Reviews

However director Brian De Palma reworked preoccupations

borrowed from Hitchcock, the French New Wave, and his own

earlier work into an erotic thriller whose complex puzzle pieces all,

by movie's end, fit together seamlessly, is itself a mystery. But it left

me feeling elated, even giddy, as I walked out of the theater.

"Femme Fatale" is "pure cinema" at its finest. De Palma ought to

get a Lifetime Achievement Award based on this one film alone.

.. which, nominally, they were. At least, they wore red coats and could quote the psalms. There were about 100 of them, plus a contingent of sick and lame in the infirmary at the supply camp at Rourke's Drift, Natal, South Africa, in 1879 when the Zulus rose, 4,000 strong, to wipe out the real army of 1,000 that protected them. They themselves were, on paper, anything but warriors. Cooks, supply masters, singers in the choir, malingerers, only a few of them stiff-upper-lipped soldiers, they were a ragtag bunch. Their foppish, racist commander, Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead (Michael Caine, making his first screen appearance) is there only because he's the son of an officer who was the son of an one who died at Waterloo. Another officer just happens to be on the scene, Lieutenant John Chard (Stanley Baker), but he's an engineer sent to extend the fruits of Her Majesty's largesse by building a bridge. When the whole Zulu nation converges on their skimpy redoubt, can these mostly green noncombatants hope to survive?

By the time of the first Zulu onslaught, the patrician Bromhead has shown just enough intelligence to let the smarter Chard deploy the troops and organize the resistance. Meanwhile, the plebeian Chard has had to dig deep within himself to summon courage to match the cool Bromhead's native fortitude. Strange bedfellows, they make a good team. The men respond to them. But, despite their successfully repulsing the Zulus in early stages of the battle, how can they ever last, given their enemy's overwhelming numbers?

Their cause is not bolstered by the presence of the Swedish missionary, Reverend Otto Witt (Jack Hawkins), and his prim daughter Margareta (Ulla Jacobsson). Neither see war as consistent with God's will. He, positively unnerved by it, takes to the bottle when he isn't exhorting soldiers to lay down their arms. Chard eventually has to expel them from the camp. The Zulus display their own nobility when they decline to massacre them.

The battle at Rourke's Drift rages on. Whatever the outcome, it is clear from the start that this taut, exciting, well-made movie from 1964 celebrates honor, bravery, and male brotherhood above all else ... including God.

Will Daisy (played by the actress June), a beautiful flaxen-haired fashion model, wind up pushing up daisies if she continues to flirt with her parents' new lodger (Ivor Novello)? After all, he looks like eyewitnesses have described "The Avenger," a Jack-the-Ripper-style serial killer of young women with golden tresses. He certainly acts "queer." Police detective Joe (Malcolm Keen), Daisy's nominal boyfriend, thinks he's a wrong 'un, but Joe is quite obviously jealous.

Joe gets assigned to the Avenger case just as Daisy and the Lodger are getting amorous for real. The Avenger claims his next victim on a night the Lodger has mysteriously stolen out of Daisy's parents' house, making Daisy's mother more than suspicious her daughter is in danger. A few nights later, Daisy and the Lodger are spooning on a bench by a lamppost when Joe comes along and assails the Lodger's impudence at moving in on his girl. Daisy haughtily breaks her almost-engagement with Joe and goes off with the Lodger. Only then does the abandoned Joe put two and two together and conclude Daisy's new beau, whom he blames for everything wrong in his world, is the Avenger.

Is he? As viewers of Alfred Hitchcock's first true thriller, a silent film from 1926, we are halfway convinced, but privileged shots of the Lodger's face that we are granted in various situations have made us feel sympathetic to him, see him as some sort of victim, not a psychotic killer. Certainly, Daisy has no doubts about him, for she resists when Joe arrests him. Taking advantage of the confusion when Daisy's mother faints at the news, the Lodger, handcuffed, bolts and escapes. Daisy meets him at their lamppost. He tells her a story of how his own sister was the Avenger's first victim. He is out to capture his sister's (and indirectly his mother's, who never recovered from the shock) killer. That's the quest that took him out of Daisy's house on that most recent fateful night. She believes him. Should we?

At the level of subtext, this is a film about Joe's patriarchal right to Daisy's hand, with her father's approval. After he puts the cuffs on the Avenger, he says, he'll be in a position, career-wise, to put a ring on her finger. Does he have a right to? Do Daisy's desires or lack thereof matter? Will her attraction for the Lodger be validated as safe and fruitful, or cost her her life and plunge her world into chaos? Hitchcock has constructed a morality play around patriarchy and, not incidentally, Christian symbolism. Notice the images Hitch places on the screen after an angry mob hunts down the handcuffed Lodger.

Susanna Kaysen (Winona Ryder) is eighteen in 1968, the year the world went a little crazy ... or a lot. She can't relate to her parents, her school, her future. To cure a headache, she downs an entire bottle of aspirin with a whole bottle of vodka. She is packed off to a looney bin for wayward teens.

The girls she meets there, her co-loonies, are in some ways more in touch with themselves than most of the "normal" folks walking around loose out there. They may have unfortunate habits, but how different does that make them? Her best friend Lisa (Angelina Jolie) is so refreshingly honest it's hard to bear in mind she's a sociopath.

Again, these girls hurt. They hurt themselves, they hurt others. But so did we all back then, and today. Life is like that. This movie captures it meaningfully by showing us people we care about deeply, in spite of what they do and what they're like. They are just like the people we really knew, back in crazy 1968, and just like us today, underneath our brave faces and cynicism.

Vacuum-cleaner heir and magnate David G. Stannard (Glenn Ford) is accustomed to getting his way. He will do anything to hold sway over his stuffed-shirt brother under the boardroom-portrait gaze of their late father, the family patriarch. David's marriage to Edith Stannard (Donna Reed) is surface-solid but fissured deep. Will it come apart when their only child, Andy, is kidnapped for ransom?

For son Andy doesn't return home as expected from school one day. By the time the day is over, David has mobilized all the men who count: the police chief, the family doctor (to watch over the potentially hysterical Edith), his brother and business associates (to assemble the ransom), the technicians who operate the switches at the phone company (to trace the kidnapper's call when it comes). The kidnapper, belatedly by phone, has demanded $500,000. And Edith, helpless woman, has already cracked under the strain and been put to bed, sedated.

Now David alone must decide what to do. The host of a TV program which David's company sponsors is standing by to go on the air in a white dinner jacket, a pre-arranged signal to the kidnapper that the ransom is ready. But here's a twist--the police chief and even an insouciant reporter who has invaded the Stannard residence (a young Leslie Nielsen) inform David that paying a kidnapper in no way improves the odds for getting the victim back unharmed!

It just shows potential future kidnappers that crime in fact pays. Criminologically, like begets like. David can strike a blow for fathers everywhere by standing up to the son-stealers of this world and refusing to pay. After a bedside visit to Edith in which he tells her nothing, and after much solitary agony, he appears on the TV show himself with the ransom money spread before him. He says to the kidnapper: Nothing doing. You get not one penny. If you don't free my son, all this will bankroll my unceasing efforts to hunt you down. Will your accomplices be able to resist its lure as bribe or reward for turning you in?

Now the wait is on. Which way will the kidnapper jump? Will Andy come home to his father or go home to his Maker? Meanwhile, just about everyone around David turns against him. The public. David's brother, with his yes-men. The sheriff. Most of the media. And especially Edith, who wakes up and twigs to what David has chosen to do. Even the police chief, who as much as egged him on, begins to play cover-his-arse. David's only stalwarts turn out to be his Negro (this is the 50's) butler, played by Juano Hernandez, and Charlie Telfer, the reporter, who has found his mettle. And, beyond Chapman's prayerful faith which likens this situation to that of the Biblical David and Absalom, they can't help.

David Stannard, a master of men, a veritable king, is completely isolated. He is making the gamble of a lifetime. If it pays off, patriarchy will be restored, in the form of a living male heir and possibly a reunited family. If it doesn't ... what?

... are they mere flotsam, or can they be more? Can they hook up? Can they become one flesh?

The two are attractive, on-the-make hustlers in jazzed-up New York circles circa 1961. Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn) was once Lula Mae Barnes, forced at 14 to steal turkey eggs and marry widower Doc Golightly (Buddy Ebsen), who really loves her but can't understand her, just to keep herself and brother Fred (now off serving in the Army) alive. Having run off and taken a new first name, she's now professional arm candy in the Big Apple, wading through the rats and superrats in hopes of wedding her one true millionaire.

Paul Varjak (George Peppard) was once an up-and-coming, "sensitive" writer. Now he's a kept man, the sex toy of possessive, rich, matronly, curiously-named 2-E (Patricia Neal). Having been installed in the apartment upstairs from Holly's, he and Holly meet. She's winsome. He's captivated. She says he reminds her of brother Fred. The first time she crawls into bed with Paul, it's completely chaste and sisterly. She needs comforting, not sex.

Her life is a gay (in the old-fashioned sense) chaos, equal parts phoniness and hope. But, as Paul can see, she's a "real" phony on a desperate quest for the rainbow's end. Perhaps they can chase it together?

If so, she will have to find a more realistic way to fend off the "mean reds" (much worse than the blues) than occasional visits to Tiffany's to ogle diamonds she'll never possess. When she takes Paul there, he wants to celebrate his revived hopes for a writing career by buying her a gift. What might be available for under $10? Oh? Then, how about engraving this ring that came in a box of Cracker Jack? Do they, the arch-but-sympathetic clerk asks, still offer prizes in Cracker Jack boxes? It gives one a sense of continuity, of solidarity with the past.

Which is exactly what Holly Golightly never had. Will she find it, and herself, with Paul at her side? There's still such a lot of world to see; can she resist, settle down, accept Paul's limited prospects for wealth, and become a real non-phony? Can Paul, for that matter, stop prostituting himself, become a real man with her?

Interestingly, the story comes originally from the pen of the late, famously effeminate Truman Capote, and the film direction comes from Blake Edwards, for whom the question of what it means to be a real man has always been major subtext ("10," "Victor/Victoria," even "The Pink Panther"). Unfortunately, the terms of the union Paul proposes to Holly are archaically pre-feminist: if she accepts him, she will "belong to him." That need not deter us from hoping they can actually come together, latch onto love, and even give her cat "Cat" (who steals every scene he's in) a permanent name.

Puppeteering, for Craig (John Cusack), is the nearest thing to his heart's desire, getting inside another person's skin to animate his soul. It doesn't pay well, so he file-clerks on floor seven-and-a-half of the world's weirdest office building--everyone on this midget-sized floor has to walk around hunched over at the waist. Craig's wife Lotte (Cameron Diaz) wants a baby but makes do with babying disturbed chimps and other castoff fauna.

At the office, Craig lusts after no-nonsense Maxine (Catherine Keener). At the after-office-hours watering hole, when he says he's a frustrated puppeteer, she's like, "Waiter! Check please!" But after behind a file cabinet he discovers a secret portal into the mind of actor John Malcovich (played by himself)--this is, after all, a fantasy--she senses a business opportunity. They can charge unfulfilled souls $200 to spend 15 minutes in celebrity skin and be spit out safely by the side of the New Jersey Turnpike.

No one is keener to try it than Lotte. Somehow she knows it'll be ecstasy, and it is: she immediately wants to become a transsexual. Hearing this, Maxine, cool to Craig but warm to Lotte, has a hot flash which stands her nipples at attention: she'll seduce Malcovich while Lotte is inside him. When Lotte digs it and Craig finds out, Craig locks Lotte in the chimp's cage and, unbeknownst to Maxine and Malcovich, replaces her as the third in a unique ménage à trois.

From here, the permutations of identify transfer proliferate to the delight of the viewer, if not always the onscreen characters. The movie creates a brand new form of perversion and then redeems it. Without giving away the ending, it can be revealed that this film extends metaphors of getting inside another person--sex, identity transfer, puppeteering--into unsuspected avenues of redemption and intimations of both novel and traditional versions of immortality.

... including those it doesn't get around to mentioning. "Dogma," the movie of the same name maintains, derives etymologically from the Greek for "to think," something the Church putatively doesn't want its members to do.

But when you think about this movie, it makes no sense. By its end, the only truth you can hold on to about God (Alanis Morisette!!!) is that She always gets her way--except when, during a Skeeball getaway in Asbury Park as a senior male human derelict, he or She becomes a puck for roller-hockey thugs in cahoots with Azrael, a fence-sitting demon disloyal even to Lucifer. Under just those particular circumstances, the Almighty gets John Doe'd into a hospital bed, put on life support, and held there until the Last Scion, the only living descendant of the Virgin Mary, can rescue Her.

Meanwhile, there are these two Wisconsin-banished angels, one the erstwhile Angel of Death, locked out of Heaven for insubordination. As a form of plenary indulgence, the Church has decreed that any pilgrim passing through the arch of a certain New Jersey church will gain an uncancelable ticket to beyond the Pearly Gates. Our alienated angels see it as their made-in-Heaven loophole, the only way for them to defy God's express will and rejoin their exalted choirs.

The skeptical Scion, played by Linda Fiorentino, gets a visitation from God's mouthpiece, the slithy-but-loyal Metatron (Alan Rickman). Get thee to New Jersey, says he. Head the angels off. If they pass through that arch, God will be shown up as fallible. All of existence will go poof.

Along the way to testing this half-believed hypothesis and, with any luck, rescuing God, our Scion meets the 13th Apostle, exiled from the Bible for being black--as, supposedly, was Christ himself; a pair of unlikely prophets (one who can't stop talking about, er, forking her and one who never speaks) whose witless mission it is to abet hers; and the Golgothan, the toilet-overflowing monster who is the sum total of all the bowel evacuations of all who were crucified on the same hill as Christ.

The whole ensemble is potty-mouthed, in fact--except Metatron, too enervated and effete to use four-letter words, the prophet Silent Bob (Kevin Smith, the film's writer-director), and, of course, God Herself, whose voice may not be heard by human ears lest they be detonated beyond eternity.

The real reason God cannot speak, if this movie is taken literally, is that She could not do so without self-contradiction. She might have to reveal why Her omnipotence could not get Her out of that hospital bed, why She gave Her Church on Earth enough loophole rope, absolution-wise, to hang existence itself, why angels, who unlike humans have no free will, could even so defy Her, or why her divine chilling-out regimen includes Skeeball and handstands.

The movie is wickedly funny, and puerile beyond belief. If no rational propositions made about God could be true, it suggests, no lascivious propositions made to complete strangers could be sinful. Keep the faith real: do every funky thing.

In the old European order, pre-WWI, one nation's aristocracy made war on another's not out of love for king and country or hatred for the enemy, but out of a sense of honor and duty. War was what they did, these aristocrats of l'ancien regime. Their castles in the air, their noble worldview, their time-honored way--all would crumble, as they very well knew, if the line between the rabble and themselves were allowed to continue to blur. The masses had new and different loyalties.

"La Grande Illusion" in 1914 was the hope that that old order could be preserved in the face of surging democracy and noveau-riche power. Jean Renoir's film presents us with an irony: the martial elites of France and Germany needed the war to vouchsafe their very identities, and yet that conflict would prove their undoing. Whatever side won, the hoi polloi would gain the upper hand.

Restored from its original camera negative, the 1937 French film now on DVD sparkles like new. The restoration lets us see that nothing is dated about this work of genius, even if its POW-camp situations today seem stock and its characters stereotypes of nationality and class. The fine acting, the deft pacing, and the fluid camerawork make for a film that could have been produced last year. The whispered subtext, the nuanced conflicts, and the ironic complexity make for a film that is timeless.

The subtext is the eternal tension between "in the air" and "on the ground," "on high" and "here below," "from a distance" and "up close and personal." From a distance, war is no more rancorous than a chess game, with national boundaries as artificial as the squares on a chessboard. Up close and personal, war separates humans from their lives and aspirations, lovers from their beloveds.

The old elites loved nothing but their class and its accoutrements. It was peasant stock and noveau riche who belted out national anthems and honored the borders which in wartime could sever lover from lover but, paradoxically, also shield prison-camp escapees who made it across them to sanctuary. Renoir's genius was that he could show that an emergent new order, manifestly better on the ground, comes at a steep price, tragically, in the air.

For the author of "Bowfinger," it's screenwriter and star Steve Martin, the organizing idea seems to have been that life is a movie: sound and light signifying nothing.

"Bowfinger" (the movie) can be read as a spoof on Hollywood, containing wicked running gags and funny set-pieces galore. As that, it's glorious. Eddie Murphy's double impersonation is a particular comedic tour de force. But the movie can also be read as philosophy. True, it can be revealed, Bobby Bowfinger eventually does get his FedEx. But the movie doesn't end there. Instead it has him opening the envelope to find a contract--yessss!!!--to make a daft kung-fu epic in Tawian with Jiff (not Kit) as star. We then see it actually being filmed, co-starring Bowfinger himself. Whose martial arts moves are more lame, we idly wonder, his or Jiff's? Never mind, for the movie "Bowfinger" abruptly halts on a freeze frame of the two leaping ineptly at the lens.

In other words, we're left with vacuity, not even the sentimental glow which might have suffused us had "Bowfinger" ended with the desideratum FedEx laid in a triumphant Bobby's hands. All triumph, we are left feeling, is prologue to absurdity.

... and so, too, will your heart be, after seeing this perhaps most wonderful of all movie musicals. The music is at the all-time apex of show tunes. Julie Andrews was born to play Maria, the novitiate too much in love with the world. The story is rescued from the cloying by the subplot of opposing and escaping the encroaching Nazi stranglehold on Austria: love, beauty, and harmony survive as witnesses to the right and the good, in a real world run suddenly amok.

Delectable farce is what you get in spades with this very first "Pink Panther" film. The extended scene in which Capucine as Madame Clouseau has to juggle both David Niven and Robert Wagner into various hidey holes in her hotel room so her amorous-but-clumsy husband, played by the late, great Peter Sellers, doesn't twig to their presence--this is truly one of the best unsung comedy sequences in all filmdom, say I.

Others will prefer the dress-up-ball sequence in which Niven and Wagner, both wearing gorilla costumes and neither knowing the other is there, open two sides of the same safe to steal the fabled jewel after which the film is named. The diamond is not there, as it turns out, and they make good their escape only because hapless Inspector Clouseau has set off all the planned-for fireworks prematurely inside the ballroom, amid panicked guests dressed as Cleopatras and zebras and so forth.

Still others will split their sides over the ensuing car chase in which the police under Clouseau look fully as ridiculous as they zoom about this way and that as do the two frustrated "Phantoms" who can't find a road that takes them out of town. The touch of the old gentleman who departs a bistro in a bit of an alcoholic fog, longing for bed, only to witness all the pandemonium breaking out around him as he sits slack-jawed in a chair he has brought to the middle of the road, makes the scene unforgettable.

The later Panther films were wonderful, but none was so exquisitely balanced on the fine edge of farce as this one.

This is one of those rare perfect movies in a kinder, gentler genre all but unknown these days: the screwball comedy with heart. The possibly invisible Harvey (playing himself), bosom buddy of Elwood P. Dowd (James Stewart), sees what we mere mortals can't: his small-eared drinking chum is a man for all seasons. Elwood's mother once told him, "Elwood"--she always called him Elwood--"in this world, Elwood, you must be oh, so smart, or oh, so pleasant." "For years I was smart," says Elwood now. "I recommend pleasant." Today and forever, he lives out his preference. I recommend this movie to all pleasant people and to all those who ought to be.

`She had such power over men's hearts,' a young Elizabeth I tells her remaining true adviser, Sir Francis Walsingham, nodding toward a statue of the Virgin Mary at whose feet she kneels, and wondering aloud why her own heart has ceased to be touched. Though it is late in the movie `Elizabeth' with Cate Blanchett in the title role, it is early in what would be the monarch's long reign to come.

`They have found nothing to replace her,' Walsingham (Geoffrey Rush) replies, nothing to connect their worldly hopes to the sphere of the divine since the English Reformation ended Catholicism as the dominant faith in the realm. Despite the success of a bloody Catholic reaction under Elizabeth's half-sister and predecessor as monarch, Mary Tudor, with hundreds of Protestants burned at the stake, Elizabeth in conscience will sever the whole Church of England from papal authority yet again. But what will take its place, not in canon or conscience, but in the depths of men's hearts?

It is now when Elizabeth realizes it must be she. `I have become a virgin,' she announces not long after. She paints her face white and embarks on her long career as the icon an appreciative history would come to call the Virgin Queen.

The movie, taking many liberties from the true text of history, chronicles Elizabeth's passage from the uncrowned, gamboling romantic who encouraged the repeated embraces of Lord Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester (Joseph Fiennes), to the severe, chaste monarch revered eternally by English people. During this period in her mid- to late twenties she authorizes much spillage of blood as she gathers authority to her and deals mercilessly with those who would dispute it. The dirty work is Walsingham's; the onus is hers.

When it is done, she knows she will never marry for geopolitics, as at first she was pressed to do. More sadly, nor will she do so for love, for her heart is dead, ground away in the forward lurch of history. She will instead sit resignedly and heroically, proxy in heaven for the hearts of her folk.

A little rough around the edges, but, hey! So are Jack, Barry, and Patrick, the Brothers McMullen: three young Irish-American guys whose dad stopped abusing them only when he fortunately died while mom still had enough of her looks to go back to the Auld Sod and find the one boy she'd truly loved but foolishly didn't marry all those years ago. It begins to look as if love's just as cruel for her three sons, but stick around--maybe things will work out, and maybe not. Edward Burns plays Barry so real he could have been your brother. He also writes, directs, produces, and maybe cleans the port-a-pots. Check it out!