RJC-4

Double-crossed ex-jailbird Powell settles his scores with sadistic relish in this mildly satisfying, workmanlike noir. Nothing special, particularly in the plot department, but watchable for a few cool elements -- notably the bitter dialogue and character actor Richard Erdman's scene-stealing turn as a witty drunken chiseler. The script constantly pushes its bad-girl theme, serving up plenty of floozies eager for the impassive Powell; it pants long and hard for little spark. Visually things start promisingly, but director Parrish has exhausted his interesting stuff within five minutes. Noir lite.

Terribly good fun, with brilliant production design, and just the right mix of desperate situation and winking dialogue, "Reign" is survival horror as it hasn't been done since George Romero.

The film's accomplishment is to take the gritty stacked odds of Romero's "Dead" trilogy and pair it with the iron-plated biological terror of the "Aliens" series. Planet-wide agoraphobia!

For genre fans, "Reign" has a deft way of appealing to both the thirteen and thirty-year old in you -- this is that elusive pop culture mastery, a casual kind of genius about pushing narrative buttons, tightrope walking between hokiness and plausibility, stacking up menace and delivering thrills.

The script has some superb throwaway quips and the narrative a slower, more methodical pace than most contemporary junk (several nice detours for backstory and texture). The cast delights with plenty of bug-eyed seething, stomping, and screaming. And the dragons are hellish. What superior pop crapola "Reign" is! I wasn't displeased for a second.

Finding this oddity on cable recently, I was quickly seduced by its opening sequence, a Welles-like plunge down main street into a small everytown's heart, Marsh's pharmacy. Here, as some clever camera work reveals, solid citizen Lew Marsh (Don Ameche) tends to the blisses of early 40's Hollywood America; everyone's prescription is filled, sundaes topped off with a cherry, local oddballs humored, etc.

What most recommends the film is its frame narrative. Quickly the idyll is broken when Marsh learns his son has been killed in the war. He sinks into a lengthy depression. Enter the ghost of Gramp to conduct psychotherapy: he spirits Marsh back into the past where we relive the childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood of the now-dead Rusty. While the mid-section unfolds linearly, Marsh and Gramp function offscreen as a Greek chorus (their melancholy dialogue often a grim counterpoint to the generally cheerful scenes). Then it's back to the present where an exorcized Marsh learns to stop questioning the wisdom of sacrificing young men in war. "Rusty died a good death," Gramp's ghost counsels, and we know it's only a matter of time before Marsh will agree.

Three years before "It's A Wonderful Life" (1946), "Happy Land" was already hijacking the "Christmas Carol" device of reliving the past on a therapeutic sightseeing tour. Unlike the Stewart film, though, the tone is more darkly somber, lingeringly mournful. The theme of sorrow outweighs the theme of recovery. Ameche looks and sounds wracked, bitter.

In fact, the film's heart is scarcely in its chief enterprise, which is to steel its audience for more wartime sacrifice. It seems at times almost to be working against its own message that war deaths are "good deaths." I imagine it may have helped salve some broken hearts, but the crime of this type of film is that, if it succeeds, it only helps to break more.

The voluptuous decrepitude of the 130-year old Danvers State Hospital is a great setting for this study in psychological terror. It doesn't take long for "Session 9" to convince you that, if you had to remove asbestos from this cavernous and sinister place, a Gothic fortress famous for lobotomies, maybe you'd come unhinged, too.

Brad Anderson's real success is in dropping compelling characters into his haunted house. Plausible portraits of working class characters don't fall off the trees in Hollywood, and especially not in today's shallow teen-dominated horror. Yet here they are, fleshed out with frailties, fears, losses and animosities -- a volatile mix primed to go off in the labyrinthine ruins.

Both in atmosphere and narrative cleverness, "Session 9" compares nicely with "The Others," which also arrived in 2001 (but to much wider distribution and acclaim). Anderson's film is as accomplished in its claustrophobia as that more expensive picture -- he shot on the new Sony digital video without a Kidman-sized budget -- yet it's much more ambitious and knowing, tendering its chills with sharp social observation and a pressing sense of the vile history of depersonalization that Danvers embodies. The setting becomes a cage for his characters much as it was for generations of the mentally ill.

No complaints from me about this one, which I enjoyed twice. Three cheers for Anderson and his co-writer Stephen Gevedon; actors David Caruso and Peter Mullan, who give unnerving performances; and cinematographer Uta Briesewitz, whose finesse demonstrates that digital video can compete. See it.

This witless exercise isn't an HP Lovecraft adaptation so much as a shameless grave robbery. Even the presence of horror cult favorite Jeffrey Combs (wasted in a minor role) can't save the halting story or painful dialogue. Producer Charles Band can do a fun Lovecraft movie (see Re-Animator and From Beyond, both made a decade earlier). But his Full Moon studio is better known for sleazy camp, and that touch is grubbily all over this film: "I'll bet you're a lousy lay -- no energy!" sneers one woman character fighting another in a tacked-on mud wrestling scene. There was apparently a bit of a budget, a few mildly interesting sets were assembled, and the opening sequence hints at what might have been a passable B-movie; the rest holds no interest at all.

Richard E. Grant steals the show as the 17th century witch hunter tracking warlock Julian Sands to 1980s California for some end times hokum involving Satan's favorite missing black magic book. The script by David Twohy (later much better as the author of Pitch Black (2000) and a creepy unproduced Aliens sequel) has its moments, especially when feeding Grant some likably cheesy man-out-of-time schtick. The opening sequence in the 1690's in Boston has promise; it recalls better British period horror from the Hammer era. But once the story leaves the past, it's all formula. Sands' blank bad guy, lousy special effects, and a tiresome Valley Girl turn by female lead Lori Singer make this subpar genre stuff. Watchable only for the superb Grant, who's really slumming here.

Buscemi's prison flick is oddly upbeat and shallow for the writer-director of the much better "Trees Lounge." We have a young drug war convict thrown to the wolves, but where is he thrown? This is prison as a place where, if he slinks off whenever trouble starts, a con can avoid most of the worst and shoot up with his pals regularly -- sometimes, courtesy of a kindly prison official! It's the joint as a center of homosexual rape, unless you happen to be doe-eyed, red-lipped 21-year old Edward Furlong, in which case you'll receive all the chaste fatherly ministrations of the skinhead hardass who happens to run your block and desires not your ass but the preservation of your dignity (an intellectual too, he'll even take an interest in your reading, steering you clear of an author who is a known "police state bitch"). These Speilbergian dimensions sit uneasily, to say the least, with the movie's cultivation of a hard edge and undermine what might have been a more honest, less sentimental view of survival.

Verité aside, this wish-fulfillment stuff is watchable for Willem Defoe's determined attempt to wrench more depth from his character than the script can provide. We never find out why such a feared badass is suddenly so caring, and what we witness isn't enough to go on to supply our own convincing answer. Then there is the complete lack of chemistry between the principals; Edward Furlong's rather bland, disaffected character hardly seems compelling enough to risk Defoe's rep or life over. We're hammered thematically with the message that caring means vulnerability, but even teen love stories can tell us that. What's more critical to this context, yet never addressed, is: why bother?

Then there's the real crime. At this moment in U.S. history our prisons are run by private companies who profit blithely from the violence boiling within; outside these pens, the drug war consumes billions of dollars in a fruitless quest. Although it is his premise, Buscemi has nothing to say about this; nothing. In fact, he has less than nothing to say, since his film's impossible sentimentality mocks the reality of the real-life Furlongs thrown daily to real-life wolves.

Yes, it's all beautifully art directed, the cellblocks washed out in harsh institutional light. Mickey Rourke's minor role as a drag queen is weirdly moving, and Tom Arnold's brief appearance as a sexual psychopath has some punch. The soundtrack by John Lurie is edgy and interesting. Just don't come looking for any narrative sense, believable motivation, or much social awareness.

As a fan of JCS for almost thirty years, I hadn't expected to see as moving, deft, or gorgeous a production -- especially not on film -- as this. Aesthetically, at least, the work seemed locked in its time, as much imprisoned by late 60s guitar music as by the dusty, overwrought 1973 film by Norman Jewison and the various traveling productions that clunkily preserved the era's design fetishes. For the longest time, the best way to approach JCS has been on your stereo. Which is a pity; it's a musical, for chrissakes.

So Gale Edwards' version is a surprise, and a right nice one. She's correct to design and stage this for the post-MTV generation, a decision that pays off hugely in scenes that imagine Caiaphas and his priests as corporate boardroom cutthroats or Simon's beseeching of Jesus to "add a touch of hate at Rome" while the crowd heedlessly and joyously lofts machine guns. If it's flash, it's intelligent flash, keen takes on the themes of revolt and its repercussions. It's witty, too: her Herod doing gay burlesque is the best visualization to date for Webber and Rice's memorable set piece. Some will feel Edwards' gambles in the last quarter of the work - discomfortingly blending bloody realism with the mordantly surreal and the leeringly profane - are reaching, and they are, somewhat, but they don't betray the production. This isn't giddy "Godspell," after all; it's a story about political murder.

The performances by the principles are superb. JCS is really Judas' story, and here Jerome Pradon's skulking, wincing, exasperated Judas is always watchable, and his singing good, although the limits of his range occasionally show. Rene Castle as Magdalene is fine enough to make you forget Yvonne Elliman; her shift between erotic spell and damaged idealism is something to see. Glenn Carter as Jesus, looking something like a youthful Robert Plant and sounding not unlike him, too, conceives his role as a troubled, unsure savior, an interpretation vastly better than those of his many predecessors in the role who relied on know-it-all saintliness (something the play's text doesn't support, anyway). Other standouts: Fred Johanson's stalking fascistic Pilate, and Rik Mayall's hilarious Herod.

Judging from the ongoing appeal of Christianity, the Greatest Story Ever Told doesn't need revitalizing, at least not in the eyes of its adherents, but JCS did. Edwards' many grace notes are perhaps not as important as her best gift to the story: locating it convincingly in a dark and ferocious political world and reminding that the official tolerance for justice, mercy, and charity is no greater two millenia later. Future messiahs, beware.

How fitting that the CBS Evening News should take its place among other entertainments in this database. For like the worst TV and movies, it rarely rises above its own melodramatic ambitions - namely, to stir in a dash of intrigue, to parade a cast of heroes and villains, to paint human complexities in broad strokes, to lurch toward awkward climaxes, and to conspire with its dull audience to expect no more and no less.

Let it be recorded for successive generations that the highest paid news professional in the U.S. at the start of the new millennium has the easiest job. Dan Rather reads the news, and, in a sense, he inhabits the news, too, as a rheumy cough inhabits the throat. Moist-eyed, curiously abashed, folksy, stolid, and mottled, his voice arrhythmically skittering past abrupt silences, a body seeming to yearn to press itself against the camera: the 70-year old Rather is a bizarre physical presence to go along with the even stranger conceit that the world can be explained in thirty minutes and that the nation's leading corporations would like to underwrite the same as a public service.

Rather reads a script, yet he also ad libs, and his lines are either unintentional howlers or hair-raising oubursts from the subconscious. The 2000 presidential election brought out the wordsmith in the man who earns a reported $7 million a year: the race was "tighter than spandex." Forget for a moment that you do not want a haggard 70-year old man to confuse politics with tight-fitting spandex; that's ok, he had other Viagrafied metaphors, too: the race was "like a too-small two-piece bathing suit." Then came banal yet creepy juxtapositions: "Close only counts with hand grenades and horseshoes." And finally a Zen riddle of sorts: "If a frog had sidepockets, he'd carry a handgun." All of this deadpan, without hint of irony. The effect was sheer bathos. But maybe also it suggested that after a career of professional tongue-biting, Rather, the epitome of U.S. journalism's chameleon-like sidling up to power, had no choice but to submit to the surreality of the election and become surreal himself.

About the show's customary product, the less said the better. Nightly, we are entreated to accept this purée as gospel, although it never rises far above the level of rehashing "official" sources with but the lightest smattering of dissident opinion or observation. What do one's government and corporations want one to think? Tune in. His eyes bulging as if some internal pressure were about to jettison them straight from his head, Dan Rather knows. At the end of the show, there will be a nice human interest story (cats in trees, brave mountain climbers) to smooth over any feelings of disquiet caused by the disjunction produced by the eerily detached running commentary and the images of war, famine, pestilence, and greed that have passed over the screen - uncommented upon, neutrally observed, "objectively" quarantined - the sedative administered and the nation resting peacefully for another night.

One mighty branch of the horror tree has always derived its power from sympathy. From Whale to Polanski, the masters grounded their best work in pathos: the monster more human than the people, the tenant in the wrong building. The way was lost in Hollywood during the 1970s and 1980s, when a succession of formula films sent horror off to summer camp. For two decades, American audiences were taught that horror is only the game of murdering banal teenagers -- a culture's revenge on its own emptiness, maybe.

Shyamalan is a savior of the sub-genre of compassionate horror, at least as it is practiced here. His "Sixth Sense" was a small revelation, a notice that the poetry is *still* in the pity.

"Unbreakable" is possibly even better. About the surface, there's no doubt it's lovely. Underneath, however, is where the action is. The theme of the outsider is handled superbly, but what grabbed me most was his treatment of the burdens of duty, justice, honesty, fragility (both in the emotional sense and, as the title implies, a peculiar, creepy physical one), and, everywhere, the redemptive possibilities of love. Then there is a very cool homage to comic books. All this and it will unnerve the hell out of you, too: for even more than in the "Sixth Sense," Shyamalan has smuggled into a mainstream film imagery and texture usually found in the work of exiled directors like Lynch and Gilliam.

It bears mentioning that, along with Gilliam, Shyamalan is the best thing to happen to the mid-life career of Bruce Willis, who keeps revealing depths that were invisible before. Will there be more collaboration?

Stylish, lugubrious Hollywood players trade volleys of self-obsessed dialogue, pause to take huge amounts of drugs and have sex with teenaged runaways, and then ponder The Meaning of It All. Preposterous? Overdone? Yeah, but this adaptation of David Rabe's wordy play has secret weapons: Penn, Spacey, and Palminteri, each full of a different acid. Penn, in particular, often looks only seconds short of brainfry, and it is casting genius to put him alongside the supremely easy-going monster Spacey.

"Hurlyburly" is a smarter exploration of the loss of self than "Leaving Las Vegas," mainly because its characters are imbued with 10,000-watt tongues (everybody, from producers to teenagers and strippers, riffs triumphantly in arch, knowing prose, so that when Penn's character resorts at one point to a dictionary to look up the word "accident," we get an unintentional har-har). But like "Leaving Las Vegas," it also tests your patience by immediately presenting inner decay so advanced that there is nothing, thematically or plotwise, that can take the exploration further after its first forty-five minutes. There is no character development, only attitudinal recycling, restatements of cynicism, perpetual wallowing. There is little to say about the women in the cast (including Penn's wife, Robin Wright); their roles are mainly props. Menace hangs over several scenes, supplied by Palminteri's presence as an ex-con turned failed actor and even worse metaphysician (he must have had access to Sartre in the slammer), but we get so many assurances of impending doom that when it comes, there is no dramatic weight. Much better at this kind of thing are Neil LaBute's films ("Your Friends and Neighbors," "In the Company of Men"), which manage to cover this psychic and moral territory with pacing, surprise, and event -- and more believable language.

As an adaptation, "Hurlyburly" can do little more than sprinkle in a few locations in order to try to breathe visual life into its vast plains of dialogue. (It's telling that the most affecting moment is a 5-minute long recollection by the characters of an awful event in the past, related while they stand around in the dining room.) There are some peaks, but there seem to be many more low-lying depressions, stuff that sounds so thick and writerly we can't believe it springs from the mouths of human beings, and to break up this stagnant air the characters suddenly...move outside the house onto the terrace! Yes, the character study here is powerfully claustrophobic, the acting very good. But repetition makes these 122 minutes feel a lot longer than they should be.

Heroin, repression, lies, lust, claustrophobia and jazz: long before "Trainspotting," this was how you made an expressionistic film about drug addiction. Still stylishly evocative, thanks to Preminger's direction and Bernstein's pounding score, the adaptation of Nelson Algren's novel stands out for its grotesques, not least of which is its title character -- Preminger's narrative pacing never flags, but he somehow manages to linger on a number of minor characters whose weird, ruined lives cling to a patchwork dignity, and the effect is pitched somewhere between the social justice aims of "On the Waterfront" and the voyeurism of "Touch of Evil." Sinatra's performance, sweaty with vulnerability, is among his best. The supporting cast is also extremely good, but it's the urgent soundtrack and anxious camera, constantly tracking over a Caligari-skewed slice of the bowery that remain in memory.

Was "The Usual Suspects" a fluke? Bryan Singer turns in a decidedly B-movie job directing this flat, predictable comics adaptation. It's almost too faithful to its original medium, with 2-d performances from all the principals except for Hugh Jackman (as the grouchy Wolverine, he displays the closest thing to personality among these cardboard cut-outs). Patrick Stewart is lifeless. Ian McKellen, who was believably dark in Singer's "Apt Pupil," here only looks very drowsy. And the X-Men themselves look like the cast of "Dawson's Creek" in drag.

This film has endless problems. The action sequences, and in particular the climactic battle in and on the Statue of Liberty, look terribly staged: just as on the comics page, the characters halt to strike dramatic poses, or dotingly brandish their "super powers" (one of them, hilariously, even utters at one point: "Storm, use your power!"). It simply doesn't work any more than if Singer had put speech bubbles above the characters' heads. Compare these silly little fights to the superb sequences in Jet Li's "Black Mask," (1996), a film shot for a fraction of this one's budget but obviously with much greater talent and vision.

For a comic with a rich graphical past, the movie's art direction delivers a strangely bland, sterile look, both for Professor X's school and for the Liberty set. Both look low-budget, but neither is quite as bad as the villain's secret seaside hideout, which Singer shot in such darkness that nary a detail can be seen.

Oddly, "X-Men" looks like two different movies. The first 15 minutes are lavishly designed and shot, from the opening flashback of Jews herded into a concentration camp to the discovery of a Wolverine slumming in a moody northern logging camp. Then, abruptly, the flair is gone, and for the remaining 90 minutes we get a film that looks like one of the Star Trek TV franchise vehicles. (Except for Storm's look: it's pure Penthouse Magazine, ca. 1975, with Halle Barry's vapid expression rounding out the bill.) The villains are half-comically done, but even that is a blunder by Singer -- we don't really get any comic relief from them, and we can hardly worry too much about the X-men if they're beset by the likes of a villain called Toad, and even less when they remind us of the far wittier and better-looking send-up of all this nonsense, last year's "Mystery Men."

Apart from the inanities, there is also a true sin: it's unforgivably trite when a pulp fiction like this one hijacks the Holocaust to inflate its meagre storyline and insincere theme. "X-Men" isn't really an allegory of genocide, or even merely of racism. That stuff is just tacked on to what is really an exercise in big fights and big boobs -- the old Marvel formula. Fights and boobs aren't bad in their own right, but they're done much better elsewhere without the pretensions to social justice.

A stunning debut by this young writer-director -- Dostoyevskian themes, an exact sense of place, and a lyricism touched by few of his peers. And now six years' wait!

While most U.S. indie filmmakers spent the 1990s studiously copying Tarantino, Gray in this overlooked gem created something entirely different: a character study of tragedy among the unhip and uncool. Torn by illness and the return of a prodigal son, a Russian immigrant family in New York tries to outlast the omens promising its destruction. The film owes something to Coppola, but you might feel the presence of Bergman, too. Unsentimental, unsparing, with brilliant performances by the principal cast. A must see.

The Ugly American, ca. 1999, isn't a fat, Hawaiian shirt-wearing 53-year old insurance salesman. She's a thin pretty upper middle class college graduate who knows her way around a J. Crew catalogue. And she has, like, had it so up to *here* with being mishandled by dirty foreigners and their legal system, which is so biased against sexy, affluent white women that, as one of these darlings puts it, it's all just a "Third World joke."

Think "Midnight Express" meets "Buffy The Vampire Slayer," and you have the embarrassment that is "Brokedown Palace." Director Jonathan Kaplan occasionally wants the gritty vérité of the former but has almost no idea how to deliver it (cockroaches scritch and scuttle, producing repeated eeks from the heroines). And Kaplan knows he has to deliver the waifish bods, narcissistic longeurs, and Perils-of-Pauline conventions of "Buffy," "Dawson's Creek," and all the other current teen trash. So you end up with dialogue that sounds more like a failed shopping trip than about the hopelessness of rotting in a foreign jail for narcotics trafficking:

Alice: They told me you signed their bull**** confession! Like we're retarded! Like we're going to sign something we can't read! ...y-you didn't sign anything, did you, Darlene?

Darlene: W-well, it -- it was...my statement! Saying we were innocent!

Alice: Was it in English or Thai? Was it in English or Thai?

Darlene: Look, if they changed what I said, then I'll tell them! Clearly I can't read Thai! I'll just tell them it's not what I said! Oh, well, God, I'm sorry Alice, I'm just not used to being tossed into some filthy, disgusting jail!

After all, it's so different from Macy's. Acting? Claire Danes and Kate Beckinsale have vocal ranges that veer between petulant and murderous; when called upon to emote, they always manage to sound like older sisters pounding on the door of a bathroom occupied by a younger brother. But there is tragedy here: it has to be mentioned that the redoubtable Bill Pullman, after excellent turns in "Lost Highway," "Zero Effect," and "The End of Violence," is back to making the lousy career choices that landed him in such dogs as "Independence Day". Pull out of it, man.

The real, and only, surprise in the film is its hideous xenophobia. A very naked condescension toward Asian culture (that notorious den of software and movie piracy) is on display constantly, and this soon deepens into hatred. The film is quite sure that Thais, caricatured in every guise from prison officials to citizens to prisoners and even hotel security guards, are officious at best, covetous and despicable the rest of the time. It's equally sure that white American girls, provided they have the looks and the outfits, are pearls cast low before these yellow swine. This is a shameful job all around -- c*** filmmaking, c*** humanity.