"The mind can be thought of as a type of space, in fact, a psychospace. Just as space is occupied by material objects, so psychospace is occupied by thought objects. It is every bit as important to fill the psychospace of the mind with useful and wholesome thought-objects as it is to fill the space of our space-time continuum with good and useful objects. For just as the bodies in space determine the nature of space, so the kind of thoughts we load into our mind daily condition the whole of our thought world. When one considers the programs of 'chaff' which are unloaded onto the unsuspecting populace daily by means of television and other media, one can hardly be surprised at the signs of decay rampant in our society" (Dr. A.E. Wilder-Smith, The Time Dimension, p. 78, The Word For Today Publishers, Tel: 800-272-9673).

With that in mind, The J Man begins separating the cinematic wheat from the cinematic chaff in our new Movie Reviews site.

The 13th Warrior: Finally! A Hollywood movie in which Whites, and not Arabs, are the terrorists. It must be noted, of course, the movie is set in the 10th century. . .but beggars can't be choosers, as they say. Anyway, a clan of cannibalistic Whites are running around in bear costumes terrorizing the Viking lands. The Norsemen are so desperate, they even recruit an Arab to help defend the north lands. The plot is a mix of semi-fact and total fiction: equally loosely based on the real-life adventure of Ahmed Ibn Fahdlan, an Arab poet who traveled north to the Viking lands in the 10th century, and the Old English epic poem Beowulf. White Christians may be shocked to see their ancestors depicted as the pagan idolaters they once were, with their Islamic helper the only monotheist in the Great White North. This juxtaposition sends a subtle message that Islam and Christianity have a lot in common, and is a reflection of the (unfortunate) world-wide trend to ecumenicism. . .witness Billy Graham's recent comments that he felt no call to evangelize Muslims. **

187: Samuel L. Jackson *stars* as an inner-city high school teacher/Christ-figure who is the victim of a vicious attack from a nail-wielding gangsta student. Starting over at a new school, Jackson's character is able to resist all temptations (including the seductions of a female Chicano pupil) save one: the temptation to administer vengeance. Confronted with a new batch of bad seed kids, Jackson's character does not leave vengeance to the Lord, but chooses to pay it out himself. A fairly interesting and thoughtful (for Hollywood) film, but movie would have been better minus its Catholic shadings. ***

21 Grams: This is one of the better movies of recent years, and to reveal too much of the plot would do a disservice to those who have yet to see the film. Let us only say an *accident* links 3 characters of disparate backgrounds and sets them on a grim collision course. The story is not told in chronological order, and while this recent script novelty is already becoming a cinematic cliche, it works here, though not for the grand metaphysical reasons the filmmaker probably had in mind. No, splintering this dour tale doesn't add any glossy supernatural perspective, but it does serve to blur the film's weakest motif. . .there is a *revenge* thread that runs through the film, and by delaying its full revelation, its implausibility doesn't dull most of this otherwise intelligent movie's preceding two hours of emotional power. The power results from the filmmaker's careful study of the 3 main characters as they futilely attempt to mend their broken lives through a *born-again* experience. To the great credit of the script, the film offers, through the struggles of the 3 main characters, an impartial examination of the world's 3 dominant paths to the *born-again* experience: the scientific, the psychological and the spiritual. Some critics complained the film is too drearily fatalistic (ignoring the tiny glimmer of hope offered to at least one of the characters at the end). . .and some Christians have griped that the spiritual point of view is ignorant of authentic Christianity. The J Man supposes one could oppose the film's fatalism from one's own subjective standards of art, yet if one judges the film's pessimistic assessment of the human condition from the objective standard of the Bible, one will be forced to recognize that this film agrees with the Lord Jesus Christ's conclusion that "strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it." As for the Christian's objection, this, too, may be dismissed, as the character (marvelously acted by Benicio Del Toro) who represents the spiritual quest is a close reflection of one of the types of personalities our Lord Jesus Christ Himself tragically depicted in His parable of the sower ("But he that received the seed into stony places, the same is he that heareth the word, and anon with joy receiveth it; Yet hath he not root in himself, but dureth for a while: for when tribulation or persecution ariseth because of the word, by and by he is offended"). 21 Grams is a sober, balanced picture of 3 empty souls in tribulation, each desperate for a crutch to carry them through hard times. ****

5x2: This is the kind of vague, post-structuralist claptrap that gives French cinema a bad name. More specifically, it's a cut-and-paste thesis on the pathology of marriage. . .five little vignettes, told in reverse-chronology, from a broken relationship. . .a union of two uninteresting people, Mr. & Mrs. French Everyman and Everywoman. This thing is so vague, with the couple never discussing their relationship, but either analyzing it in analogy (as they do in one of the vignettes as they watch the interaction of a gay couple), or leaving the viewer to his own private interpretation from the other vignettes, it would make Hemingway's *Hills Like White Elephants* seem heavy-handed and obvious. There are, of course, some sex scenes to break the tedium, but the actors are as uninteresting physically as their characters. . .the husband is skinnier than the women he beds, and the wife is one of those big-boned gals with a man-ish face and large, floppy breasts. . .there's really nothing to see here. *

8MM: This one about a private investigator hired to find out if a snuff film is real or fake is fairly interesting until the PI catches up with the porno baddies--who are some of the most ridiculous characters in recent film history. Particularly silly is the "Dino Velvet" character, a sort of skinny underground S/M Orson Welles, embarrassingly acted by the same guy who played the taciturn killer in Fargo. The film also takes more than a couple of cheap shots at Christianity (examples: the perv who commissioned the snuff film is named "Christian," and the porn actor who does the killing is a Christian Mama's boy). **

About Schmidt: After his wife of 42 years dies, a 66 year old emotionally wooden man (recently retired from *Woodmen Insurance*) gradually realizes he was a failure as husband, father and human being. . .he tries to salvage his wasted life by saving his about-to-be-married daughter from a similar fate. . .he fails, mainly because it is far too late in the game for him to start playing the concerned father. . .but, in a subplot that some might think a bit too cute, the old man does find redemption, of sorts, by sending $22 and one confessional letter per month to a starving 6 year old Negro orphan boy in Africa. Well, this really is a fine film, despite the aforementioned cuteness (which ends in tear-jerking sentimentality). . .and despite the plot, which may be a little too predictable. . .and one might quibble that the supporting characters are a little too cartoonish (there's an idiotic future son-in-law and his *wacky* family, which takes the movie, at times, onto a weird Meet The Parents detour from its generally deadpan comic route on the protagonist's road to discover the answer to the eternal question: Who am I?). Jack Nicholson *stars*. . .and he does a rather remarkable job of shutting down the *star* charisma and playing the old man, for the most part, as the semi-bitter, semi-sweet, sad, doughy old dweeb that the character is. Not quite a great movie, but one of the better Amerikan tales of *quiet lives of desperation.* ***

Adaptation: Clever film about insecure screenwriter struggling to adapt best-selling orchid book. . .the screenwriter (in a memorable performance by Nicolas Cage, who actually plays dual roles. . . the timid writer and his reckless, confident twin brother) has lofty artistic ambitions for his adaptation: "I don't want to cram in sex or guns or car chases. You know? Or characters learning profound life lessons. . .I mean, the book isn't like that, and life isn't like that. It just isn't." Of course, that is exactly how his screenplay turns out (and even includes a Deus ex Machina ending, which violates one of the fundamental commandments of a screenwriting guru who thunders literary pronouncements like a second-rate stereotype Old Testament God at a writing seminar which Cage's writer's-blocked character attends in desperation). Adaptation is a split movie, alternating between the story of the hapless writer and the movie-within-a-movie of his finished screenplay. . .which centers on the increasingly bizarre relationship between the author of the orchid book and the book's central figure, a White trash horticulturist. The theme which glues the two movies together is that all the characters, whether *real* or in the screenplay, are trying to be something they are not. . .they are attempting personal adaptation. . .this allows the filmmakers to debunk Darwinian thought (as they did in their previous film, Being John Malkovich). . .the concept of evolutionary adaptation states that over the course of time, species modify their phenotypes in ways that permit them to succeed in their environment. . .basically, the theory of evolution rests on the principle life could not survive without adaptation. . .this movie posits that we are what we are, and we are what we have always been. . .it is impossible to change our nature. . .or, as the Bible says: "there is nothing new under the sun." On a broader scale, this movie skewers the Hollywood film industry as a hapless dinosaur, totally incapable of making any artistic adaptation, doomed to churn out the same formulaic dreck over and over and over again (the sex, guns, car chases, etc.), with the only exception being *mutant* films, such as this one. . .ah, if only the genes that produced this Hollywood mutation could be passed on to other filmmakers. ****

The Addiction: Philosophy student (played by indie girl Lili Taylor) studies nature of evil, but her real class begins after she is attacked and infected by a vampire. At her graduation party, she literally spits what she has learned into the faces of her teachers. No one is immune to evil, there are no *innocent* victims. We are all collaborators. "O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" (Romans 7:24). Regrettably, the answer revealed in the final scene is clouded in director Abel Ferrara's Catholic mysticism. ***

A.I.: Strangely unimpressive fairy tale from Steven Spielberg. The storyline is as simple as the children's classic Pinocchio, in which the wooden toy wishes to become human. Indeed, it is the Pinocchio story which inspires the hero of A.I., the first robot child who similarly longs to be turned into a real boy so that he might win his *mother's* love. Perhaps taking this simple story and inflating it into a sci-fi gargantuan with the tens of millions of dollars of computer animations and cinematic special effects is what robs it of the original's charm. It's all too much. The little robot boy seems insignificant compared to the futuristic mega worlds Spielberg presents on the big screen. The little robot boy's saga is told in 3 increasingly spectacular sections: the first, and most effective, rather quietly recounts the development of the robot child and the tragic circumstances of the family that *adopts* him. The second section explodes with the robot boy's banishment from human society into a terrifyingly loud, violent, throw-the-robots-to-the-lions doom world. The movie concludes with the robot boy's eerie journey through 2000 years of desolation and a Frank J. Tipler Physics of Immortality resurrection of the both the robot boy and his *mother.* In the end, this movie is a diversion from itself. It's a small story told too loud and too big. **

Almost Famous: Sickly sweet rock 'n' roll fairy tale about boy wonder music journalist who travels around with mediocre rock band and discovers that nymphet girl fairy dust is the alchemical agent that transforms guitar chords into Pop Mythology. . .or something like that. How such a lightweight nothing of a movie could garner all the critical acclaim that this one did is beyond The J Man. On the surface, it all seems rather harmless. . .but then again, you have to wonder about the lingering effects on the subconcious of all the adolescent boys who watch the scene in which Anna Paquin, Bijou Phillips and Fairuza Balk flit around in their underwear trying to seduce the boy wonder writer. . .perhaps they will give up their air guitars for air word processors? So maybe something good can come from this celluloid syrup after all. **

Am�lie: Huge international hit is expertly crafted eye candy. . .there is no denying the film's exceptional artistry. . .each scene is perfectly colored and framed. . .and the cartoon-like script, about a shy, nutty French girl who secretly engineers happiness for the assorted Parisian losers who surround her, before finally working a little magic in her own life, is *cute* & *clever.* Expertly crafted eye candy. . .but it's superficial characters, who are really nothing more than flesh puppets, render this film not art-for-art's sake, but cute-for-cute's sake and leave it inferior to the similar black-and-white French eye candy film Girl On A Bridge, which offered far more interesting characters. **

American Beauty: Click here for Review. ****

American History X: The Redemption of a Skinhead as performed by Edward Norton is certainly an impressive achievement. Norton's eyes first shine with Luciferian intensity as he brutally stomps out the life of a Black thug, then burn with tears of repentance after he fully realizes the strange fruit of hate: blood from his younger brother's corpse draining into a urinal in a shabby high school restroom. This glorious Amerikan tragedy is not without its flaws: the Black characters are superficially--and in the case of the prison clown who befriends the skinhead--even stereotypically rendered. . .and the skinhead's father, who is gradually revealed as an Adam of neo-Nazism, is an ugly and too-simple scapegoat in an otherwise intelligent meditation on racialism. The great surprise of the film is that it is Edward Furlong (in the role of the younger brother), and not Edward Norton, who emerges wearing the Actor's Crown. Furlong is perfect in his presentation of the contemporary White youth. Adrift in a vacuous culture, Furlong's character drops into-and-out-of White supremacism in the same nihilist fashion as one engages and disengages from any other Amerikan subculture these days. When there is nothing noble to believe in, any diversion from stultifying McAmerikanism will appeal. 1.5 MB QT movie clip. ****

American Psycho: A surprisingly dull adaptation of one of the greatest American novels of all-time. The novel was a wicked satire of the Amerikan Way of Life, which came to full fruition during the dark decade of Ronald Reagan and featured Amerika's complete submission to See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Fear No Evil Consumerism--that sick Amerikan tendency to enjoy delicious living (designer clothes, $200 haircuts, health clubs, and where a reservation at a trendy restaurant is seen as the full measure of human worth) while pretending such problems as poverty and the homeless do not exist. In this way, Amerikan hedonism is much more dishonest than the fascism of Nazi Germany. Hitler fully acknowledged German outcasts. He branded them as *useless eaters* and developed a clear government policy to deal with them: extermination. The Amerikan Way, as established by Ronald Reagan, is to ignore the problem (the Amerikan der fuhrer on the homeless: "Well, the damn thing is, it's been so exaggerated. And most of the few who really are homeless are of the type of people that have made that choice"). Even now, as the presidential election of 2000 is upon us, our new generation of Reagan-esque politicians refuse to discuss the real issues which are most important to the future of the nation: race relations, the alarming growth in economic disparity and the new segregation between rich and poor. Instead, our cardboard Reagans distract the masses with trivia about prescription drug plans. But enough of depressing reality, back to the movie review. In American Psycho, hedonistic Amerika is summed in the character of Patrick Bateman, the uberkonsumer who destroys any obstacle to his vanity that crosses his path. . .even an offense as trivial as having a more elegant business card is enough to trigger Bateman's sociopathic rage. The movie does succeed in capturing all the absurd and shallow McAmerikanisms, complete even down to cultural nadirs like Huey Lewis and Whitney Houston. But watching Christian Bale play Patrick Bateman as he lectures two whores he is about to kill on the deeper meanings of Whitney Houston's cover of The Greatest Love is just not as much fun as it should have been. It's all too dry. It would seem the filmmaker was so concerned with expressing the soul-lessness of Bateman, the novel's black comic soul has been cut out. Fight Club, though marred by an unsatisfactory ending, was more successful in maintaining a comic soul while presenting a representation of soul-less Amerika. *

Animal Factory: Routine prison flick about frail pretty boy (Edward Furlong) who is taught the jailhouse ropes by wise old convict (Willem Dafoe). The screenplay tries to hint at *complex* feelings on the part of Dafoe's character for Furlong's character (semi-saintly, semi-homoerotic), but for the most part this one is just a bunch of actors mumbling a lot of Hollywood convictese about rape and respect and scoring easy prison jobs--all the usual stuff you've seen before in prison flicks. What makes this one (barely) worth watching are a couple of cameo performances by: 1) Tom *Roseanne's Ex-Husband* Arnold as a southern fried pervert who would like to go the whole nine yards with Furlong, and 2) (and really the only real reason to get this movie), the great Mickey Rourke as Furlong's drag queen cell mate. Rourke is only on screen for about 5 minutes (always busy filing his neon green painted fingernails), but his monologue (which he wrote himself and delivers through a front-toothless mouth and pursed, cherry red lipsticked lips) about a dream trip to Paris, France (complete with French hotties fetching him caf� au lait) is a MUST-SEE. Movie rating: ** Rourke rating: *****

The Anniversary Party: Written and directed by actors Alan Cumming and the Great Jennifer Jason Leigh, the movie is, one supposes, an insider's take on Life In Tinsel Town. Set during a Hollywood couple's (Leigh and Cumming, who looks too much like Pee Wee Herman to take seriously as the husband of JJL) sixth anniversary party, everything starts out fairly routine, with hosts and guests (an ensemble cast featuring such Hollywood mini-*stars* as Parker Posey, John C. Reilly, Jennifer Beals, Kevin Kline, Phoebe Cates and Jane Adams, a pasty, emaciated stick-figure of an actress, who, incredibly, flits about semi-nude for most of the movie) saying all the right things, with the exception of the occasional faux pas. The opening half of the film is a very light jab at Hollywood egotism and narcissism. The drama of the second half of the film, when one must assume screenwriters Cumming and Leigh meant the action to heat up, is triggered when one of the guests gives the semi-happy couple an envelope full of ecstasy pills as an anniversary gift. However, the characters' drug-induced shocking revelations aren't all that shocking. The film is too soft in the first half to be effective satire, and too tame in the second half to be either scandalous or dramatic. In the end, the movie seems to be nothing more than a moderately entertaining vanity project. **

Any Given Sunday: Old school football coach (Al Pacino) tries to teach selfish young QB about team play. Yawn. Hard to believe the great Oliver Stone directed this snoozer. The game sequences were touted as being ferocious and realistic, but they had the same kooky, amateurish feel as those in The Waterboy (and The Waterboy's were supposed to be kooky). Stone borrowed a lot of material from Malamud's baseball novel The Natural, including a bizarre variation of The Natural's eyeball-rolling-on-the-floor bit. Stone also continued his trend of putting cult/conspiracy symbols in his movies (for example, he uses the All-Seeing Eye for the logo of the opposing team in the final Big Game scene). Elizabeth Berkley shines in a small role as a modern, market-researching prostitute with a heart-set-on-gold, otherwise, this one's about as engrossing as a Super Bowl Halftime show. *

The Apostle: Carnal Hollywood movie legend Robert Duvall writes, directs and *stars* in this tale of a Christian evangelist's redemption. Tinsel Town gets on its knees before God? Hallelujah, right? Wrong. Duvall's evangelist is about as carnal as your typical Hollywood *star* (like, say, Charlie Sheen)--a violent and nearly insane womanizer, unable to control his lusts for the flesh or for vengeance. Now, it's true that the Church is filled with sinful men, but it's also true that most have never picked up a baseball bat and beat to death another brother in the faith, as Duvall's *apostle* does. Some would say Duvall had to make the character especially sinful, in order to present a more dramatic story of redemption. Yet it is the film's opening scene, in which Duvall's character arrives at the site of a car crash and brings a dying young man to a saving knowledge of Christ, which is the most dramatic. This scene is presented before the viewer knows anything about the *apostle's* moral condition. After this opening moment of high drama, the film slides through a downward spiral of spiritual cliche and racial condescension (Jesus only works for whoopin' 'n' hollerin' Blacks, and inarticulate, doleful redneck Whites), and outright heresy (that one can find personal redemption through good works). No doubt Duvall meant well, but it's obvious from his two-dimensional portrayal of the *apostle* that he doesn't know Christ. Yet a few *Christians* will applaud Hollywood for making a *religious* picture. But is there any spiritual value to the film? Well, how many people do you think will one day say: "I was a poor lost sinner, mired in the filth of the world, but one day I happened by the local cineplex and something just told me to go see this movie--The Apostle--I didn't have any idea what it was about, but, praise God Almighty, two hours later I was on my knees praying the sinner's prayer!" How many? Probably about as many as from Debbie Does Dallas. **

Apt Pupil: This one is sure to have brought to a boil the blood of the Dean of Revisionism, Michael A. Hoffman II, as the Stephen King novella-turned-film tells the provocative tale of a curious young Aryan who thinks he has caught an old Nazi war criminal by the toe. . .but slowly the old Nazi toe turns into a fresh Iron Fist, and the young Aryan's curiosity is pounded into neo-fascist flesh. Exciting examination of the dark side of human nature which suggests people are inherently repulsed by any sign of weakness. Ian McKellen plays the old Nazi and was deserving of an Academy Award nomination. ****

Arlington Road: Jeff Bridges *stars* as a college professor so obsessed with domestic terrorism, he can't see the trees for the forest. . .and he ends up literally becoming the subject of his own domestic terrorism class lecture. Ah, if only the *patriots* of the lunatic fringe were as smart as the ones played by Tim Robbins in this movie--then maybe those nutters could put the fear of their god in those D.C. New World Orderers! But, anyway, this is pretty good Hollywood entertainment with a true happy ending--despite the typical tedious chase-and-big-bang finale. ***

As Good As It Gets: The question here is not why Jack Nicholson won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance as a politically incorrect obsessive-compulsive who brings first grief, then joy into the lives of a weary waitress and a homosexual painter--no, Nicholson is first rate. The question is why did Helen Hunt win an Academy Award? She played the part of the over-burdened waitress as if she was still on her TV sitcom--which is to say she delivered her lines with such a lack of subtlety, The J Man could swear he heard a laugh track every time she spoke. But despite Hunt's numerous shortcomings, Nicholson's towering presence, combined with a decent script (Nicholson's character somewhat matches that of the first son in Jesus' parable recorded in Matthew 21:28 - 31) and supporting cast, are enough to make this film a pleasant diversion. ***

The Assassination Of Richard Nixon: Some people find this kind of movie depressing. . .stories about sad-sack Amerikan losers, failures in everything, so beaten-down by *The System's* continual kicks in the ass, they eventually lose their societal footing and their inhibition to rebel, and they go *postal,* committing some mad act of violence. Unfortunately, thank God, most Amerikans are not like Samuel Bicke, the character memorably portrayed here by Sean Penn (and based on a *real life* Amerikan loser who wanted to crash a hijacked airplane into the White House way back in the pre-9/11 days of 1974). Most Amerikans take their ass-kicking from cradle-to-grave with a hardly a whimper, placated by TV, credit-card fueled conspicuous consumption and assorted other lesser opiates (drugs, psychological therapy, religion, gambling, whatever, etc.). As I said, most people find this kind of story depressing, but The J Man finds them enormously entertaining. There's something guiltily uplifting in watching the slow fuse on the Samuel Bicke powder keg burn. The Bicke character's chief gripes are the inherent dishonesty and bigotry of the system (though Bicke himself is just as dishonest. . .he excuses his own lies as trifling details not to be compared to the glory to come). Bicke can't earn a living because he can't abide his employer's dishonest business practices. . .he believes he is turned down for a government small business loan because his partner is black. . .and he blames his economic woes for the dissolution of his marriage. His wife is played by the beautiful Naomi Watts. . .you couldn't imagine a beautiful woman having anything do with a pitiful putz like Samuel Bicke, so the filmmakers tried hard to make Watts look rather plain, via a bad hair dye, some frumpy outfits, etc. . .but you can't hide her body, especially when her character has to wear a '70s era cocktail waitress uniform in a couple scenes. Whereas Sean Penn's *star* status is invisible in his performance as the pathetic, ineffectual Bicke, Watts is always recognizable as Watts, and therefore her character seems incredible. . .you can't imagine why her character ever looking twice at Bicke, let alone marrying him. . .the Britney Spears-Jason Alexander marriage seems more reasonable. But this is a movie that ultimately rides or falls on Penn's portrayal of a man unraveling, so the implausible marriage is but a minor flaw. Penn pulls it off. . .the script calls for his character at times to be laughably clueless (particularly a scene where he visits an office of the Black Panthers), infantile, kookily visionary, almost catatonically depressed, and, finally, insanely violent. . .Penn's character seems genuine throughout. . .and what a kick to watch him break from the sheeplefold, and bray at the Amerikan world around him. ***

The Aviator: Though limited in scope, this is still an excellent film, a now-rarity from Hollywood: a movie seamless and entertaining from beginning to end. Plot synopsis: A young boy raised on full body erotic sponge baths and paranoid hygiene sermons from his milf-esque mother grows up to be a billionaire playboy/pilot/movie producer-director/airline mastermind. This is the near-flawless telling (with *poetic license*) of Howard Hughes' ascent into a reclusive, bizarre milk/pee/germ OCD-like madness (we say *ascent* instead of *descent* because the madness is the fulfillment of the milf-esque mother's weird programming). This is a better film than Million Dollar Baby, to which it lost the Academy Award for Best Picture. ****

Bad Company: There's a recent trend in French cinema: les hommes sont des betes. Bad Company continues the trend, though it begins as yet another tired tale of a lonely, somewhat geeky, virginal teen good girl named Delphine who falls under the spell of the new girl at school, a loud, dreadlocked, slutty bad girl named Olivia. Delphine soon abandons her one friend, a gawky pencil-necked geek boy (who, of course, is desperately in love with her) to spend all her time exploring the wild side with Olivia. In the course of her new party girl life, Delphine meets Laurent, a handsome bad boy (though he's implausibly played by one of those frail, girly-looking French pretty boys), and falls MADLY in love with him (and The J Man does mean *madly,* that's why *madly* is in CAPS). Predictably, Laurent does not quite have the same strength of ardor. . .in fact, he's a bit of a cad. . .well, he's more than a bit of a cad. . .and it's his extreme degree of caddishness that turns Bad Company from yet another tired teen love melodrama into a hallmark of the new French les hommes sont des betes genre. Revealing the exact nature of Laurent's cruelty would spoil this film's only semi-original plot twist, so The J Man will only say that even bad girl Olivia is shocked at the lengths to which former good girl Delphine will go to prove her love for Laurent. This film is supposedly based on a *real life* case in France, but considering how tritely the story begins, and how curiously antiseptically the *shocking* denouement is presented, it must only be very loosely and very badly based on the *real life* events. * A marginally better entry into the les hommes sont des betes genre is Fat Girl, whose filmmaker, Catherine Breillat, is one of the genre's pioneers. Fat Girl is a squalid erotic melodrama masquerading, as most Breillat films do, as a gyno-philosophic treatise on female sexuality. It tells the mostly-believable tale of two antagonistic sisters on a French seaside holiday. Elena is the older sister, a 15 year old piece of thin, gorgeous jail bait. Anais is the younger sister, an ugly 12 year old fat-ass. Both, for differing reasons resulting from damaged psyches (all women, all girls, in the Breillatian cosmos, are damaged by a universal misogyny) are, under the right circumstances, willing to lose their virginity. Naturally, eye candy Elena has no problem finding an eager stud, an older Italian college boy. In one long long long scene (a kind of Gen XXX version of Romeo and Juliet), the Italian lover boy climbs through a window into a bedroom shared by the sisters and begins his amazingly persistent pursuit of Elena's maidenhead. This scene, which seems to take up half the movie, meticulously catalogs just about every kind of lie an over-heated libido can produce to get its owner into the private parts of its not-so-obscure object of desire. Elena resists, though not so shyly, until her psycho-sexual conditions are met. . .or at least, until most of them are met enough to allow the Italian stud to settle for a poke in the Eye of Horus. . .MEANWHILE, the fat ugly kid sister, a soul so lonely and unloved and so desperate for attention she spends much of her time humming dark and bizarre fairy tale prayers meant to conjure any kind of man or beast to come and do something, anything with her, has been lying awake in her bed all night, tortured by the antics going on just a few short feet from her. After this, the movie drifts a bit through a briefer encounter between Elena and her Italian stallion, the predictable exposure of the stallion's superficial interest in Elena, and a nicely-scripted rapprochement between the sisters. . .and as The J Man said, despite one's own particular psycho-sexual ideology, the film manages to remain mostly-believable. . .until the film's Sean S. Cunnigham-esque ending. Some critics found the ending incongruent. . .it's not, as it's clearly linked to the ugly fat girl's fairy tale prayers. . .but that still doesn't make it any less absurd. ** Apparently in rebuttal to les hommes sont des betes films is High Tension, which suggests the epidemic misogyny presented in the genre may be nothing more than the fevered hallucinations of frustrated lesbians. High Tension is a clever, graphic and effective French homage to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (with the French countryside replacing the backwoods of Texas), marred only slightly by the gimmicky ending necessary to present the filmmaker's retro-sexual point of view. Unfortunately, the screener DVD version The J Man saw did not include the option of watching the movie in the original French with English subtitles. . .The J Man had to endure some pretty brutal English dubbing. . .avoid the dubbed version, if possible. ***

A Beautiful Mind: In the 1950s a nerdy Ivy League brainiac develops some famous mathematical theory that wins him a Nobel Prize 40 years later. . .in between he marries a pretty girl (played by the fine Jennifer Connelly) and suffers from paranoid delusions that he is involved in a Top Secret government project (mainly consisting of cutting up random magazine articles that contain *secret codes*) to stop the Soviet Union from nuking America. . .when his wife finds out that he is a nutter, he is sent off to the looney bin for 50 doses of electroshock. . .it doesn't cure him, he still hallucinates all his imaginary pals and Top Secret spooks, but he eventually learns to ignore them, treating them kind of like imaginary homeless people begging for attention (instead of spare change) at the corner of his mind. The problem with the movie is the imaginary people are far far more interesting than the real ones. . .if The J Man had a life as dull as the nerdy math teacher's, he would forget about ignoring the imaginary people. . .he'd learn to ignore the real people around him (a bunch of other nerdy math guys and a nagging wife), and then go back to locking himself in his office, daydreaming and cutting up magazines. **

Beautiful People: Immigrants from the Balkans bring the Bosnian, Croat and Serb squabbles to London. . .bewildering and angering their xenophobic hosts. But the limeys have heart, and after a couple hours of slapstick ethnic humor, even the most hateful and racist of limey football hooligans is *reduced* to reading a bedtime story to a blind little Balkans boy. Nothing much of interest here, except one truly clever scene where another limey foootball hooligan starts out on a road trip to see a football match in Germany, and after getting dazed and confused on heroin, takes a detour that leads him straight into the Balkans War and a Hero's Role with a UN peacekeeping team. **

Betty: Betty lies around nude in bed all day dimly recalling, through a drunken stupor, her lifetime of adulteries. Grim character study focusing on the nature of human filth, marred by a perverse *happy* ending. French w/subtitles. ***

Being John Malkovich: Evolution, stripped of its pseudo-scientific deceits, is an amazingly stupid theory which promotes the crude idea that man is the end result of the dead bodies of billions of lower forms of biology. Much as *new & improved* formulas of laundry detergent, stronger and better able to compete, are introduced into the soap market, so Darwinians claim *new & improved* man-types were introduced into the biological market place. What if human evolution were true and continuing? The answer to this question provides the theme of BJM--a clever comedy in which Malkovich is the not-missing link between current and future forms of homo sapiens. The film shows the dehumanizing effect of Darwinian thought on 21st century man. Three characters, at various stages of evolutionary development, wage a fierce battle to gain control of the portal into John Malkovich. The absurd conflict is a comic presentation of the hollowness of contemporary life lived by pathetic subhumans, conditioned to accept life as nothing more than the struggle for the survival of the fittest. QT & RealVideo Movie Clips. ****

The Big Lebowski: What could have been a mildly entertaining farce about zen and the art of bowling is ruined by the filmmakers' racist and anti-Christ beliefs. The filmmakers' hatred of Whites is a carryover from previous efforts (most notably Fargo). There's a kind of inverted Aryanism to the filmmakers' racial beliefs (note the *conversion* of John Goodman's slav character) that is pitiable in the way one pities the hatred of an abused child. What is not pitiable is the filmmakers' vicious slander of the Lord Jesus Christ--no need to repeat here the filmmakers' foul mockery, but only to pray their blindness be taken away. *

Billy Elliot: 11 year old boy in northern England is born to dance, and is especially eager to study ballet. . .but his tough old man, a widower and a striking coal miner, thinks that stuff is for *poofs* (poof being British for homosexual). Well, it's a familiar tale. . .and the first half of the movie drags with all the predictable gifted child vs iron-willed parent scenes: the boy sneaking off to dance lessons. . .then eventually being found out. . .then butting heads with the old man. . .and then, finally, the old man realizing that ballet may not be so bad, after all. But the movie picks up real emotional power in the second half, as the focus shifts from the father-son confrontation, to the father-son collaboration against the Satanic economic forces (the government trying to crush the striking miners) which threaten to deny the boy his chance at an audition for the Royal Ballet School in London. The working class father-son struggle against state-sponsored poverty produces a rousing, David-in-dance-slippers vs Goliath story. Homophobes beware, as might be expected in this type of film, there is a generous sprinkling of *what does it really mean to be a man?* gender definition nonsense. . .but it's pretty harmless stuff, and far less obnoxious than what you see in American films. ***

The Black Circle Boys: All-*star* high school swimmer becomes comfortably numb after death of best friend, hangs out with Satanists who dream of forming speed metal band. Satanists claim great power from their *dark father,* yet can't even afford drums or guitars. Swimmer becomes unnumbified after participating in brutal beating of school security guard, turns against Satanists. Two murders ensue, then the happy ending. A couple of funny, on-the-mark scenes capturing the typical teenage rock star wannabe's lazy pursuit of music, otherwise this is a humdrum peek into the *Dark Side.* *

The Blair Witch Project: Maryland's state motto is: Land of Manly Deeds and Womanly Words. . .but, unfortunately, in this low-budget Maryland backwoods *horror* tale, all the viewer gets is two young men of cowardly deeds and one young woman of whining words. Why this annoying trio become so terrified of the twig arts-and-crafts they stumble upon is never made clear. The J Man supposes the filmmakers meant for the twig works to represent a link to the witch legend the three *heroes* are investigating. But had The J Man been out strolling through the woods and seen these same pathetic little twig dolls, The J Man would not have imagined them to be the handiwork of a fearsome witch, but of some poor lonely retarded girl, feebly trying to cobble together some wooden playmates. So The J Man was left to conclude the three *heroes* were not unhinged by supernatural forces, but by three days deprivation of soft couches, MTV and potato chips. In the remarkably goofy ending to this unhorror film, two of the *heroes* find an abandoned house, and then, for some unexplained reason, run up and down a staircase over and over again. One of them, an overweight lad, apparently becomes so dizzy and disoriented, he then ends up running headfirst into a basement wall. . .and he sticks there, like a cartoon character. This ignoble death so upsets the other *hero,* upon discovering it, she immediately drops dead--thus becoming the first known victim of Wile E. Coyote-by-proxy syndrome. *

The Blood Oranges: Movie based on the famous novel by *postmodern* author John Hawkes, who, perhaps fortunately, died before the film version was completed. We say *perhaps fortunately,* because the movie isn't very good, though every one involved tries hard (sometimes too hard, in the case of Sheryl *Laura Palmer* Lee, who plays one of the lead characters a bit too exuberantly). Anyway, the story concerns a married couple who have moved to an unnamed sunny foreign locale in an attempt to create for themselves an idyllic sexual paradise. These two sexual hedonists (Cyril & Fiona--how Shakespearean-sounding!) will fornicate with just about anything that moves. As the husband states: "Need I insist that the only enemy of the mature marriage is monogamy? That anything less than sexual multiplicity . . . is naive?" But the swingers quest for fleshly fulfillment suffers a severe setback when they try to seduce a newly arrived couple. Oh, the wife is eager for fresh meat, but the husband just can't seem to get into it. . .for, as the movie gradually reveals, he has a perversion which even Cyril and Fiona find to be in poor taste. The real problem with the movie is that the material is so dated. These type of sexual shenanigans may have seemed avant-garde 30 years ago when the novel was first published, but compared to the sexual habits depicted on today's big screen (for example, Kids), Cyril and Fiona seem like squares. As for Hawkes' literary inventions in his *experimental novel,* which may keep the book somewhat fresh, these are, of course, lost in the translation to film. Hence, there is nothing to recommend the movie. It is an exercise in pointlessness. **

Boiler Room: Dumb story about a young Jewish guy whose daddy didn't love him enough. He uses his crummy pop as an excuse for his short lifetime of screw-ups, and, in possibly this silly movie's silliest subplot, as an aphrodisiac to woo a sexy Black chick. The scene in which he blubbers about the most traumatic moment of his life (when his dad slapped him after a bike accident when he was 10 years old) to the Black chick and she gets all doe-eyed and loving, is the movie's biggest unintentional laugher. Anyway, the bulk of the story is concerned with the guy's work at a sleazy brokerage firm, where he calls stupid Midwestern goys and sells them bogus stocks over the phone. Most of it is a stale rehash of Glengarry Glen Ross and Wall Street. In fact, in one scene, all the characters gather together to watch Wall Street on video, and they take turns reciting the lines along with the movie--it's some kind of greedy nerd's goof on Rocky Horror. And there's also Ben Affleck, who is cast in a role similar to that of Alec Baldwin's ice cold sales bully from Glengarry, but Affleck is embarrassingly bad, he looks like a little boy play-acting at being a grown-up. The fine actor Giovanni Ribisi plays the crooked broker with the damaged inner child, and not even his presence can save this Hebrew version of The Great Santini Meets Glengarry Glen Ross from being a bad investment of movie-watching time. *

Bottle Rocket: Three emotionally retarded Gen X boys band together to form a dysfunctional crime family. The lessons learned during their less-than-perfect crimes inch them closer to maturity. Likable in a Catcher in a Bottle of Rye kind of way. ***

Boys Don't Cry: This is a relatively fact-faithful retelling of the short, cursed life of Teena Brandon, the famous Nebraska girl who pretended to be a boy. Is it odd that an adult woman, 21 years old at the time of her death, will forever be categorized in those terms: girl/boy? Yes, it's odd, but oddly appropriate for Teena was a human oddity. . .hmmn, imagine Oskar of The Tin Drum suffering from a *sexual identity crisis.* Teena refused to grow up, refused to give up her boyish play-acting. . .well, that's OK if you are Pauly Shore and living in some SoCal fantasy land. . .but unfortunately for Teena, she gave her final performance art exhibitions on the wrong stage. The Sex Pistols ridiculous U.S. tour/fiasco, in which they were booked in country/western honkytonks, makes more sense than Teena Brandon starring as Brandon Teena in Falls City, Nebraska. The great triumph of Boys Don't Cry is that it expertly recreates Teena's disconnect from the reality of her Falls City surroundings. Aglow after earning by deceit the affection of Lana, Teena thinks she has finally found *home.* But her triumph by dishonesty only blinds Teena to everything else in Falls City that surrounds Lana. Falls City is that sort of small Amerikan town that is not really in Amerika. It's an isolated community surrounded by a vast expanse of prairie lands that serve as buffer zone between it and the rest of the country. Amerika has to be beamed into Falls City via television. The MiniMart is the Cultural Arts Center. Yet, Teena believes that in little what-you-see-is-what-you-get Falls City she can create an Eden for herself and Lana. . .but Teena never admits to herself that her role in this new production of Eden is not that of Adam, but of the serpent. . .the deceitful serpent. Everything Teena wants out of life depends on deceit, thus, even as Teena's genderhouse-of-cards begin to topple, she is unable to heed Lana's warning that they should flee Falls City. Teena cannot live without her lies. . .and so she clings to her dream of Eden (a trailer park managed by herself and Lana) and ignores the growing frustration and anger of two male friends of Lana, two men of limited intelligence who begin trying to fit together the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that is Teena Brandon. In the end, of course, the puzzle pieces don't match the picture on the box cover, and when these two men demand Teena provide the missing pieces, Teena is literally stripped naked of her lies. This, Teena's psychic murder, is more horrifying to watch than her physical murder. A true tragedy, superbly acted, though somewhat diminished by poor editing and the unfactual feel-good fairy tale love scenes between Teena and Lana that are crudely inserted into the denouement--and which are jarringly out of place with the rest of the movie's grim realism. Movie Trailer. ***

Bringing Out The Dead: An arty, pretentious rip-off of Broken Vessels *starring* Nicolas Cage as a burned out paramedic haunted by his failures. Movie only seems fresh during the scenes in which Ving Rhames appears as Cage's carnal Christian partner (and once again,Hollywood implies Christianity only works for unsophisticated Blacks). Title is ironic in that movie cast brings out dead marrieds Cage & Patricia Arquette (and their scenes together are about as lively as one of the film's numerous prop corpses). **

Broken Vessels: Young man from Altoona, PA with guilt-wracked conscience (seems as a teen he got drunk one night and crashed his car into a horse-drawn carriage occupied by an Amish family, resulting in the death of a 10 year old boy) moves to L.A. and gets a job as a paramedic. The young man's subconscious motivation is to eliminate his guilt by saving lives in his new career. Unfortunately, the young man is partnered-up with a nihilistic hell-raiser. The young man's spirit may have been willing to try to make amends for his past sins, but his flesh is weak, and he soon joins his partner in all-out hedonistic orgy of sex, drugs (and petty crimes to finance their life in the fast lane). The film energetically chronicles the ruin of the two medics, who leave behind a scorched earth of nutty L.A. characters in their inevitable crash-and-burn. ***

The Brown Bunny: Click here for review. **

Buffalo '66: Emotionally retarded Buffalo Bills fan is released from prison after serving five years for a crime he didn't commit to pay off a gambling debt incurred after the Bills' kicker missed a field goal in the Super Bowl. After wandering his hometown trying to find a bathroom to urinate in, he kidnaps a fat girl (Christina Ricci) in a dance studio and tells her she has to pretend to be his wife when he takes her to meet his parents. After convincing his parents his life has been a success, he then plans on hunting down and killing the kicker whom he blames for ruining his life. Of course, the fat girl helps him realize things ain't so bad. They fall in love and the kicker gets a reprieve. Moderately amusing, with a couple of interestingly staged scenes. **

Bully: Very faithful to the true crime story it is based on (review of the book of the same name). . .perhaps too faithful, because in depicting the kids as stupid and reprobate as they really were, and living the filthy lives they really did, director Larry Clark (who has a small, hilarious role as a white trash father) offers a film about the revenge murder of a high school bully that lacks completely in drama and tension. With every kid rotten to the core, there is no thesis/anti-thesis friction, and the story doesn't go anywhere, never amounting to anything more than a voyeuristic look at the debauched world of depraved Amerikan youth. One can't criticize the director for refusing to twist the story to create a little drama, however one can criticize Clark for his casting choices. Particularly galling is his casting of Rachel Miner as Lisa Connelly. . .in real life, the murder mastermindess was a pathetic blobbette, a true Amerikan teen fatty, ugly as sin. Clark told the straight story of these Amerikan losers, but by casting pretty faces on the female fatties and skags who took part in the murder, Clark unnecessarily sweetens the surface of his film with too much teen eye candy. **

The Butcher Boy: Pint-sized Irish lunatic poops on the floor in the house of the neighbor woman who has ruined his ten year old life. When that doesn't teach her to mind her own business, he kills her. Sinead O'Connor co-*stars* as the Virgin Mary. **

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