March 18 2003

film

Film listings are edited by Cheryl Eddy. Reviewers are Robert Avila, Meryl Cohen, David Fear, Dina Gachman, Susan Gerhard, Dennis Harvey, Johnny Ray Huston, Patrick Macias, and Chuck Stephens. See Rep Clock and Movie Clock, for theater information.

Opening

Boat Trip Cuba Gooding Jr. stars as a heartbroken hetero who accidentally sets sail on a gay cruise. (1:35) Century Plaza, Century 20.

*Down and Out with the Dolls See Movie Clock, page 82. (1:27) Galaxy.

Dreamcatcher In this Stephen King-derived tale, four lifelong pals (including Jason Lee and Donnie Wahlberg) face sinister goings-on when they reunite at an isolated cabin in the woods. (2:16) Century Plaza, Century 20, Jack London, Shattuck.

O Fantasma João Pedro Rodrigues's debut feature follows garbage collector Sergio (Ricardo Meneses, who possesses the necessary insolence, animalism, and narcissism) on a primarily nighttime trek through the streets and dimly lit apartments of Lisbon in search of sex. Largely dialogue free – the soundtrack is dominated by the whoosh! of passing cars and the incessant barking of Sergio's dog – O Fantasma, in its best moments, suggests a hard-core (Meneses allows his sizable hard-on to be sucked in one scene) Tsai Ming-liang. Rodrigues is shooting for something more mythic than Tsai's urban alienation, though; he wants to show a man, possessed by lust without love, gradually becoming an animal. (More than a whiff of Genet's Un chant d'amour is detectable.) When Meneses isn't wearing a stylish work uniform, he's either wrapped in a black-latex bodysuit (with convenient rear and crotch openings) or naked and licking/sniffing whatever's handy: a shower-room wall, a police officer's nightclub. O Fantasma is sometimes tedious and often pretentious. It's also extremely hot. (1:30) Opera Plaza. (Huston)

Piglet's Big Movie Pooh's sidekick stars in this animated adventure. (1:15) Grand Lake, Oaks.

Safe Conduct Bernard Tavernier's look back at the French film industry during the German occupation balances – for a while, at least – two different stories. Screenwriter Jean Aurenche (Denis Podalydès) refuses to work for the Nazi-controlled studios, while assistant director Jean Devaivre (Jacques Gamblin), employed by Continental Films, tries to subvert the German production system from within. The two men couldn't be more different: Aurenche spends his spare time juggling lovers, while Devaivre and his wife are as devoted to each other as they are to the Resistance. In a sense, Tavernier is observing and contrasting a pair of political lives, but during the film's nearly three-hour run time, Devaivre's heroics come to dominate the script. Fond of dynamic tracking shots, Tavernier's direction is more epic than that of the pre-New Wave names Clouzot, Tourneur – whose scenes he sometimes re-creates. (2:43) Galaxy. (Huston)

*Stone Reader See "Page-turner," page 38. (2:08) Opera Plaza, Rafael.

A View from the Top An ambitious flight attendant (Gwyneth Paltrow) dreams of reaching the top of her trade. (1:27) Century Plaza, Century 20, Jack London, Shattuck.

Ongoing

About Schmidt (2:04) Four Star, Oaks, 1000 Van Ness.

Adaptation (1:52) Four Star, 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, Shattuck.

Agent Cody Banks Parents and children beware, Agent Cody Banks is a sucky rip-off of Spy Kids with the bonus of questionable treatment of women. Malcolm in the Middle's Frankie Muniz plays Banks, a teen secretly trained by the CIA at "summer camp." He freezes up around girls, but must romance an inventor's daughter (Hillary Duff) in order to stop her dad's destructive, microscopic robots. Muniz is likable, but not enough to cancel out the poor story line and some mistaken production choices for a kids' movie. Angie Harmon (Law and Order) plays a CIA agent who looks out for Cody dressed in outfits that recall fetish wear, and 16-year-old Duff undergoes an inexplicable costume change after getting captured by villains: one minute she looks like the girl next door, the next she's a Lara Croft Lolita. Did the evil lair's staff special-order clothes in case of underage female prisoners? (1:42) Century Plaza, Century 20, Jack London, Kabuki, Metreon, 1000 Van Ness. (Koh)

*Amandla! A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony Filmmaker Lee Hirsch's feature-length labor of love quickly dispels any notion of simply celebrating brass-heavy polyrhythms for the armchair tourist; Amandla!, which means "power," provides a context for the laments, dirges, and protest songs that fueled black South Africa's 50-year struggle. As much a history of the nation's apartheid-to-African National Congress era, the film looks back on the days when singing something like "Beware, Verwoerd" (referencing then-prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd) was the only way to voice defiance of the white government's systematic oppression. Actual performances appear only sporadically; but when they do, often as impromptu remembrances of those days of rage by musicians and freedom fighters alike, the footage of beatings and tyranny that bookends them gives the music an amazing weight. (1:43) Lumiere, Shattuck. (Fear)

Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary (1:30) Opera Plaza, Shattuck.

*Bowling for Columbine (1:59) California, Embarcadero, Piedmont.

Bringing Down the House (1:45) California, Century Plaza, Century 20, Grand Lake, Jack London, Kabuki, Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Orinda.

*Chicago (1:47) Century Plaza, Century 20, Empire, Galaxy, Grand Lake, Jack London, Metreon, Presidio.

*City of God City of God is a Rio de Janeiro housing project, but rather than simply present it as a setting, director Fernando Meirelles views it as a character – perhaps the dominant one – in the film. In one vivid segment a single fixed point of view witnesses the deterioration of an apartment as it's passed down from one drug dealer to another. The stronger and younger the kingpin, the trashier his kingdom. But static points of view aren't Meirelles's specialty. Working with codirector Kátia Lund, he's stylistically giddy in the face of much adolescent and preadolescent violence, running circles around the surface linearity of the plot's chapter structure and uncorking an array of techniques: God's-eye aerial shots that suggest the almighty has a finger on the fast-forward button, freeze-frame character intros that revive blaxploitation swank, and camera movements that follow the paths of ricocheting bullets or circle around the violence with the speed of a meth-addled figure skater. (2:10) Act I and II, Embarcadero. (Huston)

*Cradle 2 the Grave (1:40) Century 20, Jack London, Kabuki, Metreon, 1000 Van Ness.

Daredevil (1:36) Century 20, Metreon, 1000 Van Ness.

*Daughter from Danang The first war to be fought in America's living-room TV sets is still being dissected there, where archival footage is showing one era's proudest moments to be another era's sickest jokes. Mining the libraries of the major networks, Bay Area filmmakers Gail Dolgin and Vicente Franco came up with the goods, evidence of American imperialistic hubris at work, through footage of "Operation Babylift," Gerald Ford's 1975 P.R. move to put a happy face on the sinister end of the Vietnam War. Orphaned Vietnamese children were supposedly being "rescued" by this effort, but many of the children weren't orphans: their parents had been coerced into sending them away. Dolgin and Franco's surprising doc intercuts old newscasts with the present-time story of one of those children – Heidi Bub, now a fully assimilated American living in the South with her military husband – going on a trip to reunite with her birth mom. The journey across cultures and through time turns out to be studded with land mines, leaving viewers knee-deep in emotional wreckage. (1:21) Roxie. (Gerhard)

David Hockney: Secret Knowledge (1:12) Roxie.

*Far from Heaven Set in suburban Connecticut circa 1958, Todd Haynes's Far from Heaven primarily pays homage to Douglas Sirk's All that Heaven Allows, but Far from Heaven is more than a semiotic Hallmark card to melodrama – it's an unashamedly florid expression of movie love. Within the meticulous architecture of Haynes's movie, Frank (Dennis Quaid), who reveals he is gay, and wife Cathy (Julianne Moore), who falls in love with an African American gardener (Dennis Haysbert), pass through revolving doors to meet betrayal and take elevator rides – always going down – toward a floor marked divorce. It has been argued that Haynes shows women have the least autonomy of Far from Heaven's triad of '50s outsiders or minorities, but the film isn't interested in weighing injustices so much as revealing how societal structures work to reinforce them. Cathy's and Frank's and Raymond's individual attempts at finding happiness collide, and one character's freedom becomes another's punishing trap. (1:47) Embarcadero, Piedmont, Shattuck. (Huston)

Frida (1:58) Balboa.

Gangs of New York (2:57) Galaxy, Oaks.

The Guru (1:50) Galaxy.

He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not (1:42) Opera Plaza, Shattuck.

The Hours Like fellow leading British theater director Sam Mendes's American Beauty follow-up, The Road to Perdition, Stephen Daldry's sophomore screen effort (after Billy Elliot) arrives so convinced of its masterly import that each pearly moment seems to hand itself an individual Oscar. Which is not to say this adaptation – by David Hare, no less – of Michael Cunningham's ingenious novel is nearly as ponderous or hollow as Perdition. Rather, its genuinely prestigious material is intelligently handled, but top-heavy with more conspicuous "talent" than any self-supporting story should have to bear. Three narrative strands are interwoven, tracing vaguely similar arcs amongst women ill-at-ease with their particular era's definitions of gender, social status, and creative usefulness: nose-blunted Nicole Kidman plays the real-life British novelist Virginia Woolf, battling madness and overprotected domesticity two decades before her 1941 suicide. Julianne Moore is Laura Brown, a less stable version of her "perfect" post-World War II suburban wife and mother in Far from Heaven. Meryl Streep is Clarissa Vaughan, a contemporary, lesbian-partnered Mrs. Dalloway whose privileged New York life provides little satisfaction, especially as her longtime best friend (Ed Harris) lies dying of AIDS. The book's graceful, gently echoing swings between one strand and another are replaced – somewhat necessarily, but still – by overemphatic crosscuts that hammer home each one-size-fits-all motif. (1:54) Century 20, 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck. (Harvey)

How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (1:58) Century 20, Jack London, Kabuki, Metreon, 1000 Van Ness.

The Hunted The collective cool points of director William Friedkin and stars Tommy Lee Jones and Benicio Del Toro aren't enough to save this predictable cat-and-mouse tale. Jones plays a "tracker" who teaches survival skills and intricate killing techniques to top-secret military operatives. When Del Toro's erratic, bloodthirsty soldier goes on the lam, the chase begins (as well as the hand-forging of homemade knives, and the appearance of many, many conveniently obvious wet footprints). Though The Hunted lacks originality (Jones, especially, is treading familiar Fugitive territory), the spectacularly gory hand-to-hand combat scenes between the two leads are worth perking up for. (1:34) California, Century Plaza, Century 20, Jack London, Kabuki, Metreon, 1000 Van Ness. (Eddy)

*Irréversible If you pack your picnic basket to ride along with Irréversible's road trip back from hell, you may want to pack a barf bag. Halfway through – after madman Marcus (Vincent Cassel) has unleashed his racist, hetero fury on a cab driver and some transsexual prostitutes but before he's attempted to kill a rapist – his friend and cohort (Pierre, played by Albert Dupontel) warns him against this "fucking B-movie revenge crap." Pierre clearly has no idea. This is a kind of movie revenge that hasn't visited your art-house screen before. Turning away is a decent person's impulse that director Gaspar Noé's thoroughly understands and has consistently mocked. His previous shocker, I Stand Alone (1998), also featured a sort of human meat-grinding, along with incest, misogyny, gay-hating, and an intertitle warning, near the end of the film: "You have 30 seconds to leave the cinema." We didn't leave, and at this point we're culpable. In comparison to Irréversible, however, I Stand Alone's atrocities read like black comedy. With a camera recording a grueling rape scene from a fixed and awful position on the ground, a scene that a person can't help but flinch from and/or convulse to, Noé punishes viewers for their return visit. (1:39) California, Lumiere. (Gerhard)

The Jungle Book 2 (1:30) Century 20, Jack London.

*Laurel Canyon Frances McDormand plays a record producer named Jane in Lisa Cholodenko's Laurel Canyon. Her look is rather Sheryl Crow-ish, but McDormand enlivens that southern California cliché with her tough intelligence – her character's musicality doesn't seem like a put-on, and her hedonism is connected to genuine impulse rather than ladder-climbing calculation. Jane's uptight psychiatrist son Sam (Christian Bale) and his prissy fiancée, model student Alex (Kate Beckinsale), are adrift between graduation and their wedding day; they arrive in L.A. hoping to find Jane's house empty, but when they open the door she's in the middle of work – taking a bong hit in search of a pop hit, flanked on both sides by guys Sam's age. A comic West Coast B-side to the tragic East Coast affair in High Art, Cholodenko's second film again uses a young woman's seduction by an older woman to tell the story of cloistered naïveté falling prey to cultivated recklessness. Even though its plot has the localized navel-gazing symptoms of U.S. indies' most recent dying breed, Laurel Canyon's casual intelligence is refreshing in comparison to the heavy-handed, uselessly guilt-ridden U.S. dramas that, if this year's Sundance Film Festival is any indication, will be unleashed during the time bomb known as 2003. (1:43) Albany, Embarcadero, Empire. (Huston)

The Life of David Gale (2:10) 1000 Van Ness.

The Lion King IMAX (1:29) Metreon IMAX.

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2:59) Grand Lake, Metreon.

Old School (1:30) Century 20, Grand Lake, Kabuki, Metreon, 1000 Van Ness.

*The Pianist Roman Polanski's The Pianist is a stunning look at one man's journey through the maze of fascism – a detailed map partly drawn from the filmmaker's own memories of his childhood in Nazi-occupied Poland. Pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody) is separated from his family as they are sent to Dachau, and he takes refuge in apartments that become solitary-confinement cells. When Szpilman finally wanders into the world once again, he finds a seemingly endless street of wreckage. The world has become a landfill, and only now is there a possibility of freedom within it. The same blunt paradoxes that define The Pianist's visual landscape color the film's view of human nature. In particular, the movie emphasizes that Szpilman's talent and reputation as a pianist save him from death. There's a wry incredulity to Polanski's documentation of Szpilman's survival, a quality furthered by the Brody's performance: his face is operatically sorrowful on the surface, yet it's the subtle shifts in his expressions that are truly revealing. (2:28) Albany, Clay, Piedmont. (Huston)

*The Quiet American Whether or not you think the world needs one, The Quiet American is the boldest cinematic antiwar statement of the year. Both Graham Greene's novel and Phillip Noyce's film open with an ending, and an intrigue: a dead American, who used to be a "quiet American," an apparent oxymoron in a landscape of U.S. operatives bragging and drinking their way through a Vietnamese landscape corrupted by colonialism. Pre-Vietnam War, America is just beginning to meddle in "regime change" in the area, and one of its key schemers is American "aid" worker Alden Pyle (Brendan Fraser), who dangerously falls for Phuong (Do Thi Hai Yen), the girlfriend of British journalist Fowler (Michael Caine). Pyle plans to create a "third force" in Vietnam to give people something besides colonialism and communism to choose from – using explosives that kill civilians to do it. The jaded Fowler, who doesn't want to take sides, has to migrate to one corner of the triangle by the film's end. But what Greene and the filmmakers give us is not an ideological treatise on which side is right, but a view of the terrible journey a person of conscience makes when taking sides. (1:52) Act I and II, Bridge, Orinda, Piedmont. (Gerhard)

*Rabbit Proof Fence (1:34) Balboa, Rafael, Shattuck.

The Recruit (1:55) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness.

*Russian Ark (1:48) Balboa, Rafael, Shattuck.

Shanghai Ghetto (1:35) Balboa.

Shanghai Knights (1:54) Century 20, Metreon.

*Spider Spider is David Cronenberg's first great movie since 1988's Dead Ringers. Like that investigation of extreme identical-twin identity confusion, it relies brilliantly on an introverted British actor (Jeremy Irons then, Ralph Fiennes now) and offers horrors that are seldom physical, but rather in the realm of psychological dread and confusion as a way of life – madness being in some ways the ultimate horror. The original 1990 novel by Patrick McGrath offers a madman's-eye view that's disconcertingly chatty and cheery. Dennis "Spider" Cleg narrates from his perspective as a new resident in a London halfway house, occasionally dropping in bits and pieces of his childhood, lived in the East End streets nearby. McGrath's screenplay offers an almost complete tactical reversal. Here, we are told almost nothing, while what we see on-screen is a puzzle to be solved by sussing out schizophrenic Spider's particular delusions. If the novel's matey-sounding protagonist still exists, he's buried too deep for recognition in Fiennes's tremulously physical creation – a shambling, incoherently mumbling, paranoiac wreck that's as good as anything he's done. (1:38) Lumiere, Shattuck. (Harvey)

*Talk to Her (1:52) Embarcadero, Shattuck.

Tears of the Sun (2:01) Century Plaza, Century 20, Jack London, Kabuki, Metreon, 1000 Van Ness.

25th Hour (2:26) 1000 Van Ness.