EL Magazine

HOOVER WORLD G-men on parade
	J. Edgar Directed by Clint Eastwood Starring Leonardo DiCaprio & Armie Hammer Now playing (137 minutes)
People of a certain political persuasion probably see no point in adapting the life of FBI founder and American law enforcement god J. Edgar Hoover as a Hollywood biopic. The man’s contempt for human failings and his self-aggrandizing agenda make him one of the most reviled public figures in U.S. history. The idea that Hoover’s over-reaching as both a government functionary and famous person was absurd is not something that needs to be explored, since any such study could only result in yet another sympathetic portrait of a flawed man. Certainly, Clint Eastwood’s movie, based on a script by Dustin Lance Black, whose other famous biopic was of a very different kind of megalomaniac, Harvey Milk, isn’t going to satisfy the adherents of this political persuasion, which is their loss. They aren’t going to learn anything new about Hoover, but they might still have a good time. Having come of age during a period when Hoover could do no wrong, Eastwood has to contend with the early heroic aspect of his legacy right away, and as history J. Edgar is better than it has a right to be. While investigating an anarchist bombing, the young Dept. of Justice employee latches onto the theory of prosecuting “intent,” in addition to investigating crimes already committed. This new idea, which rightly scares his colleagues with its suggestion of ignoring due process, appeals to Hoover’s Manichean mindset, expressed in his obsession with propriety (after he forms the FBI he fires anyone with an unconventional fashion sense) and his love of scientific means (he developed the fingerprint as a standard forensic tool). What Eastwood brings to these “facts” is a supposition about the psychology behind it that is almost camp in its screen manifestation. He doesn’t have to trot out the dodgy rumors about Hoover’s cross-dressing. As it’s presented here, his lifelong relationship with his aide de camp, Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer), could have been thought up by Tennessee Williams; and his habit of tape recording the sexual encounters of powerful men is presented not so much as a means of safeguarding his position through blackmail but as a genuine fetish. Understanding that the aforementioned political persuasion is looking for it, the director tones down his usual sentimentality while amping the melodrama. Hoover’s encounters with his domineering mother (Judi Dench) are a hoot-and-a-half, so even if his bizarre behavior after her death is hypothetical it’s nonetheless dramatically effective. Leonardo DiCaprio, who has become the go-to actor for portraying “greatest generation” types, gets carried away with the bulldog scowl and period vocal inflections, but in the end these calculations work to thicken the movie’s atmosphere of unreality, and that’s the only way you could tell the story of a person like Hoover. -PB Cinemas 2 23 50 58 “J. Edgar” (c) 2011 Warner Bros. Entertainment

THE PARENT TRAP
What is it with white people?

Carnage

Directed by
Roman Polanski

Starring
Jodie Foster & Kate Winslet

Opens Feb. 18 (79 minutes)

If Roman Polanski’s most indelible film remains Repulsion it’s because in that movie he really captured emotional volatility in contained spaces. The horror of Rosemary’s Baby was Mia Farrow’s inability to escape from her posh Upper West Side apartment, and the most dramatic scenes in Chinatown were those that took place in small rooms. The best thing about Polanski’s adaptation of Yasmina Reza’s international prize-winner, God of Carnage, is the way he’s taken advantage of the play’s limited setting. All the action, as it were, takes place in the living room of an upper middle class Brooklyn apartment where the only refuge from the violence implied in the title is the bathroom. The combatants are two couples who have met to discuss an altercation between their nine-year-old sons, one of whom hit the other with a stick in a playground and knocked out two teeth. Unlike in the play, Polanski shows us this altercation in long shot in the movie’s opening minutes, but since we can’t hear what’s going on the particulars of what led to the fight are unknown. And, of course, they remain unknown to the parents who throughout the increasingly contentious conversation have to surmise what actually took place, since boys will be boys and usually don’t divulge such particulars to adults. Reza establishes the dramatic parameters quickly. Penelope (Jodie Foster), the mother of the victim, quickly occupies a position of entitlement, which she bolsters with liberal dogma (she’s a writer putting together a book about Darfur). Her husband, Michael (John C. Reilly), a household goods wholesaler, is a bluff conciliator who barely conceals his contempt for his spouse’s position and doesn’t seem to feel the fight merits much attention. Penelope’s opposite number, Nancy (Kate Winslet), is an anxious “money manager” with nice clothes and a more primal reaction to her son’s predicament. The ringer, though, is Nancy’s husband Alan (Christoph Waltz), a lawyer with a lawyer’s cynical approach to contretemps. His first symbolic act is to ask Penelope to remove the word “armed” from the statement of purpose about on the incident. A writer to the end, she agrees: “What can we say, ‘carrying’ a stick?” However, Alan’s most provocative behavioral tic is his insistence on taking every cell phone call he gets, annoying everyone in the room (he can’t, realistically, take it “outside”) and providing Penelope and Michael with ammunition, since Alan is advising a pharmaceutical client on how to preempt a lawsuit related to a drug’s unfortunate side effects. “It’s a funny line of work,” Michael says, setting up a showdown that incorporates class distinctions without really exploiting them. As the gloves comes off and the booze flows, Carnage can be pretty entertaining, but while its development is predictable it never really gets anywhere. Reza’s premise is we know these people, so why say anything new about them? -PB

Cnema 9

The Hunter

Flamenco, Flamenco

Willem Dafoe plays the title character, a mercenary who is hired by a mysterious patron to track down what is believed to be the last remaining Tasmanian tiger. He boards with a family on the edge of the Tasmanian jungle. The mother (Frances O’Connor) is constantly zonked out on medication, due, it seems, to the fact that her husband, an environmentalist, has been missing for some time. The hunter has plenty of time to bond with the two children, who are mostly on their own. While on his hunting rounds, he also encounters local laborers who think he himself is an environmentalist with designs on shutting down their work. The movie maintains its low-level intrigue by holding back on information regarding both the existence of the prey and the “work” that’s so lucrative for the region. It actually works better in its more somber stretches than in the action sequences, and as a thriller (which is how it’s promoted) it may be a disappointment to some. Directed by Daniel Nettheim from a novel by Julia Leigh. Also with Sam Neill. -RS

Opens Feb. 4 (100 min.)
Cinemas 2 19 41

A music genre so exciting, they named it twice. Actually, it’s another Carlos Saura attempt to nail the unique appeal of Spanish dance on film, and if he says he’s never focused on pure flamenco in all his other movies, you allow him the luxury of splitting hairs, because it’s how he makes his living. Still, purists might be slightly put off by the range here, which starts with classic stuff by Eva Yerbabuena (along with some history) and rolls onto a contemporary interpretation by Rocio Molina that lacks the sort of melodramatic passion which makes flamenco special. What really sets the movie apart is the music, which benefits from this diverse approach, using some of the most celebrated guitarists in the realm: Paco de Lucia, Tomatito, Paolo Sanlucar. By now Saura knows exactly how to present dance on the screen, which is more difficult than it sounds. His editing and camera placement never intrude on the performance; the proof of his artistry is that you fall into the dancing without even thinking of the logistics. -RS

Opens early Feb. In Spanish (101 min.)
Cinema 29)

The Turin Horse		Late Bloomers

Nobody sets a scene like Bela Tarr. The opening shot of what he’s said may be his last film is viscerally compelling: a horse-drawn cart driven by a bearded old man rushing through a cold, foggy, gray landscape, the camera (operated by Fred Keleman) pulling steadily along to capture the exertions of the massive animal in close-up. Since this bravura one-take sequence follows a title card explaining how the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once came upon a driver mercilessly whipping his horse that had stopped doing its master’s bidding, one can’t help but identify with the brute, but as it turns out, the life this man and his daughter lead is brutish enough. They live in a kind of no man’s land, out of time, embedded in daily routines that are presented with stunning austerity. The horse is the first being to give up, refusing to budge one day and to eat the next. If life is only a chore, is there much point to it, especially when it’s centered around fetching water and eating boiled potatoes with your bare hands? -PB

Opens Feb. 11. In Hungarian (154 min.)
Cinema 40

Isabella Rossellini and William Hurt play a married couple living in London and coming to terms with approaching old age. An incident involving memory loss and a particular purchase work to pull the couple apart, with the architect husband moving out of their apartment and into his office. As each tries in his or her own way to keep the fast-approaching future at bay these two have their flirtations while their three children wonder what’s gotten into them and try to drive them back into each others’ arms. Directed by Julie Gavras, who made one of the better French films of recent memory, Blame It On Fidel, the movie never finds its footing, mainly because the dialogue seems precut and no one really belongs in the scenes they’ve been provided with. Moreover, the whole theme of aging is over-determined, and we’re never more than two lines away from yet another declamation on what a drag it is getting old. In any event, the relatively young Gavras doesn’t seem the ideal director for this kind of romantic drama. With Simon Callow. -RS

Opens Feb. 4 (90 min.)
Cinema 29

UNLEISURE CLASS
What money is really for

In Time

Directed by
Andrew Niccol

Starring
Justin Timberlake & Amanda Seyfried

Opens Feb. 17 (109 minutes)

Andrew Niccol is Hollywood’s most imaginative creator of dystopian futures, and In Time may be his cleverest gimmick yet. As with Gattaca, the theme is eugenics, though the economics are more pronounced and determinative. Humans are genetically programmed to stop aging at 25, after which they live only as long as the time they have “earned,” the way we normally think capital is earned. Niccol translates this tricky concept in a neat way. Every person has a time code on his/her arm that indicates how much time is left before extinction. The time code goes down when a “payment” is debited and goes up with payment credited. The upshot is crystal clear: the rich live longer than the poor. Justin Timberlake plays Will, a blue collar drudge who is trying to help his mother (Olivia Wilde, looking like Timberlake’s sister) pay off a debt. When she misses the payment by seconds Will is left bereft and even more of a landlord-hater than you or me. By chance he meets a wealthy guy slumming it in the bad part of town and acquires the guy’s time, much to the consternation of a local hood (Alex Pettyfer) whose M.O. is stealing poor slobs’ time for himself. Will uses his new “fortune” to sneak into the upscale sector where he invites himself to a cocktail party being thrown by a banker (Vincent Kartheiser) for his daughter (Amanda Seyfried), who is typically rebellious. When Will is fingered by a time cop (Cillian Murphy) for the death of the rich guy, he takes the daughter hostage and shows her how the other half lives. Her eyes now opened, she joins him in a string of bank robberies where they liberate “time” for the masses. By this point, the originality of the time-is-money conceit has worn off through familiarity and Niccol has to cruise on pure movie mayhem, which is fortified by his doctrinaire approach to characters, all of whom are hackneyed types impervious to whatever nuance of feeling the actors try to bring to them. Nevertheless, one aspect never wears off: the youthful appearance of everyone on the screen. Unlike the Bruce Willis vehicle Surrogates, In Time doesn’t try to make the youthfulness seem artificial, so you really do feel disconcerted when Amanda Seyfried calls Vincent Kartheiser, who’s only six years older, “father.” Since there’s no elaborate back story, the only purpose to this genetic technology is to keep the working classes completely under the thumb of their betters, and that’s a useful idea for as long as the formula lasts, which isn’t very long. Even if the car chases and gun battles were better staged, the fact that they’re here in such abundance proves that the producers think of the revolutionary subtext as nothing more than fantasy fulfillment, which means the audience will, too. -PB

Cinema 1

The Woodsman and the Rain		Inu no kubiwa to korokke to

Koji Yakusho phones in another performance in Shuichi Okita’s ill-conceived The Woodsman and the Rain. Hinting at some larger themes of father/son relationships, the film ultimately delivers little but half-baked clichés. The story, such as it is, involves Katsu (Koji Yakusho), a taciturn woodsman, who becomes father figure, guide, and muse to film director Koichi (Shun Oguri), who’s shooting a zombie movie in Katsu’s backwoods village. As Koichi goes through a crisis of confidence (who wouldn’t, being stuck in the filmic trope of making a zombie movie?), Katsu takes the reins, gathering a group of stereotypical and energetic villagers to finish the film within the film. Unresolved bits between Katsu and his real son (Kengo Kora) add to the ruse that there is something of substance being explored in the film. By the end there’s a bittersweet resolution that feels completely unearned. Between screenwriter Fumiyo Moriya’s (Underwater Love - ‘nuff said!) unfocused ideas and Okita’s imitation of film directing, The Woodsman and the Rain is a particularly wooden and waterlogged motion picture. -NV Opens Feb. 11. In Japanese (129 min.) Cinema 54 Kadokawa Yurakucho (03-6268-0015) Kadokawa Shinjuku (03-5361-7878)		Comedian Seiki Nagahara directs a movie based on his own autobiography of growing up in 1970s-80s Osaka. Seiki (Kenta Kamakari) is treated like a dog by his Korean father, who only serves him croquettes and kimchi at every meal. The boy falls into the punk lifestyle of hanging out, stealing, and getting into fights. Eventually, he’s nabbed by the police and sent to a juvenile correction facility. After he’s released, his friends introduce him to Michiko, an “office lady” whom Seiki is immediately smitten with. When Michiko learns of Seiki’s stay in prison, she says she doesn’t care about his past, a statement that pierces him to the heart. He decides to go straight, which means that whenever his chief rival, Yamato, provokes him gratuitously, he turns the other cheek and, of course, gets beaten up in the bargain. Without any real future prospects, Seiki decides to become a comedian, a vocation he once thought was the worst. “I now turn into what I used to make fun of.” The movie is populated by Nagahara’s Yoshimoto Kogyo colleagues. -MT Now playing. In Japanese (85 min.) Cinema 42

Machine Gun Preacher		My Way

Sam Childers (Gerard Butler) is yet another white man who, spurred by conscience and a new-found belief in God, channels his anger at the material world toward godless (to his mind, anyway) savages who prey on the innocent, in this case Sudanese orphans. When we first meet Childers in Pennsylvania he is a murderous drug-addled criminal, but after being born again in prison he starts a successful construction business and then uses his building talents to erect an orphanage in Sudan. There, his violent tendencies are revived when he learns of the atrocities committed by the Lord’s Rebel Army. Motivated less by white guilt than morally channeled road rage, Childers embarks on a campaign that takes Rambo as its sacred text, stylistically if not thematically. Director Marc Foster is too conscientious to let the violence overwhelm the dramatic appeal of the basic story (supposedly true), but Butler fails to reveal much of Childers’ emotional basis for what he does. The title is all too appropriate as a catchall signifier. -PB Opens Feb. 4 (129 min.) Cinema 49		Given the pop culture associations, this is a strange English title for a movie about World War II, and is even a strange Japanese title. One can only wonder what the title is in Korea, where it opened first. “Inspired” by a true story, it stars Jo Odagiri and Jang Dong-gun as two acquaintances during the period before the war when Japan colonized the Korean peninsula. Jun-shik (Jang) works for Tatsuo’s (Odagiri) grandfather, and his ambition is to compete in the Olympics as a marathon runner. Since Tatsuo wants to do the same, they are rivals. When war breaks out, they are forced to enlist, and Tatsuo ends up being in charge of Jun-shik’s unit. Both are captured by Soviet forces but manage to escape. Then they are captured by German soldiers, who separate them. They somehow meet again on the shores of Normandy in 1944, fighting for foreign armies. Directed by Kang Je-kyu, who hasn’t made a movie in 7 years but has action/war movie experience (Brotherhood, Swiri). Also starring Fan Bingbing (Sacrifice, Bodyguards and Assassins). -RS Now playing. In Japanese, Korean and Russian (145 min.) Cinemas 12 60

POSTCARDS FROM THE APOCALYPSE
Whimpers and bangs

Melancholia

Directed by
Lars Von Trier

Starring
Kirsten Dunst & Charlotte Gainsbourg

Opens Feb. 11 (135 minutes)

Whatever your disagreements with Lars Von Trier over his themes and ideas, you have to give him props as a technician. Even his habitual detractors have been swooning over the opening of his latest feature, which basically provides a precis in slow motion tableaux of the main events of the story that follows. Is there a purpose to this spoiler orgy except to maintain Von Trier’s reputation as a guy who will do anything to make his audience question his sense? Compared to the painterly drama of these images, what follows can’t help but be anticlimactic, and you know you’re in for something challenging with the first scene of a bride and groom laughing drunkenly as their limo gets stuck on the way to the wedding reception. As usual Von Trier pulls no punches in asserting that this marriage has no future. In fact, it’s over even before they get to the marriage bed, sabotaged not only by the bride’s mother’s (Charlotte Rampling) outburst regarding her objection to marriage as an institution, but the bride’s boss’s (Stellan Sarsgaard) insistence that her replacement drill her for the secrets to her success in PR. As it turns out, he drills her for even more. By this point we’ve already got the message that the bride, Justine (Kirsten Dunst), is a typical Von Trier damaged soul, seemingly manic-depressive, and a starkly contrasting figure with her obsessive-compulsive older sister, Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), whose rich husband (Kiefer Sutherland) is throwing this bash at his huge golf course estate. The night ends with the groom (Alexander Skarsgaard) sleeping alone and leaving in the morning. The end of the marriage presages the end of the world, which is the concern of the second half of the movie. Now it’s Claire’s turn to despair, not over the dissolution of her happiness, but of the extinction of everything. Whatever metaphorical meanings Von Trier wants to evoke with this juxtaposition, Claire has more of an obvious point to her depression than Justine does. Few events are as existentially devastating as the end of the world, and as the planet Melancholia looms larger in the sky, heading for its cataclysmic rendezvous with earth—which Claire’s amateur astrologer husband insists will not take place—the audience will very definitely feel her pain. Everyone knows that the director makes much of the pointlessness of life, and Justine’s placid acceptance of the inevitable could be construed as a mirror of Von Trier’s own fatalism (“It looks friendly”). Since there’s nothing that can be done, what’s there to get depressed about? Meanwhile, Claire wanders around the magnificent castle contemplating suicide while Justine lies naked by a river looking up at the sky. Just because it’s the end of the world doesn’t mean the pretty pictures have to stop. -PB

Cinemas 11 18

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

The Revelation of the Pyramids

Stephen Daldry turns his literary eye to the sophomore novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, about a nine-year-old boy desperately clinging to the memory of his father who died in the World Trade Center on 9/11. It’s clear from the start that Oscar (Thomas Horn) is developmentally different—either hyperactive or Aspergers-addled (he admits at one point he was “tested, but the results were inconclusive”)—and his father (Tom Hanks), a jeweler, challenged him with games to help him overcome his fear of the outside world. Shattered at his lost, Oscar pushes away his mother (Sandra Bullock) and devotes himself to a treasure hunt involving a mysterious key his father left behind. Foer’s idea is simple enough—the treasure hunt brings Oscar out of his mourning and reveals to him a world of equally troubled souls—but Daldry’s stylized treatment overcomplicates it, especially the tangential matter of the old mute man (Max Von Sydow) who accompanies Oscar on his search throughout New York City, an endeavor whose logistics just seem impossible, even for a mensch like Oscar. -PB

Opens Feb. 18 (129 min.)
Cinemas 2 23 50

Though he doesn’t claim that extraterrestrials built the Great Pyramids of Egypt, French author Jacques Grimault’s theory about the seventh wonder of the world will likely meet with skepticism and confusion from any but the most receptive revisionist history fans. Because he makes so much of what is unexplained about the pyramids—the ahead-of-its-time engineering, the mathematical complexities, the resemblance in structure to pyramids in other parts of the world—Grimault is able to draw the viewer in very quickly, only to leave him frustrated by the sheer volume of information. Part of the blame should be borne by director Patrice Pooyard, who has a tough time translating Grimault’s book-bound hypotheses into a linear, coherent argument, despite the participation of numerous scholars. Considering how often he backtracks, it seems obvious he wasn’t too sure, either. Add to this the English narration, spoken by a woman with a thick French accent and written for the eye not the ear, and the documentary comes off as amateurish, Grimault’s theory about ancient civilizations reduced to adolescent hyperventilating. -PB

Opens Feb. 18. Two versions, in English and Japanese (106 min.)
Cinema 63

Ikiteru mono wa inai no ka		Pain

Adapting Shiro Maeda’s absurdist play No One Alive Here?, Gakuryu Ishii (formerly Sogo Ishii of The Crazy Family fame) manages to fill the screen with vaguely directed, poorly shot set pieces that try to add up to some sort of end-of-times vision. It’s a far cry from the likes of Von Trier’s Melancholia or Soderbergh’s Contagion. In Iketeru mono wa inai no ka a mysterious illness suddenly afflicts all the characters except one, quickly dispatching them with overacted death throes. As the film progresses, corridors and sidewalks, parks and restaurants become littered with dead bodies, through which the last survivor (Shota Sometani) navigates toward a finale of apocalyptic visions (birds and planes falling from the sky). And that’s it. Not even a whimper. Neither realistic nor cogently stylized, Iketeru mono wa inai no ka plods along, leaving the viewer with hopes that Ishii will kill off each character quickly (at nearly 2 hours long, he doesn’t) and the damn thing will be over. Ishii’s inauspicious return makes me long for the old Sogo. -NV Opens Feb. 18. In Japanese (113 min.) Cinema 35		Further proof that Korean cinema will never tire of high concept, this romantic melodrama stars Kwon Sang-woo as a man who, due to a childhood trauma, feels no pain. Cut him, he bleeds, but he won’t feel the blade. It’s the perfect qualification for a debt collector, apparently, which is how Nam-soon makes his living. While trying to shake down a lowly street stall vendor, he grows attached to the object of his implied violence, a young woman who happens to suffer from hemophilia. When Dong-hyeon (Jang Ryeo-won) is kicked out of her apartment, Nam-soon comes to her rescue and as they fall in love, he loses his insensitivity. Director Kwak Kyung-taek is famous for his high production values, and the look of Pain is often extraordinary; but that seems pretty standard for Korean movies these days. Also standard is the way the story develops into a big action climax that confirms the hero’s dedication to something greater than himself, i.e., his love for a person who is “weaker.” You’ve seen it before -RS Opens Feb. 11. In Korean (104 min.) Cinema Cinemart Shinjuku (03-5369-2831)

LOVE STALLED
Why wait for it to fail?

Beginners

Directed by
Mike Mills

Starring
Ewan McGregor & Christopher Plummer

Opens Feb. 4 (105 minutes)

Personality crises are notoriously difficult to depict on film, which is why older directors didn’t bother to do it and younger directors use indirection. This reportedly autobiographical work by Mike Mills uses a lot of shorthand tricks to convey its protagonist’s self-professed inability to love the way he thinks he should, including talking dogs, speech deprivation, and impersonations of Sigmund Freud, all of which come across as cute before they make their respective points felt. However, the cutest trick of all is apparently the truest: the protagonist’s father declares he’s gay in his mid-70s, just several years before he dies of lung cancer. The son, a graphic artist named Oliver (Ewan McGregor), can’t quite process this news, which may not be entirely unexpected, but in any case Mills translates Oliver’s confusion with voiceover narration describing how the world used to be (people smoke cigarettes freely) and comparing it to the way it is now. It’s incomprehensible to him that things which used to be taken for granted no longer apply, though it was also obvious that when he was a child his father and mother had little meaningful interaction. What’s more disconcerting is that the father, Hal (Christopher Plummer), finds such unmediated satisfaction in coming out, taking up with a much younger lover (Goran Visnjic), and being part of a community. Oliver isn’t bothered by homosexuality as much as he is by the suggestion he doesn’t know himself as well and may not until he’s near death, too. Mills dispenses with linearity, alternating episodes of Oliver’s life after Hal’s death with episodes leading up to it. Coming to terms means taking possession of Hal’s uncharacteristically laid-back Jack Russell terrier (“You’re supposed to be hyperactive, you know”) and cleaning up Hal’s sunny apartment, which stands as an affront to his murky, unfulfilled existence. So when he meets a pretty young woman, Anna (Melanie Laurent), at a costume party who’s mute with laryngitis, he takes a chance. Oliver isn’t a virgin, but it’s implied his serial monogamy is characterized by large lacunae due to his belief that since things will likely go bad it’s best not to go there. This is a very definite diagnosis for what ails Oliver, but non-commitment is such a trite theme so Mills dresses it up in memory games and adorable scenes that show Oliver’s vulnerability and Anna’s compassion and understanding. The result is a life that feels like a movie rather than a movie that feels like a life. But, of course, we go to movies to see movies, and Mills gets his points across with humor and a light touch. He doesn’t take Oliver’s tribulations that seriously. I only wish my life were this perplexing—and cute. -PB

Cinema 9

Tower Heist		Tintin and I

Props to Brett Ratner for the informative title, which tells us everything we need to know about his star-studded action comedy: It’s a heist flick and takes place in a high-rise building. Ratner obviously believes the premise is enough to sustain interest and fashions a plot (with four other guys) that beggars way too much belief, probably because he has to give all the big names enough to do. Ben Stiller, as a luxury NYC condo manager plotting revenge on his richest tenant (Alan Alda), an investment banker who has squandered the condo staff’s pension fund, is no action star, though he’s called upon to be one up to a point. Eddie Murphy, as the klutzy career thief who is brought in as a kind of consultant by Stiller and his partners in crime (Casey Affleck, Matthew Broderick, Michael Pena), does what he wants to do and gets more laughs than anyone else. Even the subtext of working stiffs putting it to the 1% doesn’t connect satisfactorily since the entire enterprise is too far gone into slapstick fantasyland. -PB Opens Feb. 3 (104 min.) Cinema 6		LAnders Ostergaard’s 2003 documentary is being shown for the first time in Japan obviously to take advantage of Spielberg’s Tintin feature, though it is a very different animal. Based on a series of rare interviews of Tintin creator Herge (real name Georges Remy) conducted in 1971 by a 20-year-old student reporter, Tintin and I endeavors to get under the skin of the infamously insecure cartoonist. Ostergaard fortifies the original interviews with comments from experts and scholars who find a great deal of subtext in the comics, which most people associate with adventure and action. Over the years, many critics have pointed to the dodgy politics in Tintin, especially with regards to Herge’s perceived support of Belgium’s occupation of the Congo. The author obviously took this criticism hard during his life (he died in 1983 at the age of 75). Ostergaard doesn’t seem particularly interested in any other aspect of Herge’s art—the humor, the draftsmanship, the incredible research involved—but presumably there are plenty of other places where fans can get that information. -RS Opens Feb. 4. In Danish, French and English (75 min.) Cinemas 15 28 48

LChantrapas		Oni ni Kike

At his age 78-year-old Georgian director Otar Iosseliani can be granted the dispensation of making his movie about movie-making, and Chantrapas is better than most of that ilk. The first half is set in what looks like Soviet-era Georgia, where pugnacious young director Nicolas (Dato Tarielshvili) resists cutting his work to satisfy the authorities, who are portrayed as bumbling rather than dictatorial. He has the print smuggled out of the country, and the cultural minister eventually allows him to emigrate to France, mainly as a show of how open-minded he is. Free at last to follow his muse, Nicolas finds that the capitalist filmmaking model is no more acceptable to him, even for art house films, though the viewer has come to the conclusion that maybe Nicolas is just a crappy director. Iosseliani’s dry humor and his amateur thesps’ disaffected acting style are acquired tastes, and there are too many digressions. The conventional wisdom about Iosseliani’s movies is that if you like one you’ll like them all. This one might actually appeal to a slightly larger subset. -PB Opens Feb. 18. In Georgian and French (126 min.) Cinema Iwanami Hall Jimbocho (03-3262-5252)		This documentary explains the legacy of Tsuneichi Nishioka, one of the last great “miya daiku,” or temple/shrine builders. Nishioka, who died in 1995, was responsible for renovating many of Japan’s grandest and oldest religious structures. The technology, which is over 1,500 years old, has been completely passed down from master to apprentice. There are no written manuals or courses of instruction. Traditionally, in fact, the master did not even formally “teach” his apprentices. Everything was done by example and with a minimum of verbal communication. Consequently, such skills can only be acquired over the length of a lifetime. Nishioka broke this pattern, probably because he knew he was the last of a kind, by working with his apprentices in a more proactive fashion. Many of his teachings were recorded and the film collects them into a kind of primer of temple building, augmented by interviews with people who knew Nishioka and worked with him. The film chronicles the work he did on the grand rebuilding of Horyu Temple, as well as the reconstruction of the Yakushiji compound. -MT Opens Feb. 4. In Japanese (88 min.) Cinema 35

THE DEPARTED
An exit in verse

Poetry

Directed by
Lee Chang-dong

Starring
Yun Jung-hee & Lee Da-wit

Opens Feb. 11. In Korean (139 minutes)

The great theme of Korean cinema, or, at least Korean cinema of the past decade-and-a-half, is male violence, which may sound too broad, but any Korean film of worth, even the sex comedies of Hong Sang-soo, wrestles with society’s acceptance of male volatility, both emotional and physical. Lee Chang-dong’s best movies feature a female protagonist addressing that violence in ways that don’t often sit right with audiences. It’s not exactly accommodation, though, and Poetry may be his fullest, most realized contemplation of this theme. Here the woman, Mija (Yun Jung-hee), is older, and we learn right away that she is slowly succumbing to Alzheimer’s. A widow who lives with her truculent grandson in a small apartment, Mija still thinks of herself as an attractive woman, maintaining her outdated sense of fashion, uncomprehending of people’s general ambivalence toward her opinions and outlook. She enrolls in a poetry writing class at a community center, and seriously tries to carry out the instructor’s suggestions. Lee presents her as a typically dull middle class woman on the verge of total insignificance, but these appearances mask a decency that’s troubling in the way it’s challenged by social norms. As Mija slowly comes to realize, her junior high school age grandson, Wook (Lee Da-wit), who has been deposited in her care by a daughter pursuing a job in another city, is involved in what appears to be the gang rape of a schoolmate who subsequently committed suicide. The fathers of Wook’s confederates are trying to keep the matter quiet and the police out of it by paying off the mother of the dead girl. They enlist Mija, the only available guardian for Wook, in their scheme, and she is so shocked by encounters with these men, who approach the problem as if it were an unfortunate business transaction, that she feels compelled to put herself in the dead girl’s position. The poem that Mija struggles to write for her assignment thus becomes her means of coming to grips with whatever it was the girl must have felt, and since Mija herself is slowly entering into darkness, the task is all the more meaningful as a summation of her own life. Though the importance of Lee’s own task is no less weighty, his means are subtler, and the beauty of his accomplishment is in the slow accumulation of plot points. Mija’s caretaking relationship with her bedridden employer reflects her realization that men are capable of anything. Her inability to stand up to the fathers and their patronizing attitude speaks to her life of demure acceptance. And yet she never compromises her love for a boy who hardly acknowledges her. Mija proves that love in an unexpected way, while paying tribute to the memory of her grandson’s victim. -PB

Cinema 15)

Movie Reviews by
Phil Brasor (PB)
R.Scott (RS)
Rachel Ferguson (RF)
Nicholas Vroman (NV)
Masako Tsubuku (MT)