XXY (Lucía Puenzo, Argentina/Spain/France): 56 (Toronto 07)
[Kind of a dancing-bear movie, in that it impresses mostly by virtue of all the obvious mistakes Puenzo deftly avoids. In other words, it's the best I Was a Teenage Hermaphrodite picture you could possibly imagine -- sensitive, low-key, relatively subtle, and buoyed by an excellent (and suitably androgynous) lead performance. Still, the underlying Free To Be You And Me exhortation isn't really that much tastier just because it's gently spoon-fed to us rather than rammed down our collective throat.]

Tehilim (Raphael Nadjari, Israel/France): 43 (Cannes 07)
[Nobody seems to care much about this Israeli-French co-production, and with good reason. Like François Ozon's Under the Sand, Tehilim (the English-language title is Psalms) observes the emotional upheaval that results when a man mysteriously disappears, in this case following a minor car accident. But where Ozon's film was something of a psychological case study, Nadjari is more interested in the less-than-universal question of how and whether various forms of Judaism are equipped to sustain the faithful under such trying circumstances. For those not inherently interested in that particular subject, he doesn't provide much of a way in.]

Flight of the Red Balloon (Hou Hsiao Hsien, France/Taiwan): 53 (Cannes 07)
[No matter how fervently festival heads Gilles Jacob and Thierry Fremaux insist that films programmed in Un Certain Regard shouldn't be thought inferior to those selected for Competition, one can't help but feel apprehensive when a world-class director like Hou Hsiao-hsien winds up among -- let's face it, folks -- the also-rans. Commissioned by the Mus´e d'Orsay, set in Paris, and loosely inspired by Albert Lamorisse's classic short "The Red Balloon," Hou's Flight of the Red Balloon boasts intermittent moments of lyrical beauty and even the occasional hiccup of violent emotion, courtesy of Juliette Binoche. But in its stubborn commitment to patiently observing the mundane and quotidian, it most closely resembles Hou's 2004 film Caf&aecute; Lumière (another special commission set outside of Hou's native Taiwan), which Cannes passed on entirely. Much like the titular balloon, this wisp of a movie wafts gracefully to and fro, untethered to anything remotely Aristotelian. We meet a cute little boy (Simon Iteanu) who spends most of his free time with his Playstation; his harried, bleach-blonde mother (Binoche), who performs voices for a puppet show and is desperately trying to evict a freeloading tenant (Hippolyte Girardot), and the impassive, unfailingly polite Chinese student (Song Fang) who's just been hired as the boy's nanny. Together, they must defuse a dirty suitcase bomb hidden at the top of the Eiffel Tower...or maybe they'll just make tea, wander the streets, get the piano tuned, talk long-distance to an ex-boyfriend who's now in Montreal, etc. For me, a little of this unemphatic, anti-dramatic naturalism goes a pretty long way -- I'm still hoping for an entire movie by Hou as impassioned and beguiling as the lovely first section of his last feature, Three Times. But if you're content with a surpassingly thin slice of contemporary Parisian life, as viewed by an outsider, Flight of the Red Balloon will likely be a whole lot cheaper than round-trip airfare.]

My Blueberry Nights (Wong Kar Wai, Hong Kong): 50 (Cannes 07)
[As I'd suspected, this year's Cannes opener would have made an ideal test case for my Wack Experiment, had I somehow managed to avoid hearing of its very existence. Its English dialogue notwithstanding, My Blueberry Nights is immediately identifiable as a Wong Kar-wai picture: same bruised romanticism, same smeary neon visuals (courtesy of D.P. Darius Khondji this time), same totemic use of music (Cat Power's "The Greatest," Otis Redding's "Try a Little Tenderness"), same emphasis on the heartbroken loner. If anything, it's a little too textbook WKW -- such a concise, accessible summation of his methods and themes that it feels lazy at best, opportunistic at worst.

Wong's last feature, 2046, was sometimes described as an extended remix of In the Mood for Love. Set almost entirely in bars and cafes, My Blueberry Nights resembles an extended American remake of Chung King Express -- specifically, of its second half, in which pixie chanteuse Faye Wang engages in serial semi-flirtation with a mopey customer played by Tony Leung. This time, it's the fella (Jude Law) who's behind the counter and the singer-turned-actress (Norah Jones) who's just been dumped. In lieu of Chung King's Dear John letter, a set of keys is left for someone to claim; hesitant bonding takes place not over coffee but over late-night slices of blueberry pie, with which our heroine, Elizabeth, becomes metaphorically obsessed after discovering that nobody ever orders a slice. Toss a couple scoops of ice cream on my abject loneliness, wouldja?

Trouble is, these two cuties are so plainly meant for each other that the movie is in danger of ending happily before it's even begun. And so Elizabeth abruptly leaves New York and spends a year traveling cross-country, working various dead-end jobs and meeting a variety of harmless eccentrics, including David Strathairn as a mournful drunk, Rachel Weisz as Strathairn's estranged wife (who has precisely two modes of speech: Shrill Harangue and Endless Plaintive Monologue), and Natalie Portman as the least convincing poker pro ever to have her four cowboys busted by a miracle gutshot straight flush. And lest we wonder what Lizzie is thinking over the course of this journey of self-discovery, her occasional postcards to Law's Jeremy spell out her thoughts in over-emphatic detail.

For a while, the sheer sensuousness of Wong and Khondji's soft-focus imagery holds all objections at bay; I spent much of the initial half hour ignoring the clunky dialogue and concentrating on the dazzling colors and textures. (Video's getting less and less ugly, but it'll never look like this.) Eventually, though, one can't help but notice that Blueberry Nights amounts to little more than Wong's reheated leftovers. Maybe a more arresting central performance would have helped -- Jones has a lovely, expressive face, but she lacks the charismatic force necessary to keep us interested in this fundamentally passive woman, whose innermost thoughts too often sound like chapters from a self-help manual. Applause at the first press screening was correspondingly muted and respectful; I'll wager this film will ultimately be seen as a transitional stumble in Wong's oeuvre.]

Water Lilies (Céline Sciamma, France): W/O (Toronto 07)
[As close to a purely generic art film as I've seen in some time, though of course I can't say whether it veers in some less hackneyed direction after reel two. What I saw was practically machine-tooled, as oppressive in its own judiciously restrained way as any Hollywood romcom; the dynamic between insecure, watchful Skinny Girl, experiencing her first pangs of unbidden desire, and the haughty, secretly fearful Beauty Queen who initially uses her couldn't possibly be more blunt or familiar. Didn't help that none of the three leads can manage more than one emotion.]

Alexandra (Alexander Sokurov, Russia/France): 32 (Cannes 07)
[I've never understood Sokurov's appeal and apparently never will; even his best-known film, Russian Ark, struck me as little more than a very impressive stunt. His latest film advances the sure-to-be-controversial thesis that war is bad but old women are good, sending a feisty octogenarian (famed opera singer Galina Vishnevskaya) to the Chechen front to visit her grandson, a Russian officer. That's about it, really. She peeks inside tanks and tents; she buys treats for the men in her grandson's unit; she bemoans the state of things in conversation with another elderly woman who lives in the region. Apart from bleaching most of the color from the image -- a fairly common ploy these days -- Sokurov refrains from his trademark visual distortions, putting all of his eggs in the crinkled, careworn basket that is Vishnevskaya's face.]

Boarding Gate (Olivier Assayas, France): 48 (Cannes 07)
[The last time Olivier Assayas attempted a thriller, his fluid, sinuous camerawork and the cast's intense performances were very nearly swamped by a surfeit of philosophical, theoretical, technological and psychosexual implications. Unlike demonlover, however, Assayas' latest film, Boarding Gate, doesn't seem to have much of anything on its mind. Asia Argento, more restrained than usual, plays Sandra, a young woman with a history of masochistic behavior; as the film opens, she visits her former lover, Miles (Michael Madsen), a business tycoon who used to regularly send Sandra out to ply information from clients and competitors, using, shall we say, whatever means necessary. If only Boarding Gate itself were even half that sordid. Instead, Assayas serves up a surprisingly lackluster series of betrayals, chases and narrow escapes, distinguished only by his sharp eye for color and his penchant for letting half the visual field remain out of focus. The action moves from Paris to Beijing, several characters wind up dead, and Kim Gordon makes a self-conscious cameo as some sort of mysterious fixer, all of which would be sufficient were this some straight-to-vid throwaway starring Misty Mundae and Gary Busey...or, hell, Asia Argento and Michael Madsen. But Assayas never seems remotely invested in this nonsense -- not even in a subversive, strictly intellectual way. Should I annoy my friend Zach by suggesting that this is one flight you're better off missing?

Love Songs (Christophe Honoré, France): 42 (Cannes 07)
[Well, it's official: Seeing movies without knowing who made them does indeed purify the viewing experience. This morning's Competition screening, Love Songs, turned out to be a musical -- a genre rare enough, even in France, that you can't help but mentally designate the project a curiosity: "So-and-So attempts a musical." In this case, however, thanks to a retro-Godardian credit sequence featuring nothing but surnames (and no actual credits of any kind), I couldn't figure out who'd directed the thing, which freed me from struggling to incorporate this film into a known oeuvre. Instead, I was able to look at it simply and unconditionally as a musical -- which made it easier to conclude, as I soon did, that it was rather a bad musical, replete with repetitive yet forgettable songs, halfhearted stabs at offhanded choreography, and cozy narcissism masquerading as ardor. Christophe Honoré turned out to be the guilty party, which makes perfect retrospective sense; I skipped his last two films, Ma Mère and Dans Paris, but his 2002 debut, 17 Times Cécile Cassard, struck me as a similar exercise in empty style. Furthermore, why do people keep hiring Louis Garrel, who has yet to force a credible human emotion past the armor of his self-regard? That said, I do wonder how I might have responded to 8 Women -- a French musical I loved -- had I not known it was François Ozon's 8 Women.

Married Life (Ira Sachs, USA): 50 (NYFF 07)
[Having seen only the first two episodes of "Mad Men" -- which were quite good; just got distracted and haven't gone back yet -- I can't join the plethora of folks who've been using AMC's hit series as a club with which to beat down Sachs' superficially similar portrait of mid-20th mores. But no great loss, as Married Life is plenty banal even by comparison to domestic melodramas of the very era it's ostensibly deconstructing. Hard to go completely wrong with Pierce Brosnan, Patricia Clarkson, Chris Cooper and Rachel McAdams as your primary quartet, and all four actors do solid if unspectacular work; they're let down, alas, by a humdrum tale of multiple infidelities and by a director with no discernible point of view. There's no juice here, basically -- the movie just plods competently from one familiar, mildly diverting scenario to the next. Intermittent narration by Brosnan's character suggests we're seeing events from his once-jaded perspective, but it's strictly an expository device, no doubt derived from the British source novel. None of the wit and sophistication promised by the clip-art opening credits sequence quite materializes; none of the characters is as devious or mysterious as (s)he appears. It's all quite tame, really -- so much so that I almost wonder whether that's somehow meant to be the point. But Occam's Razor suggests simple mediocrity.]

Snow Angels (David Gordon Green, USA): 58 (Sundance 07)
[Snow Angels, too, seems to have garnered considerable support, albeit in some cases from critics who might as well be director David Gordon Green's mother. ("Point blank: I am a fan and will always celebrate his work." Oooookay then.) Those hoping for a return to the woozy lyricism of George Washington and All the Real Girls will likely be disappointed: Formally, this is Green's most conventional work to date, with only a handful of touches that are recognizably his own.

But what really troubled me was the film's miserablist worldview, which suggests that happiness more or less disintegrates as children grow into adults. At least, that's he only conclusion I can draw from the way that the narrative (adapted from a novel by Stewart O'Nan) juxtaposes teenage puppy love (Michael Angarano and Olivia Thirlby do adorably awkward emotional cartwheels around each other) with the crumbling marriage of former high-school sweethearts Kate Beckinsale and Sam Rockwell. Opening with two mysterious offscreen gunshots, the movie inexorably builds to a conclusion that's neither cathartic nor insightful -- merely bleak. Life sucks; enjoy it while you still have pimples and braces.]

Chicago 10 (Brett Morgen, USA): 74 (Sundance 07)
[Like poor beleaguered Leonard Shelby in Memento, festivalgoers tend to know who they are and where they're going, but have only the haziest recollection of where they've just been. I'm writing these words roughly a day and a half into Sundance 2007, having seen or sampled nine films thus far, and already yesterday's titles feel like ancient history -- especially now that the blogosphere chews up and spits out pictures within scant hours of their world premiere. At this point, does anybody still care what I thought of the opening night film, Chicago 10, which has already been widely dismissed as interesting-but-flawed, a context-free rehash of well-trod historical ground?

Hope so, 'cause I'm not about to ignore the festival's highlight-to-date just because everybody else rushed headlong to miss the boat. As you've no doubt heard by now, director Brett Morgen (The Kid Stays in the Picture) audaciously mixes archival footage of the protests that turned the 1968 Democratic National Convention into a "police state" (per Walter Cronkite) with animated recreations of the "Chicago 7" trial that followed a year later. (Adding Bobby Seale and the two defense attorneys brings the total to ten.) Some critics have treated the use of rotoscoped animation and celebrity voice work -- Hank Azaria as Abbie Hoffman and Allan Ginsburg; Liev Schreiber as William Kunstler; an unrecognizable Roy Scheider as the judge -- as if it were merely a stunt, Morgen's way of reaching out to the kids or something. In fact, it's simply an inspired solution to a difficult problem. What Morgen has done with Chicago 10 is truly remarkable, perhaps unprecedented: He's made a historical documentary that takes place entirely in the present tense. And to that end, he's sacrificed exposition for immediacy, thereby trading something movies don't do very well in favor of the medium's greatest strength.

Critics, as usual, have misunderstood. David Poland, for example, complains that the movie has "no context, no perspective, and no clear message." Two out of three ain't bad: Chicago 10 deliberately eschews context and perspective, the better to simply plunge the viewer into the maelstrom, as if these fires raged last week rather than four decades ago. Morgen's message, however, while implicit, couldn't be much clearer. In lieu of a "comprehensive," "dispassionate," "balanced" portrait of the most explosive instance of American dissidence of the past half-century (at least), he gives us something much more valuable: a call to arms. Yes, the movie is blatantly stacked in favor of its hero-agitators, but it's also impossible to watch Chicago 10 without becoming acutely aware of the vacuum at the center of the current anti-war movement, which has prompted countless marches and demonstrations but has produced no Abbie Hoffmans or Jerry Rubins. And it's Morgen's refusal to offer any kind of retrospective take on what we're seeing -- o give his doc the propulsive forward motion of a fictional narrative -- that prompts us to make our own disheartening comparisons between past and present. (He does nudge us a bit with source music from the likes of Eminem and Rage Against The Machine.)

The animated trial sequences, then, are simply a means of avoiding the talking-heads recollections that would otherwise have been a necessary evil. (I accepted these interludes in much the same spirit as I do the production stills employed in the restoration of the 1954 A Star Is Born, which cover sequences that survive only in soundtrack form.) I'm less hrilled about the use of animation to recreate scenes for which we have no public record, such as a diner confrontation between Hoffman and some Chicago cops, and by the way that the use of motion-control rotoscoping inspires the animators to overindulge in sweeping camera movements just for the hell of it. But Chicago 10 is vital and electrifying in a way that truly honors the events it depicts. If you're looking for the most objective and detailed account imaginable, pick up a damn book. That's what they're for.]

Chop Shop (Ramin Bahrani, USA): 69 (Toronto 07)
[One of those films -- Bahrani's debut, Man Push Cart, was another -- in which simply watching the protagonist hustle to and fro at his/her menial vocation delivers all the narrative urgency you could require, so that the plot, once it rears its formulaic head, feels like a clunky distraction. Fortunately, this time Bahrani mostly squelches his melodramatic instincts, so that the whole my-sister's-a-hooker thing (spoiler!) never quite overwhelms the movie's studiously naturalistic tone. I wish he'd found slightly better actors for the leads -- the main kid looks great but sometimes gets a tad overemphatic with the dialogue, and his best pal seems to have wandered into Willets Point straight from a Mouseketeer audition -- but the ramshackle milieu picks up the slack; the movie only falters when its scrambling, grifting, finagling little dynamo slows down, which isn't often. Bonus points for a perfectly judged ending, as unexpected as it is immensely satisfying.]

It's a Free World... (Ken Loach, UK/Italy/Germany/Spain): 51 (Toronto 07)
[Quite absorbing so long as it sticks to the humdrum details of managing an immigrant-labor workforce, with occasional astringent detours into the chaotic home life of the ambitious, foul-mouthed bottle blonde in charge. Alas, Loach's agenda steamrolls its way through the second half, transforming Angie from well-meaning opportunist to evil, self-serving Exploiter of Human Misery, then turning the tables via one of the least convincing criminal acts ever dramatized, complete with a socioeconomic lecture from one of the masked thugs. I rather like the notion of gradually revealing our ostensible heroine to be the film's villain, but Loach pushes the conceit into truly risible territory, then underlines the error by having Angie's business partner Rose do a Jiminy Cricket. Shame, really -- it starts off so well.]

George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead (George A. Romero, USA): 49 (Toronto 07)
[Turns out there was a reason Romero only made one of these per decade -- it apparently takes him a good ten years to think up a worthy idea. Here, with no time to incubate, he just serves up a feeble rehash of The Blair Witch Project, hammering the ubiquity of consumer video into the dirt -- two different characters say something along the didactic lines of "But then if it's not on camera I guess it doesn't really happen" -- and reducing his lurching undead symbols to mere boogeymen. Never scary or disturbing, rarely insightful (I'm not convinced that Romero even knows what YouTube is); it is often rather funny, which is its saving grave, but how much of the comedy is intentional is open to debate. Memorable images: 1 (the pool). Tolerable actors: 0.]

Caramel (Nadine Labaki, Lebanon/France): W/O (Toronto 07)
[Didn't they only just announce the Sex and the City movie a month or so ago? And yet here it is already, except SJP and the gang have been replaced by a gaggle of Lebanese beauticians and the Miranda character is out of the closet. Bubbly, schematic, faintly dull.]

Cassandra's Dream (Woody Allen, UK): 53 (Toronto 07)
[Further proof that his failed dramas are much less painful than his failed comedies, although a few scenes inspired far more (clearly derisive) laughter than did the entirety of Jade Scorpion. Farrell is the greatest liability here, twitching up a stylized storm that bears no relation to the more controlled performances of McGregor and Sally Hawkins; his work really needed Guy Maddin intertitles. Story, meanwhile, is yet another anguished crime-and-punishment melodrama, retilling ground that Allen tore up only two years ago with Match Point. Still, individual moments -- the seduction, the murder -- work beautifully, and the movie as a whole has a pleasing shape and rhythm.]

Still Life (Jia Zhang-Ke, Hong Kong/China): 56 (Toronto 06)
[Formally magnificent, dramatically inert. Ring any bells? Jia kicked off his career with one of recent Asian cinema's most memorable characters, so it's a mystery why he's been content ever since to position stultified zombies before ironically imposing land- and cityscapes. Here, I found myself beginning to actively resent the skeletal narrative for distracting me from Jia's sensational photo album of the Three Gorges region in flux. There are choices made here that are effectively meaningless -- you could digitally replace Zhao Tao (as a woman seeking her husband to ask for a divorce) with shots of Gong Li from The Story of Qiu Ju and it wouldn't change the movie one iota. (Actually, that's not really true: Qiu Ju has a personality.) I opted to skip Dong, Jia's new documentary, shot in tandem in many of the same locations, but now I'm thinking that one sounds more up my alley. And it's shorter, too.]

Summer Palace (Lou Ye, China/France): 42 (Cannes 06)
[Apart from an immensely tedious Paraguayan Beckett knockoff -- I saw the first half hour or so, over half of which consists of a single static shot of two old people bickering at each other in a hammock about 100 yards away from the camera -- the only other film screening for the press today is Summer Palace, the fourth feature by Chinese director Lou Ye, whose Purple Butterfly was indifferently received here three years ago. When the Cannes lineup was announced, many noted, with varying levels of surprise and rancor, that this is the only Asian picture in competition -- Greencine's David Hudson went so far as to say that the festival had "snubbed" the entire continent. "Snubbed," however, implies that worthy films were seen and rejected...which now seems kinda iffy, since Summer Palace, the one they did made room for, is a snooze and a half. Another star-crossed romance set against the turbulent backdrop of Chinese history -- in this case, the student protests of the late '80s and the following decade's gradual modernization -- it's predicated on a case of l'amour fou that Lou merely asserts rather than dramatizes, resulting in two hours and 20 minutes of undifferentiated grope 'n' mope. I can't recall ever seeing so much sex and nudity in a mainland Chinese production, but even that initial frisson quickly dissipates. Lou has a sharp eye, but narrative economy and compelling characterizations continue to elude him.]

Teeth (Mitchell Lichtenstein, USA): 42 (Sundance 07)
[I don't understand why some people are excited by Teeth, Mitchell Lichtenstein's Troma-style tale of an aggressively virginal young woman (Jess Weixler) with vagina dentata. The film delivers as many bloody penile stumps as anybody could possibly desire, but that's all it delivers -- assign the premise to 100 random aspiring filmmakers and 96 of them would turn in a movie exactly like this one, though perhaps with fewer shots of newly dickless males bellowing directly into the lens. AUUUGGGGHHHH! AUUUGGGGHHHH! Zzzzz....]

Woman on the Beach (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea): 66 (NYFF 06)
[Not sure I see how this is significantly more accessible than Hong's last few pictures, apart from the absence of his trademark anti-eroticism. (He practically fades to black whenever jiggyness commences, sparing us the spectacle of his characters methodically grinding away.) People everywhere are comparing it to Rohmer, and while the tone is unmistakably different -- less playful, more sour -- it's true that Hong, like Rohmer, seems inclined to make the same film over and over again, with minute variations; this one is basically Turning Gate crossed with Woman Is the Future of Man, much livelier than the latter but not quite as bracing as the former. The been-there-winced-at-that factor kept my enthusiasm in low gear, but it's encouraging to see Hong acknowledge that women can be more than just passive receptacles for male cluelessness; given that Ko Hyeon-gang is reportedly a smiling superstar on Korean television, I'm guessing her moody, semi-calculating performance here must create the same sort of cognitive dissonance as Jennifer Aniston's bizarre passivity in Friends With Money. A slightly frustrating film: sharp, incisive, often funny, very well acted, yet it still feels like Hong coasting down a shallow grade; I suspect he could make one of these every three months without breaking a sweat. Tale of Cinema wasn't quite as effective for me (though I need to see it again), but its formal risktaking was a lot more interesting.]