Q to Z

“QUANTUM OF SOLACE”
The latest James Bond film contains a sequence of such extraordinary cinematic beauty that it casts a disparaging shadow over the rest of an otherwise competent film, making you marvel at the possible result had the entire film lived up to the extraordinary standard set by that sequence. James Bond (Daniel Craig) has tracked a network of nasty people to a gala performance of Puccini’s Tosca. The emotionally wrenching music stands so far above the usual movie soundtrack that we are dumbfounded: whoa, they’re really giving us the good stuff! Mayhem and mischief follow flamboyantly backstage, in corridors and kitchens with occasional cuts to the searing drama onstage: a remarkable piece of movie-making. In place of the usual complex gadgetry Bond uses a cell phone camera inventively to flush out the identities of the bad guys. I don’t know what all the complaining is about—I really enjoyed the film.

Informed by the Prime Minister, not long after the death of Princess Diana, that twenty-five percent of the population favoured abolishing the monarchy, Queen Elizabeth, shaken, asks, “Is that really true—that one in four want to get rid of me?” That misunderstanding--the confusion of the institution with the person--lies at the heart of the issue presented in Stephen Frears’ new film. It seems likely that even the staunchest anti-monarchists do not have in mind turfing the incumbent: it’s Charles (and Camilla!) and all those other brats that they find distasteful.

Elizabeth II has reigned for 54 years. I remember watching her coronation on television when I was nine, seeing a young girl scarcely able to bear the weight of the heavy crown. During her reign Elizabeth has interacted with ten prime ministers, beginning with Winston Churchill, and has established a remarkable bond of sympathy with her people. The miscalculation over the appropriate response to the death of Diana Spenser (“After all; she’s no longer a member of the royal family”) shows how the nature of the institution kept the queen from understanding the fervour of public emotion toward the former princess, an emotionally disturbed woman whose public persona differed substantially from the woman whom the queen had known.

The film helped me to appreciate what daily life must be like for a monarch. I’d heard of Balmoral but never imagined the extent of the difference between the rugged, camp-like experience of Scotland and the urban setting of Buckingham Palace. I’d never really thought about what life must be like for Prince Charles, a man in his fifties, unemployed, living at home with his parents. Helen Mirren’s portrayal of the queen seems quite convincing once you get past her voice. Michael Sheen as Tony Blair seems at once winning in his defense of the queen and relative innocence of his success as a media darling, but at the same time somewhat annoying in his puppy-dog behaviour in the queen’s presence. And on the subject of dogs, reading about the queen’s fondness for the animals doesn’t compare with seeing the animals constantly underfoot in the scenes at Balmoral.

For me the crystallizing moment of the film comes when the queen visits, and essentially pays homage to, the body of a magnificent stag recently shot near her estate. Her palpable sympathy for the noble beast contrasts with her relative lack of feeling at the death of her son’s divorced wife. One can understand the resentment of this essentially private person at being compelled to give public utterance to emotions not her own.

Betrayal can take many forms. You may feel betrayed when you penetrate someone’s public disguise and absorb the difference between what you had thought to be the case and what now appears to be the truth. A different kind of betrayal occurs when one person deliberately changes loyalties without informing another. Such betrayals, call them political and personal, can occur between nations as well as between individuals and this interplay of betrayals forms the basis for an exquisitely told film, "The Quiet American."

We observe the unfolding story through the eyes of Michael Caine, who also serves as narrator. We look sympathetically upon the loving relationship between this British journalist and his young Vietnamese mistress. We tend to look upon the young American who woos her as an interloper. New disclosures complicate the picture: we learn that the journalist, with a wife in London who will never grant him a divorce, is preventing the Vietnamese girl from bearing legitimate children. We discover the young American to be more complex than we had thought.

We have no difficulty seeing the larger political context: the story takes place in Saigon in 1952 and we know that nothing happy will emerge from this situation. Despite the sense of foreboding that we bring to the film, and the careful clues that have been placed in our path, we still experience shock at the climax, which, through the British journalist’s eyes, we observe at very close range.

In a situation with strong moral consequences, a Vietnamese assistant informs the journalist, "Eventually one must take sides in order to preserve one’s humanity." But even with hindsight, with whom should we cast our sympathies? Neither with the retreating French, nor with the arriving Americans nor with the insurgent Communists, according to the film. We identify the young girl with what would now be called the South Vietnamese, and wish they could simply be left alone, but this is not an option.

Michael Caine gives one of the finest performances of his illustrious career in one of the richest roles he has ever been offered. In contrast to actors who pick and choose parts in order to maintain a certain reputation, Caine has always regarded acting as a métier and has offered his talents to anyone who wishes to engage them. This attitude has led to his appearing in a prodigious number of mediocre films in which he has nonetheless acquitted himself honourably.

Even our knowledge of this man’s life forms part of our response to this film. Who better than Caine to play a cynical journalist who takes what comes without political commitment? Then personal and political betrayals make detachment untenable and the world, both personal and political, changes forever.

It would be a mistake to view Philip Noyce's remarkable film "Rabbit-Proof Fence" from a stance of moral superiority. Too many of our own grand schemes have gone awry for us to look down on earlier attempts at social engineering. Yet one can still be amazed at the cruelty inflicted by the Australian policy of taking the children of mixed marriages away from their mothers and forcing them to attend schools to be trained as domestic servants. Though the film is set in 1931, the policy continued until 1970.

Now the procedure of making these "half-castes" wards of the state coincided with the construction of a "rabbit-proof fence" more than 2000 miles long, the government's response to the devastation wrought by the introduction of the rabbit on a continent where it had no natural enemies.

The movie recounts the true story of three girls who escape from one of the schools and attempt the 1500-mile journey back to their home, using the rabbit-proof fence as a geographical guide through a wilderness consisting mostly of desert and scrub growth. Kenneth Branagh portrays the self-righteous government official seeking to recapture the fugitives. The other actors will not be familiar to North American viewers, but the movie clearly belongs to the children. At the end we briefly see the actual survivors of that journey, now quite aged, and learn that the fourteen-year-old girl grew up, married, had a child, was removed for a second time to the settlement camp, and for a second time made the long journey home, never seeing her daughter again. The elemental simplicity of this story, and the stark landscape in which it takes place, exert a power that far surpasses the contrived adventures of conventional films.

I have never seen a better depiction of the difficulties encountered by an addict attempting to re-engage, temporarily, with the outside world after a period of seclusion in a rehab program. That the temporary re-engagement occurs during that most stressful and artificial of social events, a family wedding, only augments the difficulties. When the addict in question has a history of destructiveness, the vigilant eyes of everyone around her may feel unbearably intrusive. Anne Hathaway plays the recovering addict, whose refuge in 12-step meetings proves an insufficient buffer against the challenges of the event. Any therapist, and probably a fair proportion of the audience, would wonder about the source of this young woman’s problems. The film illustrates a possible answer in the form of a bizarrely troubling dishwasher-filling contest between the groom and the father of the bride. Truth to tell, I found this to be very scary movie, because I never knew when a social situation might explode. We sympathize with the main character but we understand the way the rest of the family walks on eggshells around her and resents her for continually occupying centre stage. A dysfunctional family at a family affair may seem like the stuff of comedy but I didn’t spend a lot of time laughing. This one’s worth seeing.

People have been criticizing the suburbs for half a century without effecting much of a change. How can this be? As with the sharks, a combination of myth and money comes into play: the myth of cities as dangerous, no place to bring up kids, and the money that developers can make from feeding the myth and fulfilling everyman’s dream of a bit of land to call his own. I found the aerial photographs in this documentary by Gary Burns and Jim Brown as affecting as the words of urban planners and the statistics occasionally displayed on the screen. These developments all use the word “community” in their promotion yet suburbia represents exactly the opposite of community, with housing completely separated from centers of activity that might draw people together. The isolation of individuals within houses promotes intolerance, in contrast to the exchange of opinion and lessons of accommodation that necessarily occur in an urban setting.

You may or may not react the way I did to the realization, late in the film, that you have been fooled in accepting the comic aspects of the situation. I felt somehow cheated, but I will not soon forget the images of urban sprawl, the traffic of long-distance commuting, or the statistical reminders of North American consumption and acquisitiveness.

Sexual: why should we accept an older woman deflowering a fifteen-year-old boy whereas if the genders had been reversed the movie would have been banned?

Ethical: what kind of movie (and the book by Bernhard Schlink on which it was based) asks us to feel sympathy for a Nazi death camp guard?

Psychological: the eponymous protagonist (played by two different actors) is so withholding of feelings that the woman for whom he represents the sole emotional support finally takes her own life. So the question “How are you feeling?” that he addresses to her toward the end feels completely false, and the tears placed in the eyes of actor Ralph Fiennes feel meretricious and manipulative.

Cinematic: the younger actor carries the protagonist over the better part of ten years without showing age change either in make-up or deportment.

Credibility: the book (and movie) ask us to believe that an illiterate woman would turn down a promotion that might expose her illiteracy and volunteer instead as a prison guard at Auschwitz. After the war she again turns down promotion under similar circumstances. In the meantime, she befriends a fifteen-year-old boy who reads to her, effectively in exchange for sexual favours. As a law student, he witnesses her trial as a Nazi war criminal. When she is sentenced to life in prison, he continues to read to her, through cassette recordings, without ever writing her a letter or visiting her. We are meant to accept this stigma of illiteracy and its eventual discovery as the mainspring driving the plot.

What’s to like: Kate Winslett’s performance as the woman, though every appearance of the actress’s canny intelligence belies the confused ignorance of the character she portrays.

During the twelve years of the Nazi regime in Germany, Canada accepted only 5000 Jews as refugees, ordering many would-be immigrants to return to internment in concentration camps. Playwright Jason Sharman has chosen this as the background for a retelling of the biblical story of Joseph, sold by his brothers into slavery, transformed into an advisor to the Pharaoh (by happy coincidence, the Canadian prime minister at the time was named King), then placed in a position either to grant or to deny assistance to his brothers in their time of need.

In "Remnants" the moral and ethical questions occupy centre stage: to what extent should Joseph deny his Jewish identity in order to assist his people? How far can he compromise his values without endangering them? For those who celebrate the theatre as an art form demanding the active engagement of the audience’s imagination, "Remnants" represents a sheer delight. Six actors take on multiple roles so convincingly that you have to consult the program to assure yourself that the Polish cleaner really is also MacKenzie King, the Canadian Prime Minister. Steamer trunks stand in for sewing machines, altars, beds, desks and yes, steamer trunks. Theatre exists for plays such as this.

Do you believe that life without death has no meaning? Have you ever considered the possibility of immortality based not on eternal youth but on getting older and older without ever dying? “Renaissance” takes the concept of “film noir” to a new level in a remarkable piece of cinematography, black-and-white animation requiring a team of three hundred collaborators, an effect achieved, we are told in the program book, by “capturing the actors’ movements before creating the backgrounds, settings and facial expressions.”

The action takes place in Paris of 2054 and involves intrigue within the city’s largest company, a cosmetics firm named Avalon. A young woman research scientist has been kidnapped and a police officer sets out to find her, a tale of honour and corruption not unlike “Alatriste” (See below). This is one of the most remarkable dystopias I’ve ever seen, including heavily armed corporate security guards wearing invisibility cloaks. Nasty business.

For awhile it’s hard to feel sympathy for an American pilot captured in Laos in the early days of the Viet Nam War. After all, in retrospect the Americans were the bad guys in this conflict, and given the policy of torture condoned at Guantanamo Bay you don’t have complete distaste for the rough treatment of the prisoner.

But who can resist an escape and survival story, especially one told with the skill that veteran director Werner Herzog brings to this story? Christian Bales stars as a navy flier displaying extraordinary resourcefulness and a refusal to give up. No more than half a dozen deaths—an unusually law body count for today’s action film. Instead Herzog focuses on the beauty of the unforgiving jungle that becomes no less an enemy than the enemy soldiers. In contrast to expansiveness of “The Great Escape,” which often seemed more like a caper than a war film, “Rescue Dawn” seems almost claustrophobic, with prisoners shackled hand and foot every night in a tiny bamboo hut, and escapees chopping their way through the intense jungle with a machete. Recommended.

Circumstances sometimes transform the merely excellent into the unforgettable. Just before the curtain went up on the Canadian Opera Company performance of "Rigoletto" on Easter Saturday, a man came to the microphone to announce that the singer scheduled to perform the role of Gilda (the soprano lead) was indisposed and would be unable to appear. The audience’s disappointment turned to expectation when he went on to say that another soprano, who had sung the part the night before with the Metropolitan Opera, had flown to Toronto that afternoon, arriving at the airport at 5 and at the theatre at 6:30.

You need to understand the challenge involved here. In the old days, opera singers would just stand in place and sing. Contemporary audiences, perhaps under the influence of movies, demand they be able to act as well, so an opera performance involves learning a blocking scheme no less complex than that of a spoken play. Moreover, aside from her celebrated "Caro nome" solo in Act II, Gilda, like the other characters, advances the action of the drama in a succession of duets, culminating in the famous Act III quartet pairing Gilda and her father Rigoletto against the Duke and his new mistress Maddalena. There cannot have been time for the guest soprano to rehearse, so what we were seeing was a kind of chamber music in action, as performers and conductor made tiny adjustments on the fly. Verdi astonished contemporary audiences by making the tenor lead a villain (the philandering Duke) and the baritone an anti-hero (the hunchbacked jester Rigoletto). The exquisite music, including the Duke’s celebrated "La donna e mobile" song, makes us temporarily forget the essential darkness of this drama. The COC had assembled a particularly strong cast for this production even before introducing a Metropolitan star, so we enjoyed a very high level of music-making. Moreover, the deliberate pairing of this opera with "Die Walküre," another work in which the relationship between father and daughter plays a central role, only deepened our appreciation of these masterpieces.

John Cage once wrote that his favourite music was the sounds of nature that constantly surround us if only we had ears to listen. Artist Robert Irwin wrote an extraordinary book called Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing Seen. Scottish artist Andy Goldsworthy embodies these ideas in a remarkable career that this documentary film, "Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working With Time," lovingly records. Some of Goldsworthy’s projects have relative permanence, including a beautiful meandering stonewall at the Storm King Sculpture Center in upstate New York, or the series of huge pine-cone-like structures he has built of rock. But many of his projects are incredibly fragile and transitory, including a series of S-curves, manufactured from fragments of icicles, that the sun backlights magnificently before destroying. Goldsworthy spends the several hours gathering dandelions from all over town to arrange gracefully in a sinkhole, a piece that we are privileged to see but which can have few other viewers. One is filled with wonder at the beauty Goldsworthy creates from natural materials, but his gift is greater than just the work of art. He teaches us to look at nature differently, to appreciate patterns when we might have missed them, to bring our aesthetic sense out of doors to the world that surrounds us. My life is immensely richer for the ninety minutes I spent seeing this film.

Sometimes it seems as though the source of one’s strength also contains the flaw of one’s weakness. The belief, from the inception of the United States, in God as the source of liberty and in a divine blessing on the republic has contributed to American idealism, support for the underdog, and the desire to spread democracy throughout the world. Alas, casting public discourse in religious terms has also contributed to the dehumanization of America’s enemies (remember the “yellow peril”?) and the reduction of complex issues to fundamentalist shibboleths (viz, righteous opposition to an “axis of evil.”) President Bush’s insistence that those who did not agree with U.S. foreign policy in the wake of 9/11 would be considered enemies reflects the same mentality that produced the abuses at Abu Gharib, the redirection of prisoners to political states outside North American where they could be subjected to torture, and the horror of the prison at Guantanamo Bay, the subject of the present documentary.

In October 2001 four young British Muslims travelled to Pakistan to attend a friend’s wedding then made an incredibly ill-conceived trip to Afghanistan, where they were eventually captured by U.S. Marines, taking to be Taliban soldiers fighting for Al Qaeda, and subjected to a four-year ordeal of inhumane treatment that I would describe as torture. One of the four, relating his experience, thought that once he’d found himself in American hands, everything would be all right. “I was mistaken,” he says, in the biggest understatement of the movie. Many decisions of the Bush administration seem mistaken (why, again, did it make sense, after 911/ to begin bombing Afghanistan?), but the construction of the Guantanamo facility, where prisoners could be detained indefinitely beyond the reach of the American justice system and the protection of the Geneva Conventions, represents a direct assault on everything one might admire about the United States. I found this a difficult film to watch.

When you're employed as a hit man for mobsters, can there be any question of redemption? Sixteen-year-old Michael Sullivan, Jr. poses this question at the start of the film, asking the audience to weigh all the evidence before bringing in judgment against his father, played by Tom Hanks. Michael Sr. vows revenge when his wife and younger son are murdered by the son of his life-long mentor and employer John Rooney, played by Paul Newman. Thus baldly presented, the theme of the movie seems as well suited to a Western as to a film about mob life in the Mid-west in 1931.

But immediately the sheer visual beauty of the film, literally a "motion picture," puts one's aesthetic sense in conflict with one's moral compass. Early on in the film, at a wake for a fallen gangster, the reflection from a fireplace against the base of the coffin gives the impression that the deceased is already experiencing hellfire. Later in the scene, we see and hear Tom Hanks and Paul Newman playing a simple piano duet composed so that the actors themselves can actually perform it, rather than dubbing in professionals. Midway through the film we see a farmer's wife feeding soup to the wounded Tom Hanks, the meager room illuminated by a single lamp. The climax takes place in eerie silence, and we admire the image of men with umbrellas, placed on a canvas of blue and grey, just before we watch them die. And throughout the film we hear Thomas Newman's elegiacal score, a subtle but constant reminder that in this kind of film, few will be left standing. Whatever your attitude toward the genre, this is one fine piece of film-making.

There’s nothing like a good story well told, and if it’s a story you’ve heard many times before, the familiarity of the plot elements makes them resonate all the more strongly. Now a really good yarn, you don’t want to tell it too fast, or leave out the details because it’s in the details that the storyteller succeeds or fails. When you’ve got Dennis Quaid playing the lead, you can count on a lot of these details falling into place—the way he digs in at the pitcher’s mound, the expression on his face as he prepares to fire in a fastball, the intensity with which he worries over the effect following his dream will have on his family. I like the expression in his eyes as he takes in a baseball situation, the depth of intelligence and experience captured in that steady gaze.

This movie has lots of good details, like the eight-year-old boy, following the play-by-play through the Internet, and pasting Sticki-note K’s on the side of the monitor every time his dad posts another strikeout. Other great baseball films have conveyed the sense of a season, but I’ve never seen a movie so well attuned to the nitty-gritty details of this beautiful and demanding game. Early on, as we see a high school team turning a double play, we know that we’re in good hands.

When I look over the list of Dennis Quaid’s films, and see that most of them are forgettable, it’s hard to resist drawing a parallel between the high school chemistry teacher who makes the big leagues when everyone thought he was too old to play, and this fine actor who finally gets a part worthy of his talents.

"The Royal Tennenbaums" troubles one as much as it delights. With so much wealth and so much talent, how can these people be so screwed up? Gene Hackman as Royal Tennenbaum captivates us with the same unyielding grasp of Maggie Smith in "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie." Only after you leave the theatre can you regain enough balance to reflect that perhaps you wouldn't want your child to have her for a teacher (or him for a grandfather). But while you're watching the performance, these giants of the screen permit no such insubordination. Our impatience with Gwyneth Paltrow's incapacitating depression reflects back on us: with all your advantages of education and talent, why aren't you successful (rich, famous, etc.)? [I.e., take off the hideous makeup and get a grip, girl.] If the Tennenbaums (and their spouses--the disease seems contagious) present a humorously exaggerated view of dysfunctionality, they embody the same contradictions we all find in ourselves, which is perhaps why we're willing to give Royal Tennenbaum more slack than he deserves. (Advising his son on his incestuous feelings towards his sister, Royal says, "Of course it's frowned upon, but what isn't these days?") This kind of kooky comedy doesn't come the pike too often.

Playwright Michael Healey turns the Toronto dream of life with the family in a lakeside cottage inside out in this three-act play covering twenty-five years in the lives of a woman, her mother, her sister, her niece, and the occasional ineffectual man. While the lake is beautiful, the cottage doesn’t have a good view of it. Even the pathway from the porch to the water takes a tortuous route. The building itself has been poorly maintained. In the first act the women lack water; in the second act the toilet doesn’t function, as they await the unreliable local handyman who never seems to be able to finish a project. At one point Rune pours a good deal of money into trying to create a beach, but by the end of the season the sand has disappeared and the rocks have returned. The lake’s abiding feature is the leeches that we see attached to the legs of anyone returning from a swim. One must pour salt on the leeches to remove them safely, and by the end of the play the porch is covered with empty salt containers stretching back over twenty-five years, for nothing ever gets thrown away and nobody ever leaves. The sister sets out in a canoe, but when she loses her paddle, Rune must rescue her by bringing her back to the dilapidated building from which no one can escape. The characters remain trapped in a dysfunctional family symbolized by this dysfunctional cottage.

The play has nothing to do with the late head of the CBS sports division: the main character, a woman, was named after him by her father, a sports fan. The playwright surely knows about the other kind of rune, or secret writing, for this is a play in which lives are laid bare. Twice we see a physical exposure when actresses change out of bathing suits, their backs to the audience; the psychic baring is full frontal. The incomparable Fiona Reid dominates the first act with non-stop conversation as a demented mother, and appears as a mute stroke victim in the second. By the third act she has died, and we watch with sympathy and distress as Rune slowly turns into her mother, finally donning her sweater and hat and sitting in her accustomed chair.

Such a play could be a real downer, but in "Rune Arlidge" Michael Healey keeps us laughing from start to finish, laughter which allows us to keep a safe distance from the pain it conceals, but by the end we have been drawn in to care about these wounded human beings, and as we leave the theatre we realize that their pain became our own when we weren’t looking.

Usually I feel a sense of visual anachronism when seeing an historical film. Had I been physically present I might have enjoyed the same clarity of vision with which I behold the 21st century, but to see the past recorded on hi-tech contemporary film stock constantly reminds me that these are modern actors wearing costumes to be doffed at the end of the day.

"Russian Ark," by contrast, offers a panorama of Russian history that preserves the look of oil paintings, the only visual medium through which we can apprehend the pre-photographic past. Moreover, the use of a subjective camera for a single, uninterrupted ninety-minute take, though tiring to watch, does create the perfect illusion of being present in the past.

The film, shot entirely at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, culminates in a vast ball reminiscent of one of Proust’s great set-pieces, as women in opulent gowns, complicated couture and lavish headpieces dance the mazurka from Glinka’s "A Life of the Tsar" with members of the aristocracy in formal attire and bemedalled army officers with sashes and fringed epaulets.

We glimpse the royal family of Czar Nicholas II and I kept expecting the sounds of the revolution that would sweep away this spectacle of the ancient regime, but despite the occasional appearance of characters in modern dress, such as several generations of museum directors, the film mostly serves as a brief, astonishing evocation of an era forever past.

Great movies leave memorable images and "The Salton Sea" provides an ample share of striking scenes beginning with the opening shot of a trumpeter, seated on the floor playing, in the middle of a burning house. Later we see a trailer explode when a drug-brewing session goes awry, a woman stuffed under a mattress, harpoons stabbing through a door as the main character leaves from a drug deal, a body spread-eagled on a concrete driveway, its blood pouring into a storm sewer, a display of various kinds of guns laid out like a museum exhibit on a long table. Now you may not want to deposit these images in your cinematic memory, and this is a seriously nasty movie, but if you do see it, you're not likely to forget them.

We come as close as I care to come to the life of the "tweakers," not occasional drug users but the land of the unending night party, the communion of "intimacy with those who can go the distance." We see the human cost, the cruelty, and the betrayal associated with this life style. We also come in contact with one of the nastiest villains I've seen in a long time, a noseless man who enjoys recreating the Kennedy assassination with pigeons and remote-controlled toy cars, who tells a sickening tale designed to dissuade those who might be thinking of treachery, and who uses a hungry badger to administer a cruel discipline. The film-maker has done nothing to glamorize this life, but has shot an extraordinarily beautiful movie.

There’s something good to be said for "The Santa Clause 2," which occupied the #1 spot in movie theatres in North America last weekend. Each of us has some favourite toy from childhood, something we haven't seen for years, something that probably isn't even manufactured any longer. I've often dreamed of a personal warehouse for each person containing everything you've ever owned--all the papers you ever wrote, all your toys, all your clothes (if such a warehouse existed, I could have made a Halloween costume from my 70's garb: bellbottom trousers in red, white and blue stripes, psychedelic shirt with mushrooms and butterflies, rainbow belt, fringe vest).

Imagine a completely dead high school staff Christmas party. Then imagine Tim Allen pulling out a bag full of presents and giving each person in the room that one special toy from childhood. Instantly the room comes to life in the magic of the moment, a bit of whimsy entirely untypical of this otherwise bloated, cheerless, aggressive film. The movie opens with a "parody" of a defense military exercise. Later an imitation robot Santa creates an army of oversize toy soldiers that subdue the elves in a reign of terror. Finally, real and robot Santa perform an aerial battle like James Bond and "Jaws." This is somebody's idea of a joyous Christmas movie. Not mine. Save your money and go rent the original version of "Miracle on 34_th Street."

Dealing with aging parents occupies an ever-larger number of people for an ever-increasing period of time as human longevity continues to rise. The hardest challenge is probably dementia, in which children may have to override their parents’ expressed wishes. “The Savages” presents the worst-case scenario: a father (Philip Bosco) whose mistreatment of his children (Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman) over the years has led them to detest and neglect him. Now they have no choice but to deal with him and with each other. The son teaches English at a college in Buffalo; the daughter aspires to write plays, without a great deal of success. As the story unfolds, they bicker about whose schedule should be disrupted to see to the father’s needs, what sort of institution they can find for their father, and what degree of deception they should employ to get him there. I found the whole movie pretty depressing, much as I admired the acting and the screenplay. Patti took a more optimistic view, pointing out the personal growth that occurs in both the son and the daughter as a result of working together to deal with the family crisis. Both have been living solitary, self-centered lives. In the course of the movie we see them shedding selfishness in developing mature relationships with their father and with each other.

For the third episode of this string of parodies of teen horror flicks they brought in Jerry Zucker, the past master of this kind of entertainment, which depends on a shotgun approach of sight, sound and verbal gags that assault you with such rapidity that if you laugh too hard at one, you might miss the next. As with any shotgun, a lot of the pellets miss their target, but the film succeeds in maintaining a mood of general hilarity so that you stay primed for the next laugh. The principal targets are the movies "Signs," "The Ring," and "The Sixth Sense," all ripe for parody. Just when you think a joke is tasteless, they vary the elements a bit and you laugh, and then wonder why you laughed this time but not the one before. (Let those who object to children being battered about explain why they laughed at the end of the film. On the other hand, having a pedophile priest as a babysitter offended me.) You’re bound to find something to object to, but a lot more to laugh at. I love the line that you saw in the previews, "Call it women’s intuition or ESPN, or both, but I always know when danger is approaching," followed by a pratfall. I also liked the play on film conventions. At one point the heroine gasps when a sound from the next scene startles her. (This is a sound gag to stand beside Mel Brooks bringing the Count Basie orchestra to the desert in "Blazing Saddles.") You could find lots worse ways to spend a rainy Sunday afternoon.

As a teacher, I found "School of Rock" to be a fascinating study in pedagogy. Imagine giving a group of high-achieving youngsters (they’re supposed to be ten years old in the film, but they look to be closer to twelve or thirteen) a chance to immerse themselves in a subject for several weeks. Forget "Monday at 10 a.m. is supposed to be spelling"; rather pick a subject and allow the kids to spend the whole day on an investigation of that subject: its history, its technique, its performance at the very highest level.

It doesn’t really matter what subject you choose; what matters is having a truly charismatic teacher. I know a math teacher in Ontario who fills the bill, a science teacher in North Carolina, a Shakespeare teacher in Ohio. Such an immersion could provide kids with a thoroughly memorable learning experience. Unfortunately, for the most part schools aren’t set up to accommodate that kind of program, though I have seen some nifty displays on the Middle Ages at a school for the gifted in Toronto.

In the present case, Jack Black plays a rock musician masquerading as a substitute teacher and leading his charges on a clandestine investigation of rock music. He teaches classically-trained musicians to play guitar, keyboard and drums and engages other students to sing in the chorus, to program a light show, and to warn him when the principal approaches. Joan Cusack does a nice job of reflecting the kinds of pressures that the principal of a posh private school must face, and eventually she gets to let down her hair and have some fun.

The whole success of this kind of movie depends on the lead character. Richard Dreyfus gave a memorable performance in Mr. Holland’s Opus some years back and of course there are the Mr. Chips movies. Jack Black’s over-the-top performance here flies in the face of the gentle persuasion tradition: he is aggressive and in your face, but with enough charm to prevent it from being obnoxious. This movie will entertain more than just the kids.

Woody Allen writes occasional pieces for The New Yorker magazine, little essays that leave you laughing for a few minutes, partly at the gags, partly at the recognition of Allen’s familiar style. Allen’s recent movies have seemed like cinematic transformations of these miniatures: amusing for a short while but eventually leaving one hungry for the substance of “Hannah and Her Sisters.” In “Scoop” Woody Allen plays a broken-down magician who invites a college journalism major (Scarlett Johansson) onstage as a volunteer for his “disappearance” act. When she enters the cabinet she is visited by the ghost of a recently-deceased reporter who passes on sensational news: the serial killer who has been murdering London prostitutes is none other than Peter Lyman, son of a wealthy nobleman. The Johansson character ingratiates herself with, and falls in love with, Lyman (Hugh Jackman) in hopes of breaking a sensational story, possibly risking her life in the process.

In exploring unfamiliar territory, in “Scoop” as in the recent “Match Point,” Allen invites unfavourable comparison with the originals. At one point the Allen and Johansson characters sneak down to the wine cellar during a party at the Jackman house, in an homage to Hitchcock’s “Notorious,” but we fail to experience the slightest frisson of terror. And the possibility that Jackman really is a killer, which would have produced unbearable suspense in Hitchcock’s hands, never affects us, despite Allen’s constantly telling us that we should be afraid. Scarlett Johansson does very well in the role of the awkward Allen heroine, as played in the past by Diane Keaton and Mia Farrow (though looking at the whole oeuvre one finds suspicious and a bit annoying Allen’s compulsion to make women unthreatening ditherers). There are many amusing moments in this film but very little substance.

A play represents a contract between playwright and audience: the audience agrees to engage its collective imagination; the playwright agrees to make that effort worthwhile. Some plays require only the acceptance of the invisible “fourth wall” and the convention that people on stage talk a good deal more (and a good deal more articulately) than anyone we know in real life. An elaborate set may depict the interior of a house in such detail that the imagination has little to do. But even such a play demands considerably more attention than most movies, which tend to shy away from subtlety lest an inattentive adolescent audience miss something.

Then you have a play like “Scorched,” by Lebanese/Quebecois playwright Wajdi Mouawad, currently receiving its English premiere at the Tarragon Theatre. To begin with, this is an audacious piece of stagecraft. You enter the theatre to see a stage covered with sand—not the bit of sand you might use for a soft-shoe routine but the deep sand you would expect to encounter in a desert. A desk perches, off-kilter and incongruous, in the middle of the stage, and from the ceiling a steady stream of sand, suggestive of an oversize hourglass, adds to the aggregation on the stage. Immediately we feel slightly off-balance; clearly this will not be a drawing-room comedy. In a desert the most precious commodity is water, and the play uses water in ways that far exceed the usual tidy boundaries of theatrical convention.

The play opens with nine characters taking their place onstage and looking impassively, silently at the audience for a considerable length of time. Then a blackout and we find a notary explaining to a young man and woman the terms of their mother’s will. He sits at the desk, in the middle of the stage desert, and our imagination rises to the task of supplying the rest of the office. The young people—twins--listen impatiently: they hated their mother, a cold, unfeeling woman who maintained complete silence for the latter part of her life. Yet the terms of her will make extraordinary demands on the children: one of them is to deliver a letter to a brother they never knew they had, the other to deliver a letter to a father they have never met, both to be found in a foreign country whose language they do not understand.

As the mystery of the play unfolds, we come to understand that we must follow the young people’s search simultaneously with flashbacks of their mother’s remarkable life in a country torn by civil war. At any moment soldiers may appear who (loudly) machine-gun all present on stage. And then the dead figures may arise to assist one or the other of the young people on their quest.

Beyond this I must not go, lest I blunderingly spoil the shocking revelations, but in retrospect one understands that the multiple roles played by each member of the cast provide yet another commentary on the theme of identity, which turns out not to be as consistent as one might imagine. One comes to see how identity is created by choices, and that in a situation of extreme violence and conflict few of these choices seem appealing. This is surely one of the most powerful plays I have seen, and I recommend it strongly.

The latest Second City ensemble continues to amaze and delight with consistently funny topical skits, including:

· George W. Bush being taken by surprise by Stephen Harper’s plan to take over the United States;

· A taxi shared by a man and his female corporate superior in which he constantly tries to recover from putting his foot in his mouth;

· A mother yielding to the temptation to impersonate her teenage son in a three-way MSN conversation;

· Demise at the hands (paws?) of a pair of over-affectionate three-toed sloths.

The skits are so inventive that you lose sight of the strict rules: no costumes and no props except for a pair of chairs. Let these six gifted performers come into your mind and play.

As you walk up the stairs to the third-floor theatre you see photographs of Second City ensembles in the 80’s and 90’s with much younger versions of Dan Ackroyd, Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, Robin Williams. As you get closer to the top the photos become more recent and you recognize one of the actresses from "Nineteen Months." Over the entrance to the theatre stand pictures of the six attractive young comedians for tonight’s revue, "Canadian Idle," a selection of Second City routines performed by members of the national touring company.

The performance elicits a lot of laughter but it isn’t until later that you realize what a special theatrical experience this has been. Without props or sets these actors have created a wealth of characters and situations reflecting on contemporary life in an entertaining manner. Three examples: At a restaurant a woman tells her boyfriend she’s received a promotion provided she’ll move to Vancouver. He becomes defensive: how will he get rid of seasons tickets to the Blue Jays? She acts mature and calm; he acts childish and upset. Then the waiter, out of the woman’s sight, begins miming more assertive responses for the man and the dynamics of the situation change appreciably. This is a lovely moment, in which the catalyst doesn’t even have any lines. In another sketch a woman dressed in blue jeans and baseball hat comes on stage and tosses a small rubber football to a man in the audience, who tosses it back. They continue tossing the ball back and forth as she establishes that she’s his daughter, happy to see him on the weekend, concerned about life issues. Should she smoke pot? He mumbles a negative. Why not? The interchange goes on. She asks why he and Mom split up? He doesn’t know. The girl moves to another part of the stage and begins tossing the ball to a woman in the audience. The woman is more articulate, thinks the girl should smoke pot, says the father is jerk. Eventually the girl gets both audience members up on stage to work the conclusion. Simple but extremely effective. The closing number involves all six members of the ensemble, three as actors, and three as a musical group reproducing the sounds of old 78 records found in the personal belongings of a recently-deceased Mother Superior. You may have seen the sketch—a priest is trying to find appropriate music for the memorial service but the records turn out to be outrageously bawdy.

The revue includes a series of eleven "blackout" sketches and a very funny sketch involving a man who can no longer afford to keep his mother in a retirement home. If you ever have a free evening and no desire to watch a poetic but extremely slow Japanese art film or Denzel Washington methodically amputating the fingers of a bad guy, why not give Second City a try?

The Second City’s latest revue follows the company’s policy of restricting props to chairs: everything else is mimed. The opening song takes Stateside criticism of Canada and turns it into a mantra: "We’re terrorist-hiding, pot-smoking faggots." Two members of the company perform a nice riff as Young Republican recruiters. We see a poison pen battle between Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. The group satirizes corporate attempts to recruit young consumers in a skit called Mortgage, Jr. A black woman sings "Why Do White Girls Sing Such Sad, Sad Songs?" In my favourite sketch, one member of a gay couple that has recently adopted a baby appeals to his female supervisor to grant him "maternity" leave. Amusing throughout, the skit raises some timely issues of pay equity, the glass ceiling and gay rights.

After the regular show the troupe puts on half a dozen improv exercises demonstrating the young actors’ inventiveness and imagination under pressure—an impressive and entertaining presentation.

Sex has always played an important part in Second City productions but never more than this Condomy Special, slated to hit university campuses this fall and serving for the moment as a fill-in on Monday nights when the theatre would otherwise be dark. The Second City’s special flair for combining mime with witty dialogue finds its epitome in a sketch treating a stop at a service station as an erotic experience. Keep in mind that the car and all its fixtures exist only in your mind: your eyes actually see only a woman sitting on a chair. But as the macho attendant struts around the vehicle and she purrs in delight as he cleans her windshield or asks her to “pop the hood,” your mind fills in far more than just the shape of an automobile. The show has a clear message in favour of safe sex, including an update of Marilyn Monroe’s most famous song, now presented as “A Condom Is a Girl’s Best Friend,” with a woman in boas accompanied by two half-naked hulks wearing white bow ties. We see a gynocological examination held along statistical lines, a sketch in which the Pope answers questions about sex, a hilarious game of “two truths and one lie,” and a surprisingly funny running gag involving two very old people sitting in chairs and feeding “pigeons” by pelting audience members with bread crumbs. The entire six-person ensemble appears on stage for a skit involving the choice of music for a memorial service for a recently-deceased Mother Superior. A priest thinks to honour her with records from a secret stash of old 78s hidden under her bed while a trio at the side of the stage recreates the crackly old-time sound and off-colour lyrics. As always, the regular show precedes a session of improvisation. Tickets for this show are only $12: it’s a real bargain.

An evening with the Second City troupe is always a good time, even better if preceded by the dinner package at Wayne Gretsky’s restaurant. This revue did not display the complete consistency of the previous two, but many sketches remain with me: two businessmen inspecting the contemporary section at the Art Gallery of Ontario; a psychologist asking a customs officer to role-play potential uses of a handgun; three guys at a male-bonding weekend at the lake learning that one of them will soon die (inconveniently); liberal efforts to remain “color-blind” in the workplace; a nearly wordless date at which the woman anticipates a marriage proposal; songs in which the “back-up” singer thwarts the lead. If you go, be sure to stay for the improv session that follows each performance. On our night, they asked for the name of someplace where large numbers of people gather, received the name of an amusement park, and improvised a fifteen-minute free-form sketch whose ingenuity offered a glimpse of how these revues are composed in the first place. Great fun.

That the current revue at The Second City doesn’t seem to have the remarkable consistency of the last two revues simply illustrates the difficult challenge of sketch comedy. “Tazed and Confused” nonetheless offers a number of memorable situations:

· A terrific extended sketch based on a woman reading a bodice-ripper on the subway

Free improv after the every show provides a bonus, especially on Sunday night when it doesn’t run too late.

Even when the Second City comes in at very good rather than superlative, it’s still better than just about anything else (and there’s free improv after every performance). The 62^nd revue contains some nifty skits :

· A priceless bit of physical comedy in which a career counsellor works with a client 18 inches tall (with helpful suggestions from the audience);

· A Cuban twosome confronts the woman’s desire to emigrate to Canada (a country that never wages war except in support of its principal trading partner);

· A comedy team visiting a Roman Catholic school assembly offends the priest with its songs (God loves everybody but loves you a little less if you’re a woman).

I consider the Second City to be one of Toronto’s greatest treasures, but don’t take my word for it—go see for yourself.

I detest heart-warming stories. I tend to agree with W.C. Fields that any man who hates children and kicks dogs can’t be all bad. So I had misgivings at seeing a film about two old codgers saddled with the responsibility of taking care of their nephew. On the other hand, the prospect of seeing Michael Caine and Robert Duvall, two of my favourite actors, firing shotguns at traveling salesmen had a certain appeal, so I went to see a sneak preview of the film and didn’t regret it. Haley Joel Osment, playing the nephew in question, skirts the boundary of sentimentality without ever crossing it. Michael Caine displays a gift for storytelling and Robert Duvall enjoys a juicy role as an ageing warrior.

The film is all about story-telling and, like Scheherazade’s 1001 tales, has more than one frame story. As an adult, the nephew Walter has become a cartoonist, depicting the story of his upbringing with his uncles in a decrepit farmhouse. (They tell him at the outset, "We don’t know anything about raising kids. So if you need something, find it yourself. Or better yet, do without.") The movie adopts the visual tone of the tall tale, with costumes and characters equally exaggerated. Garth, the uncle played by Michael Caine, keeps his young Walter entertained by recounting tales of derring-do about his other uncle Hub, shown in flashback with even more exaggerated costumes, sets, and theatrical lighting. Believable or not, these are wonderful tales, and we identify with Walter as he pesters his uncle to tell what happened next.

At one point, the Robert Duvall character delivers part of a speech he has given many times to young people on the brink of manhood, to the effect that you choose what you believe, and that it is better to believe that people are basically good and that good eventually triumphs over evil, whether these beliefs are true or not. Oddly enough, we find the speech convincing even though the stories, and the movie, become increasingly implausible. Things are not what they seem, the movie repeatedly tells us, so decide what you choose to believe. The lion that Hub has purchased for the purpose of shooting and mounting turns out to be old and virtually tame, yet proves in the end to have been a genuine lion. So too the eccentric uncles, who turn out to be much better parents to young Walter than his mother. So if you choose to have your heart warmed by the film, so be it. I choose to identify with the lion, prowling through a cornfield, pretending it’s a jungle.

Two dentists named Dana and David share an office, a marriage and a family, but not much else. In flashback we see a thrilling courtship, but in the present we see a woman who finds escape by singing in an opera chorus and a man who seems incapable of any sort of passion. Their dysfunctional relationship has an adverse effect on their three young daughters, and the whole sorry situation is summarized in an incident in which the middle daughter vomits on the floor and the youngest daughter walks into the mess.

This rather grim tale is enlivened by an irreverent patient who appears in fantasy to Dr. Dave, exhorting him to act more like a man, voicing the audience’s desire to see him confront his wife with the evidence of her unfaithfulness and try to resolve this unhappy state of affairs. But Dr. Dave resolutely refuses, arguing that once the truth comes out, both parties will be compelled to take action that can only lead to an outcome even worse than the present situation. Domestic black comedy doesn’t get much better than this, but then …

"Secretary" offers a brilliant example of multiple perspectives. The fairy-tale quality of the images leads us to suspect the validity of what we see, and we may be tempted to classify the film as an instance of the unreliable narrator. The occasional voice-overs help us identify the narrative voice as that of Lee, a troubled young woman recently released from a psychiatric hospital. Both characters and scenes display an exaggerated quality, the product of a febrile, disturbed imagination. As the film progresses, the images depart further and further from any possible reality: the lawyer for whom Lee works has replaced the plants lining the corridor to his office with framed examples of her typing errors; the demented happy ending clearly exists only in Lee's mind.

Yet the film, while centered firmly on Lee's actions and view of the world, constantly pulls back to show us a larger perspective. When Lee gets rid of the apparatus of her self-abuse, we see the package fall from the bridge to the water, taking her point of view, but then an underwater camera examines their descent from an angle that Lee cannot share. When Lee takes refuge in the ladies room to give rhapsodic physical expression to her feelings for the lawyer, the camera reveals a paralegal in the next stall overhearing her moans of pleasure. When Lee submits to the lawyer's invisible bondage, remaining for more than twenty-four hours without lifting her hands from the surface of his desk, we see images of her fantasies but also, unknown to her, the presence of the lawyer, spying on her from outside the window.

The stylized distortion of images serves to distance the viewer from the difficult themes of self-mutilation and sado-masochism, though I confess there were still scenes I found myself unable to watch. This is a remarkable piece of movie-making.

Who would want to spend 3 ½ hours watching a black-and-white Japanese film with subtitles? When it’s Kurosawa, a full house at Cinematheque Ontario’s Jackman Hall. A village of 16^th-century peasants, tired of having their crops stolen year after year by bandits, engage the samurai of the title to defend them and, in the process, learn to appreciate their own strength. Kurosawa extends this elementary story to epic proportions, patiently laying each piece in place, never wavering from the single plotline. Despite knowing that has to happen, the audience’s interest never slackens. Kurosawa strips away all sophistication and irony and brings us back to an earlier epoch in human history when a story-teller could captivate his audience for an entire evening with nothing more than the eloquent narration of a tale they’ve all heard before. Cinema this powerful and this simple makes virtually everything else seem like mere fluff.

What a rare treat: a film that delights the mind, the heart and the senses! Aficionados of post-modernist literature of Barthelme, Barth, Pynchon, Borges and Hawkes should rush out to see this movie, whose unconventional structure will give pleasure to those who enjoy puzzles. Those who revel in the unrestrained passion of Spanish and Italian cinema will find themselves swept along by the powerful mingling of love and loss. Those who admire the power of movies to tell extraordinary stories in extraordinary ways will come away exhilarated.

In the film, a writer becomes so engaged in the story he is telling that it nearly costs him his life. He tells the woman reading it that the story has the advantage of not finishing with its end. Rather it ends with a hole that leads back to the middle of the story, with the possibility of changing its outcome the second time around.

We spend much of the movie trying to figure out the relationship among its characters, and endeavoring to decide which characters are real and which belong to the writer's imagination (a dichotomy that, in the end, becomes unsustainable). Early on in the movie, we see a girl driving a motorbike along a causeway leading to a lighthouse. At first sight we may remark that we have never seen a more obviously phallic structure and we may become impatient with the too-obvious symbolism when the girl stumbles into a hole and slides down a tunnel nearly to the sea. But later, as we decipher the narrative, and come to appreciate all the meanings associated with the lighthouse and the tunnel, we marvel at the brilliant story-telling technique of the movie-maker.

Unlike "Memento," whose pleasures were mostly cerebral, "Sex and Lucia" moves us with its tale of pain and passion. This film merits the trip to the Carleton or Canada Square.

As Patti explains it, young women living cheaply in Manhattan (I hadn’t thought that was possible, but you need to accept it) might well eschew other income-consuming pleasures in order to spend (what a male viewer might consider to be) an inordinate amount of money on clothes. These assumptions fuelled a highly successful television series, so who am I to cavil. In the full-length, big-screen version, the character played by Sarah Jessica Parker has fallen in love with Mr. Right, who moves her into an intoxicatingly wonderful apartment and then builds her a dream closet that left women in the audience oohing and aahing. The natural tendency of weddings to get out of hand is magnified by the character’s fashion fetish, with the sensible suit being trumped by the wedding gown from heaven. As the hapless bridegroom in “Philadelphia Story” announces—learning that Spy Magazine has taken an interest in the affair—“this wedding has taken on national importance.” In the end, the marriage collapses under the weight of all that importance and the best friends take the jilted bride to Mexico to recover. As chick flicks go, this isn’t bad, but neither is it very good.

When you’re making a movie in Antarctica you don’t want to have to go back for retakes, so the crew commemorating Ernest Shackleton’s exploration of Antarctica made three movies at once: "The Endurance," a full-length feature film, a made-for-TV movie, and "Shackleton’s Antarctic Adventure," filmed in the IMAX format. Director George Butler had access to archival film, as well as still photographs, and skilfully weaves this historical footage into the contemporary restaging. Shackleton went to Antarctica with a crew of twenty-eight men with the intention of making the first overland trek of the continent. When his ship, "The Endurance," was destroyed by ice, his goal became one of sheer survival. He took the crew in lifeboats to Elephant Island then undertook an 800-mile open-sea journey in one of the lifeboats to send for help.

How do you record such an adventure? Antarctica remains fiercely forbidding: the sea destroyed three lifeboats used in recreating the expedition. Much of the filming in the IMAX version takes place from a helicopter, which enables one to appreciate the rugged beauty of mountains and icebergs but rather detaches the viewer from the ordeal. The IMAX version omits the killing of the sled-dogs for food—the film will be seen by a great many children—and makes no reference to the ambivalent welcome that Shackleton received on his return to Great Britain, World War I having made irrevocable changes in the world he knew. Perhaps the most telling section of the film comes at the end, when three world-class climbers, in top physical condition and making use of modern equipment, retrace the final overland section of Shackleton’s trek and marvel at his accomplishment.

No forty-five minute film can make us really appreciate what it must have been like spending more than half a year in an icebound ship waiting for a thaw, or rowing day after day in the coldest place on earth, or waiting for weeks and weeks for Shackleton to return, knowing all the while that if he failed to complete the sea voyage in a lifeboat, no one else on earth knew where you were. Instead, a soaring musical score is meant to make us celebrate a heroic feat of survival, but I left the theatre feeling a little guilty that the experience of seeing the movie required so little of me.

This is a very silly movie. An evil pharmaceutical company kidnaps a Tibetan dog reputed to be more than 300 years old in hopes of discovering, synthesizing and marketing the secret of its longevity. Their intermediate experiments produce monsters such as a cobra with a dog’s tail, barking rabbits, etc. When a high school teacher discovers their nefarious activities they frame him for arson. Tim Allen, unaware of any of this back story, serves as prosecutor in the case. When the Tibetan dog, a bearded collie, escapes from the laboratory, finds its way to the Allen home, and bites Tim Allen, a molecular rearrangement turns the man into a dog, but only gradually, so that he begins by scratching the back of his neck, growling at strangers, and peeing with his leg lifted. (Younger members of the audience found this amusing.) Eventually you get drawn into this movie. I found it touching when the Tim Allen character, as a dog, manages to arrange Scrabble letters to form I AM DAD and his daughter throws her arms around the canine, but basically the best thing about the movie is the poster.

Jackie Chan has worked out a successful formula for breaking into the North American film market; hire an English-speaking actor to handle the dialogue and let Jackie concentrate on what he does best. The storyline mocks the James Bond formula, of nefarious villains bent on taking over the world, by transplanting the action to the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria: a British Lord, tenth in line to the throne, plans to wipe out the rest of the royal family using the newly-invented machine gun, while his Chinese counterpart plans to take the Great Seal of China, storm the Forbidden City, and gain power. Sounds like pretty formulaic stuff except for a cinematographer intent on making an art film and a director dedicated to the art of Buster Keaton and Richard Lester.

Okay, so the film goes on a bit too long, but along the way we get a magnificent fight scene in a revolving door, a delightful sequence using market stall covers as trampolines, a Kung Fu homage to "Singin’ in the Rain," and a tribute to Harold Lloyd’s classic shenanigans with a giant clock-face. And you’ve never seen photography like this in an a formulaic action film: the scenes in the Forbidden City are breathtakingly beautiful; we get a brief glimpse of the Statue of Liberty under construction and a loving view of London in the era of Arthur Conan Doyle and Jack the Ripper. Rarely has such an entertaining film incorporated so many memorable images. Be sure to stay for the outtakes!

"You’re cute," the young art student says to the geeky museum guard, "but I don’t like your hair." So begins a fascinating and disturbing relationship between a college student who has trouble getting dates and a girl who transforms him into an attractive regular guy. The film might be thought of as a black comedy version of "The Princess Diaries." What do we mean by "attractive," and why does it require being "regular"? Ultimately the movie turns preachy, in a way that sometimes happens when plays are turned into films, and the story does depend on a plot twist, but all of us have experienced trying to change in order to please a prospective partner. The film merely asks how far we’d be willing to go. Critics have complained about the artificiality of the film: the characters appear to be delivering lines in a theatrical performance; the college where the action takes plays seems to be absurdly under populated. But given the underlying theme of artifice, I had no difficulty with either criticism. Watch the film as you would a play, if you like, and see if you can decide where you’d draw the line. A fascinating film but not one I’d see with someone you didn’t know very well.

Toronto diver and film-maker Rob Stewart has had a life-long fascination with sharks. Early on he discovered that virtually everything he’d been told about sharks was wrong. Despite having existed on this planet for 400,000,000 years—arriving long before the dinosaurs—sharks are among its least understood species. Stewart came to understand sharks by spending a great deal of time with them, slowing his heart to forty beats a minute in order not to frighten them away, making free dives rather than enclosing himself in a wetsuit with oxygen tanks. He learned underwater photography and spent years compiling a visual record of the creatures. Much of this film takes place underwater, including remarkable footage of entire schools of hammerhead sharks.

Stewart’s research inevitably led to a realization of the sharks’ fate: ninety percent of the world’s shark population has already been exterminated, and during the hour and a half that you watch this movie another sixteen thousand will die. Why? A combination of myth and money: the myth that the only good shark is a dead shark and the money that comes from the trade in shark fins, treasured in Asia for shark fin soup. It is hard to believe that this trade rivals drugs in the interests of organized crime, but such appears to be the case. At one point Stewart joins forces with a Greenpeace ship in a futile effort to stop long-line fishing off the coast of Costa Rica and elsewhere, learning along the way of government support for the lucrative illegal trade.

Why should we care? Sharks represent the top predator in the ocean. Remove the sharks and the fish they feed on will eliminate the plankton that provide the planet’s major source of oxygen. You will recall the beautiful photograph of the earth, taken from space, that adorned the Whole Earth Catalog back in the 1970, and you’ll probably remember editor Stewart Brand’s optimistic words: “We are as gods, so we might as well start getting good at it.” A dissenting opinion comes from the captain of the Greenpeace ship The Good Shepherd. “We think of ourselves as gods, deciding which species will live and which will die. In fact we’re just hairless apes with even less intelligence than the apes. Future generations will look back at us the same way as we look at the slave-traders—with amazement and contempt.”

You remember how excited you were by "All the President’s Men"? How two reporters attempting to determine the truth were frankly dumbfounded by the depths of deceit coming from the White House? There haven’t been many films to compare with that one since its release in 1976. If you enjoyed that film, do yourself a favour and seek out "Shattered Glass," currently playing at the Sheppard Grande and Canada Square theatres. Don’t expect it to have a wide release. It doesn’t have Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman and Jason Robards and Hal Holbrook. In fact, you may never have seen any of these actors before. But you will remember their faces.

The New Republic, one of the most highly respected political journals in the United States, has been called "the in-flight magazine of Air Force One." (Not during the Bush administration, to be sure!) When Michael Kelly came over from the New Yorker as editor of TNR in the late 1990’s, he brought with him The New Yorker’s fabled fact-checking system. Each article goes from the writer to an editor, then back to the writer, then to a second editor, then to the fact checkers, then to the legal department, then back to the writer. Good writers dread this week-long scrutiny; poor writers are undone by it. The magazine holds extremely high standards for itself, and doesn’t hesitate to point out shortcomings in the work of its competitors.

Yet the staff in 1998, when this story takes place, was very young. The median age was only 26, and the youngest editor on staff was one Stephen Glass, a personable, self-effacing, disarming young man who seemed eager to please and determined to live up to the journal’s high expectations. Those who knew Stephen Glass found it almost impossible to believe that for several years he had simply been inventing the stories he had submitted. Given the safeguards, how could such a thing be possible?

The film follows the course of the story that finally proved to be Glass’s undoing, a highly topical piece on computer hacking. Even though you know the general shape of the plot before seeing the film, you’ll be completely engaged, and even wonder whether the reviewers really had it right, due both to a clever cinematic construction and the innocent appearance of the lead actor. With tousled hair and oversize glasses he looks for all the world like Harry Potter. Highly recommended.

Who hasn't enjoyed the thrill of attending a movie at its premiere? I never thought that would extend to subways, but here we were on November 24, the opening day of the long-awaited Sheppard Avenue line, whose construction had made driving along Sheppard Avenue such a nightmare for so many months.

At first sight the project seems a trifle modest, a mere 6.7 kilometers and five closely-spaced stations. One might have hoped the city would have the vision to extend the line westward to join the University Line or eastward to meet Scarborough Town Centre. And woe betide those who enter these new stations by the wrong entrance. In any effort to cut down on token-takers, the TTC has made the majority of access points "token only."

Those quibbles aside, I am happy to report on several reasons for rejoicing. The Leslie station features 17,000 tiles containing the handwriting of 3400 TTC patrons and employees, all repeating the words "Leslie & Sheppard," a monument to populist democracy. Bayview Station, in addition to the longest set of stairs in the city (and no escalator) boasts a dozen large abstract designs splashed across floor, walls and ceilings. The Yonge/Sheppard station takes farm scenes, of the sort that would have been common at that intersection in the era before the city swallowed up the farmland, and turns the pixels into mosaic tiles, to pleasing effect. The Sheppard line doesn't go very far, but at least getting off the subway can be an artistically rewarding experience.

Michael Caine has always considered film acting as a métier, and his video "Michael Caine on Film Acting," available in many public libraries, conveys a wealth of information on the technique of acting before a camera. Thinking of acting as a job, Caine has taken on immense number of assignments, always turning in a workmanlike performance but often suffering from a bad script. Once in awhile a great role comes along, and Caine's talents receive a worthy venue.

Just as Cary Grant's blue flannel suit, worn throughout "North By Northwest, comes to symbolize the nature and treatment of his character, so a tuxedo spattered with blood represents the declining fortunes of small-time fight organizer Billy "Shiner" Simpson, whose career has included illegal bare-knuckle fights in a cage but who hopes to capture the elusive prize of legitimacy in a fight between his own son and an American champion. Convinced that his son has thrown the fight, carrying with the defeat every penny Simpson had been able to borrow, he spends the rest of the film trying to uncover the plot, in so doing uncovering for us the nature of his interactions with his daughters, his henchmen and his associates.

I love a film that tells its story in images, and the scenes of two musclemen overturning a car, of Caine entering an empty mansion, of a terrified fighter freezing in the ring, of a policeman's face looking at photos of Joe Louis and Jack Dempsey all help to propel this fine gritty film.

Sex may seem synonymous with intimacy, but “Shortbus” presents a collection of couples and singles of varying sexual orientation all seeking intimacy but finding only sex. Those who recall the director’s “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” will not be surprised by the overall air of futility and desperation, punctuated by forced gaiety, as in the marching band that arrives in the final scene to provide a thoroughly meretricious happy ending. We meet a sex therapist (“I prefer ‘couples counsellor’”) who has never experienced an orgasm; a dominatrix who has never had a relationship; a suicidal homosexual intent on introducing a new participant into the relationship so that his partner will not be devastated by his death; and a lonely man who has spent the last two years surreptitiously filming the activities of the couple across the street.

Technology plays an important role in this film: the suicidal man is filming the final year of his lie as a parting gift to his partner; the dominatrix scribbles captions on Polaroid pictures as “performance art”; the sex therapist attends a party wearing a remote-control vibrator. She gives the remote to her husband who wanders off, occasionally randomly stimulating her, and then misplaces the object, which is picked up by a stranger who thinks it is the remote to a television. The participants seem to share the illusion that if they cannot achieve intimacy by ordinary sex perhaps bizarre sex will succeed. You’ll see positions you’ve never dreamed of, as well as an answer to the question of whether a man can perform self-fellatio (it doesn’t look comfortable). I found myself unnerved by the display of so much graphic sex in the context of such a palpable unfulfilled desire for love.

Two of the most awkward ages for women dating must be 16 and 45 (as a widow returning to the scene). What happens when the woman and her daughter attend the same party and everything gets in the way of her meeting the single man that everyone has been waiting for her to meet? I found this a truly touching film, with an entire story told in less than a quarter hour.

People who attend film festivals probably don’t have a lot of first-hand contact with the kinds of marginal characters portrayed here, where an unattached woman initially falls for a has-been country singer’s line about making her his backup singer, then listens as his adult daughter tries to steer her clear of the bum. A wistful look at the universal desire for connection.

Sheer fun, in which human figures take the parts of Xs and Os. A delightful way to spend two minutes.

A forty-year old man with a split personality, partially inhabited by a teenage girl who seems to be taking over. You don’t get this kind of study of identity at your local Cineplex.

A seventy-year-old woman, about to be honoured for her years of teaching, but burdened with knowledge of a fatal disease and her lifetime partner’s increasing dementia, considers ending her life. A beautiful film, not only in its exterior shots but also in the determination in this strong woman’s eyes.

School portraits juxtaposed with voices at an elementary school spelling bee—an atmospheric experimental film.

Early on a logger nearly has his leg severed. Then he complains that the cockroaches have eaten Mary. The film-maker requested that we not look away from the screen too often. I bailed early.

For those wondering about what life was like among barbarian bands in the Dark Ages, and who don’t have the stomach to read Beowulf, “Sin Nombre” may be informative. For those who continue to preserve the belief that human civilization traces an upward line of inevitable progress, “Sin Nombre” may come as something of a shock. The theme of immigrants from Mexico or points south trying to cross the border into the United States has inspired many films, most of them depicting the antagonistic relationship between the would-be immigrants and the U.S. Border Patrol. “Sin Nombre,” by contrast, shows the fierce life of rival gangs who, far from assisting each other in the perilous journey north, provide an additional peril far more deadly than anything posed by American authorities. Normal human emotions, particularly compassion, prove to be particularly hazardous. The major part of the film takes place on the roofs of freight cars heading for the U.S., and the play of conflicting loyalties in this restricted space. An outstanding film but not for the faint of heart.

Obedience to orders is the fundamental principle of military discipline, the linchpin of the chain of command. No army can tolerate insubordination on any appreciable scale. The movement against the Vietnam War that occurred within the ranks of the U.S. military had to be officially portrayed as the aberrant acts of a lunatic fringe. That the movement spread so rapidly through the armed forces, through clandestine newspapers and off-base coffeehouses, testifies to the degree of disaffection among the young men and women sent to fight the war. From the concept of a “body count” as the measure of the war’s success to the development of napalm that would destroy human flesh, to President Nixon’s order for an aerial attack on North Vietnam that would “bomb them back to the Stone Age,” this war seemed to many participants to be a morally indefensible act of genocide. “Sir, No Sir” traces the growth of the anti-war movement within the military through a series of interviews with soldiers actively involved in the protests. Along the way we see reminders of some of the uglier aspects of America in the later 60s and early 70s, including the use of military personnel against anti-war demonstrators at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968 and at Kent State University in 1970 and the “fragging” (killing by fragmentation grenades) of officers by men in their command. We hear about the repressive measures taken against soldiers who refused to fight or who attempted to go AWOL.

Despite the pain of revisiting the country’s wrong-headed war, and the shame not of its defeat but of its inhumanity, watching this film reminds us that in the long run in a democracy the will of the people will be heard.

Okay; this film isn’t for everyone—the audience at the 7:15 p.m. show consisted of three pairs of sixteen-year-old girls and me—but seeing the first fifteen minutes of “Star Wars: The Revenge of the Sith” (I arrived early and managed to sneak in) made me very, very glad I wasn’t seeing that film.

Four girls, born within a few weeks of each other and virtually inseparable for the first sixteen years of their lives, now approach their first summer apart: one will spend time in South Carolina with her father, one will attend a soccer camp in Mexico, another will visit her grandparents on an island in Greece, and the fourth will remain at home working at Wal-Mart (whoops, make that Wallman). At a clothing store they come upon a pair of magical jeans that fit all them, in spite of their considerable differences in size and body type. They buy the pants and decide to mail them back and forth to each other so that each girl can wear them for a week at a time. Sure enough, the pants seem to bring them good fortune, though never in ways they could have predicted.

Black-out sketches, a staple of improv comedy, allow actors to set up and exploit situations without the burden of a dénouement. “Sisterhood” employs the same technique to steer clear of the ickiness to which this kind of movie seems to be prone. Surprisingly, it works. By deftly cutting among the four storylines, the film manages to be humorous but not overbearing, touching but not bathetic, romantic but not cutesy, serious but never ponderous. With an ensemble of talented young actresses, as yet unburdened by overactive egos, that proves to be sufficient, and one can enjoy a pleasing narrative mercifully free of the usual Hollywood tendency to underline everything in dark pencil to be sure the audience gets it. Be grateful for small pleasures.

Okay. I guess it’s fun to send up Disney, to have the king turn back into a toad, to have Prince Charming be a conceited villain and the fairy godmother be an evil witch in disguise, and the perfect parody of "Beauty and the Beast" in the final scene was neatly accomplished, but does it all have to be so heavy-handed, so in your face? Is there no room for wit or charm or subtlety? Perhaps not. After all, the film has to compete with the obnoxious automobile and beauty cream advertisements which precede it (or perhaps you saw the film in one of the multiplexes that blast a local AM radio station through the loudspeakers to insure you against tedious silent moments in which you might be compelled to converse with the person you came with). While Shrek II doesn’t actually have any cars being blown up or bodies torn apart by machine gun fire, it does tend to bang you over the head to be sure you get it. I suppose it’s absurd to complain about a cartoon being dumbed down, but this is mass entertainment with an awfully broad base. Far be it for me to argue with the enormous commercial success of this film, but doesn’t it say something when after seeing the movie you realize that you heard all the best lines in the trailer?

"The Sidewalks of New York" intercuts documentary-style interviews on sex, love and relationships with episodes involving eight New Yorkers linked through marriage, adultery or flirtation. The men come off as insensitive, self-serving predators, the women as insecure, self-doubting victims. Not much to admire. Does this offer a representative sample of young New Yorkers? Perhaps not, but when, in the movies, do you ever see two people actually working on a relationship? People react, in a variety of predictable ways, but when do you see authentic response or dialogue that takes more than two exchanges before ending in anger or tears? For that matter, when do you observe that in real life? Perhaps not a movie to see with your partner if your relationship is in trouble.

Rarely have I seen an audience so captivated by a film as at the 4:00 p.m. showing of "Sideways" at the Cumberland Theatre on Sunday. To be sure, a Cumberland audience is a roomful of cineastes, but I’ve seen many a film at that theatre without noticing such a magnetic connection between movie action and audience response. Why should this be so? The film has no stars (only movie buffs will remember Paul Giamatti in "American Splendor, though after "Sideways" his name will become much better known). His co-star looks like any other one-dimensional television actor; the two women look no more than vaguely familiar. The dialogue is serviceable without being memorable. What we have here is a very good story, a director with an excellent eye, and an ensemble cast devoted to honest character development.

Two men take off for a weeklong vacation in northern California wine country: an oenophile intent on educating his friend in the subtleties of the pinot grape and a groom-to-be intent on sowing wild oats during the countdown to his wedding and, incidentally, seeking sexual comfort for his dour companion. Paul Giamatti plays the wine connoisseur and unpublished novelist, a man whose self-disapproval ("My life is half over and what do I have to show for it?") expresses itself in every step he takes as he shambles and lurches his way through the picture. His companion, by contrast, is something of a narcissist and much as he appreciates his fiancée, has real misgivings about surrendering the easy availability of women in his life. They meet up with two women, both wine-lovers, and predictable complications ensue.

You may not believe that a detailed discussion of wine could serve as foreplay (as a non-wine-drinker, I never would have believed it), but the film will surprise you. The movie virtually overflows with wine (and in one funny scene, literally overflows). The film-maker turns to split screens in an exuberant display, the visual equivalent of someone so enthused with a subject that he stumbles over his words.

Three scenes of nakedness produce a crescendo of comic effects, each time overturning our expectations. As the road trip spins out of control you wonder, and then worry, how the director is going to end this story without someone getting killed. This is a story about adult relationships wrapped in a paean to pinot—don’t miss it.

Playwright Peter Froehlich says that he never understood his father’s jokes until he started researching the work of Valentin, sometimes known as the German Charlie Chaplin. Valentin delighted Munich audiences in the 20’s the 30’s with sketches in a style that North American audiences will associate with the Marx Brothers as much as with Chaplin (and that younger viewers will associate with Monty Python).

The play "Simpl" weaves a number of Valentin’s actual sketches into a loose biography that provides a context for the clowning. One might describe the basic theme as the comedy of interruption. The play opens with pianist Peter Tiefenbach, playing the role of Gerhard Krachmann, performing a virtuoso overture at the keyboard, only to stop midway through when he makes an error. He starts over from the beginning but this time a mistake in the left hand brings him to a halt. He never does get through the overture, his efforts interrupted by the arrival of Karl Valentin (performed convincingly by playwright Froehlich) with a tuba. The two begin a ludicrous arrangement of the Tannhäuser overture for tuba and piano, interrupted halfway through by the need to empty water from the valves of the instrument. Subsequent restarts are interrupted by Valentin’s commentary, and thus the evening begins. We see Valentin’s inventive genius at work both in the incipient stages of a comic idea and in polished routines. The culminating sketch of the first act has a pompous actor reciting a Schiller ode over the radio while a simpleton, played by Valentin, runs amok at the sound effects table. It sounds very basic, but you’re left helpless with mirth and you may recall Harpo Marx in similar situations.

In the second half of the play we see Valentin desperately trying to remain non-political as the Nazis exert their stranglehold over every aspect of German life. Valentin recounts an afternoon spent with Hitler in which he regaled the Führer with a non-stop monologue to forestall the possibility of questions that he could not successfully answer. Actress Nicola Lipman completes the trio of performers in this evening-long demonstration of the timelessness of well-executed physical comedy.

"S.O.B.," a very bad movie from 1981, opens with a production number called "Skip to My Lou," from a failed musical that is eventually turned into a sex picture (told you it was a very bad movie). Now we're meant to accept the number as a fiasco--it's overproduced, hokey, badly arranged--but it's performed by Julie Andrews, who's a real pro even in the most dreadful circumstances (and they don't come much more dreadful than this), and she nearly redeems it.

The movie version of "The Sound of Music" takes a sweet, even saccharine, Broadway musical, adds sugar, and bloats it up to three hours running time. The girl who sings "I Am Sixteen Going on Seventeen" looks to be around 28 and well able to teach the 17-year-old lad a thing or two. The only touch of irony in the original show, "How Can Love Survive?", has been dropped, and two other inferior numbers added.

Yet the movie has Julie Andrews, whose enormous talent is burnished by our knowledge of the circumstances of her career. Bursting into Broadway stardom with "My Fair Lady," but passed over for the movie version because she was "not sufficiently well known," she went to Hollywood and turned out "Mary Poppins" and "The Sound of Music," two of the biggest hit musicals of all time. At the other end of her life, we're aware of the botched operation that has evidently ended a singing career that has delighted audiences for more than forty years.

Julie Andrews single-handedly overcomes the grossest faults of "The Sound of Music," but the movie is so close to self-parody that it fairly invites the extra push over the edge, a push that the Sing-Along version exuberantly supplies. The program begins with a fashion show of dozens and dozens of costumes (Adriana came as a flibbertygibbet, her friend as a kitten with whiskers; there were also sets of children dressed up in drapes, Ray "a drop of golden sun," and a passel of nuns and girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes. Great fun).

Then an emcee dressed as "Reverend Mother" coached us to hiss the baroness, boo the Nazis, act out "Do Re Mi," wave a piece of edelweiss in time with the tune, and other participatory gestures.

The result was the gentlest, most affectionate fun-poking of the excesses of the musical, while still celebrating its virtues (we all stood up when Julie Andrews walked down the aisle of the chapel wearing the most gorgeous wedding dress I've seen in film). If you have children, or if you're a secret Rodgers and Hammerstein fan, don't miss this. At the Eglinton Theatre until March 21.

“THE SINGING REVOLUTION”

The people of Estonia have managed to sustain their culture despite repeated invasions and occupations, most recently by the Nazis and then the Soviets. A choral festival involving thousands of singers has provided an opportunity to reassert traditional values. My perspective on the film is probably not what the filmmakers had in mind. It occurs to me that the Chinese government, drawing lessons from the disintegration of the Soviet Union, has concluded that Gorbachev’s failure lay in losing control and that brutal repression can succeed in stamping out democratic desires. One imagines that Tibet, like Estonia, has a rich cultural tradition, but no amount of singing could save Tibet in its present circumstances. The film also impresses one with the essential homogeneity of Estonian society, which permits the stirring solidarity depicted in the rallies to save the parliament but also bypasses the difficult problems encountered in once-homogeneous but now multicultural European countries such as France, Germany and Switzerland.

“SIR, NO SIR”

Go see this film for the good of your soul. You’ll come away with a sense of exuberance, wanting to dare to dream, to cast off petty restrictions and to express what’s really inside you. Director Sydney Pollack has offered us a multi-faceted gift. To begin with, just to see—in moving pictures rather than still—a selection of Frank Gehry’s works from around the world is enough to make you sing for joy: the seductive use of building materials, the glorious curves, the sheer fun of many of the shapes become profoundly moving. We get a glimpse into the remarkable process by which an idea becomes an actual structure—from doodles to cardboard models to computer realizations capable of generating the two-dimensional diagrams required by engineers and contractors. In addition, Pollack and Gehry exhibit a remarkable rapport as artists striving to find a “sliver of space” for self-expression in mediums largely government by commercial restrictions. They must have spent a fair amount of time making the film, for we see the new Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles under construction as well as in completion. The two men carry on an extended, easy, collegial conversation that unites the aesthetic and the personal with revealing intimacy. I loved the phrase, used toward the end of the film, “Go ahead and take some credit: you made it happen.” Gehry has been influenced more by artists than by architects; his buildings seem to be in a place of their own.

Movies like this put North American audiences into a peculiar moral position as they watch desperately impoverished Indian children do whatever they can to survive. If this means stealing the shoes or stripping the automobiles or trading on the credulity of North American tourists, it’s hard for the audience to sustain much moral outrage, even as we flinch at putting ourselves in the victims’ places.

Charges of fraud ensue when one of these children, through a bizarre set of circumstances, not only finds himself on the hit television program, “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” but succeeds in correctly answering one question after another. The film follows the young man’s life as a slum dog to show how he legitimately came into possession of the knowledge he displays. For a film billed as positive and uplifting, this one has a disturbing proportion of violence, cruelty and sheer nastiness.

Seeing two films with the same initial premise illustrates what a difference point of view can make. A university professor’s depression at the death of his wife has stretched on for half a dozen years during which he has gone through the motions of teaching while avoiding any interest in his students (even the ability to remember the name of a young woman who has taken three courses with him), showing little but contempt for the rest of the world. His daughter, now a senior in high school, has grown up to be lonely, acerbic and mistrustful. The professor’s sense of entitlement leads to an accident that lands him in the hospital and deprives him of his driver’s license for several months. Into the situation comes his semi-employed half-brother and a doctor who, in student days, had a crush on the professor.

By contrast with “The Visitor,” this film makes you aware of the screen writer’s brittle humour, the contrivances of plot, and the interactions among recognizable stars (Dennis Quaid, Sarah Jessica Parker, Ellen Page, Thomas Haden Church). I confess that my new profession has altered the way I see films. Leaving the theatre I recoiled at the prospect of having to deal with any of these characters as a therapist. Patti gently pointed out that while an enforced encounter would be a nightmare, people who seek out a psychotherapist of their own free will want to change, and that desire has an important effect on the interaction between therapist and client.

The story can be simply told: a man driving to Winnipeg (Alan Rickman) picks up a hitchhiker (Emily Hampshire) who is killed when their car is struck by a lumber truck. The man goes to Wawa to convey his condolences to the girl’s mother (Sigourney Weaver) and is surprised to discover that, though quite articulate, she is autistic. She persuades him to remain in town several days for the girl’s funeral, during which time he develops a romantic relationship with a next-door neighbour (Carrie-Anne Moss).

The mother’s collection of snow globes provides a metaphor for the story: the small town life of Wawa, in which everyone know everyone else’s business, the brief moment of magic while the snow transforms the scene. At the funeral, the girl’s grandfather comments that the idiosyncratic young woman “showed us a different way of seeing the world.” The film manifests this theme of perception and appearance in eyeglasses—what one sees and how one appears. As the film opens with the Alan Rickman character flying into a northern Ontario airport the camera focuses on his glasses and his view out the window. Twice during the movie he tries on alternate glasses, with other characters commenting on his appearance in them. Each time he returns to his original pair. Changes in perception occur with each of the women he meets. At first he considers the hitchhiker to be a nuisance and rebuffs her, but then invites her to ride with him. At first encounter with her mother, he tries to make a quick exit from the autistic woman, then agrees to stay. He initially believes the neighbour to be a prostitute, then discovers his mistake and enters a relationship with her. But in the end he returns to his original plan and heads on to Winnipeg, the whole episode as fleeting as a scene in a snow globe.

But the film belongs to Sigourney Weaver, whose remarkable acting embodies the autistic absence of empathy while thoroughly engaging the audience’s interest and sympathy. Her limitations become apparent—unable to raise her daughter, she left the task to her parents. Now she cannot cope with tending her deceased daughter’s dog. Yet her childlike perception of life outweighs her limitations—her delight at eating snow, at bouncing on a trampoline, or watching the flashing globes that her daughter bought for her just before her death. One of the most charming scenes comes at the wake following the funeral, when the mother, unable to cope with the unaccustomed invasion of her house, withdraws into a prolonged, private, self-soothing dance. Clearly she lives in a world of her own, but one with its own simple rewards.

The neighbour who befriends the man describes herself as selfish and incapable of sustaining a relationship, despite evidence we see to the contrary. The man, haunted by his own past, seems to believe himself incapable of friendship, though we see otherwise. This beautifully acted film of human limitation and caring should not be missed.

The Arctic seems extraordinarily ill-suited to human habitation, yet the Inuit exist in strange harmony with this remote and forbidding corner of nature’s realm. "The Snow Walker" tells the story of a reasonably resourceful bush pilot (Charlie), rescued by a tubercular Inuit girl (Kanaalaq) whom he was supposed to be flying to hospital. The film, shot in Rankin Inlet, Nunavut and British Columbia, draws a striking contrast between the pilot’s noisy frustrated attack on the mechanical object that has betrayed him and the girl’s quiet patient efforts to lead him toward the only way that will allow him to survive. As the film shifts from his point of view to hers, what had seemed like a desolate wasteland turns before our eyes into a beautiful country capable of sustaining life that embraces nature rather than attempting to conquer it. The vastness of Nunavut, Canada’s newest political entity, is established early in the film: it could contain Europe three times and still have room left for Greenland. Charlie sees himself as hundreds of miles from civilization. Kanaalaq finds herself at home on the land. You will leave the theatre feeling more centered and peaceful than you did entering it. A gentle and compelling film.

You leave the theatre at 11:30 p.m. and find yourself alone in Fairview Mall. Did you take a left or a right at the bottom of the escalator coming in? You walk through the food court. None of this seems familiar. You return to the escalator, take the other corridor. Yes, this looks more like it. There. You can see your car in the parking lot, but the glass doors are bolted. You try the doors to the right; they are also bolted. The doors on the far right end as well. A single door on the far left end turns out to be unlocked and you leave the mall. You drive through the empty parking lot, searching for a way out of the mall. There seems to be a street nearby, but no connecting passage. Finally you discover an egress and make your way onto Fairview Drive. Where is that? Do you want to make a right? No, try the left. Sheppard Avenue? Yes. You drive home to your apartment. But is that really your apartment or just a three-dimensional recreation constructed from your memory by a sentient planet capable of increasing its mass a thousand-fold? (You might ask your physics teacher about that. That's a whole lot of MacDonalds milkshakes, fella.) If this kind of prose fascinates you, then you might want to see "Solaris," but be warned. You have never seen a slower-paced film. You look at George Clooney's face and count to ten. Slowly. Then you pan slowly to the object of his vision. It is a woman's face, which remains motionless during the count of ten. You look back at George Clooney's face and count to ten. Slowly. "Hello, Chris." It is the woman's voice. Is it a real person? George Clooney can't be sure, and neither can you, because Natasha McElhone never seemed remotely human in the first place as George Clooney's suicidal wife, so who knows what to make of her reincarnation. But you'll have plenty of time to think about it. The camera goes back to the woman's face, this time in flashback (you can tell because it has an orange background instead of a blue one), and you count to ten slowly and wait for something to happen. Keep waiting.

A divorced playwright in her fifties who’s given up on love meets a never-married playboy in his sixties who’s never known love, and both are transformed by the experience. That much, written on the right napkin in the right Hollywood restaurant will get you a meeting with a producer, who will demand that you flesh out the idea a bit. Okay, let’s say that the playboy is originally going with the playwright’s daughter, that he suffers a heart attack that forces him to share a beach house with the playwright, and that the young attending physician is wildly attracted to the playwright. The producer likes the idea, casts Diane Keaton, Jack Nicholson, Amanda Peet and Keanu Reeves in the main roles, throws in Frances McDormand as the playwright’s sister, and you’re ready to shoot.

You don’t end up with a perfect movie--the structure is clunky and contrived—but you have three great things going for you: a very funny script, a female point of view, and some real pros as actors, and they carry you gracefully over all the bumpy bits. Three women confronting Jack Nicholson (typecast as a man who’s never dated anyone over thirty); a bottle of stones as a plot element; an unforgettable scene with scissors: I don’t think any man could have written that material. The acting, moreover, is uniformly strong. Jack Nicholson, not known for physical comedy, has a number of comic turns that he executes with élan. Keanu Reeves, liberated from his "Matrix" coat, comes across with appealing conviction as the young doctor. Amanda Peet radiates an appropriate mix of intelligence and seductive innocence. The picture really belongs to Diane Keaton, who when given strong material like this shows herself to be a major actress.

To give you an idea of how the writer/director and the actors work together, consider the subtlety with which our allegiance shifts between enjoying Amanda Peet and Jack Nicholson together to finding Amanda Peet an impediment to the relationship between Nicholson and Keaton. The transition occurs during a touching exchange of instant messaging notes between two people in the same house, leading to pancakes in the kitchen. Some skilful screenwriting is going on here aided by equally skilful acting. The result is a smart romantic comedy about adults in the prime of life. Go see it.

In recent months we've seen several movies in which the death of a child plays an important part. "Lantana" as well as "In the Bedroom" depict flawed relationships that come apart when the burden of a child's death becomes too much for them to bear.

But what about a situation with a strong marital bond, and a healthy family relationship? "The Son's Room," an Italian film, celebrates the joy of living, with an emphasis on physical activity. It seems as if everyone in the part of Italy where the film is set either runs or plays soccer or basketball or some other sport. The father in the family is a skilled psychoanalyst, who manages to maintain a positive attitude and offer beneficial counsel despite having to listen to hour after hour of the most stupefyingly banal problems. The mother works as a designer in a publishing firm. The son and daughter, late teenagers one supposes, enjoy a warm, supportive relationship with each other and with their parents, quite unlike the adolescent battlefield portrayed in many American films.

When the son dies in a diving accident, everything deteriorates. The father decides he can no longer continue his practice. The couple's relationship frays. The girl is thrown off the basketball team for insubordination. And you feel the pain of this inevitable disruption because you've really grown to enjoy and admire these people.

Then a letter arrives from a girl whom the son met briefly at summer camp. It appears that he has kept certain parts of his life completely to himself. The mother wants to meet her; the girl rebuffs her. The pain continues.

Finally, the girl turns up at the couple's house, and circumstances allow the entire family to invest something of themselves into her life. The film does not have a conventional happy ending, but it is clear that the corner has been turned, and that the family will heal.

I should explain the circumstances under which I saw this film. Marathon training necessarily involves some very long runs, which may leave you drained but also susceptible to the euphoria known as "runner's high." As I drove from SAC to the city last evening, listening to some really fine radio in the form of an interview with visitors to the Canadian social centre at the Olympics (a kind of continuous party, from what we heard, with lots of joking about the 3.2% beer that Labatts was required to supply under Utah state law), I felt deliriously happy. A Utah woman, visiting the Canadian centre, commented on the contrast between Canada's cultural diversity and Utah's homogeneity. After seeing the film, I reflected that our cinematic life does not begin to reflect that diversity. If you look in the newspaper, virtually all the dozens of theatres in the region are showing the same, not particularly distinguished, and films. When was the last time you saw an Italian film? Yet the Italian film industry, not to mention the French or German, is at least as active as the Canadian film industry. We get "Amélie", and perhaps give it an award as a "foreign film", but what about the other French films that we never even heard about? I guess we should be glad for the few films that do make their way from outside North America, especially when they're as good as "The Son's Room."

--a woman slips off a barstool and falls to the floor, tries to get up, fails, tries to get up, fails, tries to get up, fails, gives up;

--dozens of people with overladen baggage carts inch across the terminal floor to the ticket counters, getting ever closer but never arriving;

--a grown man, formerly a poet, lies immobilized in a fetal position on a bed, unable to speak or move;

--a large, overweight man, covered with soot, complains that he is ruined, his business up in smoke, because of a fire he himself has set;

] --a magician makes a mistake sawing a man in half, and the man appears in a hospital word, holding his intestines in place as the doctor in charge looks on without taking any interest;

The Swedes evidently find this demonstration of the futility of action hysterically funny, but I've never felt 89 minutes go by so slowly.

The movies have had more of an influence on Broadway musicals than has usually been acknowledged. Movies have always been made from musicals—on the whole, not very well. But it works in the other direction, too. Consider the recent rash of musicals made from movies: “The Producers,” “The Lion King,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Young Frankenstein,” “Spamalot.” Now we get “The Sound of Music,” ostensibly a revival of the original Broadway show with Mary Martin but actually a transfer to the stage of the movie version, one of the most over-produced musicals ever made, Julie Andrews’ revenge for not getting to play Eliza Doolittle (the role she created on Broadway in “My Fair Lady”) in the movie version (which had Audrey Hepburn lip-synching to songs performed by Marni Nixon).

The movie version of “The Sound of Music” included new songs by Richard Rodgers, inferior songs for which he wrote the lyrics after the death of his partner Oscar Hammerstein. In place of the charming “An Ordinary Couple,” for example, we get “Something Good,” with the fatuous sentiments, “Nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could, so somewhere in my youth or childhood I must have done something good.” Give me a break! And then there’s Maria’s new song, where she sings “I have confidence in confidence alone.”

Live theatre typically calls on the imagination of the audience, unlike cinema, which supplies every detail. Think of the iconic helicopter shot of Julie Andrews atop an Austrian mountain. Andrew Lloyd Webber has done much to bring cinematic techniques to the stage (can you hum a single song from “Phantom of the Opera”? But you’ll never forget that infernal chandelier.) Webber himself produced this version of “The Sound of Music,” so we shouldn’t be surprised that he constructed a remarkable flying stage to reproduce that moment where Julie Andrews spins around at high altitude (and to permit the Trapp family to climb over the mountain at the end).

Movies (and rock concerts) have accustomed us to hearing voices and instruments coming from loudspeakers rather than a stage or a pit, to the point that theatre-goers will no longer tolerate traditional live music. It’s an eerie sensation to sit in the balcony of The Princess of Wales Theatre—the same distance we sit from the stage at Roy Thomson Hall—listening to a technically live orchestra play the overture to the second act. There are instruments down there—at least I see a conductor—but why is the sound, inevitably an artificially broadcast sound, coming from the top of the stage? Needless to say, the singers are all amplified as well, and their voices also come from loudspeakers at the top of the stage, so that you have to pay careful attention to physical movements to determine who is actually singing or speaking. That said, the singing is very nice, particularly that of Maria, chosen from thousands of contestants in a Canada-wide “Survivor”-style competition. And I found some touching moments, including the unaccompanied (if amplified) children singing “Climb Every Mountain,” and the wordless “Ländler” danced by Maria and Captain von Trapp. But I do miss truly live music at the theatre.

At a time when each day's new revelations of corporate greed make us wish for some occasion to celebrate a triumph of the human spirit comes "Space Station," now showing in Imax at the Ontario Science Centre. Those of us who can neither qualify as astronauts nor raise the $20,000,000 (US) to pay our way as tourists to the International Space Station will have to make do with this remarkable film. So accustomed have we become to ingenious special effects that narrator Tom Cruise must constantly remind us that what we are seeing is real. Even so we are bothered by the arithmetic: the narration keeps counting out the number of astronauts as successive crews construct and maintain the station. Yet somebody had to be behind the camera: are we seeing "dramatic reconstructions" of events? Yet such concerns vanish before the grandeur of the scene and the triumph of internationalism. A touching moment occurs when schoolchildren are shown communicating across hundreds of miles with astronauts on board the ISS. At last we have unforgettable positive images to dispel the terrible pictures of the Challenger disaster and other failures along the way. For forty-five minutes we are given the opportunity to stand outside the earth and imagine a life no longer earthbound, a prospect as breathtaking as it is frightening.

How you enjoy this show depends a great deal on how you enjoy “Monty Python.” If you sat with a buddy, reading the scripts aloud and chuckling over the witty lines, you’ll probably spend the entire evening laughing, as did those in the theatre around me. If, on the other hand, your pleasure in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” came from repeatedly listening to the soundtrack recording, or watching the VCR or DVD, then you’ll listen in vain for the particular inflections of John Cleese, Michael Palin, et al. Don’t get me wrong—every word has been preserved; it’s just that the delivery isn’t quite the same.

The music has been billed as a parody of every kind of show tune. Sometimes this works brilliantly, as in “The Song That Goes Like This,” a hilarious send-up of every overblown Andrew Lloyd Webber ballad. (You’ll need to listen to this on the cast album, since laughter in the theatre covers some of the details.) But “Find Your Grail,” though claiming to mock inspirational songs, simply sounds like another one. My favourite moment came at the beginning of the show, where the narrator sets us in England but the musical, mishearing, gives us a “fish-slapping” dance set in Finland. The “Trojan Rabbit” gag works even better on the stage than in the movie, I suppose because we’re aware of limitations in the theatre that don’t exist on film. The same goes for the Killer Rabbit scene and the duel with the knight who loses his limbs. In general, the evening brings the pleasures of hearing familiar Beatles or ABBA songs performed by someone else: the material is great but the rendition just isn’t the same.

Written and directed by David Mamet, "Spartan" thrusts us abruptly into the middle of a paramilitary training camp. At this point we don’t know who are the good guys and who the bad, and if we had been told, we would have been told wrong—this is Mamet, remember. But we do learn that these soldiers, for lack of a better term, learn to obey orders and to succeed regardless of the cost. Val Kilmer plays the toughest of these tough guys, who turn out to be U.S. Secret Service agents working against a terrible deadline. It appears that the President’s daughter has been kidnapped by white slave traders unaware of her identity. When she fails to appear for classes at Harvard Monday morning, the disappearance will make world news, probably sealing her doom.

But this being a Mamet film, where nothing is what it seems, the real question is not what happens to the girl but what Kilmer—an agent trained only to execute orders—will do in a situation where he must make plans and decisions himself. Even if you’ve seen a lot of this kind of film before, you haven’t seen the Mamet version, and it’s definitely worth seeing.

Can there be anyone reading these words who has never participated in a spelling bee? It seems like a universal childhood experience. But like any sport, the difference between a classroom contest and competition at the highest level becomes almost a difference in kind rather than degree. In 1999, 249 regional winners went to Washington, D.C. for the national spelling bee. The documentary movie "Spellbound" followed the fortunes of eight of these young people, ages 10 to 12, as they prepared for the event by studying dictionaries, conning wordlists, even using computer software.

While city kids were well represented among the contestants, one is struck by the number of rural youngsters, kids for whom winning a local and then a regional competition would lead to the kind of community support associated with a football or basketball championship. I was also impressed by the number of Indian children in the national event, easily the largest visible minority.

The film shows us the details of procedure: an official pronouncer reads the words, repeating them as necessary. The contestant may ask for the word’s country of origin, its definition, and its use in a sentence, as they struggle for a foothold in words at least half of which they will never have heard before. (More than a third of the words used in the movie were unfamiliar to me.) You only get one chance, and when you see words like palimpsest, logorrhea, tergiversate, and terrine in print they may seem easy enough, but could you be certain to spell them correctly given only the pronunciation, in front of television cameras and a roomful of people, even as an adult, never mind a 6^th- to 8^th-grader. And would anyone reading these words really be able to get "heleoplankton" correct? A fascinating film.

Many great directors and great actors have been drawn to the theme of madness, be it the megalomania of "Citizen Kane," the creepy inner dementia of many of Peter O’Toole’s roles, the splendid delusions of George C. Scott in "They Might Be Giants" (1972) or the famous dual personalities in Hitchcock’s "Psycho" (1960, a film that made it virtually impossible for Tony Perkins ever to play a normal person again.) Sometimes we can attach a label to the behaviour, as in Roman Polanski’s "Paranoia" (Catherine Deneuve, 1969), or the multiple personalities of "Three Faces of Eve" (Joanne Woodward, 1957), or the autism of "Rain Man" (Dustin Hoffman, 1988). In other cases, we know something isn’t right, but have trouble naming the disease, as in "Lilith" (Jean Seaberg, Warren Beatty, 1964, a film that also includes Peter Fonda, Kim Hunter and Gene Hackman), or Kubrick’s "The Shining" (Jack Nicholson, 1980), or Milos Forman’s "One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest" (Nicholson, 1975)

Where "A Beautiful Mind" startles us with the apparent reality of mathematician John Nash’s visions, "Spider" takes us into a mind that confuses the identities of a mother and a whore, both played by Miranda Richardson. "Spider" Klegg (Ralph Fiennes) as a boy comes to believe that his father has murdered his mother in order to install a prostitute in the household. We see the adult Spider wandering through the neighbourhood of his memories, trying to glean the truth. In the end we catch a glimpse of the immediate cause of his institutionalization but the underlying reason remains a mystery.

David Cronenberg uses a limited palette of grey-green hues which emphasize the murkiness of Spider’s vision while the musical score by David Shore reinforces the sense of things not being right. Early on we see an example of Cronenberg’s gift for making the commonplace seem sinister, but the object in question turns out to be pivotal in the end. Both the young and the adult Spider tend to bend their bodies into S-curves, a kind of failed foetal position. The repeated motif of bodies stretched out against the bare dirt of a garden as if trying to penetrate its surface produces a memorable image. Ralph Fiennes haunted look, never making direct eye contact, will remain with me for a long time. This is an exceptional film.

Do you love books? Do you love not just the words of a good novel but also the feel of a well-bound volume, the delight of a well-designed font, the smell of its pages, and the texture of its paper? Then you'll also have experienced the distaste of a cheap, badly-bound book, its flimsy paper uncomfortable to the touch, its text seemingly slightly out of focus, the very ink on the page threatening to smear. And that, alas, is what I felt coming out of "Spiderman," with its vapid dialogue, its expensively cheesy special effects. "Like all good stories," the leading character tells us, "this is all about a girl," but the girl, described by her abusive father as a tramp, really does seem like a tramp. The villain, played by Willem Dafoe, comes off much better, but the film is not only violent but cruelly violent, not at all something you would want kids to see, and the entire experience leaves you with a bad taste in your mouth. This piece of overproduced trash will gross $400,000,000, ranking it with the greatest box-office successes of all time. I feel like putting the book down and washing my hands.

Who has the identity crisis here? First you take a comic book and turn it into a movie. But then the characters don’t seem real enough (duh). So you make them conflicted, just like real people. In the current movie Spiderman’s having a tough time: as Peter Parker he can’t keep a job because he’s undependable; he can’t keep up with his homework; he can’t pay his rent; he can’t even keep his girlfriend for fear of what Spiderman’s enemies might do to her if they ever made the connection. It just isn’t fair. Moreover, the magic stickum coming out of his fingers doesn’t seem to be making the grade anymore: he starts falling from buildings and hurting his back. "That’s it; I quit," says Spiderman, as his tosses his uniform into the garbage bin. "I’m gonna get a life!" And so he does: his grades improve, the girl looks at him in a different way. Life is sweet.

But wait! Without Spiderman to intervene, crime in the city is rising beyond all bounds. (The Spiderman series is not exactly a testimonial to the efficiency of the NYPD.) And worse, there’s a monster criminal out there, with amazing metal tentacle-arms surgically welded to his body. Can Spiderman permit civilization as we know it to come to an end just so he can lead a normal life? No way! So Spidey comes back. But is he able to defeat the monster? No. In every encounter they’re evenly matched—in fact, Spiderman generally seems to be on the short end of the stick. In the end, he has to appeal to the monster’s inner sense of goodness to commit suicide and destroy his evil invention. Can you believe it? John Wayne or Sean Connery or Harrison Ford would be laughing their heads off. "Please, Dr. Goldfinger: I implore you in the name of all that’s good and decent to let me go and give up this insane ambition for world domination." "Oh, O.K.,007. Say, why don’t we go out and have a drink?" And yet audiences are eating this stuff up—Spiderman 2 has broken all box office records for opening weekend and opening week receipts. Evidently this is what the public wants. God help us!

As if to show that Walt Disney doesn't hold a monopoly on terminal cuteness, Dreamworks has come out with "Spirit: The Story of a Horse That Couldn't be Broken," a saccharine exercise in anthropomorphizing animals, demonizing humans (the Native Americans come off somewhat better than the U.S. Cavalry), and generally drowning the audience in massive quantities of treacle.

Adriana liked the movie because it was about horses and thought just everything about it was good. But if you're an adult accompanying a member of the target audience, don't look for ironic touches aimed in your direction: this movie serves it sentimentality straight up, and strong as stallions.

has a strangely elegiacal note. Though the framing story is set in 1991, most of the action takes place in the 70's in CIA operations in Viet Nam, Germany and Beirut, depicting Robert Redford as a mentor to Brad Pitt, almost a Redford look-alike. Now during the 1970's, Redford the actor was making a series of films that defined him as a star: The Candidate (1972), The Sting (1973), The Great Gatsby (1974), Three Days of the Condor (1975), All the President's Men (1976), The Electric Horseman (1979). To see him on his last day before retirement from the CIA reminds us of his age (64) and our own. Like Walter Matthau in "Hopscotch" and Gene Hackman in "Enemy of the State," Redford surreptitiously uses his inside knowledge of agency procedures to his own purposes, in this case, the rescue of the Brad Pitt character from a Chinese prison in which the agency is content to let him die. Redford carries the film, despite a director infatuated with helicopter shots, crane shots and other tricky intrusions upon the narrative. Redford wins in the end, but when all the good guys leave the CIA, who's left?

I confess to being somewhat at a loss for words in reviewing this movie, so instead I’ll pass along the comments of a member of the target audience, eleven-and-a-half-year-old Adriana: "I liked the whole thing except the beginning, when the president’s daughter climbed out of the ride. I thought that was pretty stupid. Otherwise it was good. I especially liked the part where the mutant animals turned out to be really friendly. I also liked having miniature animals that showed where the big animals were." If you have a choice between actually accompanying your youngster to this film and doing something else, I’d recommend going shopping (and I hate shopping!).

"Star Wars II has the worst script of any movie I've seen in the past five years, with strong claims on the all-time record. We're talking not just bad dialogue but pretentiously bad dialogue, words that make you groan out load with their awfulness. The sheer quantity of bad dialogue first amazes then stupefies us. How could such a colossally wordy movie be so relentlessly banal?

Good acting sometimes redeems a mediocre screenplay, allowing the listener to overlook weaknesses in the dialogue. In this film, by contrast, the actors call attention to, nay, beat you over the head with the ineptitude of the screen play, either through sheer lack of talent, as in the case of the photogenic but otherwise utterly unqualified young lovers, or through stilted delivery, as in the case of the actor who, you finally realize in horror, is meant to anticipate Alex Guinness, saints preserve us. So the movie might better be called "Attack of the Epigones," or second-rate imitators, after the Greek Epigonoi, sons of the Seven against Thebes, who imitated their fathers by attacking Thebes. Of course, "second-rate" gives the movie a good deal more credit than it deserves.

Even a wretched screenplay and outrageously bad acting might be overcome by visual spectacle, but here too the film disappoints. George Lucas has been trumpeting his achievement in having abandoned celluloid altogether in favor of digital video: what can the master be thinking of? Every scene, even those shot in actual sets, has the two-dimensional, unfocused feel of very old-fashioned rear-projection scenes in which characters play act in front of some obviously filmed backdrop. In contrast to the original Star Wars trilogy, whose celebrated special effects made us believe in new worlds, everything about this expensively tawdry film screams "Fake! Fake! Fake!"

At least the great all-time time bad films like "Cleopatra" had Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor to stand heroically on the deck as they sank. This stinker of a film will just disappear in a hundred million dollar whimper.

You’re right. I should have known better. A movie made from a television show. What could I have been thinking? Programs like that are the reason I don’t own a television. But I just wanted a little entertainment on a Sunday night. Big mistake. Of course, I never saw the original TV series, and they say you should look at this film as a spoof. It’s true—you caught me laughing out loud when Ben Stiller shot a horse. I know, I shouldn’t use words like dumb, inane, stupid, an utter waste of time. The New York Times said that Snoop Dog stole every scene from stars Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson. But ordinarily you steal something that has value, and every scene in this film was sheer trash. Did I already say jejune? Can I please have my two hours back?

In this age of "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" it’s easy to forget the plight of those who are not highly effective, who are not even coping with life very well. Peter Dinklage plays Finbar McBride, 4 ½ feet tall, who repairs model trains for a living until his friend and employer dies and Fin inherits an abandoned train depot in Newfoundland, New Jersey. A passionate train-lover, Fin moves into the tiny station and spends his days walking the railroad right of way and reading books about trains. Joe, who operates a coffee wagon near the premises, insists on befriending the solitary dwarf and accompanies him on his jaunts. Olivia, who twice nearly runs Fin down with her automobile, lives as a reclusive artist not dealing well with a divorce and death of her son.

The most tenuous bonds connect this trio. At one point, Joe has cooked them dinner out of his lunch wagon, then has to depart to attend his sick father, leaving Fin and Olivia to eat the meal in silence. A neighbourhood girl, mistaking Fin for someone her age, asks what grade he is in. (This innocent error amuses Fin, unlike the taunts of "Where’s Snow White?" that he is occasionally compelled to endure.) A teenage library assistant, made pregnant by her boyfriend, seeks relief from her strident family in Fin’s quiet, peculiar abode. We never learn the details of these people’s lives, only observe their interactions (in scenes virtually every one of which is interrupted by that anathema of our century, the cell phone). Under the circumstances, it’s easy to identify with Fin’s desire simply to be left alone, and we can understand his occasional rage at being a dwarf. But we admire his dignity and watch the camera chronicle his strange existence in a completely matter-of-fact style. This is quite a good film.

When "The Endless Summer" appeared in the 50’s, the worldwide surfing community numbered around a thousand people who mostly knew each other. Now that surfing has entered the mainstream and surfing movies have yielded to the popular demand for special effects and digital thrills, the old guard decided it was time to put together a movie that would combine then-and-now-nostalgia with state-of-the-art surfing technique without the use of any special effects at all. So we see surfers in their fifties as well as young people on "foil boards," ungainly contraptions resembling ironing boards in which the riders stand two feet off the surface and the "foot" rides on a layer of water beneath the wave.

The common bond of surfers—having a great deal of fun—unites not only experienced athletes but also newcomers to the sport. One sequence brings children from Northern Ireland to the surf off Donegal in the South, a part of the country into which they have never ventured. Another sequence, surfing Viet Nam, includes lots of smiling youngsters who have never seen a surfboard before. Surfers in Texas take advantage of the long waves produced by passing oil tankers to enjoy rides that go on more or less indefinitely.

But you go to a surfing movie to see the big waves, notably the celebrated 30-foot waves of The Pipeline in Hawaii, and wind-driven waves unapproachable by traditional techniques. For these waves, surfers are towed by jet skis to match the speed of the wave they plan to ride. The climactic sequence takes place one hundred miles out at sea where a quartet of the world’s top surfers tackle waves measuring up to 66 feet.

It’s difficult to sustain interest for a whole feature, but you do get a good sense of the exhilaration and joy experienced by the surfers (as well as a healthy determination to find some other sport. One of them says of The Pipeline, "You know you’re going to get injured; you just hope it’s going to be in a way that can be repaired.")

According to the poster outside the theatre, the New York Times called this film "genuinely pleasing and awfully funny." I can only imagine that some publicist has made free and easy with the phrase "Genuinely awful. Funny? Please!!"

You laugh occasionally then reproach yourself for being amused by cheap shots at easy targets. Stay away from this one like the plague.

I would describe this film as delicious even if home-made chocolate chip cookies didn’t appear as a central plot element. Occasionally I encounter a film that makes me wriggle with delight at the way a delectable central conceit works its way through to a satisfying romantic conclusion—this is such a film. If the romance makes it a chick flick, so be it. I would recommend it even if only for the pleasure of seeing Dustin Hoffman as an English professor taking seriously the preposterous notion that the man consulting him is at once a character in a novel and also a living person whose every move is being described, and sometimes predicted, by an omniscient author whose voice only he can hear. The author in question, played by Emma Thompson, exhibits the frustration of a blocked writer with an author’s surety of purpose when a confused plotline suddenly comes clear. The character in question is played by Will Ferrell, whom I’ve detested in his comic roles but who here offers a truly sympathetic performance as an IRS agent displaying several symptoms of Asperger’s Syndrome. Maggie Gyllenhaal, another actress whom I usually find annoying, here does a fine job as a baker who deliberately holds back a portion of her Federal taxes (“I don’t mind paying for roads and child care centers, but …”). Even Queen Latifa, whom I’ve never admired, gives a convincing portrayal of an editorial assistant sent by the publisher to be sure that the Emma Thompson character actually completes her long-delayed novel. (Does such a profession really exist in real life?) My favourite moment of the film? I’d have to name the scene in which Dustin Hoffman tries to persuade Will Ferrell to consider surrendering to death for the good of the novel. (“Look at it this way; you’re going to have to die eventually anyway.”) So the basic premise isn’t completely consistent—what did you expect? This is a romantic comedy, after all, but within that context I found it thoroughly delightful.

Back when I spent a good deal of my time analyzing the music of Brahms and Bartok, to name two self-consciously craftsmanly composers, I would occasionally notice a musical relationship, then wonder whether it wasn’t too far-fetched, only to have the composer decisively confirm the relationship a few measures later.

The other night I watched a DVD of the British version of Hitchcock’s "Strangers on a Train," (more psychotic and homoerotic than the American version). The verbal shorthand for the basic premise of the film—two people who "exchange" murders so that neither one can get caught—is the word "criss-cross," a motif for which Hitchcock displays an abundance of visual equivalents, notably the image of crossed tennis racquets on a cigarette lighter which serves as the crucial object of the film.

At one point the main character heads toward a door above which we see an exit sign and I wondered whether the "x" wasn’t another example of the motif. "Nah," I said to myself. "You’re getting too far-fetched." Then the camera shows us the adjacent French windows, each of whose panes is crossed with an "x." That’s what I love about Hitchcock: the smallest details of his film are planned and intentional.

The SAC Movie Club sees a lot of bad films, a situation that arises almost inexorably from its mission statement. So expectations were extremely low when it came to "Stuck on You," to the point that one could leave the theatre observing that there were entire moments in which you forgot how bad this film was. Greg Kinnear and Matt Damon play congenitally conjoined brothers, or Siamese twins. "We’re not Siamese," one of them protests. "We’re American." The scary thing is that you will laugh at this line—a kind of nervous, desperate laugh. After enjoying brilliant success as short order cooks in a hamburger joint, the duo heads to Hollywood so that the Greg Kinnear character can pursue a career as an actor. The Matt Damon character, by contrast, is pathologically shy when it comes to girls. Those with long memories may recall another film in which actors played against type: Dustin Hoffman as a chick magnet and Warren Beattie as a shy woman-fearer in "Ishtar," one of the most extravagant failures in movie history. But memories are short in Hollywood and who could resist the gimmick of Greg Kinnear and Matt Damon joined at the waist? The Movie Club gives the film its heartiest endorsement: "We’ve seen worse."

A character in the musical "A Chorus Line" sings, "I want to be a star. If Troy Donahue can be a star, I can be a star." That half the people reading these words will ask "Who the heck is Troy Donahue?" underlines my point. Described in Halliwell’s guide as "American beefcake hero of the _60_s," Troy Donahue starred in such memorable pictures as "Tarnished Angels," "This Happy Feeling," "The Perfect Furlough," "The Crowded Sky," "Palm Springs Weekend," "My Blood Runs Cold"; films you haven’t even seen on television. In short, a pretty face.

Now we encounter "The Sum of All Fears," a competently directed action picture with a decent screenplay, adequate supporting actors, an interesting premise, and the active cooperation of every branch of the U.S. military. All it needed was a strong leading man but what it got was the contemporary equivalent of Troy Donahue, a face so pretty that you can practically hear the director saying, "Okay, we’ve got the close-up, now bring in the stunt double."

To be sure, those who have seen Harrison Ford playing the same role in other Clancy-inspired films will be particularly disappointed in Ben Affleck’s insipid acting, but the picture didn’t require the fire-power of a Harrison Ford; it just needed a competent actor. The closing scene of the movie bashes the viewer over the head with the realization that the actor playing the Russian contact "Spinnaker," who appears for perhaps a total of sixty seconds of screen time, has a greater impact than Affleck, who turns up in virtually every scene of this two-and-a-half hour long film.

Movies like this need a competent actor in the leading role if only to quell the "refrigerator conversation," that takes place when you return home, go to the kitchen to get a snack, and start to think, "But wait a minute …" In a well-constructed mechanical film of this genre, the leading man is only required to cover the inevitable holes in the plot. Instead, Affleck’s lightweight screen presence draws attention to weaknesses that a real actor would make us overlook. (Think of the difference between Alec Guinness in the original "Star Wars" films and his epigonic substitute in the recent "prequel.") Affleck may have his adherents in romantic parts (though he has much to answer for in "Pearl Harbor") but as an action hero, forget it. They should have used the stunt double for entire film.

That’s Robert Frost’s take on the end of everything. In “Sunshine” the failure of the sun has produced a global ice age on earth, whose only hope (after the failure of an earlier mission) lies in an attempt to reignite the sun with a gigantic bomb “as big as Manhattan.” Given a more or less omnipotent, omniscient talking computer, you may wonder at the need for a racially-balanced human crew sure to mess things up. One reviewer has complained about the human error that sets the drama in motion. Yet the same newspaper carries an account of heavy drinking by NASA astronauts on a regular basis, so the movie’s premise doesn’t seem so much of a stretch. Thereafter the film follows the narrative line of a teen horror flick in which the only real suspense lies in the identity of the next cast member to die. But for me the visual beauty of the movie compensated for weaknesses of plot. Golden sunlight regularly bathes the screen, punctuated by the green of the oxygen gardens, the graceful shape of the spacecraft and the glowing surfaces of the spacesuits. It may be splitting hairs to complain about individual challenges to credibility in a film with so many incredible hypotheses, but it strikes me that the script writers play down to the audience, not trusting us to accept any relaxation of tension in an action film. An entertaining film notwithstanding.

Watching someone fail to commit suicide on the screen provokes conflicted nervous laughter in a theatre audience: such a desperate act should induce anguish, but the frustration of the act becomes comical. Now imagine such mixed feelings prolonged for more than two hours and you'll have a pretty good idea of the emotional world of "Sunshine State." "This is one of those films in which you're aware of actors acting (the periodic appearance of the mike boom at the top of the screen doesn't help matters any), but the actors (Timothy Bottoms, Mary Steenbergen, Angela Bassette, Jane Alexander, among many others) give such a good account of their craft that you don't really mind. Interlocking plotlines juxtapose the poignant with the ludicrous: a six-year-old witness to a horrendous crime grows up into a troubled teenager; bands of developers try to persuade poor landowners and shopkeepers to surrender their coastal property; a professional actress returns to confront her past; a trio of golfers reflect on Florida's situation ("Nature is overrated"); a local leader bewails the lack of enthusiasm for this years re-enactment of "Buccaneer Days" (the movie opens with the disturbed teenager torching the town's venerable pirate ship, an act that the judge subsequently describes as desecration, the destruction of a sacred icon); a former mermaid describes her life in an aquatic show ("The important thing is to keep smiling even if you're drowning"); a corrupt local politician, on the verge of being found out, makes repeated, unsuccessful attempts on his life; and every third scene opens with the kind of cockeyed images that Woody Allen used to mock California in "Annie Hall." "You'll laugh until you cry" seems like a peculiarly apt cliché here.

Documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock engaged three physicians and a personal trainer before undertaking his experiment of eating every meal at McDonald’s for 30 days. The doctors thought he might gain a little weight but they admitted to being incredulous at what actually happened: a 200% increase in cholesterol, a 25-lb. weight gain, and potentially devastating liver damage, not to mention lethargy, depression and loss of sex drive.

That’s just crazy, you may say. Nobody eats that much fast food. You’re in for a surprise. And it’s not just going out for hamburgers. The fast food industry has grabbed the lion’s share of the secondary school catering market. Obesity is now on track to equal smoking as the leading preventable cause of death in the United States.

The film "Supersize Me" manages to amuse as much as to horrify. Morgan Spurlock is a funny guy, and Canadians will be entertained at the sight of Americans who, unable to recite the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag, have no difficulty rattling off the ingredients in a Big Mac. In the course of the movie, organized in the form of a diary, we see what happens to Spurlock’s body and hear what his doctors have to report. Some reviewers have called Spurlock the Ralph Nader of the fast-food industry. This is definitely a low-budget film but one that should make you think twice the next time you pass the golden arches.

Movies have the advantage of allowing me safe access into areas where I probably would not otherwise venture. During the 70’s and early 80’s Off-Off-Broadway there flourished a kind of camp, transsexual musical scene, with tangential connections to the films of Andy Warhol. One of the most glamorous figures of this cultish crew was Jamie Curtis who pioneered a new kind of persona. Refusing to wear falsies, often unshaven, dressed in trademark torn stockings, Curtis created an unsettling sexual character. Appearing in masculine clothing, often mimicking James Dean, Curtis had a gentle effeminate air, whereas in drag he maintained a consistently in-your-face over-the-top persona. Playwright, composer, actor/actress, his principal contribution to the scene was a cultivated celebrity whose opulent nature contrasted sharply with his actual impecunious situation.

The film, narrated by Lily Tomlin, contains affectionate reminiscences by fellow members of the community, notably Harvey Weinstein, interspersed with amateurish videotapes of actual rehearsals and performances. The shows were outrageously successful; Weinstein recounts one occasion in which the wife of a state senator protested not being able to get into the theatre. Curtis’ death was as improbable as his life. He died in the apartment of a female admirer who, when he collapsed from an overdose of heroin, instead of calling 911, fellated him, evidently his unique heterosexual experience.

In a series of disconnected episodes we see the protagonist, a young poet named Yusuf, show only passing interest in a girl his age, display fawning affection for a condescending male teacher, and start a milk delivery route to assist in the support of his widowed mother. The story proper gets underway when the mother enters a relationship with the local stationmaster and the son travels to another city for his military medical exam. The film contains many beautiful scenes but the slow pace and allusive style leave too many dots unconnected for the narrative to make sense for this viewer.

Rarely do you get to see a perfect film: “Sweeney Todd” is one—an ideal matching of talents between the dark musical talents of Stephen Sondheim and the dark visual imagination of Tim Burton (against whose sets Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter and Alan Rickman—no strangers to darkness—get to sing and act). Perhaps you’ve heard about the premise: a demon barber who dispatches his victims with a flick of a silver razor and sends them down a chute to an oven in which they are cooked into meat pies sold by the woman in the shop below. Words like depravity, debauchery, and dementedness come easily to mind, followed by the unhappy realization of your own desensitization to the blood that comes spurting from so many slit throats (brilliant red in contrast to the murky grays and blacks and browns that otherwise fill the screen). One can look for the psychological origins of Sweeney Todd’s desire for revenge upon the corrupt judge who arranged for his deportation in order to debauch his wife and steal his child. But the film invites no such speculation. Instead we simply witness an obsession consuming everything in its path, as we listen to the lyricism of Sondheim’s score, sung by the actual actors rather than by professional singers. You won’t see a finer film this season but you need to have the stomach for it.

This film invites comparison with my all-time favourite movie, "The Philadelphia Story." When it came time to film the play that Phillip Barry wrote for Katherine Hepburn, Miss Hepburn was asked to request her co-stars. "Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy," she responded. Unfortunately they were under contract for other pictures and she had to settle for Cary Grant and James Stewart. Now "The Philadelphia Story" has a more subtle structure than "Sweet Home Alabama" since the fiancé doesn't know he's going to be dumped (though it's obvious to the audience) and the James Stewart character doesn't know he's going to become romantically involved. But the overall plots of the two movies have such strong parallels that we almost hear the echoes. When Reese Witherspoon reaches one of the movie's turning points in a coon dog cemetery (yes, it's that kind of movie), we can almost hear Katherine Hepburn looking over Cary Grant's model yacht and saying, "My, she was yar," and then making the connection: "I guess I wasn't, was I?" "Not really," concedes Cary Grant.

"Sweet Home Alabama," on the other hand, gives both the suitors strong claims to Reese Witherspoon's heart. The crisp dialogue and strong supporting cast (Candice Bergen, as the mayor of New York City, steals most of the scenes in which she appears) make us overlook little discords like Reese Witherspoon's outfits when she first appears in Alabama (the plot insists that she's a terrific designer, but the clothes she wears don't support the claim) or the business that her southern husband has conveniently created.

Josh Lucas, the man she deserted for success up north, has a mischievous grin that we haven't seen in the movies since Paul Newman in the days of "Cool Hand Luke," and we are reminded of a poll of women, some years back, asked to choose between Alan Alda, suave, sensitive, and attuned to feminist issues, and Kris Kristofferson, unruly, unmannered and masculine. Kristofferson won by a landslide.

Films such as "Sweet Home Alabama" or "The Philadelphia Story" allow us to take pleasure in the ability of movie stars to entertain. It's fun to see Reese Witherspoon smile, or Cary Grant be Cary Grant. A movie like "Sex and Lucia," by contrast, brings the more lasting satisfaction that comes with reading a fine novel, where entertainment hardly even enters the equation.

The story unfolds simply, and if you’re not put off by the obvious symbolism of the swimming pool representing sexual openness you can take pleasure in the Hitchcockian principle of complicity in which a protagonist’s minor error of judgment leads inexorably to mortal sin through a series of tiny steps. Charlotte Rampling plays an author of murder mysteries whose publisher has given her the loan of his villa in the south of France as a quiet retreat without warning her of the existence of his young daughter, something of a sexual predator who spends most of the movie topless. The film explores the relationship between the two women as it progresses from animosity to curiosity to involvement to complicity.

The act of writing serves as an important link not only between the two women but also between the girl and her mother. The film seems to suggest a dichotomy between those who re-experience life through writing about it and those who experience life on only one level, including not only the passing succession of boyfriends but even the publisher himself. The movie has a certain edgy quality in which you’re never sure that what happens next won’t be quite upsetting. I liked it.

When I use the phrase "sexual politics" do you automatically think of women? Why should that be the case? "Take Me Out" takes us to the locker room of the Empires, a AAA baseball team whose star player, half-black, half-white, has just announced that he is gay. In addition to displaying stellar talents on the field, the man is articulate, intelligent, good-looking, and evidently comfortable with his biracial background as well as his sexual orientation. Other members of the team have difficulty with both, but the first real conflict arises when a redneck relief pitcher, brought up from "Arkansas, or Tennessee," scarcely able to produce more than a syllable at a time, manages to unleash a racist, homophobic diatribe on national television that leads to his being sent back down to wherever he came from, but only after assisting the struggling Empires into first place in the league.

In the course of the play, we see that the issue of homosexuality merely provides the impetus for an investigation of communication among men, the difficulty of disclosing feelings, and the problem of making any really deep contact. The playwright treats the issues with consistent wit, so that the audience’s laughter, nervous at times, is mostly heartfelt and enthusiastic. Laying bare emotional issues takes literal form when shower heads descend from the flies and most of the team, fully naked, converses beneath the warm water. This is a remarkable piece of theatre if you’re able to catch it.

Question one: Can you accept the notion of Angelina Jolie, model turned actress, as an FBI agent? Question two: Can you, unlike the camera, take your mind off Angelina Jolie’s enormous lips long enough to embrace a convoluted screenplay that requires you to see: a series of corpses with their faces smashed in and their hands removed; a dead body suddenly falling in the face of Angelina Jolie; a car chase in which Angelina Jolie drives against traffic; a hideaway in a cellar, down a stairway hidden behind a bookcase, that Angelina Jolie has to investigate all by herself; Angelina Jolie’s naked body? Question three: Do you believe, with the producers of this film, that American audiences can’t tell difference between Montréal, where the film is set, and Québec City, where it was actually shot? If you answered yes to these questions, by all means rush out and see "Taking Lives." If not, write it off as a cheap thriller.

I had resisted seeing this film because I couldn’t imagine how a movie about two men in love with two comatose women could be anything but a downer. Now having seen the film, I’m not sure how I can explain it without sounding silly.

A male nurse, socially and sexually inhibited, becomes enamoured of a beautiful young dancer who has no interest in him. When an automobile accident leaves her in a coma, he devotes his every waking hour to tending her, talking to her, attending events that she might have attended, and imagining that he enjoys a relationship with her. A reporter, romantically involved with a female bullfighter, is devastated when she is gored by a bull and left brain dead. The two men meet in the hospital and become friends, the nurse confident that the two women will eventually awaken, the reporter resigned to the impossibility of that ever happening.

I have difficulty imagining North American actors playing either role, but director Almodovar offers a convincing and touching story of people for whom carrying for someone in need takes precedence over any other consideration. Where but in a Spanish film can you find a believable account of a man weeping at the ballet because the woman he loves is not there to share the occasion?

A silent movie, a film within a film, gives us a humorous take on the central themes of caring and frustrated sexuality. The radiant presence of Geraldine Chaplin in a supporting role as a dancing teacher further enhances the movie.

The French have a genius for turning the ordinary into the fascinating, and "A Taste for Others" (currently at the Carleton Cinema) affirms that nobody is trivial: people's feelings count. One character intermittently practices the flute--the same two or three notes over and over. He doesn't play very well. You feel sorry for him: he holds a menial job as a chauffeur, always on call at the whim of his employer. His girlfriend, in the States for an internship, sends him a letter saying she's met someone else. Yet, in the last scene, we find that those pitiable two or three notes on the flute, combined with all the rest of the notes in the band, have a place in the music. Another woman, a professional designer, decorates her sister-in-law's flat, without charging her, of course--somebody has to do it, after all, because the poor dear has absolutely no taste. People imposing on others, people too timid to make demands, people trying to be someone else in order to please another, people deciding that they're sick of pleasing others: in the course of the film, you feel that you've gotten to know half a dozen characters, and you take pleasure in seeing that despite all their problems in communication, some of the changes in their lives have been for the better.

“Why would an innocent man run?” inquires a police officer halfway through this intriguing, complicated film. Why indeed? Think of all the Hitchcock films you’ve seen, particularly Cary Grant in “North by Northwest.” The innocent man in question tries to clear himself of the murder of his wife, eight years earlier, a woman from whom he now seems to be receiving e-mail messages, along with the warning, “Tell no one. They’re watching.” The plot gets extremely involved, with murders, cover-ups and corruption set against the gratitude of a social outcast to the doctor who saved his son’s life and prevented his own prosecution. The hero (and the audience) gain information in confusing fragments, with flashbacks that may or not be reliable. The strong resemblance of the hero to Dustin Hoffman contributes to the sense that he stands for everyman, whose bereavement becomes a nightmare.

Steven Spielberg has established his reputation as a master storyteller, and the yarn he spins in "The Terminal" is fully worthy of that reputation. Through an unlikely but barely plausible combination of circumstances, a citizen of a tiny Eastern European country is stranded in a New York airport, unable either to enter the United States, since the government that issued his passport has ceased to exist, nor to return to his country, until the U.S. gets around to recognizing the new government. Though extremely limited in his command of English, the man resourcefully makes his home at the airport for the better part of a year, earning money first by gathering and returning luggage carts then by joining one of the construction crews working on terminal expansion. Little by little the story of his situation spreads among airport employees until eventually, through his generosity of spirit he comes to be regarded as a local hero. As I said, a first-rate story, with a flavour of Kafka. But unlike the anonymous bureaucracy in a Kafka novel, the regulatory organization of the airport has specific faces, notably that of the young woman who, day after day, stamps the traveler’s application "Denied," and that of the security director who takes the traveler’s ability to thrive in these unlikely circumstances as a personal affront, and after initially trying to entice him out of the terminal to become someone else’s jurisdictional problem, eventually comes to regard him as an adversary and does everything in his power to thwart him.

As a story, the narrative depends on the story-teller’s skill but as a movie the story hangs on the acting of the central character, and in Tom Hanks Spielberg has found a remarkable protagonist, fully convincing both in spoken and in body language. Hanks manages to combine the universality of the underdog with the particularity of the Slavic mindset. Stanley Tucci does a fine job as the security director strangled in red tape. Catherine Zeta-Jones only occasionally convinces as a beautiful woman with poor judgment in men. John Williams’ score, derived from Shostakovich, provides a pleasing musical background. But overall the picture belongs to Hanks, who dominates the crowded scene of the air terminal as thoroughly as he did the deserted island in "Castaway." This is one endearing film.

Some stories draw us in because of their universality, others in spite of their particularity. A 39-year-old woman experiences abandonment by her husband, the death of her adoptive mother, the sudden appearance of her birth mother and the onset of a romance with Mr. Right, all within an interval of several days, not exactly a universal theme. Now from this kind of premise many a conventional Hollywood film has flowed—so many Hollywood films, in fact, that we have developed conventional expectations not only for the story but also for the behaviour of its characters. “Then She Found Me” take us by surprise by avoiding the familiar, by giving us something that feels real. It takes a certain kind of actor to strip away the conventions and give us what feels like bare exposure (assisted, of course, by an unusual screenplay and a fearless director). Helen Hunt, serving as both leading actor and director, has the courage to be true to the unconventional. Bette Midler, as the birth mother who comes barging into her life, employs both her star persona and her willingness to be vulnerable. Colin Firth has always had the ability to seem convincing even in the most unbelievable circumstances (cf. “Love, Actually”), while Matthew Broderick has merely to appear shallow and callow. (And let’s not forget a charming cameo by author Salman Rushdie as an ob-gyn.) This doesn’t seem like the kind of movie that would easily attract financing. I’m glad they made it.

"It’s not as bad as you might expect," said the reviews. Who could resist an endorsement like that? So I went. For the first twenty minutes I thought this was a huge mistake—was peppy naïveté really going to carry a movie? But Jennifer Garner and Mark Ruffalo won me over. Some films move us on the basis of a clever script, others on the strength of brilliant cinematography. If you’re going to rely on a familiar plot you have to count on your actors, and in this case they come through, not only the leads but the entire supporting cast.

The premise you’ve seen before: a thirteen-year-old girl, daunted at the prospect of high school, wishes she could fast forward to thirty. Little girl, be careful what you wish. It turns out that the 30-year-old Jenna has made some undesirable life choices to get where she is, the managing editor of a big-time fashion magazine. Once she gets over the novelty of power, money and an adult body, she discovers the nasty truth about herself. With the help of childhood best friend (the Mark Ruffalo character), whom she callously dumped on her thirteenth birthday in order to get in with the in crowd, Jenna gradually redeems herself.

A note in passing: It helps to have seen the video of Michael Jackson’s "Thriller," since Jenna’s recreation of the dance becomes an important plot element. Of course, I’m probably the only person to see this film who hasn’t seen the Jackson video, so I guess there’s no problem.

Tommy Lee Jones must have gotten some really good advice along the way, because there’s no way you would guess that this was his first time directing a film. This is one of the most richly textured movies I’ve seen in a long time. The story line takes the form of an extended yarn: the relentless determination of an American cattleman to return the body of his hired hand, an illegal Mexican immigrant, to his home after he is accidentally killed by an inexperienced border patrol agent. The cattleman, played by Tommy Lee Jones, kidnaps the hapless agent, played by Barry Pepper, and compels him to disinter the body of Melquiades Estrada and help him carry it back to Mexico. The metaphor of a journey across a border informs the film on many levels. We see the alien desolation of small-town Texas through the eyes of the agent and his wife, who have come there from Cincinnati. (The wife, unbearably bored in her temporary trailer home, watches soap operas and weather reports from Ohio.) The material and spiritual poverty of Texas remain another step away from the life in Mexico that many attempt to flee by crossing the border. The American border patrol is depicted as both racist and resigned to the practical impossibility of their assignment.

The film is full of little touches that underline the chasm between cultures. A group of Mexicans use their truck battery to power a television in order to watch a television soap opera of which they understand nary a word. A blind American, living in a shack in a remote corner of Mexico, listens without comprehension to Mexican radio. When the border agent is bitten by a rattlesnake, the woman who heals him is someone whose nose he has broken during her attempt to cross. The symbolism sounds heavy-handed in description but it all works in the context of the haunting yarn, as does the easy complicity of a restaurant waitress, married to the simple-minded owner, who sleeps around in the afternoons. (The ineffectiveness of the American border patrol extends to the repeated sexual dysfunction of its supervisor, who looks ludicrously naked holding a pillow across his crotch.)

Tommy Lee Jones gives the kind of understated performance that we associate with Clint Eastwood just as his directing displays the uncompromising integrity of an Eastwood film. Don’t miss this one.

In "The Full Monty" we laughed at the predicament of a man who had lost his job but, afraid to tell his wife, pretended to be employed. They story took a comic turn and we stopped worrying about him. Now imagine a different kind of story about a man who becomes so dissociated from his occupation that he goes into a euphoric state while driving long distances, losing touch with everything else. Naturally he loses his job, but rather than try to find another, he continues to go through the motions of being employed.

In order to stave off his immediate financial obligations he improvises an informal Ponzi scheme, taking money from business acquaintances eager to invest in a vague, quasi-legal proposition promising high returns. The more disconnected he becomes from reality, the more uneasy we become, having vicariously taken on the very responsibilities of wife and family that he has increasingly abandoned. His proclivity for running away becomes more pronounced as the film continues, to the point that the final scene becomes almost unbearably ironic. A fascinating and disturbing film.

If you’re willing to overlook the worst acting I’ve ever seen in a major motion picture, "Timeline" has much to offer in recreating an important battle from the Hundred Years War, including a vivid demonstration of the dreaded trebuchet, or catapult, used to attack a castle with huge fiery rocks. As for the time travel, I recommend reading the novels of Connie Willis, particularly Doomsday, which involves a trip back to the era of the Great Plague. Next to the splendid catapults scene and a lovely display of flaming arrows, the hand-to-hand fighting quickly palls: nothing new here. The storyline observes the requirements of time travel—the overall outcome of major events prevails despite rearrangements of the details (in this case, a romance between a twentieth-century chap and a fourteenth-century maiden leads to her death being averted). I liked the hubris of one of the band of twentieth-century archeologists trapped in the Middle Ages: "We’ve got six hundred years of knowledge on these guys: if we put our heads together, we’ve got to prevail." Don’t count on it. You get a palpable sense of medieval warfare, but there is that awful acting to contend with. It’s a close call.

My first year teaching at California State College, San Bernardino, a student opera workshop presentation ended with some excerpts from Puccini, after which the music department chairman returned to his office and banged discords on the piano in an effort to chase the saccharine sounds from his ears.

Now, a century after "Tosca’s" premiere, the strains of Puccini’s opera are familiar to us, and its lurid portrayal of torture, execution, attempted rape and suicide pale before the graphic violence readily available on the silver screen. Yet we are affected by the believable acting in the current COC production, in which both Tosca and Cavaradossi seem scarcely out of their twenties and the sadistic Scarpia, head shaven, appears as despicable as any movie villain.

The set of the cathedral in the first act seems to have been taken from one of M.C. Escher’s wilder creations, yet the religious procession that ends the act was the most affecting I have seen on stage. In the end, Puccini’s operas rise and fall with the solo singing and regardless of how you may feel about the opera that critic Joseph Kerman once described as "this shabby little shocker," the music was well served in this performance.

Mountain climbers have always been a special breed, pitting their lives against the obstacles posed by the world’s highest peaks. In recent years, when wealthy amateurs have succeeded in climbing Everest, with the assistance of teams of guides and sherpas, some of the real mountaineers have adopted what they call the alpine style—tackling a summit with a minimum of equipment, no oxygen, no intermediate stations filled with supplies. One can appreciate the stylishness of this minimalist technique, yet the risks are substantial: there is simply no room for error.

With the Himalayas and the Alps conquered, climbers have turned to the Andes for new challenges. "Touching the Void" recounts the two-man ascent of the West Face of Siula Grande in Peru in 1985. Climbers are an arrogant bunch, and the fact that several other teams had failed attempting this route only made the challenge more attractive. This pair-- in excellent physical condition, highly experienced--succeeded in making the summit.

Eighty percent of mountaineering accidents, we learn, occur on the descent. For reasons yet unexplained, peaks in the Andes have unstable snow conditions not observed elsewhere: cornices and fluted formations that the steepness of the mountain would ordinarily render impossible. These conditions play a crucial part in the story we see recreated in the film. One of the climbers slipped and broke his leg before the rope could halt his fall. The other attempted to lower him down the mountain, three hundred feet at a time, a technique requiring the first climber to establish a secure purchase so that the knot linking the two lines could be passed through pulley, so to speak. At a critical moment, the first climber, far from being able to establish a purchase, found himself dangling hundreds of feet in the air while the second discovered his own anchorage gradually slipping out from under him. You’re the second climber, unable to communicate with your injured companion, unaware of his situation, knowing only that unless you take some radical action, within a short time you both will die. What do you do? In the instance, the second climber found no alternative to cutting the rope, evidently sending his partner to his death.

The film is narrated by the actual climbers and recreated by another pair. Two questions arise as you watch the film: How can there be any suspense if you know they both got back alive? And how on earth did anyone manage to make this film, considering that no one else has ever succeeded in repeating the feat? Let me assure you that were you not confident in the ending, you would find this film virtually unwatchable. It is the most frightening survival story I’ve ever seen (and I’ve viewed both the Shackleton films). As for the filming, you eventually put this out of your mind, so engaged are you with the plight of the climbers, particularly the injured man. The combination of the detailed narration, chronicling a man’s state of mind through the several days of his ordeal, and the visual depiction of the circumstances, has an overwhelming effect. This film is not for the fainthearted, but those who see it will be rewarded by an adventure unlike any other.

Written by, directed by, and starring Julie Delpy—a triple-threat take on romance the likes of which we haven’t seen since the Woody Allen of “Annie Hall” and “Manhattan.” I can’t think of when I’ve laughed so consistently through a movie. A thirty-five year old Francophone woman, en route to the U.S. with her monolingual American boyfriend, visits her parents in Paris for two days, and along the way encounters a number of her previous boyfriends, none of whom seems to consider their affairs to be over. Add that the current boyfriend is a serious hypochondriac and that the girl has had no experience with making relationships work: in the past, when she’s had problems in a relationship she’s simply ended it. The Delpy character also serves as narrator and translator, so we get to enjoy the boyfriend’s consternation as he suspects, with good cause, that her translations may be incomplete, if not completely spurious. Throw in a couple of aging hippies (played by Julie Delpy’s actual parents), a succession of objectionable cab-drivers, and a refreshingly Gallic approach to sexuality and you have one of the funniest movies I’ve seen in a long time. Delpy, evidently reluctant to finish the film, offers two somewhat abrupt endings, both plausible, neither completely convincing, unless you consider that the messiness of endings constitutes the movie’s main theme.

You know how sometimes you’re just looking for a little mindless entertainment? Boy, do I have the movie for you! Pre-release comments said, “It doesn’t suck,” and I have to concur. “Mindless,” though, because most of us have difficulty imagining jail as a fun place where an inmate might start up a prisoner vs. guards ball hockey tournament (and protest early release from prison because it would mean missing the finals.) Some of us may have trouble accepting a world where a ten-year-old girl could maintain a steady income stealing her neighbours’ barbecues and selling them at the flea market. Many of us, if we think about it, might be sceptical that an entire police force could be as witless or gang of petty criminals as inept as portrayed here. But the whole point of mindless entertainment is that you’re not supposed to think, and if you can succeed in turning off your brain, you’re find yourself chuckling a lot (at least I did) and even sympathizing with these no account low-lifes, appearing for the first time on the silver screen after what I am told has been a successful television series. Afterwards you may leave the theatre, saying to yourself in amazement, “Hey, it didn’t suck.”

Be prepared for a draining experience if you go to see "Treed Murray" (Varsity Cinemas). A yuppie advertising man, lost in High Park, escapes a gang of five teenagers by climbing a tree, and here the entire action takes place: Murray Roberts on a branch, twenty feet off the ground, and the gang at the bottom, unable to dislodge him but unwilling to abandon their prey. During the night-long stand-off, we learn a lot about human strengths and weaknesses under stress, and end up surrendering any moral preconceptions we may have brought to the ordeal. At the end of the film, the entire audience applauded, perhaps as much from relief as from admiration. Cinema reduced to its simplest elements doesn't get much better than this.

One of the traits of the French that I find most endearing is their embrace as high art of elements of the culture that Americans consider secondary. French poets idolized Edgar Allan Poe, for example, and treat cartoonists with reverence. Only in France could a clown or a tightrope walker or a cabaret singer occupy a place of honour. The Tour de France seizes the attention of an entire nation. If the Hollywood film is the mandatory frame of reference, it is difficult to present the plot of "The Triplets of Belleville" without sounding silly. On the other hand, if the Hollywood film were the only frame of reverence, there would be no place in the world for Monsieur Hulot.

A devoted mother serves as her cyclist son’s trainer and coach, and when he is mysteriously abducted in the middle of the Tour de France, she and her dog follow his trail, to the point of pursuing an ocean liner in a paddle boat. On the other side of the ocean she receives assistance from the eponymous triplets--once a music hall sensation, now a trio of amazingly bony old ladies—who help her take on the French mafia. Did I mention that there’s no dialogue? Did I mention that it’s a cartoon? If you enjoyed "Brazil" or "American Splendor" or "Spirited Away" or want to try something a little different (well, all right, a lot different), and don’t mind leaving the theatre with a silly smile on your face, you should find "The Triplets of Belleville" thoroughly entertaining.

The “film within a film” technique offers insights into how films are made (or how the director would like us think they’re made). Sometimes the inner film is a throwaway, as in “Singin’ in the Rain” or “Day For Night,” just a vehicle for the movie-making story. In other cases, as in “Lost in La Mancha,” circumstances prevented the director from completing the inner story, so he made the best of it by telling a story about trying to make the movie. “Tristram Shandy” looks like the latter case—a story about the impossibility of turning an intractable novel into a film—but it’s all illusion. There never was a film there to begin with. Instead, we get episodes from the novel along with internal debates about what to do with them and internal critiques about how they were acted. As in “Day for Night,” forces outside the director’s control (producers, insurance companies) supposedly dictate the course of the film (will there be a battle scene? can they afford to hire Gillian Anderson?). The character playing Tristram Shandy (and his father) also serves as narrator and director, stepping in and out of character and historical era at will. So just when you’re set for a sustained bit of narrative, the action breaks off and we join the actors to watch the daily rushes. Eventually you learn to keep one foot in each story, forgetting that behind the crew you see is another crew filming them. This is an enjoyable film-making film, but don’t expect it to substitute for reading the novel.

An 18th-century French farce by Marivaux provides the source for this witty, stylish, theatrical comedy. Mira Sorvino shows astonishing skill in playing a princess who disguises herself as a young gentleman in order to gain entrance to the object of her love, a nobleman named Ajis. In the course of the intrigue, she must also seduce his philosopher-tutor, played by Ben Kingsley, and his sister, played by Fiona Shaw, who to my eye looks just like John Cleese in drag. Such a comedy of manners requires delicacy and dexterity, qualities that the entire cast embodies. A delightful film.

Giacomo Puccini was one nasty dude. "Tosca," you will recall, featured the off-stage torture of a man by the chief of the secret police in order to win the body of the eponymous heroine. It is said that Puccini seized on "Turandot" as an opportunity to have a young girl tortured to death on-stage.

The opera borrows a story element familiar from folk literature: royal suitors of the princess must correctly answer three riddles or forfeit their lives. But in this version, it is not the king who sets the riddles in order to guarantee a clever match for his daughter, but the princess Turandot herself who composes fiendish riddles in order to gratify her hatred of men. Both her father and the courtiers are sick of the carnage but no one can dissuade the princess from her brutal policy (nor, apparently, the suitors from their folly.)

Enter the hero Galaf who correctly answers the riddles. Now it doesn’t require a recent viewing of "Monster" to make you wonder what kind of sick puppy would want to marry what amounts to a serial killer. The opera wants us to believe that the icy princess is somehow transformed by his love, but I didn’t buy it for a minute.

The music, of course, sweeps away all such reservations. The first act struck me as one of the strongest in all of opera, as Puccini’s spooky score matches the libretto’s evocation of the moon as a bloodless, severed head. We recall other masterpieces of the twentieth century: the hypnotic moon in "Salome," another tale with a monstrous heroine; the bloody moon that broadcasts death and guilt in "Wozzeck," or the ultimate moon-piece, Schoenberg’s "Pierrot Lunaire" (moonstruck Pierrot).

Having successfully answered the riddles, Calaf is entitled to claim his prize, but he puts his life in jeopardy once more as the opera borrows from the Rumpelstiltskin fairy tale: if Turandot can guess his name before dawn, Calaf will forfeit his life and allow her to retain her frozen independence. This bargain occasions the big set-piece of the opera—Calaf’s aria "Nessun dormi" (let no one sleep), echoing Turandot’s edict to the people of Peking—as well as the aforementioned torture scene. For only one person in the city knows Calaf’s identity: the servant-girl Liù who has sublimated her love for Calaf by tending to his aged father. She submits to torture then succeeds in killing herself rather than betray Calaf’s secret.

All the singers in the current COC production acquitted themselves well but special praise goes to the chorus, which performs Puccini’s difficult music splendidly while serving as essential actors throughout most of the drama. With "surtitles" proving a translation, much of the opera could be appreciated as a stylized foreign film with a particularly magnificent score, since in contrast to most grand opera—where musical time drags far behind dramatic time—here the two move mostly in synch, particularly in the stirring first act. In other words, this production has much to offer even those who don’t consider themselves opera lovers.

Hollywood has a way of producing movies that constitute simulacra of real life (in the sense of “vague resemblance”), operate within fixed conventions to arrive at predictable endings, along the way inviting—no, make that demanding—conventional emotional responses from the audience. We watch them because they’re familiar, easy (we know all the responses by heart), and better than television, though not really that much different. If you doubt me, take a look at the list of favourite foreign-language films (http://www.arthurwenk.com/foreign.htm) and compare any one of them with the last half-dozen Hollywood studio pictures you’ve seen.

Within these limits “Twenty-Seven Dresses” has a certain charm. Katherine Heigl (improbably) plays a young woman whom no one will marry but who enjoys being the wedding planner for all of her friends: twenty-seven of them. She secretly loves her boss but is afraid to tell him. Into her life come (1) a cynical, improbably attractive wedding-column writer, and (2) her gorgeous, opportunistic, shameless sister, who immediately makes a play for the boss and nearly nabs him. The film fits the bill: familiar, easy, and better than television, though not really that much different.

The film opens with Sandra Bullock leading a pathetic trio of protesters trying to prevent the demolition of a New York building. Moments later we see the face of Hugh Grant, a wealthy developer, on the cover of a magazine, and immediately know the entire plot, one we've seen several times before, often with Grant playing the same role. You saw Meg Ryan with Tom Hanks do the same routine in "You've Got Mail." In short, this is a perfectly useless movie.

It also happens to be extremely funny. Though you've seen Hugh Grant's rich bastard act more times than you care to remember, and Sandra Bullock's "all-business woman who finally discovers she has a heart" has become a career cliché, this time they have a really first-rate script to work with and you end up wishing they'd never bothered making all the second-rate films that preceded this one. You hope they don't fall in love too soon so that the crackling dialogue won't turn all icky. Never fear, the film avoids all trace of ickiness until the final few minutes. Useless it may be, but thoroughly entertaining.

“I am because you are” (a translation of the South African word ubuntu) and “our ancestors will always find us” may seem like abstract concepts but they serve to generate an entire theatre-piece called The Cape Town Project, a collaboration between Canadian and South African actors, and a Canadian playwright and director. As a biology professor explains mid-way through the drama, “We are all Africans,” based on the progression of DNA sharing through 2500 generations of the human species. As humans migrated from Africa to the rest of the world they took on changes of pigmentation, language and culture, producing the beautiful heterogeneity evident on Toronto’s streets. Yet in a deep genetic sense, we are all one. In Ubuntu “Our ancestors find us” in a literal sense as South African actors come to Canada to remind us of our roots. The play is filled with coincidental relationships that might seem forced on strictly dramaturgical grounds but which in this context serve to bring out people’s underlying connectedness.

And what a theatre-piece this is! A set constructed from dozens of worn-out suitcases, with the addition of a few props, becomes a train station, an airplane, a laboratory, an apartment and a funeral parlour. An early scene, set in a library, offers some of the most brilliant theatre I’ve ever seen, a virtuoso piece of choreography with the actors’ bodies serving as ladders and stacks, and the passing of books serving to delineate dramatic space through deft timing. A lovely, wordless ballet encapsulates the experience of meeting and falling in love. Later in the play simple movements express depression better than a textbook description could accomplish. Throughout we are reminded of relationship as reaching out, hoping for a reciprocal gesture, and the difference between the North American view of time as isolated moments and the South African view of time as always resonating within tradition. Ubuntu calls on primal acts of song, dance and story-telling to produce a deeply impressive evening.

I don't walk out on many movies, but this one had turkey written all over it. The first warning came when Richard Gere appeared as an out-of-it middle-aged man who couldn't even put his clothes on straight. The second, and for me conclusive, warning came when the leading lady and the romantic interest are supposed to "meet cute" in the middle of a wind that must have been left over from "Twister." He comes around the corner carrying an improbably large stack of books. She spins out of control in the wind like Dorothy's house in "The Wizard of Oz." They collide and he invites her up to his apartment. At that point I bailed out. Someone with a stronger stomach will have to report on the rest of the film.

A woman writer writes a story about a woman writer who writes a story about a fashion editor. (The first woman, author Carol Shields, describes deliberately refusing to make the last woman in the series another writer, to avoid an infinite regress.) A wrenching emotional event prevents the novel from being just another Chinese Box construction. The second author in the series suffers the loss of her oldest daughter, not to death, but to a post-traumatic stress that impels her to sit, week after week, on the pavement at the corner of Bloor and Bathurst in Toronto, holding a sign that says, simply, “Goodness.” The novel “Unless” offers an abundance of humour and wisdom, but always in the context of this underlying sadness. Now the Canadian Stage Company presents a stage adaptation of the novel that combines a convincing portrayal of the author with dazzling stagecraft. The fundamental set—the author’s tiny cubbyhole workshop—occupies centre stage while a kind of “lazy Susan” permits other characters, and their appropriate props, to enter and exit the scene. Her fictional characters sometimes inhabit little booths, covered with a scrim, and sometimes emerge from that controlled fictional environment to interact directly with the author. At one point the author/narrator describes her family asleep and we see, behind a scrim, four standing figures, holding pillows to mime sleep, a lovely and unexpected image. Occasional projections take place on multiple planes, producing an unusual three-dimensional effect. I had the good fortune of reading the last third of the novel a few hours before seeing the stage adaptation, so Carol Shields’ graceful prose, largely preserved in the narration, was fresh in my mind. This production is definitely worth seeing.

For years I’ve been reading articles about the negative effects on environment, cultural heritage and population of China’s Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest hydroelectric facility. Canadian director Yung Chang’s new documentary, “Up the Yangtze,” provides an opportunity to put images and people with those words. Of course by the time the film was made the water level had already risen to cover many of the temples and other cultural treasures mourned by those who opposed the project. The film-maker arrives on the scene when luxury cruise boats are taking western tourists up the Yangtze River. The film focuses on one family displaced by the project. The father has been eking out an existence growing corn. The parents cannot afford to send their eldest daughter to high school and instead compel her to seek work on a cruise ship. Here she begins to learn English, takes on the western name of Ginny, undergoes a makeover in order to meet western standards of cuteness, and suffers the loneliness of dislocation. We see a ghost city, evacuated by the Chinese government, and listen to displaced persons mouthing the party line about how a personal catastrophe for them is outweighed by the majesty of the project. Time-lapse photography toward the end of the film allows us to see the rising river swallow the makeshift hut in which Cindy’s family has been living all these years. At times one wonders about the documentary process: evidently Yung Chang was given free access to wander about the cruise ship following Cindy’s journey. But some of the scenes must have been re-enacted, including the family’s decision to send their daughter away. Other scenes, like the dismissal of a nineteen-year-old boy whose “arrogance and ego” have made him unsuitable as a cruise ship employee, were also probably re-enacted. At one point, when Cindy’s father carries an enormous piece of furniture on his back up a steep incline, I had to reflect that there would have been several dozen able-bodied men on the film crew who could have given him a hand. So much of what goes on in China nowadays has been controlled by the government that it’s difficult to know what’s really happening. “Up the Yangtze” offers a valuable insight how the decisions of a totalitarian regime can affect its people.

What does it take to make a really bad movie? When I was growing up I remember being fascinated by the titles of B movies I was never allowed to see. After "Frankenstein" came "The Bride of Frankenstein" and "Son of Frankenstein," movies whose titles today would be reduced to a stultifying succession of Roman numerals. Then there were the Dracula films, with their offspring. Eventually there would be the endless combinations: "Bride of Frankenstein Meets Son of Werewolf." Were these bad films? No, they were just B films: they were what they were and no one expected any more of them. You didn’t get angry with yourself for watching such a film because you knew exactly what you were in for when you entered, and besides, they never lasted longer than ninety minutes.

Yet even the B films exhibited a narrative consistency. As in all good science fiction, certain physical laws were contravened and the consequences of that contravention explored entertainingly. The limits imposed by the special effects of that era also tended to channel the narrative flow. What happens instead when you can depict anything you can imagine, when money is no object, but when you lack even the glimmering of an actual idea? Something like the mess we see in "Van Helsing." The movie isn’t even fun to watch, since even the most basic physical laws have been repealed, leaving the viewer with no point of reference. The computer-generated monsters don’t move like people or animals: they just jerk across the screen. The people don’t have well-defined powers, but simply levitate when it suits them. The werewolves never actually bite their victims, since that would kill them and the producers evidently didn’t have a limitless supply of bodies at their disposal the way we saw in "Kill Bill, Vol.I." As a consequence, horrifying women sprout fangs, open their mouths wide, and then nothing happens!

Even the violence has no context, which renders it incomprehensible and meaningless. A she-monster slams the female lead across the room. In another movie we would share her shock. But here, she just gets up and keeps on fighting. So how are we supposed to respond? The so-called climactic encounter between Van Helsing and Count Dracula supposedly rests on the notion that Dracula can be killed only by a werewolf. Van Helsing allows himself to turn into a werewolf in order to perform the deadly deed. But what happens instead? The two monsters wrestle for awhile, then turn back into human form, talk over the situation, revert to being monsters, engage in a noisy free-for-all, revert to human form, etc. I’ve never seen a more anti-climactic climax.

The film totally lacks irony. The movie opens cheesily with a crowd of angry villagers, complete with battering ram, storming a castle while the mad scientist waits helpless in the tower laboratory. I kept waiting for the camera to pull back, to reveal that this was just a flashback, or a parody. No such luck—this was really the film. For nearly two and a half hours I sat wondering, "Where is Mel Brooks when you need him?" Early on, Van Helsing, played with a kind of desperately embarrassed seriousness by Hugh Jackman, equips himself with, are you ready for this, a gas-powered cross-bow. And nobody even giggles. Moreover, the thing doesn’t even work (except for one brief moment when he dips the arrows in holy water).

Have I mentioned the dialogue? Why are we content to be anonymous teachers when any one of us is capable of writing dialogue as bad as that heard in this film. Having exploited every available item of special effect technology, the producers seemed determined to pack every vampire movie cliché into the movie as well.

Lots of films can be bad. To be really bad, a film needs to have pretensions, like "Cleopatra," or "Waterworld," or the most recent Star Trek film. Ordinarily when the film club emerges from a particularly dreadful opus, we give it our badge of dishonour—"We’ve seen worse." I have to say "Van Helsing" is a tough call, approaching the nadir of my cinematic experience. You can’t even recommend it to friends with the remark that it’s so bad it’s funny. This film isn’t funny bad—it’s colossally, stupefyingly awful. Save two-and-a-half hours and read the comic book.

"Vanilla Sky," although too long at two and a half hours, is almost continually fascinating. You leave the theatre somewhat confused and thoroughly exhilarated, which comes as a treat (especially if you've already sat through "The Majestic.") You accept the movie's obvious flaws: the dissonance between Penelope Cruz's astonishing physical grace and her no less astonishingly poor command of English; the constant awareness than Kirk Russell is playing the role of a psychiatrist--acting it exceedingly well, I might say, but acting it nonetheless. (One may argue that Russell's obvious acting is ultimately a plot element, since he is finally shown to be fictitious, but it remains annoying notwithstanding.) Which leaves Tom Cruise who, for all his self-absorption, really can act? A showcase production in which the leading actor appears in every frame of the film pins its success on the strength of that performance and, much as I came prepared to scoff, I had to admit that Cruise delivers the goods. And aside from the excessive length, director Cameron Crowe has offered up a beautifully photographed science fiction story of dream vs. reality. Whether or not you accept the ending, I guarantee that any man seeing this film will do a double-take the next time he looks in a mirror.

Two morally empty characters separated in age by nearly a lifetime come into each other’s lives and make a change for the better. Peter O’Toole plays an aging actor who has earned fame but little else. When asked what he believes in he responds “Pleasure.” He has abandoned his wife (played by the incomparable Vanessa Redgrave), to whom he owes considerable sums, and now spends his days hanging out with other actor cronies more or less counting the days until death.

Jessie (Jodie Whittacker, the Venus of the story), sent to London to find work when her aunt could no longer tolerate her presence at home, has taken a job as nurse to one of the old actors, a position at which she is spectacularly incompetent. Maurice (the Peter O’Toole character), an incorrigible womanizer even in advanced age, takes an interest in the girl, who takes pleasure in his interest. Despite the cultural chasm between the two characters, they become friends, though she has difficulty forgiving the selfish irresponsibility in which he offers to buy her a dress--and watches her model many—then turns out to have no money. She is not above using the old lecher for her own purposes, allowing him to pay for a tattoo to match that of her boyfriend. But when the boyfriend assaults Maurice, sending him to the hospital, Jessie/Venus guiltily tries to make amends, and toward the end of the film we sense that two utterly self-centered people may have learned to care about someone else. For the adolescent, the lesson comes as a normal part of growing up. For someone to have to wait until the end of life to learn that lesson seems tragic. At one point Maurice stands on the stage of an empty amphitheatre listening in his mind to all the speeches he has delivered during the course of an illustrious career, with the cold landscape reflecting his inner hollowness. This is a beautifully acted, rather bittersweet film.

In 2002 Peter O’Toole was reluctant to accept an honorary Oscar from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, asserting that he was “still in the game.” O’Toole’s performance in “Venus” not only supports that assertion but also makes us grateful for the many great performances in a career of playing egomaniacs (and occasionally megalomaniacs): “Lawrence of Arabia,” “The “Ruling Class” (in which the main character believes he is God), “The Stuntman” (a film director acting like God), “My Favourite Year” (an over-the-hill, alcoholic, larger-than-life actor), and of course the English monarchs of “Becket” and “The Lion in Winter,” all of which, like the current “Venus,” brought O’Toole Oscar nominations.

Great actors persuade you to accept their values on their own terms. After the performance you may regain your moral compass, but O’Toole’s magnetic presence in “Venus” is hard to resist.

Personal growth takes different forms. Patti offers clients the image of periods of progress followed by plateaus. Growth may also follow the shape of a spiral, in which you appear to trace a circle but actually end up some distance from your point of departure. Vicky and Christina, the eponymous heroines of Woody Allen’s new movie, seem to end up where they started, with Vicky (Rebecca Hall) marrying her one-dimensional fiancé and Christina (Scarlett Johansson) still not knowing what she wants, only what she does not. Yet they have been altered by their sojourn in Barcelona in ways that they may not immediately appreciate.

A narrator propels the story along, providing a narrative short-cut that allows the movie to dwell on the emotional content of telling incidents without the obligation of depicting details of the plot. No sooner have the young women settled into Barcelona than they are propositioned by a local artist (Javier Bardem) to fly away with him for the weekend. Christina leaps at the opportunity; Vicky reluctantly accompanies her. Before long both women have fallen under the spell of the seductive artist.

Then the artist’s ex-wife Maria Elena (Penelope Cruz) appears on the scene and blows the film apart. The sheer force of Cruz’s performance as an unstable, Spanish painter has the unfortunate effect of showing up Scarlett Johansson’s shortcoming as an actress. In the story, Christina deepens her skill as a photographer, coming to better appreciate the technical side of her craft, while becoming amorously involved with both artists. The choice of métier—the art of seeing—provides a nice contrast to an earlier, weaker film in which Allen played a screen director who goes blind.

Meanwhile Vicky’s fiancé shows up for a hastily-arranged wedding about which she is already having second thoughts. Vicky’s ambivalence, nicely portrayed by Rebecca Hall, contrasts with Christina’s headlong plunge.

The movie’s humour (in narrative, dialogue and situation), like the sumptuous beauty of the Spanish city and the gentle accompaniment of Spanish guitar music, occupy the background, of secondary importance to the situations of the main characters. Reviewers have described the film as Woody Allen’s strongest work in twenty years; I see no reason to disagree.

When I took my seat for a matinee performance at the Bluma Appel Theatre a gentleman and two gorgeous women greeted me by name and said that the performance couldn’t possibly begin before Arthur got there. The CSC subscription department, it turns out, had placed a customer appreciation package, including chocolates from The Nutty Chocolatier, in my seat, and these folks, who turned out to be the head of drama at St. Clements School, her husband and her girlfriend, had been looking forward to my arrival (or non-arrival: during intermission the drama head and husband filched the packages of chocolate from the seats of no-shows while the girlfriend and I carried on an animated conversation). I do love this city.

Some plays require gifted actors for their success. Others, like "Vinci," can thrive with a young but well-directed ensemble. An ingenious set can also make a strong contribution to a theatrical production and I have seldom seen ingenuity to rival the creation of set designer John Jenkins. After a brief introductory monologue by the priest Bartolomeo, set against a large reproduction of "The Last Supper," we see the set proper, an eye-delighting arrangement of interlocking spirals which subsequently rotate independently, while a giant overhanging helix eventually serves as the pathway for a red ball.

Playwright Maureen Hunter allows the problem to develop quickly: Piero, eldest son of an influential landowner in the village of Vinci in Tuscany in the early 1450’s, has impregnated his father’s maid Caterina, who retreats to a house on the mountain with her illegitimate child Leonardo. At his father’s insistence, Piero marries into a proper family but when his bride Albiera proves to be barren, the father Antonio decides that his grandson should be taken away from his mother and made into a proper heir.

The playwright so engages our sympathies with the plight of these young people, and so skillfully introduces the social fabric which delimits their options, that the child could have been anonymous without diminishing the moral dilemma. Knowing the identity of the future Leonardo, whose accomplishments are suggested in the mechanisms of the clever set, only serves to intensify our engagement.

Every once in awhile you encounter a movie so pitch-perfect that you put aside your defenses (against being manipulated) and participate so fully in the experience that when the film ends you find yourself slightly disoriented but grateful for the privilege of seeing what you have just seen. “The Visitor” is such a film. A university professor’s depression at the death of his wife has stretched on for two decades during which he has just gone through the motions of life, teaching the same course over and over (we see him whiting out and altering the year in syllabus he belatedly distributes to his students), working on a book that never seems to advance, attending faculty meetings without participating. Perhaps trying to connect with his wife’s career as a concert pianist, he undertakes piano lessons but shows no aptitude for the instrument.

An obligation to present a colleague’s paper at a scholarly conference brings the man to New York and an apartment he has owned for a long time (evidently to provide his wife with a pied-à-terre in the city) but seldom visited. There he encounters a couple (a Syrian man and a Senegalese woman) who have rented the apartment from an unscrupulous con artist, unaware of its true ownership. After some initial awkwardness, the professor permits them to stay a few days while seeking lodging elsewhere. The Syrian makes his living as a drummer with a jazz trio and offers to teach the professor African drumming. The film draws a strong contrast between the lifelessness of the academic conference and the liveliness of drummers on the streets of New York and the first half of the film reaches a happy climax as the professor, in jacket and tie, takes his place among several dozen much younger, definitely non-Wasp drummers in Central Park.

Then disaster strikes when a pair of transit cops arrests the Syrian—an error on their part, but the chain of events, once launched, cannot be reserved. As an “illegal alien” he is sent to a “detention centre” where he remains, despite the efforts of an immigration lawyer employed by the professor. A ferryboat ride to Staten Island takes us past the Statue of Liberty, which offers a mute protest to the post-9/11 mentality which has made such a mockery of the inscription at the statue’s base: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” The movie offers an even sharper sardonic criticism in the form a detention-centre poster proclaiming immigrants to be America’s strength.

Time after time the film avoids obvious opportunities for sentimentality. We see human relationships begin and develop realistically, without the clichés of romantic comedy. The absence of familiar faces on the screen contributes to the sensation of seeing a documentary. This is one exceptional film.

Pedro Almodóvar has made a number of striking films revealing a deep sympathy for women but none more engaging than this tale of a woman (Penélope Cruz) dealing with the effects of sexism on several generations of a family. The only significant male figure in the film is soon dispatched after he tries to molest his daughter. Thereafter we focus on Raimunda, her sister Sole, her daughter Paula, and her dead mother Irene whose mysterious reappearance provides the impetus for the drama. (The film opens with a lovely, if initially puzzling, scene of women assiduously tending gravesites in a cemetery.) We are struck by the wisdom and solidarity of women depending on wit and resourcefulness to survive, a situation symbolized in a simple walk down a street. Raimunda, with a chance to make some money by catering to a film company, must borrow the necessary food from friends and neighbours returning from the market. Her promise of generous payment, and their acceptance of the promise, makes manifest the network of caring relationships that supports women in a challenging existence. While the film clearly belongs to Penélope Cruz, the supporting cast shines with nary a discordant note. Don’t miss this one.

This is one peculiar movie. The story unfolds with the exaggerated effect of a fairy tale (represented cinematically by extreme close-ups and vivid colours). Jenna (Keri Russell), a waitress in a small southern café, has inherited from her mother an ability to make magically good pies, pies whose goodness can be described only in biblical or poetical terms. As the film opens she discovers to her disgust that she has been impregnated by her hateful husband Earl (Jeremy Sisto), a loathsomely abusive man who controls her every word and deed, a man who threatens at every instant to become insanely violent and whose habit of repeatedly honking the car horn when he picks her up from work becomes annoying beyond belief. Jenna finds temporary relief in an affair with her physician Dr. Pomatter (Nathan Fillion), whose office overflows with unfiled files and whose embraces bring on strains of Handel (not the “Hallelujah” chorus from Messiah, by the way, but the “Hallelujah, Amen” from Judas Maccabeus). She receives sympathy from her coworkers Becky (Cheryl Hines) and Dawn (Adrienne Shelley, the late actress who also wrote and directed this film) and moral support from the grumpy owner of the café Old Joe (Andy Griffith).

I’m not sure what we are to make of this fairy tale cum film, its larger-than-life characters and their larger-than-life problems. The pies look as dazzling as Keri Russell’s smile and seem as redemptive as the cookies that Maggie Gyllenhaal bakes in “Stranger than Fiction,” while the misery Jenna endures at the hands of Earl seems fully as burdensome as the troubles heaped upon Will Smith in “The Pursuit of Happyness.” The birth of the thoroughly unwanted baby turns out to be one half of Jenna’s salvation, but an utterly spoiled brat who occupies several memorable scenes keeps us from drawing any false conclusions about the saving power of children in general. Were it not for the exaggeration we might see the film as a parable about the virtues of simply surviving. I think you’ll find the film impossible to dislike, which given much of the current fare probably constitutes high praise.

The ability to mount Wagner’s formidably demanding "Ring" cycle has become a benchmark for opera companies. The Canadian Opera Company has enjoyed an international reputation as a world-class organization, but with the announcement of plans to introduce the Wagner tetralogy, one opera at a time over four years, culminating in the presentation of all four music dramas to mark the opening of the new opera house, the COC joints the elite of the opera world.

Make no mistake, "Die Walküre" makes extraordinary demands on everyone—the huge orchestra, augmented by four Wagner tubas; the fourteen singers; the audience for an evening that runs to four and half hours with intermissions; the designers, who need to provide the visual elements in a drama in which not very much happens in the usual sense. Meeting that challenge successfully, as the COC has done in the current production, produces great excitement, celebrated by the cheers of the audience in the performance I attended.

In a previous age, Wagner’s singers would just have stood in one place and sung, relying on the music to provide dramatic interest. Contemporary audiences demand acting, a particularly difficult challenge in Wagner, where the discrepancy between musical time and dramatic time is stretched to the breaking point. Remarkably, this production, staged by film-maker Atom Egoyan, succeeds in unifying the two time scales, and the musical performance, directed by Richard Bradshaw, made all the characters seem convincing. Wotan’s wife Fricka, who often comes across as a shrewish scold, here communicates a patient dignity, so that when Wotan finally yields to her arguments, having given his best effort in the debate, any married man can identify with his resigned "What do you want me to do?"

When Wotan’s daughter Brünnhilde attempts to fulfil her father’s inner desires by thwarting his agreement with Fricka, he reluctantly punishes her by taking away her godhead, putting her into a deep sleep and surrounding her with a ring of fire which only a hero will be able to penetrate. No man with a daughter can fail to be moved by the scene of parting as staged in this production. Wotan, having put his daughter to sleep on an isolated rock, takes off his greatcoat and covers her with it, walks away in sorrow, then returns, removes his jacket, folds it up, and places it under her head. The opera ends with the extraordinary Magic Fire music, a perfect realization in sound of the protective circle of flames. How will Egoyan stage this? I wondered. Will he use film projections or some theatrical tour de force? I was unprepared for the simple dignity of the scene that unfolded before me, as Brünnhilde’s eight sisters, the other Valkyries, each bearing two torches, placed them in a ring around her slumbering body. This is an auspicious start to an ambitious project.

Say what you will about Disney—and who hasn’t?—any Disney production can draw on a remarkable treasury of great songs and years of experience in stagecraft and technical magic. New Years Day saw Adriana and me at the Air Canada Centre for the latest Disney ice show. This time I had expert commentary on the side as Adriana pointed out salchows and axels (and expressed bewilderment at how the skaters could execute such maneuvers in their bulky costumes). The Disney show offered not just fine skating, dazzling costumes and memorable music but entire stories, with mini-presentations of "Pinocchio," "Mulan" and "Beauty and the Beast." At one point in the show, the generic castle at one end of the arena underwent a transformation, disgorged dozens of costumed skaters, and suddenly we were in the middle of "It’s a Small World." Visitors to Disneyland and Walt Disney World retain fond memories of the evening "electric parades." I shall not soon forget the year that the Orange Bowl engaged Disney to put on a black-out electric square dance for the half-time show. Familiarity in no way diminished my delight when the lights went out and costumes and floats glowed with hundreds of tiny bulbs. Most of all I was impressed by the power of context. Seeing skaters successfully landing jump after jump carries a big impact, but seeing the Blue Fairy land those jumps against a soundtrack of "When You Wish Upon a Star," that’s Disney magic.

THE WAY I SPENT THE END OF THE WORLD” (Toronto International Film Festival)

This film takes us back to the final days of the Ceausescu regime in Romania and, for all the deprivation, lack of privacy, and heavy-handed political repression, portrays a world in which affection, neighbourliness, and humour could still prevail. It seems unlikely that the film would have had anything like this tone had it actually been filmed in 1989, but the hand-held camera and close range make you feel as if you were re-experiencing that epoch first-hand. During this period the more adventuresome youth rehearsed ways of escaping the country (by crossing the Danube), or even killing the dictator (the ten-year-olds concoct an outlandish plot), but adults mostly confined themselves to mocking the leader behind closed doors because any overheard criticism might have immediate repercussions. The film jumps somewhat disconcertingly from one scene to the next, somewhat in the manner of a young person recounting “The Way I Spent My Summer Vacation,” with it’s endless “and then we…and then we” run-on sentences. Every face in the film draws you in toward elemental feelings of determination, resignation, betrayal, hope. For all its poverty, Eastern European village life, as portrayed here, makes North American luxury seem somehow sterile.

Edward Albee’s "Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf" shocked audiences in the Sixties, both on Broadway and in the film version starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor as antagonists in a dysfunctional marriage who include another couple in their venomous games. The play captured the frustration of academics whose careers don’t live up to their expectations but whose self-awareness allows them to experience a particularly exquisite pain. For all the bleakness of its material, "Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf" served up an outrageous black comedy as husband and wife tear into each other with articulate cruelty, treating their guests first as audience and then as victims.

"We Don’t Live Here Anymore", another academic story of two couples, this time involved in a long-standing friendship, has no laughter at all, just a sustained, beautiful music of unspeakable sadness, superbly acted and photographed. Laura Dern and Mark Ruffalo portray one couple, he a professor of literature, she turning into an alcoholic because of her unrequited life for her husband. Peter Krause and Naomi Watts play the other couple, he a professor of writing, frustrated at his unsuccessful attempts to publish a novel, she involved an affair with his best friend, the Mark Ruffalo character.

The film repeatedly takes us over the railroad tracks—whose crossing gate and warning lights remind us of the dangerous barriers the characters have breached—and across a bridge: now with the two men on their regular running route; now with the Mark Ruffalo character and his two children on bicycles; now for a tryst between Ruffalo and Watts. Through much of the film one remains uncertain of the extent of knowledge among the characters concerning their troubled and complicated unions. Unlike the Albee play, real children get caught up in the turbulence of these unhappy marriages and we get caught up along with them, watching intelligent, attractive people failing at the most basic of life’s endeavours. This is one irresistibly sad movie.

I once read a terrifying description of the way the AIDS virus overwhelms and defeats the body's immune system. At the first attack, the body rushes to defend itself with mechanisms designed especially for that purpose. One might imagine a conscious military leader savoring the success of that initial defense--"We really let them have it."

"We Were Soldiers" departs from other Vietnam movies by giving the viewer a sense of strategy from the perspective of both opposing field commanders. The film depicts the American victory in the Ia Drang Valley in November 1965, the first direct engagement between American and Viet Cong forces. Mel Gibson, as the American colonel on the ground, uses superior tactics to defeat the larger forces of his Vietnamese counterpart. But the Vietnamese colonel, surveying the carnage after the departure of the American 7th Cavalry, has the more accurate vision of the long-term result. This battle was tragic, he reflects, because the Americans will think they have won, and the conflict having become an American war, will now take longer and cost many more lives, even though the eventual outcome will be no different.

Early in the film, the Mel Gibson character analyzes the military situation of the French massacre in the same locale twenty years earlier, and attributes the defeat to unfamiliarity with the terrain, overconfidence, underestimating the enemy's skill and determination, the vast numerical superiority of the enemy, and the great distance between France and the battleground, the same factors that would lead to the eventual American defeat.

The body, under attack from the AIDS virus, does not realize that the outcome is not in doubt. The brave fight is all the more tragic when you know its futility in advance.

If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. Most of us respond to that moral injunction by saying that we can't all fight every problem, so we pick our opportunities: we may read to the blind or tutor underprivileged children or contribute to the United Way while electing officials who we hope can find political solutions for homelessness and unemployment, just as we pin our hopes on scientists to find cures for cancer and AIDS. We do our little part, wishing we could make more of a difference.

But some historical situations don't permit such a stance. "The Weather Underground" takes a documentary look at a pivotal epoch in U.S. history, the years of the Vietnam War. When American soldiers murdered women and children in the village of My Lai, all other social concerns seemed to become secondary, and university students who had taken the idealism of John F. Kennedy seriously felt that coming to the aid of their country meant changing its unconscionable course. Anti-war demonstrations, at first no more than vigils by a handful of demonstrators, began mobilizing crowds in the hundreds of thousands, yet the war went on and President Nixon declared he would not be moved by demonstrations, no matter how large.

In 1969 the Students for a Democratic Society, the largest and most influential of the student protest groups, began to lose confidence in the efficacy of non-violent protest and an extreme wing, calling themselves the Weathermen, advocated violent overthrow of the government as the only means of bringing the war to an end. "The Weather Underground" juxtaposes period footage with present-day interviews with the movement's leaders, notably Mark Rudd and Bernadine Dohrn, whose ambivalence about their actions of thirty years ago touches us deeply. In retrospect, the violent approach could never have succeeded, but at the time, what was one to do with a government that seemed oblivious to the will of the people? This is definitely a film worth seeing.

Once every decade or some comes a performance by a previously unheralded young actress that leaves you wondering how anyone so young could have so much talent without ever giving the impression of acting. I’m not talking about celebrated "child actors" but performances like that of Mary Badham in "To Kill a Mockingbird" or Ana Torrent in "Cria Cuerva." Now I must add Keisha Castle-Hughes to the list, for she turns "Whale Rider" from a captivating folktale into an unforgettable portrait of a young girl in a patriarchal culture stubbornly refusing to be excluded b y her gender.

For thirteen years the Castle-Hughes character has been told that her twin brother, who died at childbirth along with the mother who bore them, was the one who should have survived. Her father, driven away by an intolerable burden of shame and incomprehension, leaves her to be raised by her grandfather, who dotes on the girl until adolescence but brutally shuns her when it comes time to train the new leader for the tribe. With a display of inner courage and determination that I have seen in few adults, she stands up to the entire male community, with only her grandmother’s quiet support, and prevails. The film is indispensable not only for any girl child but for anyone capable of being moved by heroism. This is an outstanding film.

The incipient death of his physician father (Jim Broadbent) draws a middle-aged poet (Colin Firth) back to the house where he grew up and confront him with its memories, re-enacted by young actors portraying him as a child and as an adolescent. We easily understand why he hates the father who constantly called him “Fathead,” embarrassed him at every opportunity, competed with him for female companions, and betrayed his mother in an affair with “Aunt Beaty” that endured his entire life. Later we see that the father’s duplicity and boisterous charm cover a genuine affection for an admiration of the boy, and that poet, for all his efforts to escape his father’s influence, still embodies a number of his characteristics. Returning home, the poet vainly hopes for a last opportunity for the conversation that might bring understanding and reconciliation. A cinematic tour de force near the end of the film conveys an inward resolution. This is a gem of a film.

Watching a movie always demands a suspension of disbelief, a willingness to forget the theatre, the two-dimensional screen, the unrealistic size of the images. Beyond that, the story must overcome the barriers of what we consider believable. Indeed, if while watching the movie you're wondering whether you should believe it, the film has already failed. But, as a seasoned moviegoer, you recognize the limits of your own experience. After all, don't movies give us the opportunity to see things we could see in no other way?

But in 2002, can you believe Michelle Pfeiffer going to a maximum security prison for the murder of her boyfriend and month after month, whenever her daughter comes to visit, always looking as if she just came from the hairdresser, her long, blond hair suitable for a Clairol commercial? And can you believe that this same daughter, now a ward of the state, goes from Robin Wright Penn to Renee Zellweger as foster mothers? And can you believe that Michelle Pfeiffer will decide to spend the rest of her life in prison so that her daughter will give up her goth appearance and go back to being a blond like everyone else in the movie?

“The truth shall make you free,” we read in the gospel of John. A therapist recognizes this to be true of the process of grieving: not knowing the circumstances of a loved one’s death can leave a person stuck in grief, perhaps for a long time. Officially-worded announcements of soldiers’ deaths seem intended to set minds at rest: “He died bravely defending his country,” or words to that effect. Parents of dead soldiers wanting to believe in the purposefulness of their sons’ sacrifice may accept these words at face value. But what about those who don’t?

Maureen Hunter, author of “Wild Mouth,” sets her play on a farm in the Canadian plains during World War I. The family has already lost one son, a second is serving overseas and a third, only fifteen, is itching to join him. Into their midst comes Aunt Anna, the husband’s sister, visiting from the East. Unable to accept the death of her 17-year-old son, she seeks information from a returning decorated soldier who joins the household as a farmhand.

Soldiers tend not to share the horrors of war with those back home. World War I, in particular, involved close personal combat under often horrendous conditions with vast human losses, yet few details appear in wartime letters. Soldiers protect their loved ones psychologically as well as militarily. Those who survive will talk with other survivors but tend to avoid responding to non-combatants who ask “What was it really like over there?” Survivors of World War II or the Vietnam War suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder often display “persistent avoidance of reminders of the event and a subjective sense of numbing, detachment, or emotional unresponsiveness,” according to psychology’s diagnostic manual.

“Wild Mouth” centers on this issue of knowledge and its suppression. The farmer’s wife, an English woman brought to the prairies, deals with loss by repressing feelings and “getting on with it.” Her husband thinks to protect his youngest son by forbidding him to read the newspapers. The returning soldier turns aside all questions about his wartime experiences. Into this situation Aunt Anna appears, in her words, as “a kind of loose cannon,” trying desperately to learn truths which others prefer to leave unmentioned.

What about us? Lest we think ourselves superior to the stage characters in our contemporary proclivity to let everything be known, the playwright cleverly confronts us with our squeamishness by setting several scenes in the barn. Realistic sound effects, an important element throughout the play, give us a vivid sense of chickens and pigs being slaughtered just offstage, and our discomfort contradicts our illusion that we would always want to know the truth.

A first-rate cast overcomes the slowness of the first act and the quality of their acting combined with the intimacy of the Tarragon Theatre involve us directly in questions of seeking to know or choosing not to know and challenge any easy answers we may offer to these questions.

What better way for a red-blooded American to spend the Fourth of July than watching U.S. Marines shoot Japanese soldiers and make racist remarks about Native Americans? But these Japanese are so sneaky: they set traps and lay ambushes. And those Americans, they're so dumb: they walk right into every trap. Happily the movie spares us the dialogue that everyone in the theatre is reciting as the Marines enter a village from which all the men have mysteriously disappeared, leaving only women and children. ["Beggin' yer pardon, Sarge, but I don't like this." "What's the trouble, soldier? Speak freely." "It's so quiet, sir. ... Too quiet."] But these are the U.S. Marines, and they may be outflanked, outnumbered and out- maneuvered, but they're crack shots: never does a weapon discharge without one of the enemy falling out of a tree or disappearing into a crater.

James Woo has become the Sam Peckinpah of war movies and his balletic battle scenes, so often copied that they begin to seem like clichés, have been carefully orchestrated so that the audience always understands which side is which. Other than that, the movie doesn't have a lot to recommend it, unless you enjoy watching Nicholas Gage as a soldier who's seen too much suffering, or the Navaho code-sender whose cheerful willingness to serve his country eventually gets on your nerves.

And just to set the record straight, no Navajo code-sender in World War II ever had to be deliberately killed to prevent the code from reaching enemy hands. In the movie, a code-sender has to sacrifice his life in order to prevent the audience from yawning.

You’ve doubtless read about his project, filmed over four years on six continents using an array of technology including ultra-light aircraft and gliders to bring a camera into the very midst of a flock of migrating birds, but you may have wondered whether such a stunt could hold your interest for an hour and a half. My advice is, don’t miss this film.

You feel a sense of wonder as abstract numbers recording the distances of each species’ migration turn into millions of wing beats that become almost exhausting to watch as your mind attempts to find an equivalent expenditure of energy for your own body. The film traces patterns of flight past gorgeous views of mountains and plains, deserts and jungles, cities and farms, forests and seacoasts, as the birds carry out their twice-annual journey in search of food in treks ranging from several hundred miles to the amazing migration of the arctic tern halfway around the globe as it alternates between poles.

Death hovers near as birds succumb to fatigue, weather, starvation and human intervention by hunters and oil spills. The inclusion of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in this sequence makes a discreet but powerful statement.

The birds carry on this fantastic exercise simply to survive, but the makers of this remarkable film allow us to celebrate not only the amazing energy of nature’s arrangement but also its profound beauty.

A playwright enters into a contract with an audience, demand-ing an active engagement of mind and imagination in return for an experience capable of moving and delighting. "Wingfield on Ice" generously fulfills that contract. Dan Needles originally created the character of Walt Wingfield as the author of a series of fictitious letters to the editor describing the experiences of "a Bay Street stockbroker who trades his pinstripe suit for overalls and buys a 100-acre farm in mythical Persephone Township (an hour or so north of Toronto). Needles subsequently gathered a number of these letters into a one-man play called "Letter From Wingfield Farm," in which actor Rod Beattie took on the voices and mannerisms of a dozen different personages from the township.

Over a period of years, both Needles and Beattie, the only actor so far to perform the role, have polished their craft in a series of Wingfield plays of which "Wingfield on Ice" is the fifth. The first act entertains us with events leading up to a massive ice storm. The second act, while no less amusing, takes us deep into human social experience, with a moving account of the community’s response to an act of childbirth within the context of a devastating storm and. The drama concludes with a touching moment of reconciliation.

One can scarcely imagine a simpler framework for drama: a mere suggestion of a farm kitchen, a single actor who occasionally changes jackets, intermittent alterations in the lighting. Yet within this structure playwright, director and performer have collaborated to produce a remarkable piece of theatre celebrating the human condition.

This film, currently playing in IMAX at the Ontario Science Centre, has it all: breathtaking scenery in the French Alps, dazzling computer animations of the human brain in action (accompanied by a lucid explanation of up-to-date scientific information), and a fine human-interest story of two riders in the Tour de France. Take your kids or go by yourself, but don’t miss it.

You remember reading how General Motors bought up the streetcar systems in Los Angeles and other cities in the 20’s and 30’s and then scrapped them in order to promote the growth of the automobile? You may have wondered whether the conspiracy theory had any merit, but after all, that was a long time ago and who’s really going to know for sure? (For more on the story go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy)

The electric car story, by contrast, just happened. So why haven’t we heard more about it? The State of California, in order to deal with an increasingly awful smog problem, told the automakers that they would have to produce a certain percentage of zero-emission vehicles by a certain date (this was to be a phased-in approach) or lose the privilege of selling cars in California. The automakers took two approaches—create a zero-emission vehicle and fight the legislation. The EV1, produced by General Motors in limited quantities, brought great pleasure to its users: it looked sexy, it drove fast, it produced neither noise nor pollution, you could charge it up overnight in your own garage, and maintenance, every 5000 miles, consisted of rotating the tires and replacing the windshield wiper fluid: in short, an engineering triumph for General Motors (replicated by other American and Japanese automakers).

So what happened? It was one thing to create this cute little toy car in order to meet a technical challenge: a bit like building a solar-powered car or super-light airplane to win a race. But people who saw the EV1 wanted one, despite an almost complete lack of marketing, and the prospect of a proliferation of electric cars scared some very powerful interests. As “Who Killed the Electric Car?” reminds us, electric cars actually preceded autos fuelled by internal combustion engines and lost the competition over the issue of speed. The idea of an electric car competing on an equal footing with the gas-burning model was the automakers’ worst nightmare. Oil companies didn’t like the idea either. With oil prices headed in the direction of $100 a barrel, it is estimated that $1 trillion worth of oil remains to be extracted from the earth and sold—big money by anyone’s calculations. And who wants a vehicle that you can refuel yourself?

So a consortium of business and political interests undertook to scuttle the car, and succeeded. The film shows the EV1 being recalled, scrapped, and then shredded (this may seem like overkill, but it’s all there in the film), to the dismay of contented EV1 drivers and environmentalists. The film tries to offer some hope at the end, but the message I took away was that in this important battle, the bad guys won.

Teaching Advanced Placement Statistics tends to be a fairly solitary activity; once a year its adherents gather to celebrate their special vocation. At the AP Statistics reading each year, readers greet friends they haven’t seen for a year and remind each other that no one outside the fraternity appreciates how anyone could consider reading 70,000 exams to be fun. I often feel that way about crossword puzzles: I solve a particular clue and say to myself, “I happened to know that, but can there really be a lot of other people who do?” Evidently there are. As we learn in “Wordplay,” Bill Clinton, Mike Mussina (star pitcher for the Yankees), jazz historian Ken Burns and comedian Jon Stewart are all crossword puzzle fans. Not only do we hear them try to explain the particular mental fascination that comes with matching wits with the daily puzzle in the New York Times, we sit beside them as they work on the same puzzle that we have seen constructed on screen. And while I’m content to complete the solution to a puzzle, especially anything past Wednesday (the daily New York Times puzzles increase in difficulty through the week), these veterans actually time themselves.

The film centers on Will Shortz, editor of the New York Times crossword puzzle, and host of the annual crossword tournament in Stamford, Connecticut. In the course of the movie we go from casual fans to the serious to the downright obsessed, and watch them compete, first en masse, and for the championship round, right on stage. Seeing every aspect of the crossword mentality displayed onscreen made me wriggle with pleasure. I can’t imagine anyone other than a crossword fan enjoying this movie, but it appears there are a lot more of us than I thought.

An aging New Zealander realizes a lifetime dream of racing his ancient souped-up motorcycle (the Indian of the title) at Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats. This slender plotline, based on a true story, supports a movie of pure hokum. Even in 1963 would strangers have treated a codger from Down Under quite this nicely? But put aside the cavils and enjoy the tour de force acting of one of the screen’s finest, Anthony Hopkins. Let’s hope we all have the indomitable spirit displayed his character, Burt Munro, when a bad heart, a bad prostate and bad hearing afflict our old age. Don’t miss this brilliant performance.

What do professional wrestlers or professional strippers do when they come to the end of the line? They may accept reality and find another way to live or they may continue doggedly down a self-destructive path. Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei make us care about characters whose best years lie behind them, the latter willing to face facts, the former unable to make the transition to a different life. The look of the film brings out the tawdriness of their careers along with the frustration of a wrestler trying unsuccessfully to change his lot. He tries and fails to make a new start with his estranged daughter. His effort to fit in as a supermarket deli worker proves to be simultaneously laughable and cryable. His relationship with the stripper comes to the brink of being redemptive, but alas. This is one sad film.

Toward the end of this lively film, one of the main characters, a young Spanish woman, exclaims to the other protagonists, a pair of teenage boys, that they are lucky to be living in Mexico, a country so full of life. The same might be said for the film, which includes snapshots of quite a bit of Mexican life in the course of its journey, a long drive to a possibly non-existent beach. The movie celebrates its sexuality exuberantly, and the conversation among the three travelers centers on sex--how the boys met their girlfriends, what they consider to be sexual technique, how the woman discovered her husband's unfaithfulness. Sex serves as a natural vehicle for expressing both joy and sadness. Can you imagine an North-American film in which two boys and a woman, rather drunk it must be said, lift their glasses in a public toast to the clitoris? (The only other film in which I've heard the organ mentioned was an English movie in which one working-class woman confides to another that she once asked her husband what he thought of the clitoris, mispronouncing it to rhyme with "Taurus," and he said that he preferred General Motors cars.) Go see the film--it has a richness that will remain with you for a long time.

“YEAR OF THE DOG” offers an opportunity to speculate on the boundary between behaviour that we might characterize as ill-advised and the actions of a deranged mind. What separates the amusingly quirky from the seriously unbalanced? The only affection in the life of Peggy (Molly Shannon) comes from her dog Pencil. When the dog dies, she gets involved with an ASPCA agent and in order to win his affections becomes a vegan, but when he turns out to be a bisexual celibate (surely a first in movies!), rather than returning to a carnivorous existence she turns animal protection activist. J.C. Reilly, Laura Dern, and Regina King play neighbour, sister-in-law and co-worker, respectively, all concerned with the excesses of a woman who seems to have crossed the line from enthusiast to loony. Initially sympathetic viewers may eventually recoil: one dog sleeping on one’s bed may be cute; fifteen dogs are just wacko. Your personal take on these boundaries will have a considerable bearing on whether you consider the film to have a happy ending.

“A YEAR AGO IN WINTER”
“Second best is the first loser,” reads a poster in the bedroom of a teenage ski champion who committed suicide a year before the film opens and whose face haunts his older sister wherever she goes. The boy’s mother commissions a painter to commemorate her children in oil, an enterprise that the daughter finds decidedly creepy. It has been said that few marriages can survive the death of a child. The coldness between the parents echoes the cold demands of excellence they place upon their children.

The troubling and troubled commission brings the hermit painter in contact with the world, leads the daughter to rethink her relationship with her brother, and helps show her a way out of her self-destructive lifestyle. This is an affecting and beautiful film.

Lately I’ve been reading that after the age of 80, nine out of ten people are unable to care for themselves. I think of Alzheimer’s that took two of my Cornell professors. I wonder about my life’s new path, where it will lead, how long it will last. Then I see “Young @ Heart” and look upon my coming 65^th birthday as nothing more than a minor milestone of adulthood. For this unusual chorus has an average age of 80. Its members may use canes or walkers to get around (one fine bass soloist required the assistance of an oxygen tank) but they perform with all the vitality of any of my much younger singers (and can give many more hours of rehearsal time than any choir I’ve directed). As we see in the film, music-making offers particular benefits to its participants as well as an avenue of emotional access to its audiences. The quality of singing sounded surprisingly good, all things considered, but the circumstances of performance and the enthusiasm of the performers also contributed to one’s appreciation, even at the aesthetic distance of a filmed concert. You leave the theatre with a renewed determination to live life to the fullest.

A festival of ads is like cotton candy--you enjoy it all the way through, but later, you'd have difficulty remembering any part of it. The best part of an international festival is enjoying all the ads that you'd never be able to see in North America, whether because of different tastes or capitulation to political correctness. And hour and a half of fluff.

A truly awful movie. Leslie Nielson and the others who appeared in the film should be embarrassed, along with the producers, who poured hundreds of dollars into costumes, sets and special effects.

Like chewing gum for the mind, the 2002 Cannes Advertising Winners delight and entertain then are instantly forgotten. Only a few items in the 87-minute show stick in the mind, such as the Bud Light commercials offering mock celebrations (with soloist and back-up choir) of men's wrestling costume designers, or men who wear terrible toupees, or the inventor of hot dogs longer than the buns. Cautionary messages also tend to remain with you, like the musical supposedly sponsored by the tobacco industry asking us to focus on the positive side of tobacco, or the reminder that limitations on tobacco advertising exist only in North America; the rest of the world remains fair game. And there were some very funny condom commercials that, for some reason, never get aired on North American television, including an ad in which an attractive woman visits an empty apartment with a realtor; when she fakes a very loud orgasm and a neighbour complains she smiles and rejects the flat. An entertainment like no other.

Having seen an ad in “Eye” magazine for the 2005 Short Film Showcase, I arrived at the Cumberland Theatre an hour and a half before the event, not wanting to risk being shut out. The management said the tickets hadn’t been sent over yet, so I went to dinner and came back. The organizers of the event then explained that it was by invitation only—the ad in the paper had been placed in error—but seeing my enthusiasm, they arranged for me to get a ticket.

You may actually see some of these films if you keep your eyes open: Film Circuit, a division of the Toronto International Film Festival Group, has arranged for this program to be screened in the United States as well as Canada. I’ll include the official descriptions of the films as well as a few notes of my own:

· “CHOKE” A love triangle with a difference, “Choke” focuses on a teacher, her lovestruck student, and an aspiring figure skater. One character discovers a betrayal and exacts vengeance in a chilling and perversely funny way. (12 minutes)

· “DESASTRE” This witty and hilarious satire about culture and stereotypes concentrates on a young American who, much to his parents’ chagrin, is born French—insisting on chain smoking, eating baguettes and debating the merits of Jerry Lewis films. His parents hire someone to deprogram him, but the sudden arrival of a strange squadron wearing black turtlenecks and berets complicates their plans. (22 minutes) Twenty-two minutes of delicious fun, and sooo French.

· “HARDWOOD” A smart, touching examination of the meaning of family, fatherhood and athletics, “Hardwood” looks at director Hubert Davis’s relationship with his father, Mel Davis, a former Harlem Globetrotter. Constantly on the road, Davis found himself with two families to support, one in Chicago, the other in Vancouver. (29 minutes) This film was nominated for the Best Documentary Short Oscar, and you can see why.

· “MAN FEEL PAIN” The winner of the Best Canadian Short Film at the Toronto International Film Festival, this hair-raising satire focuses on a depressed man who tries to commit suicide. When his irate and anxious neighbour discovers him, he quickly turns the pour soul into a martyr-cum-celebrity in their apartment building. (11 minutes)

· “MILO 55160” Milo 55160 is a low-level bureaucrat at St. Peter’s Gates. A frequent employee of the month, he’s in line for a promotion, which is jeopardized when he intervenes and tries to aid a young boy. (20 minutes) Bet you didn’t think that the newly-dead would have to stand in line as if for a customs inspection.

· “RYAN” This innovative combination of computer animation and documentary examines the life of one of Canada’s most influential animators, Academy Award-nominated Ryan Larkin—who now earns his living panhandling on the streets of Montreal. Emotionally intense and groundbreaking, “Ryan” is a truly powerful and unforgettable work. (14 minutes) This film won this year’s Oscar for best animated short. You see flashbacks of Larkin’s creative work and wonder why this man can’t be “saved.” A disturbing and ingenious film.

· “TROUSER ACCIDENTS” One of Canada’s most celebrated screenwriters, Semi Chellas returns to the director’s chair for this humorous, absurd tale explaining how inanimate objects conspire against us. Told in mock documentary form, “Trouser Accidents” uses comedy to explore our experiences with—and penchant for—betrayal. (5 minutes) Reminiscent of a Monty Python sketch, thoroughly straight-faced absurdity.

· “WALK OF SHAME” Lively and knowing, Jennifer Saull’s “Walk of Shame” follows a young woman who decides to hit with town with a girlfriend following an acrimonious break-up. A few pitchers of beer later, she’s determined to put the past behind her, but her rash decisions will have unforeseen and embarrassing repercussions. Saull uses a split screen to create a sharp and often amusing contrast between her heroin’s actions and their consequences. (10 minutes) `

All of these films depart so radically from the kind of movies you’re accustomed to seeing that a diet of nothing but Hollywood films, for all their production values, suddenly seems distinctly non-nourishing.