Street Kings

Freedom Fried
David Ayer's "Harsh Times" Get Harsher
By Cole Smithey

Based on James Ellroy's novel, "Street Kings" is set in LA's blood-soaked streets, traversed by widowed LAPD veteran Detective Tom Ludlow (Keanu Reeves) whose carte blanche methods of obliterating suspects with his service revolver are threatened when his former partner Terrence Washington turns Internal Affairs informant. Accustomed to having his violent "missions" smoothed over with the help of Captain Wander (Forest Whitaker), Tom thumbs his nose at the inclosing IA officers, in order to find the gunmen responsible for shooting Washington down during a convenience store heist. A combination of implausible plot-points, and the miscasting of television's Hugh Laurie as Internal Affairs chief Captain Biggs, hampers a convoluted crime thriller that is nonetheless entertaining for its grotesque action sequences.

Writer/director David Ayer made a splash with his "Bad Lieutenant"-inspired script for "Training Day." It was a thoroughly modern version of a corrupt police mentality that Americans continue to see reflected in the newspapers. Unarmed suspects get shot with 50 bullets, and cops go free after lip service trials allow communities to wring out their tears before moping away with little sense of justice being served. It's this dire state of affairs that Ayer addresses with a comic perversion that views cops and criminals as not just the same brand of monster, but part of the same entity.

From the looks of Tom Ludlow's squalid apartment, you'd never guess that he was once married. It makes sense that his wife died while committing an act of adultery because this isn't the kind of guy to make a woman feel safe and secure. He's a career cop concerned with keeping his gun clean for its perpetual use. And if Tom's familiarity with racist viewpoints allows him to verbally belittle every Tyrone, Ernesto, Nam, and Ethan he comes into contact with, so much the better. Whether or not he's really a racist at heart is beside the point. Like Denzel Washington's character in "Training Day," Keanu Reeves' Tom Ludlow exists to strategically execute bad guys who, like him, frequently wear body armor and are armed to the teeth. He doesn't have any grand aspirations beyond humiliating, injuring, and killing criminals with impunity.

There's shock value in the ripe dialogue between Tom and the three Korean crooks attempting to purchase a machine gun from him in a parking lot deal that leaves Tom bloodied on the ground-his car and gun taken in exchange for his salty prattle. But Tom's bruises are a small price to pay for him to follow the suspects to their fetish-fueled cathouse. What follows is a one-man guts-and-glory mission that leaves brain matter splattered on walls and pints of oozing blood pooled on the floor. The subtext here is that you don't have to look to Iraq to witness combat-style assaults.

"Street Kings" gets a tonal shake-up from its mix of surprise casting for secondary characters. Talent typically thought of for their comedic skills hold their own, with the exception of Hugh Laurie, whose television persona follows him like a vile odor. Jay Mohr ("Are We There Yet?"), Terry Crews ("Norbit"), and Cedric "The Entertainer" all give credible dramatic performances in plot-mapping roles that help mask the film's glaring disregard for realism.

However, if "Street Kings" seems overtly alienated from reality, it serves to make a backhanded point about the surreal nature of police-committed massacres like New York's Amadou Diallo case, and the recent murder of Sean Bell. That's not to say that the film is pro or con on either side of the men in blue, merely that we are living in a time of heightened violence that taunts all logic. The film's chain of brutal climax sequences blurs so many lines that you come away from it believing that anarchy in the streets is just a dirty little byproduct of democracy. Nobody eats "freedom fries" anymore.

Rated R, 107 mins. (B-) (Three Stars)

There Will Be Blood

The Prosthetic Achievement
Oil is Sweeter Than Blood
By Cole Smithey

Paul Thomas Anderson has grown immensely as a writer/director since his last picture ("Punch Drunk Love"), so much so that in a single film he has become America’s most visionary and accomplished modern-day auteur. Anderson based "There Will Be Blood" on the first 150 pages of Upton Sinclair’s lesser known novel "Oil!," about a 1920s oil miner named Daniel Plainview (exquisitely played by Daniel Day-Lewis) who strikes it rich after being approached by the twin brother of a young preacher about purchasing his family’s oil-rich land in Southern California. Paul Dano ("Little Miss Sunshine") plays evangelist Eli Sunday, a man with Plainview’s avaricious heart but not his iron stomach for exacting the pounds of flesh that come with such thickly veiled ambition. Embedded in Anderson’s profoundly epic literary adaptation are timeless themes of savage greed, blatant corruption, and social oppression that reflect the corporate, economic and ecological injustices ravaging the world today.

At the heart of the story is a rivalry of showmanship between Plainview and Sunday as opposite sides of the same cast-iron coin. The young minister has a knack for the theater of the pulpit where he casts spells over the local citizens of a rugged desert town that wants desperately to be funded by a veritable Niagara of cash that Plainview’s oil-drilling promises. Both men are self-made inventions so invested in their presentational lies that there is no room for any inner voice of conscious to interrupt the tyranny of their intentions. But Eli Sunday is a rank amateur compared to Plainview whose carefully guarded sense of personal responsibility lends the film its crucible of thematic essence.

After a mine accident kills the father of a young boy mysteriously named H.W., Plainview adopts the lad and treats him as an equal business partner. Dressed in a double-breasted suit and tie, H.W. (played with astonishing maturity by newcomer Dillon Freasier) serves as an ideal foil for Plainview to win over the sympathy of locals and business associates. Moreover H.W. represents a link to human warmth for Plainview, whose singular focus on oil and profit would otherwise neglect. Still, Daniel Plainview is not much of a father figure as he proves when H.W. is made deaf by an oil strike accident. The tragic circumstance gives the film its emotional spine that will be crushed into dust before Plainview’s self-loathing and deep-seeded anger brings the final curtain down.

"There Will Be Blood" is a historically rooted parable that traces a vital path of Western culture through the industrial revolution via a primitive man who sees a prevalent opportunity and selfishly sets about claiming all he can for himself. It is about an iconic archetype of a man who starts out with the barest trace of human decency, and by the end of his life has none. Aesthetically there is visual, musical, and linguistic poetry in every frame. Plainview’s mechanical nature does not allow the story a traditional life-affirming closure without looking empathetically toward H.W. as a strong individual who learns from the cruel lessons of his surrogate father and escapes his clutches. A more cynical perspective would favor the actual black oil that Plainview uses to build his fortunes as a welcome result to his barbarous methods. From this viewpoint, oil is the fountain of life that feeds generations of hungry people. Paul Thomas Anderson embraces the inexplicable facts of reality for their intrinsic dramatic truths, and what we are left with is a complex multiple character study of an evangelical, corporate, and political culture.

Composer Jonny Greenwood (of the band Radiohead) creates the film’s fiercely original musical score that expands the scope of the story with unusual sounds that tweak with emotion and strange experience. Cinematographer Robert Elswit ("Michael Clayton") captures the vast landscape of raw nature reduced in scale by men with oddly shaped machines and designs. Moments of cinematic homage to "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" are evident in a miraculous picture that is simultaneously an art film and a mainstream masterpiece. Anachronistic and phantasmagoric, America’s early race for oil is brought into personal terms that resonate with the withering decay of greed.

Rated R, 158 mins. (A+) (Five Stars)

Lions for Lambs

Tightening the Screws
Hollywood Political Drama is Years Behind the Times
By Cole Smithey

Overtly pedantic and overstrained, Tom Cruise’s first undertaking as co-head of United Artists is a politically top-heavy triptych of simultaneous political conversations made all the more cumbersome due to its extravagant cast that includes Cruise, Meryl Streep, and Robert Redford, who also handles directorial duties. A pungent vapor of earnestness permeates Redford’s unimaginative handling of newbie screenwriter Matthew Michael Carnahan’s three-note script that toggles between an Afghan battlefield crisis, a senator’s one-on-one press meeting with a TV journalist, and a professor/student conference. For a film attempting to grapple with the seething anger of an American populace left hung out to dry by the Bush administration, "Lions for Lambs" is far to muted and meek to achieve its perceived goals of inciting social activism.

The film’s biblical-sounding title equates American cowardly leadership as lambs sending brave soldier lions into an arena of battle where no competent plan has been put in place. Would-be Presidential candidate Senator Jasper Irving (Cruise) invites left-leaning veteran reporter Janine Roth (Streep) for an hour-long audience with him at his Washington D.C. office to leak a surgical strike military plan in Afghanistan that he’s certain will turn the war around. Streep adopts a wounded puppy attitude for most of Irving’s self-aggrandizing monologue concerning a strategy that, as it turns out, is taking effect while they speak. Cruise doesn’t just chew the scenery; he massages, charms, intimidates, stalks and nails every bullet point of his neocon agenda with the ardor of a Baptist minister. Although the display of emotion is completely out of character for such a cold-blooded politician, the performance is nevertheless hypnotizing, and presents the most interesting aspect of the movie.

Robert Redford has a more thankless task of character development as Dr. Stephen Malley a California College professor attempting to invigorate his promising but wayward student Todd (Andrew Garfield) to take civic action. Todd has traded in his superior debating abilities and questioning mind in favor of fraternity life and savoring the flesh of his latest girlfriend. Dr. Malley establishes the parameters of the discussion when he offers Todd a "blue collar B" for the semester if the lackadaisical student will agree to stop coming to his class, rather than merely dropping in from time to time. Too insulted to take the bait, Todd stays for Malley’s preaching session that promises to recalibrate his appropriately cynical value system.

Part of Malley’s burning motivation to awaken Todd’s latent activist spirit lies in the decision of two of his former students to join the military as their way of taking direct political action. Arian (Derek Luke) and Ernest (Michael Pena) took advantage of one of the professor’s classroom debates to display their military induction letters that put them stranded on a desolate mountaintop in Afghanistan. So while the anti-war teacher expounds the power of the people, and the Washington Senator plays editor and publisher, two soldiers bleed and freeze in the midst of ever-encroaching Taliban forces.

You can sense the filmmakers trying to avoid seeming candidly leftist, as if they were walking on squeaky floorboards in bare feet. They get ready to say or do something radical, think better of it, and sit back down with an air of humiliation hanging over them. If "Lions for Lambs" were produced as the collegiate stage play that its plot constraints indicate, it would still seem like a sheepish attempt at social theater. Here is a film made to preach to the converted. It doesn’t tell us anything we haven’t already known for years; America is screwed.

Rated R, 92 mins. (C) (Two Stars)

Things We Lost In the Fire

SUVs and Other Junk
Benicio Del Toro Works Alone
By Cole Smithey

Same old story: foreign director (in this case Danish filmmaker Susanne Bier--"After the Wedding") makes an American debut movie that goes flop with a resounding clamor. Successful architect Brian Burke (David Duchovny) takes time away from his protective wife Audrey (Halle Berry), and two darling kids, to help out Jerry (Benicio Del Toro) his longtime friend-turned-junky. Jerry is shaken out his nodding fleabag existence after Brian gets killed on his way back to the suburbs, and Audrey picks up the charity baton by inviting Jerry to live in her garage to clean up his act. Allan Loeb’s mechanical script is riddled with so many Alcoholics Anonymous moments that it comes off as a rehabilitation promo reel. Del Toro pulls off a tight-wire dramatic performance that keeps the film afloat, but can’t obscure the constant hiss of pop psychology that pierces nearly every scene.

The movie starts off at a deficit due to the miscasting of Halle Berry, and more significantly David Duchovny. The actors’ combined effect of perfect skin, coats the screen in a wallpaper sheen that repels all subtlety of character and life experience. An early scene, written to win the heart of the viewer, has perfect-poppa Brian describing iridescent light to his mop-haired son, while the two hang out in their neatly lit backyard swimming pool at night. Brian confirms that iridescent means glowing from the inside—just like the child. The cringe-worthy moment foreshadows the film’s tone of sugarcoated melodrama. These guilt-struck characters seem like they enjoy feeling bad.

Audrey is vocal in her disapproval of Brian’s friendship with Jerry, who she views as a lost cause. The issue is a primary hitch in the couple’s relationship and it hints at too much windy protesting, so much so that we might even wonder if Jerry sired one or both of the couple’s children before his addiction took over. From Brian’s point of view, we get that the two men have remained fiercely loyal over the years. One symptom of that allegiance comes through in Jerry’s perfect memory of details about events in Brian’s life and stories about his children that even Audrey isn’t entirely privy to.

The movie is about Audrey’s mourning process, and how she extends her deceased husband’s ideals to help Jerry recover. The scene that sums up Audrey’s confusion comes when she invites Jerry into her bed to use him as a sleep aid. Jerry’s discomfort with the intimate-but-platonic situation is offset by Audrey’s obvious exploitation of him as a kind of house slave. It’s a failing in the script that Audrey doesn’t take advantage of the sexual opportunity that Jerry provides, since she reacts later with an amount of revulsion that would be logically supported had she crossed that line of intimacy.

Addiction movies are a losing-bet genre. Uli Edel’s "Christiane F" (1981) and Danny Boyle’s "Trainspotting" (1996) are the best of the bunch because they invigorate their stories with raw humor and pulsing soundtracks that propel the action that necessarily comes down to someone sweating in the sheets. They have a panache that sweeps up the audience in an active environment of reckless rebellion that confirms the cynicism of its characters.

Audrey is a half-hearted skeptic making a half-assed attempt at helping a man she wants to sleep with, and whose children already look up to as a surrogate father. And yet neither the screenwriter nor the director sees the emotional motives at stake. The only person who understands his impulsive wisdom beyond the shallow source material is Benicio Del Toro, and it’s his commitment to his role, and to the story, that keeps things interesting. It’s not often you see an actor doing the job of ten people to make a movie work. Benicio Del Toro has yet to hit his stride as an actor because he hasn’t yet discovered the right director and project to let him run full out. But when he does, it will be a very special moment in cinema.

Rated R, 118 mins. (C-) (Two Stars)

The Feast of Love

Beastiary of Melodrama
Adaptation of Charles Baxter’s Novel Draws Bad Laughs
By Cole Smithey

Charles Baxter’s acclaimed "Midsummer Night's Dream"-inspired romantic novel receives a clumsy screen adaptation from director Robert Benton ("Kramer vs. Kramer"). Screenwriter Allison Burnett moves the novel’s original Ann Arbor setting to Portland, Oregon where a collection of artificially drawn lovers connect and bail out before uniting with new sweethearts. Morgan Freeman lends his all-too-familiar voice-over narration, speaking the author’s generic theme lines, to guide the audience through the brief maze of doomed pairings.

Harry Stevenson (Freeman) is a semi-retired university professor who advises local coffee shop owner Bradley (Greg Kinnear) on matters of the heart after Bradley’s fickle wife (Selma Blair) abandons their marriage for a lesbian affair with the short stop from a rival softball team. Bradley rebounds with Diana (Radha Mitchell), an oversexed realtor secretly keeping up an affair with a married and equally lascivious partner. Bradley is a textbook example of a self-help perfectionist who can’t see the forest for the trees. Instead of sizing Diana up for the sexpot that she is, and savoring the relationship for its sensual rewards, Bradley goes gooey and marries her.

Bradley’s coffee shop youthful employee Oscar (Toby Hemingway) is damaged goods due to a heroin-addicted past and life with an abusive alcoholic father named Bat (Fred Ward). Oscar finds love-at-first-site with a quirky girl named Chloe (Alexa Davalos), and they promptly get married in spite of Bat’s physical threats. Good thing then that Oscar and Chloe befriend the empathetic Harry and his wife Esther (Jane Alexander) who carry the burden of losing their only son to a drug overdose. If all of this soft-soap-swapping seems overtly maudlin, that’s because it is. The tone of the movie slips from near comedic to sentimental between cliches of things like Oscar and Chloe having sex on the fifty-yard line of a football stadium beneath the stars. For all of Harry’s patronizing vocalization about the emotional physiology of his neighbors, there isn’t anyone here that sustains believability. The most interesting character is Jenny (Stana Katic), the lesbian short stop whose subplot mysteriously evaporates before the end of the first reel.

Although Harry is its mascot, the story belongs to Bradley who maims himself with a kitchen knife late in the story. It’s a narrative miscalculation that the movie attempts to congratulate itself for when Bradley falls for a nurse that tends to his self-inflicted wound in an emergency room. "A Midsummer Night’s Dream" is one of Shakespeare’s lesser comedies, but "The Feast of Love" is a hodgepodge of sentimentality that’s neither funny nor tragic. It’s just bland.

Rated R, 102 mins. (D+) (One Star)

Michael Clayton

The Turning of the Tide
George Clooney Thriller Takes Aim at Corporate Malfeasance
By Cole Smithey

Michael Clayton (George Clooney) is a contracted back-of-the-house "fixer" at Kenner, Bach & Ledeen, one of Manhattan’s largest corporate law firms. He’s the guy sent out at midnight to the Westchester mansion of some rich bastard desperately looking for a way out of a hit-and-run car accident that left a pedestrian in an unknown state of physical harm. A recent divorce and a huge debt from a personal investment deal gone awry has left Michael consumed with repairing his own unraveled life. But this ethically equivocal character is cut from hickory, not pine. Michael is a doer, not a worrier. "I’m not a miracle worker, I’m a janitor" is the line he uses to keep his self image in check. But there’s also a bit of the dreamer in Michael Clayton, and it’s a characteristic that saves his life during a harrowing scene that acts as a reference point for the story.

Screenwriter Tony Gilroy ("The Devil’s Advocate" and "The Bourne Supremacy") makes his directorial debut with the assistance of pedigreed producers and executive producers that include Sydney Pollack, George Clooney, Steven Soderbergh and Anthony Minghella. The list of Academy Award-nominated names set a cultivated tone for a scathing corporate thriller that emanates from the same narrative petri dish that spawned films like "The Parallax View" and "The China Syndrome." The point of view in "Michael Clayton" is appropriately more alienated than that of those dated films, but is nonetheless rooted in the reality of a corporation’s tendency to chew up and spit out humanity in the name of quarterly profit gains.

Michael’s boss Marty Bach (Sydney Pollack) is on the brink of inking an out-of-court settlement with plaintiffs poisoned by a weed-killing product made by U/North, an agrichemical company that Bach’s firm represents. After six years of working around the clock to protect U/North, Kenner, Bach & Ledeen’s best litigator Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson) suffers a nervous breakdown during a deposition. His freak out is the stuff of legend. Recorded for posterity on videotape, Arthur inexplicably disrobes in the conference room before running naked into the parking lot. It’s an act of self-sabotage that has U/North’s Machiavellian in-house counsel chief Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton) looking at Michael to repair in the quickest way possible.

What Karen doesn’t yet fully comprehend is the extent of Michael’s friendship with Arthur, or Arthur’s recent discovery of a smoking gun memo from U/North exposing the corporation’s moral turpitude. Arthur’s ensuing epiphany and attempt to sabotage the U/North lawsuit he has worked so hard to build hits at a depth of self-realization rarely alluded to on screen, and Tom Wilkinson’s performance is nothing short of astounding. The British actor of such films as "In the Bedroom" and "The Girl with the Pearl Earring" was cast for his innate ability to balance pessimism and optimism through a prism of teetering sanity. It’s not a far stretch to suppose that Oscar season might include Wilkinson’s name in its list of nominees.

The high stakes of corporate warfare dictate that Karen orders full surveillance of Arthur’s phone, apartment and whereabouts. She doesn’t stop there. Tilda Swinton’s character represents a sexless ambitious female swimming in the shark-infested waters of the male-dominated corporate domain. We watch her prepare for a speech in her hotel bathroom mirror while putting on make-up. The translucently layered scene captures Swinton, the actor, plotting her delivery and Karen, practicing the subtlety of every word she will speak. In the next second we see Karen paraphrasing the rehearsed lines in a boardroom she commands with every syllable. It is the clarion voice of a gangster.

Tony Gilroy exhibits utter confidence in methodically laying out his characters’ motivations during the deceptively sedate first act. Seemingly open-ended narrative threads gradually come together in rubato time. Nothing is rushed. The narrative style breathes with a realism that can be misconstrued as overly complex, and yet there is nothing excessively elaborate. The filmmaker understands the droning tempo of careers spent in corporate law offices and the alternating speed with which do-or-die tasks can be dispatched. The authenticity he achieves points to experience he’s gained since finding the original inspiration for the film while doing research for writing "The Devil’s Advocate."

"Michael Clayton" is an up-to-the-minute allegory about the devastating power and malicious intent of a corporation that conceals its unethical actions with television commercials featuring close-ups of verdant nature. The film is also a George Clooney vehicle in the vein of "Good Night, and Good Luck" and "Syriana." Clooney’s commitment to creating a cinema of social responsibility carries with it an infectious passion and integrity. He has assembled an easily identifiable brand that hits a consistent watermark of reliable quality. George Clooney helps finance his vision with money from lowest common denominator movies like the "Oceans" franchise. It seems an ethical price to pay for films like "Michael Clayton" to be made.

Rated R, 119 mins. (B+) (Four Stars)

In the Valley of Elah

Everybody Knows Everything
Paul Haggis Gets the Iraq War Right
By Cole Smithey

Its evocative title refers to the place in Israel where David defeated Goliath at the behest of King Saul more than 3000 years ago. Writer/director Paul Haggis ("Crash") uses the biblically grounded metaphor as an all-encompassing touchstone for the desperate plight of physically and psychologically wounded Iraq War soldiers returning home.

Vietnam War vet Hank Deerfield (Tommy Lee Jones) is a retired Army Sergeant who hauls gravel for a living in Monroe, Tennessee. Having lost his oldest son, a soldier, in a helicopter training accident, Hank leaves immediately for Fort Rudd, New Mexico upon learning that his younger son Mike (Jonathan Tucker) has gone missing since returning from a tour of duty in Iraq. Believing the soldier is AWOL, Mike’s platoon superiors are nonplussed by his father’s appearance until Mike’s stabbed, dismembered and charred body is found on a contested piece of jurisdiction between the military base and a civilian street. Apathy and incompetence from military and local police investigators push Hank to act in assembling the truth surrounding his son’s murder.

Local police detective Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron) teeters on succumbing to the lethargic attitude of the male cops that constantly ridicule her. A single mother with a young son, she is lost. Hank identifies Emily’s predicament and knows how to win her over. He approaches her in the same way he shows an immigrant grounds keeper how to fly the American flag right side up lest it give off an international distress warning that America has spiraled beyond our control. In a flash we see Emily transform from an unsympathetic desk clerk into a caring cop willing to follow Hank’s lead. In yet another tour de force performance Charlize Theron is nearly unrecognizable at first glance, with her hair pulled tightly back in a short ponytail and lacking make-up she blossoms into an uncompromising detective willing to learn from her mistakes.

Hank stalls an Army officer visiting his hotel room in order to prepare for the news of his son’s death. The men salute, and a subtle difference in their execution of the universal military gesture hints at a divide between military officers of different generations. We notice the division again when the steely-eyed father visits his son’s room at Fort Rudd where "property theft is a real problem." Hank takes advantage of the situation to invisibly remove Mike’s cell phone from the abandoned nightstand. Fragmented video files from the gadget provide video snippets of Mike’s Iraq missions. He was far from heroic. From these distorted images we share Hank’s second hand experience of a war that is at once familiar and bizarre. Hank silently accepts that his son did terrible things in the name of "bringing democracy to a shithole."

"In the Valley of Elah" takes on the guise of homicide procedural. The carefully painted character study that Paul Haggis smuggles inside the deceptively simple plot form has an Altmanesque egalitarian balance to it. Mike’s four platoon buddies necessarily become the focus of the investigation since they were the last ones to see the soldier alive. Conversations with their former buddy’s soldierly father enable theme-rich dialogue that cuts to the quick of their feelings about the war. It’s worth noting that Paul Haggis cast real life war vets Wes Chatham and Jake McLaughlin in two pivotal roles. "If you ask me, they should just nuke it and watch it all turn back to dust," says one of the boys, whose opinion reflects his own self-destructive streak.

Hank can’t listen to his distraught wife Joan (Susan Sarandon) cry over the telephone. A dinner invitation from Emily briefly revives his fathering skills when he tells her son (David Brochu) the story of David and Goliath. The contrasting scenes crystallize everything about Tommy Lee Jones’ brilliant embodiment of his role. We realize Hank’s personal limits and his grasp of history that his two sons must have carried with them into adulthood. So persuasive is Jones’ contained performance that we learn more about him in the things he doesn’t say. It is Tommy Lee Jones finest and most fearless performance.

Paul Haggis based the story from an article in Playboy Magazine by Mark Boal called "Death and Dishonor," about Army Specialist Richard R. Davis who was found stabbed to death shortly after returning from Iraq. Clint Eastwood (for whom Haggis wrote "Million Dollar Baby," "Flags of Our Fathers" and "Letters From Iwo Jima") collaborated on getting the film made, and his support comes through in the film’s poetic and questioning tone. What is the war doing to every one of us? What do you do when you realize that everyone in authority is lying? Why are they lying? How can we be saved from ourselves? These are a few of the questions the film raises in order to piece together aspects of a war whose effects will be felt long after the last soldier comes home. It is so patriotic as to be a radical example of dramaturgy. On top of that, it is executed to perfection.

Rated R, 119 mins. (A+) (Five Stars)

Resurrecting the Champ

Reviving Common Sense
Rod Lurie Takes Jackson and Hartnett Nine Rounds
By Cole Smithey

Rod Lurie ("The Contender") puts another feather in his directing hat with an absorbing character study about a daily newspaper writer who takes a shortcut to success only to discover that, like the subject of his career-saving article, he is not the man he thought himself to be. Erik Kernan (Josh Hartnett) is a recently estranged sports reporter for the Denver Times whose prose lacks personality. But rather than take advantage of his demanding editor’s (Alan Alda) best efforts to develop his writing style, Erik furtively leverages his way into a Sunday magazine features position with an article about former boxing-great-turned-homeless-bum (Samuel L. Jackson). Hartnett and Jackson deliver career height performances that bristle with the sting of life lessons learned the hard way.

On his way home from covering a boxing event, Erik witnesses a group of college kids thrashing a homeless man, and intervenes to discover that the elderly vagrant is former boxing champ "Battling" Bob Satterfield. These days, the Champ’s prizefighting reputation periodically inspires young toughs to seek him out to boost their infantile egos by taunting him to fight. Convinced that he has stumbled into the story of a lifetime, Erik befriends the Champ, whom he visits for daily interviews when he isn’t spending time with his young son Teddy (Dakota Goyo) and trying to win back the affection of his co-worker/soon-to-be-ex-wife Joyce (Kathryn Morris).

The specter of Erik’s famous sports broadcaster father haunts him by the sound of his very name. No amount of ambition can remove the paternal blinders that hinder his progress in life. Erik is still searching for an individuality that he can own without having to fully commit. For Erik, the Champ represents a father figure, alter ego and meal ticket rolled into one. When Erik’s loving essay, about the rise and unremarkable fall of Bob Satterfield, launches him overnight into the moneyed realm of television sports broadcasting, he waffles at a contract offer from the network’s man-eating producer (Teri Hatcher) that comes with an unsubtle sexual overture.

Screenwriters Michael Bortman and Allison Burnett adapted their idea from a magazine article by newspaper reporter J.R. Moehringer, and took liberties in crafting a story that addresses the phenomenon of disconnect between father figures and their sons, along with America’s atmosphere of media deception and hunger for fame. Unlike J.R. Moehringer’s real life article, that won him a Pulitzer Prize, Erik Kernan’s career insurance magnum opus turns out to be based on one very faulty premise. The public discovery sends Erik on a mission of eating humble pie and begging forgiveness from those closest to him. It also brings him closer to the Champ, upon whose identity he had hung his hopes. Erik’s lesson in humility and ethics causes him to come clean to his son about certain lies he has told in order to win the boy’s lasting respect. It’s in these scenes that Hartnett gives himself over completely to the role, and the effect is unmistakable.

"Resurrecting the Champ" is an understated movie about the insidious nature of public and private lies. At a time in American culture when nearly every "truth" presented in a public forum contains a heavy dose of fiction, it is restorative to see a character take accountability for his actions with the understanding that the situation demands. The cost of Erik’s mistake comes through in the eyes of his editor (beautifully played by Alan Alda) and gives the audience a sense of propriety that we should all expect from the once-lofty newspapers that we read. There’s more to life than the pursuit of fortune and fame, or the pretense of either. Rod Lurie tries to revive common sense as a means to an end. He may not succeed completely, but he does make a convincing go at it.

Rated PG-13, 114 Min. (B-) (Three Stars)

No Reservations

Medium Rare
"Mostly Martha" Remake Has the Right Ingredients
By Cole Smithey

Conventional wisdom states that remaking a movie, any movie, is an exercise in futility. Rarely does an adaptation of an existing film add anything new to an original’s rhythm or narrative melody. But that’s not the case with director Scott Hicks’ ("Shine") Americanized calibration of writer/director Sandra Nettelbeck’s winning 2002 German romance dramedy "Mostly Martha." Screenwriter Carol Fuchs makes precise revisions that put an understated focus on a budding romance between master chef Kate (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and Nick (Aaron Eckhart), the new sous chef in her busy kitchen at a West Village, Manhattan eatery. Eckhart and Zeta-Jones enjoy an authentic chemistry that only gets brightened by the ineffable charms of Abigail Breslin ("Little Miss Sunshine") as Zoe, Kate’s nine-year-old niece.

Fussy chefs have long been a character archetype in movies, and the idea of a female gourmet who compromises her personal life in order to stay at the height of her cooking game is captivating. Zeta-Jones’ Kate talks exclusively about food with her therapist (Bob Balaban) in his penthouse office. She describes cooking a "Love Birds" romance dinner, consisting of roasted quail, with such passion that her description turns poetic. It hints at why Kate’s restaurant boss Paula (Patricia Clarkson) sent Kate to therapy in the first place. Kate is a woman who cooks for her therapist as her secondary means of self- revelation.

Anyone who has seen "Mostly Martha" knows when we meet Zoe, riding in a car with her mother, that she is doomed to become an orphan with only Kate available to take over as her guardian. Kate doesn’t wear much make-up, but she does cook every meal as if she were vying for a cooking award. A fish plate with the head and body intact is enough to turn Zoe off from eating anything Kate prepares. To say that Kate doesn’t understand a child’s needs is an astronomical understatement considering that the chef de cuisine doesn’t begin to grasp her own emotional insecurities. But that doesn’t stop the sudden-mom from overcompensating enough that Zoe feels compelled to tell her she doesn’t need to try so hard.

Confrontations with guests at the restaurant, over things like the rareness of a piece of beef, have caused the owner to hire Nick, as an assistant chef to augment Kate’s less-than-cheerful kitchen. The humorous grist of the movie comes from Kate and Nick’s interaction as polar yet complimenting opposites. Watching Nick’s perfectly obeisant behavior toward Kate chip away her brittle exterior is gratifying for the gentle way he also introduces food that Zoe will eat into the equation. Nick plays opera on his boombox in the kitchen, and his singing invigorates the kitchen staff as much as it irritates the head chef. These are three likable characters that deserve a better quality of communication, and the drama springs from their impatient personalities that conspire to flee at any given moment.

On the surface, "No Reservations" is a tragedy-spiked romantic comedy where the audience always knows exactly where the story is going. What we don’t see coming is the undertow of emotional urgency that Kate, Nick and Zoe gradually embrace with a sense of kindness that breathes space for the mysterious connection of family to take hold. As a director, Scott Hicks knows how to stay out of the way of the story and of his actors. For all of the zesty food that’s cooked, it’s the organic quality of the performances that evoke just the right amount of tenderness without any aftertaste of sentimentality. The texture is just right.

Rated PG, 105 mins. (B) (Three Stars)

A Mighty Heart

Don’t Look For Neorealism Here
Third Hollywood Post-9/11 Same as The Other Two

By Cole Smithey

"A Mighty Heart," like the other post-9/11 Hollywood movies ("United 93" and "World Trade Center"), is a would-be documentary subject inflated with promotion in its incarnation as a narrative feature. The turgid emphasis on sentiment and emotion is intended to overpower the viewer into believing and agreeing with everything on the screen, lest he or she be thought of as callous or insensitive. All of the oh-so-sincere earnestness seems to say, you are either with us or you are a bad person. "Hokey" is a word that springs to the lips when I think of these films, but not hokey in a cool Humphrey Bogart in "Casablanca" way. No, these movies are meant to be perceived as "important" and "serious" because they ostensibly reveal "heroes" that we the audience should aspire to, but could never be, since we were not in the enviable position of the suffering person onscreen.

The "mighty heart" of the film’s title refers more to the long suffering wife of the deceased Wall Street Journalist reporter Daniel Pearl than it does to the man himself. We know this because the climax of the piece arrives when the protagonist, a pregnant Mariane Pearl, goes into an extended primal scream session after hearing news of her husband’s long foreshadowed death. Never more has the Shakespeare quote from Hamlet, "the lady doth protest too much" applied so obviously to a crisis decision in a movie. Daniel Pearl and his wife were acutely aware of the dangers of his job. He was in Karachi trying to get interviews with known terrorists. That Mariane Pearl chose to improperly apply for the 9/11 victim’s relief fund, even though her husband did not perish in that event, informs her unflinching sense of opportunism that carried over to writing a book and participating in making a film about her husband’s death.

Somehow, all of this obvious motivation escaped director Michael Winterbottom, the film’s producer Brad Pitt and his wife Angelina Jolie, because they bought into Mariane Pearl’s money grab pity party hook, line and sinker. Never mind that the linear story isn’t capable of maintaining a three-act structure merely because actress, star and supermom Angelina Jolie plays the rather homely-looking Mariane Pearl with every curly hair flawlessly in place. If only Warren Zevon’s "Werewolves of London" played on the soundtrack, then we’d know for certain that her "hair was perfect."

(D) (One Star)

The Lookout

Diamond Out of the Rough
Joseph Gordon-Levitt Navigates a Bank Heist Gem
By Cole Smithey

A fresh take on a well-worn genre--the bank heist movie--infuses unexpected humor from Jeff Daniels’ brilliantly modulated performance as Lewis, a blind companion to Chris Pratt’s (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) mentally challenged bank janitor. Debut writer/director Scott Frank (screenwriter on "Out of Sight" and "Minority Report") perfectly balances unpredictable plot twists with emotional pangs as car crash victim Chris tries to negotiate a normal small-town life in spite of constant memory lapses that impugn his sanity. A nasty gang of thieves exploits Chris’s vulnerability by making him act as a lookout for a robbery at the bank where he works as a night custodian.

High school hockey champ Chris suffers a traumatic brain injury when the car he’s driving crashes on a highway lit only by starlight. He’s travelling at high speed with his girlfriend next to him and a couple of friends riding in the back seat when he cuts off the headlights so they can savor the brilliance of the stars on a miraculously clear summer night.

The scene says a lot about Chris as a character blinded by his own romanticism. He loves the contrast of speed with the limitless dark beauty of the night sky, but he also relishes scaring his friends who yell at him to turn the headlights back on. Here is an innocently selfish boy doomed to be physically punished and emotionally haunted for a moment of blithe thoughtlessness. The scene is sublimely tranquil and yet fraught with excruciating suspense.

Several years later, Chris is a walking ball of dislocated longing and debilitating forgetfulness. He keeps a spare key in his sock as a safeguard against his recurring habit of locking himself out of his car. Meticulous lists guide Chris through endless days where a task as simple as opening a can threatens to bring his survival to a halt. He makes inappropriate passes at his mental health counselor, and lashes out at Lewis, his blind roommate and mentor. Like a high-functioning autistic person, Chris struggles with social interaction. During a visit to a neighborhood bar, former high school peer-turned-smalltime-criminal Gary Spargo (Matthew Goode – "Match Point") spots Chris and strikes up a "friendly" conversation. Sizing up Chris’ acute need for female attention, Gary seizes the opportunity to introduce him to Luvlee Lemons (Isla Fisher) whose phony name carries on her status as former stripper. Chris takes the bait and beds Luvlee with the erroneous belief that he is making a romantic connection.

Throughout Chris’ headlong plunge toward victimization at the hands of Gary, Lewis is a recurring voice of reason, and his blindness doesn’t prevent him from seeing through Luvlee’s false intentions for Chris. But it’s a Thanksgiving dinner that Lewis attends, with Chris and his wealthy yet apathetic family, which brings Chris’ backstory to a boil. Lewis bears witness to Chris’ unbalanced familial reality, and the uncomfortable event marks a turning point for the elder Lewis to view Chris from a more fatherly position--Lewis dreams of opening a diner that he and Chris will run.

The fairly botched bank robbery that transpires is the centerpiece of the movie and its aftermath tests Chris’ unique ingenuity of planning his actions backwards in order to save himself and Lewis. There are surprises here, and for all of the film’s apparent similarities to Chris Nolan’s "Memento," "The Lookout" proves a much more entertaining and satisfying experience.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt ("Mysterious Skin") is the new Ed Norton; he’s an actor of nuanced subtlety whose careful choices are as transparent as they are visible. His contribution fulfills "The Lookout" as that rare character-driven movie that screenwriters dream of creating, and then rush to copy after seeing it. It is a gem of a movie that beckons repeated viewing.

Rated R, 102 mins. (B+) (Four Stars)

Black Snake Moan

Wicked Gravity
Blues Roots Take Hold In Craig Brewer’s Gothic Tale of Redemption
By Cole Smithey

The title "Black Snake Moan" comes from Texas bluesman Blind Lemon Jefferson’s song about going blind, and the swampy imagery serves as a beacon of primal anguish for writer/director Craig Brewer ("Hustle & Flow"). On the outskirts of Memphis, Rae (Christina Ricci) suffers from an anxiety disorder that causes desperate fits of nymphomania that her boyfriend Ronnie (Justin Timberlake) sates. But as soon as Iraq-destined Ronnie leaves for boot camp, Rae immediately returns to seeking out promiscuous sex with every guy in her path. Her indiscretion leads to a brutal beating that puts her left-for-dead on a dirt road near the house of Lazarus (Samuel L. Jackson) a former Blues singer turned farmer. Lazarus’ chivalrous decision to risk his own life to save Rae leads him to chain her to his farmhouse radiator for an unpredictable sort of moral, mental and physical salvation. Brewer’s hard-bitten drama isn’t merely defiant; it spits fire at America’s phony media-fed version of itself. It displays human struggle on an intimate scale that prompts its audience to reflect on their own misconceptions.

Musical legend Son House sets the film’s dramatic framework from a black-and-white clip of him describing how the tension in the Blues "consists between male and female." The documentary footage cuts to Rae and Ronnie having passionate sex just moments before he leaves for military service. Like a spoiled pet, Rae chases after her boyfriend as he rides away in his best friend Gill’s pickup truck. Her mood soon switches from needy to naughty when a giant tractor dwarfs her tiny frame on a rural route that she saunters down in revealing cut-off jeans and midriff T-shirt. The tractor driver honks incessantly at Rae who flips him the bird without looking back as she slowly leads him.

After taking a handful of mixed drugs at an outdoor party, Rae accepts a ride home from Gill (Michael Raymond-James) and makes the mistake of offering herself up to him. Her boyfriend’s pal takes advantage of the situation to violently act out his insecurities on her and leave her for dead.

Already, Brewer has pulled us deep into a demimonde of subversive realness that transcends time. We know Rae as simultaneously contemptible and compatible but are drawn to her as a protagonist we care about. The T-shirt that she wears for much of the film has an American flag and a Confederate flag crossing one another as a rebel symbol that would make Hillary Clinton fume. Rae isn’t just any voracious slut of local renown; she is a force-of-nature freedom fighter on a mission to screw the world into submission.

Lazarus is a farmer suffering grave emotional pain over his wife’s decision to abandon their marriage of 12-years to take up with his brother. He drives a tractor over her old rose garden after meeting with her in a restaurant in an attempt at reconciliation that she unceremoniously refutes. This is the real South where political rhetoric means nothing against the hot sun that intensifies the aggravation of every gnat, mosquito and fly. As Lazarus will soon point out to his neighborly preacher R.L. (John Cothran), this is a place where "being black and nearby" are cause for punishment.

When Rae awakens in Lazarus’ house and realizes the debt she owes him, she offers herself to him. His clear refusal of sex shifts their paradigm into a realm that neither of them understands. It isn’t until she tries to run away before recovering from her wounds that Laz (as he’s called) chains her to the radiator with a long heavy chain that repeats Brewer’s unnerving image system of a snake representing the tool of an avenging angel (Lazarus). The other instrument that Lazarus uses is pulled out from beneath his bed in the guise of an old Gibson guitar. His reconnection with the guitar after years of not playing forms a basis of musical associations that enter Rae’s consciousness like rungs on a ladder toward a different kind of physical release.

Lazarus seeks out information about Rae from a local drug dealer familiar with her sudden and intense need for sex. He invites his preacher, and a local boy who discovers Rae chained up in heat, over for dinner. These are just two of the ways that Lazarus reintroduces Rae to the community even as he presides over her as her keeper. At the time Rae’s period of bondage ends, Lazarus has rewired her outward appearance with flattering dresses. It’s in her newfound persona that she publicly confronts her mother about the childhood abuse that caused her psychosexual condition. Without giving anything away, the scene gets at the crux of the story in a public setting and damns the mother figure as the culpable person responsible for the damage we have witnessed in Rae.

Craig Brewer is an American auteur in the Martin Scorsese sense of the term. Like Scorsese’s early films, Brewer draws on the inner workings of a slice of American experience that seems foreign. Like De Niro’s Johnny Boy in "Mean Streets," Christina Ricci’s anti-heroine is treated with a respect and patience that only her creator can preserve. But unlike Johnny Boy, Rae has a chance. "Black Snake Moan" is not the best film that Craig Brewer will ever write and direct, but it comes from the most original and independent filmmaker out there.

Rated R, 116 mins. (B+) (Four Stars)

The Wind That Shakes The Barley

Irish Political Essay
Ken Loach Examines Ireland’s 1920 War of Independence
By Cole Smithey

As winner of the 2006 Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or, Ken Loach’s film enables a look forward by looking back in time. Set in West Cork, Ireland in 1920, the story fixes on the strife within a group of Irish freedom fighters, the IRA’s Flying Column, attempting to reclaim Ireland’s independence from Britain’s cruel Black and Tan squads occupying the land. The formerly apolitical Damien O’Donovan (Cillian Murphy) gives up a budding career as a physician to join the resistance with his fiercely idealistic brother Teddy (Padraic Delaney) whose familial and political loyalties will be sorely tested by the story’s end. It evokes a lesson that governments refuse to learn—occupied people always fight back with more at stake and nothing to lose.

After a game of "hurling," a group of Irish players arrive at a nearby farmhouse where a band of armed British troops trap them and violently demand the names and addresses of each man. One of the men, ‘Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin,’ refuses to speak English in an act of snarling defiance that soon costs him his life. Angered by the impotence of their authority by intimidation, the soldiers take Mícheál into the barn where they torture and kill him off-screen.

At Mícheál’s wake, a young woman sings Robert Dwyer Joyce’s song "The Wind That Shakes The Barley" in a voice that haunts you with its depth of poetic consciousness and reason.

The elegy, "Twas hard for mournful words to frame

to break the ties that bound us,

Ah but harder still to bear the shame

of foreign chains around us.

And so I said: the mountain glen

I’ll seek at morning early

And join the brave united men

While soft winds shake the barley," reveals an undeniable purity of human dignity and resolve that sends shivers down your spine.

Still intent on leaving Ireland for Britain to practice medicine, Damian waits at a train station where Black and Tans demand to board, in spite of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union policy of not transporting any British military personnel or supplies. The soldiers exact physical revenge on the train’s unyielding driver Dan (Liam Cunningham) and stationmaster. The episode cracks Damian’s resolve and he returns to his brother to defend Ireland rather than abandon it.

Beside Damian’s loyalty to Ireland, is his love for Sinead (Orla Fitzgerald) whose family farmhouse serves as a central symbol of idyllic Irish rural life tainted by imperialism. Loach supports his anti-war theme with the human connection between Damian and Orla. The tender relationship is toppled during a gut-wrenching scene in which a squad of Tans mercilessly beats Orla while Damian and his comrades watch helplessly from a nearby hillside. Outnumbered, the men can only watch in horror as Orla suffers the humiliating physical attack. Loach is careful to keep the scene in a long shot that puts the audience at the same distance as Damian’s point of view. It’s consistent with the way that Loach refrains from glorifying violence throughout, and allows the emotions and politics of the narrative to emanate organically from arguments and situations.

Loach’s frequent script collaborator Paul Laverty efficiently articulates the goals of the resistance through fictional composite characters. Of the 11-man Flying Column group that Teddy leads, Dan is the central mouthpiece of executed socialist leader James Connolly’s progressive ideals motivated by ending oppression of the poor, rather than protecting Ireland’s national identity. Damien is quick to recognize and side with Dan’s vision for a workers’ republic that extends beyond the resistance group’s current struggle.

Laverty condenses Ireland’s struggle for independence into a series of brutal events and democratic choices that lead to the left selling out the left as a price of doing business with the British Empire. This reality is brought under a fraternal microscope between Damian and Teddy at a republican court overseen by a woman judge. A destitute woman is in debt to a local businessman who demands she pay 500 percent interest. Teddy sides with the businessman who incidentally provides weapons to the resistance, while Damien and Dan side with the old woman. When the judge finds in favor of the woman and orders the moneylender to jail until the victim is compensated, Teddy disrupts the court and rescues the man. The incident foreshadows Teddy’s alignment with limited statehood under the 1921 Anglo-Irish treaty that elevates him to the status of the Tans, and bolsters him to destroy Damian.

"The Wind That Shakes The Barley" shares more than a little in common with Paul Verhoeven’s latest masterpiece "Black Book." Both films look unflinchingly inside the weaknesses of resistance movements betrayed by disorganization and greed. Ken Loach has said that his film is a small step toward the British confronting its imperialist history so that perhaps if we tell the truth about the past, we can tell the truth about the present.

The film is an exceptional work of vigorous cinematic art filled with dynamic performances by its all-Irish cast. At 70, Ken Loach is as steadfast a filmmaker as ever. I defy anyone who gives the film the attention it deserves to deny that it is his best film.

Not Rated, 126 mins. (A) (Five Stars)

Freedom Writers

Diaries of Dark Introspection
Hillary Swank Portrays L.A. High School Teacher Erin Gruwell
By Cole Smithey

Poised as a diatribe on the abysmal state of the American education system and gang violence around Long Beach, California, "Freedom Writers" is based on the true story of neophyte high school teacher Erin Gruwell (Hillary Swank) who broke with curriculum convention to inspire her troubled students during the mid-'90s. Writer/director Richard LaGravenese milks audience empathy with so much voice-over narration that he may as well have recorded the story as a books-on-tape product. Swank's starry-eyed character assigns her students to keep diaries about their lives, and teaches lessons about the Holocaust via "The Diary of Anne Frank" to give them a sense of place and decency. Compared to a film like "Boyz N The Hood," this is cinema activism lite. Imelda Staunton ("Vera Drake") gives an outstanding performance as the school's status quo-keeping principal whose privately racist agenda is eaten away at by Gruwell's profound efforts with her class. In 1999 Erin Gruwell published the students' work as "The Freedom Writers Diary."

Hillary Swank is credited as a producer, and it seems that the Oscar-winning actress chose "Freedom Writers" as a leading role showcase in spite of its formulaic sappiness. Even with an unsupportive husband (Patrick Dempsey) and rigid school board protocol, Swank’s Erin Gruwell comes off as condescending when should be seen as a fighter. LaGravenese’s cookie-cutter screenplay doesn’t help Swank’s cherry-pie performance with its thinly sketched subplots that teeter toward sentimentality during the brief moments they occupy.

Most disagreeable is the way the Holocaust is referenced as being somehow synonymous with the violent tribulations of the African American, Hispanic and Asian students’ lives outside of Gruwell’s unifying classroom. The story hangs on a payoff scene during a school event when Miep Gies (Pat Carroll), the woman who helped hide the Frank family, visits Gruwell’s class to answer questions and share her experiences with Anne Frank. Because we never hear Gruwell lecture on how she views a connection between the Holocaust and the violent lives of her students, the audience has little context for the pivotal scene other than to sense an abstract similarity between WWII and Los Angeles’ gang violence.

LaGravenese ("The Horse Whisperer") has a tendency to sanitize every scene, and when he hits the audience’s emotional sweet spot and a few tears begin to flow, you have the feeling that the release is unjustified. The film succeeds in an incidental way by raising issues, however vaguely, of the ways scholastic public policy conspires against all students in American public schools. But "Freedom Writers" is a movie that pretends to be much more than it is. There isn’t a second of immediacy in the picture, and its theatrical tone and shortcut plotting make it a blankly rewarding entertainment experience.

Rated PG-13, 123 mins. (C) (Two Stars)

Stomp The Yard

Clubfooted Indoctrination
"Stepping" Gets Trotted Out as One More Dance Craze
By Cole Smithey

Like every other dance movie with "street credentials" (see "Take The Lead" or "Step Up") "Stomp The Yard" dangles the carrot of a finale dance-off competition to ward off any issues of narrative inadequacy that might distract from the forcefully undulating nubile bodies pushed to their contorted limits. DJ Williams (Columbus Short – "Accepted") is a talented hip-hop dancer forced to relocate from Los Angeles to Atlanta for college after his brother is murdered by a rival crew of street dancers. DJ moves in with his aunt and uncle in order to attend Atlanta’s historically black Truth University where he is exposed to the fraternity tradition of "stepping." Evolved from African "gumboot dance" the group dance style combines rhythmically dynamic steps with chants and percussive hand movements maintaining two independent military cadences. DJ’s sense of solitary individuality dissipates as he determines to steal the affection of April (Megan Good - "Roll Bounce") from her privileged-but-robotic boyfriend Grant (Darrin Henson) of the Mu Gamma Xi frat. After joining underdog stepping fraternity Theta Nu Theta (Mu Gamma Xi’s rival frat), DJ has to figure out more new ways to keep dancing in the limelight.

From a dance standpoint, "stepping" is a confrontational and mocking type of primal activity conceived to intimidate competitors by expressing a military intent. The subtext is an open invitation to violence but like the head-cutting rap face-offs shown in "8 Mile" there is a silent contract that the displays are merely a way of letting off steam for testosterone-driven egotistical young men. In the context of fraternity spirit, steppers are an equivalent to a drumline, marching band, parade and party, all in one. The Mu Gamma Xi identify with howling wolves, while the Theta Nu Thetas present themselves as hissing pythons when they present their step routines.

What newbie screenwriter Robert Adetuyi ("Code Name: The Cleaner") and music video director Sylvain White ("I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer") intend is to reinvent the clunky step moves as an extension of freestyle hip-hop under an umbrella of collegiate comradeship.

Theta Nu Theta’s leader Sylvester (Brian White) voices crucial theme lines when he boasts of a lasting bond of brotherhood that DJ will enjoy for as long as he lives if he joins the fraternity. The scene comes before DJ walks through the school’s Heritage Hall where photos of fraternity and sorority members like Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks and Michael Jordan silently endorse membership in the groups as a gateway to advantage and success. There’s a glaring disconnect between the indelible person that DJ seems to be, and his indoctrination into a populist affiliation of wannabe followers.

The shell game for DJ’s rebellious identity becomes further obscured when Grant runs a history check on DJ and turns over the information about DJ’s part in his brother’s death to the school’s provost Doctor Palmer (Allan Louis), April’s overly protective father. The movie slips into soap opera land for DJ to square off against his girlfriend’s autocratic dad even as DJ’s genteel aunt brings her own romantic past to bear with the provost in his uncomfortably populated office.

In the over-leveraged final competition between the wolves and the pythons choreographers Dave Scott ("Your Got Served") and Jesus Maldonado present an evocative, if not convincing, amalgam of street style hip-hop, krumping and stepping that the filmmakers fumble to dramatize with multiple camera angles and slow-motion sequences. The effect is a generic blend of coordinated group movement embellished with primal energy and raw anger. Who are these impressionable youth, and what will they wake up to when they realize that their devotion to fellowship is a promise glimpsed in a rearview mirror. That question never arises in "Stomp the Yard" because the story isn’t the sum of its parts, but rather just a bunch of locking, popping and posing.

Rated PG-13. 115 mins. (C) (Two Stars)

The Good Shepherd

Spying On The Enemy
De Niro Puts a Bright Light on the CIA
By Cole Smithey

Robert De Niro’s second outing as director (his first was "A Bronx Tale" - 1993) pinpoints the ruthless and dogmatic sense of privileged ideology and unscrupulous secrecy that enabled the creation of the CIA. With Eric Roth’s eloquent script as a map of detailed fictionalized events that expand to an epic scale, the film traces Edward Wilson (Matt Damon) as a pokerfaced Yale student with an inscrutable way of choosing his words and not answering questions. Through a seamless combination of flashbacks, asides, and forward moving action, we are submersed in a concealed world of cold distrust and global espionage. From Edward’s ritual-filled indoctrination into the Skull & Bones club at Yale, where he divulges his father’s unacknowledged suicide, to the tragic solution to an investigation connected to the Bay of Pigs, "The Good Shepard" illustrates an origin of American international hegemony that has turned its own country into a laboratory of supervision.

"The Good Shepherd" is all about tone and the stoic atmosphere of secrets and lies that protects U.S. government agents. It’s about a milieu of insidious self-important people in positions of power who took advantage of their autonomy to create a covert committee of global assassins. Within Edward’s small loop of associates at Yale—he really can’t call anyone his friend—are an exclusive group of people who will be personally scarred or even killed as a result of their association with a character not unlike the cunning shape-shifter Matt Damon played in "The Talented Mr. Ripley."

Edward’s poetry professor at Yale, Dr. Fredericks (Michael Gambon), is a poof with bent toward Nazi politics. A brief meeting with FBI agent Sam Murach (Alec Baldwin) sends Edward on a mission to discredit his professor, resulting in Fredericks’ dismissal from Yale. When it’s later revealed that Dr. Fredericks was in on the plan with the Office of Strategic Services (precursor to the CIA) from the start, the disclosure comes with a caveat to Edward that Dr. Fredericks’ homosexuality has become a grave problem to the "agency." And so it goes that every civilian Edward comes into contact with are eventually discovered to be knowingly or unknowingly part of a bigger picture of spying.

It’s telling that Edward dates Laura (Tammy Blanchard) a deaf girl whose hearing aid takes on a fetishistic quality. But Edward is an easy mark for rich girl Margaret "Clover" Russell (Angelina Jolie) who seduces her sitting duck and gets pregnant on their initial sexual encounter. The event forces Edward to abandon Laura, and marry Clover just when OSS agent "Wild Bill" Sullivan (Robert De Niro) sends Edward to serve in London.

Flash forward to the future when Edward and a group of CIA agents study a blown-up grainy black and white photograph, taken in a bedroom in some cryptic foreign city. In the photo are clues to the identity of an informer who gave away secrets that affected the Bay of Pigs debacle. The photo acts a McGuffin to add suspense to the story, but it also plays crucially into the climax when Edward is forced to face the ramifications of his actions in the guise of his now-grown son Edward Jr. (Eddie Redmayne) who has joined the CIA. The son’s attempt to walk in his father’s invisible footsteps proves disastrous for the family and brings the story into a personal context.

Angelina Jolie is miscast in a role that needed a different calibration of actress, Jennifer Connelly perhaps, to maneuver the glacial emotional waters Edward and Clover traverse in their detached marriage. Cinematographer Robert Richardson’s bold compositions work hand-in-glove with the script to put the audience in the mindset of its paranoid characters. "The Good Shepherd" is a movie that stays with you because it removes any sense of carefree liberty you might have felt about America. It brings you up to date with how the CIA helped ruin foreign affairs and make American citizens the hunted. We spy on the enemy, and they are us.

Rated R, 157 mins. (A-) (Four Stars)

The Pursuit of Happyness

Slipping Inspiration in San Francisco
Will Smith Takes His Son Slumming
By Cole Smithey

From the looks of Will Smith’s downtrodden character in "The Pursuit of Happyness," the only place for the capable actor’s career to go is down. Smith plays Chris Gardner, a hangdog salesman of specialized x-ray equipment whose trifling wife Linda (Thandie Newton) abandons him and their five-year-old son Christopher (Jaden Christopher Syre Smith) when the family’s financial situation gets tough. Although at the end of his rent-paying rope, Chris takes up a non-paying six-month internship at the Dean Witter brokerage firm in hopes securing a full-time job at the end of his apprenticeship. This Sisyphean movie, based on a profile on television’s "20/20," succeeds in portraying ‘80s era San Francisco as a deceptively appealing city with a flaky underbelly inhabited by desperate hippies and homeless people. But it’s the picture’s overtly grave tone that makes it about as unentertaining as waiting for a bus that never arrives.

We know that Chris Gardner is an earnest man by the careful way he talks to his son in dark mumbled tones when he tucks him into bed. He’s the droopy guy with a permanent rain cloud following him through every step of existence. Distracting voice-over chapter headings like, "This part of my life is called being stupid" or "This part of my life is called running," remind us that Will Smith (the actor) actively endorses the idea of a man pulling himself by his own bootstraps. That the man doing the pulling is a bit of an idiot savant seems to have gone unnoticed.

Chris might be able to solve a Rubik’s Cube—as he does to impress a potential boss, but he comes up short in the common sense department. When his wife leaves him Chris demands that he keep the couple’s child. But days later Chris is arrested for outstanding parking tickets and jailed overnight away from his son. Chris doesn’t have any friends to call, so he’s forced to call on Linda for her assistance. Chris’ tunnel vision of reality demands that he carry a sewing machine-sized x-ray device to sell to some unsuspecting doctor at one of the hospitals on his route. When Chris pretends with his son that they have traveled through a time machine before sleeping overnight in a public restroom at a subway station, the movie hits a low spot that it never recovers from.

The film’s title comes from a misspelled daycare center sign in Chinatown where Chris takes his son for daily supervision. It is not ironic that Chris gets personally offended enough by the egregious spelling error to ask that it be corrected, while movie goers are expected to suspend their own grammatical judgements in order to purchase a ticket. Narration explains how impressed Chris is with Benjamin Franklin’s insight at including the "pursuit of happiness" in the Constitution, because it reflects an ongoing process for fulfillment that may never come. Director Gabrielle Muccino ("The Last Kiss") strives but fails to make a message movie about the positive effects of a father-and-son relationship because the parent is untrustworthy. As the protective patriarch, Chris shepherds young Christopher through the hazards of a homeless shelter while going to great pains at Dean Witter to insure his success. "The Pursuit of Happyness," like its title portends, is not about happiness but rather about a search for fiscal responsibility in light of being a single parent. It is a thoroughly depressing and uncomfortable showcase for Will Smith and his real life descendant. If Jaden Christopher Syre Smith outshines his father’s performance, it may be due to the fact that the little boy has the only likable role.

Rated PG-13, 116 mins. (C-) (Two Stars)

Fast Food Nation

Inedible
Richard Linklater Cuts Up the Fast Food Industrial Complex
By Cole Smithey

Former Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren produced this film version of Eric Schlosser’s best-selling 2001 nonfiction expose "Fast Food Nation," about the disgusting, illegal, and dangerous aspects of America’s fast food industrial complex. Director Richard Linklater adds biting social satire while striking a comic tone to insure that Schlosser’s social medicine goes down gently until the film’s disturbing reality-based anti-climax is revealed. Greg Kinnear gives a top-drawer performance as Don Henderson, the marketing veep for "Mickey’s," a successful fast food burger chain, who gets an assignment to covertly investigate why cow manure has been turning up in his company’s burgers. Henderson’s road-trip-inquiry intersects with the brutal working conditions of illegal alien workers in a dangerous meat processing plant, rebellious teen employees at a burger franchise, and cattle supplier Harry (Bruce Willis) who tells Don, "We all have to eat a little &%#@ from time to time."

Where this year’s mushy tobacco satire "Thank You For Smoking" failed due to its filmmakers’ refusal to take enough of a stand, "Fast Food Nation" has no such pretense. Animals, people, dreams, and crap are all ground into little brown burgers for Americans to purchase at a cash discount. We’re not led to believe that there is any mask of propriety, charisma or kindness behind the process of making rich the corporate heads that mine our land and bodies for huge profits. Richard Linklater balances Schlosser’s study of corporate greed with palpable layers of human limitation and regional circumstance that inform the choices and decisions of his representative characters.

Don Henderson isn’t an exceptionally smart or shrewd corporate rook; he just has enough sincere curiosity and common sense to bear witness to the machinations around him. Henderson travels to Cody, Colorado where illegal immigrants staff his company’s busy meat slaughterhouse and packing plant. Sylvia (Catalina Sandino Moreno – "Maria Full of Grace"), her promiscuous sister Coco (Ana Claudia Talancon) and Sylvia’s earnest boyfriend Raul (Wilmer Valderrama) have recently been spirited into Cody by the local coyote Benny (Luis Guzman) to work at the plant. The immigrant subplot is the flashpoint of the story, and Linklater makes ingenious use of an actual modern-day slaughterhouse, with its ostensibly sterile areas, to dramatize the severe health risks and cruel working conditions of the environment.

The town plays a significant character in Linklater’s John Sayles brand of socially interconnected ensemble narrative. Cody’s main strip is a model of small town America where fast food chain restaurants beckon the populace with a promise of cheap food and employment opportunities. Distressed Mickey’s counter clerk Amber (Ashley Johnson) represents a generation Z character that has been duped by her surroundings into devaluing her personal potential. Amber’s professorial Uncle Pete (Ethan Hawke) pays a visit to Amber to impart some perspective and wisdom to his distracted niece. Linklater’s casting of Ethan Hawke calls undue attention to the superfluous scene wherein Hawke recites theme lines as if he’s passing along a Holy Grail of insight about the dangers of pregnancy and minimum wage jobs. The film grinds to a standstill.

The movie tips its hat to young audiences when Amber teams up with Paco (Lou Taylor Pucci), a political activist who stirs his friends to attempt an act of eco-terrorism by freeing a herd of cows awaiting slaughter. The doomed plan backfires and points toward the necessity of bigger and brighter ideas from America’s flaming youth to take on corporate systems that enslave enormous segments of the populace.

Films don’t change societies, and to believe that "Fast Food Nation" will turn people away from fast food, any more than Morgan Spurlock’s successful documentary "Super Size Me" did, is pure folly. You won’t learn much here that you don’t already know. But you will get the pleasure of knowing that you aren’t alone in your knowledge.

Rated R, 114 mins. (B) (Four Stars)

Harsh Times

 

Menace To Society
A Bush Era Soldier Comes Home To Roost
By Cole Smithey

Jim Davis (Christian Bale) is a tweaked-out discharged Army Ranger who returns from the Gulf War to his childhood South Central neighborhood in Los Angeles to stir up trouble with his best friend Mike (Freddy Rodriguez) in this devastating drama by writer/director David Ayer (writer on "Training Day"). Jim’s plans to marry his Mexican peasant girlfriend Marta (Tammy Trull) and bring her across the border are eclipsed by his desire to join the LAPD. Fate throws Jim a curveball, after he’s turned down to be a cop, in the form of a Homeland Security job offer to work in Colombia as an anti-drug enforcer even as Bale’s drugged-out character descends into a volatile madness that leaves a swath of destruction in its wake. "Harsh Times" is a modern and raw reflection of the disastrous effects of war on the soldiers that survive them and the potential danger they pose.

Since he was discovered by Steven Spielberg to play the young lead in "Empire of the Sun" (1987) Christian Bale’s already broad acting range has expanded to a place that few actors achieve over a lifetime of work. He is a commanding force of nature carrying the full moral weight of his tormented characters like an isolated atom full of speeding electrons in anticipation of being split into a mushroom cloud. He was quoted in Spin magazine as saying, "An actor should never be larger than the film he's in," and when you watch him you can understand why he is so concerned with not overpowering the narrative atmosphere that he inhabits. As a movie star, Bale is such a man of the world that he has no peer. He could just as easily play James Bond as he could the next President of the United States, Mexico or Russia.

The Gulf War robbed Jim Davis of his humanity, but he still feels phantom traces of his former innocence that evaporate whenever he attempts to communicate with people who knew him before the war. He has a gag reflex toward his innate personal nature. Jim’s friend Mike is attempting to marry above his social class with his intelligent and attractive attorney girlfriend Sylvia (Eva Longoria) but when Jim comes crashing back into Mike’s life Sylvia is painted as an obstacle blocking all aspects of liberty, loyalty and brotherhood. Jim derails Mike from his promised mission of finding a job, and orchestrates phony job opportunities through fabricated phone messages designed to throw Sylvia off of their trail of drugging and drinking. The recording of a fake telephone message provides one of the film’s few humorous moments. A double standard at play is that Jim actively pursues his own employment opportunities while assigning Mike as a captive sidekick.

You could make a case that "Harsh Times" is essentially the same story as "Training Day," but there’s far less Hollywood fantasy here. Both are powerful morality plays that share more than a few elements in common with Abel Ferrara’s "Bad Lieutenant" and Martin Scorsese’s "Taxi Driver." The difference is that "Harsh Times" is a Bush era story that applies specifically to the ways that both Bush administrations repurpose the human wreckage that they created.

After failing a urine test while applying for a Homeland Security job, Jim wins over his put-off would-be employers by admitting that he smoked some pot in a fit of rebellious frustration. As it turns out, this combination of twitchy angst and humble honesty is just what the elite government boys are looking for to represent the country’s overseas investments. Of course, Jim has been doing a good deal more than just smoking pot in an effort to block out the post war trauma that increasingly turns his charismatic personality toward reckless violent acts.

A stomach churning double climax ratchets up the third act ending to a nearly unbearable level of latent and realized brutality. Like the final act of "Taxi Driver," it is a shocking series of events that releases the drama’s built-up tension like a brain surgeon cutting into a constricted skull. It is necessarily bloody but, more importantly, it allows the audience to breathe again. We are left to wonder what future shocks await us outside of the cinema.

Rated R, 115 mins. (A-)

Catch a Fire

From Torture to Terror
Philip Noyce Connects Apartheid to Today
By Cole Smithey

Australian director Philip Noyce ("Rabbit-Proof Fence") applies his authentic sense of cinematic storytelling to the real-life story of Patrick Chamusso (Derek Luke - "Antoine Fisher"), an apolitical South African oil refinery engineer who joins a revolution against the violent apartheid regime after government goons torture him and his wife (Bonnie Henna). Tim Robbins plays Police Security Colonel Nic Vos who takes a special interest in keeping tabs on Patrick after he is released from suspicion of carrying out a bombing at the Secunda oil plant. Filmed on location in Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Mozambique, "Catch a Fire" is an incendiary movie about an individual's desperate decision to battle a corrupt government system after being mentally and psychically abused. Here, one man's story illuminates the way that government-sponsored torture polarizes human beings and gives birth to terrorists.

Although Patrick Chamusso's story occurred between 1980 and 1981 in Africa, it resonates with escalating social oppression within the United States by a government obsessed with fomenting the exact conditions of terror that it claims to prohibit. Patrick's social awakening comes after he experiences anguish typical of what victims of serial killers and sociopaths suffer. His brutal interrogation is aggravated by the simultaneous defilement of his wife with whom he shares a jail cell. Through Patrick's punishment we witness an ordinary man transformed into a vengeful soul. Few people would argue that they would not respond with vengeance if they or their spouse suffered a fraction of the abuse that anti-terrorist organizations practice on their victims, and the filmmaker makes no case for Patrick's perceived options of leaving the country or turning the other cheek.

Patrick is a loyal family man who volunteers his time as a soccer coach for local kids, but he maintains an adulterous life with a woman from his past, and it's this indiscretion that contributes to his fallibility as a suspect. Patrick's capacity for deception foreshadows his decision to abandon his family in order to train with the African National Congress freedom fighters in Mozambique before going to Angola for indoctrination with the ANC's military branch, the MK [Umkhonto we Sizwe]. Derek Luke builds layers of tension over his character's emotional wounds, and conveys a ferocity that is staggering for its depth.

Nic Vos is a walking contradiction of family man and ruthless government pawn. Robbins' problematic casting creates a wavering narrative disconnect in spite of the skilled actor's best efforts at fleshing out what is obviously a composite person created by screenwriter Shawn Slovo, the daughter of the late South African Communist Party leader Joe Slovo. If anything, Robbins keeps such a tight a lid on his character that we can only gauge his hostility and underlying fear as part of a larger alien machine called apartheid. Tim Robbins falls back on his favorite prop, a toothpick that flutters from his lips to remind us that Nic Vos is constantly on a hair trigger.

The film escalates into a third-act crisis that seems like it was pulled from an old Bruce Willis action movie. Patrick uses his intimate knowledge of the Secunda oil plant to attempt a sabotage operation that will bring down the entire refinery. The pushy action overture comes off as little more than a perfunctory chase scene with a predictable outcome that undercuts the more serious tone of the movie. Philip Noyce fudges the script contrivance with a closing episode that allows an older Patrick to quietly bury the cycle of cruelty that consumed his conscience. The shorthand narrative gesture is too abrupt to be completely effective, but it does support the idea that forgiveness is always an option.

Rated PG-13, 101 mins (B-) (Three Stars)

Flags of Our Fathers

Eastwood Deconstructs Heroism
Iwo Jima Becomes a Talking Point For Reality
By Cole Smithey

Clint Eastwood distills a wartime story of epic proportions and personal truths from the worst single engagement of WWII on the island of Iwo Jima. From the brutal reality of the bloody 40-day battle to the way a group of its soldiers were made famous and taken advantage of by their government before being discarded, the movie gives context and personality to the soldiers whose faces were hidden in the War’s most famous image. Based on James Bradley’s best-selling book about his personal journey into his father John Bradley’s wartime achievements, screenwriters William Broyles Jr. and Paul Haggis ("Crash") craft a carefully organized script that breathes with poignancy, emotion, and relevance without ever succumbing to sentimentality.

Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal took the iconic "Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima" picture on Mount Suribachi on February 23, 1945 just five days after hundreds of battleships delivered 30,000 soldiers to the shores of the small but heavily fortified Japanese island covered in black sand and volcanic ash. Far from the photo’s perceived significance of triumph, it privately revealed a more prosaic reality beneath the surface. For the picture, the photographer actually recorded a second flag raising, performed in order to insure that the original banner did not end up ‘tacked on some politician’s wall’ after a covetous troop leader demanded it for his own. Of the six men in the photo, only three survived long enough to be returned to America for the government’s Seventh War Loan Drive fund-raising tour to sell war bonds to the American public. The battle for Iwo Jima came at a time when the U.S. military was broke, and only the sale of war bonds could keep the combat effort afloat. The news media’s widespread embrace of Rosenthal’s picture enabled an unprecedented phenomenon of hero/celebrity culture around the country that overshadowed the many sufferings and deaths still taking place on Iwo Jima and elsewhere.

The three surviving flag-raisers Marines Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford), Native American Ira Hares (Adam Beach), and Navy Corpsman John "Doc" Bradley (Ryan Phillippe) resist personal issues of guilt as they appear before ardent fans to explain that the real heroes of the battle are the men killed in action or still fighting the war. Doc Bradley is the group’s spokesperson who ends his humble statement with a plea for the public to purchase war bonds. James Bradley said that the goal for his book was to break down the hero myths about the men in the picture. Clint Eastwood helps achieve Bradley’s ideal by interweaving recreated interview sequences with retired soldiers that Bradley spoke to at length when writing his book.

Just as the film follows the somber fate of the three soldiers propped up as war bond hawkers, it also chronicles the fates of the other three soldiers in the photo who died on the battlefield. The deaths of Sergeant Michael Strank (Barry Pepper), Pfc. Harlan Block (Benjamin Walker), and Franklin Sousley (Joseph Cross) give poignant context to the fireworks spectacle at home where Bradley, Gagnon and Hares reenact their flag-raising effort atop a giant paper mache hill in the middle of Chicago’s Soldiers Field stadium.

"Flags of Our Fathers" is a tremendous film about the very beginning of celebrity worship, and our need to invent and memorialize brave men. It is a deeply heartfelt and highly original war movie that takes time to get your head around—days, weeks, or months. Clint Eastwood’s "Flags of Our Fathers" companion film "Letters From Iwo Jima" will continue to provoke contemplation of the battle for Iwo Jima, except as viewed from the Japanese perspective.

Rated R, 131 mins. (A) (Five Stars)

The Departed

Underground Boston Undercover
Scorsese Scores a Stunner
By Cole Smithey

After directing two massive historical epics ("Gangs of New York" and "The Aviator") Martin Scorsese approaches screenwriter William Monahan’s highly polished adaptation of the Hong Kong police thriller "Infernal Affairs" with an exhilarating fluency that combines flawless visual compositions and informed musical cues with an unbridled sense of dark humor. Monahan reconfigures the setting of the original story to take place during the ‘80s era battle between the "Staties" and Boston’s Irish mob.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Billy Costigan, a rookie undercover cop in South Boston, where he infiltrates the Irish mob run by Frank Costello (played with volcanic energy by Jack Nicholson). Billy’s problem with maintaining Frank’s unraveling do-or-die-trust escalates while he attempts to uncover the identity of Frank’s secret mole, Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon), inside the Special Investigations Unit of the police department under the cool-headed Captain Queenan (well played by Martin Sheen) and his hard-ass assistant Sergeant Dignam (Mark Wahlberg).

Billy and Colin are opposite sides of the same coin. Each man carries intense internal struggles with his peculiar demons. Colin is profoundly loyal to Frank for mentoring him since childhood in the ways of Boston’s mean streets, and is sharper than a laser-cut emerald for the education. He’s on the ‘fast track’ within the Special Investigations Unit, even if the canny Sergeant Dignam neither trusts nor treats him with anything less than over-the-top hostility. Some of the movie’s best laughs come from the intentionally irreverent and crude Bostonian humor shared by Boston natives Damon and Wahlberg. Inside of the film’s unity-of-opposites is a classic race against time scenario wherein two similar yet different men must bring down the other one before those close to them discover their particular ploy. The two actors share an entertaining mix of similarities and differences that add a layer of character-driven substance to Scorsese’s already dense cinematic cocktail.

The secretly impotent Colin tells his police psychiatrist girlfriend Madolyn (Vera Farmiga), "Honesty is not synonymous with truth." It’s a defiantly hypocritical viewpoint that defines the philosophy of the Bush Administration, and de facto the attitude of a country so immured in corruption that it couldn’t fathom the depth of the crisis. Scorsese smuggles in some other subtle social commentary when Billy says, "It’s a nation of rats." The rodent imagery haunts the film’s artistic tableau that comes on the heels of an unthinkable spree of intensifying brutality.

"The Departed" involves interconnecting moral, ethical, and physical crises that are passed along as if from rats spreading rabies. Nearly every character, with the exception of Captain Queenan and Sergeant Dignam, are infected with betrayal. As the only female character in the movie, Madolyn sets the bar low on her ideals of marriage and career when she furtively dates Billy, her tightly wound psychiatry patient, in order to satisfy physical needs not being met at home with Colin. She soon becomes pregnant, and the filmmakers plant a soft question about the true identity of the child’s father.

The subtextual matter of fatherhood is addressed in several different pairings throughout the story. Frank is a central father figure to both Colin and Billy. He can’t help lording his barely concealed violent nature over them because he’s used to scaring people into submission. Jack Nicholson taps into his great big bag of inspiration to create an unforgettable movie gangster that is at once colorful, pragmatic and energetic. At the other end of the spectrum is the tightly knit duty-bound relationship between Captain Queenan and Sergeant Dignam. Martin Sheen (Queenan) sets an unruffled example that Mark Wahlberg’s character (Dignam) appropriately ignores. These are men who aspire to greatness within the context of their duty-bound jobs and whose priorities don’t overlap.

There is no reason to compare "The Departed" to Scorsese’s other gangster films, "Mean Streets" and "GoodFellas," just as comparing those two films is an exercise in futility. Scorsese has continued to grow as a director. He loves to toss into "The Departed" a homage to a film like "The Third Man," to give audiences a reference point about things that please him. But he’s also insanely interested in making sure that the composition of every frame contains exact pieces of narrative information and a visual balance. He’s still using the camera in new ways that compliment the progress and tempo of a scene. Cinematographer Michael Ballhaus ("GoodFellas") does an outstanding job, as does Scorsese’s ever-precise editor Thelma Schoonmaker. Martin Scorsese is a master director in every sense of the word and with the help of his ensemble has made a masterpiece of modern cinema, complete with a triple climax ending.

Rated R, 120 mins. (A) (Five Stars)

Hollywoodland

From The Ashes
Ben Affleck Rebounds In A Worthy Whodunit About George Reeves
By Cole Smithey

Ben Affleck takes a significant stride toward correcting his frat-boy-actor image in an engrossing portrayal of George Reeves, the actor popular for playing the Man of Steel on television’s "Adventures of Superman" series in the ‘50s. Reeves ‘suicide,’ after the show’s cancellation in 1959, instigates L.A. private detective Louis Simo’s homicide investigation at the behest of Reeves’ bereaved mother Helen Bessolo (Lois Smith). Adrien Brody delivers a winning performance as the embattled private investigator in director Allen Coulter’s (director on "The Sopranos") stunning feature film debut. Production designer Leslie McDonald ("Intolerable Cruelty") brings the film’s California noir period atmosphere to brilliant life with an assured eye for detail that immerses the viewer in Hollywood’s most fetishized decade.

The film’s anachronistic title references the original 50-foot tall Hollywood Hills sign that was erected on the side of Mount Lee by a real estate company in 1923 before the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce abbreviated it by its last four letters in 1949 during much-needed repairs. The word gently signals a defining moment in Hollywood history where sordid reality undermined the polished illusion of celebrity culture.

"Hollywoodland" thrives on opposing polarities. Debut screenwriter Paul Bernbaum puts together a multi-dimensional narrative puzzle where L.A. detective Louis Simo sets out to solve a mystery that connects to his personal life as the recently divorced father of young boy whose childhood values have been shattered by the self-destruction of his television hero. In a morning diner scene that could have been cut from David Lynch’s "Mulholland Drive" Simo presses his former L.A.P.D. partner to give him a hot tip. The hard-nosed plain clothes detective tells Simo about Reeves’ mother’s suspicions about her son’s death being a homicide after the police department have all but signed off on the case as an open and shut suicide. Between uncomfortable visits with his distraught son, nagging ex-wife (Molly Parker) and her annoying boyfriend, Simo attempts to reconstruct Reeves’ demise at the age of 45 that occurred during a house party with Reeves’ brash new fiancée Leonore Lemmon (Robin Tunney) present in the next room with several guests. Simo’s longingly imagined scenarios for Reeves’ possible means of death are fleshed out in narrative cul de sacs of murderous speculation that backfire on the private dick from every direction.

On the other side of Bernbaum’s narrative split is Reeves’ back-story as an actor-on-the-make whose claim to fame was a bit part in "Gone With The Wind." Ben Affleck uses approaching middle age to his advantage in radiant flashback scenes with Diane Lane as Toni Mannix a former Ziegfeld Follies showgirl now in an open marriage with MGM studio general manager and mob ‘fixer’ Eddie Mannix (played with steam heat by Bob Hoskins). George Reeves and the eight-years-older Toni Mannix set their individually opportunistic sights on one another at a fancy Hollywood dinner. Their romantic spark quickly burns into a full-fledged affair with Toni eventually footing the bill for Reeves’ house in the Hollywood Hills after he lands a multi-year contract for the syndicated TV series that will make him a household name but not a fortune to go with it.

The genius of the movie is the way in which it explores possible explanations for Reeve’s death before providing the audience with a bit of Reeves’ silent home footage that Louis Simo carefully watches for telling subtext. As Reeves performs physical acts in his front yard for what he intends to be a wrestling demo film, Ben Affleck exposes the character’s inner workings. He exhibits essential aspects of the 45-year-old George Reeves that respond humbly to every question raised in the film. The depth of Affleck’s tempered emotional enthusiasm tells you everything you need to know.

Rated R, 126 mins. (B+) (Four Stars)

The Illusionist

Smoke And Mirrors
Ed Norton And Jessica Biel Love Mysteriously
By Cole Smithey

Filmmaker-to-watch Neil Burger (his first film "Interview With The Assassin" was a gem of independent cinema) tells an enchanting story about Eisenheim, a turn of the century magician (methodically played by Ed Norton) who reconnects with his childhood sweetheart, Duchess Sophie von Teschen (Jessica Biel). Duchess Sophie agrees to Eisenheim’s romantic plan to escape together from the clutches of corrupt Viennese Crown Prince Leopold (Rufus Sewell), to whom Sophie is about to become engaged. Tragedy prompts Eisenheim to abandon his signature illusionist act in favor of conjuring the “ghosts” of real people in order to publicly trap Prince Leopold regarding a local murder the Prince committed. Melodramatic passion and a snappy mystery complement this well written movie based on a short story by Pulitzer Prize winning writer Steven Millhauser.

Eisenheim sits upon a café chair on an empty stage in a packed Central European theater (although set in Vienna, the film was shot in Prague). Eisenheim’s patient demeanor and carefully trimmed goatee belie his youthful physicality. He is not merely a skilled sleight-of-hand magician, but rather a socially aware illusionist effortlessly manipulating his audience to extemporize on the revelations of physical and metaphoric significance that he invokes. The conjurer plants a seed into a flowerpot and an orange plant full of fresh fruit abruptly blossoms; he tosses one of the ripe fruits out to an excited patron in the astonished crowd.

Historian of magic and practicing magician Ricky Jay served as technical consultant to the production, ensuring that the illusions accurately the story’s turn of the century timeframe. The effect is beguiling as Eisenheim sets free a pair of butterflies carrying a borrowed handkerchief to its proper owner in the crowd of spectators. There are no gratuitous sequences of computer generated imagery to distract from the story. Each illusion serves to reflect an aspect of the tale’s progression. Neil Burger enables his audience to discern and examine hidden qualities of Eisenheim’s intelligence and passion through plot challenges that the young magician molds to serve his needs.

Flashbacks reveal Eisenheim as a teenage magician and cabinetmaker’s son when his youthful relationship with the equally adolescent Duchess Sophie was crushed by her bigoted and wealthy parents disapproving of Eisenheim’s impoverished status. Now, 15 years later, Eisenheim notices Sophie, still wearing a locket that he crafted for her all those years before when he randomly calls her onstage to participate in one of his tricks. The two lovers meet during the following afternoons in clandestine carriage rides that are spied upon by the geeky-but-effective Inspector Uhl assigned by Prince Leopold to surveillance Eisenheim.

The dramatic elements of the romantic story coalesce when Prince Leopold commands Eisenheim to perform in the royal palace. Undaunted by the small parlor room constraints of his ‘stage,’ Eisenheim takes the bait when the prince uses an object found in the room to entertain the elite assembly. Eisenheim requests the prince’s sword and balances it on its tip on the surface of the floor from where it can only be removed, like "Excalibur," by someone pure at heart. Eisenheim lets the spell linger long enough to slightly humiliate the prince before he removes his sword from its mysteriously fixed position.

Initially it seems that Eisenheim underestimates the prince’s tem