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Director:
Robert Duvall

Starring:
Robert Duvall
Rubén Blades
Kathy Baker
Luciana Pedraza
Julio Oscar Mechoso
James Keane
Frankie Gio

Release: 28 Mar. 03
IMDb

“Talking about love is like dancing about architecture.”
        --Joan (Angelina Jolie), Playing by Heart

Robert Duvall is one of those actors who has secured his place in film history and can make a parade of bad films without ever tarnishing his career. There is not going to be a slump period mentioned in his biography because every other period of his career is built on some of the strongest performances ever put on film. For that reason, with his own experiences in front of and behind the camera, Duvall has the power to do anything he might want. He could make a film decrying the United States at this point and no one would remember it in five years because of Tender Mercies, Apocalypse Now, The Godfather, The Apostle, etc.

So, Duvall can, if he wants, make a boring film about tangos that includes some assassinations just so that it might be somewhat accessible to someone other than himself. He has with Assassination Tango, and it is all that one might expect.

His love for the tango does come across in the film, but never does the reason. Much of the film is built on snippits of tangos interspersed with conversations about the tango, neither of which are truly filling. What’s more, it comes in at an excessive two hours, which is long time to watch people talk about something that is fairly uninteresting to most people -- just ask the majority of those who watched the 90-minute final episode of Seinfeld.

And, worse yet, the assassinations aren’t that much appealing either. I guess that I could have some patience with the film if I felt that it wasn’t so masterbatory in nature, if there had been some semblance of a story latched onto Duvall’s love letter to the tango. But nothing’s there. The assassination story line is essentially built on his character waiting for the planned assassination of an evil Argentine politician, which includes him just sitting in his small dormitory. This could be seen as the time for the character to crystallize his views on the tango, but it serves more as a time for the audience to catch up on lost sleep.

Assassination Tango isn’t particularly a film, but more of a treatise; it is to narrative story telling as The O’Reilly Factor is to objective news reporting. It is a documentary in nature but a boring film in realization. Michael Moore has proven that there is a market for sloppy documentaries meant to merely impart the one-sided beliefs and obsessions of the director. And, with the potential of tango authorities waxing poetically in it, there is the possibility of a fruitful outcome that might succeed in gaining exposure to the artistry of the tango for those attending the film simply out of an interest in what Duvall might do with a documentary. Martin Scorsese is certainly one of the last people one would think of as an authority on jazz and yet his documentary on the subject is one of the most popular and exhaustive in size and breadth. Maybe the tango deserves this too (I can’t say with any authority since I’ve never tangoed and was certainly among the critics of the 1998 Oscar nominee The Tango Lesson, a film built on wall-to-wall tangoing for hours) and Duvall could have been the one to do the dance justice.

Duvall may have made this film as a way to get viewers as interested in the tango as he is. If that is the case, I respectfully report that he has failed: even if the dialogue exposing his affection for the dance were stronger, most of the audience is asleep by the second conversation.

Director:
Andrew Stanton

Starring:
Albert Brooks
Ellen Degeneres
Alexander Gould
Willem Dafoe
Brad Garrett
Allison Janney
Geoffrey Rush
Andrew Stanton

Release: 30 May 03
IMDb

If all animated films were as assured, beautiful, and painstakingly rendered as the works of Pixar studios Beauty and the Beast would no longer stand as the only animated film nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. Even though they have only made five feature films over the course of a decade, their output has artistically outdone Disney’s last twenty years of films, which usually feature two (both animated and live action) each year.

Pixar, which is in a distribution deal with Disney, probably the most valuable contract the Mouse House currently has, is consistently raising the bar for animated cinema with their amazing images (in one of the few moments I’ll praise CGI, it really is an amazing medium for animation) and heartfelt stories. Even as they move past their success with the Toy Story films (the first and only time a Disney sequel has matched its original), they continue to find new grounds for their cinematic sensibilities that come alive in these little worlds of ordinary life anew.

They have worked with children’s toys, armies of ants, and the monsters in the closet, and now, with Finding Nemo, the animators at Pixar, lead by directors Andrew Stanton and Lee Unkrich, have touched on the world under the sea. Even the Little Mermaid pales in comparison.

Although Finding Nemo is never quite as strong a film as the Toy Story films or Mosnters, Inc. (one must note that this is the first time they’ve worked without Pixar wunderkinds Pete Docter and John Lasseter), it has a sense of self unseen in most contemporary animated films which unsteadily wobble between overly sentimental treacle and unabashed pandering. Most studios are guilty of this, although The Iron Giant and South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut get to be the exceptions to the rule.

Finding Nemo centers on the search by a clownfish, Marlin (Brooks), for his son Nemo (Gould), after tropical fish merchants catch the young lad. The story exists on two fronts as Marlin enlists the help of a fish lacking short-term memory (DeGeneres) and Nemo tries to get help an assemblage other tropical fish stuck in a Sidney dentist office’s fish tank and the seagull envoy that links the vast ocean to this little microcosm.

Most of the characters that come along the way, from vegetarian sharks trying stay on the wagon to a scarred Patton-like fish scheming to get out of the tank, have a depth of character rare to family films. Generally, an team of artists must work on one character’s cosmetic look while animating a film, but the impression I get from the Pixar films is that they also have a thorough reading of each character in the story phase before they even boot the computers.

The set pieces that they create are fantastic, which is one of the reasons that these films are, unlike most animated films, acceptable in a full screen presentation (which I begrudgingly sat through on a trans-Atlantic flight). The animators at Pixar fill the screen with details that make the environments of their characters as integral to the telling of the story as the dialogue and the characters themselves. This is a team of people who, if I could allot them the time they deserve, would fill three times as much column space as this review.

I’ve only been marginalized by one Pixar film (A Bug’s Life) and thoroughly impressed by the other three. Finding Nemo may not be of the same quality as those three, but it is representative of the artistic ability of this group. Even in their version of mediocrity, the final product is a noble accomplishment. No other studio, animation or live action, can say that.

Director:
Neil LaBute

Starring:
Paul Rudd
Rachel Weisz
Gretchen Mol
Fred Weller

Release: 9 May 03
IMDb

Neil LaBute has been accused on many occasions as being a misogynist thanks to people misunderstanding his films In the Company of Men and Your Friends & Neighbors. His new film, The Shape of Things, adapted from one of his plays, should do little to negate this criticism, although this time the portrayal of Madonna vis-à-vis Whore is wholly intentional without the slightest amount of apology. Not only that, it’s insightful, which makes the possible misogyny (and abundant misanthropy) all the more integral to the story.

It is a return to those chamber dramas that introduced the director to the world before he dabbled with mainstream in Nurse Betty and Possession, aggravating many of those core believers in his painfully truthful portrayals of human endeavor. I like to think I am among his defenders, trying to even raise Your Friends & Neighbors to a level equal to In the Company of Men. The Shape of Things isn’t quite at that same level, but it still feels impressively fresh amidst its unmistakable artifice. Although the film seems to be dated -- I have no idea why, but the production design and cinematography often reminded me of watching Less than Zero more than a decade ago -- it still has the moral certitude of something impressed with its own discoveries. Even if some of them are not that groundbreaking, the way LaBute portrays them is at least conceivably artistic in scope. This is not a film that is meant to be realistic in its core, but instead in its spirit.

Going a bit overboard in the metaphorical character naming, the film struggles to make sense a relationship between Adam (Rudd) and Evelyn (Weisz). They meet at a small California museum near the small private college they attend. He stands in his ugly brown corduroy jacket as the least threatening security guard ever (and I’m including the old ladies at the National Archives in London) while Evelyn, an MFA student, walks over the velvet rope to paint a penis on a statue she says was given its fig leaf by moralizing art collectors. Tempted by the fruit of her number (I’m not sure if that is more an Adam and Eve reference than a Peter Frampton reference on my part), he lets her, and then she spray paints her number on his jacket.

The relationship is forged and LaBute wastes no time to go later into their affair without focusing on any courting or dating. By the time he presents them double dating at a performance of Medea (symbolic reference alert goes off in everyone’s mind), they are already late into their courtship and she is ready to meld him into a new shape, one that will not be recognizable in cosmetics or mentality to his only two friends, Phil (Weller) and Jenny (Mol). Adam gets contact lenses, replaces the jacket with a preppy windbreaker, starts jogging, and gets a new nose. All’s fair in love and war, and, as LaBute never quite lets leave the air surrounding them (more literary references come, including the most telling of them all, one to Hedda Gabbler -- I don’t know how he forgot Miss Julie while he was at it), this is a four-way hybrid of both love and war and no one is playing fair.

For all the misgivings I might have about the bombast with which LaBute uses his symbols, I recognize the strong storyteller he shows himself to be in The Shape of Things. Although it probably worked better on the stage, the way he blends morality with artistry (“Moralists have no place in an art gallery,” Evelyn tells Adam) has a cunning, biting edge to it that overcomes the staginess the film never quite loses. The actors play their roles, which they originated on the stage, with such aplomb that their pawn-like utility for LaBute is less noticeable and more acceptable in the process. As the film ends, with a dénouement that comes as a surprise without destroying the rest of the film’s push towards a climax, the audience becomes convinced of LaBute’s own struggle as an artist and the way he probably sees a bit of himself in Evelyn and recognizes the way he can hurt we the audience, the Adams of his tale, while blinded by his own artistic pretenses.

Maybe he’s saying he’s sorry for what he did to us while watching In the Company of Men and Your Friends & Neighbors, although in doing so he simply sins this indulgence again. LaBute is a misanthrope with some sadistic views on art, an American Michael Haneke. And, if Possession is any indication of what comes from LaBute when he hasn’t the bite of a man disturbed by the world, I’m more than happy to keep taking these flagellations by his hand.

Director:
Elia Suleiman

Starring:
Elia Suleiman
Manal Khader
Amer Daher
Jamel Daher
Nayef Daher
Salman Nattor

Release: 17 Jan. 03
IMDb

Last year Elia Suleiman’s Divine Intervention was heralded by critics who saw it at Cannes. So much was made of the film that its nomination for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar seemed a given. That is, until the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences said it was ineligible since its country of origin, Palestine (which they do not recognize as a country), didn’t nominate it.

That is fitting considering that much of Divine Intervention is built on the lack of fatherland that is found in the sovereignty war between Israel and Palestine. Suleiman, born in Israel, supporting Palestine, looks at the way that these two neighbors are stuck in a vicious circle, a series of Catch-22s that seem to forever link them in disagreement. Even if Israel were to walk out of Palestine, the Judeo-Arab conflicts would continue because, as a realistic cynic might put it, that’s just how it is.

The film is told in vignette style, similar to Roy Andersson’s Songs from the Second Floor, the best film no one heard of last year (when it was shortly my pick for the best of the year, those asking for my favorite of 2002, regardless of the cinematic aptitude, followed the question up with “What is that?”). No one in the drama really gets a full name (the director is the closest, credited as E.S.), and their struggles are portrayed less in reference to them than to the entire situation they live in.

Like Andersson and Jacques Tati, the vignettes are humorous in their presentation of the attitudes of their subjects. Although the film rarely spells out who’s Israeli and who’s Palestinian other than the soldiers, the clarity of the statement remains: these are still neighbors on the verge of mutual destruction. In one of the more humorous but most telling instances, two neighbors quarrel over the trash one threw over the fence into his neighbor’s yard. The defendant counters that this is the same trash the accuser threw into his garden. The accuser admits this but still sees it as bad manners to act in response.

The defendant (Daher) is the father of E.S. and his West Bank lifestyle is what most of the first third of the film documents. There is little neighborly love even in this Palestinian territory as pot holes are intentionally made to create driving hazards and a kid’s soccer ball is punctured. Short of government allotted civilization, these people are not in any way civil to each other. If the Israeli government is making a statement like Ariel Sharon’s defunct idea for a new Berlin Wall across the Palestinian land, how can anyone recognize a role model for their relations? And, for that matter, what do they learn from the Palestinian suicide bombers? Or the ineptitude of the Israeli army? Or the fatal stubbornness of Yasser Arafat? There’s a new leader in Palestine since this film was made, but even that is doubtful to undo the damage of a people unable to see a stable lifestyle for 40 years.

Divine Intervention loses much of its manic hilarity in the latter parts, which focus on E.S. and his relationship with another Palestinian (Khader) that reaches its crescendo as they sit in a parked car watching the Israeli soldiers run a roadblock. While there are still moments that meet the surrealist charm of Songs from the Second Floor, especially a marksmen troupe that seems to be preparing for General Bob Fosse, these sections are dedicated to long spells of repetition and immobility. Certainly, this is a similar fate brought onto the Palestinian people as they try to forge ahead with something that might resemble a fatherland, but it’s not the best way to take away the humorous tempo the director had as he informed the audience of the stasis begetting disorder the Palestinians know all too well.