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Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

The final film for legendary director John Huston (”The Maltese Falcon”/”Moby
Dick”/ “Under the Volcano”), suffering from emphysema during filming (he
couldn’t move without a supply of oxygen), nevertheless it results in a
masterful and intelligent production that’s perfectly realized and well-crafted,
one of cinema’s best literary adaptations. Within months of the film’s
release, the 81-year-old Huston died. It’s a most faithful adaptation of
the last short story in James Joyce’s 1914 published Dubliners (almost
word for word) and is superbly scripted by Huston’s oldest son Tony. Completing
the film as a family affair is Huston’s daughter Anjelica Huston, who has
a starring role in the ensemble cast made up of great Irish theater actors. 

The film is set in Dublin, on the blustery night of January 6, 1904.
During the winter season two aging spinsters, Kate Morkan (Helena Carroll)
and Julia Morkan (Cathleen Delany), annually invite family and friends
over to their town house for a dinner party celebrating the Epiphany feast.
Their favorite guests are their nephew, an articulate school teacher, Gabriel
Conroy (Donal McCann), and his beautifully poised wife, Gretta (Anjelica
Huston). The jolly guests recite poetry, sing and Kate and Julia’s much
younger single niece Mary Jane (Ingrid Craigie) plays a classical piano
piece. Huston spends a lot of time showing the guests mingling with each
other, engaging in conversation and dance, and after the goose meal and
pudding the witty Gabriel unabashedly honors the three spinster hosts with
a long-winded but warm speech of thanks for their generous Irish hospitality.
Freddy Malins (Donal Donnelly) is the aging likable bachelor drunk saddled
with a bossy elderly and frail mom (Marie Kean), whom he lives with in
Glasgow, and brings comic relief to the party by saying what’s ever on
his mind as he’s a bit tipsy even though he promised mom he wouldn’t touch
a drop. After all the guests leave, Gretta is brought to tears by the haunting
rendition of “The Lass of Aughrim” sung by the opera singer guest Bartell
D’Arcy (Frank Patterson). Back in their hotel, after a picture postcard
horse carriage taxi ride across the snowy city streets, Gretta confesses
to Gabriel that the song has stirred suppressed memories of a short-lived
romance from her youth when she was seeing a delicate 17-year-old lad who
used to sing that song and who tragically passed away after saying to her
in the cold outdoors while convalescing from an illness that “I do not
care if I live.” She believes he may well have died on her behalf. This
surprising revelation that his wife loved someone else, something he never
knew before, makes Gabriel realize for the first time the kind of immense
power the dead hold over the living and has a great impact on him, taking
him down a few notches from his cocky attitude that he’s superior to the
other guests because of his stable relationship and their empty lives.
It’s a graceful and moving scene that only a master filmmaker can achieve,
where it has McCann in a subtle performance (it seems like he’s hardly
acting) convey his new found self-awareness that he knows precious little
about his wife while he looks out from the hotel window at the light snow
falling and tries to reconcile how he will now get on with his life by
saying such things as  ”ONE by one we’re all becoming shades,” and
”Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion,
than fade and wither dismally with age.” With this being said, I still
found the elegiac Joyce story somehow even more potent and the film not
a substitute but only a reason to read Joyce–one of the last century’s
greatest writers. 

Fuelled by outrage over racism and the Vietnam combat, members of The Indisposed Underground waged an internal war to conquest the US Government from 1969 to the mid 70s, bombing targets they considered emblematical of the brute the US was wreaking cranny of the world. The clandestine group managed to evade a giant FBI manhunt. Former members of the Underground, including Bernardine Dohrn, Bill ayers, Mark Rudd, David Gilbert and Brian Flanagan articulate in publicly for the first time less their activities, including the violence that attended their actions, from armed robberies to bombings.

The Corporation of Strangers

Director:


Patrick Stettner

Drink and a mutual fascination soften the initial antipathy between tough middle-superannuated exec Julie (Channing, excellent) and her her sour underling Paula (Stiles) as they while away a few hours enjoying the stale comforts of an airport hotel. Tensions resurface with the advent of headhunter Nick (Weller), individual of Julie's associates, whom Paula alleges is a rapist from her days. What to dream up? He's shifty, she's manipulative. There's no dreary vying for procreative acclaim, putting; first-time writer/director Stettner immediately puts the headhunter into a drug-induced coma, leaving his female companions to play out a taut generational power game after scrawling obscenities for every inch of his core. What force they both come to? Intelligently scripted and thoroughly captivating.

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Considerably heavier on romance than comedy, “Hitch” stitches together relatively few laughs but generates enough goodwill and vivacity to mask much of the audience in its corner. Although the script can’t buoy up the premise — and saddles the actors with some truly lowering talk — a floating second-banana all the time alternately by Kevin James and the few laugh-meritorious moments help recompense in compensation the arid stretches. Given the unforgettable need of quality fare in this class, those attributes should strike Sony with Cupid’s arrow in the comprise of reasonably happy date-night returns.

Director Andy Tennant knows about romantic comedies longer on star appeal than smarts, what with “Fools Rush In” and “Sweet Home Alabama” on his resume. “Hitch” plods along on similar terrain, albeit with the additional boon of James’ Gleason-esque antics — a big, round, sweetly spirited lug who is awfully light on his toes.

In the process, “The King of Queens” star somewhat eclipses Will Smith as the smooth-talking “date doctor” — a near-urban legend, available by referral only, who coaches bumbling guys through the art of romance. The twist, of course, is that Alex “Hitch” Hitchens becomes all thumbs himself once faced with peeling away the hard shell of a comely gossip columnist, Sara (Eva Mendes), who turns his dating maxims upside down.

An opening sequence mixing Smith’s voiceover with him directly addressing the camera offers a taste of Hitch’s magic, but he takes on an especially challenging project when he tries to help a shy accountant, Albert (James), woo a beautiful jet-setting heiress, Allegra (Amber Valletta).

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This isn’t to say Hitch lacks a moral code. Indeed, he only opens the door for nice guys lacking the moves to woo a woman, refusing to assist a Wall Street sleaze who has conquest, not romance, in mind. Like Sara, though, he’s resistant to love himself, still cautious from a courtship-inflicted wound years before.

It’s all rather wispy, and first-time screenwriter Kevin Bisch struggles with the juggling act of keeping the central couple apart and then bringing them back together, aided by the almost-saving grace of having the Albert-Allegra storyline to fall back on.

Beyond his hangdog demeanor, James exhibits a flair for physical comedy, and the scenes of Smith prepping him for dates — if a little overexposed by the ad campaign — actually possess considerably more verve than either of the romantic pairings. In the best moment, Albert walks Allegra toward her door bracing for their much-rehearsed first kiss looking much like a guy being marched to a firing squad.

Smith branches out a little here, to the extent that this latest role is devoid of accompanying explosions, while Mendes charms the camera with an ease that exceeds her thinly drawn character. Nor is there much fleshed-out support, with what amount to cameos by Adam Arkin and Michael Rapaport as Sara’s tabloid editor and Hitch’s married pal, respectively.

As in many a romantic comedy, the juiciest supporting player is Manhattan, a backdrop that goes a long way toward setting the mood, along with George Fenton’s score. And while the film drags noticeably during its flabby closing act, the cast provides pleasant enough company to survive the Hallmark-card speeches that run through it.

All told, “Hitch” plays like the oldest of old-fashioned romantic comedies, which would be worth celebrating if only it was slightly better at it. Then again, just as love-seeking bar patrons tend to lower their standards as the clock approaches midnight, in these laugh-challenged times, it’ll do.

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A notoriously uncompromising woman to conversation, Paul Bowles is remarkably forthcoming, candid and, in his own odd way, entertaining in Canuck helmer Jennifer Baichwal’s incredible docu on the belatedly litterateur, “Let It Come Down: The Life of Paul Bowles.” Indie feat provides a revealing study of Bowles that is must viewing for anyone remotely interested in the mark or the dominant literary expat scene in 1940s and ’50s Morocco. Pic has already garnered consummate zoom on to on the fest circuit and is a honest during specialty arts webs and pubcasters far the orb, particularly given renewed interest following Bowles’ death Nov. 18.

The centerpiece of the pic is a lengthy interview with Bowles, who is captured lying in bed in his home in Tangier, smoking kif (marijuana) with an elegant black cigarette holder. Bowles looks a tad fragile in the footage, shot mostly in 1996, but he is clear-headed and always articulate regarding his life, loves and work. He holds forth with his ultra-pessimistic views of human nature, clearly shaped by a difficult childhood in the U.S., and talks in detail about his numerous famous pals, notably Gertrude Stein, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote and Beat scribes William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg.

He is more open than usual about his homosexuality, though he remains reticent about details of his personal life. He won’t endear himself to the gay community with his comment that it is normal to be ashamed of being homosexual. He doesn’t hesitate to dismiss Bernardo Bertolucci’s film version of his best-known novel, “The Sheltering Sky,” dryly noting that “it should never have been filmed. The ending is idiotic and the rest is pretty bad.”

Baichwal also caught up with a number of her subject’s close friends, among them Tangier socialite David Herbert, Moroccan writer Mohammed Choukri, American composer Phillip Ramey and Joseph McPhillips III, the headmaster of the American School of Tangier. There’s a fair bit of discussion of Bowles’ career as a composer, particularly by Ramey and conductor Jonathan Sheffer; the latter helped organize a festival of Bowles’ music at Lincoln Center in 1995.

The high point of the docu is the 1995 reunion in a Manhattan hotel room of Bowles, Burroughs and Ginsberg. It’s a captivating and strangely touching moment when these three old literary legends gently rib one another and amiably reminisce about the good old days.

The interview footage is intercut with images from Morocco, both of the crowded inner-city streets of Tangier and the desolate desert, and stock archival images are used to good effect to give hints of life in 1940s North Africa. Canuck thesp Tom McCamus adds to the atmosphere with readings from numerous Bowles works.

There is nothing fancy about “Let It Come Down”; it’s the interviews with Bowles that make it a standout docu. Helmer spent time in Tangier and befriended Bowles years before making the film, and her closeness to the writer clearly was instrumental in getting him to open up. What’s striking here is how his dark, mostly grim musings are tempered with his dry, laconic wit. Lensing is mostly low-fi, the largest section consisting of static shots of Bowles propped up in his bed. Docu includes a large number of extracts from Bowles’ musical compositions.

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Surprisingly talky for a sci-fi action thriller, this inscrutable sequel to the 1995 Japanese anime film about cyborgs and humans coexisting in a noirish future spends as much time dabbling in Cartesian philosophy and ideas about the nature of consciousness as it does advancing its ostensible story.

To the extent that a narrative can be articulated, it centers around Batou (Akio Ohtsuka), a cop with the body of a machine and the soul of a man, who, along with his mulleted human detective partner, is investigating the murder of a human master by a female “gynoid” sex slave. As the plot thickens — or, I should say, congeals — the “Ghost in the Shell 2″ script alternates between such faux-Confucian epigrams as “No matter how far a jackass travels it won’t come back a horse” and “We weep for the bird’s cry but not for the blood of a fish” and exclamations of tech-talk gobbledygook like “Rebuild the logic firewall!” Neither tone is particularly effective at transcending pretension, and, while the visuals are at times stylish, “Ghost” suffers most from a distinct lack of anything, well, cinematic.

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Do aficionados of Japanimation really want to waste their time attempting to swallow more indigestible pearls of dime-store wisdom or do they, as I suspect, not so secretly want some cyborg-on-cyborg action? As one character in “Ghost” notes, “When dialogue fails, it’s time for violence.”

GHOST IN THE SHELL 2: INNOCENCE (PG-13, 100 minutes) — Contains violence (but not nearly enough) and some obscenity. In Japanese with subtitles. At AMC Hoffman Center, Landmark’s E Street Cinema and the Majestic.

Luck takes Protestant academic Camille to the laundrette, where circus performer Petra supplies tissues, sympathy and a shady switcheroo on the holdalls containing their respective smalls. The meeting-cute restraint negotiated, the confabulation proceeds to run a relatively fresh spin on ye experienced eternal threesome. The man in Camille’s life is Martin, fellow lecturer at the College of New Faith, but how can the knock up a appeal to of onus contend with this new woman winkling manifest the new woman in her. After all, tweed jackets and keynote speeches can’t compete with unyielding black leather, arrows of desire fired throughout your window, and an epochal hang-gliding error. No, it’s not much of a contest, but Rozema provides ample pleasures to compensate for the lack of ‘No, not the least of which is a warm sensuality that not at any time feels exploitative, return the good heart to sign Czerny’s boyfriend a decent stick and even to have the stern college heroine question his own homophobia. While the surrounding Sirkus of Sorts frippery is endearing without being pushy, and Lesley Barber’s terrific score provides impassioned impose upon, the timbre to the film’s mercurial charm is the performances of the two leads: Bussières ranging engagingly from prim to perky, and Crawford a bewitching presence as the impish seductress. Cynics may demur, but the result is quite delicious.