À ma soeur! (Fat Girl) (2001)

    At first, Catherine Breillat seems determined to shock with Fat Girl.  Her use of sex is both near-ubiquitous and rather graphic, and much of the audience will indeed be shocked by what they see.  That is, however, the point.  The suggestion behind Fat Girl is that anyone who can yawn at the film's controversial subject matter has bigger problems than just being bored by a film.
    Anyone who was ever young and unpopular can relate to 12-year-old Anaïs (Anaïs Reboux), and anyone with siblings can understand her love-hate relationship with her 15-year-old sister Elena (Roxane Mesquida).  Elena is slim, pretty, and a boy magnet, while Anaïs is, well, none of those things.  As Elena remarks at one point, "No one would think we were sisters."
    But they are sisters, and Elena is forced to let Anaïs tag along everywhere, though both would prefer more freedom.  Instead, Anaïs learns quite a bit from her sister - probably too much, in fact, as the sleeping arrangements force Anaïs to spend the night pretending Elena and her sort-of boyfriend aren't there.
    The first 75 minutes of Fat Girl really serve as Anaïs' primer for what to do in the last five.  Breillat's resolution feels so crazy that one's first inclination is to scoff, but in fact it makes more than a bit of sense as the payoff to the character Breillat has spent the film developing.  It's hardly pleasant, but it doesn't feel untrue.
    There seems to be a "men are pigs" message folded into Fat Girl, and certainly the film's three prominent male characters all contribute in some form to the film's somewhat disturbing climax.  I would argue that while this seems to stand out, Breillat does not hold her female characters less accountable - everyone looks equally guilty through the eyes of Anaïs, who at one point replies to her mother's chastisement of two litterbugs with a droll, "That's the French for you."  Breillat's film is a brilliant depiction of youth's most awkward age, but it's also a smart, wickedly ironic condemnation of an entire generation's loss of innocence.  A

Dogville (2004)

    The images and music during Dogville's closing credits suggest the film as an anti-American polemic, but very little of the preceding three hours does anything to give weight to that particular attack.  With a heroine no more likable than those who do her wrong, Dogville's unfocused attack incriminates everyone and no one.
    Ramblingly written and barely directed by experimental guru Lars von Trier, Dogville presents a tiny town whose residents are universally loathsome.  Called upon to reveal a soft side upon the arrival of not-so-innocent Grace (Nicole Kidman), the town cannot maintain it for long, turning on Grace when questions about her past surface.  On the other hand, those questions are hardly unfounded, and Grace takes a shocking amount of abuse with a disturbingly quiet tolerance - until she gets a chance at revenge, that is.
    The problem with von Trier's "America sucks" message is that the audience needs to root for someone against the microcosmic America of Dogville, and Grace fails to fit the bill.  Von Trier seems to be suggesting that America is inclined to exploit the poor, who suffer such abuse because they don't have better options, but here the metaphor goes off the tracks, since the exploitation of Grace springs from a knee-jerk fear of a vaguely-described shady past and not from her financial situation alone - in addition to which, the citizens of Dogville are plenty poor themselves.
    Even assuming that the allegory were perfect, though, it wouldn't explain the film's almost unfathomably long three-hour running time, nor is it clear what the endless narration and chalk-outline sets add to the film's point... whatever that happens to be.  They fail to make the film any more interesting, at any rate.
    Both dreary and uncomfortable to watch, significantly overlong, and unsure of what about America it's trying to target, Dogville misses just about every conceivable mark.  The mixture of bad ideas with needless gimmickry hasn't worked for a film yet, and Dogville isn't even close to being the first.  D-

Beau Travail (1999)

   European minimalist cinema is often not the easiest type of film to watch (some might say "sit through"), but what it lacks in flair it frequently makes up for in ideas.  Case in point: Claire Denis' Beau Travail, a slow-moving, stark portrayal of a French Foreign Legion unit in Africa, which is never flashy but serves as a potent allegory and scathing political critique nonetheless.
   Beau Travail is not just set in Africa - it appears to personify Africa in the Legionnaires, pushed around by a superior, Galoup, who wants what's best for himself and doesn't care if they go spinning out of control.  At once a critique of France's history in Africa as well as a metaphor for it, the film also goes after the military lifestyle.  Denis paints it as curiously homoerotic - Galoup is the model Legionnaire, but he desires attention from his commanding officer, and plots revenge when one of the men he commands, Sentain, receives that attention instead.
    Denis pays more attention to the culture of Djibouti, where the movie is set, than she would have to if the movie were more direct.  The references to France's African policy are myriad, though.  Galoup screams at one Legionnaire that as a member of the French Legion, he is "no longer African."  The Africans glimpsed throughout the film seem plainly resentful of the French presence.
   Beau Travail seems to condone the removal of troops from Africa - the Africans don't want them there and the men seem a bit off-kilter after spending so much time in a remote wasteland by the Red Sea.  Denis lingers on sometimes silly-looking exercises as if to question their purpose, which adds to the military critique.  So does Galoup's return to France - once there, he cannot do anything that does not fall into his old military routine in one way or another.  He is a man who has been ruined by order.
    With an ironic title as bitter as most of the proceedings, Beau Travail is a cutting look at military culture and latter-day French imperialism that hits a lot of targets.  It may be a minor ordeal (even at just 90 minutes) due to its general quietness and slow pace, but anyone who can make it through will be rewarded with a lot to think about.  A-

    Donnie Darko is the kind of film where only half the ideas that explain the film’s meaning actually made it to the screen.  It is all but impossible to figure out the film’s full plot on a single viewing; for that matter, it’s all but impossible without listening to writer/director Richard Kelly’s commentary on the Darko DVD release.  It’s the cinematic equivalent of a professor assigning a book that simply cannot be comprehended without buying the Cliffs Notes.
   Darko is certainly a fascinating movie on many levels, but it’s hard to come away with a real appreciation for a film that never really explains itself.  Sure, there’s something to be said for a film that doesn’t over-explain itself, assuming the worst of its audience’s IQ, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible for a film to under-explain, and that’s the case here.  At best it would more than likely take several careful viewings and some choice speculation to divine what exactly Kelly’s intended plot was; that’s simply too much, and it’s not like giving the guy in the scary rabbit costume a couple lines of more clarifying dialogue would have suddenly made the film seem heavy-handed.
    The film could also stand to have a little fat trimmed here and there, but otherwise it at least remains compelling for most of its runtime.  The performances, especially from Jake Gyllenhaal as the title character, are uniformly good, with the possible exception of Drew Barrymore, who frequently seems like she’d rather be somewhere else.  The cinematography and effects are nice too, and fairly impressive given the film’s modest $4 million budget, though they do sometimes seem to have more of a “Look at me!” feel than serve any real purpose.
   Donnie Darko is an interesting film to watch, but a frustrating film to consider.  Reading the film as presented, the whole thing feels self-negating; knowing Kelly’s explanation, it makes sense, but it’s a fault of the movie that this can’t be discerned from viewing it.  Sure, it might feel kind of annoying to be spoon-fed the explanation in the film, but having to be spoon-fed the explanation on a DVD commentary track is really no more satisfying, and far too inaccessible.  B

Spellbound (2003)

   The thesis of Spellbound is evidently that spelling is the great equalizer.  Of the eight kids tracked to the national spelling bee over the course of the film, pretty much all of them have something about them that marks them apart from the "average" kid.  Some are children of immigrants, whose parents view the experience as the "American dream" come to fruition.  Some are low on the socioeconomic totem pole.  Some just aren't popular.  But on the stage, all of them have a shot at fame.
    Unfortunately, Spellbound just isn't that interesting.  Even for a documentary, its direction is uninspired, and none of the families are really crazy enough to provide the drama that everyone is turning out to see.  These children seem like smart, level-headed kids who know better than to let a misspelled word mess with their heads - even Harry Altman, the most off-the-wall of the eight, is really just goofy.
    Minor tension turns up in the later stages of the national bee, but the subject just isn't that dramatic when none of the characters is going to throw a hissy fit when they lose.  I'm usually the last person who likes to see that sort of thing, and my own spelling bee experience (at the age of ten) was similarly subdued, but the film is just too quiet without a loose cannon.
    Spellbound's message comes through, but it's bogged down by a dull framework and fairly bland subjects.  It's unfortunate, because just a little more life here and there would probably have made a much more watchable movie.  Maybe such energy is just too much to ask of studious young teenagers who like spelling but never seem to let it consume them.  They're good kids, but they're not very good characters.  C

Masked and Anonymous (2003)

   Supposedly, every member of Masked and Anonymous' star-studded cast took a pay cut for the chance to appear in a movie with Bob Dylan.  Evidently none of them ever asked to see a script either, or someone might have noticed that very little about the film makes any sense whatsoever.
   Masked appears to be set in a dystopic parallel universe where the United States is a dictatorship sprawled over most of the North American continent and engulfed by the kind of rebel insurrection more typical of Latin America - but really, it's anybody's guess.  Dylan plays Jack Fate, a character so similar to Dylan himself that he even has some of the same songs in his repertoire; at the same time, other characters discuss contemporaries of the real Dylan, like the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix.  To add to the confusion, Fate is the son of the dying president.
    The plot, such as it is, is at least pretty straightforward: Fate is sprung from prison by his manager (John Goodman) to play as the headlining act of a vaguely-described benefit concert.  Beyond this rudimentary description, however, the film is near-completely baffling.  People speak in truisms that would be rejected for inclusion in fortune cookies, and the fact that many of the actors - in particular Goodman, Jeff Bridges, and Val Kilmer - appear to have been given free reign to improvise makes it seem doubtful that even they know what they're saying or how it supposedly fits into the broader context.
    Presumably this would be more of a problem if the film had a context, but on the count of message, Masked is as unclear as it is with anything else, if not more so.  Based solely on what transpires onscreen, it doesn't seem that the film sides with either the government or the rebels.  If it's not going to do that, what was the point of depicting the conflict at all?
    Director and co-writer (with Dylan) Larry Charles is a veteran of Seinfeld, which perhaps explains something, but here he takes the idea of a show about nothing to near-absurdist extremes and then reverses it.  Where Seinfeld found its humor in the recognizable human drama of the everyday, Masked fails to make any connections to humanity in its forced depiction of the outlandish.  Considering all the talent involved, Masked is at least not very difficult to watch, but that minor concession is about the only praise it merits.  D

Saved! (2004)

    Like Kevin Smith's 1999 religion-infused comedy Dogma, Brian Dannelly's Saved! operates on a line.  On one side of the line is organized religion, and on the other side, righteous non-belief.  The line itself represents the idea that faith on its own terms is a positive thing.  Both films fall towards the righteous non-belief side while at the same time managing not to decry the mere idea of faith or spirituality, going for a message of "religion isn't always great, but faith is a positive thing," but Saved! is a bit more vicious when it comes to taking on religion, and this hurts it as a film.
   Dogma confined most of its direct attack on religion to the portrayal of Cardinal Glick, played by George Carlin, described as the kind of guy "who would bless his own clubs for a better golf game."  While utterly sanctimonious, Glick's worst crime is not believing that Linda Fiorentino and Chris Rock were sent by God, which while ultimately fatal hardly seems damning.  On the other hand, consider Saved!'s Hilary Faye (Mandy Moore), portrayed as a two-faced, self-obsessed character who'd be better served in Mean Girls' high school than at the evangelical Christian academy in Saved!  In a rather unsubtle move, she is also by far the most Bible-thumping character presented to us.  In addition, Mary (Jena Malone), our supposed heroine, starts off the movie by being crushingly naive, to the extent that she thinks Jesus has told her to sleep with her boyfriend to cure him of his homosexual urges.  That's right, kids: evangelical Christians are either mean or stupid, or maybe both.
    Of course, Mary gets pregnant from her encounter, an event which sets the movie in the right direction.  Rather than spending time mocking the Bible-thumpers, the film chooses to hang them indirectly by making the characters whose relationship to religion is far shakier be the good ones.  There's Roland (Macaulay Culkin), Hilary Faye's wheelchair-bound brother, who describes himself as "not Christian"; there's Cassandra (Eva Amurri), the gothy Jewish girl who only attends the school because she's been kicked out of every other one; and there's Patrick (Patrick Fugit), the pastor's son who is involved in religion more actively than the others but who is entirely non-judgmental in a way that his father, Pastor Skip (Martin Donovan), and Hilary Faye are not.
    Yes, an indirect attack is still an attack.  But there's a big difference between filling up the screen with caricatures and giving us nicely-drawn characters to whom it's easy to relate.  After a rocky start, and before an overly-preachy ending where Dannelly doesn't believe we could get the message from the film's first 80 minutes and decides to beat us over the head with dialogue, the film's middle portion is both sweet and touching, even if the evident suggestion is that eschewing religion (or at least significantly questioning it) is the only way to get to that point.
   Saved! works in a lot of places, though it's neither as funny nor as subversive as it seems to think it is, it cops out on the plot featuring the relationship between Mary's mother (Mary-Louise Parker) and Pastor Skip, and it throws in a warm-fuzzy ending that it hasn't entirely earned.  Really, the film works best as a coming-of-age story with religious undertones; its point might have been better served by being a little less obvious and a little less mean-spirited in places.  What had the potential to be a very effective teen melodrama was undercut a bit by filmmakers with an ideological axe to grind.  B

On Edge (2004)

   Produced in 2001, On Edge made a brief tour of the festival circuit before languishing on the shelf for three years, finally given a direct-to-video release this year in what appears to be an attempt to cash in on Marissa Jaret Winokur's recent Tony win.  Of course, it's hard to imagine the theater crowd, or indeed anyone else, is looking for a mockumentary that samples concepts liberally from Christopher Guest without borrowing any of his humor.
    Combining the localized aspect of Waiting for Guffman with the competition aspect of Best in Show, On Edge presents a group of amateur ice skaters hoping for a shot at the big time based on local and regional competitions.  Like This is Spinal Tap's Marty DiBergi, On Edge gives us a documentarian, in this case Chris Hogan as Professor Hadley Robinson, who claims to be doing a film on what drives these women to try to beat long odds.  Naturally, the film basically turns into a documentation of events, with interviews sprinkled liberally around.
   Unfortunately, these events aren't funny.  Significant screen time is devoted to ice skating sequences during the local and regional contests, and these lack even unintentional humor.  Of course, nothing that tries to be funny succeeds; only the interviews with a bearded and bespectacled Scott Hamilton, playing a skating judge, verge on funny, but even they don't quite get there.  Jason Alexander, as a pontificating zamboni driver, is utterly wasted.
    Christopher Guest sometimes gets away with being less funny than maybe he should by having characters that are worth following.  Director and co-writer Karl Slovin is no Christopher Guest, with very little sense for what constitutes character development and absolutely no sense for what's funny. On Edge is a surpassingly bland film that can't deliver on even the lowest of expectations.  Anyone involved who can't count it as their career low point needs to take a much harder look at their script choices - but then, so does anyone involved, period.  F