

By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
New and recent releases: United 93, Silent Hill, Battle in Heaven, more
A catch-up of capsule reviews of the past month, including United 93, Silent Hill, Battle in Heaven, Le Mujer de mi hermano, Marilyn Hotchkiss’ Ballroom Dancing and Charm School, On a Clear Day, The Sentinel, Brick, Lucky Number Slevin and The Syrian Bride.
United 93 (*** 1/2) Did I only imagine the quiet tolling of a church bell under the Universal Pictures logo at the start of United 93? There is much to praise and admire and fear in English director Paul Greengrass’ scrupulous imagining of the events that befell the passengers on the last of four hijacked passenger planes to crash on the morning of September 11, 2001, which made them, as the writer-director has put it in one too many interviews, the first inhabitants of a post-9/11 world. His work, however, is mostly without such big-picture posturing, instead working with small strokes of telling detail and framing and cutting with the same visceral authority demonstrated in the intimate kineticism of his first wo features, Bloody Sunday and The Bourne Supremacy. The documentary-trained, 51-year-old director’s widescreen compositions show rare, quiet intelligence, which benefit foreordained dramatic events in a story like this. For instance, as the hijackers prepare to board, there is a simple swish pan across their faces as they walk through the Newark airport, and for a split-second, the camera holds on an advertisement in the corridor: a pair of smiling women, cleavage exposed; the libidinous excess of a culture these men supposedly disdained. There is a moment when Flight 93 passes over Manhattan. One of the murderers looks out the window. For a flash, through the halation of early morning sun, we see part of the island below, and that part is the antennas and rooftops, only the tip-top of the Twin Towers. Sweet banality and bursts of jargon jar and sadden: “She’s got a crush on that maintenance man”; “Do you guys have sugars up there?”; a co-pilot preparing to slosh hot sauce on his breakfast;

Silent Hill (**) Only once have I been tempted to begin a review with these words: What The Fuck? With Christophe Gans’ Silent Hill, drawn from a popular video game in Roger Avary’s (Pulp Fiction, Rules of Attraction) adaptation, the production starts rapidly with suggestions of a febrile, ash-covered Don’t Look Now, but it devolves into imaginatively designed incoherence and inconsequence. But Gans, whose Brotherhood of the Wolf

Battle in Heaven (*** 1/2) Mexican provocateur Carlos Reygada strikes again with the magisterial, languid Battle in Heaven (Batalla en el cielo, 2005). While I can’t go as far as some admirers and call Reygada a visionary, his work is certainly idiosyncratically expressive and thrilling for that. Openly admitting that he finds film narrative oppressive, the 35-year-old director establishes the simplest narrative frameworks then embellishes them with incidents ripe with symbolism and challenges to power, class, and most emphatic, representations of sexuality.

Le Mujer de mi hermano (* 1/2) A peculiar Pan-American concoction but a decently indecent shallow entertainment, Ricardo de Montreuil’s Le Mujer de mi Hermano (My Brother’s Wife, 2005), is a cleanly shot (by Andres Sanchez) but blandly paced variation on Adrian Lyne’s Unfaithful (keeping the adulteries closer to home). It was a hit across South and Central America, embellishing simple telenovela-style emotional complications with canny production choices.

Marilyn Hotchkiss’ Ballroom Dancing and Charm School (1/2) Marilyn Hotchkiss’ Ballroom Dancing and Charm School is the kind of movie where, after a screening, you want to burn your notebook, purging your thoughts in brilliant sunlight in the great out-of-doors. Incorporating a 1990 American Film Institute short made by director Randall Miller, MHBDACS is rotten enough to have been accepted by Project Greenlight, a treacly, sentimental, noggin-bashing mix of Dirty Dancing and Amores Perros, and with the presence of a vulpine Robert Carlyle, perhaps The Half Empty Monty. (Spoilers follow.) Carlyle plays a wealthy, widowed baker in a well-appointed “thirtysomething”-worthy Mission house where he speaks to his dead dog’s ashes—“Good boy!”—and the ashes of his wife, who committed suicide for no discernible reason. (One assumes the dog did as well.) He says lots of things like “We have a lot of bread to bake before dawn,” as if a “Bright Lights Big City”-era Jay McInerney had been his writing teacher. Incessant intercutting grows from several strands: the 1990 footage of pre-teens making nice and naughty in 1960s Pasadena, Carlyle’s meetings of the latter-day version of the school, led by Hotchkiss daughter Mary Steenburgen, Carlyle’s group grief counseling sessions, and intermediate flashbacks to John Goodman as a car crash victim narrating the story, a role in which a hoarse actor does not even have to move, pinioned in his wreckage or in the back of the ambulation, variously spewing blood, bile and bromides.

On a Clear Day (***) Gaby Dellal’s feature debut, On a Clear Day, finds the great Scots actor Peter Mullan as the gruff center of this likeable bit of charm and uplift. As a Glasgow shipbuilder “made redundant,” the middle-aged Frank (Mullan, in his late 40s, playing a stocky 55) begins to question his self-worth in unsurprising fashion. The mix of eccentric comedy and unabashed drama brings the too-long-silent Bill Forsyth to mind—as well as other recent UK middle-age feel-good tales like The Full Monty and Calendar Girls—although it’s unlikely Forsyth would have hatched the notion that Frank would train to cross the English Channel as a way of regaining his respect and atoning for the guilt of a long-lost child. Still, Dellal’s keen understanding of how life can stop when the life of a loved one ends is matched by a clean, unassertive visual style that, among other things, captures the huge majesty of tankers against the working-class shape of a city whose workers built them. With Brenda Blethyn. 98m.
The Sentinel (*) Even with a few pages of notes scrawled in the dark, an identikit movie like The Sentinel leaves almost no residue on the memory: Michael Douglas, looking reasonably hale in his early 60s with notably unlined eyes, plays a Secret Service agent who’s been on presidential detail at least since he helped save Ronald Reagan from further damage when he was shot by John Hinckley. (The film opens with tricked-up footage of the Reagan shooting.) A colleague is killed early on (played by director Clark Johnson), and suspicions of an inside job—a traitor in the SS—run wild. Kiefer Sutherland is on hand as an investigator from another part of the government, angry years later because old friend Douglas had an affair with his wife, and he keeps rookie Eva Longoria under his wing. The banality is crushing, the shouting is dull, even with the introduction of lusty first lady Kim Basinger, bored by the president (David Rashe). The unmotivated swirling of Johnson’s camera, as in his earlier SWAT has some energy, but an overly busy, oddly garish digital re-coloring of almost every scene is like visual sandpaper. The extras casting is oddly distracting, too, as is a terrorist hoping to commit a murder in Toronto and making the darndest, spiffy Atom Egoyan-lookalike. 108m.
Brick (***) Rian Johnson’s loopy first feature, Brick, transposes the slangy conventions of 1940s pulp with a dose of David Lynch-style obsession to a contemporary San Clemente high school campus, a patch of California that is always bright but filtered a rain-blue, cloud-gray cast. (Call it “Blue Snuggle.”)

Lucky Number Slevin (** 1/2) Compulsively derivative, Lucky Number Slevin wants to be the cleverest three-legged dog on the block. Scots director Paul McGuigan’s first feature since the baleful Wicker Park is this Montreal-shot rendition of screenwriter Jason Smilovic’s relentlessly smart-ass feat of recombinant typing suggests Quentin Tarantino and Chris McQuarrie on slow days—“Fuck-shit-Jesus is right” is a swear by sometimes-narrator-gunman Bruce Willis in an opening set-up that includes the invocation of sthe creenwriting jargon “the inciting incident,” and later Hitchcock’s North by Northwest will be explained in painstaking detail in order to footnote (or headstone, in the case) Mr. Smilovic’s lifts. McGuigan also allows Hartnett an extended James Bond audition that’s more inside than a kidney stone.

The Syrian Bride (***) Every decent movie about a wedding party will seem like it’s had an uncredited rewrite by Beckett and/or Kafka, and Eran Riklis’ The Syrian Bride (2004) is a prime example. Beautifully observed, acted and shot,

Amen on the SILENT HILL review. What a total disappointment. I reviewed it for Film Threat and called it the best looking bad movie I’ve ever seen. I love Roger Avary and think his RULES OF ATTRACTION is a totally dismissed but brilliant adaptation, but SILENT HILL fails in its story and even more so in its dialogue. Hopefully he saved the “good stuff” for “Beowulf.”
I also agree, but was more warm towards “Brick.”