Across the Universe

There’s something invigorating about a musical that boldly treads into Baz Luhrmann’s pop-musical territory. In 2001, Baz Luhrmann constructed “Moulin Rouge” like the fevered snapshots created by viewers’ imagination before an anticipated erotic encounter. Dialogue or situation are not taken into serious consideration, but on the way viewers can imagine a fantasy object first from one angle and then another. In 2002, Rob Marshall’s “Chicago” continued the reinvention of the musical that started with “Moulin Rouge.” The film is, no doubt, a dazzling song and dance extravaganza, with just enough words to support the music and allow everyone to catch their breath between songs.

In 2007, Julie Taymor’s musical, filled with flower-powery phantasmagoria, is hugely ambitious but it works brilliantly, thanks to strong performances, a fantastic script, terrifically integrated songs and her inspired direction. Best known for turning Disney’s The Lion King into the most dazzling and daring spectacle in Broadway history, Taymor has directed films with every bit as stunning and original. In “Frida” (2002), surrealistic interludes pay homage to Frida Kahlo’s art in order to show what goes on in her inner life. Even more ambitious is “Titus” (1992), an adaptation of one of Shakespeare’s least successful plays, the Roman bloodbath Titus Andronicus. The movie’s dreamlike, wildly anachronistic imagery creates a kind of mythic space where the story can grow big enough to carry that weight of its own gruesome excesses.

“Across the Universe” aims for the same heights, but here, Taymor’s task is triply (to say the least) difficult. Not only must she make new the familiar tropes of the decade: flower power, acid rock, Vietnam, street riots, but she’s also making a great attempt to achieve so with music that’s already the definitive soundtrack of the era, from the innocent idealism of “All You Need Is Love” to the cynical disillusion of “Revolution”.

“Across the Universe” may be a historian’s nightmare, but if you want to get the history right my advice is get a history documentary or turn on History Channel. You have to get over that fact and you will see that the film succeeds on sheer catchiness, as Taymor stylishly piles on enough visual extravaganzas to conceal the fact that there isn’t much of a story. The songs are now more than 40 years old, some of them, and are timeless, and hearing these unexpected talents singing them only underlines their astonishing quality. The names of the principal characters and several of the secondary roles are derived from names in the titles or lyrics of Beatles compositions (Jude - “Hey Jude”, Lucy - “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and “I Am The Walrus”, Max - “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”, Sadie - “Sexy Sadie”, Prudence - “Dear Prudence”, even Bill (Sadie’s Manager) - “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill”).

Subtly utilizing (I will not call it “recycling”) the Beatles’ career trajectory as the template for a story about the 1960s, “Across the Universe” stars Jim Sturgess as Jude, a restless Liverpudlian ship builder lad who travels to America in search of his American G.I. father, where he meets Maxwell a rebellious young man from a privileged background (Joe Anderson) and his gorgeous sister, Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood). Soon the three of them are dropping out of society and sharing a flat in Greenwich Village, along with sexy singer Sadie (Dana Fuchs), guitar guru JoJo (Martin Luther) and lesbian ex-cheerleader Prudence (T.V. Carpio).

Jude and Lucy fall in love, and they all go through a hippie period on Dr. Robert’s Magic Bus, where the doctor (Bono) and his bus bear a striking resemblance to Ken Kesey’s magical mystery tour. They also receive guidance from Mr. Kite (Eddie Izzard), having been some days in preparation. But then things turn serious as Max goes off to Vietnam and the story gets swept up in the anti-war movement.

Thanks to Taymor’s inspired direction and a superb script by screenwriting legends Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais the music is cleverly used to illustrate the action.The director’s striking visual approach ranges from extremely literal to completely abstract. The arrangements are sometimes familiar, sometimes radically altered, and the voices are all new and often they find a mood in a song that we never knew was there before (take “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” for example.)

Applying her Broadway’s achievement, Taymor is a generously inventive choreographer. Among astounding examples are the cross-cutting between dancing to Beatles clone bands at an American high school prom and in a Liverpool dive bar, a basic-training scene where all the drill sergeants look like G.I. Joe, and a sequence where inductees in Jockey shorts carry the Statue of Liberty through a Vietnam field. I particularly like the underwater sequences which approach ballet, a stage performance that turns into musical warfare, strawberries that bleed, rooftop concerts and a montage combining crashing waves with the Detroit riots.

Sturgess and Wood are both terrific in the lead roles and there’s strong support that were chosen for their theatrical talents over frequency of appearance on teen magazine covers. Dana Fuchs, who starred off-Broadway in “Love, Janis,” is a particularly great find as Sadie, the blues-singing landlady. I’m pretty certain there will critics who believe it is suicidal to set a “Beatles musical” in the “Vietnam era.” But if you think about it, this is a movie that fires its songs like flowers at the way we live now. It’s the kind of movie you watch again, like listening to your favorite album.

“Across the Universe” stands out just by existing. The beauty is in the execution. The experience of the movie is joyous. The musical numbers are beautifully shot, with the cast actually performing the songs themselves, rather than lip synching. “Across the Universe” is a hugely enjoyable, brilliantly directed film with a moving and at times transcendent ride. Joyous and passionate, the film has buckets full of heart and a vibrant energy that invites us to experience a time when people believed in something larger than themselves and were willing to put their bodies on the line in its support. Unmissable.

About Love

About Love is what one will get by fusing together elements of Asian soaps, teenage romantic aspirations, and magazine spreads-worthy characters – honey sweet, picture perfect, and wholly artificial.

The formula used here is one that is sure to draw in and please many an Asian audience. The stories are simple and, if shallowly so, universal. They deal with infatuations that transgress language barriers, the loneliness faced by those lost in translations, and the puerile notion of love at first sight.

Aspiring Taiwanese cartoonist Yao (Chen Bo-Lin, the only lead from the excellent Blue Gate Crossing who has decided to pursue a career in acting) spends his lonely stay in Tokyo studying the local language while at the same time attempting to start a career in digital art. He spots heartbroken painter Michiko (Misako Ito), and makes it his mission to bring a smile of happiness to her face.

Far away in Taipei, A-Su (pop star Mavis Fan) is unable to sleep, and calls her Japanese friend Tecchan (Kase Ryo) over to help add finishing touches to her homemade bookshelf, thereby commencing a playful scrum and waking up the next door neighbours. Haunted by memories of a painful break-up, she once more enlists his companionship as she prepares to make one final, fateful trip down memory lane for an encounter with her ex.

In Shanghai, Japanese student Shuhei (Battle Royale’s Takashi Tsukamoto) rents a room above a tiny, decrepit convenience store operated by a mother and daughter (Yun, played by Xiaolu Li) team. Languid and scatterbrained, the daughter’s stoic sphinx-like face conceals a hidden affection for the young boarder which rapidly intensifies following the severing of the latter’s estranged relationship.

Loosely interlinked, the three segments (directed by three different directors – respectively, Shimoyama Ten, Yee Chih-yen, Zhang Yibai) share as much similarities in themes and storylines as they do in differences of tone and technical aspects – an immense contradiction forbidding any clear cut conclusions on whether About Love should be viewed as an anthology of shorts or as one whole feature.

The correlations are easy to spot. All of the characters are the very embodiments of youthful idols worshipped by thousands of teenaged Asians: unblemished white skin, lithe and athletic bodies, handsome and adorably cute faces. The plots are glaringly unabashed in their contrived resemblances – the youthful couples are all made up of one Chinese and one Japanese, one of whom is compulsorily going through a difficult post-break-up phase.

All three segments were undoubtedly meant to be moving and bittersweet, but all fail, despite their dissimilar tactics. The melancholic undercurrents surrounding the Taipei segment are traded for uproarious laughter provoked by the couple’s bumbling efforts to communicate with each other. Hilarious, yes, but inappropriately out of place – a disappointment, since it was made by Yee Chih-yen of Blue Gate Crossing fame.

The best segment in my mind is the one set in Tokyo, where the theme is not one of love, but of loneliness, emotional and literal, and the need for companionship. But best isn’t saying much, however, as it is all spoiled by an ending too fantastical and formulaically ideal to be true.

Weak and worst goes to director Zhang Yibai’s Shanghai segment, which entirely misses the point. Are we supposed to find Yun cute and innocently, even naively endearing? I personally found her immensely irritating - and to a certain degree disturbing - in the ways she try to emulate Shuhei and his ex-girlfriend. Unrequited love can be powerfully heart-wrenching and emotionally draining, but not when it’s coming from a naïvely immature adolescent.

So much for the plot. As for the assembled cast – they may have talent, but it surely isn’t being showcased here. It could probably be accurately said that they were picked for their good looks rather than for their acting abilities. Criticism must be especially directed towards the actors: Tecchan is simply too gullible, compliantly submitting himself to every one of his unstable Taiwanese friend’s capricious whims; Shuhei is unbelievably thick as to be constantly blinded to Yun’s attempts at uncloaking her love for him. As for Yao, well, he doesn’t do or say much for any judgement to be imparted upon him.

For all of its massive flaws, About Love is nonetheless a pleasurable way to spend a relaxing, thoughts-free evening. Don’t be put off – just embrace the sweetness.

About A Boy

Adapted from Nick Hornby’s novel by the makers of American Pie, About a Boy is a touching light-hearted comedy charting one man’s emotional awakening through an unlikely friendship. In it, Hugh Grant continues to move away from his usual bumbling fop persona - a transition initiated with his portrayal of a cynical love rat in Bridget Jones’s Diary.

In attempting to shake off his typecast posh buffoon guise, Grant seems to be gravitating towards the role of charming-but-shallow rogue. His two latest creations share similar traits: both are immature womanizers, afraid of emotional responsibility. (Grant infamously shares some of these ‘qualities’, admitting, while promoting this movie, to “being shallow in terms of life goals and relationships.”) This time around, Grant assumes the role of Will - an idle, wealthy Londoner in his late thirties. The story is alternatively relayed through the eyes of Will and Marcus (Nicholas Hoult), a troubled 12-year-old misfit.

Most of Marcus’ problems stem from his flaky, depressed mother Fiona – a humorless new-age hippie, superbly portrayed by Toni Collette. Sensitive Marcus is at the age when schoolchildren are at their most cruel and unforgiving – yet he goes to school attired in Oxfam, sporting a risible pudding bowl haircut. He has no friends and is so withdrawn he sings to himself without noticing. The Weisz brothers and the shrewdly-cast Nicholas Hoult show commendable restraint with oddball Marcus – resisting the temptation to make him sweet, or even particularly likeable –and Hoult has a pair of upturned, Spock-like eyebrows that ensure he’s a believable victim, and also give him an air of being old before his time.

Nick Hornby has a talent for creating tragic-comic drama from the unremarkable everyday experiences of his protagonists. His men often exist in a world devoid of culture, except for obsessive-compulsive pursuits that serve to hinder their existence rather than enrich it. Hornby-man, in this case, lives alone in an expensively trendy district of North London. He’s never had to work - he lives a lavish consumerist lifestyle off the royalties of a Christmas jingle composed by his late father. His gadget-laden bachelor pad is straight out of a marketing man’s wet dream; with its Italian leather furniture, wide-screen TV and fish-tank wall, it’s ‘cool’ as dictated by mens’ style magazines. In keeping with his flashy pad, Will drives a sporty soft-top coupe, sports a designer wardrobe of casual clobber, and maintains a painstakingly ruffled haircut. He fills his days shopping for CDs, lunching and lounging. “How do people manage to fit in a full-time job?” he muses at one point. Grant convincingly carries Will’s inner hollowness, superficially veiled behind a surface charm designed to lure women into bed. His timing is spot-on, aided by his extensive physical vocabulary of facial twitches and half-smiles.

Will decides to exploit an untapped reserve of eligible women by pretending to be a single father and joining a single mothers’ support group, SPAT (Single Parents All Together). Will’s ruthless exploitation of their vulnerability betrays a selfishness bred from a lifetime of having his own way – it’s also an indicator of the secret sadness of a pointless existence, which makes Will vulnerable too – something Marcus immediately picks up on. When the wretched Fiona unsuccessfully attempts to overdose, Marcus attaches himself to Will, hanging out in his apartment after school, rather than going home to watch mum sobbing uncontrollably.

Will gradually accepts his odd new mate, then, unbelievably, he begins to care about him. He begins to interfere with Marcus’ upbringing: buying him trendy new sneakers and the latest rap CDs – although his mother would rather have him recite Killing Me Softly in a painful, off-key choirboy falsetto. Will’s redemptive transition from heartless beast to concerned quasi-parent is a gentle one - his adoption of Marcus as a notional son is employed so Will can have something in common with Rachel (Rachel Weisz), an attractive single-mum he fancies. Things start to get hairy for Will when he realizes he really likes Rachel and will not be satisfied with a brief fling – despite the fact she thinks he’s a dad when he’s not. Another round of comedic deception ensues.

Some of the moments in About a Boy don’t ring true: the scenes in Marcus’s school are unrealistic, and we don’t learn enough about Will’s background and his own relationship with his father. The film hints at this unexplored dichotomy but neglects to refer to it beyond a brief flashback snippet. We know that Will is haunted by his father’s persistent legacy – hearing the cheesy festive jingle causes him to break down at one point. This moment of seriousness is somewhat jolting, whereas in the book Will had a darker side manifested in his hero-worship of suicidal singer Kurt Cobain, who, in life, often complained about not understanding the point of living (the book/film title is a play on a Nirvana song, About A Girl, which opens with the lyric “I need an easy friend”).

The film, which is full of witty observation and bright lines, has lightened the tone of proceedings (eliminating Cobain’s presence) but some of the Hornby-esque emptiness prevails. In the end, Marcus seems happy; he’s accepted by his peers. On the surface, this is a feel-good moment until you realize the main lessons Marcus has learned from Will are about the fickle cultural codes of fashion. He finds it easier to fit in because he now has a trendy haircut, knows who rapper Mystikal is, and wears the right clothes. His mum reminds him at the start of the film “You’re an individual not a sheep,” and this has been left behind as an archaic value, to be suppressed if you want to fit in.

A.I. Artificial Intelligence

From the beginning, discussion of A.I.: Artificial Intelligence has been centered around its unprecedented – and to many minds, inexplicable – coupling of ostensibly opposite directorial sensibilities. That the late Stanley Kubrick, whose varied movies isolated us in worlds unfamiliar both literally and morally, would select Steven Spielberg, whom Time magazine credited with reinventing film by “giving B-movie plots A-movie budgets,” to complete his long-honed adaptation of a sci-fi short story seems like self-inflicted blasphemy, the artistic equivalent of suicide.

The critical reception to A.I. has similarly revolved around the conflict – real or invented – between what’s become over-comfortably defined as “Kubrickian” and “Spielbergian,” resulting in a party line that, as neither a successful Spielberg or Kubrick film, A.I. is a “failure.” Yet the rush to use such a word (and most critics have) betrays both the narrow expectations of what A.I. was supposed to be and reluctance to see what it is: a timely, wholly immersing, and courageously unsettling approach to technology’s ability to audit our self-definition. A.I. asks the questions that 2000’s worthless Bicentennial Man avoided, reminding us that bad directors ruin good authors, and that at the very least Spielberg is no Chris Columbus.

Based on a treatment of Brian Aldiss’ short story Super-Toys Last All Summer Long, A.I. follows the path of David (Haley Joel Osment, who never blinks), the first child cyborg (“mecha”) of his kind to be programmed to love, so that he might replace real children in A.I.’s future reproduction-restricted society. The creation of the grieving Dr. Hobby (William Hurt), David is given to Henry (Sam Robards) and Monica (Frances O’Connor), whose own son Martin lies in a coma. At first resistant to the idea, Monica eventually executes David’s irreversible “love imprinting” command, thus rendering him emotionally human and committing him to the singular, and eventually tortuously unrequited mission of wanting her love in return.

A.I.’s first act makes a sharp turn when Martin miraculously revives and returns home, immediately establishing a rivalry with David he knows he will win. The cruelty of children is our first glimpse of A.I.’s rather dark view of humanity, which takes stronger and stronger forms as David is summarily shunned by Henry, abandoned in the woods by Monica, and kidnapped for gladiator-style execution by a traveling show called the Flesh Fair. Along the way he semi-befriends Gigolo Joe (a plastic-perfect Jude Law), a licensed hustler who’s also been victimized by his mecha status. It’s a journey that’s at once sickening and fascinating, not just for the technically seamless universe that Spielberg unfolds, but because of the undeniable reality of the human weaknesses that lurk behind and beneath it. The suggestion that cyborg technology, once perfected, would be immediately used to create an exploitable underclass of sex slaves and domestic servants, and that fear and jealousy would backlash against them in institutional glorified violence, is uncomfortable precisely because it’s believable, as is the idea that information/internet technology would eventually merge into an all-knowing, cartoonish pay service called Dr. Know, which gives David the clue he seeks.

Some have suggested that this coldness is Kubrick’s theme, but in fact it was Spielberg who developed the brutal second act, in which David only escapes through some arguably Spielbergian moves. Indefatigable, and trapped within his programmed craving, David presses on towards his confrontation with his creator, whom he believes to be the Blue Fairy who turned Pinocchio into a real boy. His unflinching acceptance of fairytale-as-reality reminds us that for all his sophistication, David remains a nine-year-old boy, making the dark turns of A.I.’s third act all the more affecting when Dr. Hobby proves – albeit so subtly you may miss it after the bullying ideology of the Flesh Fair – to be the lynchpin of A.I.’s underlying thesis that the technology to synthesize love doesn’t morally equip humankind to manage it.

The deus ex machina is instead entrusted to another race altogether, the presentation of which is so bizarre and overwhelming that it stretches the suspension of disbelief that A.I. otherwise maintains well. But by then David’s story has taken on enough gravity to hold us down, assisted by some breathtaking CGIs. The philosophical strain of the drawn-out ending is less from its stark invention than from its feeble side-attempt to absolve humanity in some way (look for references to human “brilliance”). Fortunately, David’s existence at that point as the sole remnant of human society and human love neatly seals his bittersweet achievement of humanity – even though he doesn’t realize it.

Just as Kubrick’s films are rarely appreciated in their own decade, perhaps his decision to express A.I. through Spielberg’s sensibilities (which Kubrick knew well) will similarly require time to comprehend or deconstruct. It seems clear that a story revolving around an artificial boy whose “love is real but he is not” would benefit from a deft touch with warm, fuzzy emotion – albeit only to drag it into the wilderness later and torture it – and no one couches us in the familial and familiar more convincingly than Spielberg. But speculating on the genius of their collaboration is in many ways as specious as crusading for its failure. As critic Jonathan Rosenbaum put it, “Calling a movie a masterpiece is little more than an impatient desire to close off discussion of its ambiguities and uncertainties, to deny that it’s a living, evolving, work of art.” A.I. may or may not be a masterpiece fifteen years from now, but watching it is unquestionably a masterful experience, more so if you can avoid looking too hard for the hand of its two masters.

A Snake of June

At one point in A Snake of June, the victim of an acute case of blackmailing laments to her harasser that he is torturing her “because you want to make fun of one last person before you die”. This statement could well be directed towards director Shinya Tsukamoto, who must secretly take gleeful pleasure in his audience’s befuddlement.

From the creator of Tetsuo: The Iron Man comes another mind-boggling, unwatchably nerve-racking sanity test that is bound to push the boundaries of what is acceptable to the very limits.

In an eternally rain-drenched Tokyo, Rinko (Asuka Kurosawa) is a demurely cropped-haired working woman in her early thirties who makes a living as a telephone counsellor whose praiseworthy record of success should give her enough reasons to be satisfied with life in general. But her domestic life is a completely different set of affairs and, as one of her callers mockingly observes, it seemed somehow ironic that a counsellor who helps people find cause for living should be unable to find one of her own.

Rinko is married to Shigehiko (Yuji Koutari), an overweight salaryman who politely gives little regard to his wife, but much to the cleanliness of their apartment. Their platonically estranged marriage might have gone on in perpetuity — until death does them apart — had it not been for the arrival of a mysterious envelope addressed to Rinko, bearing the title ‘Your Husband’s Secrets’. Inside it she finds, to her total shock, a series of photographs of her masturbating.

Unfortunate Rinko is duly phoned by the sender of the envelope, who turns out to be one of her callers, a once-suicidal photographer by the name of Iguchi (Shinya Tsukamoto himself) who has now found a new reason to continue living, thanks to the help of Rinko. Now, he believes, it is time to repay the debt, by helping her enact her private fantasies. In order to motivate her, he has resorted to blackmail.

In order to acquire all of the negatives, Rinko submits to Iguchi, and so begins her descent into the risky world of carnal pleasure and depravity. The stakes get continually raised, as Rinko is forced to visit the local shopping arcade wearing an excessively short miniskirt sans panties; to buying groceries prescribed by the caller (which consisted of bananas, cucumbers, and eggplants) with a vibrator buzzing within her.

The movie’s first of three parts ends on a somewhat satisfactory note with Rinko finally being rewarded, but, as is always the case, there’s a hitch: Iguchi still has one final negative left. Thus finishes the first act and what follows are the last two acts of the film; acts that travel to new levels of unbearable lurid intensity until the film culminates in a final mind-numbing assault on the senses that will surely leave many viewers stunned and gasping for breath.

Tsukamoto’s refrainment from employing repulsive scenes of visceral terror and revolting explicitness that has become characteristic of his previous works proves that he has made great strides towards maturity as a filmmaker. Indeed, the highlight of A Snake of June is the director’s decision to channel the dreadfully noxious uneasiness that permeates throughout the entire movie through (sometimes ineffable) symbolism and a well placed – if overly so – emphasis on atmosphere.

Take, for example, the omnipresent apparitions of water in all of its forms – from sweat-filled faces to rain spattered windows to currents racing down drainage pipes as a recurring motif symbolising sexuality and the irresistible urges of suppressed desire.

Which is why Tsukamoto, whose works have been favourably compared to Lynch and Cronenberg, can be forgiven for indulging in a little of his usual obsessions with physical deformations and biomechanical imagery, which becomes blatantly apparent in one fantasy sequence where phallic-shaped tentacles come sprouting out of a character’s torso.

This is no exploitive flick either. Apart from the one scene where Rinko bares all in a moment of orgasmic ecstasy, little flesh is shown; instead, much of the focus is on the character’s facial expressions and emotions; explicitly disturbing in their own inexplainable way. What Tsukamoto has created here is a thought provoking meditation not only on compulsive voyeurism, but also on the daily sexual frustrations and emotional alienation typically encountered in dysfunctional family units that is fast becoming a prevalent feature of today’s rigid urban society.

Stunningly filmed in arctic blue-tinted monochrome that effectively augments the literal dampness of scenes in conveying the film’s prevailing mood of aqueous trepidation and nascent sexual consciousness,A Snake of June may be Tsukamoto at his most ethereally complex, and at his most translucently palpable – captivatingly accessible and at the same time abhorrently repulsive.

A Man Apart

Vin Diesel is the new Arnold Schwarzenegger, a 21st century update of the muscle-bound Austrian. How did the son of an astrologist and drama teacher become the next action hero? In Diesel’s latest blockbuster, A Man Apart, the reasons he’s the latest contender for heavyweight champion of the box-office world become clear.

Mostly, it’s his cross-cultural appeal, for which A Man of Apart forms a perfect vehicle. The film follows two buddies from the ‘hood — Sean Vetter (Diesel) and Demetrius Hicks (Larenz Tate) — who give up gangbanging for gangbusting. Diesel is only one of a handful of non-black actors who could convincingly play such a role. And he’s doesn’t do it Eminem-style, with self-conscious and self-deprecating bravado about his aberrant status. Diesel mixes with the homies as easily as he chilled out with white Californian car junkies in The Fast and The Furious.

A Man Apart — fortunately — is not the obvious movie about the partners’ conflicts about taking out former friends. Vetter and Hicks are top DEA agents, so they’re chasing down the cartel in Mexico, not the street hustlers they used to hang with. But the film’s not a raucous action movie either. Instead, it steals from almost every genre: it’s a cop buddy movie about conflict and loyalty; it’s a black movie about redeeming the hood; it’s a B-movie not afraid to show some tits-and-ass; it’s a mafia movie about respect and family; and, most of all, it’s a modern Western about a man moving beyond the law to exact justice.

And it’s got a love story, a revenge story, and a twist taken straight from the Usual Suspects. Sounds like a recipe for a spectacular disaster. But if A Man Apart succeeds completely in one particular way, it’s that it manages to combine all these elements in an exceedingly tight and well-paced movie.

After Vetter and Hicks take down Memo Lucero, leader of the Mexican cartel, in a memorable opening sequence, Memo vows revenge. ”You do not know what you have just done,” he chides Vetter. From there, the film slows down in order to introduce the main threads of Vedder’s character, from his roots in the ‘hood to his perfect marriage to high-school sweetheart Stacey (Jacqueline Obradors). When Stacey is killed during a failed hit on Vedder, the movie again turns up the throttle. Vedder questions Memo in jail and learns that the new kingpin on the scene, named Diablo, is responsible. The rest of the film follows Vedder’s quest to track down the elusive but brutal Diablo and avenge his wife’s murder in increasingly vigilante fashion. Fighting fits of anger that lead him to go too far, Vetter ultimately is suspended from duty, forcing him to gather his posse for a final suicidal run on Diablo.

The moral dilemmas implied in the film’s title are not interesting, most of all, because they’ve been raised with more complexity in Westerns time and again. And at its worst, ‘A Man Apart is just that, simply a cleverly woven rip-off of many genre themes. Seen in this light, the cinematography looks too much like Traffic, cop buddy Hicks’ character is just annoying, and jailed drug kingpin Memo is no Colonel Kurtz.

But A Man Apart ultimately succeeds as a film because director F. Gary Gray has the good sense to make the scenes short and to the point, never letting the film stall, and then puts the rest in Vin’s hands, letting Diesel be Diesel, carrying the film with the type of subtle nuances that 10-million-dollar-per-film contracts are made of: a one-of-a-kind voice, memorable delivery, a make-no mistake-I-will-kick-the living-shit-out-of-you glare, and the generic good looks and bulletproof torso of an action hero.

This is the same concoction of visual and acting traits offered by Schwarzenegger and shared by Arnie’s predecessor Sly Stallone; and, for that matter, lacked by the likes of Wesley Snipes, Dolph Lundgren or Steven Seagal, preventing them from ever commanding audiences, films or the big bucks. But Vin Diesel, perhaps, brings more to the table than any of his precursors. Dare I say, he’s got some genuine range. He’s more believable acting soft, thoughtful or conflicted than Arnie ever was. And like Stallone, he’s got street cred, clearly a graduate of the uniquely American immigrant’s school-of-hard-knocks; but he also’s sympathetic, bearing his past like a boxer’s beaten face. In fact, it wouldn’t be hard to imagine Diesel as Rocky himself, screaming ”Adrien, Adrien”.

By the way, what is Diesel’s background? Mysteries around his actual ethnicity persist, with Diesel himself keeping mum, though most reports claim he’s Italian-American. So a new Rocky might be his next billing, if Diesel decides to continue playing action heroes. Where his career goes from here will be interesting. Already signed up for two more high-octane action-thrillers, Diesel certainly won’t be The Last Action Hero so if he wants to avoid making a film equally as bad, he might be advised to take note of the spectacular falls of his forerunners and move genres before the genre lays him to waste. Until then, viewers can enjoy the Diesel-led revival of a tired genre.

A Knight’s Tale

Anyone who’s seen Robbie Williams’ video for his cover of Queen’s “We Are The Champions” (in which, incidentally, he delivers a reasonably good channeling of the late Freddy Mercury) might be tempted to believe that the song’s attachment to A Knight’s Tale, the film whose footage is interlaced with shots of Williams and gang prancing about a faux-medieval concert stage, was some secondary soundtrack marketing ploy, another clever Robbie Williams’ piss-take spiritually detached from the movie about 14th century knights. It is not. The video and the movie which occasioned it, spiritually speaking, are the same, and how much you enjoy the 2.5-minute former is a good barometer of how much you can endure the 2.5-hour latter. It helps to be an adolescent, at heart if not in body.

Written and directed by Brian Helgeland, who also wrote L.A. Confidential and wrote/directed Payback, A Knight’s Tale might be weakly justified as the work-vacation of a talented film artist who’s letting down his hair and exploring a childhood fantasy. But as such was the explanation for Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which this is not, it’s probably more accurate to call A Knight’s Tale a return to form for a schlockmeister who made most of his money on the Friday the 13th TV series and horror comedies like 1988’s MST3K-worthy 976-EVIL.

Self-absolved of any historicity by its opening sequence in which jousting tournament fans sing along to Queen’s “We Will Rock You” and do the wave, A Knight’s Tale is an undisguised sports movie with armor instead of protective padding, and is either reveling in cliches as some sort of irony or simply unable to think of anything more sophisticated than them, depending on how much credit you want to give to Helgeland. A serviceable Heath Ledger plays Will, our underdog hero who enters knight-fighting contests by faking his nobility with the help of a writer named Geoffrey Chaucer (Paul Bettany), who promises to immortalize him in a later story (note to anyone who’s read “The Knight’s Tale” in Canterbury Tales: Don’t hold your breath, O Brother, Where Art Thou this isn’t). Along the way he develops a rivalry with an arrogant, classist nobleman, Count Adhemar (Rufus Sewell, who deserves better roles), falls in love with beautiful-but-independent noblewoman Jocelyn (Shannyn Sossamon, who deserves worse roles), and reunites with his estranged father (Christopher Cazenove, who emotes so well you think he wandered in off to another, better film set.).

Starved of plot surprises, the audience’s challenge is to shop among A Knight’s Tale’s various anachronisms and absurdities for some kind of elevating redemption. There are a few inspired riffs, many coming from Bettany’s Chaucer, and the persistent 1970s stadium-rock soundtrack – which includes Bachman Turner Overdrive and Thin Lizzy for crying out loud – does at times steep A Knight’s Tale in a weird haze of self-aware silliness that at its best is kind of fun, but at its worst feels like an inside joke unleashed upon the world, as if a bunch of college buddies inherited a fortune and decided to use it producing the movie they wrote while drunk on a spring break road trip. Two-plus hours is also excessive for a story we’ve seen before in The Karate Kid et al, especially when much of the jousting footage is not particularly clever technically and then visibly recycled.

In the end, A Knight’s Tale is a kids movie that garners its energy from some odd cocktail of exuberance and apathy, as if the freedom from high expectations brought out the self-centered, childish wonder necessary to make a movie that reaches for boyhood fantasy rather than art or even entertainment. To call it a bad movie seems to miss the point entirely, as if the usual spectrum of quality didn’t occur to its producers at all. Of course this is often applied as apology to much of Hollywood’s low-watt schlock, and the best one can say about A Knight’s Tale is that it perhaps earns the exception more legitimately. At least the boys who eat it up won’t have much opportunity to practice real jousting at home.

A Good Lawyer’s Wife

The provocative poster for A Good Lawyer’s Wife, featuring the lead actress posing seductively, hints at the film’s explicit material without forewarning of the movie’s disturbing nature. This hard-hitting and painfully honest suburban-dysfunction yarn is not for the squeamish, depicting as it does frank scenes of illness, death and sex in unflinching and sometimes gruesome detail. Not only does it push the boundaries of permissible Korean film but most Western viewers will also raise an eyebrow. However, this is not exploitation cinema: the movie’s scandalous outer layer can be peeled back to reveal a serious, nuanced core that defies easy interpretation.

Until a generation ago South Korea was a repressive dictatorship sealed off from the West. But since its division from the North (officially declared in 1950), the South has developed into one of Asia’s most affluent countries. Likewise, the local film industry has undergone a remarkable transformation, with a new generation of moviemakers revitalizing the industry and making it a significant cog in the emergent pan-Asian movie scene. Writer and director Im Sang-soo has already demonstrated a predilection for forthright sexuality and nonconformist protagonists in his two previous films, Girls’ Night Out (1998) and Tears (2001). This, his third effort, drew comparisons to American Beauty, won a handful of awards on the international festival circuit, and was included in the prestigious main competition section at the Venice International Film Festival.

A Good Lawyer’s Wife takes aim at South Korea’s nouveau riche, confirming Im Sang-soo as a brave and direct filmmaker, unafraid to expose the rotting skeletons in the national closet. Or, in the case of the movie’s opening scene, unmarked mass graves: the remains of people who unaccountably went missing during the Korean War, and a discovery that many would rather remain buried. The movie similarly opens up other taboo subjects for scrutiny via the well-to-do family of respected counselor Joo (Hwang Jeong-min). As a well-regarded lawyer he’s completely professional, while his attractive wife, Hojung (Moon Soo-ri), holds dance classes and raises their precocious adopted seven-year-old son, Sooin (Jang Jun-young). But beneath their veneer of respectability both Joo and Hojung are having unfulfilling affairs and taking their privileged lives for granted; only when a random tragedy strikes do they realize how disconnected they truly are.

Im Sang-soo never explains why his players are so unsatisfied with their ostensibly cozy bourgeois existence, preferring instead to plunge us knee-deep into their unraveling lives. Perhaps the director is illustrating that old maxim “Money can’t buy you happiness”; or maybe he’s expressing a budding existentialism evolving alongside South Korea’s shotgun exposure to capitalism and the global economy. There’s certainly a hint of the left bank in the way this movie ambles along without judgment, observing its complex characters’ flaws with a detached gaze and a world-weary shrug, rarely passing comment. Joo’s alcoholic father (Kim In-moon), for example, is dying yet remains stubbornly unrepentant of a boozy lifestyle that has damaged both himself and his family. His slow and painful passing is not afforded clichéd cinematic devices designed to tug at the heartstrings; in fact, his caustic widow seizes his death as an opportunity to get laid before boasting about it to her family.

Though this movie admirably swerves moralizing, we can pin down some recurrent themes. Although effective in the short term, inebriation doesn’t eliminate pain and guilt — it often compounds it. Female sexuality, as presented here, is an expression of power: Hojung retaliates against her wayward husband by seducing a much younger man whom she can control; in contrast, Joo, who enjoys professional but not personal power, eventually loses control of his mistress. And life, like this film, is a crazy, horrific, beautiful, inexplicable thing, open to different readings.

This is not a movie about the flaunting of social conventions, despite the frankly depicted extra-curricular sex. The main characters’ unconventional tactics instead play like a survival mechanism from the family, traditionally thought of as a protective base which shields its members from pain. However, the family seems to be the root cause of much of the unhappiness here, and few films ultimately deliver such a sober-eyed and aggressive questioning of the institution, especially in Asia, where this film rings with amplified resonance.

There are still problems: the characters are unlikable, aside from the little boy, Sooin, who’s not in a central role. Though there’s admirable screenwriting bravery inherent in such even-handed storytelling as this, the characters’ lack of bitterness, even as their worlds collapse around them, makes it difficult to connect with anyone onscreen. Also, the director so emphatically separates the halves of the dissolving marriage, you almost forget they were ever a couple at all. Meanwhile, it should go without saying: although sporadically punctuated with grim black humor, A Good Lawyer’s Wife is hardly a barrel of laughs.

In a lesser director’s hands, this domestic drama could easily have descended into melodrama hell, but Im’s handling of the sensitive subject nature is skillful and precise. While a successful ensemble piece, much of the film’s chilly power comes from the performance of Moon So-ri as the titular heroine: her compelling portrayal of a willful, empowered woman drips with skill, wit, and class, particularly in a region still struggling to shake itself free of the reins of patriarchy. Ironically, the production company, Myung Films, sued the actress originally hired after she pulled out of the project at the last minute; in hindsight, they should have sent her a sizeable bonus for her no-show. A Good Lawyer’s Wife Moon So-ri certainly isn’t, but she has produced a most mesmerizing piece of acting.

A Beautiful Mind

“For example, a non-Zoroastrian could think of Zarathustra as simply a madman who led millions of naive followers to adopt a cult of ritual fire worship. But without his “madness” Zarathustra would necessarily have been only another of the millions or billions of human individuals who have lived and then been forgotten.” - John Forbes Nash

Quick quiz: What do the following actors all have in common – Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino, Tom Hanks, Dustin Hoffman, Geoffrey Rush, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Cliff Robertson? Answer: They all won Academy awards for portraying men with physical handicaps or psychological abnormalities. The polite description of this trend is to say Oscar loves its disabilities. The more accurate admission is that nowhere does the voting population of the Academy display its inability to distinguish art from novelty than with its ignorance between acting and prolonged surface affectation. Which is not to say the people on the list aren’t skilled or even Oscar-deserving, but that few or none of then won for their best acting roles. And while Russell Crowe’s predicted Oscar for his portrayal of John Forbes Nash in A Beautiful Mind isn’t nearly the travesty of, say, Al Pacino’s victory for Scent of a Woman, it is a continuation of the trend that this time has the added effect of boosting Ron Howard’s odds for a Best Director Oscar. And that is simply wrong.

It’s not that Ron Howard is a technically poor director, or any kind of self-indulgent celebrity (his willingness to cameo on a Simpsons episode was quite admirable), but that his preferred kind of story material and the way he tends to form it into film represents some of the worst kind of optimistic reductionism that film-educated critics tend to accuse Hollywood of unleashing on an already desensitized audience. Which is not to say that there can’t be great entertainment made out of such empty theses such as “Astronauts are heroes” (Apollo 13), “Firefighters are heroes” (Backdraft), “Little people can be heroes too” (Willow), and “Kidnappers are bad, and those who fight them are heroes” (Ransom), but that the triumph-of-the-human-spirit-as-theme can only surmount cliché if it genuinely exposes something more relevant than the well-trodden – and largely fictional – purity of heroism. By continuing to decline to do so, Ron Howard denies the film medium its most potent capacity as an art form. And while no one should begrudge him the rewards of free market forces, he should not be given an Oscar for anything he has created and the small-mindedness he, by extension, represents.

Small-mindedness, of course, is what A Beautiful Mind presumes to obliterate with its subject, the mathematician John Forbes Nash, who won the 1994 Nobel Prize in economics for a game theory he developed five decades earlier while a graduate student at Princeton. In between, Nash endured a harsh descent into degenerative schizophrenia and delusions, his emergence from which required insulin-shock therapy and medication that eliminated his ability to, as he puts it, “see the solutions.” It was this painful paradox – of being either sane or genius but never both – which Nash described often in later interviews and in his Nobel autobiography quoted above, and which should have served as the focal point of a movie that wants to explore both Nash’s true world and the dark, frightening nature of genius and its implications on our definition of sanity. Certainly this seems the direction Nash himself views his life within.

Instead, A Beautiful Mind is a middling biopic that roots our point of view firmly in the status quo of accepted polarities. There is good, there is bad. Nash’s universe is neatly divided between the forces that would destroy him, including manifestations in some very colorful characters, and those who would save him. And of course, there is love. Much has been made of the love story around which A Beautiful Mind hinges its chapters – on the positive side, the astute acting of Jennifer Connelly, who plays Alicia Larde, Nash’s student and eventual wife, whose support and labor keep him just on this side of complete institutionalization. On the negative side, there is the inconvenient truth that their marriage was unstable and led to a divorce in 1963, that Nash’s other son who was born out of wedlock to another woman, the persistent rumors about his experimentation with homosexual affairs, and the simple fact that he was institutionalized against his will a number of times. None of this has been included in A Beautiful Mind, choices which Ron Howard defends as that which serves to “emphasize Nash’s struggle.”

It’s a cowardly rationalization for Howard’s particular brand of reductionism, choosing to show only the socially palatable portions of Nash’s madness rather than the whole spectrum, and to offer only the socially palatable paths towards redemption. It is reported that Nash made repeated anti-Semitic comments during his delusional rants. This would hardly be a shock, as delusion often uncovers what lays in the unconscious mind. Unconscious anti-Semitism would have taken nothing away from Nash’s genius, or pain, nor would Alicia’s final exasperation with his violent tendencies. Furthermore, a more naked exposure to Nash’s inner mind, along with a truly unsettling journey into the questionable evil of free irrationality and the questionable good of chemical sanity would have helped us understand and feel the life of this extraordinary man. What we are left with instead is a pedestrian outside view, exceptional only because of the strength of the story and the fine acting by Crowe, Connelly, and others including Ed Harris and Paul Bettany.

On balance, A Beautiful Mind is, technically-speaking, a pretty movie, with occasionally excessive music but otherwise excellent visual storytelling, courtesy of cinematographer Roger Deakins. There’s admittedly something to be experienced from a well-crafted tale of a suffering genius saved by love, even if it’s a fiction pretending to be history. A Beautiful Mind may well encourage many to further investigate the fascinating life of John Nash and perhaps through it arrive at the challenging notions he raises about the way we define a desirable state of being. But many more will inevitably accept the film as the final, low-impact word on the subject, and with it the absurd and destructive beliefs that even in madness the world can somehow be divided into black and white. As such, A Beautiful Mind is neither a great nor an important movie, and if Ron Howard is rewarded for it myopic directing may soon replace one-trick-pony acting as Hollywood’s ugliest trend.

8 Mile

8 Mile has drawn comparisons with enduring blue-collar-triumph-over-adversity flicks like Rocky and Saturday Night Fever. Rapping has a redemptive power for the central character, Rabbit, just as boxing boosted Balboa and dancing made Tony Manero. But while the aforementioned movies made icons out of Stallone and Travolta, Eminem is already the world’s biggest pop idol.

Two years ago he was the foul-mouthed bane of parents everywhere. A mama-hating, misogynistic, homophobic, anti-authority, bad influence. Vilified by the media as a figurehead for everything wrong with youth culture, here was a gun-toting white-trash thug who dealt in outrage and reveled in his dysfunction.

But in a notable cultural about-face, the artist commonly known as Eminem or Slim Shady, but really named Marshall Mathers III, is now hailed as a commentator for the media-saturated, broken-home, attention-deficient world. Eminem is just the latest in a legacy of parent-worrying teen menaces who have become celebrated icons, from James Dean, via Elvis, to Kurt Cobain.

Just as Dr Dre’s presence lent Slim Shady credibility in the music world, Mathers’ silver screen debut is legitimized by the presence of Curtis Hanson (LA Confidential). But 8 Mile avoids the pitfall of becoming an Eminem vanity project - despite the fact that Mathers is essentially playing a fictionalized version of himself. It’s a gutsy, socially aware character-driven drama.

Jimmy is the white kid from the wrong side of the tracks who dreams of using his emcee skills to get out of Detroit’s run-down 313 area. By day he works in a steel plant; at night he works on his lyrics in the trailer he shares with his trashy, bingo-addicted mom Stephanie (Kim Basinger), and adoring six-year-old sister Lily (Chloe Greenfield). They live next to 8 Mile Road, a notional racial border separating the white suburbs from the black inner city.

The movie opens with Jimmy living up to his nickname Rabbit (in the headlights), by freezing onstage before a sea of black faces, during a freestyle contest hosted by his friend Future (Mekhi Phifer) at the local rap club. From thereon in, the movie centers around Rabbit’s quest to find his voice, against the backdrop of familial ructions, gang rumbles, dead-end slogging and the decaying urban wasteland of downtown Detroit. Rodrigo Prieto, Amores Perros’ cinematographer, lends a gritty feel to the settings, with raw yet fluid hand-held camera work, and a washed out palette of grays and pale blues; the skies are always overcast for the economically repressed 8 Milers.

Some of the most evocative scenes draw on Eminem’s early grounding in the local hip-hop battle scene. Each of the black rappers that Jimmy goes head-to-head with homes in on his color, employing coded racial epithets to disrespect him, including “wigger’”(wannabe nigger), “Vanilla Ice” and “Elvis,” yet screenwriter Scott Silver’s edgy narrative recognizes the issue without making it the focus.

The race factor augments other agreeable ritualized rap codes like male camaraderie, machismo, and homophobia, and 8 Mile paints them in an honest way. But for a film that skillfully negotiates racial and class issues while deftly sidestepping clichés, 8 Mile is disappointingly reductive with its female characters. Rabbit’s ex-girlfriend lies to him that she’s pregnant; his slutty mom gamblers her rent money; his romantic interest – Alex (Brittany Murphy, seemingly modeled on Courtney Love) – sleeps her way up the career ladder.

Evan Jones is a scene-hogging presence as Jimmy’s dorky buddy, Bob Cheddar, although it’s too early to say if Eminem can act. He’s playing a filtered version of himself, after all, but he has screen presence – despite his permanent scowl and predilection for skulking around beneath a cap and/or hood.

Those surprised by the sight of Rabbit defending a gay co-worker, and say he’s diluted his aggressive persona for this movie, take Eminem too seriously. There’s always been the feeling that his music is an extended joke at Middle America’s expense. Remember, this is the same rapper who’s repeatedly rhymed, spoken and even sung of his love for his daughter, and who performed a duet onstage with Elton John (a self-confessed Eminem fan) at the Grammy Awards ceremony.

Unsurprisingly, Mathers, a master lyricist, alliterator and enunciator, comes into his own in the rap-battle scenes. The duel scenes are the most entertaining, with Mathers’ flow the real star of the show; his rhymes forming articulate torrents of barbed humor, ironic observation and profanity. Hanson skillfully tantalizes the audiences with fragmented snatches of Rabbit’s lyrical dexterity, while holding back the rap payoff for the finale. The climax also swerves the rags-to-riches clichés you’d expect from formulaic fare like this – the duels are about winning respect, not multi-million dollar record deals.

That hip-hop should also remain untarnished by glib Hollywood representation was essential for Eminem; the rap cognoscenti are wise to the outside world’s stereotyped perception of their culture. And so the star of 8 Mile emerges with his credibility intact – no mean feat, when you consider the extended roll call of pop stars failing in Hollywood, from The Spice Girls to Michael Jackson, Mariah Carey to Madonna. As MC Hammer might say — U Can’t Touch This.

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