First thirty minutes is actually kind of good, in that Sandler and co. almost achieve a modern day Capraesque verve; as soon as the sinister plotting begins, though, the many turgid characters fluctuating wildly,  and other random, plot alienating events occurring almost on top of one another - Mr. Deeds becomes almost unbearable. (I honestly was going to write more, but have decided not to waste my time. The movie, despite it's more upstanding and revered source material, is still an Adam Sandler Movie and all of the simplistic formula cues and look-at-me sight gags that go with that declanation, as ever, bog down any momentum it might have possessed. It just isn't very funny).
 

So unbelievably exhilarating and full of surprise - that's the word here, by the way; Andeerson's film is almost categorically avant-garde (which is a good thing, were Sandler's character introduced into any of Anderson's previous films - which were confidant and assured, but not nearly this beautifully off-the-wall - it would've been repetitious and conventional). As it is, it's an experience; a film that you should treasure upon first viewing - because everything that happens is neither predictable nor tired.  What fuels Punch-Drunk Love and keeps it - barely, at times - from becoming a reoccuring is-he-a-savant or is this a lost angry-man-loses-it-repeatedly sketch from SNL, is something I'll call Fluorescent Honesty. You'll remember (or, more accurately, I'll remember) what George Carlin said about fluorescent light in a bathroom and how you could see every nick and scrape and scratch and pimple you've ever had since birth? Even if you don't, perhaps you'll recognize it by extension in the film. Adam Sandler's character, Barry Egan, who seems to be running a company - sort of - surrounds himself with an ugly, bright fluorescent world. From the opening sequence where Egan calls Healthy Choice to verify what he believes to be a glitch in a Frequent Flyer giveaway, to the sequences in the tackily decorated interiors of the San Fernando Valley, to the buzzing light of a mattress store Phillip Seymour Hoffman uses as a mask for credit card billing statements that will no longer reflect the phone sex operation he runs - the movie is full of harsh and revealing white luminescence. Egan, we'll find, is so unlike the world he inhabits and so unlike the society human beings are familiar with. Instead of playing along with underlying hostilities, sarcastic attacks and unexplained phenomenon, Egan is brutally honest and often, blunt to the point where he appears rude. In his fluorescent world, where everything is laid out - why lie? Instead of misappropriating his anger management, he lets it out (albeit, in one of the film's suspiciously indulgent reoccuring statements, violently). Sometimes he cries, sometimes he breaks plate glass windows, but he's always honest with the world - even when the world stabs him in the back. How does the film escape the fate of lowbrow physical comedy? Easy: Egan's honesty reacting against the cold surface of a fraudulent world becomes a dissection seen through the powerful perception of amour. What better showcase for this than the vulnerability of falling in love? Anderson stages dating and romance - like he did with John C. Reilly (who played a similarly innocent character) and Melora Walters in Magnolia. He celebrates the awkward rush and, with Egan's quirk in tow, cranks it up to ten. Biggest gripe is that it only runs half as long as Anderson's previous opus. At ninety minutes, I was wholeheartedly disappointed when the film ended. The giddy, intoxicating thrill of seeing greatness for the first time - and recognizing it - though, wasn't missing.
 

It's so bare bones, you can almost see act breaks sticking out between it's action setpiece joints. The fighting is even more video-game influenced than in The Mummy Returns (but, at the very least, The Scorpion King has the good sense not to spill over two hours - keeping its running time a compact and ideal ninety-one minutes). Some of it is good-hearted fun; it's pretty much all action hero observatory wit and more openly anachronistic - and therefore more forgivable - modern sensibilities (i.e. - no one's ever going to accuse it of being a period piece). So devoid of ambition, I'm not sure I can call it a B movie and comfortably sleep at night (the dialogue is so campy, it's almost too much even for an actor of The Rock's caliber; see also, the opening sequence wherein said former wrestling icon bursts into room, kills multiple dudes and scares everone else away by whispering: "Boo"). Whomever instructed him to make his eyes bulge as reaction to anything and everything, and to read his lines as if he were Putty (Elaine's boyfriend on Seinfeld), did him a huge service: as it is, he belongs here, in this silly, borderline Indiana Jones spoof; (Enrich your viewing tip #349 of 500: For fun, take out a pad and pen and write down every instance you feel like Raiders of the Lost Ark is being unofficially referenced - or stolen from). Kelly Hu wears so little clothing throughout the film, we almost wonder if the camera crew worked for free; Facinelli reprises his usual role as a random, prepubescent adult male angry at the world because his daddy wanted to rebel against the friggin' King of Egypt instead of bouncing him on his knee (or some such reason - if I were interested, or though it would have affected the outcome, I might have pondered it for more than a few nanoseconds); Duncan honestly never says anything devoid of hostile, competitive machismo; and the actors who play the king and the horse thief, respectively, were born to play roles just like those in subsequent films (Ben makes predictions!). I'll have to be honest about things, though: The best part is that it never, in any way, remotely resembles any of the sequel-by-numbers pandering of the eye-lid challenging The Mummy Returns. I can't stress this enough, people.
 

The contrast between life before a child's death and life after a child's death is anything but fragile here, but, you know, when characters wander around their landscape underlining moments right before the title character drowns in a diving accident, you're gonna have this. What's so unbelievably entrancing about The Son's Room is Nanni Moretti's performance in front of the camera. Effortlessly belying an almost unearthly calmness (and still channeling a personable sense of stability), he moves in and out of his role as therapist, parent, husband and observer with a versatility that's totally and completely believable. When he heaps his two big arms around his wife and daughter, moments after they've received the news, it's one of the film's many skillfully crushing moments - and it's also the last time we'll see Moretti before the pieces become unglued. The subject matter in the first two acts is bland. It's been done to (pun intended) death. I found myself crying at some of the more original bits: the coffin being sealed in front of the family, the mother's loud sobs as she registers closure after the funeral (why do we never see this in other films?) and the constant replaying of the last few events of the boy's life before he left his family to go diving. At that point - when the film has exhausted pretty much all the healing motifs - the secret girlfriend shows up. The sppry, out-of-nowhere third act wherein the family chauffers the girl and her new boyfriend to the French border, peppered with a Brian Eno song (that defines passion via teenage ears and won't be leaving your head anytime soon) - this is the piece of The Son's Room that really makes it special. The girlfriend shows them pictures of her and the boy. They are taken with a timer. Learning of an event in the boy's life after he has died allows them to stop time. It's goopy sounding - but the last act is a masterful new twist on grieving.
 

Looks like its going to be fun and then - straight away - becomes pretty darn typical. My biggest qualm is that it really never lives up to the homage it pretends to be (to films like 1954's Them!). If anything, it's more of a modern day B movie - which is a whole other sport than the B movies of the 1950s. Arquette's far less goofy performance is, inexplicably, a hinderance rather than an asset (but then, Kari Wuhrer is supposed to be the town's single mom sheriff with two kids - so, there's not a whole lot of reality floating around here). Moments of interest include the hilarious expository get-up posing as a scene wherein the owner of all these spiders divulges their strengths (and no weaknesses) to a young boy, who will later be able to stop them - because he paid attention; Doug E. Doug as a conspiracy-mad radio DJ (who broadcasts what seems to be the only radio signal in town from his van); and a dandy of a scene involving an old man and a tent (I won't spoil it for you - it's one of the only scenes employing the expensive and semi-real looking digi-spiders that isn't terminally monotonous).
 

A series of master shots (the camera never moves) so gorgeously framed and so apt at giving life to offscreen space - that you might almost miss the fact that absolutely nothing is fucking happening (at all) (ever).
 

Never expected Scotland, PA to employ prediction humor (it's a revolutionary idea - it's called a "drive through window"!) as carefully and sparingly as it does and, miraculously, to make terrific use of a its premise - and still manage to turn itself into a generic indie whodunnit. Though lacking in subtlety, Morrissette seems fervent in his passion to translate Macbeth like special sauce (with just the right ingredients and tons of overkill), but, in fact, I began to wish, mid second act, that he'd ease the hell up. The bitch of it is, his movie looks great - the cracked perception in clothing and interior decorating of the seventies with photography that benefits from what looks like a lack of funding and, you know, a lack of lighting; he seems a little insecure about the time period (most of the first act - which is still the most entertaining bit of the film - is a series of musical montges set to a variety of seventies' tunes, some recognizable, most not). Morrissette has a gift with dialogue, but the movie is unevenly cast. We like Christopher Walken in his role as the vegetarian Lieutenant MacDuff - but he's far too interesting an actor to fit in with everyone else (especially Tierney, who is usually competent, but terribly tiresome here). Dick and Levitch are used as sparingly as the references to "little pieces of chicken with...dipping sauce?", but it is Corrigan (as Banquo) who ends up walking off with the movie. Among all of these actors - some at home, others pretty far out to lunch - he seems like the only one who can truuly feel the pulse of an independent film. Scotland, PA may devolve into a scheme far too complicated for its tone but, it's still a loose adaptation of Shakespeare's "Macbeth" set in a small town (which, somehow, manages to make the ever-changing owners of a fast-food restaurant rich) called Scotland, PA in the mid-seventies. That alone, is almost worth remarking about.
 

You know that scene in all cautionary drug addict tales, in the early morning light of some run down urban apartment where a junkie - who's on the verge of seeking help - divulges to a non-junkie the absolute thrill of the narcotic high. He describes it in those vague, vulgar similes ("it was like I was fucking a cloud, man") and stares up at the camera as if Jesus were reaching down to him. Now pretend, instead, you're Bob Crane, star of Hogan's Heroes and, instead of a flurried, redemptive revelation, you were describing an encounter with a dominatrix to your video surveillance expert (if you had one, that is) as if it were a new drug. The line between the two dissections of addiction lies in culture: we don't quite know what to make of a tale that outwardly proposes that a character  is addicted to sex in the same way, more commonly, people are addicted to smack or booze (and frankly, it just feels silly). Greg Kinnear plays Crane with a goofy high-on-life sensibility that's a lot of fun to watch. Unfortunately, it doesn't spill over into the rest of the movie - and it doesn't last long - in what turns out to be an absolute downer and, worse, a grueling excercise in trying to fit a fascinating sex addict skin over the old cautionary tale bones. Paul Schrader, the writer (and sometimes director) of some of the most depressing studies of the bruised male ego of the last thirty years, paints such an obvious-headed picture from start to finish. Crane is given the Norman Rockwell of perfect lives: He's married (to Rita Wilson) with three children, attends church regularly, works as a good-hearted DJ, and his hobbies include drums and photography. Until he meets John Carpenter, of course... (who is played by the sly let-me-convince-you-i'm-human weasel Defoe, also, of course). Though the film unofficially implies that Carpenter is almost the sole reason for Crane's fall from grace, the more pressing flaw is how pushy the film is about making sure each and every paying audience member learn the big lesson. As Auto Focus wanes on, inane voice-over  keeping us up to date (coupled with indulgent montages like "I like breasts"), the happy-go-lucky skip in Crane's step mixes horribly with scene after scene of Kinnear registering his losses with an exaggerated gut and dark glasses: wife and kids (check), dignity (check), popularity (check), money (check), other wife (check). Schrader certainly sympathizes with Crane (even going so far as to intimate his death was the result of a too-late shot at beating his sex habit), painting his indulgences (ever-growing video technology as a means to both justify and aggrandize one's male-ness) and his impulsive excess (you should see some of the dogs he ends up as his popularity plummets and he's forced to tour the west in a dinner theater sex farce). In the end, though, Schrader simply ignores the fact that Crane was pretty much a loser from the start (who happened to be good-looking and lucky - hardly a new combination), and that his partner in crime, Carpenter, was a self-conscious swinger who hopelessly confused his envy of Crane with his own inadequacies. The whole over-kill of a moral whammy is obtrusive, but it's not half as limiting as the fact that I could have cared less whether Crane's life went to pot - or not.
 

PPGM does everything you don't do when trying to hide the fact that your concept works for ten minutes tops. Not only do I resent having to sit through an elongated, re-staged version of how The Powerpuff Girls came to be, but I resent having to watch such narrow, flat situations with none of the off-the-wall humor and sophisticated nonsense of the show, (and I also resent the humorless, almost uncharacteristically dull Dexter's Laboratory short - called "Chicken Scratch" -  which plays before the film). In the history of bad ideas, this one is pre-packaged with its own date stamp and amnesia pills. (As in, "Yawn, this is a forgettable un-vision of a truly inspired toon").
 

Purports to pinpoint, repeatedly, Where It All Went Wrong, but fails to realize that it can't be done with a series of miniature climaxes. Principles are all likable enough, however dull; it's a hot button flurry of casual Southern excess (alcoholism isn't an ailment, it's a merit badge) driven by characters who are constantly and consistently outrageous - without actually being interesting. Bullock and Burstyn aren't nearly as interesting as Judd and Bernilo. Most of the exploits in female togetherness, mental instability and healing wounds aren't exactly taking place on new territory. Ya-Ya's time shifting structure pays off big time, though, dividing modern and ancient quibbles as if they were separate narratives. Khouri seems to be aware that if you move a commonplace story along fast enough, and break it up small enough - it may actually resemble an interesting one. It's a feat - because it almost works.
 

We never get under the surface of Jodie Foster's Nun-Zilla, which seems like a pretty big deal (every scene she's in, we're leaning forward, expecting to get a glimpse of some shade of her character), except that the rest of the movie - a retread of the Lost Boys theme that feels oh so tired - never actually connects with the spotlighted Catholic School blues. It's fodder for a comic book Hirsch writes - which explodes into Todd McFarland-produced animated sequences, perhaps the mere saving grace of the film - that becomes a source of trouble when it falls into the hands of Foster and D'Onfrio in a scene that could so easily have been great (I'd beg them to sympathize or feel, but it might knock the 2-D wind out of their cardboard shells), but seems hopelessly grounded by the disease that cripples the rest of the film: The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys is full of resentful characters, but the cause of their umbrage is left terribly unfocused: Is it there home lives? Is it their boredom? Is it the authority figures at school? Culkin is extraordinary, as is Hirsch, both of them almost winking at the audience, as if they know they're locked into a predictable, flat landscape of precise, television series proportions. (A subplot about a brother and sister copulating should seal the deal on that theory). And, though the symbolic excess of the animated sequences doesn't quite find its way into a harmonious side by side with the rest of the film, somehow it doesn't discredit the crossing of mediums. (As in, "Yeah, it's still a good idea.") Instead of using it's hook to downplay its paint-by-numbers story, though, the void left in place of humanity and characterization ends up slighting the exciting cartoon battle sequences. Pity, that.
 

I like Dogme 95. I like romantic comedies. This is more of a cinema verite soap opera with various unconventional situations, each compelling, however useless against the power of melodrama. (Or, as it's more commonly known, schmaltz). There's a number of really great idiosyncratic tics in these characters, which produce a terrific amount of really challenging scenes where strange, unconventional human observation is competing with a tiresome malaise of the painfully reminiscent. For instance, there's Halvfinn, a great character who is recklessly abusive with reasonable customer requests in the Hotel Sports Bar he manages. His plight sets up three big off-shoots: Funny scenes wherein he rips into the customers or zings pleasantly with his mates, the terror of the man who must fire him (and happens to be his impotent best friend - here's where it starts to dip into the shallow cauldron of American TV plot points) and finally, the love of a woman whose idea of romance is immediately jumping in the sack with Halvfinn everytime she sees him (except one time, where she heard him ragging on her recently deceased, alcoholic mother - which is kind of the point I'm trying to make: this is fodder for convention again, as we know Halvfinn will have to change in order to keep his lady and Halvfinn, changed or not changed, isn't a civil human being.) In the end, the idea of introducing strict - almost paint by numbers - genre constrictions, besides being entirely in opposition to the Dogme 95 rules (and ultimate transcendent final product), serves to corrupt the natural-ness from the technique, leaving it as limp as Halfvinn's aforementioned best friend.
 

Everybody's a lot more comfortable in their world - especially Chris Columbus, who lets thhe film flow rather to the point of absorption instead of the painstaking set-up and recreation of the first film - which never really sucked me in. He sort of eases off, kicks back, and let's the endlessly fascinating (though its dialogue still sounds simpleton) Harry Potter adventure rev its engines until it's coasting on autopilot (the only catch is that, at two and a half hours plus, you do eventually begin to feel the length of the ride). Hogwarts feels more like a dank castle, the villains feel more threatening, the quidditch match is exhilarating and much less clumsy, Kenneth Branagh is hilarious as a narcissistic professor, there's a rather annoying digi-character called Dobby who exists to piss and moan, the kids (save Harry, who is still in high school production mode) are more resourceful and cruel to each other, there's a dash of social strain (blossoming romantic awkwardness that comes abruptly) and another dash of social issue (Kids are criticized for their parent's lack of,  in Ron's case, money and, in Hermoine's case, for their non-wizard blood. And also, a character is carted off to prison). It's funny - I actually think scarier, more dangerous kids movies make for better kids movies than the conservative, safe ones.
 

Hard not to gawk at the soft, bare narrative. Equally hard not to wonder why Dreamworks insists on hiring dorky mush-rock staples to write songs for their films (in The Road to El Dorado, it was Elton John, in Spirit, it's Bryan Adams). The inner voice of the horse is represented by this gentle, soulful incarnation of Matt Damon - but when he rocks out, we're back in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, realizing that everything that we do ... we do it for you. (How did Floyd ever end up involving this guy in their The Wall: Live at Berlin, anyway?) I hate to disapprove on the tiresomely male grounds of "goopiness of music in animated films", but as a Dreamworks' reoccurring motif, I'm starting to wonder if we're going to go back to the whininess of Disney in the1980s - and why we might want to relive that horror (The Fox and the Hound, anyone?) Nevertheless, a mute protagonist makes for a much more mise-en-scene driven (therefore, easy to follow) film, and, as animal-acted live-action films go, they rarely match the power of the easily manipulated cartoon movie. And it's damn short.
 

People don't move to Florida, so much as they land there (which is the operative word, as everyone in John Sayles' anti development epic seems to be hell-bent on what they call their own - emotionally and physically, as we're never to forget). This idea is introduced and re-iterated in the metaphor-laden - however well written - dialogue exchanges between several old golfers, who yammer back and forth about the way things are and the way they used to be. They sound like Mamet characters, until you realize that these characters are mere commentary - demonstrating that older people tend to flock towards Florida in order to cut loose of their stressful lives - only to, when they get there, go looking for any other sorts of stress so, for the love of God, there's still something to bitch about. Falco is properly world-worn and poetic; there's a great performance here from Bill Cobbs as the intellectual pillar of a small African-American beach community; there's a dandy from Tom Wright (most memorable as Mr. Willhelm, George's NY Yankee boss on Seinfeld), as Flash, a college football would-have-been with a taste for investing. Trouble is, for all of Sayles symmetrical Altman rotations (several sets of characters, we cut back and forth as their lives casually intersect), he still comes up with a rather generic emotional center. Little remains of the progressively brilliant last three John Sayles pictures (in order, Lone Star, Men With Guns, and Limbo). Sunshine State has a structure and a social consciousness that could be recognizable as Sayles-land, but rarely does Sayles' construction or critique come to prove why it would be so deserving. The relationships, I think, are the root of the problem: Everyone is numb to everyone else, it seems, and the lot of them communicate in mechanized novelspeak (every line is a small metaphor in the large pool of metonymy). Instead of earthy, lived-in characters, the ones Sayles tends to stress as a rule, these characters only connect with each other on theoretical terms as if, tomorrow, they'll be going back to their real lives. There's a temporary-ness, too, in the feel of a beach town trying to preserve culture in a time when land changes hands at an alarming rate. The conflict here, of changing versus static, doesn't really seem vivid enough, exactly. With people passing through and the few that live there, and their fickle-ness, I never really bought that the impending world of high-rises and golf courses was the real problem with some of the members of this community. And their real problems couldn't be more run-of-the-mill. It's a testament to Sayles' ability with characterization (save Steenburgen, all are fleshed out and quite remarkably so), that these characters are so damned interesting for the entire duration of the near two and half hour running time. In this case, perhaps the scope of the project is more valuable. There's way too many characters running around for Sayles' to keep track of but, somehow, he uses this to make a rather good point about this beach town: See what is spoiled when there are too many cooks you know where.
 

"My twin brother was CIA?" says Chris Rock, clarifying Anthony Hopkins’ proposition of said information. Though the preposterous implications within the quotes pretty much sum up the spirit of the movie, more interesting, one would think, is the confirmation that both of these usually typical actors, in fact, appear anywhere near train wreck like this one - much less together in said disaster. However unfortunate though it may be, it sure sounds like one of the penultimate experiments to go down in the Hollywood laboratories: A modern, wildly unlikely pairing a la the 1980s. It's so base, though; Hopkins rarely does anything interesting in the role - much less the teaming - so much so that we have trouble believing he's got any interest at all in any outcome that doesn't have the words “pay to the order of” looming in the foreground. He snakes about sedately, acting as if he's on painkillers, and blurts out, repeatedly, through the first act, "this is going to be interesting" or "this is going to be a disaster" as if he honestly believes all this hullabaloo with the CIA tapping Rock to pretend to be his twin brother (pause for guffaw) isn't going to pan out. Hopkins brings to life, almost verbatim, the stereotype of his role - which is a uniquely disturbing display  for a performer of his gift. Rock, on the other hand, isn't bad at all (at playing a terminally misunderstood small time hustler). He belongs in a world this strained for reality - pretending to be part of the upper crust while never pausing his rambling, PG-13-safe commentary. He's so handsome, mannered and intelligent, in fact, that I bet he could almost be programmed as a role model, (which is where I chirp in with disgust: Is the film supposed to be making the point that poor black people would be better off if they'd just dress up in suits and speak better?) As Rock begins to assume his brother's identity, the film becomes hypothetical again: What if a heavyset James Bond had this little street tough black guy as his side-kick - and all these technically realistic world-at-risk terrorism set-ups were reduced, frequently, to goofy, appetizing quips? As it is, Schumacher doesn't seem preoccupied at all with the foreknowledge that the cold war is over, instead making his biggest concern a rampantly obvious digi-tour of Prague, using any and every possible remote, voluptuous location he can squeeze into his running time and delineate with subtitles that look like a mock computer read-out. (At the very least, there doesn't seem to be a heavy agenda, really: The bad guys are stock 007-rejects, eastern bloc megalomaniacs and do-rag rebels rather than headline friendly baddies - most notably, an indulgent Russian arms dealer played by Peter Stormare, who busts off lines like: "Welcome to my church - where we worship money!") All this terrorist stuff is so goofy, so by-the-numbers, it barely registers as impending or even remotely reminiscent of our country's own, very real attacks. Couple of questions, though: 1) Rock tries to fend off his twin brother's beautiful girlfriend and not blow his cover in the kind of aside usually engineered as comic relief. Everything here obviously lacks a a strong, serious edge, so what is the purpose of comic relief? Relief from what, exactly? 2) A number of times, Hopkins and his CIA surveillance team will be watching Rock on a computer screen a few rooms away - and then they'll be communicating with him, as if there is some strange intercom system in every room Rock walks into. If we never see them wire him, how are they hearing him? And more importantly, how is he hearing them? I don't have the answers to these questions. There are no answers to these questions. To clear up why Bad Company doesn't earn a much lower grade (not that there are too many branches left to fall through, mind) - besides the one-liners - it turns out that Bruckheimer can still command a rather flashy, somewhat exciting car chase through the forests near Prague (as a bonus, we get to hear Rock screaming “I wanna watch Oprah” as his Hopkins is wrestling to get his head inside of a smashup BMW before pursuers can crush his skull with their ratty terrorist van). Scenes like this, which glimpse a fun, anachronistic version of Anthony Hopkins, are far too rare. The experiment, I'm thinking, has gone awry; even the filmmakers know they've got nothing, covering their bases in expectation that filmgoers will tell their friends: “It's worth it to hear Anthony Hopkins tell Chris Rock to, ‘Get in the car, bitch.’” That scene, of course, is safely placed thirty seconds from the closing credits.

[Schumacher seems to have a bit of a track record - or perhaps a mere stockpile of bad luck. This film was pushed back after it's plot, involving terrorist activity on the homeland, supposedly hit too close to home. (In fact, an isolated moment - wherein a terrorist tells Rock and Hopkins that Americans are fat and lazy and watch other countries spill blood on television before dictating how said countries should live after the fact - is a valuable, chilling fact, and  would almost certainly be better served in a movie that didn't have the name Bruckheimer or the name Schumacher attached to it). Then, originally scheduled for a November 2002 release, Schumacher's Phone Booth met with a three month delay thanks to the Beltway Sniper.

Not to be distasteful, but, could this be the break we've been waiting for? Will Schumacher finally pack it in for good? Wouldn't that just be too perfect?]
 

Or, Character Arc: The Movie. (Okay, the smugness is out of the way). Joking aside, Pumpkin defies something that obvious. It's like an after school special played as satire. It's like a teen flick bathed in the attention to detail and sensibility usually reserved for Merchant and Ivory. It's like Beauty and the Beast with no agenda. It's like a movie Todd Solondz might make if he'd grow the hell up. It's like, surprisingly remarkable. What sets Pumpkin so daringly apart from the rest of the drivel starring young adults these days is its tone: Blunt sincerity that only comes out corn ball. People are exaggerated - or are these characters enacting theirr usual roles, evinced as ridiculous because they've been put on display? Here lies the story of Carolyn (played with a handsome steam of veteran indie cred by Christina Ricci), a sorority girl, complete with a shallow rich-girl's life (so callous even, she attempts to opt out of the house charity on the grounds that helping different people only underlines how different they are - she's a more realistic version of Election's Tracey Flick). Unsuccessful at begging off from the required service of helping these challenged kids train for their version of the Special Olympics, Carolyn smiles, acts awkward and promptly becomes tortured over the experience (At one point we're actually watching the sisters help the crippled stars of track and field to Belle & Sebastian's "Stars of Track and Field"). Instead of quitting, she begins to fall for the title boy (yes, the title boy), which ends up melting her upbeat bubble of security, exposing to her - for what appears the first time, literally - a painful, cold reality. Worse, is what happens to poor, chained-to-mama Pumpkin. As she inspires him, he falls head over heels and, it seems, in the process, crawls out of his shell and behaves more and more like a functional adult. He gets out of his wheelchair, which he really didn't need. He starts talking because there's someone who will listen. And his mother begins to realize she'll have to give him up if he sustains a predominant reversal. What happens next is brilliant, and very Solondzian (I call coin!) - the mother begins attempts to drive awway the root of - and therefore the whole of - her son's improvement. She wants him dependent and helpless. Ouch. Also interesting is the way this picture perfect setting, the organized prim-and-proper of Ricci's home and sorority lives begins to look ugly - it begins to grate on us. We can almosst taste the horrible plastic of her world. In that respect, the so-called "arc" is transferred to us. And it's oddly haunting. It's like a propaganda film for those of us who turned our noses full-on up at Fraternities and Sororities in college. Propaganda for those of us who didn't feel the necessity to buy our friends. Propaganda for those of us who are big enough to admit that handicapped people make us a little bit nervous. Pumpkin is an achievement. It's Solondz with epiphany.

The principles are each uniquely up to their performances: Moore, subservient yet uncharacteristically interesting; Quaid, reticent and tortured (and hot and heavy in his gay love scenes, let's not forget); Haysbert, kind but real, probably the best character Far From Heaven has to offer us (his grace feels almost physically soothing). Most remarkable is the stunning re-creation, including the sharp technicolor and constant, unnecessary crane shots which bring the 1950s melodrama easily screaming back. The film never feels quite modern - which is perhaps the most important achievement of all - and, quite often, we actually forget the inference of it's brand, namely, a period piece. (Haynes seems to be doing everything shy of buying up billboard space to ensure we know this is an homage). The multi-thematic verve of underlying passions suppressed by social constraint, which is genuinely unnerving at times, often goes even further - because the time period is so vivid - it's satisfying like a Sirk movie. It's refreshing to see Moore break racial taboos and to see Quaid, eventually, face up to his homosexuality. Difference here is that Sirk and Ophuls (the directors named in Haynes' director's statement), were filmmakers who populated their films with taboos of the time. Here, we're watching a flashback about things no longer considered brow furrowing taboo, exactly. It doesn't really decrease the gravitas, but it's less a homage, methinks, than a precise recreation. For example, Sirk's playful, mise-en-scene driven filmmaking is supplanted by a kind of anti-naturalism - a look of perfection to a fault, such as the Whitakers' house, which looks like a museum Haynes put together praising the accessories of a 1950s family (it's obvious that he's quite taken with the whole spread). Striking that Far From Heaven is so powerful - but  it would have been more relevant had it been about a subject still considered taboo today. Minor quibbles, though. The Leave It to Beaver-style pleasantries and mannerisms are a gas to watch, which makes viewing this family's unraveling, perhaps, far more entertaining that one could possibly hope to expect.  Perhaps a nod to one of it's seven working titles, the film is bathed in fall - a time of change - which, maybe, would have been more suiitable had the film actually been called Fall From Splendor. Nevertheless, we're not taking any points away for gushing - melodrama's what it's all about, after all.
 

First of all, objectivity goes, I'm afraid, straight out the window, for two reasons: My own rabidly anti-gun views (as well as my anti-TV news views) are supremely tapped and fulfilled here and, also, the unrelenting, unabashed emotional response (I wept openly, sobbing even, through at least two segments) the film elicited, sorta takes me out of the running for Least Partial Audience Member '02. Nevertheless, as Dogme-style confessions go, this one falls closer to the tree adorned by Randall Good's perpetually sound theorem that praising films with a message you tend to agree with will undoubtedly betray those who trust an unbiased opinion - but, to distill his long, semi coherent rant (which he coined after viewing, of all films, The Big Kahuna): You pretty much have no choice but to go along with your own feelings. And there it is. Admittedly, Bowling For Columbine is propaganda to the last - and its the best thing I've seen thus far this year - but, in fact, it's the kind of fact driven, for-all-our-benefit propaganda that's (forgivably) more in the style of Moore's personality than, say, that of other lopsided docs I've seen (Grass comes to mind, maybe [sic] Triumph of the Will...) The lightness of this crusade to probe anyone and everyone, militiamen and banks with free gun promotions alike, stops dead in its tracks as a short montage, detailing some absolutely shocking U.S. hypocrisies, conveys a very sobering reality: Moore wants the whole damn pie this time. (This is also where, I suspect, a number of viewers may begin to take him with a grain of salt - no judgment handed down, just an observation).  The film continues on, examining why Canada has just as many guns as we do, but nearly 10,500 less gun related deaths per year. When it gets to the title dissection - including a haunting sequence wherein the screen is drawn and quartered to reveal 4 separate views of the closed-circuit security surveillance in assorted rooms at Columbine high school during the massacre - the film just about overpowered me. What's so exciting about Moore's films are how personable and easy he is to believe, and to trust; he's a credibly quintessential everyman who skillfully and successfully weaves tangents into a broad, solid scope, while carefully monitoring the pace, never forgetting that he's making a film. It's a factual, extremely intelligent take on an indescribably convoluted issue: And Moore makes it seem palpable that he may attain the old stand-by - "If I reach just one person, it will all have been worth it" (of course, he's aiming high when he hopes that person will be Charlton Heston) - and that one of his pro-gun audience members may actual be moved to stop raising firearms to God status. Intimating that the government wants to keep us in check by making us fear anything and everything, Moore's tactics include admitting his own faults (he's an NRA member, by the way) and playing up his relative lack of shyness; As in Roger & Me and The Big One, his disdain for corporations is present - but he takes it a step further (with Kmart, this time) and receives an unexpected surprise. I'm keeping the vagaries relatively vague (some of the sharpest moments in the film are the ones you don't see coming) and acknowledging forthright that Bowling for Columbine presents no definitive answers as to why our culture is so gun crazy - but rather invests its energy in suggesting a handful of possible explanations. At one point, Moore interviews the Nichols brother who was once charged in the Oklahoma City bombing - but never convicted (in fact, it seems a rather believable fact that he had nothing to do said heinous act). When Moore suggests the methods of Ghandi after Nichols finishes a rant about how to deal with a conniving government, Nichols seems befuddled: "I'm not familiar with that method", he sputters. Anybody else need clarification? This is a brilliant film.
 

Something about having eight protagonists - none of which possess any admirable qualities whatsoever - that just saps the fun out a murder mystery meant to show the catty, bitchy effect on one man we never actually see. But, you know, there's some musical numbers, so, I guess it's light. Anyway.

You're welcome to a go at convincing yourself that transplanting Treasure Island into a space motif isn't an almost laughable stretch - but you'll have to contend, rightly, with the gusto and excitement of this swift-paced rebound off of a painfully obvious "twist-by-necessity", probably Disney-enacted, a mighty blow upon whomever was idealistic enough to be interested animating the novel for modern crowds. The film is equal parts forget-yourself and forget-able, working best when plot points from the novel are in motion  - some of the new twists bring little side-stories, most of which are as ugly as barnacles on a hull. The role model thing is a particularly large step overboard - Must be the effects of inhaling the drab, orange-cat color schematic that delude us just long enough not to harp on the fact that Jim actually finds a father figure in Long John Silver - who is very bad, and Jim, subsequently, pardons Silver on the basis that Silverknew when he was licked.. I'm sorry to be the one to break it to the big Mouse, but those sorts of villains are reserved for films with a looming, lesson-learning agenda. Leave it to them to find something of interest and value, productive in the cultural scheme (for kids, especially), and to find the need to draw a beaming moral from it. And the clunky, irritating-on-purpose (is that redundant on purpose) robot voiced by the annoying-on-purpose Martin Short, I need to be notified when those decisions are being made. (Good calls on Emma Thompson, Michael Wincott and, indeed, David Hyde Pierce - on one of his third or fourth vocal outings).

From the greeting card separator headings, to the fact that it's about routines and fate, Thirteen Conversations About One Thing is so distant that it's almost abstract - and then so forward that it's almost confusing. And it's a movie where characters kill accidentally, meditate on the finality of their actions, and then, in the next scene, a completely unrelated, philandering physics professor, teaching a lesson in said most exact of sciences, scrawls the word 'irreversible' across his blackboard, as if his place in the wacky cross-section of the middle class was such that he was required to summise the themes of the film. Acts of cinema such as this, are just too indie-mechanical (right down to the inclusion of John Turturro) to prove to me that people really enjoy watching these films, which occupy a strange niche that's similar to one-hour television dramas, but could more easily pass in the arena of made-for-cable pictures (ironically, though, it feels most like a film begging to be adapted for the stage). Entertaining enough to be mildly interest me, the storytelling method feels like an amplifier: An incongruous dissection of the power of routine, underlining reoccurence by interrupting the sequential flow. I've heard, in some quarters, outrageously compared to Magnolia, a film that playfully marries its own ponderance on fate to something of worth, (or, at the very least, has the courage to include a single creschendo of ephiphany or more.) And, you know, if you're not sure what to get out of it, there's dozens of shots of characters looking into mirrors, reflecting, if you will, to subconsciously force you to reflect on the delicacy of incidents and their order in your life.