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WFIU Movie Reviews If the new G-rated, squeaky-clean, live action version of E.B. White's book Charlotte's Web were graded solely on its lack of offensive material, it would get an A . Unless you're offended by burp and fart jokes; and if so, and you have small children, good luck with that. The story concerns a spring pig, named Wilbur (voice by Dominic Scott Kay), who is the runt of the litter. He is saved from the frying pan by Fern Arable (cute Dakota Fanning), who admonishes her father for wanting to kill something just because it's small. If she were small at birth, would he have killed her? When we had the story read to us as kids, we probably thought Fern's logic was iron-clad then, too. Part of the story's magic is how strange and desperately unfair the adult world seemed, while a farm filled with talking animals was just as it should be. Unfortunately, this New Englandy film farm has had the life-and-death sanitized right out of it. It's always sun-kissed, and the backlit Arables look like their clothes just arrived from Eddie Bauer. Even the mud looks clean. The animals are always framed in medium shots or close-ups of no interest, and the wall-to-wall music works overtime to keep things generic. You keep expecting the logo of a prescription antihistamine to dominate the screen. Things perk up a bit when Charlotte the spider arrives, and hatches a plan to save Wilbur by spinning superlatives in her web. Apart from the fact that her two largest eyes look kind, Charlotte, rendered by computer graphics, looks like a spider. Exactly like a big -- fat -- hairy -- spider. The horse faints, and when Charlotte gets a close-up, I saw his point. The edginess is welcome, but it doesn't build to anything. Julia Roberts does the voice, much too sweet, as if making up for Charlotte's ghastly looks, when in fact she should have played up the prickly intelligence. For a spider, she's bloodless. The 1973 cel-animated version of this story was cheaply done, but a couple of the songs were catchy, and there was a great turn by Paul Lynde as Templeton the Rat. This time, Templeton is voiced by Steve Buscemi, which is solid gold casting. But what's he supposed to do with a screenplay that has him say "I guess the yolk's on me"? Maybe the kids haven't heard that one, but can you imagine the Muppet Show without the irony? In fact, all the celebrities lending their voices - from John Cleese to Reba McIntyre - are perfectly cast, but they have nothing to work with. So will kids like the movie? I suspect they'll watch it, then move on to the next thing. We didn't need Animal Farm, but look what a dash of darkness did for Babe, which casts a shadow over this film at all times. What's missing here is the personality. This and other theater and music reviews can be read, listened to, or podcast by visiting wfiu.org. Reviewing movies for WFIU, this is Peter Noble-Kuchera. There is more than a superficial resemblance between Helen Mirren's performance in The Queen and Meryl Streep's performance in The Devil Wears Prada. Both actresses play imperious women in difficult jobs whose glare can strip the paint off a wall. But though Streep is almost certain to win a supporting Oscar for her role, Mirren - who will probably be the sixth actress directed by Stephen Frears to be nominated and lose -- is, in her subtlety and generosity, even more of a delight to watch. The Queen takes place in week following the death of Princess Diana. To Queen Elizabeth II, this is a private affair, not a matter of state. As she sees it, Diana, divorced from Charles and the royal family, is no longer a political figure, and therefore unworthy of even a public statement - certainly not a gaudy public funeral. If there is an element of private rancor in her position -- after all, during her life, Diana created nothing but problems for the Establishment - the Queen would never admit it. When the headlines report a public outcry, the Queen is in denial: "The British people will come to their senses, and return to quiet, dignified mourning," she says. Fat chance. Prime Minister Tony Blair, elected by a landslide, has the correct temperature of the country. Michael Sheen expertly plays the tricky role of a man new to his job and trying to find his footing, star struck by the Queen, and going half mad trying to explain to her that Royals who are that badly out of touch with the people are usually beheaded. It's not that Queen Elizabeth has been living on her 40,000 acres as a $40 million-a-year parasite, though some would see it that way. It's that her values were forged by World War II, and she took an oath before God to do her duty until death. It's no surprise that she finds the celebrity culture that attended Diana, culminating in the spectacle of Elton John singing her Marilyn Monroe's song, to be mystifying and shameful. She fails to see that Diana was more than a reckless person; she was, and is, a symbol. In addition to being a political procedural and a comedy of manners, The Queen is a nuanced character study. Whether it was Mirren's, director Stephen Frears's, or writer Peter Morgan's idea to play Queen Elizabeth II as a sass is anyone's guess; but it's Mirren's sex appeal that makes it possible. It's hard to believe that in the same year, the same woman also played the hatchet-like Jane Tennison in TV's Prime Suspect VII. It takes a while to warm up to her, but the closer we get to Queen Elizabeth, the more we like her; public dignity is in short supply these days. By the end, when we get our answer to the question, "Will she change?", another question still lingers: "Should she?" This and other theater and music reviews can be read, listened to, or podcast by visiting wfiu.org. Reviewing movies for WFIU, this is Peter Noble-Kuchera. In film, no debacle is complete without brilliant sequences, and Mel Gibson's Apocalypto is a complete debacle, all right. To find a movie with this combination of overblown, muscular, and dopey, you have to go back to Rapa Nui in 1994. But we need to be careful when we try to pinpoint exactly why it's so terrible. Critics have lambasted Apocalypto for its over-the-top violence, which is not so much disingenuous of them as it is unexamined. They didn't complain about Saw III, because that's a genre film, and it therefore gets a pass. But many of these same critics also didn't complain about Saving Private Ryan, one of the most violent movies ever made, because that film had a God-and-country overlay that they bought into big time. By contrast, Apocalypto's political agenda is so half-baked it's not wroth talking about. The real problem with Apocalypto isn't that it's excessively violent - though it certainly is that. It's that the violence is so effective, and nearly everything else is such a failure, the violence stands out in sharp relief. The early scenes are especially terrible. As we witness the pastoral lives of young Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood) and his peaceful Yucatec-speaking clan, the unpolished, non-professional cast is allowed to embarrass itself. As evidenced by similar scenes in Braveheart and The Passion of the Christ, Gibson has no feel for light-hearted fare. Yet he is a horror director born. He creates a long sequence of human sacrifice that is mercilessly harrowing. It's upsetting in the way that seeing cattle slaughtered, or learning about the Nazi death camps, is upsetting: it's the cold efficiency of blood on the gears. But scenes like this are not offset by characters we care about; so the violence become overheated nonsense, culminating in a climax so godawful over-the-top, it's more unintentionally hilarious than any scene in years. Gibson has said that his inspiration for the movie was that he's never seen a good foot chase on film - and brother, is there ever a lot of running around, and yes, a lot of it works. There is a chase involving a jaguar that looks absolutely real. The actors are muscled and physical, effective when they don't speak, tattooed and accessorized brilliantly as in Gibson's The Road Warrior. But the characters don't have much depth apart from their action; they are mythological archetypes, not human beings. A curious thing happens as you watch Jaguar Paw use the forest to fight his pursuers: a poison frog, a wasps' nest, mud to camouflage himself, jumping over a waterfall. You start to feel the clock turning back, until you're watching a cartoon action movie from the '80s - Lethal Weapon or First Blood, maybe. Gibson went all the way to Mexico, and spent his own money to shoot in a rainforest with a script he wrote himself. But everywhere he looked, all he could see were other movies. That's kind of sad. This and other movie, theater, and music reviews can be read, listened to, or podcast at wfiu.indiana.edu. Reviewing movies for WFIU, this is Peter Noble-Kuchera. I wish I could just say six words - there's a new George Miller movie - and you would grab your coat, jump in the car, and run every red light between you and the theater. In the interest of public safety, instead I offer this movie review. Because they are expensive, and because they are so dependent on technology, the tools of computer graphics animation almost always end up in the hands of marketers and techies. Even including the occasional bright spots, isn't it amazing that, in the eleven years since Toy Story, no one has thought to use CG to capture the beauty of the natural world? Happy Feet begins in the stars, enraptured by the Horsehead Nebula, adrift in an ethereal rendition of the Beatles song "Golden Slumbers". The film's title emerges from the sun, the prime source of life on earth, and perhaps a deeper metaphor. And as we drop towards the tiny marble of Earth, and skim across the Antarctic ice, the melody merges into an R&B medley of staggering imagination and complexity. The emperor penguins are singing. Each has a single tune that best expresses who he is inside. We follow a female as she searches for a mate. She will fall in love with the penguin whose song meshes with her own. Here, one offers '70s Stevie Wonder, here The Beach Boys; there Prince and Pink. Again and again she turns away. I won't give you the name of the song that wins her heart. These opening minutes are more beautiful than anything we've ever seen in computer animation. And there's more: great craggy slices of azure ice shelf; a bone-stripping wind in the dark driving the penguins deeper into a huddled mass; an underwater ballet of rocketing penguins, trailing bubbles, like contrails behind the Blue Angels. I just can't do it justice. It must be said that Happy Feet is a compromised movie, with a treacly story about a young penguin finding himself, voiced by a cloying Elijah Wood. That's not surprising, considering the commercial cold shoulder given to Miller's magical Babe: Pig in the City eight years ago. Parents thought the movie's darkness was doing something bad to their kids, when in fact it was treating them to the beauty they desire and deserve. It has taken Miller this long to get another movie made - or maybe to want to - and he knows enough, or is on a leash short enough, not to enrage those parents again and commit financial suicide. But Miller's passion is everywhere. His purpose -- the film's ecological theme -- is to dramatize the violence done to the earth by sheer human destructiveness. When the little penguin finally confronts the evil doers, it recalls the moment Babe stared right into the eyes of a lethal pit bull, and through compassion tried to get through to him. This movie shares the same stout heart, and is trying just as desperately to communicate. This and other theater, music, and movie reviews can be read, listened
to, or podcast at wfiu.indiana.edu. Reviewing movies for WFIU, this
is Peter Noble-Kuchera. The film Joyeux Noël recounts a situation, amidst the slaughter of trench warfare in World War I, that probably didn't occur exactly as depicted, but that apparently did, in fact, happen. On Christmas Eve in 1914, there were pockets of detente between Scottish, French, and German soldiers. In the film, we see them laying down arms to share whiskey and song in the blasted no-mans land between the lines. But before this moment of peace can occur, there must be battle. We meet soldiers from all three sides, who speak in their native tongues (the French and German are subtitled). Though this at first seems a conceit, it turns out to be the whole point. Sprink, played by sad faced Benno Furmann, is a great German tenor, now a soldier, his gift unremarked amidst the shivering bodies of freezing, terrified Germans. Among the Scotts are two brothers who, according to war movie tropes, will be tested by death and vengeance. On the French side is Lieutenant Audebert (Guillaume Canet), an intelligent man struggling for bravery. The fighting is staged without any of the virtuosic vigor of Saving Private Ryan - but who among us isn't tired of seeing war served up as entertainment? Events are set in motion by Anna Sorensen (Diane Kruger), a Danish opera singer who is also Sprink's wife. The Crown Prince is a fan of the couple's work; Anna manages to get his signature on a one-night pass, for her and Sprink, to perform a private concert. Afterwards, Sprink insists on returning to the front lines to sing for the men; Anna insists on accompanying him. The Scotts, the French, and the Germans share a similar heritage and the same name for God. When the Germans line the top of their trench with Christmas trees, Sprink sings "Silent Night," and steps into the surreal no-man's-land. The Scots accompany him on bagpipe. Eventually, gingerly, men from all three armies share a mass given by a Scottish stretcher bearer who is also a parish priest. His sermon about brotherly love is contrasted with a didactic scene in which a different priest uses the Bible to justify the war. Joyeux Noël is more sentimental than A Midnight Clear, a film that covers similar ground. But that's not a bad thing. Noël was nominated for the Best Foreign Film Oscar in 2005; audiences seem to need it. We all know what usually happens to the lamb when the lion lies down with him. But it's no accident that the writer/director, Christian Carion, has an artist be the first one to enter no-man's-land. If the singer/soldier, no braver than the rest, had simply walked across the line, he would have been shot. But the first thing to cross was not his foot, but his voice. A film like this is the song. Joyeux Noël is playing at the Buskirk-Chumley theater Saturday, November 25th, at 8:15 pm. This and other theater, music, and movie reviews can be read, listened to, or podcast at wfiu.indiana.edu. Reviewing movies for WFIU, this is Peter Noble-Kuchera. Kazakh journalist Borat Sagdiyev, on a trip across America to document our culture for his homeland, has talked his way into singing our National Anthem at a rodeo in Virginia. He enters the ring wearing his thick moustache, a dim-witted grin, and an American flag for a shirt. "Kazakhstan supports America's war of terror," he announces over the loudspeakers -- in heavily Eastern European-accented English -- to cheers. "May the U.S. and A. kill every one of the terrorists." Even louder cheers. "May George W. Bush drink the blood of every man, woman, and child in Iraq." The cheering is only a little uncertain. Borat is a good-natured racist, misogynist, and every other kind of -ist. He is also a fictional character, the creation of British comic Sacha Baron Cohen, star of Da Ali G. Show. The racist, misogynistic Americans he exposes are absolutely real. This is one of the levels of Baron Cohen's brilliant film, Borat!: the character puts others at ease by his ignorant beliefs, and by manipulating their condescension, so they will show their hand. "In my country, we throw homosexuals in prison and then hang them," Borat tells the rodeo's manager. "That's what we're trying to get done here," the man replies. An RV full of drunken frat boys lets all their vicious hatred of women hang out. A gun dealer cold-bloodedly suggests to Borat the best weapon for killing Jews. And a Southern dining society can keep decorum when Borat brings a bag of his own feces to the dinner table - but not when the stripper he's ordered turns out to be black. I don't mean to suggest that this is a movie with a deep socio-political agenda. The bulk of Borat! is in the tradition of recent assault comedies like the South Park movie, Team America: World Police, The Aristocrats, and Jackass. Some viewers will feel tickled unmercifully; others will recoil as if from electric shock. Don't know which you are? Do you think you would laugh if you saw an obese man's naked, hairy buttocks wrapped around Borat's face? If you're even a little unsure of your answer, you'd better see something else. Among the angry is the government of Kazahkstan, none too happy about its country's portrayal as a land of squalor, racism, and prostitution. The Anti-Defamation League has warned that some people might not understand that the Borat character's racism is a joke. A similar argument is often levied against horror movies, and is just as spurious. It also might be worth noting that Baron Cohen is a strictly observant Jew. The dizzying joy of Borat! is to watch as a fictional character, with no cultural sensitivity whatsoever, spills his blinkered opinions, with perfect comic timing, in the very presence of those most likely to be offended. In our politically-correct age, some of us, in a dark theater, are grateful for his nerve. This and other music, theater, and movie reviews can be read, listened to, or podcast at wfiu.indiana.edu. Reviewing movies for WFIU, this is Peter Noble-Kuchera. Every great romantic comedy needs a great obstacle to keep the lovers apart. In a brilliant innovation, the new film Going to Pieces has not one, but two. Better bring a box of Kleenex. Maddy, played by Angelina Jolie, is a rank-and-file investment banker for a swanky Manhattan firm. City stress and loneliness keep her on what she calls her "cycle": every three years, she has a complete nervous breakdown. When we meet her, the voices in her head have told her to barricade herself in her West Village studio. Wearing three-week-old sweats, watching a VHS of The Invisible Man over and over, under the delusion that if she consumes only clear liquid she, too, will become invisible, she compulsively prowls internet dating sites like her life depends on finding a mate. Maybe it does. We next meet Stu, another tricky role essayed by the always-nimble Brad Pitt. Stu does not have a profile on eHarmony. He doesn't own a computer. After a tragic accident with a band saw, he doesn't even have fingers. What he does have is a terrible acne flair up and low self-esteem. He has just gotten out of prison after serving six years of a ten year sentence for holding up a liquor store; his sentence was reduced when it was pointed out that he couldn't possibly have pulled the trigger. As everyone knows, the two most attractive people in a movie, regardless of the fact that Pitt's face is swathed in cotton bandages, are the perfect match. But if Maddy believes that all men are aliens from another dimension, and Stu spends all his time casing liquor stores in a black coat and sunglasses, how can these loony, leprous lovers even meet, let alone fall in love? The answer comes in the form of Maddy's wisecracking friend Rhoda, played by Rosie O'Donnel. When she glimpses Stu's uniform under his black coat, Rhoda hits on a plan. She calls Pink Dot, and orders a fifth of voldka for Maddy's apartment, asking for the bandaged delivery boy who looks like Claude Rains in The Invisible Man. When Maddy sees Stu through the peephole, we hold our breath. Will she open the door? Going to Pieces was co-created by husband-and-wife team Nora Ephron and Oliver Stone. Fresh off their success as children's' book authors, the pair searched for inspiration in sick joke books before being gobsmacked by what will surely be a $200 million plot. And in a unique double-blind experiment, Ephron wrote and directed all the female scenes while Stone, without consulting her, did all the male scenes. Like Maddy and Stu, WFIU is also greater than the sum of its parts; but an important part of our success is you. We rely on the support of our listeners to continue to provide the theater and movie reviews and interviews, and all the other quality shows, you know and love. If you will do your part, we promise you won't have to listen to another gag review like this one until next year. Reviewing fake movies for WFIU, this is Peter Noble-Kuchera. No documentary is unbiased, and neither is any movie review. The film Jesus Camp isn't just critical of the movement it portrays, but is outraged and alarmed by it. Yes, the film stacks the deck. But when up against Goliath, David needs all the help he can get. Jesus Camp takes you inside the churches, homes, and especially a certain summer camp, of Pentecostals, to see how they're raising their kids. Regardless of what you think of home schooling for religious reasons, and the ultra-conservative view of the world that's being inculcated, what's disturbing here is the force. One of the parents says, "God gave me this daughter to train." Not "raise," not "nurture" -- "train". Becky Fischer, a youth pastor who is center stage in much of the film, says, "I don't think children are capable of making choices." When she asks a group of kids whether God is all-powerful, a mother takes hold of her child's arm and raises it for him. The bulk of the film takes place at Becky's Kids on Fire summer camp in Devil's Lake, North Dakota. Compassion, gentleness, and tolerance have no place here; the imagery is violent. As they pour syrup on their pancakes, kids are told to pray for Jesus' blood to be poured on a godless nation. They are presented with a hammer, and are told to shatter our evil government that took Jesus out of the schools. They are told that the Devil is after the young. Becky says, "If Harry Potter had lived during the Old Testament, he would have been put to death." Becky would have thrown the first stone. "I want these kids radicalized," Becky says, comparing her camp to a militant Islamic training ground. "I want them to make war." She's working on a PowerPoint presentation. On the screen are two words: "Sin" and "Death". Not scary enough. She changes the font. Now, the letters have blood dripping down them. No wonder so many of these kids have tears literally pouring down their faces as they speak in tongues. If this group just wanted to opt out of society, that would be their right. But as portrayed in the film, they want their world to become the entire world, starting with reversing America's 200-year-Constitutional-separation of church and state. "Democracy is destroying this country because it gives too many people freedom," Becky says. In its zeal to indict, Jesus Camp fails to make the case that the Kids on Fire camp represents the views of most Evangelical Protestants. According to a 2005 Newsweek poll, more than half of Evangelicals said that those who don't subscribe to their religious beliefs can still get into heaven. That leaves a lot more middle ground than the film credits them for. American public life swings between liberal and conservative like a pendulum, with a tendency to find the center. Let's hope so. Post-scriptum: Pastor Ted Haggard, pastor of the 14,000 member Evangelical New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colorado, is seen in the film decrying homosexuality. He was fired shortly after the film's release amidst allegations of sex with a male escort, and methamphetamine abuse. This and other theater and music reviews can be read, listened to, or podcast by going to wfiu.indiana.edu. Reviewing movies for WFIU, this is Peter Noble-Kuchera. First time directors often make horror films as a relatively cheap calling card. If you supply genre fans with the gore they desire, and if you get lucky, you can even make your money back. What's very rare is an independent horror movie that delivers the goods and has an original idea. Travis Betz, an Indiana University alum, spent two years making such a film, called Joshua. It revolves around a secret so repellant and demented, the well-adjusted need not apply. I mean this as high praise. For those of us who love the genre, Joshua is a true-blue horror film, superior to most others with ten times the budget. In a nod to the opening sequence of Blue Velvet, Betz's camera floats through an idyllic suburban neighborhood in the Indiana town of Brisbee. Old folks are out for a stroll together, kids are playing in the lawn. But the music takes a turn into a minor key, and the camera, now hand-held, stalks through a darkened woods, enters a house, and comes to rest on the floor of a bare room. A good-looking young man and his drunken pick-up are arriving home. Suddenly, the girl is on the floor in front of us, and we are witnessing an ice-cold murder. Cut to the protagonist, Kelby, played by Ward Roberts. He escaped Brisbee years ago. He now learns that his father, a convicted pedophile, murderer of his infant sister, has died of a heart attack in prison. Kelby and his pretty fiancée, Amelia, Christy Jackson, must return to Brisbee to make the funeral arrangements. These early scenes struggle to cohere. As Kelby confronts his remaining family, including two childhood friends who hold a dark secret - one of whom is the killer from the opening sequence -- the super-16mm cinematography, and the music, by Jeff Grace, are quite good. The acting, and the dialog scenes, don't feel natural - at least not yet. But why see a first film, if you're unwilling to make allowances? And if you hang in there, soon enough you won't have to. Joshua's black humor first surfaces at the funeral parlor. Kelby meets Uncle Bob, a traveling knife salesman who has brought his work along with him. Uncle Bob expresses his feelings for his brother by plunging one of his samples into the chest of the corpse. "See?" he says, "Told you they were sharp." As we edge closer to the secret from the past, the more go-for-broke the acting becomes, the more gothic is the sensibility, and the better and better the film works. When we at last learn what the boys did - and it's truly, deeply sick - Joshua's rattling fragments come together with an almost audible "snap". The film has gone (as its characters say) to "the next level". The filmmakers, in their unrepentant way, have done Indiana proud. Joshua is playing in Bloomington this weekend as part of
the Ryder film series. On Friday, October 20th, the director and
cast will be on hand for a Q&A. This and other theater and music
reviews are available online at wfiu.indiana.edu. Reviewing movies
for WFIU, this is Peter Noble-Kuchera. Critic Pauline Kael said of Martin Scorcese's Goodfellas that it was "about guys getting high on being a guy." That's also true of Scorcese's new film, The Departed, which moves from his films of Italian machismo to Irish, David Mamet-like, blunt and profane verbal collisions. If I were Irish, I don't know whether I'd be offended or proud. While The Departed doesn't quite match the energy of the earlier film - and what could? - it's laced with disarming humor, especially in the first act, before the stakes go up. The film is about a cop, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, who is deep undercover in the Boston mob - so deep that only two controllers know who he is. He is paralleled with a mobster, played by Matt Damon, who is a mole in the State Police. One tries to take down, while the other tries to protect, a crime boss played by Jack Nicholson. This is the basic setup of the Hong Kong original, Infernal Affairs - a movie with the black-and-white sensibility of a graphic novel. Scorcese preserves many of the fiendishly complex double binds from the first film; but he adds the shades of gray, and roots his film in ethnicity and place. William Moynahan's verbal script combines the cop and the mobster's girlfriends into a single woman - the only woman in the film - a police shrink who must now choose between the two men. This is preposterous, but why not? She says at one point, "Sigmund Freud wrote that the Irish are the only people in the world impervious to psychoanalysis." The poor girl can't see into either man, though they certainly have her number. The chief joy of The Departed is its casting, which doesn't just load the marquee with big names, it matches actor to role like hand to glove. DiCaprio has replaced DeNiro as Scocese's lead of choice, and he has a method naturalism. Matt Damon, perfect for a liar, has John Cusak's gift for sounding like the smartest guy in the room. As in The Talented Mr. Ripley and the Bourne films, he's charming, but with something coiled and shifting behind the eyes. There are also four plum tough guy roles, filled by Ray Wintone, Maritn Sheen, Mark Wahlberg, and Alec Baldwin. Baldwin has been given the best lines - and he knows it - including a speech about marriage that will go down as a classic. He works harder now that he's pudgy and can't rely on looks alone. While giving the characters room to breathe is highly pleasurable, this "B" material can't quite support an "A" treatment. But what marvelous moments it contains. As Woody Allen did earlier this year with Match Point, Scorcese proves he can do more than work in a young man's genre: he can do the kids one better. The Departed is playing at Showplace West. Also of note:
this Wednesday evening, The Game of Their Lives will be screened
at Wittenberger Auditorium, followed by a Q&A with its writer/producer,
Bloomington screenwriter Angelo Pizzo. Reviewing movies for WFIU,
this is Peter Noble-Kuchera. Seeing the movie Jackass depressed me. I considered it close to the nadir of the cinema, a geek show of stupidity and self-hatred. Yet last weekend, I willingly saw the sequel, Jackass Number Two. I haven't revised my opinion so much as refined it. Describing what appears on-screen tests the limits of euphemism, but I'll try. The film is an extension of reality TV shows like Fear Factor. Nine guys create and perform a series of video vignettes, from a few seconds to a few minutes each. These fall into three categories. The first is exhibitionism. Sadly, the bodies of old people, dwarfs, and the obese are somehow equated with segments displaying human and animal excretions and secretions - many of these consumed by the cast. Director John Waters makes a cameo, even as his own Pink Flamingos is surpassed. The second category is sadistic practical jokes. One of the guys, terrified of snakes, is locked in a cattle car with a king cobra. He weeps in panic. Another dresses as an Arab terrorist, complete with fake dynamite strapped around his chest. He is made to believe that a cab driver is aiming a real loaded gun at him, and is probably going to kill him. Ha, ha, ha. The third class of vignette is high-concept stunts, from the simply self-abusive to the staggeringly dangerous. Nether regions are kneed, kicked, shocked with stun guns, frozen to blocks of ice, and allowed to be bitten by a snake. Why don't these boys just sleep with each other and have done with it? I now realize that this stuff is as heavily stage managed as pro wresting, and sometimes, that freed me up to laugh, sometimes hard. When the guys writhe in pain, they are milking it for the camera. They are young and athletic, coached by stunt coordinators how to take a fall; and the danger has been carefully calculated and minimized. Even so, mark my words, if this series goes on, somebody's going to get seriously hurt. Consider Mark Zupan, subject of the documentary about quadriplegic rugby players, Murderball. In Jackass Number Two, they strap rockets to his wheelchair and fire him across a lake. Zupan originally broke his back when he got drunk and fell into a river. Is it a proud moment to prove that he can be just as stupid as the was able-bodied? This begs the question: who's dumb, them or us? One genius allows himself to be branded on the buttocks. Not tattooed; branded, like a cow. This goes wrong, leaving him with multiple scars, which he then displays for his mother. "You had the greatest butt, and now you've ruined it!" she exclaims in horror. True, but now he's a celebrity. In one shot you can just see, in the background, the car he drives. It's a Lamborghini. Jackass Number Two is playing at Showplace East. That it's only rated "R" is another sick joke. This and other theater and movie reviews can be read, listened to, or podcast at wfiu.indiana.edu. Reviewing movies for WFIU, this is Peter Noble-Kuchera. The current remake of All The King's Men is, like the 1949 original, based on the novel by Robert Penn Warren, itself based on the life of Louisiana Governor Huey P. Long. Fictional Governor Willie Stark, played by Sean Penn, stomps around the screen, a compact populist thug with his fist in the air. If you've seen one movie about a great man toppled by his excesses - or if you lived in America during the Clinton years - you've seen them all. The filmmakers know this, and have shifted the focus. You barely even glimpse Willie's wife and many mistresses. The point of view is instead situated with a man named Jack Burden, whose name implies his listlessness. Burden is a newspaper man chronicling Willie's rise who quits to work for him full time. He is a black sheep from a rich family, whose mother looms large in his psyche. Jude Law, whose lack of charisma usually hamstrings him, has no problem with pretty, cynical, and privileged. Like many men with a weak sense of self, Burden is attracted to men with an excess of it. "You stay with me because you're the way you are, and I'm the way I am," Willie tells him. "That's just an arrangement founded in the natural order of things." The great man himself, Willie Stark, begins public life as a county treasurer too honest to take a bribe. When the graft he resisted gets three children killed, and is exposed, Willie is approached by the Louisiana political machine. His first political act is to keep his face blank when they say he could be Governor. But Willie is supposed to split the vote and lose. When he figures this out, he channels his rage into stentorian speeches declaiming the oil companies and the old guard. They are bleeding the "hicks," as he calls his ever-larger crowds, meaning him, too. He's gonna "nail 'em up". You can almost hear the knives sharpening in the dark. There's a wonderful duel between Willie and a retired-but-influential judge who wants him impeached, played by Anthony Hopkins - a battle of egos and moral philosophies that should have been the meat of the film. Instead, too much time is spent on a subplot concerning Jack Burden and the Judge's two grown children. Jude Law is too asexual to connect with Kate Winslett, and Mark Ruffalo is just stranded. The writer/director, Steve Zaillian, is a screenwriter first; he must have become enraptured of the novel's layers, and couldn't resist adding another wrinkle. Most American critics disliked the film, finding it too broad and vague; I think it's stately. Maybe Willie's just not a bad enough for them. If the worst that can be said about him is that he was a bully and a letch, then he was great while he lasted. Hell, I'd have voted for him. All The King's Men is playing at Showplace West. This and other theater and music reviews can be read, listened to, or podcast by going to wfiu.indiana.edu. Reviewing movies for WFIU, this is Peter Noble-Kuchera. What makes many people recoil from Brian DePalma's movies is his pornographic gaze. That's what's prized by the camp that defends him; we love his movies in part because they are alive with arousal. His new one, The Black Dahlia, is based on James Ellroy's unusually fevered novel. DePalma observes that fever, but somewhat surprisingly stands apart form it. The result is a movie that might repel both camps. The critical community has certainly turned its back, and I doubt the film can find a home in the American marketplace. Yet it is just shy of a masterpiece. DePalma has forgotten more about film technique than most directors will ever learn. His fingerprints are all over this one: doubling of characters, split diopters, a point-of-view steadicam shot, you name it. But these are no longer youthful statements in and of themselves; here, they are strictly at the service of the source material. That's not a symptom of retrenchment, but of maturity. DePalma has wrapped his teeth around the novel and won't let go, even when he almost chokes on it. The sheer force of his hunger carried me over nearly insurmountable passages of momentum-killing plot convolutions. One characteristically bravura shot begins at a crime scene. It cranes up to the roof of a building, where we see a pair of foreboding crows, and focuses on a second crime scene in the distance. While camera virtuosity for its own sake is what made American audiences embrace the lustrous The Untouchables, here, that shot is motivated by story, weaving together two seemingly unconnected threads. I was reminded of a crane shot in DePalma's Casualties of War, where Michael J. Fox gives an impassioned speech. The music swells, and audiences laugh. Writing off moments like that as camp is an understandable defense against earnest melodrama. I have seen The Black Dahlia twice, and both times it elicited this kind of laughter from the audience. Were we watching a brilliant film, or a ludicrous one? The line between the two can be very fine. I should say some things about the plot. The film takes place in LA after WWII, presented seamlessly by Dante Ferretti's production design and Vilmos Zsigmond's camera work. Two former boxers become policemen, then become partners. They are Bucky and Lee, nick-named Mr. Ice and Mr. Fire, played by Josh Hartnett and Aaron Eckhart. They both love the same woman, Kay Lake, Scarlett Johansson. Lee lives with her, but he's too strung out to sleep with her; Bucky's love for Lee, and maybe some other kind of blockage, also hold him back from sex. As Bucky says, she is "always in the middle, never between them." Then a body is discovered, a nude woman, cut in half, internal organs removed, mouth slit ear to ear. She is The Black Dahlia, a Massachusetts girl who fell into prostitution and stag films. She is the lid on a can of worms. Following Lee's trajectory, and a femme fatale played by Hilary Swank, who is supposed to look like the Dahlia, Bucky tunnels down, down, through layer after layer of interlocking, buried crimes, until the sickness begins to infect him. Underneath the façade of Josh Hartnett's nice, good-looking kid is a mounting, deadly anger. If you are intrigued by The Black Dahlia, I hope at the very least I've given you a sense that it's black-on-black. Maybe it's genius; maybe it's madness. You know where I stand. The Black Dahlia is playing at Showplace East. This and other theater and music reviews can be read, listened to, or podcast at wfiu.indiana.edu. Reviewing movies for WFIU, this is Peter Noble-Kuchera. In a gauzy flashback, a peasant boy, an amateur magician, carves a locket for the high-born girl he loves. It's a tiny wooden oval, cut in half diagonally; the halves can be rotated to form a heart. Then the heart can slide open, revealing, inside, a photograph of the boy. The boy and the girl are parted by circumstance, but she will secretly wear the locket into adulthood. The problem with the locket is that it's impossible. The illusion is accomplished with an edit. In fact, all of the magic tricks in the film The Illusionist are impossible - unless high-powered lasers, holograms, and anti-gravity devices were available in the early 1900's. The greater illusion, that we are watching a lush period piece, is also strained. The costumes and art direction are definitely on a budget -- $17 million, to be more precise. But consider: that's less than is spent marketing many movies. I watched with a lot of good will. The poor boy travels the world, developing his craft. He returns to Vienna as the masterful Eisenheim the Illusionist, played by Edward Norton. Norton is neat and economical in the role; instead of stealing scenes, as he has done so many times in the past, he yields the screen to others. The rich girl fills out to become Dutchess Sophie von Teschen, played by Jessica Biel, who is more ample than able. When the film calls for her to render an emotion other than "pretty," another edit comes in handy to place a fake tear upon her cheek, which blushes not with youth and afterglow, but with rouge. Rekindling their romance is a dangerous thing for Eisenheim and Sophie. She is all but promised to the Machievellian Crown Prince Leopold, Rufus Sewell, who is rumored to beat his girlfriends; perhaps he even threw one off a balcony to her death. An entire hallway of his castle is festooned with dozens and dozens of heads, from the wild game he's shot (a friend of mine said, "When you're decorating, just because you can do a thing, doesn't mean you should.") Sophie knows that Leopold has plans to overthrow his father, the Emperor; and Leopold is aware than Eisenheim and Sophie took a suspicious carriage ride together. If Eisenheim is going to effect Sophie's disappearance, and his own, it has to be now - and it must be under the watchful eye of Leopold's Chief Inspector Uhl, played by Paul Giamatti. Uhl has been promised the mayorship of Vienna when the Crown Prince ascends to the throne. A trial of wits between him and Eisenheim ensues. But we suspect, from Giamatti's puppy dog eyes, that he is a good man who would like Eisenheim to get away with it. Maybe an actor with a better poker face, or at least some darker shading, would have added some urgency and mystery. On the one hand, magic tricks performed with computer graphics are sorely lacking in magic. But consider: what is CG but a conjurer's art, and what are movies, if not illusions? Sometimes a willing suspension of disbelief can be deliberately willed. See if you can forgive the visible seams in costume and art direction, and the uninspired imagery of cinematographer Dick Pope. Forgive the American cast for their bad accents. Forgive that only a half dozen of writer/director Neil Burger's scenes really work. Forgive all this, because you can tell everyone was trying his best. If you're willing to squint a little, it comes off. The Illusionist is playing at Showplace West. This and other theater and music reviews can be read, listened to, or podcast, by visiting wtiu.indiana.edu. Reviewing movies for WFIU, this is Peter Noble-Kuchera. Some movies are classics to us personally because the effect they had on us at the time lingers year later. The 1973 film The Wicker Man is, for many, a classic by this definition. The majority of the film is goofy; it's like we are traipsing along a path in the woods, merrily collecting flowers -- until we step right in a bear trap. The Wicker Man is now a remake starring Nicolas Cage. It has been carefully re-scripted and re-directed, by Neil Labute, of The Company of Men and The Shape of Things: he knows from horrific endings, and how men and women can sometimes victimize each other, and those must have been why the project appealed to him. But competence wasn't what was needed: that would be the lurid and hallucinogenic, a sense that a director like Ken Russell or Terry Gilliam might have provided. The Brothers Grimm is looking better by comparison. Cage plays Edward Malus, a cop investigating the disappearance of a little girl. He is seeking personal redemption; he failed to save a similarly-aged, red-sweatered, blonde-pigtailed girl from a car wreck. We are told that not only were the bodies from the crash never identified, they were never found. Were they ever there? A private supply plane drops Malus off on the private island of Summersile, where the girl was last seen. He discovers a gaggle of women wearing handmade clothes, whose self-sufficient farming economy seems inexplicably based on honey and mead production. The commune claims never to have heard of the missing girl, Rowan; but evidence begins to mount that they are all lying through their teeth. The few men, always speechless, are caught lugging around a twitching, dripping, menacing bag of - well, something, anyway. What worked so well in the original is that the villagers were weird, but benign: just a bunch of hippies dancing around a maypole and speaking in iambic pentameter. When the trap is sprung, we never saw it coming. But LaBute's version labors to infuse everything with menace, so what eventually happens seems drearily inevitable. The film's second mistake was just plain stupid. The power of the original Wicker Man derived from the fact that the cop, played by Edward Woodward, was a Calvinist. The 2,000-year-old hostility between the female and the male, the pagan and the Christian, fomented a yeasty subtext; the ways of the islanders were a challenge to the faith of a rigid man, and the plot was not just a test of his detecting skills, but of his belief in Jesus Christ. The film was rife with sexual hysteria, and the pleasures of Britt Ekland dancing around naked. But if Cage's character is interested in sleeping with the islanders, or is afraid to, he doesn't show it. His speeches are about the law and "normal" society - not nearly as suggestive as Woodward's increasingly desperate protestations. Woodward's final, shouted line of dialogue in the original has multiple meanings, and has haunted the dreams of viewers for decades. Neil LaBute knew The Wicker Man was in many ways sacred, but he never discovered that it was the sacred that made it so. And the stricture of a PG-13 rating pulls his fangs. The film is just another skeleton tossed on the remains of the glut of horror remakes we've been getting. In another five years, Hollywood is going to run through all the classic horror, and will have to start re-making the remakes. The Wicker Man is playing at Showplace West. This and other
theater and music reviews can be read, listened to, or podcast at
wfiu.indiana.edu. Reviewing movies for WFIU, this is Peter Noble-Kuchera. The best thing about Little Miss Sunshine is that it makes you feel good to recommend it to people. There are a couple of deep-down comedic payoffs that arise from quirky characters and a script that knows how to hold its cards until it has a royal flush. The odd thing is that, though I've been telling people it's good for a week, I've been doing it without much conviction. The movie is like the pretty, college-bound girlfriend your parents like, when you'd rather be going out with the chick with the black fingernail polish smoking American Spirits behind the school. Little Miss Sunshine has, thank heavens, a character aptly named Frank, played by Steve Carrell, who cuts the sweetness with some much-needed acidity. Frank, a gay Proust scholar, tried to kill himself after his boyfriend dumped him for a professional rival and his career went down the toilet. "I'm glad you're still here," says his sister Cheryl, played by Toni Collette, in the Toni Collette role. He disagrees. Cheryl's husband Richard, Greg Kinnear, is a self-absorbed motivational speaker who has just gambled the family's nest egg to promote his book: the Nine Steps to…something or other. As his seven-year-old daughter, Olive, observes later, "Daddy hates losers." Of course Richard is the only loser in the movie. What, if anything, his dad (Alan Arkin) had to do with that is unclear; he seems like a pretty good guy, though he's recently become an obscenity-shouting heroin addict. Alan Arkin as Greg Kinnear's dad? The movie doesn't care that the casting doesn't add up; it just has to be funny! Which it is. But it doesn't add up. Rounding out the five is teenage brother Dwayne, who, inspired by something he dug out of Nietzche, has taken a vow of silence until he gets into jet pilot training. He's made it almost a year and a half. When his resolve finally cracks - as you know it must - he speaks the only word possible. The movie introduces itself as I have done: one character at a time. Then it traps them all in a yellow Volkswagen min-bus on a cross country trip to take Olive to compete in a beauty pageant. Mis-matched personalities in close confines went dreadfully awry in the Robin Willimas vehicle R.V., but it works here, even if the family's adventures are a bit precious. There are a few great details. At a restaurant, Olive asks her mom, "How much can I spend," and that's true to life. The scene that follows, about the ice cream, is from the heart. But I wanted more painful truth. When Cheryl and Richard finally have their blowout argument, we only hear it through the thin walls of a hotel. I needed to be in that room. I needed something else when Richard finally faces his dad. I needed more when Richard and Dwayne finally have their talk. The third act, the child beauty pageant, is even more ghastly than you can imagine, and I guarantee you will feel a stab for Olive, and think of Jon Benet Ramsey. Lessons, about not caring what other people think, are learned. Thank God for Frank, with his swollen eyes and bitter tongue. Richard has a way of driving Frank deeper and deeper into a kind of sarcastic Nirvana. Richard admonishes him, "You know, sarcasm is the refuge of losers." "Really?" says Frank. Little Miss Sunshine is playing, in a limited engagement, at Showplace East. This and other theater and music reviews can be read, listened to, or podcast at wfiu.indiana.edu. Reviewing movies for WFIU, this is Peter Noble-Kuchera. Among the misguided elements in Oliver Stone's film World Trade Center is the audacity of its title. What film could be definitive enough to merit that name? Certainly not this one, that favors myth-making over global perspective. John McLoughlin, a real-life Port Authority Police Sergeant played in the movie by Nicolas Cage - one of the men who managed the response to the terrorist bombing of the towers in 1993 -- is observed going about his morning on September 11th, 2001. New York City wakes with him: delivery trucks making their drop-offs, commuters going to work and talking about baseball. The twin towers are there on the horizon. It's a convincing and poignant moment, frozen in time. Then we see the shadow of a plane, and feel the thump from our theater's subwoofers. In the confusion, McLoughlin and his small, ad-hoc team of police volunteers know only that one of the towers was struck, and there are people up there in need of rescue. As they begin to gather the equipment they will need, in a terrifying cacophony, the building they are in collapses on top of their heads. McLaughlin and rookie officer Will Jimeno (Michael Peña) are, as they were in real life, immobilized under twenty feet of rubble. They are crushed and bleeding; they know that if they fall asleep, they will die. With throats choked with dust, they force themselves to talk about their wives and children. Though this may well have been what the real men discussed, the dialog here is awfully weak. And when these conversations are intercut with hokey scenes of the worried wives - wasting two gifted actresses, Maria Bello and Maggie Gyllenhaal -- and when the gooey music starts to swell, the film drops like a stone. Paul Greengrass' film United 93 recreated the confusion and terror of 9/11, but reorganized the information in documentary style and invited us to draw our own conclusions. But what does World Trade Center have to do with 9/11? We've already seen a hundred schmaltzy profiles on the Nightly News. Please don't misunderstand me. I am not saying that what those two men did wasn't heroic; it clearly was, as were the actions of the men who risked their lives to save them. What I am saying is that 9/11 is too complex a symbol to reduce it to narrow hero-worship, and that isn't going to promote healing; and I think it's too soon to start healing, anyway. Oliver Stone, the director of JFK, Platoon, and Born of the 4th of July, has made films with time on their side. They forced us to revisit painful memories of a past that had receded. Eventually, we will have that perspective on 9/11 - but not now, not when we're still in the middle of it. Both Jim Emerson, the editor of RogerEbert.com, and I were reminded of a remark made by Stanley Kubrick: "Schindler's List wasn't about the Holocaust. It was about success. The Holocaust was about six million people who got killed. Schindler's List was about a few people who didn't." Moving or not, the same criticism can, and should, be levied against World Trade Center. We shouldn't feel better about the thousands who died, and are still dying, because two men didn't. A character in the film says, "The smoke from the towers was erected by God to keep us from seeing what we're not ready to see." Stone's film is that smokescreen, and what it obscures is the Middle East. World Trade Center is playing at Showplace West. This and other theater and music reviews can be read, listened to, or podcast, by going to wfiu.indiana.edu. Reviewing movies for WFIU, this is Peter Noble-Kuchera. The British film The Descent is the best of this year's crop of horror movies, but that's not saying much. What it understands better than the others is that evocative atmosphere is the best way to ratchet up the tension. If it had delved as deeply into its characters as it does under the earth, and if its monsters were better, we really would have had something. Six friends are brought together each year for some extreme adventuring by their leader, Juno, Natalie Jackson Mendoza. Considering that the friends are all women, athletic, and twenty-something, we might have expected a cheesecake festival. Instead, though Juno is gorgeous, flexible, and chesty, the other women are plausible human beings. An all-female cast might beg a post-feminist critique, but regardless of what the breathless critical community is saying, there's not enough material here to merit one. I dissent on Descent. One year ago, one of the six, Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) lost her husband and daughter in a gory auto accident. Now, she is fragile and troubled by flashbacks. If she thinks she has bad memories now…but we're getting ahead of ourselves. Her friends have convinced Sarah that another adventure would be good therapy. This time, Juno is taking them spelunking. They meet for a hug-in at a cabin in the Appalachians, a scene meant to establish the characters; but three of them are so ill-defined, it's hard to tell them apart, especially when they put on helmets. When the women enter the cave, cinematographer Sam McCurdy suspends their tiny helmet lights in compositions filled with smothering, oppressive dark. Like an underground version of the film Poseidon, each chamber is replete with danger: black pools, bottomless pits, walls of glistening rivulets, and a passage so narrow you squeeze through it like a birth canal. That sequence, where one character gets stuck and begins to hyperventilate, is one of the best of its type. Would it weaken the illusion if I told you the cave existed almost exclusively on a sound stage, and that it's not rock, but polystyrene? Not at all. The film's ad campaign does not reveal the creature the women encounter, so I'll just say that it would look at home on the cover of The Weekly World News. It's a smart move that the Boogeyman is rendered without computer graphics. It works best when only glimpsed, especially in long-shot, leaving our imaginations to sketch in the rest. When fully revealed, the monster -- or is it monsters? -- is a letdown, and its governing rules don't add up. Is it tough, or is it a cream puff? Wouldn't it have a better sense of touch, and of temperature? How, exactly, is it able to climb on the…but no, I've said too much already. The Descent gets monotonous with its jack-in-the-box shocks. Critic Pauline Kael called these "boo" movies; Roger Ebert dubs them "Gotcha" flicks. More effective are the film's gross-out moments, such as something unconscionable that happens to a leg. It would please writer/director Neil Marshall if you thought of Deliverance; he has cited that film as a key influence. Genre fans might also note that near the movie's end, one of the characters becomes hyper-masculanized and dripping with ichor from head to toe - essentially Ellen Ripley and Carrie White in the same body. An inexperienced director is wise to look to his betters. Marshall knows how to do that, and for the most part, he gets the job done. The Descent is playing at Showplace East. This and other theater and music reviews can be read, listened to, or podcast by going to wfiu.indiana.edu. Reviewing movies for WFIU, this is Peter Noble-Kuchera. Criticizing the film Miami Vice for its tired plot, about undercover narcotics cops, is to miss the point. The familiarity lets us know where we are, so we can comfortably revel in the elegance of the variation. The director, Michael Mann, is so in control, it's like he's taking a stroll around the block with a leopard on a chain. The film doesn't even have an opening credits sequence. In just seconds, we are in motion with Sonny Crockett, Colin Farrell, and Ricardo Tubbs, Jamie Foxx, in the middle of a drug bust in a pressed and sweating nightclub. These are men of action, longtime partners, with no need for heart-to-heart conversations. They use jargon-heavy shop talk. When they do say something personal, it's to briefly touch base like soldiers in a battlefield. The bust is called off when Sonny gets a cell phone call from Alonso, John Hawkes, a Federal informant they know. Alonso is wild, talking suicide. Crockett and Tubbs rush to him in a black Ferarri F-430, the first of the movie's fetishized vehicles, that's no more than a rocket engine with a seat. Alonso admits he was squeezed by a particularly scary drug cartel and rolled over on the Feds. Then, a usual stool pigeon deer-in-the-headlights, he steps in front of an eighteen wheeler and becomes a smear (violence here is sudden, bloody, and matter-of-fact). The Federal cover is blown; there might be a mole. Crockett and Tubbs, whose cover is intact, are deputized and instructed to secretly make contact with the cartel. The meeting is to take place in the "Tri-Border Zone" where Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina join. For a detail-obsessed director like Michael Mann, it was of course necessary to actually shoot there. And that is the very spirit of the film: to seize technology and tread where others have not. Miami Vice was not shot on film. Australian cinematographer Dion Beebe used the same hi-definition video cameras he used to shoot Mann's last movie, Collateral. These cameras are new, and temperamental; the production had terrible problems with them breaking down in the humidity. But their advantage is they are small and light, so they can penetrate almost anywhere. They allow Michael Mann a freedom directors have not felt since the '70s. The images those cameras produce, especially in low light, are grainy on the big screen; but in this case, it's a great look, a match for the grit of the film. This is a dark movie, in tone and in fact, which wants us to believe we are infiltrating a hidden night world. It has no patience for sets or for cumbersome lighting setups. In this, it feels like William Friedkin's The French Connection and To Live and Die in LA, films that devoured their real-world locations with a run-and-gun fervor. The women, the clothes, and the music are sexy, the heavies are memorable, and the compositions have the precision of advertising. But as in Mann's film Heat, it's star power that makes it so much fun. Jamie Foxx's scowling Mr. Clean, who could start a bonfire with his gaze, is an ideal foil for Collin Farrell's rhumba-dancing, preening wild man. Foxx's charisma could blow Farrell off the screen, but Mann reins him in. They have summoned a world of men and their toys more potent than a year's subscription to Maxim -- and man, is it cool Miami Vice is playing at Showplace West. This and other theater and music reviews can be read, or listened to, or podcast, by going to wfiu.indiana.edu. Reviewing movies for WFIU, this is Peter Noble-Kuchera. In 2002, a Newsweek cover story proclaimed writer/director M. Night Shyamalan "the next Stephen Spielberg". Two of his films, The Sixth Sense and Signs, made a combined $1.6 billion. Is it any surprise that the guy started believing his own press? When he turned in the screenplay for his new film, Lady in the Water, Disney, his usual studio, gently tried to tell him it wasn't going to work. Ignoring them, he jumped ship for Warner Brothers, which probably thought it had scored a coup. It didn't. Lady in the Water is a self-conscious myth reminiscent of a bad '50s science fiction short story. Its protagonist is a stuttering building supervisor named Cleveland Heep. In the swimming pool of his apartment complex, Heep discovers a "narf," a sea nymph played by Bryce Dallas Howard. She wears only a man's shirt, and she apparently learned English in a land without contractions. She is being hunted by a wolf-like creature called a "scrunt". Though it's hard to believe a major screenwriter could have such a tin ear, Heep must save the narf from the scrunt. The narf, named Story, has been sent to find someone called "The Vessel". She knows only that he is a writer, and that she will awaken something in him that will change the world. The Vessel turns out to be a tenant named Vic, played by none other than Shyamalan himself. Story tells Vic the good news that the book he's writing will "be the seed of great change". The bad news is that some time in the future, he will be murdered for his ideas. Shyamalan seems to believe that the world is a broken place that only his movies can redeem. Cleveland Heep, played by Paul Giamatti somewhere in the middle of his range from specific to sentimental, is yet another martyr. He ministers to his lonely tenants, whose lives have no purpose until he gives them one. These secondary characters are no deeper than their function in the plot; they are jigsaw puzzle pieces. One of them is Harry Farber, a movie critic, named for critic Manny Farber, played by Bob Balaban. Farber stands for all that is jaded and faithless, claiming that there is no originality left in the world. It's not spoiling much to say that he comes to a bad end. By killing a critic, Shyamalan is hedging against a critical backlash -- and he's been getting forty lashes, all right. He has even tried to inoculate his movie against the possible cynicism of his audience. Lady in the Water's opening narration says, "The narfs tried to warn mankind that it has lost its way - but man may have forgotten how to listen." It all smacks of megalomania. Mankind, burned by Shyamalan's terrible last film, The Village, isn't interested. The high-priced Lady made only $18 million in its opening weekend, a disaster by summer movie standards. Tellingly, Shyamalan's production company is called "Blinding Edge". Its logo is a man arching his back, muscles tense, diving face first into a bright light. Like Icarus, Shyamalan has flown too close to the sun, and the result is a bloody mess. It's possible to shake your head at his lack of judgment and still admire his sincerity. He is certain to produce more good work; he just needs to find a screenwriter, fast, and stop with the whole auteur thing. Lady in the Water is playing at Showplace West. This and other theater and music reviews are available online at wfiu.indiana.edu. Reviewing movies for WFIU, this is Peter Noble-Kuchera. Philip K. Dick was one of the 20th Century’s greatest writers, period. This is understood almost everywhere but in Dick’s own America, where he is pigeonholed in science fiction, considered a ghetto by the literati. Dick was plugged directly into something very powerful; his amphetamine use wasn’t the source of his ideas, but the tool that allowed him, at one point, to midwife eighteen novels in five years. In the end, for twenty hours a day and at 120 words-per-minute, he wrote himself to death. A Scanner Darkly, one of Dick’s richest and most controlled novels, has been transmuted into a movie by Richard Linklater. As he did in his earlier film Waking Life, Linklater shot the movie on video, nearly as fast as Dick wrote it; then, for a year and a half, a staff of animators painted over the images in the computer. They have created a striking palette of sharp borders and liquid centers that pops off the screen. Objects in the background shift in rhythms of their own, as if the characters are trying to walk a straight line on a listing ship at sea. It’s an inspired match for the tenuous membrane of Dick’s realities. The Southern California of the film is a paved dumping ground for discarded people. A designer drug called “substance D” – users call it “Death” – floods the streets. Use causes brain damage to one hemisphere; as the other hemisphere tries to compensate, the competition causes hallucinations, delusions, and eventually a disintegration of identity. Bob Arctor, Keanu Reeves, is a narcotics officer. As a cover, he uses substance D himself. He lives in a run-down house with two other users, a tousled blonde bum played by Woody Harrelson and a wound-up paranoid played by Robert Downey, Jr. We spend a lot of the movie amused by their whacked-out conversations as they freak each other out. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. Arctor’s house is riddled with hidden cameras. His job is to monitor the activities of his friends by sneaking off to the police station and surveilling endless hours of them, and himself, babbling away. To preserve his undercover identity, he becomes Officer Fred, wearing a “scramble suit” – a loose jumper with a shroud that covers the head. Seen from the outside, Fred is a blur of millions of randomized and rapidly-changing facial fragments. As substance D erodes him from the inside out, Arctor – which sounds like Actor – forgets that he and Fred are the same person; he is narcing on himself. Linklater’s camera slips under the shroud; Arctor’s suffering face, the shrinking identity behind the façade, fills the screen. It’s a masterstroke. But we are left wanting more. Animation should have expanded the possibilities for expression, as it did in Waking Life, but Linklater doesn’t go too crazy, perhaps wary of alienating a mainstream audience. More could have been said about an America under surveillance. The undercover plot, and the paranoia, are not as potent as they should have been, the music is a downer, and it all might have been funnier. Keanu Reeves is a natural and truthful actor, but he is too good looking and together; when we finally see how far gone Arctor has become, it’s a shock. We weren’t with him. And yet this is probably just as Linklater intended, and it all adds up -- to the best film of the year so far. Dick wrote the book as a remembrance of his lost friends; he said, in his afterward, that they were like children playing in the street. He said that he was not a character in the novel: he was the novel. The movie is perhaps best understood as a poignant remembrance of a keen and empathic author, used up too soon. A Scanner Darkly is playing at the Landmark Theater in Indianapolis. This and other theater and music reviews are available online at wfiu.indiana.edu. Reviewing movies for WFIU, this is Peter Noble-Kuchera. You might ask: why would anybody make a movie about crossword puzzles, and why would anybody want to see it? Okay, fair enough. But whereas The DaVinci Code was a movie about puzzles that forgot to be about people, the new documentary Wordplay isn't about crosswords, but the people who love them. It is a delightful film about smart people at play, with some things to say about thinking itself. The New York Times crossword is the gold standard in the puzzling world, and Will Shortz, the Puzzle Editor for the Times and NPR's Weekend Edition Puzzle Master, is a rock star. He spends ten to twelve hours a day making or solving puzzles. I imagine he would do this if they didn't pay him. As with so many of the movie's colorful cast, he says he caught the bug as a child. When he got to college, no doubt with that twinkle already in his eye, Shortz convinced Indiana University to allow him a self-created major: "enigmatism," or the study of puzzles. What kind of person is drawn to crossword puzzles? Shortz says, "People who hunger for solutions." The greatest solvers come from the ranks of musicians and mathematicians - people who can think fluidly through a complex problem. Bill Clinton, one of several celebrity solvers interviewed, compares working out a crossword to problems of state. He says you focus on what you know and keep at it until the whole thing unravels for you. We see him ponder four across: is the answer to the question about a missile "ICBM," or "MERV"? I'm sure the filmmakers wanted to get George Bush solving a puzzle, but he was busy. Though Shortz writes about half the clues himself, he is abetted by men like Merle Reagle, the Times' ace "constructor". Reagle says he spends most of his day thinking about puzzles. He drives by a Dunkin' Donuts. "Move the "D" to the end, and you get 'Unkind Donuts,'" he says. "Swap the 'a' and the 's' in 'Noah's Ark,'" and you get "No! A Shark!" In a fascinating scene, we watch Reagle create a puzzle from scratch. He shares his thought process as he does so; he is thinking at right angles to the way solvers think. Contrary to our assumptions, puzzles aren't really a solitary activity. They are an interaction between the minds of their constructors and their solvers, who share a game where the puzzle is the toy and the language. One champion player dares to say that when minds connect, it's art. Perhaps Will Shortz' greatest innovation was to make crossword puzzling social. Twenty-eight years ago, he founded the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. It has all the excitement of a sporting event - except that only minds, and pen tips, are moving. Patrick Creadon, the director of Wordplay, has a big bag of graphic tricks to make this cinematic, and he sustains a reasonable dramatic tension. Will Ellen Ripstein, who can't always catch a baton but can solve the Sunday puzzle in eight minutes, make it to the finals? Will Tyler, the twenty-year-old phenom, beat Trip, the driven favorite, to become the youngest-ever champion? Will Al, perhaps the fastest solver - but who has never placed higher than third -- defeat himself in the mind game? But more important, we get to see these quick-tongued, bright-eyed people reunited each year with others who think in the same unique ways. "It's like we have our own tribe," says one. An invitation to share in that joyful world of jousting, dancing minds is one we accept with pleasure. Wordplay is playing at Showplace East. This and other theater
and music reviews are available online at wfiu.indina.edu. Reviewing
movies for WFIU, this is Peter Noble-Kuchera. My strongest childhood movie memory is the time my grandfather took me to see Superman. I loved the movie so much, he took me to see it again the very next day. Fast forward twenty-eight years. I arrived home in the dark after screening Superman Returns. The kids were asleep. There, crumpled in a ball on the ground in front of the bedroom, was my four-year-old's Superman costume. I felt a great sense of sadness and loss. Never mind that it's an unnecessarily violent PG-13; why would I take my kids to see Superman Returns? What would they find there to aspire to? The first two Superman films were magic. They were bright with goodness, optimism, and hope, and anything was possible. But this new film is lost and wandering, sour and deeply strange. The film labors mightily not so much to plunder the past as to turn back the clock to a kind of movie-making that might be lost forever. It begins with a credits sequence recreated in the finest detail from the 1978 original. We hear the voice of Marlon Brando, coming to us from beyond the grave, and the John Williams theme, soon to be recycled to annoyance. Brandon Routh, the young actor who plays Superman, mimics Chrisopher Reeve's voice and mannerisms to creepy perfection, though he can't do the comedy. What would Reeve have thought of this ventriloquist's dummy? We've been here before, and more vividly. Superman goes for another aerial pas de deux with Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth). Bosworth is a far cry from Margot Kidder's spitfire, and hardly an equal partner for Superman. Curious that she stands on his feet, like a little girl dancing with her daddy. She's also not likely to win any mother-of-the-year awards, as she routinely drags her son into the most dangerous areas on planet Earth. Lex Luthor, now played by Kevin Spacey, is voluptuously wicked; he belongs in the sumptuous deco production design. But his evil plan once again involves Kryptonite and a land grab. Can't he come up with anything new? We observe the plot with more curiosity than involvement, and - in part due to the movie's two and a half hour length - more than a little boredom. And yet there are some new things here. Whenever Superman flies, he is usually a completely computer-generated construct. This allows director Brian Singer to create images that Richard Donner, the director of the original film, could only imagine. When we see Superman in long shot, flying around a gorgeous model of Metropolis, it works; and the images have a stronger effect upon reflection than they do when you first see them. But the computer graphics also make Superman far less human. His skin is too smooth; he's too perfect. Lois Lane is a Mary Magdalene kissing her god. She says he's warm, but we doubt it. Of course, Superman isn't human. But in order to identify with him, it's critical that we forget this. As evidenced in his X-Men films, Singer has a genuine concern with alienation. But what's fun about that? Superman's longing is very much like the robot child in Spielberg's A.I., who desires only to be human. We feel sorry for him. And like Superman, hovering outside Lois Lane's house, watching and listening to the family life inside, the movie itself remains outside our hearts, wondering how to get in. Superman Returns is playing at Showplace East. This and other theater and music reviews are available online at wfiu.indiana.edu. Reviewing movies for WFIU, this is Peter Noble-Kuchera. According to Entertainment Weekly, Garrison Keillor approached director Robert Altman about making a movie of his screenplay. "Are you interested?" asked Keillor. Without batting an eyelash, Altman said, "Of course". He knew an invitation to play jazz when he heard it. Keillor, the host of the live radio show A Prairie Home Companion, for which the resulting film is named, is so droll, so ugly, and yet so graceful. Altman locks in on the way Keillor commands his ensemble by moving slower than everyone else. In the film, Keillor continually tells the story of how he got into radio. The tall tale is an evolving tapestry of lies, constantly cherry picking from the orbiting swirl of activity and incorporating it. That's what the movie is like: extemporizing, embroidering, riffing, refusing to rush. A Prairie Home Companion is part live concert film, part backstage farce. It finds the humor in Minnesotans, in Powdermilk Biscuits, in black coffee ("It keeps the Swedes and Germans/Awake through all the sermons"). Director Altman has a love of performers that's inseparable from his joie de vive. He has Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin as a pair of singing sisters; who wouldn't be delighted about that? He keeps things loose and watches his actors work; they resonate with one another like musical instruments, though Kevin Kline's heart isn't in it, and Lindsay Lohan, a sop to the demographic, is like a stuck key. But this is a variety show, and you aren't expected to like everything. During a hilarious bit on duct tape, Keillor says something interesting: "All repairs are temporary and short-term." Altman, one of the greatest directors alive, is 81 years old, held together by duct tape himself. Eleven years ago, he had a heart transplant. What he's up to here is so much more than just nostalgia. The references to mortality are too numerous to recount. Death shadows almost every conversation and the lyrics of almost every song. But the film is, like those lyrics, soft and tender. One of the characters, played by Virginia Madsen, talks like a religious nut job. Then you find out she is really an incarnation of the Angel of Death. Significantly, she is compassionate, beautiful, and wears not black, but white. She says of a man she has come to claim, "The death of an old man is not a tragedy. Forgive him his shortcomings, and thank him for all his love and care." Later, she visits Garrison Keillor. She has not come for him - not yet. Where Max von Sydow played chess with Death in The Seventh Seal, Keillor instead tells Death the "penguin joke". Maybe you've heard it. It is Zen-like in its stupidity. How many times has Keillor told that joke in thirty years? Death asks why it's funny. Keillor says, "I don't know. I guess because people laugh at it." Then he takes a bite of an apple. A Prairie Home Companion may end up the coda to Altman's brilliant career, or it may not. It's his tip of the hat to the ephemeral nature of live performance, and of life itself. It seems simple, and so it is. It also pretty much says it all. If you're hearing this review on Tuesday, you probably have until Thursday night to catch A Prairie Home Companion on film; by Friday, it will likely have shuffled off this mortal coil. Catch up with it on DVD. This and other theater and music reviews are available online at wfiu.indiana.edu. Reviewing movies for WFIU, this is Peter Noble-Kuchera. For the last six years, former Vice President Al Gore has dedicated his life to educating the public about global warming. He has perfected a lucid multimedia presentation and delivered it over a thousand times all over the world. The new documentary An Inconvenient Truth provides background on why Gore chose this life course. But mostly, it functions as a record of that performance. The result is a film that is funny, warm, and entertaining at the same time it is absolutely chilling. False assumption number one: global warming is a theory. In fact, in the scientific community, there is no debate. In 928 peer-reviewed scientific papers on the subject, there is not one dissenting opinion. Sources that attempt to position global warming as anything other than fact are deliberately spreading disinformation because they have a vested interest in the status quo. False assumption number two: the Earth is so big, humanity can't be the cause of global warming. It took 10,000 generations for the world population to reach 2.5 billion. In a single human lifetime, that population has climbed to 6 billion. There is an almost perfect correspondence between the record levels of CO2 in our atmosphere and our cu |