all my dislike of L.A. I have to acknowledge the movie’s elegant portrayal of the city as a beautifully surreal location. The careful pacing, the sharp dialogue and the simplicity of the relationship between the protagonists make this one of the most stylish examples of film noir I’ve seen in some time.

"CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND"

If the name Chuck Barris doesn't immediately strike a bell, think of the late-Fifties, early-Sixties game shows "The Dating Game," "The Newlywed Game" and "The Gong Show" that he created, or the pop tune "Palisades Park" that he wrote. [I was alone among my learned colleagues last night in never having seen any of these programs; on the other hand, I believe I am the only one to have visited Palisades Park, a now-defunct amusement park perched on the escarpment on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River.]

Now if these contributions to twentieth-century culture don't strike you at first glance as being on the same plane as the theoretical achievements of John Nash, a version of whose life was depicted in "A Beautiful Mind," you may wonder why the life of Chuck Barris even merits cinematic treatment. After all, his private life had none of the out-of-control raciness of television personality Bob Crane, brought to the screen in "Autofocus." In fact, as portrayed here, Barris was obnoxious, abrasive, heartless, and boorish, the very epitome of the term "loser." Why would we want to watch him for two hours?

It turns out that Barris wrote a book detailing his shadowy career as a CIA assassin. His jaunts as "chaperone" for couples from "The Dating Game" would provide him a perfect cover for trips to Helsinki or West Berlin where he would carry out covert killings. Now despite everything we know about the level of incompetence in the Central Intelligence Agency, this story seems totally unbelievable, but the premise of the book seemed like a natural invitation for a film, natural, that is, if you have a mind like that of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, who brought us "Inside John Malkovich" and "Adaptation." It also appealed to George Clooney, who makes an impressive directorial debut with this film. (You can imagine him chatting conspiratorially with the cinematographer with the same easy charm he displayed in "Ocean's Eleven.")

One of the strongest features of "A Beautiful Mind" was the convincing presentation of John Nash's fantasies, specifically the intelligence agent played by Ed Harris. So here, even if we discount the plausibility of Chuck Barras' CIA connection, we are swept away by the acting of George Clooney as the recruiting agent and Julia Roberts as an undercover femme fatale, showing only her nasty side with never a glimpse of that copyrighted smile.

The television side of the movie has been so delightfully displayed that we wish we could have seen more. In a brief "Dating Game" episode, a female contestant asks questions of three unseen bachelors, settling on an unappealing fat man and passing over Brad Pitt and Matt Damon. A representative of the Federal Communications Commission does a brief scene-stealing turn that left the theatre audience in guffaws.

Drew Barrymore plays a lollipop of a girl with perky charm. In short, everything about this film provokes delight except its main character, who is likely to irritate the hell out of you. In retrospect, you can block out the center, focus on the periphery, and remember what a good time you had with it, but these fond memories come at the cost of having to watch a self-loathing, disagreeable bundle of superficiality for 113 minutes.

"CONFESSIONS OF A TEENAGE DRAMA QUEEN"

Would you believe a G-rated teen flick? I applaud the good timing of a movie I can take my daughter to during March Break. Lindsay Lohan, star of "The Parent Trap" and "Freaky Friday," plays a girl from Manhattan, transplanted to New Jersey when her parents split up, who invents a few personal details—including a name change—in hopes of making herself more interesting to her new classmates. Never mind that she has the looks, charm and poise of a veteran movie star. The movie would sell us the message that honesty wins out over pretense. A rock star with an alcohol problem (in the world of this film, drugs don’t even exist, which is something of a blessing) decides to reform when someone who admires him has the nerve to identify his problem to his face.

All well and good. But the film itself totally lacks honesty. The Lindsay Lohan character has a wardrobe never found even in suburban New Jersey. And the "high school play," directed by Carol Kane to great comic effect, bears no resemblance to any actual student production: this is big-time Hollywood with small people as singers and dancers. We’ve gotten used to this kind of thing ever since Mickey Rooney’s "Hey kids! Let’s put on a show!" But the Andy Hardy movies weren’t trying to sell the value of authenticity in personal relationships. Indeed, the word "relationship" didn’t even exist in those days.

You’ll enjoy spotting the downtown Toronto landmarks standing in for New York City: Union Station for Grand Central Station; the Elgin Theatre and Yonge Street for Broadway. Perhaps you can find others. The whole notion of a Hollywood film advocating ingenuousness is pretty loony on the face of it, but your kids will have a good time, and Lindsay Lohan does have a gift for embodying wholesomeness.

CONFIDENCE

There’s nothing like a good con movie. Unfortunately, "Confidence," despite the presence of Dustin Hoffman, doesn’t make the grade. We return to "The Sting" over and over because of the acting of Paul Newman, Robert Redford and Robert Shaw; because of the fine screenplay; the stylish camerawork, the excellent direction, and the musical score that made Scott Joplin a household name. "Confidence" attempts to be stylish but just comes out as sleazy. Neither actors, nor script, nor direction nor music could make us want to see this film again, and after reading this you may not even want to see it the first time. You won’t be missing much.

"THE CONJUROR" (At the Isabel Bader Theatre)

I guess I can't claim to love all magic shows. There is one clown who really gets on my nerves and David Copperfield's blatant exploitation of teenage girls does become offensive. But I'm an ideal magician's audience because I'm so easily fooled. On a Saturday afternoon I'll visit one of Toronto's magic stores just to watch the salesman demonstrate some favourite illusion, and on a slow day I often end up getting an entire show.

My favourite magician was Doug Henning, whose television spectaculars I never missed and whom I once saw in a full-evening show in Pittsburgh. For two hours he made me believe things that couldn't possibly be true and I left the theatre deliriously bewildered.

In "The Conjuror" David Ben recreates an old-style magic show from 1912, complete with a male assistant sawed in half (no possibility of identical twins this time--I don't know how he managed it), a terrific levitation, and a marvellous illusion in which he repeatedly reached into a punchbowl, withdrew his hands dripping with water, then opened his fist to pour dry coloured sand into a container. There was even some old-fashioned spiritualism.

If you enjoyed reading Glen David Gold's novel, Carter Beats the Devil, the story of a San Francisco magician in the 1920's, you won't want to miss this charming show.

"CONTACT" (Canon Theatre)

Those who enjoy the movements of classical ballet but tire of tutus may want to check out "Contact." Where a musical presents a story that periodically bursts into song, the "dansical" breaks into dance, and one can take a peculiar delight in a commonplace scene, such as a New York restaurant in 1954, where waiters and patrons episodically turn into virtuoso dancers, then suddenly return to their normal roles as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred.

The second act consists of a dream/fantasy that introduces a lonely advertising executive to the world of swing dance, with fillips recalling sequences from classic dance movies like "Singin' in the Rain" and "Holiday Inn."

I felt uncomfortable watching a show whose entire musical support came from tape recordings, but that cavil aside, I'd recommend "Contact" as an engaging bit of entertainment.

"COOKIN’ AT THE COOKERY" (Held over at the Canadian Stage Company)

"C at the C, subtitled "The Music and Times of Albert Hunter," tells of the jazz singer who enjoyed a career extending over more than four decades, who became a nurse when the singing jobs ran out, and who then made an extraordinary comeback at the age of 82. Narrator Montego Glover plays a multitude of roles, including the young Albert Hunter and a remarkable turn as Louis Armstrong. But the evening belongs to Jackie Richardson, who sets the theatre rocking, to the accompaniment of a first-rate jazz combo. A remarkable slice of cultural history has been served up in an infectiously upbeat musical wrapping. See it if you can.

“COPYING BEETHOVEN” (Toronto International Film Festival)

How far may one go in a story “based on actual incidents”?  Beethoven indeed required a copyist just before the first performance of his Ninth Symphony, but is it likely to have been an outspoken young woman who challenged his arrogance, corrected his musical choices and allowed him to mime her gestures so that he could pretend to conduct the premiere?  This strikes me as taking artistic license a bit too far.  Still, the director (Agnieszka Holland) has allowed us to see a remarkable performance by a virtually unrecognizable Ed Harris portraying the composer with power and authority, as well as permitting us to hear large chunks of the Ninth Symphony (period costumes, modern instruments), for which we may be truly thankful.

"THE CORPORATION"

Forget the "Scary Movie" series, "The Corporation" is one of the most frightening movies I’ve seen lately. This 2 ½-hour documentary examines every aspect of the modern corporation, starting with its history (ubiquitous and omnipotent though it be, the corporation as an entity is not very old). The 14^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, originally passed in order to protect the rights of emancipated slaves, was seized upon by early corporate lawyers, who persuaded the courts to treat the corporation as a legal "person," with all the rights and privileges pertaining thereto. The documentary investigates just what sort of "person" the corporation resembles and, using the United Nations checklist of mental disorders, finds that the corporations it studies fit all the criteria for a psychopath. In addition to familiar faces like that of documentary filmmaker Michael Moore, we see CEO’s of major corporations offering what they consider cogent justifications for their actions and you listen in utter dismay and disbelief as they incriminate themselves with their own words. The alliance of transnational corporations with repressive governments, both past and present, becomes particularly troubling. In one city in Bolivia, for example, the World Bank, in an effort to insure a fresh water supply, awarded a contract to the Bechtel Corporation the terms of which made it illegal for the inhabitants of the city to collect rainwater. When the population protested, the army came out to quell the demonstrations and protect Bechtel’s interests. When I saw this film, the theatre at Canada Square was completely filled, and people actively rooted for the good guys and booed the bad, almost like an old-fashioned melodrama, but broke into loud applause at the end. This is a film that should be seen not just by concerned adults but by students like those at St. Andrew’s College, who will become the next generation of corporate CEO’s.

“THE COUNTERFEITERS”

          Operation Bernhard, the German plan to destabilize the British and American economies through the circulation of vast quantities of counterfeit currency, depended on the engraving and printing skills of a number of Jewish prisoners in a concentration camp.  As an expert counterfeiter, does your ethical responsibility lie in supporting the Nazi cause, to prevent the death of your fellow prisoners, or to sabotage the operation, to undermine the German war effort?  The morality of the concentration camps, as portrayed in “The Counterfeiters,” becomes starkly simple:  survive another day, and perhaps the day after that, and, if possible, do what you can for another’s survival.  If you collaborate with your captors, you may delay your death, and perhaps even see the end of the war.  Or perhaps you can play the dangerous game of trying to have it both ways, preserving the appearance of cooperation while doing everything in your power to delay success.  The issues raised in “The Counterfeiters” resonate with current events, particularly the resistance of Buddhist monks against the military junta in Burma and the Chinese usurpers in Tibet.  The film strips away the protection of our comfortable philosophy and brings us, nearly naked, to the front lines.  Not to be missed.

“COURAGEOUS” (Tarragon Theatre)

          Michael Healy’s latest play twists contemporary subjects—including gay marriage and immigration—into a convoluted series of sketches.  The play opens with a hilarious civil ceremony uniting an airhead and a total jerk.  Immediately thereafter a gay couple appears ahead of schedule but the functionary who performed the first union tells them they must wait for his colleague to appear.  The first act continues in an improbable, but within the parameters thoroughly logical, examination of ethical and legal rights around the question of gay marriage, with a distinguished Somalian carrying the issue to a larger global context.  The second act begins, to our surprise, with the jerk from the first act announcing that the other actors will not be seen again and that he will now serve as our narrator.  Once again Michael Healy bends the conventions of theatre to his own ends, with the help of a talented cast of seven performers.  This play engages both the intellect and the emotions of anyone willing to make the trek to Bridgman and Howland, but act fast—the theatre was completely filled on the Sunday matinee that we attended.

“THE COVE”

          Blame it on “Flipper,” the television show that taught audiences from 1964 to 1967 about the gracefulness, intelligence and particularly the cuteness of bottlenose dolphins.  Blame “Flipper” for the world-wide proliferation of dolphin shows and for the fad of “swimming with dolphins.”  It took only five dolphins to produce the “Flipper” show.  It takes thousands of dolphins to supply the current demand for dolphin encounters of one sort or another.

          Many of them come from Taiji, Japan, described in “The Cove” as a dolphin’s worst nightmare.  Every September, as dolphins carry out their annual migration, a fleet of Japanese fishermen creates a “wall of sound” to confuse the dolphins’ sophisticated communication system and drive the cetaceans into a cove where certain dolphins are chosen for their potential entertainment value and the rest slaughtered.

          “I wanted to make this film legally,” explains director Louie Psihoyos. That proving to be impossible, he assembled a team of divers, photographers and infiltration specialists to introduce hydrophones and hidden cameras into the slaughter area where no outsider had been permitted to enter.

          The major part of the film points out the ineffectiveness of the world’s whaling commission, the dangers of selling dolphin meat (high concentrations of mercury), the Japanese support of the dolphin slaughter, and the personal odyssey of Ric O’Murray, the man who trained the dolphins for the “Flipper” series and who now leads guerilla efforts to free dolphins everywhere from captivity.  (The famed Seaworld dolphin show, for example, relies on heavy medication to treat the dolphins’ stress-induced ulcers.)  Finally we come to the forbidden footage:  a grisly scene of blood and carnage.

          In the 60’s we had “Save the Whales.”  Now activists are crying “Save the Dolphins,” and “Save the Oceans.”  The results of a collapse of ocean life—now predicted to occur within 40 years—will be catastrophic for human life.  On the other hand, may we should just let our species be wiped out, since we are clearly the problem.  (For more information go to http://www.takepart.com/thecove/)

“CRACK”

          Imagine a private girls’ school on a remote English island in the 1930s, a boarding school where parents essentially dump their daughters, an institution where incoming mail is interrupted and outgoing mail censored.  In such a restrictive, bleak situation you can imagine the influence a flamboyant teacher might have on her young charges—a diving instructor who takes the girls on midnight sessions of skinny-dipping—even if the adventures she recounts as her own come in fact from 19^th-century romances.  The mental instability of such a teacher could be incorporated into a more or less stable, if mildly dysfunctional, system.  So far it sounds a bit like “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.”  Now introduce a new student, a Spanish aristocrat, whose presence threatens both the pecking order of the student clique and the supremacy of the unbalanced teacher—and “cracks” begin to show. 

          How can a first-time director produce such a remarkably assured film, with nary a wasted word or superfluous scene, even if her father is a famous director?  This represents an extraordinary debut.  A lush musical score contributes to an ethereal atmosphere reminiscent of “Picnic at Hanging Rock.”  Unlike most films about schools, we never see any actual instruction, but surely the girls experience more than their share of life lessons.

“CRAZY HEART”

How, you might ask, would any sane woman become involved with a drunken, unreliable country singer, reduced to performing in bowling alleys, who has to leave the stage in the middle of a gig in order to vomit in the parking lot?  And suppose the woman has a four-year-old son?  Well, you have to imagine that the singer performs some really good songs and has the charm of Jeff Bridges.  But still.  From the moment that the woman (Maggie Gyllenhaal) goes off, entrusting her son to this man’s care, you know that nothing good can come of it.  Bridges has earned an Academy Award nomination for his performance as a broken-down musician who watches his best material being performed by a younger, more popular singer (Colin Farrell).  Alcoholism isn’t a pretty sight at the best of times, and Bridges lets it all hang out here.  Strong performances, a good screenplay, and some fine music prevent the film from being a complete downer.

"CRIMSON GOLD"

The few Iranian films I have seen have left me with unforgettable images. If you haven’t yet seen "A Time for Drunken Horses," I recommend seeking it out. "Crimson Gold," in contrast to the desert setting of the latter film, takes place in Tehran, mostly at night. The main character Hussein, played by a non-professional veteran of the Iran/Iraq war, moves and speaks slowly, partly on account of the medication he receives. The film, based on an actual event, begins with a botched jewelry store robbery in which Hussein shoots the owner and then himself. The rest of the movie attempts to explain, in flashback, what might have led up to the incident.

Hussein, incapable of holding an office job due to his mental condition, makes his living delivering pizzas on a motor scooter. Many minutes of the film are devoted to the sight of his nocturnal travels, with the camera usually focussed through the windscreen onto his heavy, expressionless face. Since Hussein never shows feelings, we have to imagine what we would feel like in his position. One evening he delivers pizzas to an address being staked out by a police team set to arrest unmarried couples as they emerge from a drinking party. Compelled by the authorities to remain on the scene, Hussein distributes the pizza to the police and to other detainees. Attempting to case a jewelry store for a proposed robbery, Hussein and his partner are not even admitted. When they return in much finer clothing, accompanied by Hussein’s fiancée (his partner’s sister), they are let in but then treated in a patronizing manner.

For me the unforgettable images come with Hussein’s delivery to the apartment of a wealthy but lonely young man who invites Hussein in to keep him company. As Hussein wanders through the apartment we see a richly appointed dining room set for ten, a grand piano in an alcove, and finally the kind of swimming pool one associates with grand old hotels.

The event that sets the film in motion remains a mystery. If we find the filmmaker’s solution unsatisfactory, we can try to invent another. But Hussein’s face isn’t giving anything away.

“THE CRUCIBLE”  (Shaw Festival)

What are you willing to risk for the sake of a principle, for the sake of doing the right thing?  Social disapproval?  Your livelihood?  This issue appears on the front page of today’s “Toronto Star” as Ontario aviation workers, concerned about deficiencies in safety, but without the protection of the kinds of whistle-blower laws prevalent in the U.S., have adopted a code of silence, fearful that reporting dangerous conditions will cost them their jobs.  Witnesses to gang violence in this city are reluctant to report what they have seen to the authorities for fear of reprisal against themselves and their families.  While this issue remains active in one form or another in every generation, certain historical conditions focus the question with intolerable intensity.  In a situation as extreme as the Holocaust, would you number yourself among the Resistance if it meant putting your life and the lives of your loved ones in jeopardy?  The hunt for communists in the United States in the 1950’s put loyalties to the test.  The House Un-American Activities Committee, under the leadership of Senator Joseph McCarthy, used its power of subpoena to summon people from all walks of life, but with particular emphasis on those in the arts and show business, to demand whether they had ever been associated with the Communist Party (many had; it was no sin) and if, to escape prosecution, they would name others. 

In 1952 playwright Arthur Miller learned that Elia Kazan, the man who had directed Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” planned to offer the names of former communists from the 1930s, having been warned that he stood in danger of having his career as a Hollywood director terminated.  Miller had already been reflecting on what he could do, as a playwright, to protest the hysteria of the “Red scare” and he decided to write “The Crucible,” about the Salem witch trials of 1692.  The play focuses on the climate of fear generated by the witch hunts.  A group of adolescent girls, initially as a prank, and to excuse their own indiscretion (dancing in the woods, a dangerous practice in this era) accused women in the town of having appeared with the devil.  They supported their claims with acts of fainting and received support from adults open to finding supernatural explanations for common vicissitudes. 

In the play, the farmer John Proctor imagines that he and his wife can remain above the fray, but he is drawn into the maelstrom when his servant girl joins the accusers and his wife is taken away by the bailiff.  While we may not believe in the devil or consider risking our lives for the sake of our souls, we cannot be immune to the power of this dark play, or ignore the scary parallel between the insistence of the judge that one is either for this court or against it, and the similar language invoked by the President of the United States in the “war on terrorism.”  The play traces a spiral beginning with the townspeople at large and moving inexorably to the fate of John Proctor and his wife Ann as the face the question, “Will you confess in order to save your life?”  This is very powerful theatre.

"CRUSH"

Finally an adult comedy! Imagine three attractive professional women—a doctor, a police inspector, and the headmistress of a school—all forty-something, unattached, and devoted to each other. Imagine that the headmistress falls in love with a twenty-five-year-old, one of her former students, even, and that the other two do their best to bring her to her senses. Yes? No? Could go either way, depending on how the theme was treated. "Crush" takes the premise and runs with it in a delightfully self-conscious, post-modern way, with a sparking screenplay and the best music I’ve head in a movie in ages (except that the young man is shown to be playing a horrid Hammond organ while the sound track comes from a grand cathedral pipe organ). If you like the idea of a personal cell-phone message coming in the middle of a police action on a dotty rifle-shooter, go see this movie for some jolly grown-up fun.

“THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON”

A chap born as an old man at the end of World War I lives his life backwards, growing younger and younger until he finally expires as an infant in the present.  A curious story line, and even more the revelation that it came from a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald.  Reviewers have said that there’s no lesson to be learned here, that one simply marvels at the technology that permits us to see the face of Brad Pitt, hidden in many different bodies (until the reverse-aging protagonist finally reaches the actual age of the actor and, seeing Pitt unadorned, we almost feel disappointed).  I disagree.  Benjamin Button, in his long curious life, encounters a great many people, nearly all of them decent, kind and helpful.  Now this has also been my experience in life, but one seldom portrayed on the screen.  So quite aside from the cinematic wizardry, I applaud the courage to show the world as a good place full of good people, a vision you won’t find in newspapers or television news programs or most movies.  Cate Blanchett turns up in many supporting roles, including serving as our surrogate as the auditor of this remarkable tale.

"THE CURSE"

In the late 50’s, at the beginning of the rock-and-roll era, white-owned record companies, unwilling to market the black performing groups that furnished the creative impulse for the music, routinely arranged for white groups to cover each black hit, then invested heavily in promoting the white version. This open racism seems to have been accepted without much comment.

Contemporary Hollywood takes a similarly racist approach to "foreign" films (meaning any cinematic activity outside the United States). Movie companies buy the rights to foreign films then remake them with American actors. "Shall We Dance," the current romantic vehicle for Richard Gere and Susan Sarandon, was originally made in Japan in 1995, and described in the Halliwell guide as a "charming comedy that makes the familiar seem extraordinarily exotic." No one has had such kind words to say about the American remake, but the powers that be have determined that American audiences won’t watch Japanese actors.

"The Curse" is a remarkable remake in that it employs the same director, sets and script as the Japanese original, differing only in substituting B-movie American actors for the Japanese leads. The alteration does provide an additional level of discomfort as the audience shares the plight of American non-Japanese-speaking women, accompanying male partners. The males presumably have company-provided translators to ease their every step while the women are left to fend for themselves.

"The Curse," evidently one of a series of horror films set in the same house, illustrates the differences between the Japanese and the American approach to the genre. Where contemporary Hollywood fare depends on gruesome special effects, Japanese horror films rely on creating terror in more or less ordinary situations. While death occurs in "The Curse," there is little one could call violence. That doesn’t prevent it from being a very scary movie (although it would be even scarier if the musical score didn’t insist on building to a crescendo every time something untoward was about to occur).

I’m not sure I’d want to sit through the other five films in the series, but there’s much to appreciate in this stylized approach. Despite the dense population of Tokyo, characters keep finding themselves alone when creepy things begin to happen. A woman in a stairwell of a large office building becomes fearful when, above her, floor by floor, the lights begin to go out. The house which forms the center of the action manages to seem threatening despite the absence of the dank cellars one associates with horror movies. The film-maker repeatedly achieves an eerie effect from a little boy with an awful scream. The time sequence of the narrative has been shuffled a bit, but this can hardly be described as a plot-driven movie. Instead we see a series of variations on a theme, carried out with the artifice of a Japanese Noh drama. As pre-Hallowe’en fare, I found this infinitely preferable to, say, "Nightmare on Elm Street."

“CWCW”

The Female Eye Film Festival has been a Toronto fixture for eight years, long enough, one would think, to work out technical glitches, such as foreign films with no subtitles, or invisible subtitles, or half-hour waits to start a program.  Despite such frustrations, “CWCW,” a Welsh film directed by Delyth Jones, provides a rich reward.  Jane Jones, a script-writer for a soap opera called Family Doctor, has a fascination with Virginia Woolf.  She dresses like (and resembles) Woolf, constantly reads Woolf’s biography, and dreams of writing a novel tying together the marriage between Virginia and Leonard Woolf, George and Martha (the main characters in Edward Albee’s play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”) and Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor (who play the roles of George and Martha in Mike Nichols’ film of the play).  In “real life” (an expression with constantly shifting meanings), the script-writer’s marriage to the man playing the lead role in Family Doctor becomes a nightmare, due to his Jekyll & Hyde behaviour under the influence of alcohol, and she runs off to begin a new life in a quaint village whose inhabitants seem to come from a Virginia Woolf novel.  As the story continues you realize that you’re seeing plot elements described earlier in a failed soap-opera script.  The resulting film is clever, engaging and even moving.  I don’t know where it’s likely to turn up, but with so many channels of television nowadays I wouldn’t be surprised if you can catch it in some unexpected corner.

“DAN IN REAL LIFE”

          I don’t see much television.  Actually, I don’t see any television, but I know it when I see it, and “Dan in Real Life” is television disguised as a movie, with actors you’ve mostly never heard of delivering lame lines and situations manipulating the audience’s emotions in predictable ways.  Steve Carell makes this kind of movie regularly, but what on earth is Juliette Binoche doing here, Juliette the stunning star of “Chocolat,” “The English Patient,” “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” and Krzysztof Kieslowski’s brilliant “Trois Couleurs”?  Binoche’s presence makes the movie barely bearable, and perhaps that’s all you can ask for in a season of holiday clunkers.

          A widower with three bratty daughters and a noticeable lack of luck in finding a new partner (Carell) meets a charming, witty and attractive woman (Binoche) in a used bookstore, and looks forward to seeing her again.  He does, half an hour later, when she turns up at a family reunion as his brother’s new girlfriend.  I mean, even when someone wrote the idea on a napkin at a producer’s lunch, didn’t anyone say, “Great television show”?  Take it for what it’s worth.

"THE DANGEROUS LIFE OF ALTAR BOYS"

This is one scary movie. I'm not talking about things-that-jump-out-at-you scary. I mean the fear that comes when you see that the opening scene--two teenagers bringing down a telephone pole with a chainsaw--has no consequences. When these same boys, with more freedom than sense, undertake to break into a zoo, tranquilize a cougar, transport it to their school, and release it in the office of a hated teacher, you know nothing good can come of it.

The boys imagine their little gang to be an alliance of superheroes, a comic-book fantasy that one of the lads depicts in skilful drawings and which the film incorporates as a series of interpolated animations which only add to the sense of dread and impending disaster. The animations provide a graphic insight into the workings of the adolescent mind, where the protagonists use awesome strength to break their fetters and fight violent battles. But when the film cuts back to live action, you realize that there don't seem to be any parental restrictions to speak of, nothing to prevent the boys from actually realizing their fantasies.

Jodie Foster gives an unsmiling performance at the Catholic nun whom the boys anathematize as "Nunzilla" and Kieran Caulkin gives an eerily convincing depiction of a young man utterly lacking in restraint. (He goes through the film with his arm in a cast, the result of some earlier misadventure.) A very unsettling film.

“THE DARJEELING LTD”

          For all the glorious scenery and the fun of being on a train for a prolonged period, I eventually became impatient at watching three screw-ups screwing up their lives.  Late in the film a cameo appearance by Angelica Huston as their mother explains their problems.  Patti explains that when the parents are crazy or absent (or both), the oldest child takes on the parent role.  That’s what happens here.  After their father’s death (and mother’s disappearance), three brothers take a train trip in India to “re-bond.”  The oldest (Owen Wilson) has concealed from the others a plan to visit their mother in the isolated monastery to which she has repaired.  The other two (Adrian Brody and Jason Schwartzman) react to his bossiness the same way they have their whole lives:  apparent assent contradicted by passive-aggressive and occasionally open resistance.  The general craziness of the film brings measures of delight or irritation depending on the viewer’s level of patience.  It’s one of those films that you neither want to endorse nor miss.

"DARK BLUE"

In the summer of 1968 I was invited to join a study group reading books on racism and the black experience. By the time we had made our way through a dozen books we decided that the problem of institutionalized racism needed action, not study. We spent the fall preparing for the university’s first student-run course, "Racism in Western Society," in which several hundred students enrolled for the spring term.

Only later did we become aware that we were actually serving as someone’s doctoral project in the School of Education, not essentially different from the hamster that Adriana used for her science project. We focussed on racism but the project in which we unwittingly participated focussed on educational processes. (I don’t know what the doctoral student thought when, late in the spring, aghast at Nixon’s "secret" bombing of Cambodia, all several hundred of us postponed our work on racism and proceeded en masse to Washington to lobby our congressmen.)

In "Dark Blue" Kurt Russell plays a third-generation police officer who maintains an Old West pragmatic approach to law enforcement (shoot first, ask questions later). With the lines between the good guys and the bad guys so clearly drawn, it’s easy to enter a kind of Alice in Wonderland world in which the bad guys flush drugs down the toilet just as the cops are planting drugs to use as evidence. The experienced cop teams up with a likeable young chap trying to make the grade in a world of murky morality where "initiation" consists of shooting someone in cold blood. In a scene which takes place just before the start of the film, the young man has lost his nerve and the Kurt Russell character fires for him. As the film opens, the young lad is defending himself before a police review board, taking "credit" for the kill. Later the older cop reassures him, "If you go down, I go down; and if I go down, Jack goes down; and Jack ain’t going down," referring to the disagreeably paunchy puppet-master who has built an impregnable defense by collecting dirt on everyone in the department. Later we learn that the dubious street tactics are serving not so much to administer a frontier-style justice as to line Jack’s pockets: his puppets include not only police officers but also the hoodlums who carry out robberies at his behest.

The story plays itself out against the backdrop of the riots that took place in Los Angeles in 1991 after a jury acquitted four white police officers of the beating death of Rodney King, even though the event had been recorded on video and widely telecast. Entire sections of the city seemed to go berserk, with looters not even appearing to act in their own self-interest, considering the impractical things many of them chose to steal. The apparent breakdown of the justice system mirrored the rampant corruption within the police administration, engendered by an understanding that to oppose the system would be to end one’s career.

The breakdown of social institutions extends to marital relationships and we see in painful detail the ease with which attentiveness to police work can sap the strength of a marriage until nothing remains but an empty shell. In this context, one greets the repentance of someone with nothing to lose, willing to bring the entire corrupt system down, with either relief or incredulity depending upon one’s perspective and disposition.

This admirable film raises uncomfortable questions about means and ends, and the multilayered issues defeat easy answers.

“THE DARK KNIGHT”

          “The Dark Knight” is hardly the first film to find evil more fascinating than good, but I cannot think of a more flamboyant, balletic (dare I say?) exultation of evil.  Imagine a troupe of clowns, in the midst of robbing a bank, gradually knocking each other off.  Imagine seven riflemen offering a twenty-one-gun salute to the mayor and on their third volley directing their weapons at the honouree.  Imagine a man in a semi-trailer, travelling parallel to a line of police cruisers, obliterating them and their occupants one by one with a hand-held bazooka.  These acts move to an artistic level beyond mere violence and explosions, though the film offers enough of those to cover gaping holes in the plot.  (I have a friend who objects to my raising credibility issues in movies made from comic books.  I maintain that seeing real human beings doing horrendous things to each other has a different impact from looking at successive panels of a comic book.)

          Heath Ledger’s Oscar-nominated performance at The Joker glorifies his status as an agent of chaos in a manner capable of causing nightmares, while raising the ethical question of how a person of principle can combat an adversary with none.  As the film’s true protagonist, The Joker turns the audience to his mayhem into a mob begging a potential suicide to jump, a plea for forbidden pleasures that runs on for two and a half hours.

“THE DARK RIDER” (Tarragon Theatre)

          Back in my musicology bibliography seminar we learned to answer three questions about a book:  (1) What was it attempting to do? (2) How well did it succeed? (3) Was it worth doing?  “The Dark Rider” undertakes to retell the old German folktale of the Freeshooter, in which a poor marksman, determined to win a shooting contest to gain a maiden’s hand, consorts with the devil for six magic bullets guaranteed to hit their target.  The catch comes in the form of the seventh bullet, which does the devil’s bidding.  (You can probably guess the outcome from here.)

          “The Dark Rider” achieves its goal brilliantly, with ghostly costumes evoking a carnival play, fine ensemble acting and singing that clearly fulfills the director’s intentions.  Was it worth doing?  The answer evidently depends on your generational perspective.  Personally, I hated every minute of the show.  I detested the egregious overacting, like a parody of silent movie acting.  I abhorred the deliberately distorted singing.  I loathed the dumbing down of every aspect of the story, to the point that the single paragraph of intelligible dialogue had to be repeated verbatim as if pandering to an audience of cretins.  For me the show represented everything I deplore in a contemporary culture that has given us Sarah Palin as a vice-presidential candidate.  I longed to be at a production of Carl Maria von Weber’s opera, Der Freischütz, based on the same story.  So see the show and decide in which camp you belong.  The Toronto Star awarded it their highest rating.  Why listen to an old curmudgeon like me?

“DARWIN:  THE EVOLUTION REVOLUTION”  (Royal Ontario Museum)

I have been to many museum exhibitions in my life but never to a more intellectually stimulating presentation than the Darwin display currently showing at the ROM.  Here we learn not just a scientist’s conclusions but the thought processes that led to them and the observations behind the thought processes.  We learn the prevailing wisdom:  the Earth is 6,000 years old, based on information contained in the Bible (in the early 1800s, few questioned the biblical story of creation); each species was created individually by God; human beings not considered part of the natural world (these 150-year-old beliefs may sound very familiar to those with creationist friends).  We see replicas (and a few living specimens!) of animals that Darwin studied on the Galapagos Islands and the observations he made:  layers of rock show that the world is not static or fixed and that the earth must be much older the 6,000 years; connections between the fossils of giant mammals and smaller living animals suggest that species were not unchanged after all (cf. glyptodonts and armadillos—at the exhibit you get to touch the replica of a glyptodont shell). Species on each of the Galapagos Islands were slightly different (tortoises, giant daisies, iguanas, flightless cormorants), specifically adapted for life there, and found nowhere else.  We learn Darwin’s celebrated conclusions (the only satisfactory explanation for the diversity of life):  struggle for survival is produced by limits of food supply (incorporating ideas of Thomas Malthus); chance variation (what we would call mutation) produces slight alterations in a species; survival of the fittest leads evolution by means of natural selection (The Descent of Man extended these principles of evolution to humans).  Short film presentations, interactive games, and an entire Discovery Zone for children complete the exhibition.  This is definitely one you should see.

“DARWIN’S NIGHTMARE”

          You remember the phrases from high school biology class:  “struggle for existence,” “survival of the fittest.”  At the time some of it seemed pretty nasty, but the applications we learned about operated on a small-scale.  Contemporary aberrations of evolution have much broader implications.  Take the case of Lake Victoria, the second-largest fresh-water lake in the world, the source of the Nile River, formerly home to a rich ecology that supported the people of Tanzania.  Somehow a non-native predator, the Nile perch, got introduced into the lake, where it virtually wiped out every other species before turning to cannibalism. 

          Some good might have come from this story:  the huge perch makes mighty fine eating.  Now enter the European market, willing to pay enormous sums for frozen perch fillets, vastly outpricing the local market.  A fishing industry that once sustained a country has now been taken over—in both raw materials and profits—by foreigners.  In the film, the Europeans who visit Tanzania are interested only in assuring the sanitation levels of the fish factories.  Tanzanians not thus employed are reduced to splitting and drying the discarded fish heads--an operation that produces noxious ammonia gas—or prostituting themselves to the pilots who carry the fish to market.  And, of course, the planes don’t fly into Tanzania empty:  they carry illegal arms from Europe to sustain Africa’s many civil wars.  The film could stand a fair bit of editing, but critical carping seems entirely out of place beside the obscenity of greed that the film portrays.

"THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW"

"What are you doing?" the young lad asks as he finds himself in the girl’s embrace. "I’m using my body heat to warm you up," the girl explains, in the mock-scientific tone that characterizes the entire dialogue in this film. Good thing we got the explanation: wouldn’t want to think the couple was just necking when the world as we know it was coming to an end. And why is the world ending? The film explains that, too. You’ve heard that if global warming continues, nasty things may happen. The nature of those nasty things forms the subject of this film. Here’s the way it works: the only reason we can grow tulips in Toronto is because of the Gulf Stream. Melt enough of the ice caps and a bunch of fresh water messes up the balance of salt water. "Mr. Vice President," Dennis Quaid says solemnly, "we have reached a critical desalinization level." Kill off the Gulf Stream and pretty soon the entire northern hemisphere is covered in ice. How soon, you may wonder? Incredibly soon: not eons, not centuries, not even years, but in a matter of days and minutes.

Now that’s enough pseudo-science to have launched a first-rate disaster movie. "The Towering Inferno" or "The Poseidon Adventure" had initial premises no more promising than this. But eventually you get tired of "Western civilization for dummies." Seeking refuge from the ice age in the New York Public Library, the young people mentioned above keep warm by burning books. One of the few surviving adults remonstrates: "You can’t burn Kafka. He was one of the greatest minds of his age." "He was in love with his sister," says one of the girls as she tosses the volume into the flames. Our humanities lesson isn’t over. "What’s that?" the young people ask the adult as he clutches a very large tome to his chest." "It’s a Gutenberg Bible," he explains, in the same boringly didactic tone that we hear from the scientists. "It’s the first book ever printed."

If the dialogue is laughable (and eleven of us laughed out loud practically whenever anyone spoke—and the film wasn’t intended to be a comedy), the special effects are no better. Remember Mel Brooks’ "Spaceballs," with space stations made of pie plates and rocket ships made of cardboard? It was a pretty horrid movie, but I recalled it fondly several times during this disaster of a disaster flick. The action supposedly begins in Antarctica, but if you’d actually seen a palm tree peeking over the set, it wouldn’t have been any less convincing. The extreme weather conditions preceding the ice age supposedly involve hail, but instead we just get hunks of candy glass dropped on cars and pedestrians. The great tidal wave that crashes over New York City and the tornados that destroy Los Angeles are decidedly cheesy.

When it was all over, the consensus seemed to be "It could have been worse." How, specifically could it have been worse? I demanded. "It could have been eight hours long," came the reply. I continued to reflect on how the film could have been worse. Ian Holm could have cried, as he prepared to die, rather than downing vintage scotch with dignity. The President of the United States could have tried to fight off the ice age with nuclear weapons. But that’s about it. Otherwise the makers of "The Day After Tomorrow" have made about as bad a movie as they could, complete with the survival of a New York street person and his dog, hoards of Americans wading across the Rio Grande into "what we used to call the Third World," an ambulance that arrives, after all hope had vanished, to fetch the brave bald boy with a brain tumor, the climatologist who bravely cuts the cord and falls to his death so that his comrades can survive. This is one truly awful movie.

Be warned: According to The New York Times, "The Day After Tomorrow" is rated PG-13. Millions of people die, but nobody swears, copulates, undresses or takes drugs.

“DAYS OF DARKNESS”

          In James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” the hen-pecked protagonist escapes into a fantasy world of fearless leadership as pilot, surgeon, and commander of the fleet, only to be brought back to reality by his wife:  “Not so fast!  You’re driving too fast!” said Mrs. Mitty.  “What are you driving so fast for?”  If you haven’t read this brief humorous piece from the 30’s recently, I recommend it.  Surely Denys Arcand, creator and director of “Days of Darkness,” knows it well.  The movie, like the story, begins in fantasy, as a stand-in for the protagonist charms a beautiful woman.  But before long we are in a slightly surreal Montreal, the protagonist’s “real” life as a bureaucrat in a converted hockey rink who spends his days listening to terrible stories from miserable people to whom he must deny satisfaction.  (A man who has lost his legs in an auto accident complains that he is being billed for the price of the light-pole knocked down.  The protagonist corrects him—government policy requires that he must only pay his share of the cost.)  A casual remark brings him up before a tribunal of the Language Police, a concept that will not seem unfamiliar to anyone who has lived in Quebec for any length of time.  A rich fantasy life provides the only escape from a Kafkaesque existence.  As the movie progresses, the line between reality and fantasy becomes blurred.  A session of speed-dating brings the hero into an actual world of knights and ladies (on the order of the Society for Creative Anachronism in the States) and he finds himself jousting against the Black Prince.  Arcand’s savage comedy, the completion of a trilogy that began with “The Decline of the American Empire” and “The Invasion of the Barbarians,” contrasts with Thurber’s gentle humour, a testament to the changes that have taken place in the world over the last seventy years.  Watching the film I felt as if I were being driven into the earth by a pile-driver in between each bout of laughter.  A happy ending redeems the grey bleakness, but the message is clear:  the only escape from the madness of our society is actual escape.

DEFINITELY, MAYBE

“Definitely, Maybe” explores the complicated interplay among work, dating partners and personal identity in young adults in the 1990s and its consequences for a young girl in the present.  That Abigail Breslin plays the young girl in question helps to anchor a film whose absence of grounding might otherwise leave us entertained but unengaged.  A young Midwesterner (Ryan Reynolds), in New York to work for the first Clinton presidential campaign, dates three women, one of whom becomes the mother of the Abigail Breslin character.  As her parents prepare to divorce, the girl demands to know how they got together.  The film serves as her father’s response.

          Ryan Reynolds, a rather light-weight leading man, comes off as pleasant but confused.  Three women, including the radiant Rachel Weisz, try to straighten him out.  (Elizabeth Banks and Isla Fisher round out the trio.)  Kevin Kline does a marvellous comic turn as a college professor unapologetically involved with a succession of his students.  I found myself surprisingly moved by this film, clearly more than just the sum of its parts.

"THE DELICATE ART OF PARKING"

The Montreal Gazette supposedly described this film as "explosively funny." Perhaps life in Montreal is more naturally incendiary than life in Toronto. I would describe the film as "mildly amusing." "The Delicate Art of Parking" falls into a category more or less invented by Christopher Guest, and referred to by reviewers as "mockumentary." Seeing a film like "Best in Show" without prior preparation can be disconcerting (funny as hell, but disconcerting). The picture looks just like a documentary but the people are so, well, weird. (If you haven’t seen "Best in Show" yet, do yourself a favour and find it.)

Since seeing "Best in Show" for the first time (and being thoroughly disconcerted) I’ve learned more about Guest’s method. He and collaborator Eugene Levy outline the scene-by-scene structure of the movie. A team of actors ad lib the dialogue through a whole series of takes, then Guest edits them into a film which has the feel of a documentary except that it’s hysterically funny.

I thought about this a lot after seeing "The Delicate Art of Parking" and trying to figure out why it was only mildly amusing rather than explosively funny. The premise isn’t bad: imagine a meter reader who takes his job really seriously, who thinks of himself as performing a vital service to the city, who rationalizes the attacks that he and other meter readers occasionally suffer. Imagine a whole legion of meter readers who enjoy their own after-hours club, who have their own union, who suffer from various personal tics. The idea has a good deal of promise on the face of it.

What Christopher Guest has going for him is a troupe of skilled improvisational actors who have worked with the director on films like "Waiting for Guffman" and "A Mighty Wind." The actors in "The Delicate Art of Parking" mostly lack the light touch and an ear for dialogue. It doesn’t help that the "director" of the documentary we’re supposedly seeing created is portrayed as a real jerk. Instead of the delight you feel in spending time with the quirky characters of "Best in Show," you feel annoyance at his insensitive, exploitative nature. So it isn’t a bad first effort—in fact it’s won awards as best first film—but don’t expect more than "mildly amusing."

“DELIVER US FROM EVIL”

          The mind shields itself with powerful defenses, of which the strongest and most effective is deflection.  When you try to recall something unpleasant or forbidden, you’ll usually find yourself thinking of something else instead.  We may control our conscious minds, but our unconscious minds are really pulling the strings.  In writing about “Deliver Us from Evil,” I had to go to the Internet to get the name of the priest at the centre of the film, Oliver O’Malley, even though that name occurred in virtually every sentence for 100 minutes.  When you listen to O’Malley talk about his pedophilia, which numbered hundreds of victims, and he says that his fingers may have slipped beneath a girl’s underpants, his disarming frankness and charming smile (bearing an unnerving resemblance to that of Robert DeNiro), as well as your mind’s reluctance to deal in detail with this subject, encourage you to accept his story, despite emotionally charged denials from several of his victims.  They must be exaggerating, you tell yourself.  Surely it couldn’t have happened the way they say.

          “Abuse” is too vague a word, insists the father of one of the victims.  “He raped my daughter and destroyed my family.”  Why didn’t the girl speak up at the time?  Her father had once announced that he would kill anyone who hurt his little girl.  She had asked a friend what happened to people who killed.  They get locked up in jail and never come back.  So, to protect her father, the girl kept silent.

          The silence of victims makes unholy alliance with an even stronger silence on the part of the Roman Catholic Church, who, aware of O’Malley’s pedophilia, kept transferring him from parish to parish in California then, more recently, after he served seven years of a fourteen-year prison sentence, sent him back to Ireland where the church evidently continues to support him, again without allowing any information about his past to reach the ears of potential new victims and their families in the community where he lives.

          The church’s response to the problem of pedophilia among its priests is compared in the film to the tactics of corporations such as Enron or Big Tobacco:  deny, deflect, cover up, or pay off.  The mental gymnastics are frightening.  If all sexual behaviour for a celibate priest is bad, then pedophilia is no worse than anything else.  Where did celibacy come from in the first place?  It’s never mentioned in the Bible.  According to Amy Berg’s documentary, the practice was introduced in the 4^th century for economic reasons.  Prior to the introduction of celibacy, the property of married priests upon their death would pass to their first-born son; under the new system, their property would pass to the Church.  Since priests frequently enter seminary in their teens, it has been suggested that pedophilia brings them into relationship with partners at a comparable level of sexual awareness and development.  And the literature suggests that pedophiles do regard encounters with their victims as romantic caring partnerships. 

          Part of the cover-up by the Roman Catholic Church involves claiming that the problem involves only a small number of homosexual priests.  According to the film, the scandal involves both homosexual and heterosexual relations in which more than 100,000 victims in the United States have come forward (and that fewer than 8% of victims ever disclose their abuse).

          This powerful, disturbing film will not reach as wide an audience as it deserves, but its message needs to be heard.

“DEMOCRACY” (Tarragon Theatre)

            “Democracy” traces the rise and fall of Willi Brandt, the charismatic chancellor of West Germany from 1969 to 1974, and his symbiotic relationship with Gunter Guillaume, an East German spy whose identification and exposure brings about the political death of his host.  The play presents itself as a colossal case of dramatic irony since the audience knows the actual identity of the toadying mole from the outset.  The theme of identity embraces every member of the chancellor’s cabinet, showing different faces to party leaders and sympathetic henchmen as it suits their political interests; the citizens of the divided country that Chancellor Brandt seeks to reunite; and especially the complicated relationship between Brandt and Guillaume.  The success of this masterfully constructed play depends not only on witty dialogue and an ingenious structure culminating in a stunning coup de theatre but also on the individual strength of its large cast, brilliantly displayed in the current production at the Tarragon.  Don’t miss this powerful play.

“THE DEPARTED”

          The film starts stylishly, communicating narrative information swiftly and colourfully.  Mob leader Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) has planted a mole (Matt Damon) in the Massachusetts State Police unit (led by Alec Baldwin) dedicated to bringing him down.  A special police subdivision (led by Martin Sheen and Mark Wahlberg) has planted a mole (Leonard DiCaprio) in the Costello operation.  The bulk of the movie unfolds as a cat-and-mouse game between the two forces, with the Matt Damon character finally being assigned to find himself.  The star-studded cast delivers the goods, although Jack Nicholson offers us sly bits and egregious overacting in more or less equal measure.  If you thought about it at all, you’d realize it had to end badly, but you had no idea how badly.  This is one seriously nasty film.

“THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA”

      I’m probably not the best person to review this film—I still can’t spot Prada.  The film has taken some hits from members of the fashion community, who complain that it doesn’t represent current chic adequately. No comment from me.

      I’ll stick to relationships.  Now the book on which the film is based took the form of an exposé of Vogue magazine and its demonic editor-in-chief, a woman who kept her entire staff in a constant state of terror, who commanded without ever raising her voice, whose judgment could make or break an aspiring designer.

      I once worked for a woman like that.  The late Sarah Caldwell engaged me to work for the Opera Company of Boston, back in the 70s, offering a salary that wouldn’t even cover the rent.  When I accepted a teaching job at Wellesley College to cover the difference, Sarah said ominously, “I thought we had an agreement.”  But unlike the fashion editor, Sarah had a human side.  “I can understand that a young man might occasionally want to eat.”  So we worked out a deal whereby I’d cram all my teaching into two days and be available to Sarah 24/5.  Of course, unlike the personal assistant in “The Devil Wears Prada,” I didn’t have a cell phone.  Sarah would call me early on a Saturday morning, announce that she would pick me up in fifteen minutes, and arrive in her Cadillac ready to pour out instructions that I would write down on a legal pad.  “Get all the music teachers in New England together for a luncheon so I can tell them about our ‘Opera in the Schools’ program.  Things like that.

      The trouble with making an exposé into a movie lies in the casting.  Remember Michael Douglas in “Wall Street”?  His eloquent sermon on the text “Greed is Good” left erstwhile liberals muttering, “Yeah, gimme summa that.”  When Charlie Sheen brought him down at the end of the film, more than one viewer regarded wearing a hidden tape recorder to have been an act of craven betrayal.

      Casting Meryl Streep at the editor of Runway magazine changes the whole thrust of the movie.  When Meryl Streep rejects an entire collection or insists on reshooting an expensive photo session, instead of feeling indignant, you’re likely to say, “The poor shmuck should have gotten it right,” and when she demands that her hapless personal assistant obtain the unpublished manuscript of the new Harry Potter book for her children to read over the summer, or not bother returning to work, you marvel at the assistant’s ingenuity in carrying out the impossible task rather than condemning the editor for unspeakable gall. 

      Meryl Streep makes the monster seem human, assisted by a scriptwriter who softens the portrait while making it less one-dimensional.  Nonetheless, as the reviewer in The New Yorker observers, “this has to be the most devastating boss-lady performance in the history of cinema.”

      Anne Hathaway, a notably unimaginative piece of casting (“Get me that girl who started out as a klutz in “The Princess Diaries””), shows genuine pleasure in getting to wear fabulous clothes (betraying the anti-fashion bias of the book’s author), but also, thanks to the scriptwriter, gets to enlarge her perspective, and even earns a grudging parting smile from the Meryl Streep character.  I had a lot of fun at this movie; I hope you will, too.

"DIE ANOTHER DAY"

Some films can be watched in solitude, others benefit from a large, appreciative audience. "Bowling For Columbine" falls in the latter category, as does "Die Another Die." I managed to slide into the front row of a sold-out theatre just as the previews were beginning. Endless previews. Then the logo for "Feature Presentation" appeared on the screen and someone behind me quipped, "This might be it," bringing general laughter. The opening action sequence, performed on hovercraft above a mine field, looked just like a bumper car competition in an arcade--terrifically well done, I thought. Eventually Bond is captured, tortured (fortunately this is shown rather abstractly behind the opening credits, and jailed for fourteen months. [The introductory song, performed by Madonna, used electronically inserted silences in place of acoustical silences, making it practically unlistenable, but I'd already heard it on the radio and was prepared.]

The action moves to Cuba where, happily, Bond appears in appropriate dress. (I once saw Roger Moore as Bond walking through Harlem in a business suit and acting surprised when he was mugged. I mean, really!) Halle Berry makes her first appearance, rising from the sea in the celebrated orange bikini. Throughout the film she gets to utter the kind of racy dialogue that we used to associate with Lauren Bacall and which has been sadly missing from contemporary films. The villains are introduced, one a Chinese man with diamonds surgically implanted in his face, the other a strange-looking result of a DNA transplant, both thoroughly frightening and up to the standard of the classic Bond films.

The action moves to London where we get a first-rate dueling sequence between Bond and one of the villains: you know the kind I mean, where virtually the entire arsenal of swordsmanship comes into play, along with a fair amount of destruction of a posh London club.

We move to Iceland, inside an ice palace constructed especially for the occasion. The villain demonstrates his plan to take over the world: a vast mirror, set in space, capable of melting icecaps or, by focusing its image, melting an ICBM sent to destroy it. And Bond gets to use one of the neatest gadgets I've seen in these films, a ring capable of demolecularizing glass.

Two weak spots occur in the latter half of the film, a bit of fairly shoddy digital magic that could have been omitted without damaging the film, and a fairly pointless duel between Bond and the diamond-faced villain, both driving gadget-equipped cars on ice. But the story gets back on track as the villain, controlling the space mirror from an airplane, sets off the million-odd land mines separating North and South Korea. Halle Berry (as Jinx) and Pierce Brosnan (as Bond) both engage in separate duels, intercut so as to generate excitement but actually producing boredom--we'd already seen a great duelling sequence; a lesser one just seems redundant, regardless of clever editing. Eventually the bad guys get put away, and Bond & Jinx escape to a lonely hut.

As Bond films go, I'd rank this just below the first echelon, which made it jolly good fun, indeed. John Cleese gets to have an entertaining scene as Q, Judi Dench does her part as M, and all the mayhem associated with a Bond film, when seen in context, brings a certain satisfaction. Some movie-goers will refuse to attend a film starring 007, but those who go should have a good time.

"DIRTY PRETTY THINGS"

From time to time in Adam Hall’s spy novels, Quiller must go to ground in an unfriendly country: without even a cover identity, he must avoid any contact with the authorities. Of course, before long Quiller accomplishes his mission and gets to go home. Not so the illegal immigrants portrayed in Stephen Frear’s latest film, "Dirty Pretty Things." In constant fear of exposure and deportation, they take menial jobs that must be kept secret from the immigration service, live with friends willing to shield them, and remain in constant jeopardy of betrayal by whose who extort money, sex or other services in return for keeping their secret. Okwe, a physician on the run from Lagos, stumbles on an organ-harvesting operation in which illegal immigrants sell their kidneys for money and a fake passport. The film underlines the contrast between Okwe’s decency in assisting those who share his precarious existence and the men who exploit these "invisible people." Audrey Tatou plays Senay with irritating helplessness but the photography, seeking out beautiful images even in the midst of deplorable circumstances, and the remarkable acting of the main character have a strong impact. A film well worth seeing.

“THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY”

          Imagine that you wake up from a long coma completely paralyzed except for one eyelid.  (We’re not talking paralysis caused by an accident, as, for example the case of Christopher Reeve, but an exceedingly rare paralysis, called “locked-in syndrome” resulting from a stroke.)  Having trouble picturing the situation?  You won’t after seeing “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” whose first forty minutes use a subjective camera to give the audience the claustrophobic sensation of being trapped inside a body over which you have no control, whose very limbs seem like foreign objects. 

          Who could have thought up such a story?  In fact, it isn’t a story but a recreation of actual events in the life of French journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby who turned his experience into a book with the same title as the film.  Lest the notion of writing a book suggest recovery, let me hasten to explain that the book was written in a very peculiar manner.  The journalist’s speech therapist used a system in which the alphabet, rearranged in order of frequency, appeared on a board.  The therapist would read the letters in order until a blink signified that she had hit the right one.  She would then write that down and start again.  Another woman, sent by the journalist’s publisher, learned the system and served as amanuensis for the book.

          Just as a technical aside, let me suggest that things would have moved a good deal faster if they had employed a 5 x 5 grid, something like the following (I’ve used the beginning of the English order of frequency, a bit different from French):

in which the first blink or blinks would designate the row, the second the column.

          When we finally get an objective view of the journalist, slumped in a wheelchair, his mouth in a slack frown, one eye sewn shut, the other unusually large, we may think of Stephen Hawking, confined in a similar prison by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, from whose febrile mind have emerged penetrating visions of the cosmos.  No such luck here.  Just as we begin to recover from the horror of the situation with which the subjective camera compels us to identify, we start to recoil from the character of the journalist, who in his pre-stroke life was a fairly detestable person.  But he can write, and after abandoning his initial desire to die, write he does. 

          A fine cast, including Max von Sydow as the journalist’s father, make the film feel more like a documentary than a drama.  Highly recommended.

DOGVILLE

Thornton Wilder’s "Our Town" may fairly be described as the archetypal American play, a stylized drama that affirms the fundamental decency of ordinary people. One comes away from a performance with one’s faith in the basic goodness of humanity strengthened. In "Dogville" Lars Trier has succeeded, quite brilliantly one must concede, in creating the archetypal anti-American film, a stylized drama (sparse theatrical set, avuncular narrator), that affirms the fundamental cruelty and mean-spiritedness of ordinary American people. One comes away from the film wishing one had heeded the reviews and chosen a different movie instead of this, the first of a projected trilogy of films about America, a country which the director has never visited but which he actively despises.

A young woman appears in a small town during the darkest days of the Depression. Mistrusted by the townspeople, she gradually wins them over, and they agree to protect her from the gangsters who seek her death. Then, according to the film, they reveal their true nature and turn against her. I can think of no actress better suited to this role than Nicole Kidman, a woman capable of radiating innocent faith in human goodness. One can almost feel the sadistic pleasure that the filmmaker takes in her betrayal, humiliation, degradation, violation and dehumanization. One’s propaganda detector would probably reject overtly political anti-Americanism. This film slips in and plants a virus in your heart. It is the most hateful film I have ever seen.

"THE DOOR IN THE FLOOR"

Jeff Bridges, probably the screen’s most self-effacing actor, plays a writer and illustrator of children’s stories. Kim Basinger, probably the screen’s most vulnerable actress, plays his wife. We observe their dysfunctional world, during the summer of their separation, through the eyes of the seventeen-year-old prep school student, himself an aspiring writer, whom the older man has employed as his chauffeur and general assistant. "But what exactly will he do?" the wife asks, when the writer informs her of the arrangement. Essentially the boy will serve as a catalyst for an important transition in their lives. Complicating the situation is their adorable four-year-old daughter, a disturbingly precocious little girl, and hovering over the action are the sons they lost in an automobile accident a few years earlier. Framed photos of the boys line the upstairs hallway as constant reminders of the past.

From the earliest moments of the film we, and the young man, feel ill at ease with the way disconcerting events are presented totally without affect. The writer, completely self-absorbed, is comfortable with his own nakedness and unconcerned, perhaps even unaware, of the discomfort this may produce in others. When not naked, he goes through the picture in what might charitably be described ass a caftan, really a kind of oversize nightshirt, though never worn at night. (He’s naked when his daughter comes to be comforted from a nightmare and comments, quite matter-of-factly, about the shape of his penis.)

Several times in the course of the film the writer, affecting modesty, says he is merely an entertainer of children who (looking at his hand as if it were an independent agent) likes to draw. Besides illustrating his own books, he likes to draw naked women, using not professional models but women whom he seduces (through a combination of fame and personal charm) and subsequently degrades (by treating them as objects). In one scene we see him rotating the pedestal on which one such woman poses, just as if she were made of clay rather than flesh.

The trauma of the automobile accident--whose horrifying details are revealed, in a characteristically understated manner, only in the final minutes of the movie--has rendered the wife incapable of functioning as a mother. Indeed, the only temporary pleasure she enjoys is having sex with the young assistant, in scenes shown with uncomfortable frankness and, in one instance, witnessed by the little girl.

If you are finding this description creepy, you’ll find its depiction even more unsettling for the absence of emotion. The writer, learning about the affair, instead of getting angry with the assistant, lays out the legal implications of the situation in the same clinical detail with which he dissects and destroys the sample of writing that the young man has submitted for his evaluation. The only emotion we see in the film, in fact,

comes from the model, who turns homicidal when the writer thoughtlessly discards her after invading her person.

This is an uncommon film, brilliantly acted, one realizes in retrospect, directed by the screenwriter in a production in which all parties have put aside their egos for the sake of the project.

“DOUBT”

          When people write about turning plays into movies, they usually concentrate on the problem of “opening up” the play by introducing more exterior scenes to offer greater visual variety than theatre usually permits.  “Doubt,” as a successful theatre-piece, involved only four people:  a Roman Catholic priest, the principal of the school who accuses him of sexual abuse, the mother of the alleged victim, and a young nun who provides an audience for the other actors.  The movie version, which shows us the children, lets us see the young nun teaching classes and the priest delivering sermons.

          Another problem with turning a play into a movie has to do with language, and in this case the movie does a disservice to the play by remaining so faithful to the text.  The unrealistically intense, prolonged speeches that we accept without difficulty in the theatre don’t usually work well on the screen, even with such skilled actors as Meryl Streep (the principal) and Philip Seymour Hofmann (the priest) delivering them. 

          The title conveys the moral dilemma:  the playwright has perfectly balanced the arguments on both sides--the priest could be concealing abuse; the principal could be fabricating the charge in order to deflect the priest’s interference in her school.  The novice nun, played by Amy Adams, wrings her hands and wishes the problem would go away, while the two principal actors go at each other like gladiators, with no holds barred.  Worth seeing for the acting, but I think I’d rather see the play.

“DOWNFALL”

          You can hardly expect a 2 ½-hour film (German with English subtitles) devoted to Hitler’s final days in Berlin to be anything but grim.  Choosing to see the events through the eyes of a young woman, Hitler’s private secretary, Traudl Junge, helps to leaven the prevailing tone of calamity.  (Her reminiscences formed the basis for the 2002 documentary, “Blind Spot:  Hitler’s Secretary.”)

          In order to keep from drowning completely in the despair of the bunker, I watched the film as an exercise in psychology.  Imagine an incredibly charismatic leader, to whom men already trained to obey military orders have sworn additional personal oaths of absolute loyalty.  Now imagine that leader losing his mind.  Anyone in the inner circle who attempts to introduce a note of reason (“But the emperor has no clothes”) is immediately pressured by the rest of the group to abandon any such treasonous thoughts.  We watch in fascination as Hitler, who earlier in the war had displayed astonishing gifts as a strategist, now calls on virtually fictitious battalions to redeem a hopeless military situation, while his leaders remain more or less paralyzed.  Himmler, who attempts to make a deal with the approaching western armies, is denounced as a traitor.  Even after Hitler’s death by suicide, the military leaders feel constrained by their promise never to surrender, even as they recognize the terrible cost of these decisions on the civilian population.  Hitler has exercised such total domination over these men and women that Frau Goebbels proclaims that life in a world without National Socialism is unthinkable, and on that basis proceeds to murder her children, in one of the film’s most chilling scenes.  This is a brilliantly acted and directed film, though despairing and grim.

“DREAM GIRLS”

          Take the pop music industry, where an artist’s persona and musical style can be manipulated as easily as his or her wardrobe, then make a musical based loosely on a singing group’s rise to fame within that industry, then restage that musical as a movie:  can there be any surprise that the result seems artificial, commoditized, manipulative and exploitative?  Evidently the people who nominated “Dream Girls” for Oscars in eight categories found much to admire in the film.  Not I.

          There were some affecting moments in this long, long movie—notably the singing of “American Idol” favourite Jennifer Hudson—but being “inspired by a true story” made the film even less convincing for this viewer.

"THE DREAMERS"

The film opens with the Eiffel Tower—the most photographed monument in Europe—shot in a way you’ve never seen it before. You tell yourself that’s what it has to be, but the camera never pulls back to give you confirmation: you’re just supposed to know. From the very first moment, you find yourself in the hands of a master director, and the next scene announces that he’s a cinephile as well. In fact, the entire film is full of allusions to earlier films, but Bertolucci is no snob—he democratically provides clips from the films to which he refers, just in case you don’t remember. His characters are less charitable, continually playing identification games with each other, with forfeits for failing to respond correctly.

The story takes place in 1968, the heyday of Godard, Truffaut, Carné, Resnais, Chabrol, Lelouch, Buñuel. In no other place or time has film been so passionately embraced. In no other place or time could the dismissal of the head of the national Cinémathèque bring street demonstrations. We watch the fervent young protesters, and blink in disbelief: can that really have been Jean-Pierre Léaud in the crowd? Indeed it was, we learn in the credits at the end of the film. The love of cinema permeates the film: the protagonists sit in the front row at the theatre, engage in heated debate over the relative merits of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, and recreate a famous movie race through the central gallery of the Louvre.

Film becomes more real to them than the world outside. Yet that world is in turmoil. Soon the demonstrations on the streets of Paris spread from cinephiles to students to members of the working class, and not just in Paris but in capitals around the world. Those not protesting on the streets were accused of being dreamers, refusing to put their theories into action. I lived in Paris in the fall of 1968 and was no less a dreamer. I loved being able to see old American films in theaters all over the city, accepted the astonishing number of policemen as the norm, never having seen Paris any other way, and remained pretty much unaware of the revolution that had unfolded a few months earlier.

Dreams have a scary way of turning into nightmares. Flirtation with the forbidden becomes ever more dangerous as the thrill of guilty pleasures dulls with familiarity. By the end of the film, the most frightening depiction of confrontation between protest and authority that I can recall, you begin to wonder who the dreamers are. Returning from Paris in January of 1969, I listened to young people begging president-elect Richard Nixon to "bring us together," and, like them, I dreamed he might be able to do it. A nasty awakening lay in store. This is an astonishing film in its ability to depict youthful passion without judging it. For those who lived through those heady days and then moved on with their lives, this film puts us right back into that state of confusion: war, sex, drugs, film—can there be a more incendiary mixture?

"DRUMLINE"

In high school I pass up a chance to be one more inaudible flutist in the marching band and held out for bass drum. Our drum line of the late Fifties thought ourselves regular iconoclasts as we introduced jazz or Latin rhythms into our drum cadences. Ever since, I've been unable to resist the lure of a drumbeat, and if you ever hear spectators wondering, "What's that guy doing in the parade?" they're likely talking about me.

I offer this explanation so that if you're not someone who loves a parade, who considers the half-time show more indispensable than the football game, someone who can't keep his feet still at the sound of zippy drum cadence, you might not be enthralled by "Drumline."

I can't recommend the film on the strength of its plot, but if you've ever been frustrated by television coverage of American college football games that always cuts to a commercial whenever the band takes the field, here's an opportunity to see some very snappy bands in rehearsal and in performance. At the end, when the national band competition finishes in a tie and the drum lines of the two opposing schools meet for a face-off, you'd think you were at a soccer or hockey shoot-out. The competitiveness and intensity of these musicians equals that of collegiate athletes. Band lovers won't want to miss this one.

“DUPLICITY”

Julia Roberts and Clive Owens play former intelligence agents (she CIA, he MI6), with a taste for each other and for an expensive life style, who hit on the idea of one great con that will allow them to retire in luxury.  But who has that kind of money?  Large corporations intent on protecting their secrets.  They stalk their prey:  the Owens character comes up with rival pizza chains; the Roberts character tops that with rival cosmetics firms.  Each character rises to prominence in the intelligence division of opposing companies run by Paul Giamatti and Tom Wilkinson.  After that things get murky, with many flashbacks complicating the narrative and the audience kept in doubt as to whether the two scheming partners also intend to double-cross each other.  The script crackles with pretty good dialogue and the interaction between Roberts and Owens exhibits pretty good chemistry as the film, written and directed by Tony Gilroy, attempts to capitalize on Gilroy’s earlier success in “Michael Clayton.”  Eventually, for me, the plot complications overwhelmed everything else, and while I gladly saw “Michael Clayton” a second time (and would be happy to see it again), once the individuals details finally made sense, I have no particular desire to do the same with “Duplicity.”  It just isn’t that good a film.  The opening scene, a slow-motion wrestling match between the corporate heads, will last in my memory for a long time.  Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for what follows.

"DYING TO BE THIN" (Young People’s Theatre)

Eating disorders can ruin a teenager’s life, perhaps even end it. The secretive behaviour can go on for a long while undetected and even when diagnosed, anorexia and bulimia have no certain cure: neither drugs nor therapy assure recovery. The best approach appears to be prevention, getting the message across early, preferably to pre-teens.

Linda Carson’s one-woman play "Dying to Be Thin" intentionally grosses kids out. Adriana found it disgusting to see all the food that the fifteen-year-old character had assembled for one last binge. Her friend Maryke was troubled by the description of her desperate search for a toilet in which to purge. The dramatization carries more weight than a factual report as we hear how a young girl avoids her friends until she can lose weight and see how she has concealed junk food throughout her bedroom. She describes how the self who confesses to us a behaviour she would never confess to her friends disappears in the shadow of another helpless self riding the roller coaster of bulimia. A grim cautionary tale but one that every parent of pre-teens needs to hear.

Arthur Wenk homepage