Danimal-7

This enjoyable little yarn is classic Twilight Zone. What I enjoy most about it is the dialogue and its use of foreshadowing.

"That's the going rate today, Mr. Farwell. It may change tomorrow; I haven't checked the market." This is a beautiful little piece of double irony, intended ironically by the speaker but also unwittingly reflecting the real problem he doesn't know about. By itself, it makes the whole third act worthwhile. Even if you've already figured out what's coming, as I had, you don't expect one of the characters to pronounce his own sentence.

The only thing I would change would be Farwell's murder of De Cruz, because it partly spares De Cruz the consequences of his own actions. Every one of those gold bars weighs a good fifteen or twenty pounds. By extorting gold from Farwell, De Cruz is adding to his own burden and reducing his chance of survival. Leaving Farwell to die of thirst when he runs out of gold to buy water with, only to have De Cruz collapse because he's carrying twice his share and has sold half his water - now that would have been a true character-is-destiny moment.

I haven't read the screenplay for King Arthur, but I'll bet it's far better than the piece of crap Antoine Fuqua put on the screen. It couldn't have been much worse.

If it had been done right, this would have been a compelling story of how a group of Roman soldiers, loyal and devoted to their Empire, gradually realize that the nation they loved is dead and adopt a new country for their home. No other version of the Camelot tale, at least that I've seen, approaches from this direction. It was a very good idea, and it deserved a better fate.

But Fuqua didn't understand that this process of British naturalization was the most important part of the material. Once Fuqua is done with it, Arthur is turned into a bore, Lancelot into a whiner, and Guinevere into a . . . I don't know what Guinevere was intended to be, but I know it takes considerable ineptitude to make a largely unclothed Keira Knightley look this unattractive.

We hear a great deal about "fighting for freedom," but as usual, only the fighting gets an examination, never the freedom. No thought is put into what freedom means or what impact it has on the lives of the characters. If they had said they were fighting for monarchy, not a single frame of film would have had to be changed.

Rating: *½ out of ****.

Recommendation: TV fare for hardcore D&D fans only.

The Crusades have lost their old glow of moral rightness, but not their unique sense of high adventure. We may put the name "crusading" to either a fanatic or a hero, but never to a stick-in-the-mud. For good or ill, a Crusader plays for high stakes.

The Kingdom of Heaven concerns one Crusader, Balion of Ibelin, who comes to the Holy Land seeking forgiveness for his sins, and those of his lost wife. Once in Jerusalem, he encounters a delicately balanced political situation. Baldwin of Jerusalem, the pious, leprous Crusader king, and his loyal marshal Tiberias, seek to keep peace with their Muslim neighbors while keeping control of their hard-won holy cities. Another Christian faction, led by the Templars Guy of Lusignan and Reynald of Chatillon, motivated by both religious zeal and simple greed, seek war with the Muslims. Looming over both factions is Saladin, the formidable Muslim sultan of Egypt and Syria. The dying King Baldwin walks the tightrope between Saladin and the Templars for as long as he can, but he cannot keep it up forever, and when he fails the consequences will be tragic.

Despite some deep flaws, Kingdom of Heaven is worth watching. First, it approximates the historical facts pretty closely. Balion, Guy, Reynald, Baldwin, Saladin, and Baldwin's sister Sibylla all really existed, and their behavior roughly resembles that of their historical counterparts.

Edward Norton's performance as King Baldwin is magnificent. He is denied the most versatile tool of the actor, his face, spending the entire movie with his leprosy-ravaged features concealed behind a steel mask. Yet he still conveys a fine leader who embodies all the best aspects of the Christianity of his era, and very few of the worst. In Baldwin's Christianity appears the simple, patient faith that enabled him, and many less exalted than he, to bear burdens of pain and degradation that most of us in the modern age cannot even imagine, without becoming sour or embittered. The ever-presence of physical weakness, discomfort, and imminent death strengthens his moral standards, where many in the modern era would use them as excuses for doing wrong. Baldwin is really the heart of the movie, and one of Kingdom of Heaven's chief problems is that it takes too long to get him on stage, and loses its moral center when he exits. Balion, the ostensible main character, is nowhere near as interesting.

Like most Ridley Scott movies, Kingdom of Heaven has a lot of visual impact. The colors are beautiful and rich, with the magnificent reds and yellows of the Crusader states contrasting vividly with the somber blues and greens of Balion's native France. The battle scenes have a great sense of scope and spectacle. In the post-Saving Private Ryan movie world, one may legitimately question Scott's decision to make the battles spectacular rather than horrific; the emphasis is always on the action, never on the agonizing and tragic consequences. But, question the worthiness of Scott's objectives all you want, the fact remains that he achieved the grandeur he was aiming for. Less defensible is the choppiness of Scott's close combat scenes, which often end up looking like an R-rated network war game on the verge of lagging.

The visual display, sweep of history, and compelling story of Baldwin make up for a number of sins. The beginning and end of the story are vacuous, amounting to little more than a thin frame for the battle scenes. The final act centering around the siege of Jerusalem, fails dramatically (though not visually) for two reasons. First, Balion's decision to defend the city to save the lives of the inhabitants is logically absurd. By his age's rules of warfare, a surrendering city's population was to be spared, while populations that resisted were to be slaughtered, and so Balion's defense of the city endangers the people's lives, rather than saving them. Second is Balion's speech to his troops justifying their battle against the Muslims. It is a good speech, eminently reasonable, but also an absurd anachronism. Balion's arguments are clearly aimed at our age, not his own, knocking down doubts about the rightness of denying Muslims access to a city that was once Muslim. We today have such doubts; hardly any 12th-century Christian would have even considered the question of right and justice for the "infidels." Even granting that Balion is a rare exception, he would never have voiced his thoughts publicly in this way.

The final production also shows signs of timidity. In a movie that spends so much time on intimate, gory details of every minor skirmish, and whose central story is of how Christianity lost Jerusalem to Muslim rule, what reason can there be for not showing the battle of the Horns of Hattin? Saladin is one of the central characters of the movie, yet his outstanding military achievement is hustled off screen, hinted at but never displayed. And yet the entire premise of the movie depends on this single battle. This choice gives rise to the ugly suspicion that the producers were simply afraid to present Western audiences in this age of the "Global War on Terror" a picture of Muslims winning a decisive battle against Christians, and the historical facts be damned.

The man who directed this movie also directed Gladiator. Gladiator is much superior, featuring a much more interesting hero and villain, and even more effective and brutal scenes of battle. If you only see one of Scott's period pieces, by all means see Gladiator. But, despite all its imperfections, Kingdom of Heaven is a worthy effort.

Rating: **½ Recommendation: Historical epic fans should rent it off the new release shelf; others wait for TV.

Sea captain Bart Paxton has a thankless task from the King of England. Henry Morgan, erstwhile ally of the crown, has set up a kingdom on Tortuga, whose buccaneers are robbing English ships at will and strangling the island of Jamaica. The Royal Navy can't attack Tortuga without igniting a new war with Spain, so the King is sending Paxton as a secret privateer to put an end to Morgan's depredations. And Meg, the young hellion who has stowed away on Paxton's ship, isn't making his job any easier.

Unlike its predecessor The Black Swan or its contemporary Morgan the Pirate, Pirates of Tortuga casts Henry Morgan as a villain, the correct and natural role for that treacherous, rapacious, and brilliant man. The one difficulty is that the historical Captain Morgan died rich, contented, and even respectable, a most unsatisfying end for a movie villain. The movie deals with this problem straightforwardly, by constructing a sort of alternate history that shows what might have happened if Morgan had not chosen to answer King Charles's summons to England after his raid on Panama in 1671, with its very real attendant risk of imprisonment and execution, but instead had followed the course many of his fellow buccaneers did by raiding and looting indiscriminately. It would have been well within Morgan's power to set up the "buccaneer kingdom" on Tortuga that the movie shows.

The plot is bare-bones, but serviceable: Paxton finds Morgan, Paxton poses as partner of Morgan to spy out Morgan's fortress, Meg flirts with the governor of Jamaica, but ultimately decides her heart truly lies with Paxton, Paxton defeats Morgan. But the denouement is a major disappointment: unimaginative, perfunctory, and implausible at once, and moreover, it fails to tie up Morgan's end of the story.

Bart Paxton's part is well-written, a potentially dashing commander with real brains and imagination, but Ken Scott is unable to bring anything to the role but heroic blandness. Letitia Roman is certainly fetching as Meg, especially in her sailor's togs, and her bare-legged wriggling in Paxton's bed is a clear sign of the sexual revolution's tsunami roaring toward the beach of the Hayes Code. But looking beyond her physical charms, Meg's personality really has nothing to recommend her: she's not smart, brave, loyal, honest, or even charming.

Robert Stephens' Henry Morgan is interesting, but ultimately ineffective. Stephens plays Morgan as a full-blown alcoholic, complete with the shakes. His Morgan is greedy (his eyes almost bug out when Paxton presents him with a chest full of guineas) and cruel, but credulous and unintelligent. He is fun to hate, as a good villain should be, but he lacks the frisson of menace that emanated from Rathbone's Levasseur or Newton's and Heston's Long John Silver.

The supporting cast comes to the rescue, particularly Dave King as PeeWee and Stanley Adams as Montbars. King is appealing, dashing, and sometimes very funny, while Adams' Montbars is pure, unbridled appetite, fat and greedy and bullying, a perfect pirate.

Visually, the movie is outstanding. The shots of the sailing ships are sublime, the colors are sumptuous, and the islands and cliffs are magnificent. The movie is fun to watch, and while it won't stay with you long, it avoids the gratuitous absurdity of many pirate movies.

Rating: ** ½ out of ****.

Recommendation: Worth a rental after it leaves the new release shelves.

This movie is named "Troy." It is not named "The Iliad." Troy was a real place, and the Greeks really did besiege it and destroy it. The Iliad is a work of fiction written some centuries after the fall of Troy by a guy named Homer, who guessed at what happened based on the chants and oral histories handed down to him. The movie Troy is not an attempt to recreate the Iliad word for word; it is an attempt to show the kind of real events that might have given rise to the myths retold in the Iliad So it is no crime that the movie leaves out much of the Iliad. The problem is that the new inventions that substitute for the Iliad's version often didn't work. To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, Troy is both good and original, but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.

To review the good part: as in the Iliad, Hector is the most noble and impressive character in the story. In fact, he's even nobler here than in the Iliad, as he faces Achilles down directly, while Homer's Hector understandably but ingloriously flees the Greek champion for as long as he can. Eric Bana does the role justice, showing his devotion to his family and his city, and there is a streak of true Greek tragedy in how his love for the one destroys the other.

On paper, Brad Pitt looks like a disastrous choice to play Achilles, so I'm pleased to say he did a fine job. He does very well in his scene with Priam, and he manages to convey with his tears over the body of Hector that he has finally realized that the man he has killed and whose corpse he has desecrated was a better man than he. Also, the movie comes up with a fairly imaginative explanation of how Achilles got his reputation for invulnerability to mortal weapons.

Peter O'Toole, meanwhile, gives a radically different performance from his customary acting, investing Priam with far more dignity and majesty than he usually gets. It's delightful to see O'Toole still willing to strike out in a new direction at his age.

I'm sorry, but that's it for the good part. The bad choices are overwhelming.

To start with, making Agamemnon into a villain was a perfectly defensible decision, but making him into an incompetent was not. It is impossible to believe that a man like Brian Cox's Agamemnon could have united Greece despite lacking not only scruple but also courage, foresight, diplomatic skill, and military prowess. The pious complaints that kings don't fight, but let their underlings die for them is an almost charmingly clueless modernism: from ancient Greece to the Middle Ages, personal skill at arms and tactical mastery were the qualities most demanded of a king, and kings who lacked those qualities were usually deposed and killed by kings who had them.

The second major failure is that the movie wants us to like Achilles, and I left the theater wishing that Briseis had cut his throat when she had the chance. Then Hector would have lived, and possibly Troy would have been saved. And what, precisely, would have been lost by Achilles' death? A talented killer whose only motivation for killing is so that generations untold will sing of his butcheries. Who is worse: Agamemnon, who slaughters people who did him no harm in order to unite warring nations under his rule, or Achilles, who also slaughters people who did him no harm, but does it only to make a name for himself in the epics? Achilles gives a high-falutin' final speech to Briseis, saying "you brought me peace," but what exactly did she do to bring him "peace" that the woman he slept with in the opening scene didn't do too?

It would be easier to like Achilles if there were at least some justice to the Greeks' cause; if, for instance, Paris had been the sniveling coward he was in the original text, or had kidnapped Helen, and if Menelaus had really been in love with her. But in this version, Paris is doing Helen a favor, Menelaus is fighting not for love of his wife but for his wounded pride, and Paris bravely (if incompetently) challenges Menelaus to single combat. Who can possibly want the Greeks to win?

Rating: **1/2 out of ****.

Recommendation: See it on TV.

This movie is a ghastly abomination, the movie-world equivalent of desecrating a corpse. You don't need to see the Frankenheimer original (which was pretty good, if not the classic it's sometimes made out to be) to see that this movie is garbage. Most obscenely, The Manchurian Candidate is routinely praised as "smart," when in fact it is a 129-minute nonstop insult to the viewer's intellect, as well as to whatever artistic sensibilities he or she has.

The story follows Denzel Washington's Bennett Marco, who is kidnapped along with his entire squad of U.S. infantrymen during the first Gulf War, a remarkable trick somehow pulled off single-handedly by his unarmed guide, who is evil because he works for a private contractor called Manchurian Global. Manchurian Global then uses Advanced Technology to brainwash them all, including the squad leader Sgt. Raymond Shaw, into machines who will kill their own comrades – or consent to be killed by them – without hesitation. Seventeen years later, Shaw's mother maneuvers him into running for Vice-President of the United States, his sole qualification being his fictitious war heroism, which is based on false memories implanted in him and his squad during the brainwashing. Manchurian Global leaves Marco alive, apparently because they want their evil plot foiled, which Marco proceeds to do.

The idiocies that ensue are mind-boggling. I almost tore out my hair screaming WHY?

1. WHY does Senator Jordan advertise his knowledge of the coup plot to the plotters, while doing nothing to protect himself?

2. WHY does Raymond Shaw drown the Senator with his bare hands in broad daylight (had Jordan been so much as carrying a pocket pistol, he could have defended himself)?

3. WHY does Jocelyne wade up to her father's murderer so he can drown her too, instead of calling 911 for help?

4. WHY does Manchurian bother implanting chips in Marco's and Shaw's shoulders, when it can control them equally well without the chips?

5. WHY doesn't Marco pull out the drainpipe trap to recover the chip he's dropped?

6. WHY isn't Marco arrested and imprisoned when he slugs his interrogator?

7. WHY doesn't Shaw press charges against Marco when Marco bites him?

8. WHY am I watching this movie?

The ninth "why" is, "why does anyone consider this movie intelligent?" Doubtless, because it is transparently aimed at the crew of nitwits and fanatics that have run most of the U.S. government since 2001. For supporters of the American right wing, movies like this are a minor irritant at most. But for its opponents (and I am certainly one), this film is an infuriating example of the intellectual feebleness of the art world's resistance against the sectarian, paranoid, and authoritarian currents sweeping America.

Rating: A million trillion zeros!

Recommendation: What do you mean, the original is better? Hara-kiri would be better!

Andrew Niccol is the greatest screenwriter of our generation. He thinks deeply, writes intelligently, and is blessed with an incredibly fertile imagination. Above all he has passion and isn't afraid to show it, when most writers today hide their real feelings, if they have any, behind cute, cynical inanities. When his screenplays end up in the hands of good directors, like Weir in The Truman Show or Spielberg in The Terminal, the result is a masterpiece. But, regrettably, Niccol feels driven to be a director himself, a trade for which he has no talent at all. In 2002's Simone, his hand on the helm hobbled his own brilliant script, reducing a potential all-time classic to an ordinary good movie. And now, directing his own script again for Lord of War, Niccol falls flat on his face.

The story: If you've got money, Yuri Orlov can sell you guns. Or tanks, or helicopters, or whatever weapons you need. It's his job, and he's good at it. He sells African dictators the weapons they use to slaughter their own people. He sells arms to terrorists for their mass murder jobs (though not to Osama bin Laden, who is always bouncing checks). For some reason, although he will sell guns to anyone, good people never end up buying his wares. He uses his blood money to buy a beautiful wife, a nice home, and to support his drug-addicted brother Vitaly. The development of the plot is essentially a moral version of the Limbo: how low can Yuri go?

This is not one of Niccol's best scripts. It suffers badly from the worst kind of political naiveté, the kind that imagines itself to be sophisticated, making profound insights like "somebody makes money off guns," while cluelessly confusing Liberia's HIV+ rate with Zimbabwe's, attributing non-existent arrest powers to Interpol, and equating the single misguided Bush v. Gore decision to the rampant every-election cheating of a Third World despotism.

But the script still had potential to be good, as it studies Yuri's growing self-loathing, and his suspicion that his brother Vitaly's worthlessness stems from his shame for Yuri's way of life and his own failure to do anything about it. The best and most tragic scene, where Vitaly finally does take action both to stop and to save his brother Yuri, represents what the movie could have achieved. A better director than Niccol would have focused on these character-driven moments and ditched the naive political nonsense.

But alas, thanks to Niccol's directing, character languishes in the background while sloppy political thinking stands is spotlighted. The essential problem is that nobody in the movie, Yuri least of all, honestly examines gun-running as a profession. Yuri tries once to justify himself by saying that he sells people the tools they need to defend themselves. In Yuri's case, that happens not to be true. His clients, or at least the ones we are shown, use their new-bought weapons to massacre political opponents, wipe out ethnic minorities, and otherwise commit mass murder, not for self-defense. But the movie never addresses the fact that lack of guns, and the arms embargoes that Agent Valentine castigates Yuri for violating, also can facilitate mass murder. For a famous recent example, an international arms embargo against Yugoslavia in the 1990s left Bosnian Muslims and Croats defenseless against Serbian nationalists bent on genocide, and the resulting carnage went on for years before the international community decided to do anything about it. Yuri's sin is his choice of customers, not his choice of merchandise.

This basic error percolates. As the movie points out, private gun suppliers like Yuri are small potatoes on the world stage. The five members of the UN Security Council sell far more weapons than all the world's private dealers combined. What is not addressed is whether these nations behave like Yuri, arming any murderous psychotic with ready cash, or whether they can legitimately say that they are helping people defend themselves. It is again simply taken for granted that all arms dealing is evil.

The movie loses the opportunity to examine the ethics of arms dealing through the underused character of Simeon Weisz. Weisz has some kind of ideological basis for his arms dealing, but it's not clear what it is. Weisz believes that "Bullets change governments far surer than votes" – an absurd claim, as in fact challenger candidates win far more often than armed rebels do. Eventually Weisz ends up selling guns to the enemies of Baptiste, the African dictator that Yuri is arming (or I think he does, anyway; Baptiste denies it but is probably lying). But there is no clue whether Weisz has chosen to arm Baptiste's enemies because he is morally opposed to Baptiste's brutal rule, or merely because Yuri has beaten him to Baptiste's pocketbook.

However, Niccol's direction has other flaws than self-indulgent and sloppy political moralizing. He has also taken an above-average actor, Nicolas Cage, and wrung a bad performance out of him. Cage is monotonous and shallow, with none of his trademark appealing vulnerability. I blame Niccol not only because Cage is normally better than this, but because the supporting players who get less directorial attention are mostly doing good jobs. Eammon Walker is commendable as the ruthless Andre Baptiste, Sr., and Ethan Hawke projects considerable frustration in the role of Agent Valentine. I feel his pain, for this movie is an intensely frustrating experience, despite occasional flashes of character insight.

Rating: ** out of ****.

Recommendation: TV fare for a VERY slow night.

This is the second film adaptation of George Orwell's classic satire on the Russian Revolution. For those of you who slept through grade school, the story tells how the animals of the Manor Farm throw out their human oppressors, rename their home Animal Farm, and try to create a new society where they will live equally and prosperously without exploitation. Instead, everything rapidly goes wrong.

Unfortunately, this film does not adequately convey the warning message of Orwell's superb novel. In the book, the corruption of the animals' revolution is subtle. Until the very end, they do not understand what is happening to them, so they are powerless to resist. In the movie, the pigs are far more open about their power seizure, and the other animals far more aware of what is happening, and thus the lack of resistance to the pigs is hard to excuse. The movie says from the start exactly who the villains are going to be, so the viewer is not allowed to share the animals' initial view of Napoleon and Snowball as heroes, or their reluctance to believe that their heroes are betraying them.

The most startling departure from the book is Jessie the dog's new role as narrator. Orwell views much of his story through the eyes of Clover the mare, and he clearly sympathizes most with the pessimism of Benjamin the donkey. In this movie, Benjamin's role is greatly diminished and Clover is nearly eliminated to clear the set for Jessie. Jessie is a triumph of Jim Henson's Creature Shop, a beautiful, lifelike creation, superbly voiced by Julia Ormond, and she could have become the basis for a bold new interpretation of Orwell's story. Unfortunately, Jessie's narration is confusing; she delivers it entirely in retrospective, and it is hard to tell what she knew at the time and what she realized later. She ends up giving the impression that she saw the revolution being betrayed from the outset, and leaves us wondering why she didn't do anything about it. The dramatic potential of Jessie's feelings toward her puppies as they are corrupted into NKVD-like bully boys is unmined; after Napoleon denies her the right to see her offspring, she never mentions them again.

Director Stephenson often forgets that this is the animals' story. He gives the humans much more camera time than they deserve. Orwell's first chapter, a masterpiece of economy, is bloated into about fifteen minutes of screen time by the irrelevant doings of the humans. Stephenson also wastes precious time on Farmer Frederick, who should have been written out of the script the minute the decision was made to exclude Frederick's attack on Animal Farm.

Aside from the endearing Jessie, the film gets its greatest boost from Ian Holm's rendition of Squealer. Squealer here is so sinister that he often eclipses Napoleon. The creature design is good, but it is Holm's silky, menacing voice that really makes the character.

The ending of the movie ultimately sinks it. Neither this film, nor its 1950s predecessor, has the courage to stick with Orwell's spiritually crushing conclusion. The earlier animated version merely repeated the revolution, with no explanation of how the same fatal course will be avoided. This version is even worse, simply destroying Napoleon's reign by a deus ex machina device. Orwell's supreme contribution to the world was his power to face unpleasant facts - a power that this movie lacks.

Rating: ** out of ****.

Recommendation: Don't hesitate to miss it.

Let it never be said that Edward Zwick doesn't know how to make beautiful movies. Glory, Courage Under Fire, and The Siege are all magnificent to look at, and The Last Samurai is the most gorgeous of them all. It is also, by far, the worst story of the four.

Tom Cruise plays Algren, an American Army officer tortured by guilt over his role in the slaughter of Indians and seething with bitterness toward his former commander, Custer. He speaks disparagingly of his comrades who died for `modern conveniences.' So he feels conflicted when he is hired by a Japanese railroad baron named Omura to train the Japanese Emperor's army to crush a rebellion by traditionalist samurai who want to block Japan's Westernizing path to modernity.

Now, a word or two about those `modern conveniences' that Algren disparages. Those conveniences include living past the age of one (which about half the Western population owes to modern vaccines and plumbing), being able to read (a luxury of the church and nobility until modern schools came along), and the radical concept of constitutional democracy, which may have been conceived of in Greece but not successfully practiced until modern times. These modern conveniences are worth fighting for, and it is no credit to Algren - or to Katsumoto, the leader of the samurai rebels - that they fail to see their worth.

The man who does see their worth is Omura, who is made out as a villain but who ought to be the hero of the film. He is represented as being a coward and a fool on the battlefield, but in fact he does the single bravest thing of anybody in the movie. Katsumoto enters the imperial council chamber wearing his swords, defying the Emperor's law forbidding these weapons. Omura bars Katsumoto's way, standing unarmed before a master swordsman who could cut his head from his shoulders with one well-practiced motion, and says, `We are a nation of laws.' Omura stands in the shoes of many Japanese who stood up for law against Japan's feudal reactionaries, and happily he wins, instead of being defeated and murdered like many of the militarists' opponents in the 1920s and 1930s1.

The message Zwick wants to get across is simple; the samurai lived for honor, therefore they were good. Westerners are dishonorable, and any Japanese who wants to Westernize his country is a despicable sellout. This is simply an ignorant idealization of the samurai. There was much to admire about the followers of bushido: allowing for individual variation, they were disciplined and brave beyond anyone else the human species has yet produced, and were taught to make and appreciate art in a manner that their Western counterparts, the medieval knights, would have scorned as effeminate. But like all human beings, the samurai were far from perfect. They were hidebound traditionalists who froze Japanese society in stasis for hundreds of years. They may have protected the common folk from bandits, but they were equally capable of testing a new sword's blade by cutting down a passing townsman. They were xenophobic to a degree even the most ignorant and bigoted redneck would be hard-pressed to match.

Akira Kurosawa, who understood the history of the samurai, saw through the simple-minded myth that Zwick has swallowed, as he showed through his character Kikuchiyo's speech in The Seven Samurai: `But then who made them [the Japanese farmers] such beasts? You did! You samurai did it! You burn their villages! Destroy their farms! Steal their food! Force them to labor! Take their women! And kill them if they resist!' Kurosawa's samurai are people, real individuals with both good and bad in their natures. Zwick's samurai are simply symbols, non-human ideals to which his guilt-ridden hero aspires.

The Last Samurai is an excellent example of what George Orwell called `transferred nationalism.' Orwell saw that after someone like Zwick has been stripped of attachment to his own country, he `still feels the need for a Fatherland, and it is natural to look for one somewhere abroad. Having found it, he can wallow unrestrainedly in exactly those emotions from which he believes that he has emancipated himself. God, the King, the Empire, the Union Jack -- all the overthrown idols can reappear under different names, and because they are not recognized for what they are they can be worshiped with a good conscience. . . . [Transferred nationalism] makes it possible for him to be much more nationalistic -- more vulgar, more silly, more malignant, more dishonest -- than he could ever be on behalf of his native country, or any unit of which he had real knowledge.' This is exactly what has happened with Zwick. His knowledge of American history has made it impossible for him to portray the U.S. cavalry or the cowboys as pure-hearted superheroes, so he has simply transplanted those traits into the samurai, and because he does not know much about the samurai he can avoid seeing that they do not live up to these ideals. Kurosawa, with a real knowledge of bushido and its influence on Japanese culture, could never have done something so silly.

But despite its naivete, The Last Samurai is worth watching. The cinematography by John Toll is breathtaking. The acting is very good all around. Anyone who was watching Tom Cruise with an open mind saw that he did an outstanding job of shedding his 20th-century persona. Masato Harada is excellent as Omura despite Zwick's butchering of his character; Shin Koyamada is heart-wrenching as the young samurai Nobutada, and Hiroyuki Sanada does great work as the gruff old warrior Ujio. There is a magnificent score by Hans Zimmer, which Zwick uses to excellent effect (there is a sequence in the final battle where Zwick times his cuts to the beat of the music, which may be the single best use of a film score that I have ever seen). As a story and a lesson, The Last Samurai is poor; as just plain cinema, it's terrific.

Rating: **½ out of ****.

Recommendation: Watch it, just don't believe it.

Fellowship of the Ring was far and away the best of the three Lord of the Rings movies, and the Academy snubbed it. The Two Towers was far less impressive, but that was understandable since the book of the Two Towers is the weakest of the original trilogy, and Jackson saved one of its best episodes, the confrontation between the hobbits and Shelob, for the third film. The third film rebounds, as it ought to have given that the third book is the best, but it does not reach the level reached by the first movie, much less by the book. Overall, Jackson did a good job, none of the movies is bad, and he deserves recognition for his work and the risks he took. It's just hard not to feel disappointed, given the huge promise of the first movie, to find that the trilogy as a whole is quite good but nowhere near great.

Certainly Jackson achieved a very impressive feat in constructing battle scenes that are even more exciting and terrifying than the excellent ones in the previous two movies. The assault of Grond on the gate of Minas Tirith, the wild charge of the Rohirrim, the confrontation between Eowyn and the Lord of the Nazgul, and the desperate clash with the Oliphaunts are probably the finest fantasy warfare sequences ever filmed, managing to be intimate and detailed while also giving a sense of the overall strategic picture of the battle. Kurosawa would have been hard put to do better.

Too, Jackson pulled a major coup by constructing a version of the climactic scene at Mount Doom that will surprise the readers of the original book without disappointing them – and it would have been very easy to go wrong at this point. And, Jackson manages a few times to do what he did with astonishing regularity in The Fellowship of the Ring: spot the dramatic moments and give them even more impact on film than they have on the printed page. His version of the scenes in the Paths of the Dead and the lighting of the beacons of Gondor are masterful.

But, Jackson has lost his eye for character; indeed, he has lost it so disastrously that I have to wonder whether his master portraits of Boromir and Gandalf in the first film were anything more than luck. This is clearest in his revolting representation of Denethor. Jackson's Denethor is a cretin: weak, craven, stupid, self-pitying, insensitive, spiteful, utterly devoid of redeeming features. No man cut from this cloth could have lasted a month as Steward of Gondor, much less raised two of the boldest warriors of Minas Tirith or pitted his will against the Dark Lord Sauron for control of a Palantir. The true story of Denethor, which Jackson misunderstood completely, is not of the crumbling of a coward, but what is infinitely more tragic, the crumbling of a brave man.

Meanwhile, Gandalf has receded into Old Testament prophet mode, and seems to have no emotions of his own whatsoever. Granted, even in the books Gandalf seems more distant and unapproachable after his reappearance, but he still had the old irritability and humor underneath. Arwen, after being used so well in the first movie, again becomes an annoying hindrance to the plot. Gimli, at least, has improved somewhat since The Two Towers; he is still being used as comic relief, but the humor is now more of a deliberately self-deprecating kind than the humiliating pratfall jokes he had to suffer through last time.

Also, I have to complain about some of the things that Jackson left out. I will concede that he was right to omit two of my favorite parts: the meeting with Ghan-buri-Ghan and the Scouring of the Shire; time was limited, and something had to be cut. (he could have omitted the Paths of the Dead too, if he'd had to, although that would have been a shame considering how well he did that sequence). But the confrontation between Gandalf and the Witch-King of Angmar at the ruins of the Gate could have been done in thirty seconds, and the parley with the Mouth of Sauron would have required less than one minute to deliver one of the dramatic high points of the whole book.

That Minas Tirith, Mount Doom, and the Grey Havens are magnificently done almost goes without saying. Art direction has been the one consistent strong point throughout this whole trilogy.

In all, The Return of the King is a good movie. Certainly far worse ones have won Oscars. I just hope that the award doesn't lead to people imagining that this is the best movie of the trilogy.

Rating: *** out of ****.

Recommendation: Go see it on a big screen. But watch The Fellowship of the Ring first.

I'm not going to comment on the whole movie, since I only saw the last three or four hours of it. But those hours present a point that most of the viewers (and perhaps Stephen King and his adapters themselves) miss.

There is a story, much beloved by Christians (and dog lovers), of a man walking along with his dog, his faithful companion of many years. The man and his dog come to a brilliant gate of pearl with a golden road leading inside, and a shining winged figure who tells the man that this is Heaven. But when the man starts to enter, he is told that no pets are allowed. The man turns away and continues down a different path. Some time later, he comes to a simple green pasture with a humble old hayseed farmer who invites the man in for a drink. The dog, too, is welcomed and refreshed. The man asks the farmer where he is, and is told that this is Heaven. The pearl-gated place back down the road is Hell, and it serves the useful purpose of screening out those unpleasant people who would willingly abandon their friends.

Many of the viewers of The Stand imagine that the three people who complete the journey to Las Vegas to be martyred are admirable. If you pay attention though, you will see that before they ever arrive in Las Vegas, all three of them fail the test that the man in the dog story passes.

Simone is a delightfully funny movie that nevertheless gives us a good look at the life of its main character, movie director Viktor Taransky, played by veteran Al Pacino. Taransky has trouble handling his actors; for a man who puts `the work' above all else, catering to the petty demands of actresses who want Jacuzzis eighty paces from their trailers is stultifying. After Taransky's star, Nicola Anders (played by a delightful Winona Ryder) storms off the set of his latest movie, Taransky replaces her with a digitally rendered artificial actress provided to him by a dying admirer of his work. The programmed woman, named Simone, is a blonde with more glamour than beauty, and wears quantities of lip gloss that have been found fatal in laboratory animals. But she is a massive hit with audiences, and Taransky is tested to the limit to keep her identity as a piece of software secret. And even though Simone, docile as only a computer program can be, urges audiences to focus on Taransky's work, the work remains irrelevant to the audiences. It's Simone they love.

That the movie strains credibility is an understatement. Director-screenwriter Andre Niccol does not come close to dealing with all the problems arising from keeping a digital star's real identity secret. But the key point is, the problems that we do see Taransky solve, he solves so cleverly that we can believe that he has found off-screen solutions for the off-screen difficulties. Just as any heist movie depends on making the audience complicit with the thieves, Simone depends on making the audience complicit with Viktor Taransky's fraud. The story pulls this off without a hitch. When Taransky deflects what looks like certain exposure with a glib explanation of why Simone's studio contains nothing but a computer suite, I waved my arms and chanted, `Go Viktor! Go Viktor!'

Nicola Anders' reappearance is crucial, showing how Simone's success has cost Taransky the thing that matters most to him: his ability to do his work. Having taken some acting lessons and drawn on her own experiences and emotions, Nicola gives Taransky a screen test that wows him, and he realizes that Nicola should play the lead role in Taransky's new movie. Simone could never have surprised Taransky in this way; while the cyber-star does everything he tells her to, she has nothing of her own to contribute. But Taransky cannot cast Nicola in the lead; audience demand requires Simone to get the starring role.

Regrettably, a number of flaws keep this superb story from being a genuine classic. First, the photography is frequently awful. I don't know whether to blame the cinematographer or the director for the weird filters that must have been used to make the footage look this bad. Second, most of the actors, including Pacino, are not doing their best work, and that's usually a sign of bad direction. Only Winona Ryder is at the top of her form. The denouement flubs badly; not only is it predictable, but it requires the Taransky who met all of the problems engendered by Simone's presence with intelligence and imagination to meet the problems engendered by her absence with no moxie at all. And even to a cyber-illiterate like myself, the computer technology looks ridiculous (Taransky uses a 5¼' disk drive, and he has one of those keyboards with keys labeled with words like `Loop,' `Tears,' `Hologram' and probably `Self-Destruct'). Diagnosis: Niccol wrote an outstanding script that he should not have tried to direct.

And finally, I must really, seriously object to the untruth that the movie's publicity machine fed us, that the title character is merely a digital creation. The title character is played by the very much flesh-and-blood Rachel Roberts. Would that someone had taken to heart Taransky's daughter's last line: `We're fine with fake, as long as you don't lie about it.'

Rating: ***½ out of ****.

Recommendation: See it on video or DVD at your earliest opportunity.

There are some movies where stupid things happen in order to give us thrills, chills, or tears. Swashbuckler is not that kind of movie. This is a movie that is just stupid, without any payoff gained by being stupid.

You want to know how it's stupid? Try lines like, `I have one master; his name is Darkness.' Then, to make the line even worse, don't deliver it in the over-the-top, cackling manner of someone who might be insane enough to really believe it, but instead in Peter Boyle's flat Pennsylvania accent.

The movie's idea of excitement is to match larger than life heroes not against larger than life villains, but against useless stumble bums who could have been defeated by any jerk with a pocket knife. The movie's idea of romance is simply to display Genevieve Bujold's body, with no emotional exchange of any kind going on between her and Robert Shaw. The movie's idea of humor is to have Robert Shaw and James Earl Jones sit on rocks and tell each other bad limericks.

The portrayal of women in Hollywood action movies has not been an uninterrupted forward progression, as Genevieve Bujold proves here. Her principal job is to be held hostage by the incompetent villains. She is given a sword a few times, but she is useless with it. If Bujold had taken on Maureen O'Hara in any of her roles from The Black Swan, At Sword's Point, or Against All Flags, O'Hara would have taken about five seconds to run her through.

It is a crying shame that there are so few good pirate movies out there. The 1990 and 1950 versions of Treasure Island are about the best there are. Pirates of the Caribbean and Cutthroat Island are silly, but genuinely fun. Beyond that, even the so-called classics of the genre have little to recommend them: The Black Swan has a revolting hero, and Captain Blood is rendered bearable not by Errol Flynn's most wooden performance, but by the energetic villainy of Basil Rathbone. But even The Black Swan and Captain Blood look great compared to Swashbuckler.

`A popcorn action flick.' This is the way some people describe The Seven Samurai, and outraged critics will then rush to its defense. But it needs no defense. It is no insult to call a movie a popcorn action flick; many of the greatest movies ever made are popcorn action flicks, and a well-made popcorn action flick deserves more praise than a shoddily made art house film. And while some patience is required, The Seven Samurai is very much capable of being enjoyed simply as a popcorn action flick. But if you care to invest some effort, it can be enjoyed in many other ways: as a love story, as a character study, as a thoughtful commentary on warfare, and as an exploration of civilian-military relations.

In war-torn 16th-century Japan, a band of forty outlaws plunders a farming village. Unable to survive another such attack, the village farmers try to hire samurai to defend them against the bandits. Their problem: they have nothing to offer the samurai but the rice that they grow. Their solution? Find hungry samurai.

They manage to find Kambai Shimada, a grizzled, unflappable veteran. Kambai in turn locates six more samurai. The ones we get to know the best are Katsushiro, a devoted young samurai liable to serious bouts of hero-worship, and Kikuchiyo, a blustering, demonically driven impostor who poses as a samurai.

Director Akira Kurosawa was challenging his own country's conventions on the portrayal of the samurai. He deliberately includes, for contrast as much as anything else, one samurai who closely matches the Japanese samurai archetype: Kyuzo, who concentrates on the art of the sword to the exclusion of everything else, and lives in a state of tranquility and calm in the Zen tradition. The other samurai are quite different. They can be naïve and can weep heartbrokenly for lost friends, like Katsushiro. They can run away from battle and learn from the experience instead of wasting their lives uselessly in a lost cause, like Kambai. They can overeat and become fat. They can show compassion for human weakness. They can have their heads turned by beautiful women. They can be human and still be warriors.

Psychologically, the most interesting samurai is the impostor, Kikuchiyo. In an impassioned monologue, Kikuchiyo reveals a dramatic combination of conflicting emotions: contempt for the farmers, but also compassion for them, and then envy for the samurai, mixed with rage against them.

Fighting off the bandits is a cooperative effort; the farmers are as much involved as the samurai are. Indeed, for all the heroic and perilous service that Kambai does with his sword and bow, it is clear that the most valuable work he does is his planning for the defense and his direction of the spear-wielding farmers in battle. Few military movies are so successful in showing that battles are won by brains as much as by swords and guns. The movie follows Kambai as he successfully applies one principle after another of the military art: channel the enemy's approach, sacrifice inessentials to guard what is vital, break the enemy's force into manageable chunks and destroy them piecemeal.

One issue that always arises when discussing The Seven Samurai is how it compares to its western retelling, The Magnificent Seven. Unfortunately, it is de rigeur for fans of one film to dismiss the other as inferior, instead of recognizing them both as masterful, but different, stories. The Seven Samurai does not develop all seven samurai characters as thoroughly as The Magnificent Seven develops its principals. Also, the Magnificent Seven, true to the Hitchcock maxim that a movie is only as good as its villain, provides us with a doozy of a bad guy in Eli Wallach's Calvera, while The Seven Samurai's ronin leader is an anemic antagonist. On the other hand, Sturges cannot match Kurosawa for the intricacy and detail of the military planning or the depth of the tense relationship between the village and its defenders. Nor could the energy of all the performances in The Magnificent Seven combined equal Toshiro Mifune's fiery dynamism. You may prefer one movie or the other, but you certainly should not miss either one.

Rating: ***1/2 out of ****.

Recommendation: Should not be missed; it belongs in every cinephile's library.

Contrary to some reports, Pirates of the Caribbean is not a movie about a band of pirates seeking to raise an Aztec curse by some mumbo-jumbo ritual, or the heroic rescue of a beautiful maiden who has fallen into the cursed pirates' hands. Oh yes, the cursed pirates, the Aztec ritual, the rescue and all that rubbish are IN the movie. But, fortunately, they're not what the movie is about. Pirates of the Caribbean is really about white canvas sails and creaking cedar hulls, gleaming cutlasses and flintlock pistols, sailors' tattoos and golden earrings, sun-spattered islets and towering Caribbean cliffs, moonlit seas and driving storms. It is not about any particular pirates, but about the aura of pirates, their atmosphere. And if you love the pirate aura, as I do, you'll forgive the picture the preposterousness that it wears on its sleeve.

The best thing about Pirates of the Caribbean is that the actors and the crew show real love and affection for the screwy B-movie they are making. Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley, and Geoffrey Rush all look like they're having fun, and director Gore Verbinski's shots look like he loves watching the scenes he's making, lingering on the pirates and the ships and the islands instead of hustling them on and off.

This movie is much better than such dreck as Die Another Day, not because it's any smarter, but because it lacks the air of cynicism, of contempt for itself and its audience that mars productions like Tamahori's. Die Another Day was made by people who didn't care a flying fig for espionage or intrigue; Pirates of the Caribbean was made by people who loved piracy, adventure and the sea. The scene where Captain Sparrow finally swings aboard, caresses the ship's wheel like a long-lost lover, and murmurs, "Bring me that horizon," is inconceivable in a typical heartless summer blockbuster; most action filmmakers wouldn't be caught dead expressing such embarrassingly sincere emotion.

This is not to say that Pirates of the Caribbean deserves comparison with the handful of real classics that have also been summer blockbusters, such as Raiders of the Lost Ark or Star Wars. Those movies had stories; Pirates of the Caribbean has a muddle that passes for a story. Just because Verbinski's movie is better than the average summer fare we get nowadays does not mean that it's great art, or even good art. But unlike most movies about which people say, "Don't think about it, just have fun," Pirates of the Caribbean actually IS fun.

Rating: **½ out of ****.

Recommendation: Lovers of pirates and the sea must catch this one in the theater, but others can wait for video.

Spoilers ahead, mate! Turn your course ninety degrees north or you'll run aground on Spoiler Island!

The opening says, `Inspired by actual events,' which basically means that there really was a Hotel-class sub called K-19 that had reactor trouble. That's about as close as the movie gets to the real events. Everything else, even the names of the participants, has been changed to serve the story.

But it's a good story, with interesting people, conflict over important things, and jaw-hurting tension. Captain Vostrikov and XO Polenin are excellently portrayed by Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson (and their accents aren't as bad as all that; aside from varying in intensity they were decent enough). Vostrikov really is a bad and irresponsible commander; every criticism that Polenin levels at him is true. That makes Polenin's actions in supporting him all the more interesting. But Vostrikov does learn from Polenin's example.

The heart of the movie is the reactor near-meltdown, and the terrible consequences it has. Military movies all too often portray courage as simply risking one's life to kill other people. But what you see in this movie is REAL courage: I'd rather go into battle ten times than do what the reactor techs have to do in this movie. Bigelow's portrayal of the chief reactor officer's breakdown is a touch of genius; it shows us what the people who did go into the reactor chamber felt, and overcame, and what the reactor officer himself overcomes later in the movie. This movie should never have been marketed as a blockbuster; it works best as a simple and touching tale of heroism.

Regrettably, Bigelow felt she had to cheat to keep the audience's interest, specifically by selling us the preposterous story that the reactor meltdown could have caused a 1.4 megaton nuclear explosion. This changes the story from one that merely didn't happen, into one that could not possibly have ever happened. Nuclear reactors cannot cause nuclear explosions, because they don't use weapons-grade uranium. Even if they did, it would require explosives, not just heat, to crush the uranium to a sufficiently supercritical density to detonate it.

Why did Bigelow resort to this? Did she believe that a Western-world audience wouldn't care about the fate of mere Russkies, so that she needed to pretend that the fate of the whole world depended on K-19 to keep her viewers watching? If so, she lacked confidence in the story she told. I was, and am, a partisan of the West in the Cold War, and am glad that the West emerged victorious, but neither am I inclined to blame these Soviet Navy sailors for the evils of the tyrannical system that they were born into. I would have enjoyed the movie every bit as much had Bigelow admitted that the sailors were fighting only for their own lives and the lives of their fellow crewmen. And for those chauvinists who would see these sailors as less than human for being Russian, pretending that they saved the world doesn't help.

Rating: *** out of ****.

Recommendation: See it in the theater, and bring your suspension of disbelief along; it needs a workout.

I'd like to be kind to Paul Matthews. He was clearly trying to make a good western movie. He failed, but these days it's rare to find someone who even makes the effort.

The movie opens with a harrowing scene of Union soldiers attacking and destroying a small Texan town during the American Civil War, murdering the inhabitants indiscriminately. I don't know if anything like this actually happened in Texas, but it's to the credit of the movie that I believed it at least could have happened. The son of a townswoman called Hannah is killed, deliberately shot in the back. Several other women are raped, lose their families, and are otherwise victimized. After the soldiers leave, the women shoot some stragglers who attacked them, but also shoot some officers, including a general, who were appalled at the massacre and, had they been allowed to live, might have brought the soldiers who ran amok to justice. The indiscriminate nature of the women's revenge, their indifference to who suffers for their grievances, is brought out from the start. In keeping with this theme, the women form an outlaw gang and begin robbing banks all over Texas.

Some time later, the hero named Wes and his gang of friends, all former Union soldiers, ride into town to find the bank robbed. Wes is the son of the general whom the gang murdered, and Hannah has conveniently left behind a medal belonging to Wes' father near the scene of the bank robbery. Wes accurately concludes that the bank robbers are the same people who killed his father, and he and his friends Ride for Revenge.

This is a movie that could have worked. Each scene arises logically out of the scene before it. The director does not yield to the temptation to make the outlaw women `cute'; early on, they are shown putting lawmen at their ease with food and hospitality, then ruthlessly gunning them down, exploiting their surprise advantage and leaving their victims no chance at all. The women wear almost no makeup, adding to the rough atmosphere.

There is a real, if thin, effort at characterization and motivation, certainly more than you would expect in a movie whose subject matter looks so exploitative. There is a real and successful effort to make Ellie, Hannah's murderous and psychotically jealous lover, a pitiable figure instead of a totally repulsive one.

There was also a genuine, though unsuccessful, effort at realism. In a nifty early scene there is a gunfight in a saloon. This saloon is a dark and dreary place; the only light is what comes in through the windows, and you can smell the poverty, the bare-bones quality, of the frontier here. Wes and his friends wear their guns with butts forward in genuine cowboy style, a touch of authenticity I have seen in only one other Western (THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE). In a unique shot where Wes ambushes Hannah and shoots her horse out from under her, we see Hannah in close-up with Wes' hiding place several hundred yards behind her; the puff of smoke appears and drifts away in eerie silence, and only some seconds later do we hear the boom of the rifle firing. Kudos to Matthews for trying to pay attention to the physics of firearms.

Unfortunately, Hooded Angels is undone by a number of problems, the severest of which is the poor performance of the leads. Playing Hannah, Chantelle Stander deals chiefly in numb expressionlessness. Perhaps she and Matthews were trying to show her character's inability to feel love, but they overdid it by a mile. Hannah is supposed to be a successful bank robber, and should be confident and alert; when she leads her gang toward the bank with wooden, staring eyes, she looks like she's either dazed or terrified. Paul Johansson as Wes is no better. He is supposed to be in love with Hannah, but he strikes no sparks with her at all; he shows not the slightest tenderness or passion, even when they are having sex. He is more believable when he turns away from her and says, `This is crazy.' Indeed it is, since he never looks like he loves her.

In secondary parts that presumably received less direction, Amanda Donohoe and Juliana Venter do fine jobs; Donohoe upstages Stander so consistently that you wonder why she's not cast in the lead. Venter is over the top, but she is playing the over the top character of Ellie, and restraint was not called for. Also, Donohoe is the only important player who keeps a consistent voice; Stander's and Venter's South African accents come and go wildly.

Also, the movie's efforts at realism failed far too often. With South Africa standing in for Texas, somebody forgot that Texas is hot in the summer. We see these so-called Texans riding around wearing multiple layers of vests and overcoats that wouldn't have been out of place in Montana or Wyoming. In the aforementioned sequence where Hannah's horse is gunned down, we hear the gunshot just BEFORE the supersonic rifle bullet strikes Hannah's horse. Good idea, poor execution. Hannah, who certainly ought to know something about gunfighting after her bank robbing career, leads her gang out of a nearly impregnable position to confront Wes and his friends in the open, with predictably disastrous results.

The photography is mediocre, with TV-ish color and focus. This is not helped by poor use of special effects. Notably, in one scene Ellie sticks a knife through a character's hand. This might have induced horror if it had been just barely glimpsed; instead, we see it in full closeup and think, `Oh, somebody stuck a knife through a fake-looking artificial hand.'

I can't give Hooded Angels a high rating. But I will be on the lookout for Paul Matthews' next work. I think he has a good movie in him somewhere.

Rating: *½ out of ****.

Recommendation: Both Western fans and exploitation fans should avoid it.

Dangerous Beauty pretends to be the story of real-life 16th-century Venetian courtesan Veronica Franco. In reality, it is an attempt to rewrite history to suit the wishful thinking of pseudo-feminist ideology.

I have no objection to making a professional prostitute the heroine of the story. The contempt that society, then and now, showers on such women while excusing the men who pay them for their services is rank hypocrisy. And it is true, just as the movie claims, that many Venetian courtesans became wealthy, well-educated, and independent women. The nightmare of drug addiction, violence and de facto slavery to a pimp that is prostitution in modern America was not true of prostitution in all places and times.

The movie still glamorizes the profession far beyond what the historical record will support. The historical Veronica Franco suffered frequently from the occupational diseases of prostitutes, but this Veronica is always hale and hearty. Hilariously, we also discover that 16th-century Venice has already invented a safe, effective morning-after pill, enabling Catherine McCormack to avoid the real Veronica Franco's numerous pregnancies. Still, if Dangerous Beauty had done no worse than this, it could still have been enjoyable, if silly, for these historical absurdities do not amount to gratuitous slanders against Veronica's non-courtesan contemporaries.

Much worse is the pretense that prostitution was women's only path to education and influence in Renaissance Italy. Excuse me, but Isabella d'Este and Beatrice Sforza might have a word or two to say about that. Read Castiglione's `Il Cortigiano' and you will see that educated women were a staple of Renaissance Italy's upper crust; poorer women remained uneducated, of course, but so did poorer men. Indeed, Castiglione was careful to include education as one of the attributes of the ideal female courtier.

The movie further kicks marriage in the teeth; a married woman expresses envy for Veronica's position and bemoans that being a wife is a `state of perpetual inconsequence.' Merely because women (not just wives) were unconscionably mistreated in that age, we are expected to swallow the idea that the woman who ran the household and raised, moulded and educated the children, and who could not be divorced without an expensive and hard-to-get dispensation from the Pope, was less `consequential' than a prostitute men used and forgot the next week.

Still more disgusting is the movie's attempt to disparage love itself. I have no personal moral objections to prostitution: when one willing person sells her body to another willing person, it may be considered an offense against God, depending on your religious beliefs, but it is not an offense against people. No person is hurt by the exchange. But to mislabel this morally neutral commercial transaction as `love' is to do both love and prostitution a horrible injustice; it turns prostitution into a fraud while turning love into a trifle. Veronica is presented as giving the priceless gift of `love' (for only 100 ducats a pop!) to men who are assumed to be incapable of loving the women they live with and raise children with. Well, loveless marriages have always existed, but there have always been loving ones too, even in the days when bride and groom never met before their wedding. There was never a loving trick turned.

It is not only the movie's attitude toward women that is unhealthy; its view of men is warped, too. We are presented with that cliché that turned up in the '70s, the sexually frustrated man (Oliver Platt here) as inherently evil and malicious. On the other hand, we are shown that sadistic rapist-murderers present no danger at all, if you know what they really want, which is to be dominated. Why didn't the thousands of women killed by such creeps think of that?

Having said all this, I must reluctantly admit that the acting by all parties is good, and the sets and costumes beautiful. If you think that excuses this movie's lying in an evil cause, you're wrong. Leading man Rufus Sewell had the honesty to admit that this movie was unadulterated horse manure. Better that the rest of us admit it, too.

Rating: * out of ****.

Recommendation: Unless you're writing a thesis on pseudo-feminist distortions of history, give this movie a wide berth.

I might have enjoyed this film more if I were a foreigner completely ignorant of America's political system. The story, if it had been set thirty years ago (or on another planet), was good enough in itself: one woman against the odds, sticking by her principles. I didn't like Laine Hanson much, but I admired her.

But alas, the movie also has a `message': that the American public holds female politicians, but not male ones, to high sexual standards. Anyone who has observed the American political scene with any care at all knows that this is balderdash. Sexual improprieties ended the careers of Bob Packwood and Gary Hart, cost Ted Kennedy his chance at the presidency, and almost brought down Bill Clinton – all men. Not one American female politician has experienced nearly so much uproar over some alleged sexual misconduct. Thus, the film's portrayal of Laine Hanson as fighting for the rights of women (the film even ends with the silly dedication `To our Daughters') rather than the right to privacy, is outright silly.

Less important, but even more bizarre, is the script writing Hanson into the Republican Party. Hanson is an avowed atheist who is pro-choice, advocates banning (not merely restricting) private ownership of handguns, and gets livid not only at school prayer but even at the mention of Jesus' name in a public classroom. In other words, she is well to the left of many Democrats, and would not belong in any wing of the Republican party. I think this stupidity was inflicted on us to make the Republicans on display here appear to be anti-woman rather than merely anti-Democrat, by showing them attacking a woman from their own party.

There's another significant overlooked point in the movie, but I'm not sure whether it's a flaw or a subtle lesson. Hanson has in fact done something that is very seriously wrong; she has betrayed her best friend, Cynthia Charlton Lee, by stealing Lee's husband away from her. Hanson even tries to defend her action, saying that she fell in love with William Hanson even though she didn't mean to. Well, people do fall in love without meaning to, and they cannot be faulted for that. But is this an excuse for Hanson taking her friend's husband from her? Is it possible that Cynthia Charlton Lee was also in love with William Hanson, and that, being married to him, her love deserved priority? And is Hanson's treatment of her best friend a relevant measure of her trustworthiness?

But, the whole affair of Hanson vs. Lee barely makes a blip on the radar screen. What obsesses the public, and takes up far more time in the movie, is not what Hanson did to her best friend, but what she did with a couple of drunk frat boys when she was a single woman in college, even though this is clearly irrelevant both to Hanson's professional qualifications AND to her moral character. I don't know what to make of this. Maybe the director is blind to the fact that Hanson's treatment of Cynthia was wrong, and means us to take at face value Hanson's defense of her own outrageous behavior. But maybe Rod Lurie is very subtly pointing out to us that the so-called investigation into Hanson's `character' is really merely about sex and sensationalism, by showing us that when real evidence about Hanson's character comes to light, hardly anybody pays attention.

The movie's stance on privacy is clear, but still thought-provoking. I do think that moral character is relevant to picking political candidates. Nothing in politics is done without resistance, and character determines whether a leader will fold in the face of resistance, try to compromise, or stand fast. THE CONTENDER forces us to confront the question: given that character is important, is it important enough to justify the kind of invasion of privacy that Hanson undergoes?

Regardless of Lurie's sometimes questionable `messages,' he's clearly done a sterling job with his cast. Granted, he had good actors to start with, but when EVERYBODY is doing their best, the director surely has a hand in it. Joan Allen does a superb job doing a delicate balance between strength and pain. Jeff Bridges gives a great performance as a cynical politico who finally discovers his principles, while Sam Elliott is wonderful as another cynical politico who never does. And don't overlook Gary Oldman: his Shelly Runyon is a far more ambiguous villain than he initially appears. Unquestionably, his methods are evil, but you're never quite sure if his goals are equally evil. At first it appears that he is persecuting Hanson just because she is female; as the story progresses, he claims to have other reasons. You sense that he really believes this, that he wants to give up the fight against Hanson, but feels obliged to go on because he honestly thinks she can't be a good vice-president. But you never learn just what his reasons are.

Rating: **½ out of ****.

Recommendation: Watchable; just set your bunkum detector in high gear.

Whoever thought Owen Wilson could carry a major action film should be shot. He would have ruined even a good action movie, and this is not a good action movie. I can't think of any living actor more totally lacking in charisma or more irritating to listen to (where does he GET that nasal whine?). He's a godsend to his supporting cast; my eyes naturally long to go somewhere, anywhere rather than settle on Wilson, so the bit players get a lot more attention than they otherwise would. Unfortunately, a lot of this film shows Wilson out in the wild by himself, so my eyes cannot escape this thing, this sorry excuse for an actor, that is on the screen.

But the converse applies also; if Wilson would have ruined even a good action movie, not even a strong leading man (say, Joaquin Phoenix) could have saved this movie. There is only one good action set-piece, the missile attack against the Hornet fighter-bomber. For the entire remainder of the movie, we are subjected to Wilson stumbling through one stupid situation after another. Wilson skylines himself while trying to communicate with the carrier crew; a sniper misses him even though he is a perfect, stationary target; at another point a whole freakin' ARMORED COMPANY misses him with everything from small arms to 20mm cannons at a range of about 250 yards -and he isn't even taking cover! These stupidities are important even for a lowbrow action movie from which you expect no brains: the action scenes need to make you think, `Wow, isn't he good!' not `Wow, God looks out for fools and drunkards.'

Even the redoubtable Gene Hackman can't contribute much to this movie. With the best will in the world, it's impossible to miss the fact that Hackman is too old to lead young, strong men into combat. He belongs behind a desk, where his mind can save their lives; behind the controls of a chopper, he's apt to cost them their lives.

Worst of all, John Moore invests the military men he intends to glorify with a large dose of that most unmilitary of traits: self-pity. Every character gets his turn to whine - and yes, I'm afraid `whine' is the word - about the political rules that make their lives tougher and more dangerous. Get this, warriors: WARS ARE FOUGHT FOR POLITICAL GOALS. A war without political goals is mere pointless murder. No warrior has the right to expect the country to which he pledges his life to let him endanger GOOD policies (stopping genocide in Bosnia, for instance, or destroying al-Qaeda) in order to save his own skin or his comrades'.

Only one thing in BEHIND ENEMY LINES is consistently good. I have never seen a clearer portrayal of the immense devastation that civil war wreaked on the Balkans. Nathan Crowley presents us with a bizarre, surreal moonscape of broken, twisted metal, wrecked vehicles, destroyed buildings and ruined works of art. The sets hauntingly render the sheer waste and sense of loss.

Militarism is not merely the exaltation of the military virtues: courage, honor, loyalty, discipline, and teamwork. If it were, militarism would be a good thing. But true militarism is more than this. It is the belief that the nation exists to serve the professional military forces, rather than the other way around. And in this sense, BEHIND ENEMY LINES is a militarist movie in the worst sense of the word.

Rating: ** (an extra half star for the sets)

Recommendation: Watch on TV, but only if you appreciate fine production design.

I'm not hard to surprise when it comes to movies. I didn't guess the ending of the SIXTH SENSE, I had no idea who Keyser Soze was, and I didn't predict the twist in PRIMAL FEAR. But with the BOURNE IDENTITY, it was perfectly obvious exactly who Jason Bourne worked for in the first five minutes, and in the first ten minutes it was clear what his job was. I simply can't understand how people could call it suspenseful, much less confusing. Frankly, I don't think Director Doug Liman meant to keep anything about Bourne secret from the audience. And that is stupid, because whatever potential the movie had to generate tension and suspense depended on us being as clueless as Jason Bourne as to who he was.

Compare this movie to THE MATRIX. THE MATRIX is a pretty second-rate movie too, but it's good for its first half, for one reason: we know no more than Neo does. He doesn't know who Morpheus and Trinity are, or what they're up to, and neither do we. The brief glimpse we got of Trinity just deepened the mystery. In THE BOURNE IDENTITY, there is no mystery for us to penetrate; we're just waiting for Bourne to catch up to where we already are, which is simply an exercise in tedium. This is aggravated by the fact that Bourne is pretty slow on the uptake. By the time he got out of the Zurich bank, he should have realized that there were only two possibilities for what he was: intelligence agent and professional criminal. The audience, of course, doesn't even have that much uncertainty, since we are shown Bourne's employers early on.

Very little thought went into this movie. For instance, when Bourne discovers his pile of passports, each with a different identity attached, he should have had no way of determining which one was actually him, since he had no memory. But he just guesses right, miraculously. The Swiss police are shown as being unaware that a U.S. Embassy (not present in Zurich anyway) is sovereign U.S. territory. The Marines guarding the embassy are shown as being unarmed until they get into the arsenal; I've never been to the Swiss embassy, but in Nicaragua the Marines carried their M-16 rifles in the very door of the embassy, and even in the consulates.

The best I can say about Franka Potente is that she managed at times to distract me from the fact that she adds nothing to the story. This movie should have been entirely Bourne's show, and she's there just to provide a love interest and to be a springboard for dialogue, because Liman is too lazy to provide exposition with just Bourne himself. Julia Stiles is window dressing; the director obviously hasn't the foggiest idea what to do with his female actors.

Anyway, THE BOURNE IDENTITY isn't a complete disaster. It gets markedly better in the second half; it's no more credible than before, but at least the stupidities, like Bourne's escape scene, have a payoff in thrills. The acting is good by everybody. Take a note of the small touches: when Agbaje enters the morgue, his nostrils quiver as the smell hits him, and when Stiles hands over the information to the assassin, you can detect her fear of him even though he is on her side. And it has a superior car chase scene. The acting by everybody is good.

Overall, the movie is tolerable, but the premise could have delivered a much better film.

Rating: ** out of ****.

Recommendation: Action fans should catch it on TV.

Professional intelligence case workers appeal to four principal motives to recruit their agents: Money, Ideology, Compromise (meaning blackmail), and Ego, sometimes referred to by the acronym MICE. In THE LITTLE DRUMMER GIRL, we see a fifth motive used: Screenwriter's Fiat.

Charlie, a little pro-Palestinian Jane Fonda wannabe, is kidnapped by the Israeli Mossad, humiliated, and offered the job of spying on Palestinian terrorists. She accepts because, um, because, well, the screenwriter says so. Okay, so there's a vague effort to make us believe that Charlie's in love with one of the Mossad agents, but since her attraction to him was based entirely on the belief that he was a romantic, dashing leader of the Palestinian `revolution,' there's no basis for her to continue being attracted to him once she learns he's a spy for the Israelis whom she hates.

I'm not sure any woman in the world is quite so easily manipulated as Charlie in this movie. If such a woman really exists anywhere, why on earth would anyone want her as an intelligence agent? Anyone who can be convinced to change sides that easily once can surely be convinced to do so a second time. You wouldn't dare let her out of your sight for ten seconds, and as for allowing her to join a Palestinian terrorist training camp, where she'd be out of sight and in the presence of her old friends for months on end, forget about it. It's absurd. If I were politically correct, I would call it a misogynist movie, but that would probably be unfair. There's no evidence that director George Roy Hill imagined Charlie's weakness and stupidity to be typical of all women.

It's a shame that Charlie is neither a believable nor a likeable heroine, because in every other respect THE LITTLE DRUMMER GIRL is a great spy movie. I can't say precisely how realistic it is technically, but it feels authentic at every turn. The brutal interrogations of the captured terrorist, and the intense multilayered surveillance of Charlie ring very true. There's no one-man-army James Bond crap here; the Israelis assign a full squad of spies to every job. More importantly it gives us the psychological feel of the espionage profession. The stock in trade of professional spies is the betrayal of loyalty and the abuse of friendship. Naturally, this does not make for likeable characters, however much one may admire the cause for which they work. Hill does not attempt to sugarcoat this; he shows it to us as it is.

Diane Keaton should not be blamed for failing to make her ridiculous character convincing; she is clearly doing the best she can, and quite probably the best that anyone could have. Klaus Kinski steals every scene he gets as Mossad master agent Marty Kurtz. David Suchet gets a fine small role as a terrorist thug.

THE LITTLE DRUMMER GIRL is a fine example of how outstanding supporting performances, dedication, and sincerity (you rarely find movies this honest in Hollywood anymore) can rescue a movie whose protagonist is badly written. It's not half the movie it could have been, but it's a good movie anyway.

Rating: **½ out of ****.

Recommendation: See it on video or DVD with your friends.

THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES is a wonderful story about a wounded man, Josey Wales, a Missourian who has lost his home and his family to the Civil War. As the Civil War ends in defeat and despair for the South, Wales alone of his guerrilla unit refuses to surrender. He has nothing left to live for, except to fight, and he cannot give that up.

This is a setup that has appeared many times in the movies, as the hero with nothing left to lose is a perfect excuse to show nonstop gunplay. To some extent, this happens in THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES too. It is an action western according to the classic formula, but it is more than that. Josey Wales heals his wounds as the story goes on, and begins to replace the friendship, and then the love, that he has lost. And as he heals, he begins to grow out of violence as a way of life. Many westerns have the theme of the older breed of man who tamed the west by violence being abandoned by his fellows; only this one, so far as I know, has the older breed of man abandon himself, that is to say, change his ways with the changing of the times.

Clint Eastwood is a decent actor, not a great one. But at times he has shown the skills of a really first-class director, and given his limitations as an actor it is the more to his credit that he did not hog the stage. He gives plenty of screen time to an excellent supporting cast, of whom the most memorable is Chief Dan George as aged Cherokee warrior Lone Watie, a role he plays with an eerily perfect balance of dignity and humor. Will Sampson makes an unforgettable cameo as Comanche chief Ten Bears, and Paula Trueman is a magnificently feisty Sarah.

John Vernon plays Fletcher, the man who betrays Josey Wales early on. I don't understand why Vernon could not find work in quality movies after this (he has appeared in 38 cinema releases since this movie and I challenge you to name any of them). Vernon has one of THE great basso-profundo voices in American cinema; only James Earl Jones could compare to it. If mountains could speak, they would sound like John Vernon. His role is a neat twist on the trope of the 'reluctant hero'; Fletcher is a reluctant villain.

The ending of THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES is the most beautiful and poetic of any in western movie history, maybe the most beautiful of any movie ever. According to the rules of the genre, the final confrontation between Wales and Fletcher can have only one outcome; the movie finds another way, because Josey Wales has found another way.

Rating: ***½ out of ****.

Recommendation: Western fans should own this one, but any movie fan should enjoy it.

I am the worst possible target market for this movie. I am indifferent to dance, not a fan of musicals, and I always hate movies that have no sympathetic characters. So if I was won over, and I was, how could anyone else resist it?

CHICAGO is about Roxie Hart, theoretically a real person, a would-be vaudeville starlet who murders her lover when he reneges on his promise to put her in the spotlight. A couple of shots from a snub-nosed revolver gain her the fame that she couldn't get with her voice or her dance moves, and she will stop at nothing to keep it.

I can't believe I just wrote that. It makes the movie sound awful, but please believe me when I say it's not. It is the funniest comedy I have seen in a long time, much funnier than the same year's MY BIG FAT GREEK WEDDING, although certainly nowhere near as wholesome. I think the key to CHICAGO's comic success is that, unlike in inferior comedies about unsympathetic people, we are supposed to laugh at their foolishness instead of at their nastiness.

Over and above that, the music really is good and the dancing superb. Although Renee Zellweger gets top billing, I call this Catherine Zeta Jones' show. She sings and dances magnificently; the suggestiveness of her number `All That Jazz' is twenty times sexier than the interspersed shots of Zellweger and Dominic West actually doing the deed, and I think that was deliberate. Zeta Jones adopts a feline persona for this movie, with short hair and a pasty face that makes her look so different from the previous roles I saw her in (THE MASK OF ZORRO, ENTRAPMENT, THE HAUNTING and SPLITTING HEIRS, for the record) that I quite literally did not recognize her. Zellweger's performance as a puppet in `The Press Conference Rag' is also very impressive, and `The Cell Block Tango' is superb.

The movie's relentless cynicism sometimes leaves a sour aftertaste, but I think that is unavoidable. CHICAGO is a movie about women trying to get away with murder. If there had been a sincere attempt to defend their actions, it would have become offensive. Cynicism is the only alternative I can think of, and is much preferable.

The supporting cast comes through very well. Richard Gere has never been much good at anything besides projecting smugness, so he has been cast as lawyer Billy Flynn, a role that requires nothing else. Kevin Spacey, also considered for the part, would have blown Gere's doors off, but Gere was probably the better choice regardless, since it's easier to imagine an airhead like Roxie falling for Gere than for Spacey. Queen Latifah does an adequate prison warden and shines in her musical number, while John C. Reilly is excellent, as always, as Roxie's numbskull husband. And I love Lucy Liu in anything she does, although in this case she doesn't get nearly as much screen time as she deserves.

I can't guarantee you'll like this movie; a lot of people saw it and didn't like it. But if I liked it, there's got to be at least a chance that you will too.

Rating: *** out of ****.

Recommendation: I don't care who you are: hie thee to the theater and watch it.

The basics: two young Chinese boys go to opera school together in the 1920s, and grow up to become big stars. Their lives revolve around their specialty act, the classic Chinese opera, `Farewell My Concubine,' to such a degree that their offstage life begins to reflect their onstage one (shades of `I Pagliacci').

Everybody loves FAREWELL MY CONCUBINE but me. And I can certainly see why they love it: it is an epic view of the story of China's 20th century, magnificently shot. All the same, it leaves me cold for much the same reason that another epic, DOCTOR ZHIVAGO, did. It is chiefly the story of what happens to the protagonists, not the story of what they do.

This is also why, again unlike everybody else, I like the second half of this movie better than the first. The second half has Gong Li in it, who (in addition to making the film more beautiful, as she would any film) is the most dynamic character present, the one who most determinedly takes her destiny in hand. It has the courtroom scene, which is the only one where Daeyi tries (and fails) to influence his own fate. And it has the Cultural Revolution scene, where Shitou finally makes an important decision with immediate, and tragic, results.

The first half, on the other hand, I found almost unwatchable. Behind disgustingly coarse subtitles, we are forced to endure scene after scene of little boys being tortured. I just don't enjoy that sort of thing, and I frankly feel uncomfortable about those who do. It might be different if the torture actually had a purpose, if the kids were suffering in order to achieve something, but it is made deliberately and brutally clear that this is not the case: the teachers act with the same sadism toward both the good and the bad students, and think nothing of completely destroying their precious talent by maiming them, killing them, or driving them to suicide. Furthermore, the first half appears to portray Daeyi's homosexuality as being something he learned in his youth. This does not accord with scientific observation, which clearly suggests that homosexuality is not a learned behavior.

I admit I am being cynical here, but I believe that Daeyi's homosexuality has given this movie a popularity with the faux intelligentsia that it would not enjoy otherwise. Many who would denounce the love triangle as cliché if it consisted of two men in pursuit of the same woman will claim to suddenly find the formula interesting when, as in this case, it consists of a man and a woman in pursuit of the same man. After all, this movie dares to ask the question, if a straight woman and a gay man both love a straight man, which will he choose? What do you mean, you guessed already? This is a Great Dramatic Question, dammit!

My first exposure to Chinese opera was from Zhang Yimou's RAISE THE RED LANTERN, where I found the performance of the opera singer quite enchanting. I'm afraid I did not enjoy the operatic element of this movie nearly as much. To my Western ear, Daeyi's singing voice sounds grating. The masks generally look grotesque. The acrobatics, I admit, were very impressive, lending an energy to the performance that Western opera would benefit from. But for me, opera will always stand or fall on the vocal performances, and those were lacking. This is probably another reason I didn't enjoy the movie: if I had felt the beauty of the opera as many Chinese do, and could have shared the two principals' passion for it, I wouldn't have found the experience of the movie so unmoving.

Rating: ** out of ****.

Recommendation: What can I say? Everybody else enjoys it; don't mind me.