reviews

Jimmy Smallhorne’s 2 By 4 — he cowrote, directed, and stars — is triply frustrating for me, because it’s set in a world I know, peopled with people I know. I don’t mean ‘the kind of people I know.’ I mean: I know the man whose life inspired 2 By 4, and I still felt like an outsider by the end of the film.

A sense of place is vital in almost any film, but I think it’s especially important in an action movie, which by definition is moving around that place so much. Now, End of Days isn’t bad merely because it can’t get New York City right, and Die Hard with a Vengeance isn’t good merely because it does. But how these two movies use — and misuse — New York is illustrative of the films’ relative failure or success on a larger scale.

Based on the epic poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Song of Hiawatha (which debuted on the cable network Showtime on Thanksgiving Day and is also available on video) is a likable introduction to Native American history and legend. Some of its young, mostly Native American cast are a bit too modern in their demeanor and the delivery of their dialogue for this to be taken as a serious historical film, but Song is respectful — almost reverential — in its presentation of Native American religious beliefs and cultural attitudes, which isn’t something seen onscreen often enough.

This is not your father’s Civil War movie. It’s more like your father’s Vietnam movie. Morally complicated and frequently disquieting, Ride with the Devil is an intelligent and moving reexamination of the Civil War from the point of view of cultural Southerners living on the western frontier of the United States.

Sleepy Hollow is only loosely based on Washington Irving’s famous tale, but the liberties that Burton and screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker take serve to make the story more than a simple and effective spookfest, exposing fears and anxieties we — and, in particular, men — still share in common with our counterparts two hundred years ago.

Already an historical document, capturing the brief, heady time during which this new medium was charted and explored by online pioneers. But that was incidental to Block’s overt intention, which was to look at how the Web has altered and continues to alter the art of human interaction. The result is fascinating, funny, and often disturbing.