The film, much like the title character (sorta) Roger's approach, is all about manipulation. Point B is left to rot and boil while point A joyfully skips over its carcass, eyes fixed on point C's sexy ass. Roger Dodger takes one bracing, illogical turn - and then another. Writer-director Dylan Kidd sets up the Scott character as a talker - a bluntly hateful one - and follows this up with a series of exchanges between himself, his nephew (Eisenberg) and two nymphets. These exchanges - which we'll politely dub the second act - still feel as if they're in the midst of setting this character up (but, in actuality, its no more than stuck tires spinning in the mud). When we finally understand that the character actually yearns to accept something similar to love (maybe) - and has botched it by sleeping with a married woman - the second illogical turn comes: Instead of Roger facing up to the failure of his actions - by seeing the value in his nephew's idealistic, love-conquers-all world view - there's this goofy scene, at close, where Roger visits his sister After All These Years and helps his nephew and his high school cronies with their lady problems. Roger is a pretty major character (savoring the efficiently engineered surprises delivered in the dialogue - and watching Scott deliver it - almost makes a first viewing worthwhile). Kidd, however, wastes a perfect opportunity to look closer at Roger (we keep getting distracted by the familial skeletons/jealous rage/alcoholism subplots that never seem to materialize into anything), and another to look closer at the full edge to his corruption of his nephew, and yet another to dissect whether Roger's career as a copy writer for an advertising agency is in any way responsible for his coolly wretched state. Trying to float by on dialogue alone, its never more than a terribly amateurish film, shot in completely unnecessary you-are-there, semi glossy Dogme 95 shakicam, and banged out without thought of structure or thematic consistency.

It's indie fluff - and the whole affair smacks of an excuse for everyone involved to get some serious overacting out of their respective systems. Using staggering poverty and old-fashioned slapstick, though, was as good an idea as hiring a cast of this caliber (it pays to be a well respected producer like Steven Soderbergh) to bump the low rent theatricality of the piece up a notch. Eventually, it all adds up to something just south of anti-climactic, but the attention to how little pressure appears to be on the viewer complements it as a remake of the 1958 Marcello Mastroianni vehicle, Big Deal on Madonna Street. Calling it anything more than a diversion, though, is pure delusion.

The strong air of Graham Greene (one of the best reasons I know of to get voice-over out of the closet) permeates The Quiet American like a druggy haze, giving Caine unspoken license to ploy his volatile boost of world wearied cynicism mixed with a master's edge of adaptive bliss and the quietly dispensed pleasantries that give way to a casual existence of pure and utter security of self. In short: Caine is still the big reason Noyce's film is so successful. Not to discount Fraser, or Do Thi Hai Yen or even Tzi Ma, but the film is a character's centerpiece, a memorable tread of the same depths of self-pity which plagued Joseph Cotten in The Third Man and Ralph Fiennes in The End of the Affair. As love triangles go, this one is a little too abstract to work with such a weak female counterpoint (or, more truthfully, female-as-metaphor counterpoint); The triangle seems forgotten quite often - which is sometimes more of a blessing than at other times - but the constant white-washing and redefinition of Fraser and Caine's relationship has a much more vivid and interesting visage to it, tending towards periods of genuine old-timey intrigue. The political swirl of anti-Communist paranoia, greedy American intervention and journalistic neutrality is totally revitalized here. Sequences of war violence are terrifically human - something I remember Noyce demonstrating in the criminally underrated Clear and Present Danger.

Another traumatic grouping of stories of personal trauma that would ordinarily - almost certainly - feel like it were lost somewhere in the translation between Lifetime and IFC. Luckily, Rebecca Miller is quite good at giving the film a uniquely literary feel (though her prose ain't bad, the constant third person narration sounds more and more like that of a Noah Baumbach film and Personal Velocity elapses). She sculpts her actresses to perform halfway between slumming and being cast - beautifully - against type. An emotionally (and, to a degree, physically) unrecognizable Sedgewick - playing a part usually reserved for Jennifer Jason Leigh - easily gets the most mileage of the three, playing a woman who stops just short of icy, defying all sympathy we might have for her; Posey plays what amounts to a career hypocrite (a more mature spin on her usual shtick) - with daddy issues to boot (this segment also plays like Hal Hartley devoid of dark comedy); and Balk, the only one of the three who has already begun a career of debasing her image (see The Craft and American History X), realizes the duality of independence by pondering fate and the precious nature of life. (Sarcasm alert! That sentence reads like it fell out of a disease-of-the-week movie trailer.) Through excessively cathartic piano tinkling in a digital, typically indie frame, Miller has managed to  prove herself an incredibly skillful director. Unfortunately, once its over, it relies far too much on metonymy to make a ripple as a piece of cinema.

On a shelf just below the soapy ethical strong holdings of Legends of the Fall, gaze directed squarely - and enviously - at The English Patient, Kapur'ss film contains a barrage of terrific performances, a number of well staged desert action sequences, and enough filler and hokum to foolishly spoil it all. Ledger and Bentley, disappearing into period roles with a gusto and success I couldn't have begun to expect, are the crowning achievements of what director Kapur seems, quite honestly, to find depth in. The film's love triangle is so weak, and so unsupported by the relative fury and proportion of its wartime sketching, one almost wonders why a filmmaker would subject his audience to such a banal subplot in the face of such a towering, often exciting set of showdowns between the Brits and the Mardis (however broadly painted - I still don't understand a wit of the political machinations, but can vaguely coalesce through previous exposure to the oft hammered concept of English Colonialism as it appears in motion pictures). Hinsou is right on the money - playing his well treaded, fire eyed slave role, and Hudson doesn't embarrass herself. What makes the film - often too silly for words - bearable, is the sense that Kapur has grounded everything in Robert Richardson's cinematography. The film looks beautiful, framed as most epics are, with a sense that the DP is allowed to experiment heavily with transition and establishing shots, and can inflict a good dose of his style into the rest of the film. (Albeit, not enough to lift some of the more heavy-handed themes - the church confrontation between Ledger and Hudson has the workings of deliberate comedy). There is certainly enough to look at that we are, at the very least, lulled by the imagery, and given an opportunity to tune out the whining sound of these nutty British folk and their feelings.
 

There's nothing to watch. Our fearless documentation has clearly fashioned a compare and contrast piece, but it backfires, revealing not the young comedian's break into the business vs. the established comic's return to the stage, but revealing instead a funny man (Seinfeld) and another deeply self conscious - frankly - unfunny man. (Too often, it also feels like a vindication for Jerry, as if getting back into comedy required him to personally commission his feelings about closeting his ego for a short while. The executive producer credit doesn't help matters). Also, in the spirit of drawing attention towards the film as a documentary and not as a segue to Jerry's routine, we see very little actual stand-up, making the interesting but largely ignored inter workings of perfecting a routine seem like a build-up without a release. And what's worse, among Seinfeld's endless entourage of famous friends is Bill Cosby - whose routine so awes Jerry that he just has to tell Cosby that "...it's an honor to even know you". Yeah, too bad the rest of us aren't privy to the two and a half hour set Cosby was doing that everyone in the film can't stop talking about (most notably, Chris Rock). To watch these comedians revere, briefly, their idol is appropriate - and gives a certainly fleeting insight into the progression of the craft. Too bad there's nothing to watch for the rest of the seemingly endless ninety-six minute running time.

If you've never thought of dialogue as a crutch before (why do you think so many foreign films are so much more hypnotic than English films), perhaps you should take a look at how stuffy and purposefully minimal De Palma's use of it is in Femme Fatale. It's one of a rather bountiful variety of tricks in the director's most recent throwaway - and easily his best work to date (hyperbole alert!). To call the film trash is understating - and mis-stating - its relatively unique nature. De Palma has crafted the suspense tactic into an entire movie, a cinematic taffy: ever spinning, and growing thicker and thinner, alternately, on coherence. Occasionally using split screen to illustrate two viewpoints, occasionally substituting one of the viewpoints for an entirely unseen character, sometimes pulling the rug out from this chinese box only to do a changeover into a surprise twist that's carefully plotted to almost look like face value, until it isn't - and then it is. Confused? Very. Entertained? Moreso than nearly any film I've seen this year. Not only is there never a dull - or sexy - moment, there is never so much as a rest or a breather. The plot dimensions feel stupid, then smart, then stupid, then smart again (the dialogue feels like it betrays it - it doesn't, really, though). Romijn-Stamos and Banderas are terrific fun together, the former playing a double-crossing nymphet to the latter's double-crossed paparazzi photographer - each of them certainly in on the joke..

Tim Blake Nelson’s film dallies in a British-TV style world (It’s objective, too, retaining no particular character as a definitive focal point), announcing itself as a historical account with lengthy pre- and post- film titles of explanation, and consistently muting its historical description with cement-heavy thematic weight and Mamet-esque speech rhythms (leftover, no doubt, from Nelson’s play, on which the film is based). It’s the “story” of the Sonderkomando, Jews who helped the Nazis gas, process and dispose of their own people in exchange for a few months more to live, extra food and bed linens. Nelson seems somehow torn between exposing this corner of history to the light as an unprejudiced statement of what has happened and dissecting the savage self-hatred that went into these people’s daily lives (a dividing line between many is the idea of escape vs. suicide in the act of destroying the ovens; Many state that they don’t want to live with what they’ve done – a abysmal concept, to be sure). As a holocaust film, it’s a sobering, obsessively composed vision of unsparing paradox: What meaning is there in lives that have, for all intensive purposes, already ended? (He doesn’t make this as clear as he could, though – hinting through unsure oven workers that no group of Sonderkomando has lived past four months - and slowly the idea dawns on you that the Nazis have been up front with these men, and told they have no intention of letting them live). The film eventually culls a narrative that includes the duty-weary, equally self-loathing (not to mention constantly drunk) commandant Muhsfeldt (a fitting Keitel, who also executive produced), several tortured workers (including David Arquette whose performance seems to coast on the phrase “by comparison”, i.e. – it’s like nothing he’s done to date), a strong-willed doctor (the always-effective Allan Corduner) and several women who are sneaking gunpowder into the ovens, developing a plan to destroy the devices. There’s a nagging feeling that none of the characters seem to be grounded in any sort of humanity (this was, after all, an emotional event), and one can’t help wondering if Nelson’s intention is to serve the less effective, significantly darker and more abstract sense of the broad, hypothetical nature of his film. He's thinking, perhaps, that these characters inhabit a world  constructed of shocking credos and philosophies than the hell they’re truly inhabiting. He also never seems comfortable painting them as the antiheroic “traitors” they seem fashion themselves. He follows the heavy, crushing O with the heavier, crushed The Grey Zone. Inappropriate pun time: I'm just going to start calling him Tim Bleak Nelson.
 

A variation on The Talented Mr. Ripley for people who don't like their movies to resemble literature - in any way, shape or form. It's more like a heady A&E series, gurgling with a Katie Holmes performance where she tries not to act like a grown-up teenager. Rarely does the film decide - with any commitment - that exploring the psychology of its main character is more valuable than exploring the disappearing and reappearing Heath Ledger look-a-like (Charlie Hunnam). It is, however, quite obvious from the get-go that Stephen Gaghan is straining as hard as he can muster to transform this tale into something of worth. He is certainly due for the effort, but the final product is still convoluted to nary a purpose, (except perhaps to give Zooey Deschanell - Holmes' deadpan hornball of a roommate - yet another instance to prove why she's one of the best character actresses you almost recognize).

It's not that Wahlberg spoils the show, exactly - it's that Newton is so perfect,, that pretty much anyone they cast alongside ends up whiling in transparency. Robbins has some great oddball quips, brilliant in the purposefully forced (and hilariously awkward) delivery he employs as he plays shady is as shady does (briefly). As my wife said, "That takes some balls to remake Charade": A crudely put piece of honesty that almost completely overshadows Jonathan Demme's quasi-French New Wave homage. He can't seem to make the twists of Charade as palpable or as fun, only appearing to enjoy the chaos he creates rather than celebrating the actual unfolding or, more importantly, its effect on poor Regina (Newton). He's only having fun, though, and the Paris atmosphere is mighty easy to succomb to, even when the film appears to be breaking a sweat running in place on the plot treadmill. Had The Truth About Charlie's progression been a bit less airy (it doesn't feel like much is happening and it feels like it takes a long time for it to not happen), its mysteries a bit more engrossing (by the time all is revealed, there's no more weight or depth to it than our original suspicions suggested), and its male lead not Wahlberg but, instead, his reoccuring co-star (the oft-proclaimed risen Cary Grant) George Clooney - - - The Truth About Charlie might not sit on the losing side of my wife's bold proclamation regarding Demme's cajones.

[Wow! I reviewed Charade in May of 2000! How masterful of me!]

[On second thought, don't read that review. It's written by the less masterful me, nearly three years my junior.]
 

A real page-turner of a movie - full of unnecessarily high profile stars in small parts. Easily Ratner's only complete success behind the lens (I assume it was intimidation that steered him from pointing out to Keitel that his performance blows); Helps that Norton is so deft at carrying a movie in weighty company like Hopkins (he nails the early tottering of an un-hunted killer in a free world) and Fiennes (whose mere presence is so terrifying, his screen time never allows the viewer to look away from him). It's the story that eventually wins the day. Manhunter or no Manhunter (and this is no Manhunter), Thomas Harris's Red Dragon is a chilling procedural, not necessarily because we already fear Lecter but, rather, because of the long, bizarre stretches where we're just flat-out immersed in the dark, rancorous world of multiple homicide and tortured obsession. Though it doesn't swim in the entertainment-happy, operatic dimensions last year's Hannibal was content to, Red Dragon clunks like a studio picture tends to - whiling in the status quo on just abouut every level - and never comes anywhere close to the hushed, ceaselessly brilliant grey of Silence of the Lambs. But everyone was much more interested in making comparisons between Michael Mann's Manhunter and this film. To be sure - Ratner goes neither the stylistic or minimalistic route Mann chose, instead, he gives us the much less profound (and so much more profitable) slick-thriller-as-a-beach-paperback. And I'm just can't argue with it.

Innate goodness is a hard quality to ignore, but the film is so thoroughly shut before it opens, it's almost hard to let the simplicity be anything more than a bag on my hip as I sprint towards the end credits. I'd blame it on the annoying cuteness of these characters if they weren't so human and flawed. Maybe that's why I find it easy to believe that communicating with animals on our terms is a more stable candidate for the theme of the film than, say, children can talk to animals because all animals have the mind capacity of children. You can stop me whenever you think I've past the overanalyzed point of no return.

The writer whose story this film is based upon worked as a hooker in Times Square for twenty-five years. Her stories tend to deal with sexually bizarre themes, as in Steven Shainberg's Secretary, a film that keeps the themes of dominance and submission so proactively in the forefront of the film, its almost a surprise when you get a sense of where the whole thing is headed. This use of taboo lifestyles without subjectivity (or batting an eye) is obviously not a usual trend, and I was reminded quite often of Mike Figgis' Leaving Las Vegas, with its envelope-pushing insistance on being, first and foremost, a love story. Shainberg's world is so immodest, and his actors so succinct, (dare I say, driven) that even when he dives into visually playful and character breaking fantasies, they seem somehow less obtuse than the sobriety taking place on the main stage. Gyllenhal took most of the kudos (and, indeed, this year's Oscar snub, a seeming nod - along Emily Mortimer in Lovely & Amazing - by the Academy, beaming the message actresses who debase themselves would only be rewarded if they appeared in accepted, tasteful (elongated nose) sorts of films) and, indeed, Miss Maggie is absolutely stunning in the film, giving the sort of performance that recalls her many recent turns as a background prop, tinged with the same sort of credibility-proving accomplishment we're glad to see her wear (the same way we envision Adrien Brody never having to slave away in the bit parts he's collected over the last few years). Spader, too, echoes some of his best work, particularly that of the desperately honest Graham in sex, lies and videotape. There are some rough spots: Davies is terrific, but Shainberg doesn't seem to know what to do with him most of the time, and a subplot involving Gyllenhal's drunken father flirts with its participation in explaining her state but falls flat because of how early Shainberg forces us to accept the fact that the movie is in no way, shape or form about examining (or forgiving/apologizing for) her state. Most of all, though, Secretary, in all its twisted brilliance, tells a terrific love story, neck in neck with PT Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love (in more ways than one) for the best one I've seen this year (or last year - it's friggin' April, man).

"Over-heated TV movie with sumptous cinematography" oughta cover it. Hard not to get caught up in what's going on when the director is standing behind you, pushing your nose into it full-force, whispering little tidbits of garish historical generalization into your ear as the whole thing elapses. Perhaps it never occured to anyone that the journey of these three little girls, pursued in such a nazi-esque context, probably shouldn't be framed in the wise of an action-adventure movie. (Nevertheless, it does function above and beyond its parameters, to quite thrilling results, as long as you're willing to separate your emotion from your adrenaline which, as you can tell from the grade, I had no trouble doing.) Kept waiting for the Peter Gabriel score to grab hold of me the way it was advertised to - but it doesn't seem to kick in until the end credits standing as it does, just outside of the action for the duration of the film, as if reduced to background noise. Branagh is no better or worse than he needs to be, but the three female leads - you'll forgive a young man for plum misplacing their names - are astounding, never missing a beat or landing lame.

Besides being a staggering work of cinema verite - you're instantly lost in this remarkabbly real-feeling world - Bloody Sunday is one of the most prolific examples of the value of non-violent demonstration, and the savage habit man has of contradicting himself. I can see where people may find cause to criticize the film on the basis that it appears to be lopsided in favor of the Irish. In fact, it's a rather objective account of aggressor vs. repressed, staged in a go-for-broke re-creation that, when viewed against black and white photographs/eyewitness accounts from that day, is all the more admirable because there aren't scores of inconsistencies and rows of fingers being pointed in contradiction. Greengrass uses just the right dose of warts-and-all sloshing around with terrifically realized cross cutting between the Brits and the Irish marchers.

This movie's silly - and what's more, it's silly for bothering. Bean's idea seems courageous; Not so much because of what it entails - a self-hating Jew who also happens to be a neo-nazi/white supremacist/budding fascist at heart - but because it sounds like a right whopping challenge. "Really", I thought. "How is he going to pull that off?" In a word, he: "Doesn't". Instead, Bean seems to rely, (as Romper Stomper director Goeffrey Wright did) on his lead performers' scenery-scorching, evilly magnetic turn to guide everything from narrative thrust to (in this case) narrative existence. Ryan Gosling's sadistic nazi who turns into niceboy Jew when his sometimes girlfriend (a way out there Summer Phoenix) needs Torah lessons (to expand her "understanding of western texts") is mostly smoke and mirrors; he's a good actor drowning in a goofy, underbaked premise. That Bean can't seem to flesh out this main character - his prime (scatch that, only) concern - with any conclusive coherence, is hardly as much of a problem as his horribly confused worldview in which every character has as much trouble sticking to a single, viable belief as they do keeping a straight face amdist a clutter of indie-movie cliches. The home video effects-lookin' slow motion combined with the downright sloppy mise-en-scene (there's a bunch of em', but my favorite is the shot of Gosling listening to barely audible opera music on his headphones, a shot which is interrupted by a louder voice-over - that takes forever to lead into the next scene - of Gosling as a young boy arguing with the teacher in a Hebrew school; I thought: "Is he listening to an old tape of his argument with soothing opera music over it like some people mix Pachabel's "Canon" with ocean sounds?"). A number of people have said they liked this film better when it was called American History X. (That, believe it or not, sounds much like an insult to that film).