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BOOKS INTO MOVIES: Books on sale at Cinemapolis and Fall Creek Pictures
In cooperation with the Bookery II, Cinemapolis and Fall Creek Pictures are making novels "Brick Lane" by Monica Ali and "Brideshead Revisited" by Evelyn Waugh available for purchase at both theaters.
The film version BRIDESHEAD REVISITED starring Emma Thompson and Ben Whishaw, is now on screen at Cinemapolis.
The movie BRICK LANE will open Fri. 8/22.
THE EDGE OF HEAVEN PREMIERES FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 5 WITH DISCUSSION
The Fingerlakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF) and 7th Art announce that the next special screening + discussion event will be the premiere of Fatih Akim's THE EDGE OF HEAVEN on Friday September 5.
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ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD (99 unrated)
REVIEW BY OWEN GLEIBERMAN, ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY
Werner Herzog, who has been making memorable documentaries ever since the 1970s, has dedicated himself more than perhaps any filmmaker alive to the proposition that truth is the new fiction — a realm not merely of drama but of mystery and enchantment and imaginative power. When Herzog stares at reality, he sees the uncanny. In Encounters at the End of the World, he takes his cameras to the most extreme corner of the planet: Antarctica, a place that looks sculpted by some pretty unfriendly gods. It's a subzero dreamscape of spooky, desolate majesty.
There, he finds a community of flaked-out scientist-drifters, almost all of whom are still carrying the shaggy renegade spirit of the '70s. For a while, Herzog hangs around a settlement called McMurdo, which is like some industrial mining village. But then he enters the awesome terrain — the glaciers as high as mountains and as vast (literally) as Texas; the ancient water world that lies beneath the ice. The divers refer to this ocean-with-a-ceiling as a ''cathedral,'' and when the movie takes us down there, we can see why. The configurations are like lunar basilicas made of frozen blasts of crystal. The stunning images aren't enough for Herzog, though. He wants us to see how these quirky researchers, in their lust to explore, are acting out a drive as primitive as nature: the need to break away from the world in order to find it.
BRIDESHEAD REVISITED (135 PG-13)
 REVIEW BY DAVID ANSEN, NEWSWEEK
"Anyone who fell in love with the landmark 11-part British TV series of 'Brideshead Revisited' 26 years ago is likely to approach the movie version debuting next week with extreme trepidation. Not to mention all those who have fallen under the spell of Evelyn Waugh's opulent, elegiac 1945 novel. How could this rich work possibly be condensed into a film running a bit over two hours? "Director Julian Jarrold ('Becoming Jane') and screenwriters Andrew Davies and Jeremy Brock clearly knew they'd be facing comparisons—Jarrold, not wanting to be influenced by the Granada TV series, claims not to have seen the original. They argue that this literary classic, like a Shakespeare play, needs to be reinterpreted for a new generation, re-evaluated with contemporary eyes. In fact, more than any Waugh novel, 'Brideshead' lends itself to different readings: what you take away from it says as much about your own obsessions and world view as it does about Waugh's intentions. Written during the privations of World War II, the book looks back to the '20s and '30s, memorializing the last gasp of the dying aristocratic order. Waugh's stand-in is the covetous, wide-eyed, middle-class painter Charles Ryder, who fall in love with the children of the Marchmain family, Roman Catholic aristocrats who invite him into their imposing ancestral home, Brideshead Castle.According to Waugh, who converted to Catholicism in 1930, his theme was 'the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters.' Yet the primal 'Brideshead' image to me is the one that adorned the paperback I read in college: the charming, decadent Sebastian Flyte carrying a teddy bear. For some it may be the grand estate itself and its real-life stand-in: Castle Howard, a setting so iconic in the series that the filmmakers used it again. For many who worshiped weekly at the 'Brideshead' altar in 1982, the series was the apotheosis of a certain mandarin gay sensibility, even though the homosexual motifs were always unstated, and the nature of Charles's infatuation with Sebastian left ambiguous. I'd bet that many barely remember the issues of sin and sacrifice and Catholic guilt that lurk in the mystical depths of 'Brideshead's' last act. For the non-Catholic reader, and for contemporary viewers, Waugh's spiritual themes don't quite take hold; it's as if he created characters too strong to fit the mold of their author's intentions. His artistry outshone his ideology. "The remarkable thing about Jarrold's movie is how much of the book it manages to capture. The focus has shifted: it's structured as a love triangle. Ryder (Matthew Goode, in the role that made Jeremy Irons a star) falls first for the dandy Sebastian (Ben Wishaw), who widens his worldly horizons, and then for his sophisticated, spiritually conflicted sister Julia (Hayley Atwell). Sebastian's sexual attraction to Charles has been made more explicit; his jealousy when he discovers (in a scene that's not in the novel) that Ryder and Julia are in love is the trauma that sends him spiraling into his alcoholic decline. As Sebastian, the thin, dark-haired Whishaw is both the most riveting thing about the movie and the most problematic, for he has radically reinvented the character. Febrile, tightly wound and more overtly gay than the blond, debonair Anthony Andrews, Whishaw's vulnerable Sebastian seems doomed from the get-go. Jarrold's movie, rushing too fast through the halcyon days at Oxford, short-shrifts Sebastian's legendary charm. Other omissions are painful but understandable: the extravagant, stuttering queen Anthony Blanche has been reduced to a cameo; young Cordelia barely registers; Ryder's father, played by John Gielgud on TV, has lost his best scenes. What remains, however, is formidable. Emma Thompson makes the iron-willed Lady Marchmain a figure both terrifying and sympathetic; Michael Gambon's lusty Lord Marchmain, who's abandoned his family for life in Venice with his mistress (Greta Scacchi), gets the most out of his brief appearances, and Atwell is a wonderfully sensual and sharp-edged Julia, torn between her love for Charles and her religious beliefs. "The toughest role, because it's so reactive, is Ryder himself. Because the film doesn't rely as heavily on voice-over to convey his inner thoughts, Goode faces a challenge illuminating the soul of this diffident, divided, ambitious man, whose own social and sexual aspirations even he doesn't fully understand. It's a solid, sensitive performance. He sounds remarkably like Irons, but he doesn't have Irons's quicksilver transparency, that ability to let us see the roiling feelings under Charles's formal English reserve. "Think of Jarrold's briskly paced, stylish abridgment as a fine introduction to Waugh's marvelously melancholy elegy. It brings these unforgettable characters to life again, and if it sends people back to the novel, and back to Charles Sturridge's classic TV series, all the better. There's room for more than one 'Brideshead' in this far less glamorous day and age." Official Website
UP THE YANGTZE (93 unrated)
In China, it is simply known as 'The River.' But the Yangtze—and all of the life that surrounds it—is undergoing an astonishing transformation wrought by the largest hydroelectric project in history, the Three Gorges Dam. Chinese-Canadian director Yung Chang returns to the gorgeous, now-disappearing landscape of his grandfather’s youth to trace the surreal life of a “farewell cruise” that traverses the gargantuan waterway. With a humanist gaze and wry wit Chang’s Upstairs Downstairs approach captures the microcosmic society of the luxury liner. Below deck: a bewildered young girl trains as a dishwasher sent to work by her peasant family, who is on the verge of relocation from the encroaching floodwaters. Above deck: wealthy international tourists set sail to catch a last glance of a country in dramatic flux. The teenage employees who serve and entertain them—tagged with new Westernized names like “Cindy” and “Jerry” by upper management—warily grasp at the prospect of a better future. "Up the Yangtze" gives a human dimension to the wrenching changes facing not only an increasingly globalized China, but the world at large. (Zeitgeist Films)
REVIEW BY STEPHEN HOLDEN, NEW YORK TIMES
"Imagine the Grand Canyon turned into a lake. That image is summoned by Yung Chang, the Chinese-Canadian director and occasional narrator of UP THE YANGTZE, an astonishing documentary of culture clash and the erasure of history amid China’s economic miracle. The film explores the incalculable human impact of the giant Three Gorges Dam project on the Yangtze, China’s longest river. When completed, the 600-foot-high dam will be the largest hydroelectric project in the world. As we watch the steadily rising water swallow more and more of the landscape, the film conveys an ominous sense of a society changing too fast in its stampede into an unknown future.
"The dam, suggested by Sun Yat-sen and later supported by Mao Zedong, but not begun until 1994, is expected to be finished sometime in 2011. Not since the Great Wall has China undertaken such a massive engineering project. By the time the dam is completed as many as two million people will have been relocated to new homes from the flooded area. As one struggling merchant forced to move from his riverside home explains before breaking down in tears, the Chinese people are expected to 'sacrifice the little family for the big family.'
"UP THE YANGTZE is the second recent film based around the project. 'Still Life,' Jia Zhangke’s haunting docudrama, was about a man and a woman who never meet while searching for their mates in Fengjie, a town in the process of demolition. It was drenched in a mood of despair. The more sociologically oriented UP THE YANGTZE is largely set aboard a ship making what are billed as 'farewell cruises' up the river. Many of the tourists, we are told, come expecting to see the 'old China' before it disappears. As the boat sails upriver, the landscape is spectacular. At the same time the yellowish haze over the water suggests China’s already serious air pollution problem. There are brief glimpses of cities whose gaudy wall-to-wall signs match those of the Las Vegas Strip or Times Square. In these cities what remains of the old China is hidden by the glitter.
"Beyond Mr. Chang’s reflections on the country as described to him by his grandfather, the movie refuses to editorialize. It lets the images demonstrate the degree to which the old China has already disappeared. What emerges is a country in the throes of rampant economic development and the global homogenization it augurs.
The movie offers an 'Upstairs, Downstairs' view of life aboard the vessel, which is crowded with well-to-do American and European tourists catered to by a Chinese staff that is minutely drilled on proper etiquette: Never compare Canada and the United States; never call anyone old, pale or fat (plump is O.K.); never talk about politics.
"The movie observes the culture shock felt by two young employees. Yu Shui, the 16-year-old daughter of illiterate peasants who can’t afford to send her to college, is a reluctant dishwasher. Like the other employees she is given a Western name, Cindy. Miserable, sullen and homesick, she has a difficult time adjusting. Meanwhile her parents, who are forced to leave the riverbank where they have survived by growing vegetables and fishing, are shown carrying out the backbreaking labor of moving to a new location. Chen Bo Yu, renamed Jerry, is a cocky, good-looking go-getter from a middle-class background. We are told he is an example of the 'little emperor' phenomenon in which male products of the country’s one-child policy grow up spoiled and entitled. Shortly after Mr. Chen begins receiving generous tips, his cheerful but hard-nosed boss confronts him with complaints from tourists that he is soliciting tips. As he engages an American teenager in small talk about girls and sports, he seems eager to shed his national identity and make money: the more the better.
"All the while the water continues to rise."
WACKNESS, THE (95 R)
 Funny and poignant, THE WACKNESS is one of the better coming-of-age films to hit theaters in a while. "Real life plays intriguingly in the background of this edgy comedy, set in 1994 during a sweltering New York summer. The recently inaugurated mayor, Rudy Giulani, begins to implement his efforts to cut down on such urban annoyances as graffiti, public inebriation and noisy portable stereos. Running up against these restrictions is Luke (Josh Peck), a recent high school graduate. Troubled by his parents' incessant squabbling and grappling with his growing sense of depression, he sells marijuana, trading weed for words of wisdom — from his drug-addled psychiatrist, Dr. Squires (Ben Kingsley). When Luke asks for anti-depressants, Squires advises him to embrace his pain, rather than run away from it. In the good doctor's opinion, Luke just needs to find a girl. "But things get complicated. Luke develops a powerful crush on Squires' cheeky stepdaughter Stephanie (Olivia Thirlby). Thirlby, last seen in Juno as the title character's best friend, gives an appealing, natural performance. "Meanwhile, Squires is having a whopper of a midlife crisis, aching to cheat on his wife (Famke Janssen) and acting more like an adolescent than his teenage patient. This is Sir Ben as you've never seen him. His long-haired character is whacked out on booze and drugs and even indulges in a dalliance with Mary-Kate Olsen, in dreadlocks, playing a worshipful druggy chick. But the film belongs to Peck, who gives an achingly honest performance as a smart and sensitive kid on the brink of adulthood. "He watches his parents fight and can't get over how childish they seem, but he's a good kid and yearns to help them somehow. He falls in love with Stephanie, and one of the film's highlights is how he reacts when his heart is broken for the first time. You sense the character's burgeoning maturity amid the pain. <>The writing and filmmaking style are often poetic, and the dialogue, steeped in '90s phrases, sounds believable. Though teen angst is familiar cinematic turf, the key to the film's authenticity lies in Peck's winning performance. THE WACKNESS is both darkly funny and life-affirming, in an offbeat and offhanded way. "
REVIEW BY DUANE BYRGE, HOLLYWOOD REPORTER
"PARK CITY -- Sunday mornings don't usually go down with standing ovations, but THE WACKNESS inspired a packed Sundance house to forget their Saturday-night pains and stand up and cheer. A rollicking performance by Ben Kingsley as a pothead psychiatrist would steal the show in lesser films, but THE WACKNESS is not overpowered: It rips in all aspects, compliments of talented writer-director Jonathan Levin. Generically, it's a rite-of-summer-passage yarn, but THE WACKNESS bursts the form.
" In this 1994-set piece, recent high-school grad Luke (Josh Peck) sells weed and yearns to get laid. He trades grass for therapy from a drug-fuddled shrink (Kingsley) who exhorts him to sow his wild oats, albeit in more colorful language. Under filmmaker Levine's inspired hand, the performances erupt with precise energies. As the decadent doctor, Kingsley is marvelous as a randy old-goat, who anesthetizes his fears that life has passed him by. Peck as low-key Luke is a wonderful touchstone, exuding both decency and daring, while Thirlby is entrancing as the temptress teen, delicately revealing her wild-child's emotional wounds.
"Technical contributions torque this splendid movie ride. Special praise to editor Josh Noyes for the well-calibrated pace, and composer David Torn for the ripe and torrid sounds."
Official Website
TELL NO ONE (125 )
The first art-house hit of the summer, TELL NO ONE is "Vertigo" meets "The Fugitive" by way of "The Big Sleep." A gentle pediatrician whose wife is murdered is suspected of the crime, but 8 years later begins to believe she may still be alive.
REVIEW BY STEPHEN HOLDEN, NEW YORK TIMES
"In the shortcut language of a movie pitch, Guillaume Canet’s delicious contemporary thriller TELL NO ONE is 'Vertigo' meets 'The Fugitive' by way of 'The Big Sleep.' That is meant as high praise. This French adaptation of Harlan Coben’s 2001 best seller is the kind of conspiracy-minded mystery almost no one seems capable of creating anymore, except David Lynch in his surreal way. Watching it is like gorging on a hot- fudge sundae in the good old days when few worried about sugar and fat. There are no bogus geopolitics weighing it down with a spurious relevance. Beautifully written and acted, TELL NO ONE is a labyrinth in which to get deliriously lost.
"The story, which involves murder and depravity in high places, is so elaborately twisty that about halfway through the movie you stop trying to figure it out and let its polluted waters wash over you, trusting that the denouement will reveal all. It does and it doesn’t. When the truth spills out, and ugly revelations pile onto one another in an extended final confession, the puzzle pieces fit more snugly than those of 'The Big Sleep,' the granddaddy of impenetrable noirs. But one of the pleasures of both films is surrendering to a vision of corruption and evil that resists tidy explanations.
"The protagonist, Alex Beck (François Cluzet), is a kindhearted pediatrician in Paris who goes out of his way to help the poor in the clinic where he works. He is also a spiritual cousin of Scottie Ferguson from 'Vertigo' in his obsession with a woman who may or may not be dead. As the story begins, he and his wife, Margot (Marie-Josée Croze), are revisiting the remote country lake where they spent summers as children and became sweethearts who carved their initials on a tree. Blissfully married decades later, they return to swim nude in the moonlight, then sprawl on the offshore raft where they have a minor squabble about real estate. Margot abruptly departs and disappears into the woods. A minute later Alex hears a stifled cry. Scrambling to shore, he is struck on the head while pulling himself out of the water. He remains in a coma for three days.
"While Alex, who was inexplicably pulled to shore, recuperates, Margot’s father, Jacques (André Dussollier), an imperious police inspector, identifies his daughter’s body in the woods. In the film’s most wrenching moment Alex comes apart in a drunken reverie remembering her cremation, as Jeff Buckley’s version of the early-’50s torch song 'Lilac Wine' is heard on the soundtrack.
"On the eighth anniversary of Margot’s death, Alex, still numb with grief, is interrogated by the police after two bodies are unearthed near the site of her murder, along with a key to a safe-deposit box that contains incriminating photos and a bloodstained weapon that connects him to Margot’s death. Simultaneously, Alex begins receiving anonymous e-mail messages directing him to a Webcam video of a woman who appears to be Margot, gazing anxiously into a surveillance camera. An attached message warns: 'Tell no one. They’re watching.' He begins a desperate undercover search for the woman, suddenly believing Margot may still be alive.
"TELL NO ONE is the second feature film directed by Mr. Canet, whose 2002 satire, 'My Idol,' examined the warped mind of a sadistic producer of reality television. In that movie Mr. Canet played the producer’s aspiring young assistant forced to be his boss’s court jester (and his wife’s part-time lover) at a sinister country estate with a carnivorous aviary. Mr. Canet also appears briefly in TELL NO ONE as the debauched son of Gilbert Neuville (Jean Rochefort), a billionaire politician and horse-racing magnate whose tentacles extend in every direction. In the film François Berléand, who played the producer in 'My Idol,' portrays a sympathetic police investigator in charge of Alex’s case.
"The characters encompass a wide swath of Parisian society. Alex’s confidante and best friend, Hélène (Kristin Scott Thomas), is the wealthy lover of his secretive younger sister, Anne (Marina Hands), a competitive equestrian. Through Hélène, Alex acquires a high-powered defense lawyer (Nathalie Baye), who begins to doubt Alex’s innocence after he flees the police. Just as Alex is about to be taken into custody, a gangster (Gilles Lellouche), whose hemophiliac son’s life was saved by Alex in the clinic, rescues him and spirits him to a safe hiding place in a working-class suburb where young toughs delight in foiling the police. The rescue follows a thrilling chase sequence worthy of 'North by Northwest.' Like that 1959 classic, TELL NO ONE is about an innocent man on the run with nowhere to turn. Mr. Cluzet may not be Cary Grant, but he is a convincing Everyman with a heart and soul stretched to the breaking point.
"TELL NO ONE is pure, nasty fun. I watched it twice. It was even better the second time."
FALL, THE (117 R)
 REVIEW BY ROGER EBERT, CHICAGO SUN-TIMES
Tarsem's "The Fall" is a mad folly, an extravagant visual orgy, a free-fall from reality into uncharted realms. Surely it is one of the wildest indulgences a director has ever granted himself. Tarsem, for two decades a leading director of music videos and TV commercials, spent millions of his own money to finance "The Fall," filmed it for four years in 28 countries and has made a movie that you might want to see for no other reason than because it exists. There will never be another like it.
"The Fall" is so audacious that when Variety calls it a "vanity project," you can only admire the man vain enough to make it. It tells a simple story with vast romantic images so stunning I had to check twice, three times, to be sure the film actually claims to have absolutely no computer-generated imagery. None? What about the Labyrinth of Despair, with no exit? The intersecting walls of zig-zagging staircases? The man who emerges from the burning tree? Perhaps the key words are "computer-generated." Perhaps some of the images are created by more traditional kinds of special effects.
The story framework for the imagery is straightforward. In Los Angeles, circa 1915, a silent movie stunt man has his legs paralyzed while performing a reckless stunt. He convalesces in a half-deserted hospital, its corridors of cream and lime stretching from ward to ward of mostly empty beds, their pillows and sheets awaiting the harvest of World War I. The stunt man is Roy (Lee Pace), pleasant in appearance, confiding in speech, happy to make a new friend of a little girl named Alexandria (Catinca Untaru).
Roy tells a story to Alexandria, involving adventurers who change appearance as quickly as a child's imagination can do its work. We see the process. He tells her of an "Indian" who has a wigwam and a squaw. She does not know these words, and envisions an Indian from a land of palaces, turbans and swamis. The verbal story is input from Roy; the visual story is output from Alexandria.
The story involves Roy (playing the Black Bandit) and his friends: a bomb-throwing Italian anarchist, an escaped African slave, an Indian (from India), and Charles Darwin and his pet monkey, Wallace. Their sworn enemy, Governor Odious, has stranded them on a desert island, but they come ashore (riding swimming elephants, of course) and wage war on him.
Roy draws out the story for a personal motive; after Alexandria brings him some communion wafers from the hospital chapel, he persuades her to steal some morphine tablets from the dispensary. Paralyzed and having lost his great love (she is the Princess in his story), he hopes to kill himself. There is a wonderful scene of the little girl trying to draw him back to life.
Either you are drawn into the world of this movie or you are not. It is preposterous, of course, but I vote with Werner Herzog, who says if we do not find new images, we will perish. Here a line of bowmen shoot hundreds of arrows into the air. So many of them fall into the back of the escaped slave that he falls backward and the weight of his body is supported by them, as on a bed of nails with dozens of foot-long arrows. There is scene of the monkey Wallace chasing a butterfly through impossible architecture.
At this point in reviews of movies like "The Fall" (not that there are any), I usually announce that I have accomplished my work. I have described what the movie does, how it looks while it is doing it, and what the director has achieved. Well, what has he achieved? "The Fall" is beautiful for its own sake. And there is the sweet charm of the young Romanian actress Catinca Untaru, who may have been dubbed for all I know, but speaks with the innocence of childhood, working her way through tangles of words. She regards with equal wonder the reality she lives in, and the fantasy she pretends to. It is her imagination that creates the images of Roy's story, and they have a purity and power beyond all calculation. Roy is her perfect storyteller, she is his perfect listener, and together they build a world.
Ebert notes: The movie's R rating should not dissuade bright teenagers from this celebration of the imagination.
Official Website
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