WFIU Movie Reviews
2004-2005

SYRIANA

Politics in the movies, when done right, are more thrilling than any chase scene. Syriana is a byzantine thicket of venal motives and cross purposes. You may find yourself behind the curve and struggling to keep up. But the movie trusts that even if you fail you'll want to try, and so becomes a uniquely fascinating political thriller about big oil and power politics.

Begin with a fact: the world's oil reserves are running out, and we are coming to the end of cheap energy. The scramble for what's left is becoming increasingly deperate and violent, and all that oil never seems to benefit the citizens of the countries who have it.

A massive Texas oil company, Connex, is trying to merge with a smaller one, to gain access to one of the last remaining undisovered oil fields. Once conjoined, the new company will become the 23rd biggest economy on Earth. But the U.S. Attorney's Office is sniffing around for corruption, and threatens to block the deal. Lawyers for Connex will fight as dirty as it takes.

We meet Nasir Al-Subbai, Alexander Siddig, a Syrian prince who will soon succeed his father. Bryan Woodman, Matt Damon, is a financial advisor from a Swiss energy consulting firm that wants the plum account that Al-Subbai represents. Woodman has just lost a son, and lets his bitterness show: "You are squndering the greatest natural resource in the world," he says. "China outbids the U.S., but you turn your back because of corruption. 100 years you were out here in the desert chopping each other's heads off, and that's where you'll be in another 100. We're going to suck you dry."

Al-Subbai is an Oxford-educated reformer, sick of yes men, who likes Bryan's frank approach. He would like to keep the oil money in his country, and he proposes changes that scare Connex and powerful interests in the U.S. government. They would rather install his playboy brother as a puppet.

Among the dozen or so important characters, we also meet Bob Barnes, George Clooney, a CIA operative who did wetwork in Beirut. He speaks Farsi, and has deep knowledge of the Gulf. He is sent to scare Al-Subbai, or worse. Bob is accustomed to being used; but something horrible will happen to him, and he will awaken.

Like the movie Traffic, also written by writer/director Stephen Gaghan, Syriana doesn't just enter the rooms where decisions are made that will affect millions of lives; it depicts those affected. The most moving is Hashim, a young Pakistani man who lives with his father in the Gulf. When Connex fires its local workers, Hashim is facing deportation. He tries to find other work, but he doesn't speak Arabic, and is turned away. As his options vanish, he is inexorably drawn to the most desperate solution: suicide bombing. That he is seen sympathetically is the movie's bravest move.

Now forget the summary, which is as doomed as counting grains of sand in the desert. When watching Syriana, you are absorbed by the complexity, and don't need to straighten out the details to get the picture. The movie is amazingly assured, since it is practically Gaghan's directorial debut, and that's why you trust it, and go with it. It has the authority of real location work; it looks like Iran, Spain, Switzerland, France, D.C.. As expose, it recalls The Constant Gardener, but it's ambition is greater, and it's much better. That its ending is pat hardly hurts it; it had to find a way to stop. You may not want it to.

Syriana 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.

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KING KONG

With his remake of King Kong, director Peter Jackson has almost matched the young Stephen Spielberg in his ability to keep you on the knife's edge. In the movie's first half, he sustains two out-of-the-frying-pan-into-the-fire sequences so outlandish you almost can't stand it. You might do what I did, and simply bust out in disbelieving laughter at the way he puts the screws to you.

Jackson, who says the original 1933 King Kong is what made him want to be a director, has stayed true to the well-known plot. A group of adventurers follows an ancient map to undiscovered Skull Island, so an obsessed director (Jack Black) can shoot a movie there. The writer, Jack Driscoll (Adrian Brody), and star actress Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts), begin a flirtation. They are interrupted by grotesque natives, who capture them and offer the woman as sacrifice to a sixty-foot-gorilla called Kong. Ann looks down from the gorilla's fist and sees the ground below littered with pulled-apart damsel bones. Kong, usually a vegetarian, must crave animal protein every once in a while.

But because Anne is blonde, Kong stays her execution. Like Shaherezade, she performs to stay alive, and fascinates Kong. She soon escapes him, but is set upon by dinosaurs in the primordial forest. Kong rescues her. In their own way, the two fall in love, sharing a sunset and some kind of understanding. The gorilla, not the writer, always gets the cheerleader. Sorry if I sound bitter.

The Skull Island stuff, the bulk of the three-hour film, is gorgeous and exciting. But King Kong has some trouble getting going. The long establishing scenes on the ship don't work. Jackson and his writer/wife Fran Walsh try to get us to care about his secondary characters, so we will feel a tug when they die. We don't. In a movie of high adventure, gratuitous violence is perfectly acceptable. The minor characters are there to be stabbed, crushed, and eaten for our pleasure. The film's ending, coming after such action highs, necessarily feels redundant and anticlimactic.

King Kong peerlessly blends the real and the digital. You have squint to see that sometimes the little people in long shots are computer generated. Then, real actors are inserted into environments that look real, but aren't. Rather than relying on digital sets, Weta, the New Zealand effects company built by Jackson, used more miniatures than all three Lord of the Rings movies combined. Miniatures are just more there than digital backgrounds, because you can sense they have been created by human hands, and they are photographed rather than drawn.

With all of its special effects and dazzlingly inventive action sequences, the best part of the film is Naomi Watts. She's conventionally pretty, nothing special, but she has a purity and sweetness unspoiled by the world. Her beauty is not remote, but approachable and warm: a kindergarten teacher, a girl next door, a buddy who's a secret wildcat in bed. This is her specific charm; watch as she transforms, as she did in Mulholland Dr. As Ann Darrow, she follows Fay Wray and Jessica Lange in the greatest screaming role in the movies, and becomes a siren.

King Kong is playing on six screens at Showplace West; that ought to about cover it. This and other theater and music reviews are available online at wfiu.indiana.edu. Reviewing movies for WFIU, this is Peter Noble-Kuchera.

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GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK

Good Night and Good Luck is a story of perseverance both in front of and behind the camera. George Clooney co-wrote the movie for a dollar, directed for a dollar, and played the second-biggest part for the minimum the IATSE union allows; even so, he says it was nearly impossible to raise the modest budget of $7.5 million for a black-and-white film. His passion for telling the story of the battle between straight-arrow newsman Edward R. Murrow and crusading Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy has yielded a film of uncommon relevance in our current era of the Patriot Act and the curtailing of civil liberties in the name of public safety.

It is 1953. McCarthy's Communist witch hunt is in full swing, reputations and lives are being destroyed, and tendrils of fear and repression have reached into every aspect of public life. Murrow, played as a man of dignity by David Strathairn, grinds his teeth during an interview with flaming Liberace, who says he's waiting to meet the right girl and settle down. A married couple in the CBS newsroom, played by Robert Downey Jr. and Patricia Clarkson, will be fired if they admit their union. Everyone at CBS has to sign a loyalty oath or be fired. A fellow reporter, movingly played by an imploding Ray Wise, has been smeared as a Communist, and his career is going down the tubes. Murrow is quietly seething.

When a lieutenant is kicked out of the Air force for refusing to denounce his Serbian father, Murrow finally gets mad as hell and won't take it any more. With the hard-hitting news show See It Now as his pulpit, he fires a fusillade at McCarthy. He bets everything that a newsman can trump a Senator if his moral character were unimpeachable, and if he were on the side of right. "Dissent is not disloyalty," he says in that landmark broadcast; "We are not descended from fearful men."

Elsewhere, Murrow said, "What is happening to radio and television is decadence, escapism, and insulation from the world we live in. We are fat and complacent. Whatever happens in this relationship between the individual and the state...we did it to ourselves." That the big guns of government came after him was not a surprise. Thoreau might have been talking about Murrow when he wrote, "A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the state with their consciences...and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it."

Good Night and Good Luck was shot in color and printed in black-and-white, which makes the images flat; and Clooney directs tastefully, but with a television aesthetic. The movie would have played best on TV, not least because it's about the ruination of that medium. But since Murrow's day, the battle for the the idiot box, the glass teat, has been lost. Clooney knows this, so he took his fight to the theaters, where the struggle to tell stories of worth despite the stranglehold of corporate greed is now being waged. Last Friday, Saw II, a hack job in every sense, played in Bloomington to packed houses, while only a handful showed up for Good Night and Good Luck. Clooney's on our side; the very least we can do is see his movie and enter the fray.

You'll have to hurry if you want to catch Good Night and Good Luck at Showplace East. This and other theater and music reviews can be found online at wfiu.indiana.edu. Reviewing movies for WFIU, this is Peter Noble-Kuchera.

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THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: THE LION, THE WITCH, AND THE WARDROBE

J.R.R. Tolkein, the author of The Lord of the Rings, detested allegory. His friend, theologian C.S. Lewis, who wrote the seven Narnia books, embraced it. The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, the first book of the Narnia series to be published, is also the first to receive the Hollywood treatment. Somewhat surprisingly, the story's Christian parallels have been left intact, narrowly rescuing the movie from sword-and-sorcery also-ran.

The story concerns the four Pevensie children: Peter, Susan, contrary Edmund, and charming Lucy (Georgie Hensley). They are tagged like luggage, as refugee London children really were, and shipped to the countryside to escape the Nazi bombings. In the home of big-hearted Professor Kirke, Jim Broadbent, during a game of hide-and-seek, the children discover that a wardrobe is a door to the magical world of Narnia.

The land has been enchanted by Jadis the White Witch, self-proclaimed Queen of Narnia, trapping it in a hundred-year-winter. The Witch (Tilda Swinton at her most sallow) makes quite a first impression, entering on a white sleigh, with Medusa's hair, ensconced in furs and attended by a murderous dwarf. The younger brother, Edmund (Skandar Keynes), is snared by the Queen, who preys on his sibling rivalry, and beguiles him with sweets into betraying his family. The sweets are delicious, but they are made of snow, and they fill Edmund with cold and emptiness.

After a series of narrow escapes from the wolfen secret police, the other children join the army of the lion Aslan, the true King of Narnia, voiced by Liam Neeson. His lessons about Deep Magic sound like Mustafa the lion's "Circle of Life" speech in Disney's The Lion King. Consider that Mustafa was voiced by Darth Vader, and that Liam Neeson played a Jedi, and we can conclude…well, nothing, I guess.

Aslan is paralleled with Jesus Christ. Since he is without sin, he can offer his life in an act of atonement for Edmund's betrayal. He is shorn by the Witch and sacrificed; his body is attended by the two weeping girls. The sacrificial altar splits in two as did the Jewish temple is in the New Testament, forever ending the need for sacrifices. Aslan is resurrected, and leads his army to victory. We are still six movies from Armageddon, but it's heavy stuff, don't you think?

Director Peter Jackson took a few pages of Tolkein and blew them up into the forty-minute-battle for Helm's Deep. His friend and fellow kiwi director Andrew Adamson has done something similar; the climactic battle took up only two pages - two pages! -- of C.S. Lewis's book, but is stretched to twenty minutes of film.

It's a question of priorities. Disney, with dollar signs in its eyes and the Christian base in its crosshairs, sees a franchise to rival Harry Potter, so the movie skews older. In one passage, C.S. Lewis wrote, "I won't describe this further, because if I did grown-ups would probably not let you read this book." Because the movie realizes everything, pushing the PG to the limit, I can't take my four-year-old. That's kind of a shame; but then, Narnia best abides not on screen, but in the imagination.

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe 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.

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WALK THE LINE

It would have been easy for the Johnny Cash bio-pic Walk the Line to be maudlin. But the movie is buoyant because of its leads, Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash and Reese Witherspoon as June Carter. They embody the gravitational pull, much more than just sexual, that keeps Johnny and June in intersecting orbits through addictions, misguided passes, career setbacks, and failed marriages. As screwed up as he got, Johnny always saw June as his destination, and that pulled him through.

We see Johnny's hardscrabble roots in a poor Arkansas cotton farming family, singing hymns in the field with his mother, and at night, listening to the Appalachian music of the Carter Family on the radio. His brother Jack, Lucas Till, is supposed to be the talented one. But Jack dies young, and the alcoholic father, played in a caustic performance by Robert Patrick, says the Devil took the wrong boy.

Johnny joins the Air force, and learns the guitar to stay sane. Director James Mangold makes the case that Johnny's loneliness there became the song "Folsam Prison Blues," written from the point of view of an inmate in Folsom Prison. Mangold's insistence that Johnny transmuted personal experience directly into lyrics is a reductive method, leaving little room for ambiguity, or for the fact that it was Johnny's imagination that made him such a hit with the striped shirt set.

Once out of the Air force, Johnny marries and has babies, and languishes under the burden. He starts a band with two mechanics who can barely play. His rockabilly trio auditions for Sam Phillips, Dallas Roberts, of Sun Records. Phillips doesn't want gospel; have they got anything else?

So he starts into "Folsam Prison Blues." His band has never heard the song before. Their signature slow playing emerges spontaneously from a lack of technical ability. There's some truth in the hokey scene; Johnny was deeply religious, and Phillips refusal to let him record gospel eventually caused Johnny to leave Sun for Columbia. But in fact, Johnny's idiosyncratic style was intentional, a natural outgrowth of the two-step pioneered by the Carter family.

Johnny had already fallen for June on the radio, let alone when he sees her in a red dress. On tour together, June comes to want him too, but Johnny is married and strung out, and her instinct for self-preservation fends him off. She says, "You wear black because nothing else is clean, you got your sound because you can't play any faster, and you tried to kiss me because it just happened? You should try taking credit some of the time."

Joaquin Phoenix will be nominated for an Oscar, because his voice can go down low, and for the way he curls his lip around the microphone. But without Reese Witherspoon's complimentary energy, the movie wouldn't have worked. Their pitch-perfect acting duet elevates Walk the Line from good popular entertainment to real love story. And the music is hotter'n Georgia asphalt.

Walk the Line is playing at Showplace East. This and other movie and theater reviews and interviews are available online at wfiu.indiana.edu. Reviewing movies for WFIU, this is Peter Noble-Kuchera.

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KISS KISS BANG BANG

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is a low-budget screwball LA noir. To really get the "in" jokes, you have to know Los Angeles, '40s pulp novels, and '80s action movies. Raise your hand if you're still in the room.

If you stick around, you'll hear great lines like this: "I don't understand LA girls. It's like somebody grabbed America by the East coast, shook it, and all the normal girls managed to hang on". That's the cynical narration of Harry Lockart, Robert Downey Jr.. Since he's telling the story, he can do cute things like freeze the film to emphasize a point, or bring the dead back onstage. Sometimes he even tries to help us solve the mystery.

Harry is a thief. When a burglary goes bad and his partner is shot, Harry, looking for any port in a storm, bursts into a casting session for a cop show. "You got your partner killed, didn't you," the casting agent accuses him. Harry, misunderstanding the situation, tearfully confesses. The producer, played by Larry Miller, says, "That's what I'm talking about. That's method. That's Brando."

Harry is whisked from New York to LA. For research, he rides along with a private eye everyone calls "Gay Perry" (Val Kilmer). Gay Perry is investigating the case of Veronica Dexter, who was slutty, then got born again, then got dead. Before finding her final resting place on a curb, her body will be strangled, shot, drowned, thrown out a window, and urinated on. Well, it's funnier than it sounds.

The third leg of the Harry/Gay Perry triangle is Harmony Faith Lane, Michelle Monaghan. She escaped an incestuous home to be a movie star; now she's 34 and already flotsam washed up on Venice Beach (how she can afford a seaside apartment when she's only done one commercial is an unsolved mystery). When she and Harry meet at a party, he comes to realize that this is the Harmony Lane, the same unattainable dream girl who cried on Harry's shoulder all the way through high school and slept with everyone but him. Maybe Harry is too gallant. Or maybe his sexuality is more ambiguous than he knows, and Gay Perry will be more than a thorn pricking his side.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is the directorial debut of screenwriter Shane Black, the enfant terrible of Hollywood's gold rush '80s. Black was twenty-two when he sold his spec script, Lethal Weapon, to Warner's, for a quarter of a million dollars. But after three prominent flops based on his work, Black disappeared for a decade. The movie is also a comeback for Downey Jr., his first starring role since his battles with drug addiction made him too big a risk for the studios; and for Val Kilmer, who has been in nothing but terrible movies for ten years, with the exception of the brilliant Spartan. Finally, someone remembered Kilmer is funny.

The down-and-dirty photography by Michael Barrett was fiddled with in post-production, adding colored light. With a few million more, he and Black could have had another screenwriter-cum-director's Hollywood love letter, Tequila Sunrise. But the dark undercurrents add some heft, the unconventional maybe-love-triangle is original, and though the movie's a botch, it's an interesting one.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang 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.

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HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE

Millions of kids and adults around the world are passionate about Harry Potter (including those who would censor the books without having read them). Fans overlook or forgive the fact that many of J.K. Rowling's fantasy ideas are hackneyed. They love Rowling's bustling plots, and her spry, conversational language. Most of all, they love her characters. They want to know what happens to their friends.

Since the fans are eager for any new words by Rowling, few complained that the fourth book, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, was bloated. In adapting the book for the screen, writer Steve Cloves did what an editor should have done in the first place; he threw out most of the first hundred and fifty pages, and nixed or combined redundant scenes and unwelcome sub-plots Even so, the movie is too dense to affect you like it should. Will you shed a tear when a certain character dies?

The movie begins with the Quiddich World Cup, played in an arena that seats 100,000 wizards. Quiddich is a cross between rugby and cricket, played on broomsticks hovering fifty feet off the ground. The festivities are interrupted when someone casts the "Dark Mark," a floating skull in the sky. It's a sign that the Dark Lord, Voldemort - still only a wizened homunculus at this point -- has returned.

Voldemort's servants, the KKK-like Death Eaters, could be anywhere and anyone. Harry gets a warning from his mentor, Sirius Black (Gary Oldman), whose face appears in the coals of a fireplace. "The demons are within the walls, Harry," the likeness of Sirius intones. Which of the many character actors is a Death-Eater? You'll probably figure it out, but it's fun guessing, and Rowling's mysteries always play fair.

The bulk of the film concerns the Tri-Wizard Tournament, a triathlon of magical tasks played between the three great wizarding schools. Harry's name is selected by the Goblet of Fire, even though he's too young. He will have to face a deadly Hungarian horn-tailed dragon cribbed from Harold Robbin's Dragonslayer. (Hey, why not steal from the best?) The other two events will also test Harry's courage and "moral fiber" - though the second event, which takes place underwater, is so muddy in its plotting that it will also test your ability to figure out what's supposed to be going on.

Warner Brothers made a critical decision not to re-cast the young actors for each movie. As a result of this, and the tight eighteen-month production cycle, we get to watch the kids grow up on film. They are now fourteen. Harry Potter, Daniel Radcliffe, has a voice a full octave lower than before, and he's sort of soulful. Bookish Hermione, Emma Watson, has become a knockout with a high forehead and a sly half smile. Ron, the red-headed poor boy played by Rupert Grint, has developed shoulders and acting chops. Director Mike Newell, of Four Weddings and a Funeral, is the perfect choice to bring out the humor in their crushes and misunderstandings.

The movie is too long, and it's rated PG-13 for an intense scene between Harry and Voldemort. But watching one of Rowling's stories, brought to life by good actors and cool special effects by ILM, is like sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner. Go, and enjoy yourself.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire 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.

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C4-2

C4-2, the new movie from director James Cameron, is more than just a sequel to the explosive hit C4. It is a culmination of everything we've learned about action since Rambo first strapped on the headband. At last, Hollywood has realized Aldous Huxley's dream, set forth in his novel Brave New World, creating not a movie, but a "feelie": pure sensation, unencumbered by plot, character, or theme. I say it's about time.

C4, as any child can tell you, is plastic explosive. Ace bomb squad captain Jack Fist (Nicolas Cage) is attempting to defuse 4,000 pounds of it. A madman, calling himself Mephisto (Robert DeNiro), has wired up a prophylactic factory to explode. His nefarious plan is that without contraception, more people will be born for him to kill. We wonder: Should Jack cut the white wire or the black? The black and white are a sophisticated and original metaphor for Jack's dichotomous soul. Suffice it to say, he chooses wrong.

Framed for the ensuing population explosion, wanted by the LAPD, Jack is now a renegade cop. Since his partner was killed, the only person he can trust is the beautiful Heather McGillicutty, played with a convincing brogue by Jessica Alba, the finest actresses of her generation. She is a SWATINOBI, or Scientist With A Theory No One Believes In. Every computer around the world has received a mysterious email, from the Internet itself, which reads: "I think, therefore I kill."

Sally believes Mephisto has written a virus which has made the Internet into a self-aware artificial intelligence. And in three days, the Internet will cause evey computer in the world - laptops, digital watches, ipods - to explode.

C4-2 had a budget of nearly one billion dollars. Director Cameron worked in close cooperation with the Pentagon, shooting scenes in space, in North Korea, and at the bottom of the ocean. There's a spectacular chase down the Champs Elysee involving a motorcycle, a helicopter, and a rickshaw. The action is all real. The actors, on the other hand, are completely computer-generated facismiles, allowing them to hit notes previously out of reach. But C4-2, the most expensive movie ever made, is tanking at the box office. Apparently, audiences are confused about the hypen in the title. They think the movie is called C-42, and they're staying away in droves.

WFIU does not have a budget of a billion dollars. We rely on support from you, the listener, to provide the programs you like: Car Talk, All Things Considered, Ether Game, and reviews of theater, music, and movies. If you enjoy the work we do, please support WFIU by making a pledge. We're waiting for your call. For our part, we'll try to review better movies than C4-2.

C4-2 is not playing in Bloomington, or anywhere else for that matter, because it doesn't exist. Why not pledge your movie money for the week to WFIU? Reviewing fake movies for WFIU, this is Peter Noble-Kuchera.

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PROOF

It is said that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. So why is there never a genius around when you need one? The 1% is very rare, and few who have the big ideas are stable enough to do anything about them. That's where the ones who love these crazy people come in.

In Proof, Catherine (Gwyneth Paltrow) is sitting in a dark house, with her father, on her birthday. Robert (Anthony Hopkins), a brilliant and famous mathematician, went off his rocker at 27, about the age she is now. She's a lot like her dad; she's studying mathematics at Northwestern, and her mood is becoming unstable.

"How do you know if you're crazy?" She asks him.
"Because crazy people don't sit down and wonder if they're crazy."
"But you admit it."
"Ah, but that's because I'm dead."

Robert did, in fact, die of a brain aneurism, at 63, one week ago. The funeral is tomorrow. Hal (Jake Gyllenhaal), one of his grad students, has been allowed to root through the great man's office. There are 130 of the professor's notebooks up there, every page filled with tiny printing. The notebooks are probably worthless, but Hal hopes to find within their pages a last flicker of brilliance from the teacher he loved.

Hal is afraid that he's already past his prime as a mathematician; the great ones made their contributions by age 23. If he found something important in the notebooks, would he steal it? Catherine and Hal seem romantically suited, but she doesn't trust him -- she doesn't trust anything -- and it's her fear that's making her crazy.

The film's final important character is Claire (Hope Davis), Catherine's older sister. She is the picture of health; she has just been promoted and has gotten engaged. Her every conversation is one-sided prattling about the mundane details of her bourgeois life:

"You should try the conditioner I gave you. It has jojoba."
"What's that?"
"It makes your hair healthy."
"Hair is dead."
"All I know is it makes my hair feel good."
"By adding a chemical?"
"It's not a chemical, it's organic."
"Just because it's organic doesn't mean it's not a chemical. Ever hear of organic chemistry?"

In subtle ways, Claire makes Catherine feel crazy. Yet it was Catherine who gave up school and spent five years taking care of her father in that little house. Catherine was already in the shadow of her father's charisma and reputation. Imagine how difficult it must have been for her, trapped with him while his boundaries of self broke down. Maybe she's not as weak, or crazy, as we think.

I hope I've given you a sense of how fine the dialog is - funny, revealing, full of twists and turns. The screenplay was co-adapted by David Auburn, from his play. The film version of Proof was directed by John Madden, who doesn't impose a visual sense upon it, but who knows where to put the camera for maximum effect. Madden also directed Paltrow in Shakespeare in Love. In the intervening years, Paltrow has grown from bewitching to real actress; and now Madden has made a second movie as solid as the first.

Catch Proof, if you can, 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.

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BROKEN FLOWERS

When Bill Murray was younger, he convinced us that a slob could make it with a beautiful woman if he made her laugh and let her know that he appreciated her. By the time we get to Lost in Translation, we believe Murray could pick up a woman just by looking into her eyes. Some will see Broken Flowers and say that Murray is repeating himself; but in fact, his character is an entirely different branch of the tree - as if the young lothario aged without ever growing up.

Don Johnston (Murray) made a fortune in computers, but he doesn't care about his work or the money. His latest very young girlfriend, Sherry (Julie Delpy), is walking out on him. "What do you want out of life?" she demands. He opens his mouth, but only silence comes out. Poof, she's gone.

Then a bombshell lands on Don's doorstep: a letter, on pink stationery, allegedly from an old flame who claims she bore him a son. His circuits blown, Don flops on his leather couch, alone in the dark, unable to think, to decide, or even to move.

Don's Ethiopian next-door-neighbor Winston (Jeffrey Wright) has a busy family life that looks like a lot of fun. He strolls over to Don's, reads the letter, and becomes obsessed with it. The pink paper, the stamp, the manual typewriter it was written on -- all are clues. He prods Don into making a list of old girlfriends, then prints out an itinerary for Don to visit the women, one by one. What are friends for, if not to pester us out of stasis?

The first woman, Laura (Sharon Stone), is a faded widow who still offers warmth. Her daughter, Lolita (Alexis Dziena), has an interesting way of breaking the ice. When Don sees mother and daughter together, he sees the girl he knew, the woman she became, and his life as it might have been. The next three women, each of them memorable, are progressively angrier. The fifth is dead.

I haven't much enjoyed the other films I've seen by writer/director Jim Jarmusch. But this movie is something else. Much of its effect comes from the muted photography of Frederick Elms that draws power from the landscape. Elms and Jarmusch note poverty without going for pathos. The shambling musical score is great "searchin' music".

Bill Murray was once thought of only as a comic actor. In his first dramatic film, The Razor's Edge, both Murray and his character were searching for themselves. Can it be coincidence that he also played the title character in Scrooged, an updating of the Dickens story, about a man traveling through his life? Or that he played Phil, in Groundhog Day, forced to live the same day endlessly until he changed? For a man at a crossroads, everyday coincidences connect and take on meaning, as if the Universe were trying to tell him something. Maybe it is.

You might still be able to catch Broken Flowers 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.

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IN HER SHOES

Directors like Curtis Hanson, who appreciate a good screenplay and know what to do with it, are rare in modern Hollywood, where the writer is despised. Hanson started out as a screenwriter, and has retained his sense of structure and efficiency. The basis of his new movie, In Her Shoes, is a good adapted screenplay by Susannah Grant. Each scene has a single purpose, and they string together, if not exactly like pearls, at least like one of those colorful candy necklaces.

Cameron Diaz plays Maggie, the younger of two polar-opposite sisters. She has the kind of unfairly leggy, chesty body that many women resent. She's also a total tramp. The older sister, Rose (Toni Collette), is a workaholic lawyer with a freezer full of Häagen-Dazs and a closet full of designer shoes she buys on impulse but never wears.

After a failed drunken debauch in the bathroom at her high school reunion, Maggie washes up on Rose's couch. Rose doesn't find this behavior cute anymore, but she would never turn her sister out. Soon, Maggie gets up to her old tricks: wearing Rose's shoes, stealing her money, and dreaming instead of getting a job.

Rose has had a one-night stand with a partner in the law firm, and hopes he will at least become her first adult affair. Remember that Maggie, who has sex with every man in sight, is sleeping on the couch. You can guess where this is going. In the resulting war of words, the sisters inflict the kind of wounds that take years to heal, if ever. With her last two hundred ill-gotten dollars, on a long shot, Maggie catches a bus to Deerfield Beach, Florida, a pink haven for gray heads. Maybe her grandmother is still alive, and will put her up.

Ella (Shirley MacLaine) is very much alive, and her late entrance greatly deepens the film. She had to bury a daughter, which made her tough, but she's happy with her life. Her friends at the assisted living center warn her that Maggie is trouble. But if Ella can straighten out the vagabond blonde, she can restore the broken family's female line.

For her part, Rose may be slowing down enough to notice Simon (Mark Feurerstein), another guy from work, who has always liked her. He has a unique method of seduction, involving sushi and romance novels. (I wonder if it really works?)

Curtis Hanson started with clockwork thrillers, made a great noir, and a wonderful comedy. In addition to different genres, he's interested in different kinds of people. I saw In Her Shoes with an audience of college women; the movie should also appeal to the elderly. I'm thirty-four, and I liked it, too, though I found it exhausting. It's wise enough about families that it knocked some things loose inside me.

In Her Shoes is playing at Showplace West. This and other theater and music reviews can be found on the web at wfiu.indiana.edu. Reviewing movies for WFIU, this is Peter Noble-Kuchera.

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A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE

In David Cronenberg's film A History of Violence, teenaged Jack Stall (Ashton Holmes) defuses a bully by refusing to take a swing. Instead of returning the bully's insults, he insults himself, with far more dexterity than the bully's limited intelligence could muster. His riposte is like that paradox in martial arts: sometimes, if you don't present a target, a blow can't connect. Sometimes.

But the peaceful solution always seems so much more complicated than the alternative, and it sure doesn't feel as good to the reptile brain. A History of Violence concerns the whole Stall family, and how a violent act seduces and transforms it. You can take it as a tight, straightforward thriller, or take its darker meaning.

Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) is a gentle, soft-spoken man raising his family in a neat-as-a-pin Indiana town. Two mass murderers stroll into his diner, to kill some people for gas money. Tom tries to reason with them, but he and the customers are obviously going to die. He gets his hands on the gun and executes the killers like an old pro. One of them has his face blown half off.

They don't know it yet, but life, as the Stalls know it, is over. The story is picked up by the national news, drawing the attention of even worse people. Two more men walk into the diner. One of them, Carl Fogarty (Ed Harris), has a black suit and a dead gray eye. "This eye can still see one thing. It can see the guy who took it. It sees right through you -- Joey." He thinks Tom is really Joey Cusak, a killer involved with the Philadelphia mob, who disappeared twenty years ago.

Tom's wife, Edie (Maria Bello), at first stands by her man, but then starts to wonder: why is Tom so good at killing people? In a scene that's uncomfortable in every way, Edie, afraid of Tom (or is it Joey?), is running away from him, up the stairs, out of his life. Acting on instinct, he grabs her throat, trips her. Maybe he, and we, suspect that she has a taste for this; they do it right on the wooden staircase. Please, don't try this at home.

If that scene sounds clichéd, offensive, or downright ridiculous, Cronenberg gets away with it. It's in keeping with the theme and characters, and his actors are physical and honest. You see a drowning man clutching another swimmer. The question is: will Tom drown Edie in the process? In the morning, her back has large, red welts from the steps. Violence here has consequences, just like the real thing.

The screenplay, greatly improving upon the graphic novel of the same name, is two-thirds new work by newcomer Josh Olson and an un-credited Cronenberg. It follows Cronenberg's fascination with divided men to a conclusion that is intellectually satisfying, but that is outside the nuclear family and therefore less pressurized. I wish the movie had stayed in the claustrophobic little house, where sons seem born to take up their fathers' guns, where marriages die and might be born again. It would have been more thematically interesting if men kept arriving at the diner, to kill or be killed in endless supply.

Still, A History of Violence is mostly sharp angles. Like Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs, it inverts the meaning of the usual, bloody payoffs. The Greeks understood that you can wash your weapons in the sea. But first, somebody's going to die.

A History of Violence 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.

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FLIGHTPLAN

The Jodie Foster airline thriller Flightplan could have emerged in no other year than 2005. We want and need a movie that will engage our anxiety about terrorism and the chaos in Iraq. For forty-five minutes, it looks like we're going to get it. But this is 2005, Hollywood is just flirting, and Flightplan is a beautiful, terrible tease.

Kyle Pratt, Jodie Foster, lost her husband six weeks ago when he fell from the roof of their apartment building. She's flying home with her six-year-old daughter, Julia, on the world's largest plane, which Kyle helped design. There are two decks, four bathrooms, a lounge, and hundreds of seats. You could get lost in there. When Kyle wakes from her nap, Julia is missing.

Strangely, all the evidence says Julia was never on board. There have been hints that Kyle may not be right in the head. She's taking something. She had a conversation in the snow with her husband, but we're pretty sure there was only one set of footprints. Shots are set up ambiguously, so that other characters never get a clear view of Julia. Has Kyle been imagining her dead daughter?

Director Robert Schwentke and editor Randy Thom build tension with precision. The flight attendants try to keep a lid on Kyle's rising panic with calm body language and soothing, professional tones. Funny lines of dialogue pop up to let off some steam, just so it can build back stronger. The tiny world of the giant plane seems to rotate around Jodie Foster's terrified face -- classic paranoid cinema from the Hitchcock play book. The movie's real progenitor, though, is John McTiernan's Die Hard, a movie everyone involved must have studied. This is not a criticism.

And then, what's this? Kyle is suddenly confronting an Arab man named Ahmed, Assaf Cohen, who is sitting peacefully with three Arab friends. She is sure she's seen him before. She accuses him of kidnapping her daughter to hijack the plane. The passengers watch like a hanging jury. We are shocked: can this scene really be happening?

Imagine if the movie followed through with its ideas about paranoia. Has terror made all Arabs look alike to Kyle? What if she next terrorized the plane, with Ahmed as hostage? Try the implications of that on for size.

But the plot twist arrives on schedule, and the movie gets a 200cc syringe of stupid, right in the neck. For the twist to hold water, an impossibly long string of events would have had to go perfectly. The movie gentles down into convention, and those hard-nosed ideas fade to black.

Is this expecting too much of what is, after all, "just" a thriller? They played the political card; we didn't. Take a look at who lifts the luggage in the movie's last shot, and tell me you don't sense a calculating intelligence behind the camera that's dangerously disinterested in the world.

Flightplan 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.

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LORD OF WAR

The movie Lord of War starts with a bang. The camera travels down a conveyor belt, as in the opening shot of Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Except this American factory isn't making a candy bar; it's making a bullet. Through computer graphics and compositing, we follow the bullet into a crate. The crate is opened by Russian soldiers. Soon, the bullet winds up in the dumping grounds of the industrialized nations: in Africa. Lodged in the brain of a child.

The opening sequence tells you everything about the movie to follow. The sequence, and the movie, don't look convincing. But they're audacious -- and that's all too rare in American films these days. Here's a movie that takes you to Beirut, Bolivia, St. Barts, and Bosnia - and that's just the B's. Like the recent film The Constant Gardener, Lord of War travels down the corridors of corruption to show you the whole cynical system.

Nicolas Cage plays Yuri Orlov, a Ukranian immigrant whose family, in the 70's, posed as Jews to escape the Soviet Union. Judaism rubbed off on his father, who teaches, "Remember, Son, there is someone above you." His brother, Vitaly (Jared Leto), puts up a sign in the kitchen of the family restaurant that reads, "Beware of dog". "It's a reminder to beware of the dog in myself," Vitaly says.

Yuri isn't interested in the restaurant trade. "The problem with an honest buck," he says, "is the margins are too low; everybody's doing it." So he twists his brother's arm, and they run guns for such pretty customers as Andre Baptiste (Eamonn Walker). They'd sell to Osama bin Laden, but his checks bounce. Yuri isn't bothered when a village is massacred right in front of him with his own AK-47's.

African warlords pay the brothers off in "conflict diamonds," also called "blood diamonds". A Columbian dictator pays them in coke, and Vitali becomes an addict. "Why don't you stop?" Yuri demands. But the worse addict is Yuri. Addicts don't hold themselves responsible; their choices make themselves.

Lord of War is a fussy, writerly movie. The satire abrades, but doesn't break the skin. It was made by Andrew Niccol. Though he did a nice job directing his own Gattaca, his work is probably best interpreted by others. What Lord of War needed was a director like David Mamet, who can set elements in tense relationship, like a Japanese tea ceremony.

I gave a positive review to the movie Crash, also by a writer who shouldn't be directing. I'll also give a nod to Lord of War. These movies, while creaky, at least have conscience and ambition. I'll go for mediocre art that has this much to say. As the poet Robert Browning said: "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?"

Lord of War 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.

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MURDERBALL

Murderball is the title of a scrappy new documentary. It is also the original name of a sport: wheelchair rugby. "I guess they changed the name because it wasn't marketable," muses a player. Is the movie marketable? Do you want to see quadriplegics bashing armored wheelchairs into each other? Yes, you do. Because Murderball isn't about the sport, but about the men who play it.

The best wheelchair rugby player in the world used to be Joe Soares. He looks like Robert Duvall when he screams, which is most of the time. Then he got old and was cut from the American team. He became captain of the Candian team for revenge. Murderball begins as Canada, under Soares, defeats the top-ranked Americans. "How does it feel to betray your country?" someone asks him.

An entire wall of Soares's house is covered by custom shelving filled with his trophies. He constantly browbeats his brainy, unathletic son Robert. Robert admits, "I hate dusting my dad's trophies." He has to climb a ladder to do it.

The poster child of the American team is Mark Zupan. He is 200 pounds of tattoo-covered testosterone. "Don't want to hit a guy in a wheelchair?" he says. "Go ahead, take a swing. I'll hit you back." His curvy, able-bodied girlfriend used to work in a morgue. What does she miss most about her job? In a perfect deadpan, she says, "The people."

As a teenager, Zupan got drunk and passed out in the bed of his best friend's truck. Mark Igoe, also drunk, didn't know his buddy was back there. Igoe plowed the truck into an embankment, and Zupan flew into the canal, hanging on to a branch for 14 hours with a broken neck. Zupan and Igoe aren't the kind of guys who talk about their feelings over a beer. They don't speak for ten years.

All the players open their lives to the camera, and knock down myths like dominoes. "Quadriplegic" doesn't necessarily mean you can't move your arms and legs. Bob Lujano, for example, who has no legs at all and arms that end just past the elbow, drives a car and plays poker with the dexterity of a surgeon. How does a man with no hands catch a rugby ball? With glue. No, really - with glue. These men even share details of their sex lives, which have as much variation as anyone not in a wheelchair.

Henry Alex Rubin and Dana Adam Shapiro, the directors, always seem to be at the right place and time. When Joe Soares has a heart attack, the camera is in the operating room. Afterwards, he is a different person - a better one. Now watch the faces of Zupan and Igoe as they reunite. People change right before our eyes in Murderball. They adapt. Zupan sums it up when he says, "I've done more in a wheelchair than I ever did able-bodied."

Murderball is playing in a limited run at Showplace East. Also of note this week: the Manhattan Short Festival plays Saturday at the Buskirk Chumley Theater. Bloomington is among the cities that will vote for the winner, who will then be given everything necessary to make a feature film. This and other theater and music reviews are available online at wfiu.indiana.edu. Reviewing movies for WFIU, this is Peter Noble-Kuchera.

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THE CONSTANT GARDENER

Ralph Fiennes is a chilly actor, well-cast in Schindler's List and The English Patient. As Justin Quayle in the new movie The Constant Gardener, he doesn't let you close. But afterwards, when you reflect on the film, you may remember Justin's disarming decency when he first flirts with his future wife; or much later, the soft strength of his shoulders as they choose a name for their baby. It's on reflection that Justin gets to you.

Justin is a meticulously groomed mid-level diplomat with the British Foreign Service. He is finishing a boring speech when a woman in the audience stands up. "What map was Britain using when it invaded Iraq?" she demands. "We blew it up because we were running out of oil." That's Tessa (Rachel Weisz), and he's hooked. They tumble joyfully into bed. "I feel safe with you," she says. He will soon be examining her charred body in a morgue.

For now, Justin takes his new wife to Kenya. At a party, Tessa marches right up to Kenny Curtiss (Gerard McSorley). Kenny's company is running clinical trials on a new AIDS drug. Tessa smells a rat: if they are testing for AIDS, why are they also testing for TB for free? Drug companies don't do something for nothing.

Justin sees, but doesn't see. When he drives down the street, hungry children call out, "White man, roll down your window!" He sees a plane drop a few bags of rice to thousands of starving people. Another plane drops useless drugs, long past their expiration dates, as a tax write-off for the drug companies. For Africa, these are not just a drop in the bucket, but a drop in a bucket with no bottom. It takes Tessa's murder to shock Justin into awareness.

Was Tessa just using Justin to get at his powerful contacts? Was she having an affair with Dr. Bluhm (Hubert Koundé), with whom she was found dead? All Justin knows is that his wife was so full of secrets, he can't even grieve. Eventually, the movie reveals all of Tessa's secrets. Not necessary. For Justin, understanding Africa, and Tessa, are one.

If the thriller plot is average, the movie is anything but. Most studio-financed films are shot on sterile sound stages. But in director Fernando Meirelles's previous film, City of God, Rio itself seemed to be writing the story, like a chef cooking right at your table. Here, Meirelles wants to show you the real Africa so badly it makes his camera twitch.

Meirelles doesn't penetrate the Englishness of John le Carré's novel, but he knows the anger. Africa's need, exploited for corporate greed, should stir you up but good. But the real target of The Constant Gardener is indifference. Africa has no resources to plunder, so it's not on our radar. Here's a movie with more on its mind than the price of gas.

The Constant Gardener 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.

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MOOLAADÉ

Africa conjures in us images of famine, wars, and AIDS. Moolaadé, a Senegalese film from 2004, shows an Africa not seen in our news. It takes place in a tidy village in Burkina Faso, with buildings the color of citrus. Sounds of bird song, laughter, and millet being pounded mingle like a warm breeze. These are people with nothing, who have everything.

Drums in the distance warn that something is wrong. Six little girls have escaped a rite called "purification". This is a sanitized term for female genital mutilation. When mutilated, girls are left unable to experience sexual pleasure for the rest of their lives. Many bleed to death. The practice is self-justified because it is tradition, and is supposedly proscribed by Islam. Yet on the radio, a Grand Imam decries it. As a woman in my audience put it, there are times when cultural relativism goes out the window.

Four of the escaped girls run to Collé (Fatoumata Coulibaly), one of three wives of a village elder. She herself was "purified". As a result, two of her children died in childbirth. Her surviving daughter, Amasatou (Salimata Traoré), was born by risky caesarian. Collé refused her mutilation. Now Amasatou, because she is "unpurified," even though she is a golden-skinned beauty, has slim prospects for marriage. She hopes the French-educated Doucouré, the son of the village chief, will defy his father and marry her.

Collé cannot resist the frightened faces of the tiny girls. She speaks the magical word of protection: "moolaadé". It means something like "asylum" in Pular, but it has a power far beyond that. Legend says that an enormous anthill, grown next to a 150-year-old mosque, sprang up over the grave of a king, struck dead when he disobeyed a moolaadé. As pressures in the village mount, the men will confiscate the women's radios and pile them up in front of the mosque to be burned. A shot frames the mosque, the radios, and the anthill in an image of tradition and modernity in tension. Something has to give.

If any of this sounds depressing, it doesn't play that way. The director is the eighty-two-year-old Ousmane Sembene (sim-BEN), the father of sub-Saharan cinema. His film has a joyful spirit. He captures the energy of men at council, how younger wives relate to the Elder wife, and how the genders interact across the great divide. These scenes are so simple, they may seem easy to pull off, but they are not - only a master filmmaker can evoke life in this way. It is only towards the climax that Sembene brings the full force of his argument to bear. Even then, he gives you the minimum graphic detail you need for understanding and empathy.

The final image, of the village's new television aerial, is ambiguous. Though the modern world has spurred a woman's revolution which is ending a horror of the traditional world, it also brings all the problems that come with it. Moolaadé holds hope that a world can be forged that is better than both.

Moolaadé has been playing at The Ryder Film Festival; the DVD will be out in a few months. This and other theater and music reviews are available online at wfiu.indiana.edu. Reviewing movies for WFIU, this is Peter Noble-Kuchera.

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GRIZZLY MAN

Timothy Treadwell is the subject of Werner Herzog's new documentary, Grizzly Man. Treadwell spent 13 summers running free as a child with the grizzlies on the Alaskan peninsula, in what he called "The Grizzly Maze," videotaping the bears and himself. Late in the final season, an old bear - named by the park rangers bear #141 - couldn't find enough salmon. So he ate Treadwell and his girlfriend instead. Whether Treadwell got what he deserved is what you're going to be talking about as you exit this fascinating film.

Treadwell was a handsome and athletic, but otherwise unremarkable, child of a blue-collar, Midwestern family. He moved to California and became a blonde surfer dude with a phony past. But then he invented a new persona: protector of the grizzlies. "I will die for them," he says, "but not by their claws and paws." Herzog points out that the bears live on a federally protected reserve, and didn't need saving. But Treadwell was a man on a mission, following orders he gave himself.

Treadwell got a charge from the danger, but deeply believed the animals could never hurt him if he was brave and stood his ground. We wonder: how could he be so naïve? At one point, he is talking to us about a surly bear he calls The Grinch. "If I turn around too much, she'll bite me," he says, and sure enough, The Grinch is creeping up behind him. "Don't do that," Treadwell admonishes the bear, in his reedy, John Denver voice. "I love you. I love you." He is scolding a child. The cruelty of the wild didn't fit his idealized worldview.

Treadwell seems at times to be hosting a children's show about bears. He does multiple takes, perfecting his improvised script. But alone in the wilderness, Treadwell begins to turn to his camera as a confessional. He tearfully describes a bankrupt life of drugs and drinking, redeemed by the bears. He complains of his failures with women, protesting that he is not gay while gesturing like a drag queen. His listing emotions topple into paranoid rages against a God he doesn't believe in, and against the people's world, where he never found a moment's peace.

"I have seen this madness before on a film set," Herzog narrates. He is thinking of Klaus Kinsky, the lunatic star of five of Herzog's fiction films. Herzog took Kinsky up the Amazon, and used his rampages to photograph a fragmenting soul laid bare. Herzog always employs his cool intelligence to blur the line between fiction and fact, reality and madness. He does this, he says, to pass through chaos into what he calls "ecstatic truth". In this moving study of a tortured man, he has certainly found truth - and the meaning in Tim Treadwell's death.

Grizzly Man is playing at Castleton Arts in Indianapolis. Consider making the drive; it may not come to Bloomington. Reviewing movies for WFIU, this is Peter Noble-Kuchera.

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THE ISLAND

HOLLYWOOD – The movie The Island, of Hollywood, California, died Thursday at the multiplex, of natural causes. It was four weeks old. It is survived by director Michael Bay and actors Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson. Viewing is every two hours between now and Thursday. After that, you’ll have to pay your respects on DVD.

The summer blockbuster The Island cost $120 million to make, and returned only $30 million. That puts it on the list of the top ten biggest disasters in Hollywood history. But it’s far from the champion. That would be The Adventures of Pluto Nash, which cost $100 million and made $4.

Poor Bay and company are also being sued by Robert Fiveson, who directed an obscure 1979 movie called Parts: The Clonus Horror. Cloning has been a science fiction staple since A.E. Van Vogt's 1945 novel "The World of Null-A". But The Island’s similarity to Parts is no coincidence. Both are about people who don’t know they’re clones, grown for spare parts. They are pacified by the lie that they will soon go to a land where everyone is happy. The hero finds out about life on the outside by a butterfly in Parts, a moth in The Island. He goes on the run with a female clone. An evil doctor sends hit men after him to destroy the evidence. Oops.

The irony is that The Island is Michael Bay’s best movie. Those who think he’s the Antichrist will argue: that’s not saying much. Bay is a commercial director with no sense of kinetic poetry, except for freeway demolition. But his brutalist montage has a certain disoriented, rhythmic punch.

The Island is rife with missed opportunities for real science fiction. In fifteen years, LA will be lucky to pay its water bill, let alone build monorails – never a good idea with earthquakes around. But at 136 minutes, The Island is long and satisfying, with a good-looking, poured-concrete-and-glass production design out of The Sharper Image catalog.

Ewan McGregor’s Lincoln Six Echo fills out his tailored jumpsuit; he’s as sleek as a seal. Scarlett Johansson is Jordan Two Delta, a moon-faced, perky-breasted, Swedish sundae. His sincerity, and her youth, are well chosen. Lincoln is really only eight years old, Jordan is nine, but in adult bodies with surging hormones. You want to see them kiss, because they’ll be inventing it.

What is the lesson of The Island? The heads that aren’t rolling are being scratched. Husband and wife mega-producing team Walter Parkes and Laurie MacDonald blame the title, the marketing, and lack of star power. But screenwriter William Goldman famously said that it doesn’t matter what a movie’s called, what it’s about, or who’s in it. There is only one law: Nobody knows anything. Caprice sank The Island, simple as that.

The Island has been playing at Showplace East, but you should check the listings to see if it’s still there. This and other theater and music reviews are available online at wfiu.indiana.edu. Reviewing movies for WFIU, this is Peter Noble-Kuchera.

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MARCH OF THE PENGUINS

Though March of the Penguins is released by National Geographic Films, it is not a scientific documentary. It is a story, and it makes a case. It argues that the Emperor Penguin’s strategy for survival is not merely an example of instinct, but of love. Whether you will buy what the movie is selling reveals how you think about animals.

Antarctica is the coldest, darkest, driest, flattest, and one of the harshest places on Earth. Penguins, slippery little blubber tubes, have evolved beautifully for life in its freezing ocean. But every year, they must leave the water to breed.

On tiny legs, like tottering, determined marshmallows, they walk day and night for a week, for up to a hundred miles, to the breeding grounds they have used for thousands of years. The ice is thicker there, so when the thaws come, the babies won’t fall into the water. Here, the penguins will mate, and form an intense pair bond that will last for eight grueling months.

Every species must choose reproductive quantity or quality. A penguin female lays a single egg. In doing so, she loses a third of her body weight. She must eat soon or starve. She carefully transfers the egg, which rests on top of her claws beneath a fold of fat, to the father. Sometimes an egg is dropped. The cold claims the little life in seconds.

It is now endless night, eighty below zero, with hundred mile-per-hour winds. The fathers huddle in a single boiling superorganism, taking turns on the inside. When the mothers finally return, there is a scene where a penguin prods her dead chick, crying out in what sounds like grief. But sometimes her mouth is closed; the sound has been inserted in post production. When the bereft mother tries to steal a chick, it’s not clear that this is the same penguin. I don’t trust the journalistic integrity of this scene, and others that personify the birds with emotion. But as storytelling, it is skillful and affecting.

This is an excellent movie for children, unlike Pooh’s Heffalump Movie and Madagascar, which are pap. But I thought about the scene in Madagascar where a group of penguins hijacks a cruise ship and sails it to the South Pole. They take one look around, and say, “This sucks.” If these “lower animals” could reason, why wouldn’t they move? I lived in Minnesota for eleven years. I often asked the same thing of my neighbors.

It is arrogance to believe that humans are evolution’s highest achievement. We, too, are animals, with less choice than we like to admit. Do penguins do what they do out of love? Maybe the real question is, what is love? Isn’t it partly about survival? Yes, it’s Darwinism, but if readiness to die for your child isn’t love, what is?

March of the Penguins 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.

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ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW

The title of Miranda July's film, her first, is Me and You and Everyone We Know. That's all you need to know, you don't need my review, just go see it. The movie, like most poetry, is not to be interrogated, but felt. If you are open to it, it seeks to look right out of the screen and deep inside you, like a lover. Talking about it feels like "kiss and tell".

Christine, played by July, makes art on her camcorder. She zooms in on photographs. She talks into the mic, changing voices to create yearning conversations between the people in the picture. She dreams of showing her videotapes in a gallery show about digital life.

We meet Richard, John Hawkes, a department store shoe salesman freshly separated from his wife. As a grand, dumb gesture to his kids, he douses his hand in lighter fluid and sets it on fire, not realizing he will be burned. He's not crazy; he's just a little too inspired for his own good.

Richard's co-worker Andrew, Brad William Henke, is flirting dangerously with a pair of sexually precocious, underage girls. He tapes explicit notes to them on the window of his apartment. He is making a mistake -- but he is seen with sympathy. The suggestion is that in an isolated, digital culture, computers and cell phones are that apartment window. To get rid of someone, you flip a switch.

Eventually, Christine and Richard meet. He helps her with a pair of shoes. He explains that he is not allowed to touch her foot. He notices a welt on her ankle. "You probably think you deserve the pain," he says. "But you don't. Life is actually better than that."

Christine and Richard find themselves walking down the sidewalk together, floating like people in a Richard Linklater film. In two blocks they will part forever. Christine, her eyes lit by imagination and hope, says, "That intersection is us dying together of old age." Too close; Richard says something cruel to push her back. Later, she videotapes her feet. On one shoe, in magic marker, she's written "You"; on the other, "Me." Her feet gently touch, recoil, and -- very tentatively -- touch again.

The recent movies Crash and Closer were concerned with the violence of misguided encounters. July's film is better - tender, more oblique. We are accustomed to movies about eros: sexual desire. Here is a rare film about agape: spiritual love. Sex is seen as a means, a fumbling, confusing bridge. What we really long to do is sleep together like babies.

Me and You and Everyone We Know is the best film of the year. It is saturated with Miranda July's warm, lyrical presence. I'm a little hesitant to tell you how much I'm in love with it. But if July can risk embarrassment, so will I. To paraphrase Martin Buber: it pains me to talk about this movie in the third person.

Me and You and Everyone We Know 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.

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THE DEVIL'S REJECTS

In 2000, punk/hard rock hybrid Rob Zombie surprised everybody and made a movie. His House of 1,000 Corpses was a throwback to 70's psycho-shock cinema, a sadistic vision of hell on Earth so disreputable that Universal Pictures stuck it in a dark vault for three years. Lion's Gate Films liberated the movie, God love 'em, and it made them a boatload of money.

The Devil's Rejects, Zombie's follow up, is of a different genre, but it's just as remorseless. It's the kind of movie that makes the legion of decency lock its daughters away from the film's procreative vitality. It's not really a sequel, though it contains some of the same characters, made less lurid. Now they have become a family of all-American mass murderers.

There's Otto, with his long blonde hair hanging straight down, a black beard, and messianic eyes. Bill Moseley plays him with Charles Manson in mind. But he has none of Manson's confusion, and is chillingly articulate about his mission: he's Satan's right hand man. Otto's sister Baby, played by Zombie's wife Sheri Moon Zombie, is a hillbilly flower child with a laugh like broken glass.

There's also Captain Spaulding, an evil clown played with relish by Sid Haig; and Mother Firefly, Leslie Easterbrook, who looks like a used Faye Dunaway. Tiny, a hulking, childlike burn victim, is the deus ex machina.

In the pre-credits sequence, Sheriff Wydell, William Forsythe, leads a raid on their West Texas murder house. The Firefly Family - or as the news calls them, the Devil's Rejects - are prepared for that. Otto and Baby gun their way to freedom. Sheriff Wydell's idea of frontier justice is to catch the family, and do unto them exactly what they've done unto others.

A room in a fleabag hotel becomes an abattoir. Two couples have committed the mortal sin of being in Otto and Baby's way. They huddle in terror, appealing to reason, but they are mice toyed with by cats. The scene can raise your gorge, or at least your indignation. You may not be interested that the acting and directing are brilliant.

Zombie was only a year old for Bonnie and Clyde. He was three for Easy Rider and the murder of Sharon Tate. The Devil's Rejects is elegiac for that decade, and the music and movies that followed. But here we are in 2005 with plenty left to protest -- not least that corporate ownership has etherized the movies to irrelevance. A truly radical film has an impossible job finding an audience when the midnight movie distribution channel has dried up. Is it for you? You know who you are. The Fantastic Four and The Dukes of Hazard make you feel dirty. For you, The Devil's Rejects is a cleansing shower, scalding hot.

The Devil's Rejects just opened at Showplace East, but check the listings to see if it's been run out of town. This and other theater and music reviews are available online at wfiu.indiana.edu. Reviewing movies for WFIU, this is Peter Noble-Kuchera.

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CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY

Roald Dahl is the most popular children's author of all time, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is his greatest book. The book delights kids, and scares them a little bit. Hollywood has adapted it before, with Gene Wilder as the candyman Willy Wonka. Wilder was Groucho and Harpo in the same body -- a foxy, unhinged performance that made a wheezing movie become unpredictable.

Tim Burton's postmodern version stars his usual leading man, Johnny Depp, as Willy. They have preserved the letter of the book, but their spirit borders on savage. There should be a sign outside the theater which says "You must be at least this tall to take this ride". And yet I can see a certain kind of child stumbling on this movie and feeling that somebody really understands him. He'll see himself not in Charlie, who is shoved aside, but in Willy.

Pure-hearted poor boy Charlie Bucket, Freddie Highmore from Finding Neverland, is one of five children to find a golden ticket in his candy bar. The ticket admits them to a one-day tour of the fabulous candy factory, led by Willy himself. The other children are beastly creatures. Their parents come along, so we see the bad parenting that created them, and the horrid people they will become.

The factory is vast, twisty funhouse that even Willy doesn't fully understand or control. The tour starts in the mixing room, where a chocolate waterfall churns a chocolate river. Everything is edible, even the Astroturf. Like any factory, if you touch the wrong thing, it can kill you.

Agustus Gloop, the obese German boy, tries to drink the river, falls in, and gets sucked up a tube. Is he made into fudge? Does the spoiled brat, Veruca Salt, burn up in the incinerator? The book and the movie are deliciously coy. Each room is a Venus fly trap, baited with the children's character flaws - and this Willy Wonka is out for revenge.

Willie is a ghoulish recluse who reads from cue cards so he won't say anything too bizarre. He wears surgical gloves, like his Dentist father, to avoid contact with people. Here's Dr. Wonka, played by horror great Christopher Lee: "This is a lollipop. It should be called cavities on a stick." He straps his son in headgear like a medieval torture device, stretching the boy's mouth in a permanent rictus. What a quintessentially Burton hero. Think of The Joker's wound-as-smile, and Jack Skellington's carved pumpkin grin.

Willy is an artist trapped inside a factory. When you see all the assembly line imagery, and consider the movie's last shot, it's easy to see that factory as Hollywood. Tim Burton has made a Halloween chocolate with a razorblade inside, and got it past the studio squirrels. In life, as in art, Willy Wonka has had the last laugh.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory 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.

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HOWL'S MOVING CASTLE

Japanese animation director Hayao Miyazaki is the foremost master of his art, the idol of the Disney animators. He is 64, but he still draws tens of thousands of frames himself. In Japan, where animation is taken very seriously, Miyazaki's Spirited Away is the top grossing film -- ever. They know something we don't.

Miyazaki's latest, Howl's Moving Castle, is a fairy tale of aging bodies and youthful spirits. Or is it the other way around? Its hero is Sophie, voiced in the English dub by Jean Simmons. She mends hats in a tiny room of her mother's house. Outside is a fantastic copper-roofed Parisian city, with steam-driven Victorian flying machines. But her window shows only the thick smoke of passing trains. She wears plain dresses with severe collars. She's maybe seventeen, going on seventy.

Sophie has a run-in with the Witch of the Waste, who turns her into a 90 year-old woman. If that happened to you or me, we would scream from the pain. But Sophie's upper lip is as stiff as her back.

Her search for a cure leads her to the eponymous castle. It's a sight out of Jacek Yerka: a great grouper walking on four spindly legs, encrusted like barnacles with metal domes, smokestacks, and buttresses. There's even a little cottage stuck to it.

Its captain is the wizard Howl, silkily voiced by Christian Bale. Long, golden hair surrounds effeminate features dangling with jewelry. He is unflappable, but also narcissistic, spoiled -- a Peter Pan. When he accidentally dyes his hair red, he wails, "What's the point in living if I can't be beautiful?" He calls forth the spirits of darkness and begins dissolving into green goo. But Sophie, an old soul with a knack for seeing through illusion, knows a depressive snit when she sees one. "Such drama," she says.

Sometimes a director's late movies are summary works. Here are Haku's scales, Ashitaka's enchanted arm, and the sky chase from Laputa. A scarecrow is a spinning Totoro, complete with umbrella. If you have seen Miyazaki's earlier work, the images collocate and leave you dizzy. Is Howl's Moving Castle a stand alone masterpiece like Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro? "Masterpiece" is a creation of the taste makers, and has nothing to do with what an artist is trying to accomplish, unless he's angling for immortality -- and that's a will-'o-the-wisp.

Movie theater attendance is at its lowest since 1983. We're staying home because the movies stink. In fact, dozens of good movies are released every year, but only in big cities. The rest of us get hot dogs every night. If you live in Bloomington, you'll have to drive 70 miles to see Howl's Moving Castle on film. Is any Hajj more worth half a tank of gas?

Howl's Moving Castle has been playing at Castleton Arts in Indianapolis, but you should check the listings to see if it's still there. This and other theater and music reviews are available online at wfiu.indiana.edu. Reviewing movies for WFIU, this is Peter Noble-Kuchera.

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THE WAR OF THE WORLDS

George Herbert Wells published The War of the Worlds in 1898. It was about impregnable machines from space razing London. Britons were worried about Germany's growing military power. The book sold by the millions.

40 Years later, Orson Wells adapted it for radio as a Halloween prank. The Great Depression was just ending, and World War II was coming. Part of the show sounded just like real people dying on the air. Over a million people thought the broadcast was real, and panicked. Police seized all the scripts.

Guess who owns the only extant original copy? Stephen Spielberg. When he decided to film a remake for 2005, his first obstacle was that there's no need for one. So he uses a handful of symbols from 9/11 to stir our anxieties - ash, panic, a falling jumbo jet. The contemporary graft doesn't "take" on the old fashioned story. But I guess if one thing could put terrorism into perspective, it's aliens destroying the world.

Tom Cruise plays Ray Ferrier, a selfish New Jersey crane operator. His kids, a teenager named Robbie (Justin Chatwin), and a little girl, Rachel (Dakota Fanning), are staying with him for the weekend. He sort of wants to be a dad sometimes, but the kids are having none of it. He's soon going to have to figure it out all at once.

There is a storm; wind blows the wrong direction. Everything electrical dies - cell phones, watches, cars. Ray walks to where lightning struck 26 times. It has left a mysterious crater. A giant machine on three legs rises from the hole and aims heat rays at people, turning them into puffs of ash. The street buckles, a church splits in two, and a lot of it looks real.

Ray commandeers a working car and drives the kids towards his ex-wife in Boston. I steadily lost interest in the hokey family's fate. But their point of view affords surreal glimpses of civilization's collapse. The complacent are going to be shocked that this is not Independence Day, but Saving Private Ryan. This alien Final Solution is Spielberg's fifth movie troubled by his artistic nemesis, Nazi Germany - the shadow of his own doubt.

Spielberg has spent his career playing to audiences better than anyone - a great entertainer, but not an artist. Now he is a powerful mogul and studio chief of DreamWorks. I am certain that he is trying to become an artist, but the inertia of commerce and fear of failing to connect with an audience are holding him back. His anguished film A.I. showed a Spielberg at war with himself. An intelligent, visionary movie was clawed back into a sentimental fairy tale. Now, The War of the Worlds is filled with images and scenes from previous Spielberg movies. He is looking back. But he is rummaging through an attic filled with toys.

Spielberg told Wired magazine that the older he gets, the less he's interested in what people think. That's a hopeful sign. In The War of the Worlds, in a bizarre scene, Tom Cruise is plucked by a tripod. He wriggles free of a colon, is squirted out a sphincter, and deposited into one of two suspiciously egg-shaped cages hanging under the belly of the thing. It can now be said that Spielberg has got a pair.

That scene, and what the aliens want form the people they don't disintegrate, are Spielberg flexing a muscle atrophied since Jaws, used again on Minority Report: a wicked sense of humor. That's it - the breadcrumb trail that can lead him out of the forest. May he have the courage to follow it.

The War of the Worlds 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.

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HIGH TENSION

When people say they like horror movies, they usually mean "scary" movies or "thrillers": a rollercoaster ride. True horror films are different. There's nothing safe about them, and the images can hang with you for life. They are about repugnance. They pin you to the board like an insect in a collection.

High Tension is a French film from 2003 that is now released in the States, dubbed into English. Lion's Gate Films, the Canadian company that released the film, is the world's largest independent. They were built largely by acquiring horror movies that no one else wanted, like the ineluctable Open Water and the overrated Saw.

Marie, played by Cécile de France, is a college student. She's visiting Alex (Maïwenn Le Besco), a girlfriend, at the house of Alex's parents. To reach the house, you have to cut through a cornfield and drive five kilometers down a tractor trail. It's coal black at night.

Marie is in the upstairs bedroom, lost in erotic fantasies about Alex. An old pickup pulls up to the house. A man in a mechanic's uniform and a ball cap, with a bloated, hard gut, comes to the door, and begins implacably slaughtering the whole family - including a four year-old boy. This scene has some power, owing a debt to In Cold Blood.

But is this what you thought you would see when you bought a ticket to a movie called High Tension? The title is a bait-and-switch, symptomatic of what's wrong here. "High Revulsion" would better have prepared you for the scene in the house.

For what purpose have I been asked to witness the murder of a child? In Cold Blood meant something, as did another recent horror film, The Passion of the Christ. High Tension devolves into a clichéd cat and mouse slasher. Marie chases the killer to free Alex, who has been kidnapped. She huddles in the last bathroom stall while the killer checks the others, one by one? You've got to be kidding me. I say devolves, because suspense is of a lower order than horror. A final plot twist is so dumb, it torpedoes any lingering credibility. By the time we get to the ending, an homage to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, there is a little heat, but we no longer feel it.

It's not everyone's cup of Sturm und Drang, but looking into the abyss deepens the experience of being alive. This path in art is the sublime: overwhelming you with awe and pity at the terrible power of the universe. When something like High Tension seems to have conviction, but then turns out to be cynical, amateur hour dreck, I feel betrayed -- like Virgil guided me half way across the river Styx, then flipped me the bird, jumped overboard, and left me standing there.

High Tension has been playing at Showplace West, but you