Reviews

....It's a figure of speech where something more inclusive is used to refer to something less inclusive or vice versa, e.g. saying "the law" instead of "a policeman." It's usually pronounced "sa-neck-da-key" instead of "sin-eck-dosh" as the two lesbian protagonists use it. They have lots and lots of conversation in this movie (unlike Quentin Tarantino's famous torrents of dialog, there's no particular payoff to it), not all of it audible what with the iffy technical quality (this looks like it was filmed with Denise Ohio's own camcorder) and non-stop "grunge music" on the soundtrack (I mean, you know, it's like Seattle and all). Anyway our sapphic heroines work for a magazine called "Amazing World," evidently based on "National Enquirer" et al. They're sent out to interview "ordinary people" who claim to be able to hypnotize bees and whatnot. (Years ago a Monty Python sketch managed to spoof such folks in a lot less time. "I understand you can put bricks to sleep. Can you put this one to sleep for us?" "Well, it's asleep already." "How can you tell?" "It's not moving, is it; it's completely still.") When not doing interviews, they spend lots of time bickering (like your stereotypical straight married couple) and (unfortunately only a small bit) making out. To the extent there's a "plot," it concerns a serial killer who of course eludes the stupid police and stalks our gals, leaving messages in their hubcap etc. Eventually there's a climax which with just a little more verve and imagination could have been a great lampoon of every "action flick" we've seen. I won't bother revealing who the killer is, mostly because I personally didn't really care one way or another. The "butch" member of the pair gets a little more "back story" than her partner; she has "issues," such as the apparent disappearance of her previous partner some time back. Periodically she vents her frustrations on a punching bag. (Almost hate to say it, but---yeah, she hits like a girl.) A few supporting characters have semi-interesting moments at times, such as the duo's boss at the magazine (who eerily resembles a young David Byrne) who reveals that he used to work for a "real newspaper" but prefers his current gig because "nobody gets hurt"; sic transit journalism in this country, I guess. There was potentially an interesting story here not so much about the people who work for these publications, who know what they do is "crap" (as the Byrne lookalike puts it) but about the people who read them and why they do.... I did get a little jolt seeing those little cassette tapes that the ladies play in their big red convertible; I must have a ton of those at home in a box somewhere. (Can they be recycled?) By the way the car gets so much screen time it practically deserves a credit. Nice to see a non-rainy Seattle for change... I guess I should include a spoiler, since there's a spoiler warning: None of the people interviewed turns out to be a guy claiming he's really Elvis Presley. That reminds me: if you haven't seen it yet, please rent or buy "Bubba Ho-tep"; best thing directed by Don Coscarelli (of the "Phantasm" series) or starring Bruce Campbell (of the "Evil Dead" series). It's a blast...

I hate to admit how long it took me to "get around to" renting this from the Facets crew in Chicago, in fact this was the 150th title (the previous 149 including some real dreck). Now that I finally have, I think it's a damn shame that Erich Von Stroheim couldn't have been around nowadays when this could've been a series on HBO. As you've all heard, the original nine-hour offering was mutilated in various stages down to a few hours; the resulting cinematic corpse must've been downright baffling for 1924 audiences. What I've seen is the 1999 239-minute reconstruction using a lot of still photos. The original gold tinting has been restored (for the giant tooth etc.) and some of the stills of the nice elderly couple are fully colored. There's also a new score which fits in pretty well.

I haven't read the Frank Norris novel on which this is based, but apparently Stroheim followed it faithfully, if not fanatically. Over a period of 15-20 years we follow a California miner named McTeague as he becomes an apprentice dentist, then practices on his own in San Francisco, then is forced to give that up and returns to being a miner after killing his increasingly crazy wife; fleeing the law he winds up in Death Valley handcuffed to a corpse. Two factors show how far "ahead of his time" Stroheim was: first the relentless grimness of his vision of humanity as slaves to their various weaknesses, and second his nuances in terms of the performances he gets from his actors and in his presentation of events. Most of you have probably seen at least a few silent films, you know how theatrically over the top most of the acting was (to be fair to the actors, of course they didn't have their voices available, plus that was the style of the day). But Stroheim gets some wonderful naturalism from his cast, principally from the "hero" Gibson Gowland, a big lug who lets his inner urges both toward kindness and cruelty seem to well up from within rather than being imposed from the outside. Near the beginning and the end McTeague is seen kissing a tiny bird he's carefully holding in his huge hand; the second one is his pet that he's about to set free anticipating his own death; it's as poignant as a similar moment that Rutger Hauer had years later in "Bladerunner." Unfortunately Jean Hersholt as McTeague's best friend and later bitter enemy is more conventionally hammy, and Zasu Pitts as McTeague's doomed wife Trina plays virtually every scene with her eyeballs bulging; again, to be fair to the actors, that maybe was what Stroheim wanted. I personally was disappointed that some downright gruesome elements only survive in the still shots, such as McTeague getting his ear bitten nearly off in a wrestling match with his friend, or his wife discovering the corpse of the local junk dealer's wife, then having a nightmare about the latter (in the dream the dead woman seems to have as many teeth as Lon Chaney in "London After Midnight"). But along with the viciousness and degradation there's also some genuine tenderness (mostly involving the old couple who live next to each other for years before finally getting intimate) and even some humor, mostly of the "black" variety. ("Black humor," it's an old expression not involving African-Americans, you can Google it.) As a final "modernism," there's really no "emotional payoff" as such; it's basically a bleak view of humanity carried through to the bitter end, and to paraphrase the Frank Norris quote seen at the outset, people will like it or they won't. But I doubt they'll forget it.

I will confess that parts of "Greed" seem dated now, such as the depiction of Trina's German immigrant parents with their Katzenjammer-Kids dialog cards, also some vaguely anti-Semitic elements; the junk dealer has a Jewish-sounding name and looks somewhat like the old drawings of Charles Dickens' Fagin character; there's also a sign for SEMITE BUTCHER. (I read that Stroheim may have been originally Jewish himself before adding "Von" to his name, so maybe this was also a subtle dig at the "goyim.") The junk dealer's wife seems a stereotypical "shifty Mexican." I would imagine Stroheim was again adhering to the novel. Some of Stroheim's directorial flourishes veer a little too close to "German expressionism," such as a recurring shot of a pair of gnarled arms caressing a pile of gold coins, or a similar recurring shot of several pairs of arms clutching at a pile of gold dishes. There's a scene with McTeague's cat leaping up to attack a birdcage that clearly involved the cat being tossed into the air. I could probably think of a few other quibbles but I'm really not so inclined. As my (unprecedented) 10 out of 10 vote indicates, I want to convey what an amazing achievement this movie is, even in it's truncated form, and whatever issues I may have with Ted Turner, may the movie gods bless him for presiding over this reconstruction. ("Colorizing" the classics, on the other hand...) Bottom line, don't just see this out of a "sense of duty." See it because it's relevant to us now, reminding us that we have choices in life, and those choices have consequences...

The poor ol' "Swingin' Sixties" haven't really aged terribly well, have they---at least not cinematically (for the most part). This Z-grade curiosity from the Something Weird vault comes off now as a cross between a wanna-be biker flick and an episode of "Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In," complete with body painting. Determined to be "in your face" from the outset, it opens with close-ups of people's mouths messily chewing food--"fressing" would be the Yiddish term---inter cut with shots of a toilet---Hmmm, is there a "message" to be gleaned here? I doubt it. Then when we see some clean-cut white people at various jobs (tree climber, dance instructor, painter, bartender, office types); promptly at five per the Big Clock the four couples go strolling through the streets (inter cut with shots of a white pyramid in the desert) until they get to a warehouse, from which they duly emerge on motorcycles transformed into the Red T-Shirt Gang----uh-oh, better move over, Hell's Angels. Off they roar into the countryside for their weekend. After this, believe it or not, the movie goes downhill....

I'm trying to think of anything at all about this thing that might warrant an hour and change of your precious time (it feels longer than that... a lot longer). Nudity, simulated sex, chick-fights---you've seen it all before, and better. There are a few moments that hint at a kind of Godard-like nihilism, e.g. when one of the women falls into (obviously fake) quicksand and the others stand there watching and wisecracking---the dialog doesn't even match the actors' lip movements, like a badly dubbed kung fu flick. But the director chooses to turn this moment into another stupid joke by having the gang leave a sign behind as a kind of epitaph--HERE LIES GIRL WITH MUD IN HER EYES AND USELESS THIGHS---is that, like, funny? The one scene coming closest to some dramatic tension (the three surviving women are assigned to waylay a passing motorist so the men can rob him for drug money, although we never see any drug dealers) is similarly marred by another stupid sign at the end. I wish one of the gang had been shown whipping out the sign from behind his back, like a cartoon, which this movie essentially is. (The ambush scene has the best line though, about "sex-starved females.") The director even tosses in a stereotypical Native American ("How," "me no like-um") (who may also be bisexual for no particular reason) whose only apparent function is magically to bring the quicksand chick back to life. Eventually our heroes reach the white pyramid, the interior of which seems vastly larger than the exterior, where one of them becomes the Devil somehow and the others put on period costumes and have more simulated sex, etc. etc. In a bit lifted from the original "Bedazzled" one of the guys gets to realize his dream of seducing the boss's wife next door, but is put off when she proves to be the aggressor---Hmmm, is there "irony" to be gleaned here? I doubt it. Is there any point to the inserts of a square couple getting cozy in a wheat field or an elderly woman in a hat looking constipated? I doubt it...

The videocassette (available from Facets Rentals) follows "Acid Eaters" with some "psychedelic" scenes of nude women dancing and whatnot, which is visually more interesting than anything in the "feature." That reminds me, I did think of something from the latter maybe worth your time---a (mercifully) dialog-free sequence with Pat Barrington (the blonde "Chickie") gyrating accompanied by a black bongo drummer. Maybe Something Weird "On Demand" can include that in one of their "Retro Erotica" or "Striptease" segments or something... In case you were wondering, we never do see anyone actually taking drugs, unless you count the Devil shoving what looks like a big hunk of cheese at someone...

If you have a little more than an hour to kill, you could do worse than watching "Alley Tramp"; of course, you could also do a whole lot better. Legendary pioneering "gore-hound" Herschell Gordon Lewis, whose career begin with "soft-core porn," apparently yielded to nostalgia and returned to it here before getting back into the bloody saddle with "The Wizard of Gore." (The cast and crew amusingly use French pseudonyms, with Lewis becoming "Armand Parys"--"Paris," get it?) In a nutshell: a sixteen-year-old spies on her parents having sex, then proceeds to "get it on" with anything on two legs wearing pants. Up until the obligatory "uplifting" ending, it's actually a bargain-basement hoot. The actors are nothing if not enthusiastic, with Julia Ames as the "nymphomaniac" and Jean Lamee as her equally horny mother running neck and neck in the scenery-chewing department. (The latter has this as her only IMDb credit; the former also has a few other Lewis flicks listed.) Ames in her "big emotional scene" keeps glancing at the script a la Marlon Brando, who of course was much more subtle about it. The most memorable sequence would have to be Ames seducing her mom's new bar-found f--ck-buddy, who of course goes right along for the ride. "Statutory rape, shmatutory rape..." There's a kind of unassuming naturalness (even innocence) to Ames in her disrobing scenes, making it plausible that she'd be taking a toy stuffed animal to bed with her (which of course also strategically obscures her pubic area). Try if possible to have had plenty of beer before viewing this, and if like me you have the pre-paid rental plan from Facets Multi-Media, you can "feel better" by not having to pay for it separately. Fair warning, there's nothing particularly erotic on-screen and of course no gore. Like many other off-the-track offerings from the Something Weird vault, you can appreciate it for it's "historical value..." By the way, in the opening scene the teenager spends a lot of screen time eating an apple; dear Herschell, why spoil such pleasant sleaze with a Garden of Eden reference?

If so, you may enjoy this directorial debut from Bryan Bertino that seems part of a post-"Devil's Rejects" trend of "no-frills" low-budget horror films ("Vacancy" also comes to mind) where basically you take some "ordinary people" and let some miscreants have at them for an extended period of time. It harks back to the original "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" where there's no "big payoff" in terms of learning who the miscreants are or why they're doing what they're doing. They're presented as a kind of force of nature whose victims were just luckless enough to cross their path; the moral equivalent of a car accident, maybe. If you've seen the trailer for "The Strangers" you've already heard the only "explanation" offered for this local terrorism:

"Why are you doing this to us?"

"'Cause you were home."

(This itself seems a ripoff of the classic Richard Pryor routine about meeting prison inmates, but never mind.) It seems almost pointless discussing the victims because, as in a De Sade novel, they clearly only exist to be victims, but it's Liv Tyler (who, as with Cate Blanchett, having seen her as an elf it's hard for me to accept her as anything else) and a guy unknown to me as a young couple arriving at the guy's remote (very, very, very remote) South Carolina digs after a wedding. We learn that earlier she had rejected his own marriage proposal to her, thus bumming both of them out. The only reason for this subplot seems to be to give them something to discuss until the strangers show up (there's an awful lot of "filler" in this flick) and to let them have a poignant moment when they're about to die. Once the strangers do arrive, it's pretty much "by the numbers" cat-and-mouse stuff; as is a requirement for horror movies made since cell phones were invented, it's pointed out why their cell phones are useless. What did strike me here was a kind of "Hollywood throwback" level of stupidity displayed by the victims. Citing all the examples would make me exceed my IMDb word limit, but here's one: after the male victim unwittingly kills his friend with the shotgun (which hardly seems to count as a "spoiler," it's telegraphed so clearly), do he and his non-fiancée decide to take the shotgun (by the way shotguns fire "shells," not "bullets," but I figured that was a deliberate goof) and make a run for the motor vehicle that the friend must have used to get there? Or even just hold their ground with the gun and wait for the strangers to come after them or leave? Of course not....

As for the performances: Ms Tyler bumps up against her thespian limits (I hadn't noticed before how essentially sad-faced she is) but at least does some stretching out, unlike the total inertia of her male co-star. Director Bertino never lets us see the strangers' faces clearly, so what I can say. The only one of them who has lines delivers them well, I guess. (Okay, maybe the other woman had a line too at the end, I couldn't tell which of them spoke it.) The film is almost stolen by the two Mormon boys who bookend the proceedings and who enable the semi-obligatory "final pre-closing-credits shock" moment. ....A few minor points: the opening narration is merely irritating, reminding us of the vastly superior "Massacre" and trying to impart some cheap authenticity to this fictitious tale. ("Inspired by true events" ---one could say that about almost any movie.) Also, the old-fashioned turntable playing the old-fashioned vinyl records gets so much screen time it deserves a credit. It almost inspired me to go dig mine out of the attic... but not quite.

The late film critic Dwight Macdonald once commented on the somewhat patronizing attitude displayed by French critics towards American cinema: "They seem to regard our movies as interesting specimens of native handicraft, like birch bark canoes." Many Americans seem prone to this also, given some of the comments I've read having recently seen "At Mignight I'll Take Your Soul" and it's follow-up "This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse" (those two titles by the way are absolutely interchangeable). The writer/director/star Jose Mojica Marins gets a lot of credit for this having been "the first Brazilian horror movie" and for having next to no budget; some even feel he's a "visionary" of sorts. Psychotics have visions too but we don't generally pay to see those (although of course in the old days "respectable" people went on guided tours through asylums). I don't care if a given movie is the first of it's kind or the last or in the middle, nor do I care what it cost to make. We can only go by what's in front of us, or at least I only can.

What I saw in front of me on my TV screen (thank my lucky stars I didn't pay to rent or---gasp---buy this) was the most god awful piece of crap I've seen since---I don't know---the last of the "Chucky" series, maybe. I'm not sure where to start; maybe the outlandish premise: Mr Mojica Marins plays an undertaker in some remote village who looks like a fourth-rate vaudeville magician; when he "shocked" villagers by proclaiming he would eat meat on some day that apparently is supposed to be meatless, I half expected him to take off his black top hat, pull out a rabbit and start chomping on it--in fact that would have been more amusing than anything that did occur. This "Ze" wields godlike power in this particular village; it's never clear exactly why this is. One of the movie's many laughably chintzy special effects involves Ze's eyes turning bloodshot whenever he gets annoyed; maybe that puts everybody into a trance a la Svengali or something. Thus people stand around like zombies as Ze goes about whipping people in the face or hacking off fingers with a broken bottle or anything else he feels like doing. He also commits murder with impunity; these scenes begin somewhat promisingly but then peter out. There's an odd tameness to all the proceedings; nothing very scary or exciting or erotic ever happens. Ze spends lots of time deriding religion and daring God to strike him dead and is obsessed with having a son due to "the immortality of blood" or some such. This groping towards some kind of existentialist philosophizing would be more impressive if Ze had any interests other than sneering at people and generally being a jerk. He's a garden-variety bully and only would have merited a few minutes of screen time in a Stephen King flick. In one brief scene Ze admonishes a father to treat his son better but otherwise does nothing to demonstrate he's anything but scum himself.

There are only two styles of acting on display, catatonic and maniacal (Mr. Mojica Marins mostly employs the latter). The only semi-enjoyable character is a deranged gypsy fortune teller who addresses the camera warning the audience not to watch what follows (that's one astute gypsy) and who occasionally pops up to warn Ze of his impending doom. The special effects make, let's say, "Tormented" look like Steven Spielberg. Towards the end a ghost character has some kind of aura that looks like it was drawn on the film itself a la Kenneth Anger; Mojica Marins also resorts to reverse black-and-white for other ghosts. It would've been about as effective if he'd merely had actors dress up in sheets. The sequel was more of the same except for straining credulity even further, if possible. "Corpse" did differ from "Soul" in featuring a color sequence in the middle of Ze dreaming about being in hell. This sequence should be required viewing in every Sunday school in the Christian world; it it's not enough to turn any normal kid into a questioner of dogmatism, then nothing is, or to paraphrase what H. G. Wells wrote about Fritz Lang's "Metropolis": "Either the sequence is hopelessly silly or the afterlife is hopelessly silly, one thing or the other..." Sure, it's fun sometimes when one comes across an "obscure gem" of some kind, although usually that obscurity turns out to be justified. Apparently Mojica Marins has done lots of other work in the following forty years, none of which I am inclined to ferret out. I understand he's a kind of cult figure in Brazil; well that's Brazil then, isn't it. If you see it on some cable movie channel, please follow the fortune teller's advice and don't waste your time. You'd be better off following the Brazilian soap "La Esclava Isaura" (as it's called in Spanish) on Telemundo; there's more unsettling human drama in five minutes of that than in Mr. Mojica Marins' entire opus, or opi?

(Acknowledgements to Talking Heads for musically capturing the theme of this movie.) George Clooney gets better as an actor each time I see him, further away from his slick Doug Ross persona on "ER." In "Michael Clayton" he's the eponymous 45-year-old New York lawyer whose father was a cop and one of whose brothers still is one who used to prosecute criminals but for years has let his talents be put to profitable (and ethically questionable) use by a firm whose clients include a big nasty pesticide company (whose TV ads of course ooze "green"-ness) whose products kill people. At the outset we see Clayton playing cards with some dour Chinese, symbolic of his attempts to keep the various elements of his life in play. (He and his wife have split up and he's in debt due to a failed business venture.) Clooney retains his haunted world-weary look from "Syriana" (minus the beard) and adds the pathos of a man who's been doing his soul-killing work too long and whose gas tank is visibly close to "E." He conveys what Graham Greene in the 1930's described as "not just corruption but the sadness of corruption, a mind in chains." In some scenes one senses that Clayton has a full arsenal of witty and trenchant remarks at his disposal but just can't summon up the needed impetus to make them; he'd clearly rather be somewhere else. His closest (and almost only) human attachment is to his young son who keeps trying to get him to read a certain adventure book. (This book and in particular a depiction of horses will come to loom unexpectedly large.) The best scene for me is when Clayton pulls his car over to reassure his son that he won't grow up to be a loser like one of his uncles (and by implication his father). That desperate urge to be genuinely paternal is something I haven't seen from Clooney before.

The trailer tells you mostly all you need to know about the story, which is not particularly original. What's compelling is the way Clayton and the other characters rationalize their participation in an immoral (or maybe amoral would be more apt) system. Sydney Pollack (whom I actually like better as an actor than as a director) as Clayton's boss uses candor as his "safety valve." ("Fifteen years in," he remonstrates to Clayton at one point, "and I gotta tell you what pays the bills around here?") Indie favorite Tilda Swinton as counsel for the pesticide company uses the business-suit-and-pearl-necklace facade to mask how out of her depth she feels in this "cut-throat" environment. (Near the end when she's forced to grasp that her whole career has been a house of cards, she's visibly shaking.) The chameleon-like Tom Wilkinson has to grapple with the most theatrically written role as the manic-depressive legal-barracuda-turned-crusader (I almost expected him to shout "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it any more" a la "Network") but he carries it off with gritty panache. The minor characters are perfectly cast, which generally is enough. The music, photography and unobtrusive direction (fine debut by veteran screenwriter Tony Gilroy) all combine for the sustained somber yet not hopeless mood.

Just a few quibbles: at times it's unclear how the MacGuffin-like "Document 229" winds up in the possession of various persons, not to mention on occasion why or when something is happening, but nowadays I've made my peace with any plot machination short of the whole thing turning out to be taking place inside someone's head or something. Also, while I'm happy to believe the worst about big nasty corporations, it seems just a bit facile that the Swinton character can pick up a phone and instantly be making arrangements with the blond felons for hire (I found it somewhat hard to tell them apart). But overall I'd say that this and "Eastern Promises" are the two best films I've seen this year. They're both intelligently written verisimilitude-drenched dramas for an adult audience and they trust that audience to have the patience to let momentum develop at the appropriate pace. (Now if it's non-stop gun play and gore you crave, "Resident Evil Extinction" is still playing, also a flick I enjoyed---no "artsy" snob here, folks.) If that cab ride at the end reminds you of the end of "The Graduate"--well, nothing wrong with paying tribute to a classic, is there? ....Finally, don't forget to stop and say hi to the horses in life---may prove to be a "lifesaver"!

This movie reminded me a lot of Costa-Gavras' 1982 "Missing," also about a young American man swallowed up in the internal machinations of a foreign dictatorship with American ties, with family members and others desperately trying to stave off the inevitable unhappy outcome. "Missing" is hands down the better film. Not only is it more compelling with it's human drama and the meticulously accumulated character detail and the gradually revealed horror of what is and has been happening (not to mention better acted, with Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek giving career-best performances), but in various subtle ways it lets you feel what it's like to live in a place where your freedom and maybe your life could end at a moment's notice at the whim of some indifferent functionary. It also makes no bones about "choosing sides." Costa-Gavras was against the neo-fascist regime in Chile and the Nixon administration backing it up, and wanted us to be against it. It was hard for the audience in the early Reagan era not to share the conclusion voiced by Jack Lemmon at the end: "I just thank God we live in a country where people like you can still be put in jail." A quarter of a century later ("post 9-11" and all that) we have a British director with a reputation as a maverick (I haven't seen his other work) who absolutely drops the ball on any kind of larger implications. I mean, this is Pakistan for God's sake---the sponsor of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, the home of A. Q. Khan who was the "Johnny Appleseed" of nuclear prowess in that region, the backer of terrorism against democratic India in Kashmir and, oh yeah, a Bush-backed dictatorship led by a guy who's survived about half a dozen attempts on his life. (Is there an American with any kind of IQ who doubts that we could find Osama Bin Laden in about a week if Musharaf would let us?) Michael Winterbottom finds none of this worth delving into. He chooses to treat the sensationalistic Daniel Pearl case as about as geopolitically significant as a street mugging. We see Mr. Pearl (played as a real schlemiel by Dan Futterman, but I guess that's how it was written) putting off going home with his beautiful pregnant wife so he can get ONE MORE STORY, proceeding with bizarrely naive lack of concern for his own safety---I mean look, I don't like the "Wall Street Journal" but I know they tend to hire very shrewd people----practically begging to get kidnapped. (In one scene a local bigwig asks Pearl about his religion having just accused the Jews of staging 9-11. Guess how Pearl responds. As Leo Rosten once advised: "You don't have to lie. You don't have to tell the truth either. Just keep your mouth shut.") His story as presented could have taken place anywhere in the world. Those "people out there," I guess they're just evil or crazy we're meant to suppose, they just "hate freedom." Meanwhile the heavy-handed tactics employed by the Pakistani security forces just seem to be "business as usual." "Well these are foreigners, they have different ways…." At least Jack Bauer on TV's "24" occasionally displays a few misgivings about torturing people, especially when the results tend to be so dubious.....

There are certainly some things to enjoy in "A Mighty Heart," chiefly the performance by Angelina Jolie as Pearl's wife Mariane, whom I've only seen once recently on C-SPAN but Jolie absolutely has her nailed. I'm puzzled by some of the comments I've read about Jolie's performance---"We always know it's her," etc. Yeah, no kidding we always know it's her. We always knew it was Bette Davis. We always knew it was Meryl Streep (okay, she's still working more or less). A movie fan with any kind of power of imagination can recognize that an actor is so-and-so but still "go with it" enough to enjoy the performance in context. As relentlessly publicized as Jolie is, I still barely recognized her in this. She absolutely lets Mariane Pearl swallow her up. Of course it would have helped if the script (presumably approved by the real Mrs. Pearl) hadn't insisted on her being Superwoman, but Angelina's up for it. When Winterbottom finally lets her have the "big moment" towards the end, even though I was expecting it, I'll confess it "got me," because Angelina delivers the goods, just reaches in and finds that raw agony. COME ON, ACADEMY, JUST GIVE HER THE Oscar ALREADY---look at all the accolades showered upon Forrest Whitaker for chewing up the scenery as Idi Amin. The rest of the cast is good too, especially Will Patton exercising amazing restraint in basically the Charles Cioffi role from "Missing," although he lacks Cioffi's slimy virility. Great cinematography, editing etc. etc., but then there's a certain "floor" of technical expertise we've come to expect from anything with a studio name on it. But ultimately one comes away with this gnawingly unsatisfied sensation. Even on just a de-fanged de-politicized visceral level, one still wonders----"Who exactly was Daniel Pearl and why should we care about him?" If only someone like Tim Roth had played the part….

For you "gorehounds": no, they don't recreate the infamous decapitation video, which is probably just as well, not because of "taste" (Winterbottom doesn't mind showing us a naked guy hanging from a ceiling sweating out his pain and fear) but it would have willy-nilly put "Heart" into "competition" with the latest "Saw" or "Hostel" or whatever other neo-Grand-Guignol crap comes down the pike. I was hoping for greater expressiveness in the characters' reaction shots, though. …..One of the best moments in "Missing" was towards the end with Lemmon and Spacek taking down pictures from the walls of the apartment before going home; that made me cry for the loss of that human being. I would have killed for such a scene in "Heart."