Roger Ebert's Movie Yearbook 2007: Every Single New Ebert Review

By Roger Ebert

The most-trusted film critic in America." --USA Today 

Roger Ebert actually likes movies. It's a refreshing trait in a critic, and not as prevalent as you'd expect." --Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle

America's favorite movie critic assesses the year's films from Brokeback Mountain to Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Roger Ebert's Movie Yearbook 2007 is perfect for film aficionados the world over.

Roger Ebert's Movie Yearbook 2007 includes every review by Ebert written in the 30 months from January 2004 through June 2006-about 650 in all. Also included in the Yearbook, which is about 65 percent new every year, are:

* Interviews with newsmakers such as Philip Seymour Hoffman, Terrence Howard, Stephen Spielberg, Ang Lee, and Heath Ledger, Nicolas Cage, and more.

* All the new questions and answers from his Questions for the Movie Answer Man columns.

* Daily film festival coverage from Cannes, Toronto, Sundance, and Telluride.

*Essays on film issues and tributes to actors and directors who died during the year.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 5, 2013
• ISBN: 9781449445546

Book preview

REMY-001.jpgREMY-002.jpg

Other Books by Roger Ebert

An Illini Century

A Kiss Is Still a Kiss

Two Weeks in the Midday Sun: A Cannes Notebook

Behind the Phantom’s Mask

Roger Ebert’s Little Movie Glossary

Roger Ebert’s Movie Home Companion annually 1986–1993

Roger Ebert’s Video Companion annually 1994–1998

Roger Ebert’s Movie Yearbook annually 1999–

Questions for the Movie Answer Man

Roger Ebert’s Book of Film: An Anthology

Ebert’s Bigger Little Movie Glossary

I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie

The Great Movies

The Great Movies II

With Daniel Curley

The Perfect London Walk

With Gene Siskel

The Future of the Movies: Interviews with Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas

DVD Commentary Tracks

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

Citizen Kane

Dark City

Casablanca

Floating Weeds

REMY-003.jpg

This book is dedicated to my Aunt Martha, who took me to the movies.

Contents

Introduction

Acknowledgments

Key to Symbols

Reviews

The Best Films of 2005

Interviews

Nicolas Cage (The Weather Man)

Flora Cross (Bee Season)

John Dahl (The Great Raid)

Al Gore (An Inconvenient Truth)

Philip Seymour Hoffman (Capote)

Terrence Howard (Hustle and Flow)

Ang Lee and Heath Ledger (Brokeback Mountain)

Bai Ling (Three . . . Extremes)

Joaquin Phoenix and James Mangold (Walk the Line)

Steven Spielberg (Munich)

Charlize Theron (North Country)

Mark Zupan (Murderball)

Essays

Duma at the Crossroads

Marshall Field’s vs. Macy’s

How I Gave Oprah Winfrey Her Start

Polar Express Rerelease

In Defense of Crash

Is Unknown White Male a Fake?

Documentary Is Not a Fake

On Charles Dickens and Crash

Indie Spirit Awards

Crash Takes Top Honor at Joyous 78th Oscar Ceremony

Crash and Its Critics

In Memoriam

Richard Pryor

Film Festivals

Telluride

Toronto

Hawaii

Sundance

Overlooked

Cannes

Questions for the Movie Answer Man

Ebert’s Little Movie Glossary

Index

Introduction

In six decades there have been three revolutions in the way movies are distributed. The first was in 1948, when the Supreme Court found the big studios in violation of antitrust laws and ordered them to sell their theater chains. Until then, the majors owned theaters and booked their own movies into them; afterward, the playing field was more level for independent producers.

The second came when platforming was replaced by mass national bookings of major new films. For decades, a new film would open in a few big markets, typically New York and Los Angeles, and then trickle through to the rest of the country. This provided a way for audience word-of-mouth to spread and was a godsend for smaller films that needed time to win a reputation. Three films that especially benefited from platforming were Bonnie and Clyde, My Dinner with Andre, and Chariots of Fire.

That model changed when studios started using national TV ad campaigns for their movies. At about the same time, more movie stars became willing to appear on television; for years, many of them had refused. Now the pieces were in place for the modern system in which a big movie will open in thousands of theaters on the same day, backed by an advertising and publicity blitz.

A drawback of this model is that it is best suited to blockbuster films. The opening-night audience for a mass-market action picture is made up mostly of teenagers, who have free time; adults need more warning to gear up for a visit to the movies, and often the movie closes before they can get to it. This has created a loop in which more and more Hollywood movies are aimed at young action and comedy audiences. To some degree, the pattern has been offset by the rise of independent films and the theaters that show them, including the Landmark chain.

The third revolution is happening right now. It involves a fundamental shift in the medium chosen by moviegoers. The studios get more of their revenue from DVDs than from ticket sales, and if you consider that much of that revenue comes from rentals, it’s apparent that most people see more movies on DVD than in theaters. Sure, these movies would look better in a theater, but if they are getting to audiences that want to see them, that’s a good thing. There are precedents. When Allen Lane introduced Penguin paperbacks, he was told he would destroy the book publishing industry. When the first Betamax home video machines came onto the market, the studios sued to block home videos, which would eventually earn them billions. If I were a director, I would prefer for my work to be seen in a theater but would be happy for it to find an audience anywhere. And the extras on DVDs now mean moviegoers can learn more about the making of a film than any one filmmaking professional used to know.

Movies also have a big presence on television, and the studios are correctly experimenting with technology that will allow viewers to rent movies on demand via cable, satellite, or the Internet. The danger of such digital distribution, from the studios’ point of view, is that movies in digital form are easier to pirate than those on 35 mm film. That’s one reason that digital projection, which was supposed to replace film in theaters, seems stalled (another is that no one wants to foot the $100,000 per booth price tag).

I believe that the best way to see a movie is in a theater with an audience, and that light-through-celluloid is still better than any digital projection system I have seen. But this is not the way most people now see movies, and there is a bright side to the digital revolution. Home video itself meant that for the first time viewers could program their own viewing; they were no longer at the mercy of theaters and TV stations. There has been a big jump in the quality of home entertainment systems (and a rapid fall in their prices), and it is no longer unusual for a consumer to have a big flat-screen or front-projection screen and a surround sound system. Movies shown on these systems look impressive when seen on high-quality DVDs and will look even better when HD-DVD comes in, although that switch has been stalled by a war between two formats.

Last year Steven Soderbergh, who makes both big commercial movies (Ocean’s Eleven) and small indie films (Sex, Lies, and Videotape) did some lateral thinking about the problem of distribution, especially for smaller films. It costs a fortune to open any first-run movie in New York City and, in a sense, if it hasn’t made it there, it can’t make it anywhere. But what’s the point of producing a $100,000 movie when it costs more than that for an ad campaign in the New York Times?

What Soderbergh tried with his film Bubble was revolutionary: He would release it more or less simultaneously in theaters, on DVD, and on pay cable. This strategy was not welcomed by theater owners, needless to say, but it had the advantage of concentrating all of the publicity and advertising efforts at one time. The heat generated in each medium would in theory help the film in the others.

At Cannes 2006 I ran into Jonathan Sehring, the inventive and risk-taking producer of nearly fifty independent pictures, many of them for IFC Films and its digital spin-off, InDiGent. He said the Soderbergh model seemed to hold hope for his kind of film, and he cited one title whose box office take went up 15 percent in New York in its second week, apparently because of word-of-mouth inspired by cable.

My guess is that theaters are wrong to oppose this form of distribution, which will apply mostly to smaller films. Although the window between theater and DVD has been growing smaller for all releases, it is probably true that for many more years big Hollywood movies like Superman Returns will open exclusively in theaters. But smaller indie films like Me and You and Everyone We Know, The Proposition, L’Enfant, and Water could benefit from cross-platform openings.

Moviegoers know that all movies will eventually be on DVD; they choose to go to theaters because they like that experience, but they can’t see every film that way. Imagine a scenario in which Landmark, say, sells DVDs in its lobby. A hypothetical customer buys a ticket to Lonesome Jim, and on the way out runs into friends who have just liked The Notorious Bettie Page. On an impulse, he might buy the Bettie Page DVD. If theaters limited themselves to movies currently in release, it wouldn’t involve a lot of inventory and sales space; it would be more like the CDs displayed at Starbucks.

Another major distribution channel is Netflix and its clones, which have a large customer base seriously interested in a lot of movies. How do I know this? Because Netflix has a stock of about 60,000 films, and two-thirds of them are rented on a given day (if only by one person). That contradicts the Blockbuster model, in which new releases are piled in big displays but the backlist is limited. This is called the phenomenon of the Long Tail, and it benefits Web sites like Amazon, which does more business selling a few copies of countless books than a lot of copies of a few.

There may be only one person in a city who wants to see a film or read a review, but because of Netflix and the Internet, that person can do it. We observe that pattern at www.rogerebert.com, where there are more than ten thousand reviews and our Web traffic statistics show that even the most popular film represents less than 1 percent of our business. As of June 15, 2006, The Da Vinci Code and Brokeback Mountain were tied at 0.8 percent of our page views; the next most requested reviews in 2006 have been for V for Vendetta (0.7), X-Men: The Last Stand (0.6), and An Inconvenient Truth (0.5). The lesson: People are curious about a lot of different movies. (Of course, all of these titles will pick up hits as the year advances; in 2005, the most-requested review was Wolf Creek, followed by Munich and Brokeback.)

Twenty years ago when we reviewed a new art, indie, foreign, or documentary film on the TV show, we would hear from viewers complaining, That movie will never open in my state. Now they thank us: I’ve put it in my Netflix queue. Some analysts think that the Netflix model will eventually be replaced by video-on-demand, but I don’t think that will happen until you can demand just about any movie you’ve ever heard of. The current pay-for-view titles on cable and satellite are sadly limited to recent wide commercial releases. Look at those Netflix shared lists and you see people renting the damnedest and most obscure titles.

Eventually HDTV and HD-DVD will become so affordable and so good that its quality will rival theatrical projection. If the theaters have switched to digital projection, consumers will rightly notice that they get the same quality at home that they get in a theater. That’s why American theater chains desperately need to upgrade the quality of their projection, not settle for a questionable sideways move.

For years and years I have stubbornly been writing about MaxiVision 48, a system that provides a 400 percent improvement in picture quality over current 35 mm projection and involves a per-booth cost of only about $12,000 (only the front end of the projector changes; the housing remains the same). MV48 shoots at forty-eight frames a second but doesn’t require twice as much film; because of the way it uses the real estate on a frame of film, it needs only 50 percent more, and it has an economy mode that slows to the standard 24 fps. It can switch seamlessly between frame rates, because it doesn’t use sprockets to pull the film through but a nonvibrating electric motor and compressed air (that means no scratches). In March 2006 I visited Eastman House in Rochester, New York, and had a talk with their best film people. They all knew about MaxiVision, they all knew Kodak could sell more film if it were introduced, and not a single person in the room thought they had seen digital projection comparable even to ordinary 35 mm. But they said Kodak was being repositioned as a digital company and would not be investing in new film projection systems. That may work in the short run and be suicidal in the long run.

In the past, theaters have responded to competition from other media by upgrading their projection. Radio brought the talkies. TV brought wide screen. Stereo brought surround sound. All of these revolutions required visionaries in Hollywood boardrooms. The time is here for someone to step up to the plate with MV48. The obvious candidate is the IMAX chain, which could use MV48 to project a picture at much higher quality than current IMAX offerings and at smaller cost, because the big 70 mm IMAX format is costlier and more cumbersome than MaxiVision. That there is an eager market for high-quality sound and picture is shown by the success IMAX has had with ordinary 35 mm films like Batman Begins and King Kong, not to mention the enormous success of its 3-D version of Polar Express. If Polar Express could be released in 3-D and flat versions, why not in MV48 and standard versions? The IMAX box office alone makes it plausible.

What I foresee happening in American exhibition is the more or less simultaneous release of smaller films in theaters, on video, on cable/satellite, and on the Internet. I see big films continuing to showcase in standard theaters, but only if the theaters offer a clear improvement over home video standards.

*  *  *

This is the twenty-first annual edition of this Yearbook and its predecessors. My thoughts go back to the original Movie Home Companion and to Donna Martin, the editor who conceived it and later persuaded me to switch to the Yearbook format. My sincere thanks to her, and to Dorothy O’Brien, who has been the book’s valued editor at Andrews McMeel Publishing in recent years. Also to Sue Roush, my editor at Universal Press Syndicate, and to Laura Emerick, Miriam Dinunzio, Teresa Budasi, Thomas Conner, and all the other heroes at the Chicago Sun-Times, and Jim Emerson and Cathy Williams at www.rogerebert.com. Many others are thanked in the acknowledgments.

In autumn 2006, the University of Chicago Press published Awake in the Dark, a survey of my forty years of writing about the movies. As for the Great Movies books, as I write this I’ve written the first fifty-seven of one hundred reviews for The Great Movies III, which should be published in 2008.

ROGER EBERT

Acknowledgments

My editor is Dorothy O’Brien, tireless, cheerful, all-noticing. She is assisted by the equally invaluable Julie Roberts. My friend and longtime editor Donna Martin suggested this new approach to the annual volume. The design is by Cameron Poulter, the typographical genius of Hyde Park. My thanks to production editor Christi Clemons-Hoffman, who renders Cameron’s design into reality. I have been blessed with the expert and discriminating editing of John Barron, Laura Emerick, Miriam DiNunzio, Jeff Wisser, Darel Jevins, Avis Weathersbee, Jeff Johnson, and Teresa Budasi at the Chicago Sun-Times; Sue Roush at Universal Press Syndicate; and Michelle Daniel at Andrews McMeel Publishing. Many thanks are also due to the production staff at Ebert & Roeper, and to Marsha Jordan at WLS-TV. My gratitude goes to Carol Iwata, my expert personal assistant, and to Marlene Gelfond, at the Sun-Times. And special thanks and love to my wife, Chaz, for whom I can only say: If more ½lm critics had a spouse just like her, the level of cheer in the ½eld would rise dramatically.

ROGER EBERT

Key to Symbols

Reviews

A

Adam & Steve S2.jpg

NO MPAA RATING, 100 m., 2006

Craig Chester (Adam), Malcolm Gets (Steve), Parker Posey (Rhonda), Chris Kattan (Michael), Noah Segan (Twink), Sally Kirkland (Mary), Julie Hagerty (Sheila). Directed by Craig Chester and produced by Kirkland Tibbels and George Bendele. Screenplay by Chester.

Adam & Steve exerts a strange fascination with its balancing act between scenes that work and others so clunky that, I dunno, is it possible to be this awkward by accident? There is an underlying story here, and some comic ideas, that in the hands of a better director (or more ruthless editor) could have become an entertaining romantic comedy. But the couple in love is forced to enact so many directorial conceits that the movie trips over itself. The director, Craig Chester, is also the costar; as an actor, he has the wrong director.

Chester stars as Adam Bernstein, first seen in the 1980s with best pal Rhonda (Parker Posey), dressed as Goths and entering a gay disco on Glitter Night, the wrong night for them. Adam makes eye contact with a dancer named Steve (Malcolm Gets), and it’s love at first sight, but, We don’t dance, they explain. We’re Goths. We’re dead. Not too dead for Steve to give Adam his first hit of cocaine, which makes him instantly addicted. The coke is laced with baby laxative, leading to a scene in which so many bodily wastes and fluids are ejected or vomited that a serious plot miscalculation is involved, evoking such a strong ewww! reflex that it takes the audience five minutes and a 17 Years Later subtitle to get back on track.

Adam and Steve meet again in their late thirties, neither one remembering their first meeting (or perhaps much else of the late 1980s). Adam is clean and sober now, a pet lover who accidentally stabs his dog while slicing sausage and takes him to a human emergency room, where Steve, a psychiatrist who trained as a veterinarian (does that make him a pet psychiatrist?), treats the wound. For the two men, it’s love at second sight.

Their romance develops despite the usual plot convenience (fear of commitment), but there’s a crisis when Steve realizes who Adam is and flees rather than confess he made the deposit on Adam’s rug seventeen years ago. Will they reconcile? Can Rhonda and Steve’s straight roommate, Michael (Chris Kattan), be the go-betweens? Before we can learn the answer to that question, we get a scene both bizarre and weirdly funny.

Remember those old musicals such as Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, where lumberjacks would stage dance duels for the favor of the girl? Steve and Adam face off in a disco where western line dancing and two-steps in cowboy boots are the dance style, and both men instantly acquire backup dancers for a meticulously choreographed confrontation that’s as well-staged as it is dramatically inexplicable. That scene, and one where Steve serenades Adam by singing to him at brunch, show how the movie uses any genre that can be plundered for effect, and does it with humor and sometimes charm.

I liked, for example, the visit to Adam’s parents, who are the nicest people in the world although they suffer from the Bernstein curse (mother in neck brace, father in wheelchair, sister bites tongue). I liked the deadpan way Posey plays the formerly fat Goth who has become a slender stand-up comic who still tells fat jokes. The scene where Adam, leading a bird-watching tour in Central Park, meets Steve again after a tragic duck shooting. And Sally Kirkland as an AA group leader shouting no cross-talking! during a verbal fight.

But what can we make of other scenes that destroy any dramatic effect and all but shout, This cumbersome scene is being committed to film by ham-handed amateurs? I’m thinking of a conversation that is observed by a man in the center background who stares at the camera, reacts to the conversation, and closes the scene with an unintelligible comment. Who was that man? Friend of the director? Investor? In another scene a drunken girl, trying to pick up Michael in a bar, is so self-consciously awful in her awkward overacting that you can see Kattan, a pro, wishing himself elsewhere. Or a scene where Adam and Rhonda have a talk on a bench in a gay sculpture park, and in the last shot they awkwardly happen to take the same pose as the sculptures they’re seated next to. What does a shot like that mean? Where does it go? How do we react?—Wow! They’re in the same pose as the sculpture!

There is a gay-bashing montage in which Adam and Steve try to pursue their courtship while offscreen homophobes throw beer bottles at them. Far from funny, and it isn’t saved by a pan up to the street sign: Gay Street. And a scene where Steve gets fed up with a homophobic neighbor who screams insults at them and drags him, beaten and bloody, into a bar so that the gay-basher can get his arm twisted while he speaks for Steve in proposing marriage to Adam. This is an agonizingly bad idea.

The movie is one hundred minutes long. My guess is that by taking out maybe fifteen judicious minutes, it could be cut into a measurably better film—funnier, more romantic, more professional. The sad thing is to watch it finding a rhythm and beginning to work as a comedy, then running into a brick wall of miscalculation or incompetence. Any professional film editor watching this movie is going to suffer through one moment after another that begs to be ripped from the film and cut up into ukulele picks. Never mind the film editor: A lot of audiences, with all the best will in the world, are going to feel the same way.

The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D S2.jpg

PG, 94 m., 2005

Cayden Boyd (Max), David Arquette (Dad), Kristin Davis (Mom), Taylor Dooley (Lavagirl), Taylor Lautner (Sharkboy), George Lopez (Mr. Electricidad), Sasha Pieterse (Ice Princess), Jacob Davich (Minus). Directed by Robert Rodriguez and produced by Elizabeth Avellan and Robert Rodriguez. Screenplay by Racer Rodriguez and Robert Rodriguez.

The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D is an innocent and delightful children’s tale that is spoiled by a disastrous decision to film most of it in lousy 3-D. Fully three-quarters of the movie is in 3-D, which looks more like 1-D to me, removing the brightness and life of the movie’s colors and replacing them with a drab, listless palette that is about as exciting as looking at a 3-D bowl of oatmeal.

The 3-D process subtracts instead of adding. Ordinary 2-D movies look perfectly real enough for audiences and have for years; if it’s not broke, don’t fix it. Paradoxically, since it allegedly resembles our real-world vision, 3-D is less real than standard flat movies; 3-D acts as a distraction from character and story, giving us something to think about that during a good movie we should not be thinking about.

To be sure, there is a new 3-D process that is pretty good. That would be the IMAX process that uses oversized glasses and creates a convincing 3-D effect, as in James Cameron’s Aliens of the Deep. That is not the process used in Sharkboy and Lavagirl, which settles for those crummy old cardboard glasses where the left lens is such a dark red that the whole movie seems seen through a glass, darkly.

What a shame. I assume the unaltered original color footage of the movie exists, and no doubt will be used for the DVD. My suggestion to Robert Rodriguez, who directed the movie from a screenplay by one of his sons and uses three of them as actors, would be to make a non–3-D version available theatrically as soon as possible. This is a movie aimed at younger kids, who may be willing to sit through almost anything, but they’re going to know something is wrong and they’re not going to like it.

The origin of the film makes a good story. Rodriguez’s son Racer, then seven, told him a story about a boy who grew gills and a fin and became half-shark, and a girl who incorporated fiery volcanic elements. He encouraged his son to keep working on the story, in which the young hero, Max (Cayden Boyd), is a daydreamer. Max is mocked by Linus, the school bully, because of his Dream Journal, where he documents the adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl. Then a tornado appears out of a clear sky, bringing with it Sharkboy (Taylor Lautner) and Lavagirl (Taylor Dooley), who explain they have been created by Max’s dreams and now need his help; the world he created for them, Planet Drool, will be destroyed by darkness in forty-five minutes. I may not have followed these details with perfect fidelity, but you get the drift.

Max, SB, and LG go on a journey that takes them on the Stream of Consciousness to the Sea of Confusion; they ride a Train of Thought, and eventually arrive at a Dream Lair. There they find the nasty Minus, played by the same actor (Jacob Davich) who was the bully in Max’s classroom. Many adventures result, some of them involving an Ice Princess and a robot named Tobor, as well as an all-knowing character named Mr. Electric, who looks exactly like Max’s teacher Mr. Electricidad (George Lopez).

Mr. Electric appears as a big, round smiling face in a frame outfitted with spindly arms and legs. He reminded me of someone, which was odd, since he looked like nobody I’ve ever seen. Nobody, I realized, except the Man in the Moon in Georges Melies’s A Trip to the Moon (1902). Mr. Electric floats about like a busybody commentator, offering advice, issuing warnings, and making a general nuisance of himself; one of his peculiarities is that he won’t allow the kids on the planet to stop playing—ever. One group is trapped on a roller coaster that never stops.

Sharkboy and Lavagirl has the same upbeat charm as Rodriguez’s Spy Kids movies, and it must be said that the screenplay by Racer Rodriguez involves the kind of free-wheeling invention that kids enjoy; this is a movie where dream logic prevails. Their movie also resembles Spy Kids in having roles for parents, including Max’s dad and mom (David Arquette and Kristin Davis).

Because the real-world scenes are in 2-D and the dream and fantasy scenes are in 3-D, we get an idea of what the movie would have looked like without the unnecessary dimension. Signs flash on the screen to tell us when to put on and take off our polarizing glasses, and I felt regret every time I had to shut out those colorful images and return to the dim and dreary 3-D world. On DVD, this is going to be a great-looking movie.

After the Sunset S2.jpg

PG-13, 100 m., 2004

Pierce Brosnan (Max Burdett), Salma Hayek (Lola Cirillo), Woody Harrelson (Stan Lloyd), Don Cheadle (Kingpin), Kate Walsh (Sheila), Naomie Harris (Sophie), Rachael Harris (June), Jeff Garlin (Ron). Directed by Brett Ratner and produced by Beau Flynn and Jay Stern. Screenplay by Paul Zbyszewski and Craig Rosenberg.

I am bemused by what a movie expects us to accept on faith. Consider the opening sequence of After the Sunset, a diamond heist movie. Woody Harrelson plays Stan, an FBI agent who is a passenger in an SUV; he holds a briefcase that contains a precious jewel. After the driver gets out of the SUV, the thief Max (Pierce Brosnan) uses a PDA to assume control of the vehicle, backs it up at high speed, and speeds away from the FBI security escort. On a side street, it halts in front of a garage door, and a semitruck pushes it sideways through the door, which slams shut behind it. Stan is relieved of the jewel and foiled again by his longtime arch-enemy.

Very good. But now think some more. Max’s partner in the heist was Lola (Salma Hayek), who disguised herself as a bearded squeegee guy at a stoplight, using her squeegee to read the bar code on the SUV window so Max could key in the vehicle on his PDA. Very good. But why did he need to know the vehicle identification number when he manifestly had already customized the vehicle? After all, it contains the remote controls he is manipulating. Even the best-equipped SUVs don’t come loaded with equipment allowing them to be driven automatically by PDAs. We’re distracted from this logic by the obligatory scene in which Lola rips off her whiskers and wig, looking of course perfectly made up underneath.

All very well. But hold on: Did I say Max was on a rooftop? Yes, because that’s how he can look down and see the SUV that he takes control of. Excellent. Except, what happens after the SUV turns the corner and races down the street and turns another corner? How can Max still see it? How does he know where to steer it? How come it doesn’t run through a crosswalk containing a baby carriage, two nuns with six orphans, and a couple of guys carrying a sheet of plate glass? And how could they be sure the SUV would stop exactly in front of the open garage door, especially since Brosnan can’t see what’s happening? Maybe it was remote-controlled too.

The movies are never more mysterious than when they show us something that is completely preposterous, and get away with it. Not 1 viewer in 100 will ask the questions I’ve just asked, because in movies like this we go along with the flow. And this whole movie is flow.

After the Sunset is skillfully made, but it’s not necessary. I can think of no compelling reason to see it during a time when your choices also include Sideways, Ray, The Polar Express, The Incredibles, Primer, Vera Drake, and Undertow. On the other hand, should you see it, the time will pass pleasantly.

The actors are good company. Pierce Brosnan and Salma Hayek hurl themselves into their roles—but gently, so nothing gets broken. She’s in full plunging-neckline-in-the-sunset mode. Woody Harrelson has the necessary ambiguity to play the FBI agent’s love-hate relationship with Max. Don Cheadle has fun as the American-born Bahamian gangster who wants to become Brosnan’s partner in stealing a precious diamond from a cruise ship. Naomie Harris is intriguing as a local cop. The locations are sun-drenched, and there are enough plugs for the Atlantis resort hotel so that we know the cast enjoyed their stay on the island.

But what, really, is After the Sunset other than behavior-circling clichés? The heist itself, with its entrance through the ceiling, etc., is recycled from other films. However, the method by which Max establishes his alibi is clever. I can’t describe it without giving away too much, but should you watch the film, ask yourself (1) if there’s really enough time to do what he does, and (2) how likely it is that a nondiving FBI agent would agree to come along with a couple of thieves on a midnight scuba expedition to an old wreck?

The subplot is the old standby about the crooks who pull off one last job and plan to retire. Of course the woman is in favor of this, but the man grows restless and misses his old life. The same thing that happens to Max happened to Mr. Incredible. The female lead always gets the thankless task of trying to talk the hero out of doing what he obviously must do, or there would be no movie. Now the challenge is to find joy in simple things, Lola tells Max. After the Sunset is a simple thing, so we could start there.

Against the Ropes S3.jpg

PG-13, 111 m., 2004

Meg Ryan (Jackie Kallen), Omar Epps (Luther Shaw), Charles S. Dutton (Felix Reynolds), Tony Shalhoub (Sam Larocca), Timothy Daly (Gavin Reese), Joseph Cortese (Irving Abel), Kerry Washington (Renee), Skye McCole Bartusiak (Young Jackie Kallen). Directed by Charles S. Dutton and produced by Robert W. Cort and David Madden. Screenplay by Cheryl Edwards.

You know the slow clap scene, where the key character walks into the room and it falls silent? And everybody is alert and tense and waiting to see what will happen? And then one person slowly starts to clap, and then two, three, four, and then suddenly the tension breaks and everyone is clapping, even the sourpuss holdouts? Can we agree that this scene is an ancient cliché? We can. And yet occasionally I am amazed when it works, all the same.

It works near the end of Against the Ropes, a biopic about Jackie Kallen, who was (and is) the first female fight promoter in the all-male world of professional boxing. It works, and another cliché works, too: the big fight scene, right out of Rocky and every other boxing movie, in which the hero gets pounded silly but then somehow, after becoming inspired between rounds, comes back and is filled with skill and fury.

Against the Ropes meanders until it gets to the final third of its running time, and then it catches fire. Its setup story is flat and lacks authenticity. Meg Ryan is barely adequate as Jackie Kallen, and Omar Epps, as her boxer, Luther Shaw, is convincing but underwritten. The film plays like a quick, shallow, made-for-TV biopic, but then it relies on those ancient conventions, and they pull it through.

When we meet Kallen, she is the assistant to Cleveland’s top boxing promoter. She grew up in boxing; her dad ran a gym and when she was a little girl he sometimes had to chase her out of the ring. Now she knows as much about boxing as anyone, but of course as a woman isn’t allowed to use that knowledge. Then, observing a fight in a ghetto drug apartment, she sees a (nondrug-related) guy waltz in and cream everyone, and she intuits that he could be a great fighter.

This is Luther Shaw, played by Epps as a man with psychic wounds from childhood that sometimes unleash a terrible fury. Kallen persuades him he can be a fighter, signs him, hires a trainer to prepare him, edges around the Cleveland boycott against her by convincing a Buffalo promoter it’s time for him to return the favors he got from her dad. Many of the scenes in this stretch are routine, although the performance by Charles Dutton as a veteran trainer has a persuasive authenticity; he also directs.

Meg Ryan works hard at Jackie Kallen, but this is not a role she was born to play. Ryan is a gifted actress, best at comedy but with lots of noir in her; she’s good in thrillers, too. But she’s not naturally a brassy exhibitionist, and that’s what this role calls for. Kallen, who seems to buy her wardrobe from Trashy Lingerie and Victoria’s Secret, and who talks like a girl who grew up in a gym, might have better been cast with someone with rougher notes—Gina Gershon. Ryan seems to be pushing it.

There’s also a problem with Renee (Kerry Washington), Kallen’s best friend, who becomes Luther’s girlfriend, I think. I say I think because the role is so seriously underwritten that the movie would have been better off just not including it. Although Luther and Kallen are never romantically attracted, theirs is the movie’s central relationship. Dutton (working from a screenplay by Cheryl Edwards) doesn’t seem much interested in Luther’s private emotional life, and so we get inexplicable scenes in which Luther and Renee seem to be best friends, or are hanging out together, or—what? The two of them have hardly any dialogue with each other, and although Renee is cheering during the big fight, there’s no scene resolving her feelings for her man; the spotlight is on Kallen, which is all right, but it leaves a loose end.

Epps is always convincing, however, and by the last act of the movie we make our accommodation with Ryan because the character has grown more interesting. Intoxicated by the spotlight of publicity, she starts to think it’s about her, not her boxer, and eventually she turns into a media caricature and finds herself forced outside the world she helped to create. Then comes the big fight, and the slow clap, and I’m damned if I wasn’t really moved by the payoff.

Agent Cody Banks 2: Destination London S2.jpg   Half.jpg

PG, 93 m., 2004

Frankie Muniz (Cody Banks), Anthony Anderson (Derek), Hannah Spearritt (Emily), Daniel Roebuck (Mr. Banks), Keith Allen (Diaz), Keith David (CIA Director), Cynthia Stevenson (Mrs. Banks), Connor Widdows (Alex Banks). Directed by Kevin Allen and produced by David Glasser, Andreas Klein, David Nicksay, Guy Oseary, and Dylan Sellers. Screenplay Don Rhymer.

I’ve been trying to mind-control myself into the head of a kid the right age to enjoy Agent Cody Banks 2: Destination London, but either I was never that age, or I haven’t reached it yet. I’m capable of enjoying the Spy Kids movies, so I know I’m not totally lacking in range, but the movie seems preassembled, like those kits where it takes more time to open the box than build the airplane.

The movie opens at a secret summer camp where the CIA trains teenagers to become junior James Bonds. The opening scene, in fact, is uncanny in the way it resembles the prologue of David Mamet’s Spartan. In both movies, characters in combat uniforms with lots of camouflage paint on their faces creep through trees and try to cream one another. For Mamet, that is not the high point of his movie.

Cody Banks (Frankie Muniz) is a smart, resourceful kid who thinks there may be something fishy at the camp, which is run by Diaz (Keith Allen), love child of Patton and Rambo. After a secret plot is revealed, Cody finds himself on assignment in London, where his handler is Derek (Anthony Anderson) and his mission is to prevent the CIA’S bad apples from gaining possession of a mind-control device that fits inside a tooth and turns its wearer into a zombie.

It’s a pretty nifty device: At one point, its mad inventor fits it to a dog which then sits upright at a piano and plays a little tune, reminding me inevitably of Dr. Johnson’s observation that when a dog walks on its hind legs, it is not done well, but one is surprised to find it done at all. The dog is impressive but no pianist, and Derek, watching the demonstration on a spycam with Cody, decides he won’t buy the CD.

The agency, as in the previous film, supplies Cody with various secret weapons, including a pack of Mentos that explode when moistened. Turns out the evil master plan is to subvert a conference of world leaders at Buckingham Palace; to infiltrate the palace, Cody must join a world-class youth orchestra—not easy, since he doesn’t play an instrument, but easier than you might think, since his agency-supplied clarinet plays itself. It seems to know only Flight of the Bumble Bee, unfortunately.

Hilary Duff, who played Cody’s sidekick in the previous movie, is MIA this time, and her place is taken, sort of, by Emily (Hannah Spearritt), a British agent who looks in a certain light as if she might be a teenager, and in another as if she might be, oh, exactly twenty-three. You will recall from the previous film that Cody is too busy being an agent to date much, and his little brother sees more action. (That produced a good exchange: Cody says most of the brother’s dating doesn’t count because it’s limited to a tree house, and the brother replies, It does if you’re playing Doctor.)

The big climax at Buckingham Palace features look-alikes for Tony Blair and the queen, and a scene that is supposed to be funny because the youth orchestra stalls for time by improvising a song with a funky rhythm and the queen boogies with the heads of state. Since I am enough of a realist to believe that a large part of the target audience for this movie doesn’t know who the queen is or what she looks like, it’s a good thing the action starts up again real soon.

There is a mind-controlled food fight that begins promisingly but is awkwardly handled, and a chase through London that is (sigh) just one more chase through London, and apart from funny supporting work by the inventor of the mind control and the guy in the Q role, the movie is pretty routine. I wanted to be able to tell you the names of the actors in those two entertaining roles, but half an hour’s research has not discovered them, although the movie’s Website has signed me up for junior agent training.

The Agronomist S3.jpg   Half.jpg

NO MPAA RATING, 90 m., 2004

A documentary directed by Jonathan Demme and produced by Demme, Bevin McNamara, and Peter Saraf.

Jean Dominique was a brave man in a dangerous country, and Jonathan Demme’s The Agronomist shows him telling the truth as he sees it, day after day, on the radio in Haiti. It is obvious that sooner or later he will be assassinated. Dissent cannot be tolerated in a nation that depends on secrecy to protect its powerful. What is remarkable is how long he survived, and how courageously he owned and operated Radio Haiti-Inter; it became the voice of the powerless in great part because it broadcast in Creole, the language they spoke, instead of in the French of their masters.

Jonathan Demme, who made the documentary, is a man who seems to lead parallel lives. In one, he is the successful director of such films as The Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia, Married to the Mob, and Melvin and Howard. In the other, he has made documentaries about Haiti, has visited there countless times, has helped promote Haitian art and music, and has a heart that aches as he sees the country victimized by powerful interests both within and without.

In Jean Dominique and his wife, Michele Montas, Demme finds subjects who reflect the agony of Haiti’s struggle. His documentary draws on hundreds of hours of filming and conversations from 1991 until Dominique’s death in 2000. It begins at the moment when President Jean-Claude Aristide was overthrown in 1991, follows the Dominiques into exile in New York, watches as they return to Haiti and Aristide is restored to power, and observes how Dominique, originally a supporter of Aristide, became one of his critics.

Dominique is a man who seems to have come to heroism because it was the only choice for a man of his nature. His college education was in agriculture (which explains the movie’s title), and he first came up against the ruling clique through his efforts for land reform. He was interested in the arts, started a cinema club in Port-au-Prince, and was shut down by the dictator Papa Doc Duvalier after showing Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog. That was a film about the evil of Nazism; why Papa Doc found it unacceptable is easy to imagine.

At first it seemed that the rebel priest Aristide might force a change in his nation’s destiny, but soon he, too, was employing the tactics of those he replaced. There is a sequence in the film where Dominique interviews Aristide and challenges him with pointed questions. The president responds with measured sound bites that repeat the same inanities again and again, as if he is incapable of understanding the actual meaning of the questions he has been asked.

Dominique and Montas are persons of great cheer and energy, leaping into each day with such zeal that they sometimes seem to forget the risks they are taking. Their problem in Haiti is that by honestly speaking to the ordinary people in their own language, they offend not only their obvious enemies but even those they do not know they have made. A nation built on lies cannot tolerate truth even when it agrees with it.

Radio Haiti-Inter comes under siege more than once, and Demme’s camera does not overlook the bullet holes in the exterior walls. The station seems to be run informally, as a mixture of music, gossip, local news, and political opinion; at times of crisis, Dominique stays on the air as long as he can, until power outages or the government shut him down.

This is a couple who could have led the good life in Haiti. With the light complexions of the French-speaking Haitian establishment, with education and some wealth, they could have gone along with the ruling elite and earned a nice little fortune with their radio station or other enterprises. What fascinates us is Dominique’s inability to do that. He is well enough connected to know what is going wrong, and too principled to ignore it.

Did he know he would be killed? Who can say? His country was in tumult, and the inconsistent policies of the United States did little to help. The country seemed almost to force its rulers into fearful and repressive policies. The wise course for Dominique would have been to return in exile to New York and use a dissenting magazine or Web site to spread his beliefs.

But no. When he could go back, he went back. Demme often followed him. We watch Dominique use humor and cynicism as well as anger, and we understand he is not a zealot but simply a reasonable man saying reasonable things in an unreasonable country. After his murder, Michele Montas goes on the air to insist that Jean Dominique is still alive, because his spirit lives on. But in this film Haiti seems to be a country that can kill the spirit, too.

Aileen: The Life and Death of a Serial Killer S3.jpg   Half.jpg

NO MPAA RATING, 89 m., 2004

A documentary directed by Nick Broomfield and Joan Churchill and produced by Jo Human.

Aileen Wuornos was trashed by life. That she committed seven murders is beyond dispute and unforgivable, but what can we expect from a child who was beaten by her grandfather, molested by a pedophile, abandoned by her mother, and raped by her brother and other neighborhood boys and men? A child who was selling sex for cigarettes at the age of nine, who had a baby at thirteen and was thrown out of the house, who lived for two years in the woods at the end of the street or, in cold weather, in the backseat of a car, wrapped in a single blanket? Society made Aileen into a weapon and turned her loose.

Aileen: The Life and Death of a Serial Killer is a documentary by Nick Broomfield, the guerrilla filmmaker who works with a crew of one (cinematographer and codirector Joan Churchill) and structures his films into the stories of how he made them. He met Aileen, invariably described as America’s first female serial killer, soon after her original arrest, and made the 1992 documentary Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer about the media zoo and bidding war that surrounded her sudden notoriety. Florida police officers were fired after it was disclosed they were negotiating for a Hollywood deal, and Aileen, meanwhile, was represented by Dr. Legal, a bearded, pot-smoking ex-hippie who was incompetent and clueless. She saw his ad on late-night TV. She couldn’t pay him, but he figured he could cash in, too.

As Wuornos’s often-delayed execution date inexorably closed in, Broomfield returned to the story for this film, made in 2002. He had become friendly, if that is the word, with Aileen, and indeed she gave him her last interview. He also interviewed many people instrumental in her life, including childhood friends, former sexual partners, and even her long-lost mother. The portrait he builds of her life is one of cruel suffering and mistreatment. This was a young woman who hitchhiked to Florida when she was thirteen because she was tired of sleeping in the rough, and who became a roadside prostitute because, really, what else was open to her? Social services? Invisible in her case.

Wuornos herself is onscreen for much of the film. Charlize Theron has earned almost unanimous praise for her portrayal of Aileen in the film Monster, and her performance stands up to direct comparison with the real woman. There were times, indeed, when I perceived no significant difference between the woman in the documentary and the one in the feature film. Theron has internalized and empathized with Wuornos so successfully that to experience the real woman is only to understand more completely how remarkable her performance is.

Wuornos talks and talks and talks to Broomfield. She confesses and recants. She says at one point that her original defense (she was raped and attacked by her victims, and shot them in self-defense) was a lie—that she was in the stealing biz and killed them to cover her tracks. On another day she is likely to return to her original story. We hear her describing a man who tortured her with acid in a Visine bottle, and her vivid details make us feel we were there. Then she tells Broomfield she made it all up. What can we believe? Broomfield’s theory is that after more than a decade on Death Row, Wuornos was insane, and that she used her last remaining shreds of reason to hasten the day of her execution. She said whatever she thought would speed her date with death.

Oh, yes, it’s clear she was crazy on the day she died. She talks to Broomfield about secret signals and radio waves being beamed into her cell, about how the police knew she was the killer but let her keep on killing because it would make a better story for them to sell, about how she would be beamed up "like on Star Trek" to a spaceship waiting for her in Earth orbit.

Remarkably, three psychiatrists examined her right before her death and found her sane. No person who sees this film would agree with them. Florida Governor Jeb Bush was scarcely less enthusiastic about the death penalty than his brother George, who supported the notorious execution assembly line in Texas. Aileen died in October of an election year, just in time to send a law-and-order message to the voters. Should she have died? That depends on whether you support the death penalty. She was certainly guilty. The film makes it clear her imprisonment would simply have continued a lifelong sentence that began when she was born. No one should have to endure the life that Aileen Wuornos led, and we leave the movie believing that if someone, somehow, had been able to help that little girl, her seven victims would never have died.

Akeelah and the Bee S4.jpg

PG-13, 112 m., 2006

Angela Bassett (Tanya Anderson), Keke Palmer (Akeelah Anderson), Laurence Fishburne (Dr. Joshua Larabee), Curtis Armstrong (Mr. Welch), J. R. Villarreal (Javier), Sahara Garey (Georgia), Sean Michael Afable (Dylan), Erica Hubbard (Kiana Anderson). Directed by Doug Atchison and produced by Laurence Fishburne, Sidney Ganis, Nancy Hult Ganis, Daniel Llewelyn, and Michael Romersa. Screenplay by Atchison.

Akeelah Anderson can spell. She can spell better than anyone in her school in south central Los Angeles, and she might have a chance at the nationals. Who can say? She sees the national spelling bee on ESPN and is intrigued. But she is also wary, because in her school there is danger in being labeled a brainiac, and it’s wiser to keep your smarts to yourself. This is a tragedy in some predominantly black schools: Excellence is punished by the other students, possibly as an expression of their own low self-esteem.

The thing with Akeelah (Keke Palmer) is that she can spell, whether she wants to or not. Beating time with her hand against her thigh as sort of a metronome, she cranks out the letters and arrives triumphantly at the words. No, she doesn’t have a photographic memory, nor is she channeling the occult, as the heroine of Bee Season does. She’s just a good speller.

The story of Akeelah’s ascent to the finals of the National Spelling Bee makes an uncommonly good movie, entertaining and actually inspirational, and with a few tears along the way. Her real chance at national success comes after a reluctant English professor agrees to act as her coach. This is Dr. Joshua Larabee (Laurence Fishburne), on a leave of absence after the death of his daughter. Coaching her is a way out of his own shell. And for Fishburne, it’s a reminder of his work in Searching for Bobby Fischer (1993), another movie where he coached a prodigy.

Akeelah is not mocked only at school. Her own mother is against her. Tanya Anderson (Angela Bassett) has issues after the death of her husband, and she values Akeelah’s homework above all else, including silly after-school activities such as spelling bees. Akeelah practices in secret, and after she wins a few bees, even the tough kids in the neighborhood start cheering for her.

Keke Palmer, a young Chicago actress whose first role was as Queen Latifah’s niece in Barber Shop 2, becomes an important young star with this movie. It puts her in Dakota Fanning and Flora Cross territory, and there’s something about her poise and self-possession that hints she will grow up to be a considerable actress. The movie depends on her, and she deserves its trust.

So far I imagine Akeelah and The Bee sounds like a nice but fairly conventional movie. What makes it transcend the material is the way she relates to the professor and to two fellow contestants: a Mexican-American named Javier (J. R. Villarreal) and an Asian-American named Dylan (Sean Michael Afable). Javier, who lives with his family in the upscale Woodland Hills neighborhood, invites Akeelah to his birthday party (unaware of what a long bus trip it involves). Dylan, driven by an obsessive father, treats the spelling bee like life and death, and takes no hostages. Hearing Dylan’s father berate him, Akeelah feels an instinctive sympathy. And as for Javier’s feelings for Akeelah, at his party he impulsively kisses her.

Why’d you do that? she asks him.

I had an impulse. Are you gonna sue me for sexual harassment?

The sessions between Akeelah and the professor are crucial to the film, because he is teaching her not only strategy but also how to be willing to win. No, he doesn’t use self-help clichés. He is demanding and uncompromising, and he tells her again and again, Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. This quote, often attributed to Nelson Mandela, is actually from Marianne Williamson but is no less true for Akeelah (the movie does not attribute it).

Now I am going to start dancing around the plot. Something happens during the finals of the national bee that you are not going to see coming, and it may move you as deeply as it did me. I’ve often said it’s not sadness that touches me the most in a movie, but goodness. Under enormous pressure, at a crucial moment, Akeelah does something good. Its results I will leave for you to discover. What is ingenious about the plot construction of writer-director Doug Atchison is that he creates this moment so that we understand what’s happening, but there’s no way to say for sure. Even the judges sense or suspect something. But Akeelah, improvising in the moment and out of her heart, makes it airtight. There is only one person who absolutely must understand what she is doing, and why—and he does.

This ending answers one of my problems with spelling bees and spelling-bee movies. It removes winning as the only objective. Vince Lombardi was dead wrong when he said, Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing (a quote, by the way, first said not by Lombardi but in the 1930s by UCLA coach Henry Red Sanders—but since everybody thinks Lombardi said it, he won, I guess). The saying is mistaken because to win for the wrong reason or in the wrong way is to lose. Something called sportsmanship is involved.

In our winning-obsessed culture, it is inspiring to see a young woman like Akeelah Anderson instinctively understand, with empathy and generosity, that doing the right thing involves more than winning. That’s what makes the film particularly valuable for young audiences. I don’t care if they leave the theater wanting to spell better, but if they have learned from Akeelah, they will want to live better.

The Alamo S3.jpg   Half.jpg

PG-13, 137 m., 2004

Dennis Quaid (Sam Houston), Billy Bob Thornton (Davy Crockett), Jason Patric (James Bowie), Patrick Wilson (William Barrett Travis), Emilio Echevarria (Santa Anna), Jordi Molla (Juan Seguin), Laura Clifton (Susanna Dickinson), Leon Rippy (Sergeant William Ward). Directed by John Lee Hancock and produced by Brian Grazer, Ron Howard, and Mark Johnson. Screenplay by Leslie Bohem, Stephen Gaghan, and Hancock.

The advance buzz on The Alamo was negative, and now I know why: This is a good movie. Conventional wisdom in Hollywood is that any movie named The Alamo must be simplistic and rousing, despite the fact that we already know all the defenders got killed. (If we don’t know it, we find out in the first scene.) Here is a movie that captures the loneliness and dread of men waiting for two weeks for what they expect to be certain death, and it somehow succeeds in taking those pop culture brand names like Davy Crockett and James Bowie and giving them human form.

The arc of the Alamo story is a daunting one for any filmmaker: long days and nights of waiting, followed by a massacre. Even though the eventual defeat of Santa Anna by Sam Houston provides an upbeat coda, it’s of little consolation to the dead defenders. This movie deals frankly with the long wait and the deadly conclusion by focusing on the characters of the leaders; it’s about what they’re made of, and how they face a bleak situation.

Davy Crockett, the man in the coonskin hat, surprisingly becomes the most three-dimensional of the Alamo heroes, in one of Billy Bob Thornton’s best performances. We see him first in a theater box, attending a play inspired by his exploits. We learn of his legend; even Santa Anna’s men whisper that he can leap rivers in a single bound and wrestle grizzly bears to death. And then we watch Crockett with a rueful smile as he patiently explains that he did not do and cannot do any of those things, and that his reputation has a life apart from his reality.

Crockett, who was a U.S. congressman before fate led him to the Alamo, has two scenes in particular that are extraordinary, and Thornton brings a poignant dignity to them. One is his memory of a U.S. Army massacre of Indians. The other occurs when the Mexicans, who have brought along a band, have their drummers put on a show. Crockett knows just what the percussion needs, climbs one of the battlements, takes out his violin and serenades both sides. It is one of those moments, like the Christmas Eve truce in World War I, when fighting