reviews

This little history lesson, as depicted in Phillip Noyce’s poignant *Rabbit-Proof Fence,* is likely something of a newsflash for most American audiences, illuminating a heretofore unknown shame of our friends Down Under. But it can hardly come as a surprise — instead, it’s with a kind of deep and embarrassed resignation that we have to acknowledge yet another horror wrought by European colonialism and cultural imperialism.

Are there three more terrifying words in the English language than “Jerry Bruckheimer Presents”?* (I know, you’re thinking, “What about ‘A Michael Bay Film'”? But that’s four words.) We people who care about film — and by this I mean “we people who don’t enjoy clawing our eyes out in an effort to retain our sanity while we watch a film” — joke a lot about each successive entry in Bruckheimer’s oeuvre being a sign of the apocalypse. But this time it could really be true.

Women live lives of quiet desperation, forever in the thrall of their obeisance to the men and children who depend upon their tender loving care. At least they do in the stately, elegant, slightly too precise films of late December, when Academy members start paying attention to the product of their industry and the critics’ groups start passing out their awards candy. Beautifully produced, impeccably acted films about women quietly enduring the fate of their gender or quietly succumbing to it do very well in this arena, an unconsciously guilty reaction, perhaps, to its smothering of more puissant female voices.

Just dreadful. Ashton Kutcher and Brittany Murphy (8 Mile), without a lick of chemistry and nary a brain cell between them, are two idiots abroad in Europe on what’s supposed to be the perfect honeymoon, the perfect capper to their perfect romance. But though they lived together for nine months before the wedding, they don’t … more…

The tale of a drug dealer’s last night of freedom before a long stretch in prison is not the kind of tale one expects to be so heart-stoppingly distressing, so emotionally devastating as Spike Lee’s *25th Hour* is. But it’s impossible not to like Montgomery Brogan, who is affable and charming even if he is the scum of the earth, and so his sorry story becomes an ode in a minor key to the lost opportunities and missed chances of us all, the ones for which we have only ourselves to blame.

Hypnotic in its lunacy and sorta plaintive in its depiction of blustery patheticness, *Confessions* doesn’t even try to pretend that its protagonist is mentally ill… just crazy. It’s sad, and it’s hilarious, no matter how you take it. Either that *Gong Show* guy Chuck Barris was so insecure and so bored with his own life that he made up a story about being an assassin for the CIA, which is pitiful yet amusing, or Barris really *was* an assassin for the CIA, which means the world is even more fucked up than any of us knew, which is downright, insanely funny.

The Holocaust is no new subject for film, but its scope is so horrendous that all its stories could never be told. And even if they could — if the lives of the six million dead, of the countless millions who survived, of the countless millions who allowed such horrors to happen could be related to us — would they ever cease to inspire such dread, such numb fascination as do those we’ve already been told? If it weren’t true, if it all hadn’t really happened, the enormity and evil of something like the Holocaust would never be believed in a fictional story… nor would, I suspect, the depths of the human will to survive we now know are there to be drawn upon.

This absolutely (and unintentionally) terrifying production of the classic children’s tale will have parents and kids alike squirming in their seats. From his own unintelligible script, director Roberto Benigni has created a baroque nightmare of creepy half-humans/half-animals, disturbing imagery of hanging and torture, and a Blue Fairy (Nicolette Braschi) with more fashion sense than brains. … more…