reviews

A French photographer and documentarian who has lived in Nepal for nearly 20 years, Valli knows the remote Dolpo region — in the Himalayas near the Tibetan border — intimately, and its people even better. Using a story developed with his Dolpo friends and performed mostly by Dolpo villagers playing versions of themselves, Valli has given us what he calls a ‘Tibetan western.’

You are standing in the lobby of a movie theater. The smell of popcorn and Jujubes is in the air. To the south is the box office. To the east is the concession stand. To the west are the restrooms. To the north is the auditorium.

The year is 1914. Jessica Rabbit visits Young Indiana Jones with the news that her employer, Frasier’s dad, has in his possession Professor Jones’s Grail diary. Indy joins their motley crew of adventurers — demolitions expert Father Guido Sarducci; chief engineer Rosie Perez — and they all ride Jules Verne’s submarine 20,000 leagues under the sea. After an attack by MechaGodzilla, they discover the Gungan City on Naboo, which is ruled by Pocahontas and her father, Mr. Spock.

But if you can supply the line of dialogue that ends in the title of this film, then avoid it by all means necessary. Because you’re going to find yourself tickled that someone took this password-related line of classic film comedy and finally used it in a movie about hackers. You’re going to go into the film expecting that someone cool enough to do so — presumably screenwriter Skip Woods, though I’m not sure how far you can trust someone named ‘Skip’ — would be able to turn the action movie genre on its ear, or at least come up with something fresh to amuse us geeky film buffs. Or at least actually use the password-related reference in some meaningful way in the film.

Ah, poor David Duchovny. So desperate to get away from The X-Files, he goes as far from paranoia drama about alien invasion requiring a Russian-novel attention span as he can, leaping into an action-comedy asking nothing more than an 8th-grade mentality. Okay, it’s still about alien invasion, but he gets to say things like “horseshit” and bare his ass to moon military types and generally behave in a PG13 manner that had been somewhat restricted to him on television.

Where’s Quentin? Tarantino has obviously emigrated to Japan and gone out of his head. Or else Takashi Miike has seen Pulp Fiction too many times, and thought it was too sober a drama. Miike’s 1999 film Dead or Alive is pretty much plotless mayhem in the neo-noir streets of Tokyo as black-trenchcoated Chinese crime lords … more…

And now your Movietone newsreel! Dateline: Hollywood. The enemy continues his vicious and unprovoked attack on all that is right and good and decent in America with renewed vigor! As General Von Bruckheimer and Baynito Michaelini jointly launch an assault unprecedented in its force and duration, hundreds of horrified citizens are crushed in the panicked stampede to escape!

Krikalev’s story was like some weird little piece of metaphysical science fiction — the kind that’s always written by Russians and badly translated into English. How appropriately ironic is Krikalev? I thought, symbolic of an entire nation’s — an entire system of government’s — demise. I mean, the poor guy: He’s like the last kid waiting to be picked up after soccer practice, and Dad never shows up.