Reviews

If John Carpenter's dynamite '70s actioner ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 was his nod to Howard Hawks' RIO BRAVO, this coolly professional space opera is his EL DORADO--same movie, different setting, in a late-career taking of inventory. In flashback, space cop Natasha Henstridge tells a (matriarchal) tribunal in 2176 how she and her fellow officers went to pick up Ice Cube, a criminal accused of dismembering several colonists on Mars. Instead, they found a mysterious floating parasite that turned its human hosts into self-mutilating, murderous zombies--forcing an uneasy alliance between cops and crooks. The threat to identity is a Carpenter staple since the days of THE THING, but the possessed "ghosts" here are a letdown: They have paleface makeup and choreographed rallies, like an amateur production of STOMP. And the co-writer/director wastes cool actors like Pam Grier, Joanna Cassidy, and Clea DuVall in undeveloped parts and dead-end plot threads. That's the bad news. The good news is that Carpenter can stage a chaotic action scene involving dozens of extras and keep it super-tight. Alone among Hollywood directors, he knows how to film martial-arts battles without ruining them with bad framing and sloppy cutting. And since the second half of the movie is mostly chase scenes and fights, cut to the director's own heavy-metal score, it rocks. For Carpenter's fans, there are plenty of self-references and directorial trademarks combined with a tricky structure of interlocking flashbacks and a near-experimental use of dissolves. Even the cheap sets give the movie a clammy, constricted tension as the heroes get cornered. This is far from great, but like Carpenter's recent VAMPIRES and IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS, it'll probably seem a lot better in a few years when it turns up on late-night cable.

In the wake of the sarin-gas attack mounted by the Aum Shinrikyo cult on the Tokyo subway system in 1995, horror films enjoyed a sudden spurt of popularity in Japan. Many of the films focus on hypnosis or media-induced violence, the fragile normalcy of modern life, and grisly deeds committed by seemingly ordinary citizens. This unnerving 1997 thriller, which seems like a direct response to the Aum Shinrikyo incident, offers a glimpse of how our own national cinema may absorb the blow of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. A rash of senseless murders wracks Tokyo; the victims have deep X-shaped gashes across their throats, and the killers (often their loved ones) are found in a daze. The only connection appears to be a mysterious drifter (Masato Hagiwara) who gets into random strangers' heads with a single, oft-repeated question: "Who are you?" What makes this subtle, quiet shocker so unsettling is the idea that everyone has secret resentments that render him or her hypnotically pliable--that everyone harbors some glimmer of murderous rage that can be exploited, whether by a drifter or by religious extremists. The writer-director, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, a prolific Japanese filmmaker who's developing a large cult following here, heightens the unease with buzzing soundtrack noise and eerie long takes that leave us consistently unprepared for the violence to come. And the last sequence will leave people arguing--it requires close attention, culminating in an ending even more disturbing in its implications than the conclusion of SEVEN.

A magical, one-of-a-kind movie--a near-wordless 1984 tribute by the late Japanese director Hiroshi Teshigahara to the 19th-century Catalan architect Antonio Gaudi, whose ingenious, sensual designs grace the city of Barcelona. To call Gaudi's designs unique is to belittle them: His buildings borrow organic shapes from nature--the whorl of a seashell, the gnarled rigidity of a tree trunk--to create free-flowing forms of almost surreal beauty. Teshigahara's camera prowls the streets of Barcelona seeking the buildings, then lavishing attention on their alien curves, vaulted ceilings, and bizarre portals. The movie sounds dry, but the buildings are so fanciful and voluptuous that you can scarcely believe your eyes: They erupt from the city like weeds through a sidewalk, and their entropic strangeness becomes hypnotic. The director delights in watching people interact with these forms, as when a little girl roller-skates placidly through a forest of vertical columns. In his WOMAN IN THE DUNES, Teshigahara made moonscapes of sand and glistening crystals, immersing us in their texture; here he shows a similar fascination with everyday forms made shockingly unfamiliar. And his frequent collaborator, the great composer Toru Takemitsu, fashioned Catalan folk tunes into a haunting score that's at once ancient and futuristic, just like Gaudi's designs. A must-see for architects, for anyone intrigued by the possibilities of public art--and for anyone who wants to be transported to another world for an hour.

Sam Peckinpah's hallucinatory bloodbath was considered career suicide when released in 1974; today, this scuzzy, squirrelly road movie looks less like self-parody than self-autopsy. As such, it has aged better than some of Peckinpah's more "reputable" movies. Like John Cassavetes' THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE and Brian DePalma's BLOW OUT, it's a thinly veiled allegory about the muck a filmmaker will wade through to get his movies made. Peckinpah's stand-in is Warren Oates, an actor who always brought a rotgut reek of authenticity to his roles; here, he's a washed-up pianist who stands to score a bundle if he completes one simple task--fetching the severed head of the yutz who impregnated a Mexican warlord's daughter. When Oates isn't defending his not-unwilling girlfriend (Isela Vega) from rapists Kris Kristofferson and Donnie Fritts (!), he's carrying on a boozy, uh, tête-à-tête with the brown-bagged head on an endless drive down Mexico way. But Oates isn't the villain--that distinction is reserved for the effete suits (the slimy duo of Gig Young and Robert Webber) on his tail. Oates is just a guy trying to maintain enough of his integrity to see a dirty job through: He's one of those screw-you Peckinpah heroes who completes his assignment just so he can wage war on his bosses. The movie has such a gritty, oozing, flyblown feel you could swear it was shot on No-Pest Strips instead of celluloid, and as Oates bears down on oblivion it slows to a druggy crawl: Each cut is like a dying man's blink. No matter-in its sick, ornery way, this is one of the director's most personal movies, and worthy of far better than its laughingstock status.

Edward Yang's four-hour study of Taiwanese youth gangs in 1960 and their search for personal and national identity is a stunning film; its scope and narrative power reminded me of seeing "The Godfather" for the first time. One remarkable thing about Yang's direction is the virtual absence of close-ups. The action is often shot through a doorway, window, or facade that obscures part of the world within; there's always a sense of life going on beyond the boundary of the frame. That this film hasn't been released in America is a crime.