Directed by Spike Lee

When critics praise Spike Lee’s bank heist picture Inside Man, are they praising the movie, or the fact that Lee finally directed something that looks like standard-issue Hollywood product? Either way, the key word is “looks.” Written by first-timer Russell Gerwitz, and almost certainly tinkered with by the improv-loving Lee, this is a curious film, a popcorn movie with a bitter aftertaste.  

The plot pits robber Dalton Russell (Clive Owen) and a team of henchfolk dressed in hooded painter’s outfits and face masks against promotion-hungry detective Keith Frazier (Denzel Washington) and mysterious Madeline White (Jodie Foster), a shady fixer who’s hired by the bank chain’s founder and owner, Arthur Case (Christopher Plummer), to learn Russell’s motives and prevent certain devastating secrets from being revealed.

In a touch that links this film to The Killing, Reservoir Dogs and other time-shifting pulp thrillers, the bank heist narrative is interwoven with flash-forwards (shot by cinematographer Matthew Libatique in degraded, blown-out sepia) to scenes where cops interview hostages after the fact.

Russell fancies himself the planner of a perfect heist. He’s not a real crook, but the sort of suave, sexy mastermind who only exists in Hollywood caper flicks. 

His philosophical detachment, dry wit and seemingly omniscient ability to predict the cops’ actions make him seem like the most likeable James Bond-type baddie ever. (He even gets to take part in Spike Lee agitprop-disguised-as-a-humanizing-moment, a scene where Russell checks out a young boy’s gory gangsta videogame and is disturbed by it.)

Oddly, though, despite the genre setup, movie star leads and complex set pieces (including some S.W.A.T. team action modeled on The Silence of the Lambs), this isn’t a by-the-numbers film. 

Gerwitz and Lee intertwine plot twists (many of them patently ludicrous) with character development that feeds back into the film’s two main themes: the tendency of a fragmented, alienated community to unite around trauma, and the conflict between doing the right thing (so to speak) and getting paid. 

The neatly-planted bit of info about Frazier being investigated for taking $140,000 in seized gambling money, for instance, makes you wonder if he’s the inside man of the title; White and Russell’s comfort level makes you wonder if she’s connected and, of course, it’s impossible to look at Mr. Case and wonder if he’s really as hapless and ignorant as he seems.

Lee’s human quilt of a cast includes James Ransome of The Wire and Ken Leung, star of Lee’s Sucker-Free City, as bank hostages, and Chiwete Ejiofor  as Frazier’s tough, funny partner. Bill Mitchell proves his social panoramist’s inclination is as strong as ever. This movie is as likely as Jungle Fever and Summer of Sam to put the plot on hold and let characters shoot the breeze, often in language that reveals their prejudices even as they try to conceal them. (Keepers include a scene where Frazier and Mitchell interview a Sikh who’s furious about always being mistaken for a terrorist, and a post-heist interview in which Mitchell can’t stop himself from checking out a busty hostage’s cleavage.) 

Some of Lee’s social tension seems shoehorned in, but the best of it plays like an earthbound answer to Crash‘s direct-from-1971 racist caterwaulingan accurate rendition of modern urban America’s infinite gradations of prejudice, and a true portrait of how such impulses get submerged and redirected so people can get ahead. 

I also appreciated Lee’s visual intelligence: The way Inside Man starts out by isolating its supporting characters with discrete, zoomed-in close-ups (most of them are talking on cell phones or listening to iPods), and then, as the movie goes on, unites everyone by moving from person to person in lengthy, uncut, Steadicam shots. It’s a visual analog for how trauma forces people out of their private technological bubble and forces them to connect with what Deadwood creator David Milch calls the larger human organism.

There are times when you feel as though Lee is straining to superimpose his sociological dramatist’s sensibility on what amounts to gussied-up Hollywood product. Lee’s ambivalence toward this project is reflected in the film’s motif of heroism and decency overcome by (or at least tainted by) self-interest; every character, including the cops, is ultimately just looking to get paid. Inside Man aims to sell out without selling outan impossible task, but you’d be surprised how close Lee gets to accomplishing it.  

Directed by Fernando Eimbcke

A master class in doing more with less, Fernando Embcke’s delightful Duck Season finds a whole world inside a small, cluttered Mexico city apartment, where two barely-adolescent pals, Flama (Daniel Miranda) and Moko (Diego Cataño) are spending the day alone. Flama’s newly-single mom is gone for the day, and he and Moko plan to pass the time by playing videogames, ordering a pizza and drinking lots of soda. The only wild card is the surprise appearance of their upstairs neighbor Rita (Danny Perea), who has come over to bake a cake in their kitchen.

When the power goes out, all bets are off. The boys order a pizza, but the moped-riding pizza guy Ulises (Enrique Arreola), who had to climb multiple flights of stairs because the elevator was out of commission, is 11 seconds late, which prompts the boys to play hardass and refuse to pay him.

Ulises, a good man who’s reached the end of his rope, announces he’s not leaving until he gets paid, and to the boys’ astonishment, he actually means it. Between the deadpan stare-downs, newly-forged relationships, ghastly silences and continually shifting allegiances (Rita invites Moko to help her bake a cake so she can do something about her crush on him and Ulises gives Flama the mix of tough love and philosophical affection his absent father can’t provide), we feel as if we’ve entered delightfully unfamiliar territory.

Like the three principal characters in Rebel Without a Cause, the four inhabitants of this apartment enact an affectionate but sexually messed-up parody of a nuclear family, with Rita and Ulises standing in for Flama’s absent mom and dad (who are not yet done with their bitter divorce) and Moko standing in for the brother Flama never had.

The first thing to admire about Duck Season is its droll tone. Some reviews have invoked Jim Jarmusch—the go-to comparison for any black-and-white movie with quirky characters and a lot of static camera setups—but the comparison only goes so far. Eimbecke and cinematographer Alexis Zabe take the comedy to a higher level by reinforcing verbal gags and revealing character moments with compositions that reinforce the story’s narrative arc.

Duck Season‘s visual scheme changes as the characters get to know each other, moving from stasis, loneliness and inertia (signified by many locked-down, symmetrical master shots) to curious, active engagement (as the story unfolds, the filmmakers shift to asymmetrical shots and handheld, moving closeups that follow the actors bodies and gesturing hands). The strategy is pursued so unobtrusively that it isn’t until much later that you realize how intimately the images join with the script. Note, for instance, the dialogue pertaining to palindromes—words comprised of mirrored words which, when split in half, reflect each other; they’re of a piece with the mirrored shots—not just the symmetrical masters, but medium shots in which a character confronts his own reflection. The idea of "reflection" is further deepened by naturalistic monologues that let characters flash back to small but significant moments in their lives (another type of reflection).

I hope that in dwelling on the filmmaking, I haven’t made Duck Season sound like a dry, academic movie. Except for an ill-advised, just-in-case-you-didn’t-get-it monologue explaining the significance of the title (a mural showing ducks in migration that’s the object of a mama/papa dispute), Eimbcke rarely calls attention to the movie’s cinder-block density.

Every minute there’s a small, perfectly judged moment of human behavior: the boys pouring two sodas and making sure each glass contains exactly the same amount; Moko and Rita sneaking hits of Reddi-Whip; the four exhausted characters lounging around in the living room, eating cake with their hands. It’s a multifacted crowd-pleaser that can be enjoyed as a teen romance, a coded domestic drama or an existential comedy, and it never gets so wrapped up in its own intricacies that it forgets to amuse you.

Any critic who condescends Tyler Perry hasn’t seen his films with a paying audience. Madea’s Family Reunion, Perry’s follow-up to his smash hit Diary of a Mad Black Woman is the sort of film that invites murmurs of delight or disapproval, gales of laughter and the occasional half-embarrassed sob. This is the kind of movie where the villains behave so atrociously that half the audience bands together to rebuke them. To watch Madea’s with a paying crowd is to understand that popular movie storytelling is alive. Not necessarily alive and well, mind you, but alive.

Perry, an Atlanta-based theater legend who followed his screenwriting/producing/scoring/acting vehicle Diary by adding “director” to his list of credits, is a fumble-fingered theatrical carpetbagger whose imagination is chained to the proscenium arch. A few genuinely cinematic touches appear: sharply-timed violent surprises and an opener in which CGI rose petals tumble over helicopter footage of Atlanta, form into credits, then merge into a trail of real petals that leads to a sleeping woman’s bed. Otherwise, Perry comes across as an amateur who thinks of the camera mainly as a recording machine; a means of preserving his Southern-fried homilies (“It ain’t what people call you, it’s what you answer to”) and his prosthetics-and-slapstick clowning.

Like Diary, Madea features Perry in multiple roles, including flatulent Uncle Joe, strait-laced single dad Brian and Mable “Madea” Simmons, a cranky but warmhearted matriarch who tough-loves her extended family out of jams.

Madea agrees to take in a smart-mouthed, hard-case girl who’s been shunted from one foster home to another. Of course the girl flowers under Madea’s watchful eye and punishing strap. One of Madea’s nieces, Lisa (Rochelle Aytes), is about to wed a rich sociopath (Blair Underwood) who beats her when he isn’t pampering her in bizarre ways (he hires a classical ensemble to score her bubble bath).

Meanwhile, Lisa’s sister Vanessa (Lisa Arrindell Anderson) gets wooed by another Perry archetype, the super-hunky, single Christian dad (Boris Kodjoe), but she can’t commit due to emotional damage inflicted by her cold, whorish mother (the great Jenifer Lewis, whose smashingly unsympathetic performance recalls Joan Crawford).

Perry’s directorial inexperience keeps breaking the movie’s spell. Some of his exposition is just plain awful, and he lets the film’s momentum flag by inserting too many prosthetics-dependent improvs. A tearful monologue in the movie’s third act invites derision because the actress’ performance is too big and intense for the tight close-up that encloses it.

In any case, there’s no denying Perry’s ability to seduce the audience into hopping into a stylistic time machine, following him back to the golden age of goofball slapstick and melodramatic “women’s pictures” (the 1930s through the ’50s), then watching as he tries to mix these seemingly incompatible genres. The combo works better than you think. Rookie clumsiness notwithstanding, no American director shifts so fluently between slapstick, melodrama and moral fervor. Plus there’s a depth to Perry’s vision of black life that’s easy to miss when you’re laughing or sniffling.

At this early stage, Perry’s films are more curious than impressive, but they still deserve respect as genre-fusing entertainment, as records of a particular time and place in black America, and as reminders of an era when even the klutziest films connected with life.

Renaissance might be too strong a word at this point. Despite such star-packed, borderline-Hollywood efforts as Noam Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale, and such near-breakthrough Brooklyn indies as Mutual Appreciation (shot in Williamsburg by Bostonian Andrew Bujalski) and Four Eyed Monsters (by Bushwick residents Susan Buice and Arin Crumley), what’s happening in Brooklyn is still very much under the radar. It’s less a fullblown Renaissance than a percolating scene that has yet to erupt into national view. And Brooklyn isn’t the only city with a buzzing filmmaking scene. Relatively cheap and easy-to-learn digital filmmaking technologies and Internet-based forms of publicity and distribution (particularly downloads) have combined to allow a small army of moviemakers to learn an art form they might not have been able to afford ten years ago.  (And if you doubt it, check out Google Video, which has become an international showroom for homemade film and video projects, some of them fascinating.) 

That said, Alafia isn’t imagining things. Something is happening in the borough. And what’s distinctive about it is probably due to the collision of five critical factors: the aforementioned new technology; numerous Brooklyn-based festivals (including the Brooklyn Film Festival, the Brooklyn International Film Festival, the Brooklyn Underground Film Festival, Reel Sisters, Rooftop Films and the Brooklyn Jewish Film Festival); the relative health of the tax-break-encouraged New York film and TV industry, which allows the most talented or tenacious filmmakers to earn a living, or at least some walking-around money; a vast yet dense geographical area, served by the world’s most thorough subway system; and affordable rents, compared to much of Manhattan. (Unfortunately, the clock is ticking on that last factor, thanks to developers.)

The result of this convergence is a rare instance where the term filmmaking community isn’t a contradiction in terms. Unlike Los Angeles or even most parts of Manhattan, Brooklyn filmmakers don’t just live in the same area code and occasionally run into each other at screenings or parties. They live on the same city blocks, shop at the same stores, patronize the same restaurants and bars and see each other every day.  And it’s a bit less competitive, image-driven and stressful than Manhattan. The borough gives artists emotional as well as physical space to do their thing. 

Brooklyn has definitely supplanted the lower Manhattan of the late ’70s and early ’80s, the Jim Jarmusch era when a lot of young filmmakers were living on the Lower East Side on the cheap, and making small movies, says Bryan Wizemann, a Las Vegas native turned Clinton Hill resident who shot his first film, the existential gambling drama Losing Ground, at The Gate, a Park Slope bar. A lot of filmmakers, a lot of artists, have been priced out of Manhattan. I’ve noticed that when I pick up a new novel in the bookstore and flip to the back, it says, ‘so and so lives in Brooklyn.’

Brooklyn has the advantage of being in New York, but being a little outside the hustle and bustle, said Vladan Nikolic, a Belgrade native who shot his first feature, the romantic thriller Loveabout a Yugoslav hit man, his ex-wife and her cop loverin locations throughout Brooklyn. I keep discovering this place is full of filmmakers. Every day I run into people that are filmmakers or who know people who are filmmakers.

This literally pedestrian familiarity leads to friendship and collaboration, and a sense that just because filmmaking is a serious business doesn’t mean filmmakers can’t be generous to each other. 

This is a referral-based industry, but I’ve gotten to the point where I know enough people that I don’t even have a reel, said Alafia. It’s been years since I got hired off a reel. What other places do you know where you can freelance as a cinematographer and editor without a reel?

Brooklyn filmmakers tend to want to help each other, and because people are helpful, you start to collaborate in more informal ways than you might find in a place like LA, which is so competitive, says Four Eyed Monsters’ co-director Crumley. You just start making stuff together and you don’t worry so much about the formalities.

Crumley says he and Buice couldn’t have made Four Eyed Monstersa documentary-drama hybrid about the filmmakers’ relationship that has continued online in regular podcastswithout the support of people in their Bushwick apartment building, which is thick with people who are either employed by the film and TV industry or hovering on its margins.  

Everybody else in the building is pursuing some sort of artistic endeavor, Crumley says. Not everybody in the building is doing filmmaking, but there are lot of complimentary skills. We mixed our audio with a sound guy down the hall. Next door to him we had our fashion designer, who gave us all the male clothing for the film.  Upstairs there’s sort of a rock opera theater group that has a lot of actresses and actors who come through and do rehearsals there, and we ended up casting a lot of small roles from that pool of people.

Crumley and Buice even used their building, specifically their apartment, as a de-facto studio, devising breakaway partitions that allowed them to do pre-production, production and postproduction in the same space, sometimes simultaneously. We did auditions at the same time that someone was rough-cutting a scene on the other side of a wall. You can make that kind of stuff happen here, kind of pull people together.

Locations are more varied in Brooklyn than they are in Manhattan, they’re easier to get, and it’s easier to film on the streets without getting hassled, says Eric Werthman, a therapist turned director who shot his debut feature Going Under, starring Roger Rees as a therapist in a relationship with a dominatrix, in and around Park Slope. They’re more varied than they are in Manhattan, there’s more of a visual sense of history because things don’t get razed and built over quite as fast as Manhattan, and they’re easier to get. Park Slope, of course, is used all the time (in Hollywood productions), but it’s still easier for cars and trucks to park there than in Manhattan. (Intriguingly, Love‘s Nicolic served as a producer and editor on Werthman’s film.)

Shooting in Brooklyn was the big reason I was able to finish the film and get it made how I wanted, says Wizemann, who re-dressed The Gate to resemble a Vegas poker bar for Losing Ground. We were inside the bar the whole time, but I felt like the movie got made with the permission of the entire Brooklyn community, from the bar owners to the traffic cops to the frickin’ liquor distributors, who would wait till we were done with a shot to unload their liquor.

So far, there is no recognizable Brooklyn aesthetic. One can’t easily compare Losing Ground, a dreamy real-time drama shot on high definition video with Rembrandt lighting, with the handheld, 16mm black-and-white Mutual Appreciation. Nor can one confuse the video-diary-influenced DV feature Four Eyed Monsters with Going Under, whose steamy 35mm color photography makes Park Slope look like Bernardo Bertolucci’s Paris. 

The only common quality, so far, is a combination of ambition and intimacy, qualities that aren’t unique to Brooklyn, but which seem to flower there. These aren’t indies as the mainstream media define them, i.e., small, theoretically serious movies with half-a-million to multimillion-dollar budgets, starring people you’ve heard of, distributed by arms of major studios. These are tiny, personal films, a few steps up from a home movie; they belong to a genre that was recently given a marvelous label by IndieWIRE: Undies. They have an international flavor, spiced with bohemian assumptions, and they’re often attentive to the offhand beauty one finds throughout the borough.

For me, the appeal of Brooklyn is the beauty of it all. I wish we’d shot more in the streets between Fort Greene and Williamsburg, where there’s a kind of desolate land but beautiful stretch, with all these bodega lunchonettes that are worn, but because of their diverse ethnic mix, very lived-in and beautiful. And where the Arabs live on Coney Island is beautiful, too.  Vlad (Nicolic) used a location I almost used, the bridge on the Gowanus Canal. You look at it in his movie, you’d think he shot in Amsterdam. It’s just beautiful. 

Directed by Noah Baumbach

WALLACE AND GROMIT: THE CURSE OF THE WERE-RABBIT

Directed by Nick Park

Noah Baumbach’s Reagan-era domestic drama
The Squid and the Whale is about a Park Slope family shattered by divorce. It’s a sweet and
funny (if visually unremarkable) take on the end of innocence, the awkwardness of teenage sex,
the ugly feelings dredged up when parents split and all the other subjects you expect to see tackled
in this sort of movie. But Squid also manages two other more original achievements: It’s
an icily polite takedown of aging bourgeois intellectuals who puff themselves up into oracles
so they won’t feel like failures, and an acknowledgment that when parents’ failings inflict emotional
wounds on children, pop culture can serve as a Band-Aid.

Married writers Bernard and Joan Berkman (Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney)
stayed together mainly for the sake of their sons, Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) and Frank (Owen Kline).
The Berkman household is Received Wisdom Central, with the children demonstrating their love
for (and loyalty to) their parents by regurgitating their gaseous pronouncements. (Elmore Leonard,
says Bernard, is “the filet of the crime genre.”) The family’s deadpan snobbishness binds them
to each other and establishes their superiority over the “Philistines,” a mouth-breathing species
represented by the family’s tennis instructor, Ivan (William Baldwin), a genial dope who ends
every other sentence with “mah brothah.”

The family’s split-up exposes their smug pretension as a defense mechanism,
a showy repudiation of a larger world that never really noticed them anyway. The grey-bearded Bernard
is a creative writing professor still coasting on the fumes of his early success. He seems happy
only when flirting with his star pupil, Lili (Anna Paquin, who, creepily enough, played Daniels’
daughter in Fly Away Home) and grousing about how uneducated and undemanding everyone
else is. Joan, once Bernard’s protege, is now writing fiction that’s as good as
Bernard’s early stuff, and saleable, too. But like Bernard, Joan seems to view her sons mainly as
reflections of her own history and intellect. When the Berkmans subject the kids to an unwieldy
joint custody arrangement, the boys are no longer constrained by the centripetal force of living
in the same house, and start acting out. Frank becomes a secret drinker and a compulsive (sometimes
public) masturbator; Walt continues parroting his parents’ snooty verdicts on books he hasn’t
personally read, and takes the self-deception a step further by teaching himself Pink Floyd’s
“Hey You” on guitar and claiming to have written it himself. (Walt’s defensethe outgrowth
of life among wannabe-geniusesis that he could have written it.)

The boys’ polite, mysterious meltdowns seem a fitting response to Joan
and Bernard’s passive-aggressive, intellectual brand of control.

They don’t lash out, they implode, taking bystanders with them. Needling
“liberal academics” in The Armies of the Night, Norman Mailer wrote, “If you did not do what
they wished, you had simply denied them.” The Berkmans are that unthinking; they dominate without
even knowing it. Baumbach illustrates the family’s collapse by drawing on his own history (he’s
the son of novelist Jonathan Baumbach and former Village Voice film critic Georgia Brown),
then placing it in a larger cultural context. The director isn’t content merely to get back at Mom
and Dad; he admits the haplessness and emotional blindness of several generations’ worth of East
Coast intellectuals.

Squid is executive-produced by whimsy master Wes Anderson, Baumbach’s
writing partner on The Life Aquatic. Predictably, some mixed to negative reviews of Squid have dismissed it as a scaled-down rehash of Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums, with wild
handheld camerawork substituting for Anderson’s insanely detailed CinemaScope panaoramas.
But where Tenenbaums ended on an up note, with the vain, selfish patriarch healing his broken
family and dying a domestic martyr, Squid leaves the Berkmans’ distress unresolved, as
if to suggest that Joan and Bernard’s divorce opened wounds that remain unhealed to this day. Squid could be considered a harsh corrective to Anderson’s wishful thinking: not nostalgia, but its
opposite.

Baumbach’s canny period details and barbed caricatures will divide
viewers along generational lines, and prompt arguments that seem disproportionate to the film’s
mild tone (but really aren’t). The characterizations are ironic, mildly satirical, at times cartoonish
(in the Peanuts sense), but they’re prompted by real and powerful emotions: resentment at Boomers
who lord their cultural dominance over every successive generation; anger at parents who treat
their children as empty vessels to be filled with freeze-dried cultural opinions, and who spend
more time preaching self-esteem and career satisfaction than teaching right from wrong.

The film’s depiction of a certain time, place and pop culture moment
is so anthropologically exact that moviegoers between the ages of 30 and 40 might be moved even if
they don’t particularly like the film. I’m in that demo, so I’ll confess being blindsided by two
under-the-radar music cues: Tangerine Dream’s lust-fogged Risky Business track “Love
on a Real Train,” which accompanies Frank’s Portnoy-esque bumblings, and a spiral-of-sadness
montage scored with the “School House Rock!” piece “Figure 8,” which starts with a plaintive female
vocal and a Bach-like melody played on electric piano. Baumbach’s sophisticated use of pop gives
an otherwise subdued comedy-drama a dark, urgent undertow. The director doesn’t just love his
music and movie references; he clings to them like life preservers in memory’s polluted sea.

In Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, a stop-motion
epic in which the stalwart pooch Gromit and his erstwhile “master” Wallace try to save London from
the rampaging title beast, writer-director Nick Park hasn’t so much re-imagined his popular short
films as simply inflated them. But you don’t mind because it’s fun; every frame exemplifies Park’s
sense of humor, a kind of brilliant obviousness.

Wallace (Peter Sallis) and Gromit now run a non-lethal pest-control
business called Anti-Pesto, which sucks bunnies out of the ground with vacuum tubes. They meet
their match in the Were-Rabbit, which appears after an experiment in which Wallace mind-melds
with a rabbit by way of the Mind-Manipulation-O-Matic and tries to quash the animal’s innate hunger
for vegetables. (If you can’t see the movie’s big plot twist coming, you’ve never seen a movie.)

The funniest gags are groaners in the spirit of Mel Brooks circa 1974.
A newspaper headline critical of the duo declares “Anti-Pesto Fails to Turnip in Time.” The prim
Lady Tottington (Helena Bonham Carter), a wealthy gardener who hires Anti-Pesto to rid her palatial
estate of rabbits, unsubtly lets Wallace know that her relationship with great white hunter Victor
Quartermaine (Ralph Fiennes) isn’t pleasing her. “He’s never shown any interest in my produce,”
she sighs, stroking a pair of melons.

Park is a contraptionist filmmaker in the Spielberg-Zemeckis-Jeunet
mode, and there are three action scenes in Were-Rabbit whose precise cutting and flamboyant
yet purposeful camera movements would be more widely praised if they didn’t involve stop-motion
puppets and miniatures. (The Were-Rabbit announces its presence by rumbling just beneath the
earth’s surface, kicking up spines of dirt.) Park has a knack for conferring new identities on inanimate
objects: during a lull in a Were-Rabbit attack at a fairground, a tuft of pink cotton candy rolls
through the frame like a tumbleweed. And there are a couple of in-jokes so sly that they take a while
to sink in. Early in the movie, when Wallace has stepped out of their Anti-Pesto truck and left Gromit
there alone, the dog fiddles with the radio and we hear a few seconds of an Art Garfunkel song: “Bright
Eyes,” from the 1979 rabbit cartoon Watership Down. An obscure flourish, but not unwarren-ted.

Adapted by playwright-actor-composer Tyler Perry from his own theatrical
smash, Diary is the movie version of a potluck supper. The spread includes cartoonishly
broad slapstick, 100-proof melodrama, romance-novel wish-fulfillment, social commentary,
Oprah-ready self-help blather and a powerful undercurrent of southern-Christian sentiment.
Perry’s chameleonic, Peter Sellers-Eddie Murphy turn in a number of supporting roles is this feast’s
equivalent of a dessert overdose: three different kinds of pie heaped on the same Chinette plate.

Building on her dazzling star turn as a death-row inmate in last year’s
Woman Thou Art Loosed, Elise plays Helen McCarter, a working-class woman who breezed into
Atlanta society on the coattails of her husband, flamboyant Atlanta defense attorney Charles
McCarter (Steve Harris of The Practice). The movie begins with Charles accepting an award
as Atlanta attorney of the year; the couple’s dreamy, slo-mo arrival at the event has a grim undercurrent,
thanks to shots of Charles checking out attractive women en route to their table.

Accepting the prize, Charles thanks his wife of 18 years for making his
success possible, but the hearts-and-flowers shout-out is a prelude to moustache-twirling villainy.
Pulling into the driveway of their Xanadu-like McMansion, Charles informs Helen that he’s leaving
to take care of something. Helen knows what that means, but passive-aggressively requests clarification.
"When you get a job and pay one of these bills, then you can ask me questions," he answers.

Soon enough, Charles has kicked Helen out of her own house to make room
for his mistress and her son. Shattered, Helen hitches a ride with a sweet corn-rowed hunk hired
to pack up her stufffuture love interest Orlando, played by soap star Shemar Moore. But
she literally kicks the good Samaritan to the curb in a fit of pique, drives the U-Haul to her old neighborhood
and seeks solace with her aunt-cum-grandmama figure, a feisty, sarcastic, chain-smoking, gun-toting,
advice-dispensing mountain of black womanhood. The older woman is none-too-subtly named Madea
and played under two tons of makeup by Perry.

Like Martin Lawrence in Big Momma’s House, Perry makes no pretense
of trying to convince you that the character is anything other than a theatrical conceita
drag-queeny "life force" as embodied by a strapping young man impersonating a much larger older
woman. Whenever Perry is onscreen playing Madeaor Madea’s raunchy, flatulent older brother
Joethe movie’s esthetic shifts from straight-faced melodrama to italicized farce, so
drastically that it’s a wonder the projector gears don’t shatter. Yet Perry’s rollicking life
force pulverizes any cognitive dissonance.

The performance is so big, in every senseJackie Gleason-, Orson
Welles- and Benny Hill-bigthat it presents viewers with a rare, starkly defined choice:
Accept Diary as the movie version of live theater or shut down and start sneering. Your decision
will depend on your tolerance for the reckless splicing of three-hanky melodrama and sketch comedy.

Incredibly, Diary grows more ambitious as the story unfolds.
Madea spurs Helen to return to Charles’ McMansion and vandalize the mistress’ wardrobe; Helen
reconnects with the blue-collar life and childhood affection she abandoned for life with Charles,
then allows Orlando to court her; Charles lets himself be bullied into defending a vicious drug
dealer on a murder beef, setting the stage for inevitable karmic payback. Perry’s script also makes
room for a subplot involving Helen’s cousin Brian (Perry again!), a straight-laced single dad
who won’t permit his darling young daughter, a wannabe-singer, to follow in the footsteps of her
mom, Debrah (Tamara Taylor), a musician turned drug addict.

Perry isn’t just adding plot for plot’s sake: The stories bounce off
each other in satisfying ways, particularly during the film’s final stretch when Helen’s unexpected
chance at vengeance is juxtaposed against Brian’s decision to let his daughter take baby steps
toward autonomy. Both narratives are about independence and forgiveness; Helen must forgive
(but not forget) Charles’ treachery, and Brian must forgive (but not forget) the damage wrought
by Debrah’s addiction.

Both journeys also unfold within the context of Helen’s reconnection
with the Church, incarnated by Helen’s elderly, God-fearing, nursing-home-bound mother (Cicely
Tyson, whose high-backed red chair suggests a throne) and other faithful characters. Unfashionably,
the movie treats religion as a source of strength and a moral tether binding fallen individuals
to their culture. "He was my everything," Helen tells her mother, mooning over her hateful ex. "God
is your everything," her mother replies. "Don’t you know He’s a jealous God?"

Music-video ace turned feature filmmaker Darren Grant juggles Perry’s
mood and modes proficiently but without flair, using the camera mainly to record performances.
A vision this eclectic and electricTerry McMillan plus Douglas Sirk plus Jerry Lewisneeded
an obsessive, inscrutable, off-kilter filmmaker to do it justice; Grant seems too polite and even-tempered
to summon that sort of energy.

Diary is a jumbled wreck of a moviealternately prosaic
and loony. But the source material is so rich and in-your-face sincere that it works anyway. I suspect
the film will be greeted with the same mix of anthropological curiosity and snickering that’s dogged
Perry throughout his theatrical career. But maybe audiences will see what critics can’t. This
may prove to be a slow-building cult phenomenon that endures withering pans but lingers in theaters
for weeks, eventually forcing the same critics who dismissed it to write think-pieces explaining
its success.

Up and Down

Directed by Jan Hrebejk

Czech filmmaker Jan Hrebejk’s Up and Down is a character-driven
movie that’s more interested in atmosphere and performance than visual acrobatics and three-act
plotting. Set in modern-day Prague, a once-homogenous city upended by immigration and cultural
change, it takes its cues from Mike Leigh, Milos Forman, John Cassavetes and the first and third
acts of The Deer Hunter, following an ensemble cast through a meandering, somewhat elliptical
narrative, punctuated by intriguingly long, detailed, dramatic setpieces that unfold in real
time.

The tale is sparked when two immigrant-smuggling Czechs accidentally
end up in possession of an Indian infant, which eventually finds its way into the hands of a childless
couple. Mila (Natasa Burger) is a baby-obsessed basket case, while her bull-necked security-
guard husband, Frantisek (Jir Machcek) is a convicted criminal, ex-soccer
hooligan and racist who must then explain how he and his wife came into possession of a brown-skinned
baby.

Their story intertwines, rather loosely, with the tale of an expatriate
Czech named Martin (Petr Forman, Milos’ son) who leaves his adopted homeland of Australia to visit
his dad, Otakar (Jan Triska), a professor who survived a stroke. This family’s life is a hornet’s
nest of domestic intrigue: Otakar divorced Martin’s mom, Vera (Emlia Vsryov)
to marry the much younger Hana (Ingrid Timkov) and fathered a daughter (Kristyna Bokova),
whom half-brother Martin has never met. Vera tries to reconnect with her ex-husband and unite the
fractured family, but her uncouth emotionalism and straight-up racist sentiments unnerve everybody,
including her too-patient son.

Up and Down is an intelligent, likeable, at times charming movie,
loosely woven around the idea that change of any sort (demographic, domestic, financial) cannot
be reversed or even resisted, only accepted. But it’s too shaggy and unfocused to make its points
with the resounding impact such an ambitious story requires. You keep wanting it to be great, but
in the end have to settle for it being good and decent. It’s an achievement that should have been a
triumph.

I hope this
description doesn’t suggest that The Eye is simply an Easternized
remake of The Sixth Sense. The Eye doesn’t have Sense’s
unexpected melodramatic heft—where Shyamalan wants to scare us and uplift
us at the same time, the Pangs just want to scare us. But they’re eerily
good at it. Technically, The Eye might be the most precise, appropriate,
fresh match of style and content to hit the horror genre since Sense,
or maybe since Lars von Trier’s epic ghost miniseries The Kingdom,
which played New York back in 1995.

You know
you’re in the hands of aggressively clever directors from the opening sequence,
which shows the blind Mun going about her daily routine, riding public transportation,
walking down the street, futzing around in her high-rise apartment, preparing
for bed and so on. The Pangs and their amazing cinematographer, Decha Srimantra,
shoot the whole sequence hand-held, apparently with a zoom lens, from a distance.
In each composition, the framing seems slightly off (on purpose) and the plane
of focus is shallow. The only part of the frame that’s crisp is the part
of the frame that contains an object significant to our blind heroine—a
cane, for instance, or the pillow on her bed. Everything else, from foreground
to background, is fuzzed out, irrelevant. This is a brilliant stylistic choice,
because it gives moviegoers a rough idea of how blind or near-blind people use
their other senses to experience life, fixating on what’s crucial at that
instant while factoring out everything else.

The Pangs’
technical mastery continues throughout the film, shifting to adapt to Mun’s
changing visual circumstances. For the first few days after she gets her new
corneas, she can’t see details, only generalized shapes and colors. The
Pangs match Mun’s POV shots with closeups of Mun straining to see (or understand)
what’s happening in her field of vision. These reaction shots are often
framed so tightly that Mun is isolated in the frame—visually cut off from
the same environment she inhabits. She is a stranger in her own world, and within
her own body.

The apparitions
have lots of personality. They are, by turns, bored, distracted, myopic and
furiously angry. They’ll appear at the end of a hallway, then gradually
shuffle (or float) toward Mun. Sometimes she’ll think she hears them coming
from one direction, eventually decides she’s just imagining things, then
turns to the left or the right, in closeup, and sees a ghost six inches from
her face, slightly out of focus.

The soundtrack
is a merciless marvel, following long stretches of ghastly, Kubrickian silence—dead
air whooshing through the ear canals—with a burst of shrieking violins.
Like De Palma, the Pangs are so technically fluent that they can joke about
their own mastery while they’re scaring the bejesus out of you. A scene
with Mun trapped in an elevator with a ghost goes on for a terrifying eternity,
like a nightmare that refuses to end; then there’s a cut to a lighted number
on the elevator panel revealing that those doors aren’t going to open anytime
soon.

Throughout,
Lee’s performance stresses honesty and understatement. Recalling Audrey
Hepburn in Wait Until Dark, it acknowledges the heroine’s persecuted
state without sentimentalizing it. Most impressively, Lee doesn’t merely
react to things seen and heard, or half-seen and half-heard. She also uses body
language to convey a range of other sensory events that cannot be represented
in movies—a sudden change in temperature, a strange new smell, the sudden
rise of gooseflesh. I’d really rather not say anything more about the plot
for fear of spoiling it. I’ll just say that Mun does what she can to understand
her own predicament, and that her quest leads her into treatment with a kindly
young psychiatrist (Lawrence Chou) and to a journey to learn the identity of
her cornea donor. The film’s final act isn’t as unrelentingly frightening
as the first two-thirds, but the last 10 minutes are an apocalyptic knockout.
Viewers who love a good fright will want to see this movie; filmmakers will
want to see it more than once.

The Eye
Directed by Danny & Oxide Pang

Framed

Fifteen
and counting: The New Festival, the New York Lesbian & Gay Film Festival,
celebrates a decade and a half with a lineup of screenings and events that runs
June 5-15 at the New School, NYU and BAM Rose Cinemas. Among the more intriguing
items on the schedule are Zero Degrees of Separation, a documentary work-in-progress
by Ellen Flanders about an Israeli and Palestinian gay couple in Jerusalem (June
8, 3:45 p.m.); Lock Up Your Sons and Daughters!, a 75-minute reel of
gay-hating and gay-baiting scenes from educational films (June 8, 5:45 p.m.)
and Madame Sata, a dramatic feature about the queen of a bohemian Rio
de Janeiro neighborhood in the 1930s (June 13, 8 p.m.). For a complete schedule,
visit www.newfestival.org.

It’s
just one grace note in an abduction sequence composed and edited with a ruthless
clarity that D.W. Griffith might have admired, but it’s key to understanding
what separates Pixar, the company that produced Finding Nemo, from almost
any other commercial animation company working today. They think through their
premises, finding cartoon equivalents for real things; like all true artists,
they sweat the small stuff. Nemo continues the Pixar tradition of giving
charmingly contemporary suburban characteristics to nonhuman things. (Yes, it’s
a gimmick—but it’s a gimmick that provokes the audience into seeing
their world in surprising new ways, like Picasso’s putting two eyes on
one side of a subject’s face.)

This time,
Pixar’s environment is the ocean, and the characters are fish instead of
toys, bugs or monsters. As always, the real subject is the delicate bond between
parents and children. Director Andrew Stanton, co-director Lee Unkrich and their
school of animators and voice actors work together like Spielberg in full-on
popcorn mode, mixing old-school artistry, up-to-the-minute technology and primal
emotions with jokes that, though older than the Great Barrier Reef, rarely fail
to give kids the giggles. It’s a great movie—probably the funniest
animated feature since Monsters, Inc., and the most adroit mix of slapstick,
sentiment and social commentary since Toy Story 2.

Like every
Pixar movie, Nemo revolves around the attempts to rescue a character
that has been abducted or otherwise removed from his home. It divides its time
evenly between Marlin, the father, and Nemo, the son. Marlin teams up with Dory,
a pop-eyed goofball with severe short-term memory problems, to find his boy,
the sole survivor of a long-ago attack by a predator that claimed the lives
of Marlin’s wife and Nemo’s 399 siblings. (The Pixar folks have described
Nemo as "Bambi underwater," and its opening sequence, while mercifully
short, rivals the killing of Bambi’s mother in its power to disturb; the
predator is at first glimpsed from a long distance, hovering in the open with
a blank expression, like a stalking monster from a John Carpenter flick.)

Marlin’s
journey is episodic, at times almost Homeric, despite all the poop jokes. Tracking
the dentist to Sidney via an address written on the strap of a pair of lost
goggles, the brave little fishies encounter more colorful friends and foes than
can be listed here. My favorites are a flock of single-mindedly ravenous gulls,
a bale of sea turtles who talk in surf slang and a trio of sharks who profess
to be reformed fish-eaters, and hold 12-step meetings in a sunken submarine
ringed by mines.

Nemo, meanwhile,
is imprisoned in a fishtank back in the dentist’s office, awaiting the
day when the dentist’s niece, a hideous little goon who’s notorious
for shaking fish to death inside plastic bags, arrives to take him away. This
part of the movie is a goof on prison flicks. Nemo’s compatriots include
Allison Janney’s watchful starfish, Brad Garrett’s neurotic, very
emotional puffer fish and Willem Dafoe’s Gill, a scarred moorish idol who’s
hatched an escape plan but can’t carry it out without help from a fish
small enough to crawl through the tank’s filtration system. (Dafoe played
the same part in Steve Buscemi’s little-seen prison drama Animal Factory—a
grizzled mentor to a kindhearted younger inmate.)

There’s
more going on in Nemo than thrills and laughs, but as always, the Pixar
folks are such adept entertainers that most viewers (and most critics) probably
won’t notice. Like the plot of Holes, Nemo’s stint in the dentist’s
tank suggests that prisons are more about power than justice, and that captivity
breeds insanity. "Fish aren’t meant to be in a box, kid," says Gill. "It
does things to you."

The script,
credited to Stanton, Bob Peterson and David Reynolds, also chides Baby Boomer
and post-Boomer parents who devote every waking moment to insulating their kids
against "danger"—the modern parent’s synonym for "experience." ("I’m
H2O-intolerant," chirps a classmate of Nemo’s.)

This funny-scary
fish tale begins after Nemo disobeys his dad and swims away from his school
to check out the dentist’s boat. But this incident marks the beginning,
not the end, of the movie’s lesson. "I promised him I’d never let
anything happen to him," Marlin confesses to Dory, who replies, "That’s
a funny thing to promise." Nemo ultimately emerges from his experience a stronger,
smarter fish; so does Marlin, a loving parent who must summon the emotional
strength to let go and let the boy find his own way in the world. Fish gotta
swim.

Finding Nemo
Directed by Andrew Stanton

Framed

Dive In.
Adults who crave aquatic symbolism but don’t dig talking fish should check
out the 1968 Frank Perry film The Swimmer. One of my very favorite dramas,
it’s an eerie, moving adaptation of John Cheever’s short story, now
showing at Two Boots Pioneer Theater in a newly restored print. Burt Lancaster
is superb as the swimtrunk-clad fortysomething suburban dad literally swimming
his way across his suburb for reasons that are as mysterious to him as they
are to everybody else. The generational flipside of The Graduate, the
movie hovers between sociological precision and mythic abstraction. The finale
image is a heartbreaker.

See the
movie, buy the car. The Italian Job, about an Italian heist that ends
in a double-cross that leads to a payback heist in Los Angeles, is no great
shakes as a thriller. A remake of a late-60s Euro-swank thriller, it’s
more about jive-ass attitude than suspense, and it probably wouldn’t have
been made without the cult success of films by Quentin Tarantino and Guy Ritchie,
which every red-blooded heterosexual male actor in Hollywood would kill to be
in. (Guns, cash, designer clothes, kiss-off dialogue; what’s not to like?)
Director F. Gary Gray (Set It Off) stages pretty good action scenes,
but because they lack a strong sense of spatial geography, they’re not
spine-tinglers. The predictably mismatched cast of glamorous actors (boring
blank Mark Wahlberg’s alleged mastermind; Ed Norton’s sullen second-in-command;
Donald Suthlerland’s kindly, clearly doomed mentor; Charlize Theron’s
improbably shapely safecracker; Guy Ritchie vet Jason Statham’s hostile,
womanizing wheel-man; a half-deaf explosives expert played, appropriately, by
Mos Def) is competent enough. But after a while, you start wondering when the
stars will show up. They arrive in the form of merchandise—everything from
brand-name security systems to stereo components to the tiny, superhip Mini
Cooper, to Pepsi One, which contributes a billboard that plays a shamelessly
pivotal role in the film’s nifty final chase. The product-placed goods
are photographed as lovingly as a Julia Roberts shopping trip. Tellingly, in
the press kit, the Mini gets a longer bio than any of the top-billed actors.
It’s hard to get outraged about ads before movies in an era of movies-as-ads.

Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary
Directed by Guy Maddin

It begins like so many other movies. A train pulls into a sleepy small town and off steps a stranger–a strong, mysterious man who will change many lives. You’ve seen his ilk before; he’s a cross between a Camus-style existential hero and a taciturn cowpoke from a classic American western: a good guy who at first seems like a bad guy, or maybe the reverse. He could be Joseph Cotten in Shadow of a Doubt, William Holden in Picnic, Spencer Tracy in Bad Day at Black Rock, Charles Bronson in Once Upon a Time in the West. There are a lot of possible variations here, but you’ve seen most of them before, and when a similarly moody, charismatic character makes the same kind of entrance in the opening of Man on the Train, you think you know what to expect.

JOHNMALKOVICH’S directorial debut The Dancer Upstairs doesn’t quite work, but it’s powerfully engrossing–dark, playful and sometimes cruel, as the best Malkovich performances usually are. Javier Bardem, the out-of-nowhere superstar who animated Before Night Falls, plays the hero, a police captain trying to uncover the leader of a terrorist cult in an unnamed Latin American country. He’s thicker than you remember, and slower, different but equally manly, grounded, lived-in–a Nick Nolte kind of performance. Working from Nicholas Shakespeare’s 1997 novel, Malkovich infuses the story with a disquieting, uncertain mood that recalls one of his acknowledged inspirations, Costa- Gavras. The atmosphere makes more of an impression than the plot, and both are more successful than the central relationship between the hero and his daughter’s ballet teacher. Missteps aside, it’s worth seeing; it could be the opening chapter of a potentially major, but certainly fascinating, directorial career.