Reeling

Review: ''Kinatay''

This review won't appear in print until Tuesday, but I'm posting it early here to alert more intrepid viewers, since it is only being screened once at the Miami Film Festival. Kinatay is the kind of film that practically dares you to watch it, but if you want to see it, I highly recommend catching it at the theater for maximum effect and not wait for the DVD.

 

Almost half of Brillante Mendoza's controversial, galvanizing Kinatay unfolds during a car ride. Some drug dealers in Manila - among them Peping (Coco Martin), a rookie cop who occasionally runs errands for the gang to help support his new wife and infant son - have kidnapped and beaten a prostitute (Maria Isabel Lopez) who owes them money and are driving her to an undisclosed location.

Using handheld video cameras, Mendoza allows the harrowing ride to unfold in something close to real time, the woman's agonizing screams and the heightened sounds of traffic underscoring the dark, murky images. Much of the screen is filled with shadowy shapes and faces lit only by passing cars and streetlights: You can't really see what's going on. Boredom, anxiety and tension build simultaneously as the ride stretches on and on (and on; I clocked it at about 30 minutes' worth of screen time).

If you haven't walked out by the time the kidnappers finally arrive at their destination, Kinatay further tests your mettle by depicting in graphic detail how the drug dealers handle junkies who don't settle their debts. When it premiered at Cannes last May, Kinatay earned Mendoza the Best Director prize, even though Roger Ebert had immortalized the movie as the worst film to ever be shown at the festival.

The disparity of reaction is understandable. Anyone who stumbles into Kinatay unaware of what's in store will be baffled and put off by Mendoza's meticulous attempt to put you inside Peping's head and make you experience exactly what he sees, hears and feels over the course of one long night's journey into hell. In marked contrast to the dynamics of Lola, Mendoza's latest film (to be shown at the festival on Wednesday and Thursday), narrative is not Kinatay's point. There is no narrative, really.

This is more of an exercise in experiential cinema, as well as a blistering critique of a society that drives its poorest to unimaginable acts for mere survival. The early scenes in Kinatay (Filipino for "slaughter") depict Peping's city-hall wedding to his girlfriend and the overall happiness of his friends and family. An hour later, as that same young man is standing by helplessly, witnessing the savage rape and dismemberment of a woman, Mendoza's message could not be more clear. Even if the filmmaker's hand is a bit heavy at times (the police academy shirt Peping wears reads "If you lose your integrity once, you lose it forever"), Kinatay's bruising power cannot be denied - at least for viewers with the patience and stomach to endure.

Kinatay screens Tuesday at 10 p.m. at the Regal South Beach as part of the 27th Miami International Film Festival. There will be walkouts.

Here's a sneak peek at the Miami Film Festival

 Tomorrow's Weekend section will be jampacked with my first batch of reviews of movies in this year's Miami International Film Festival, which kicks off Friday. You can get a sneak peek at some of them here and here.

I've been concentrating on the film festival so much for the past couple of weeks, I've barely had time to think about the Oscars. I just filed my annual Oscar predictions piece, which is running in Sunday's paper, and I'm already wishing I could go back and tweak some of my calls.

I usually fare pretty well when it comes to handicapping the Oscars, but if The Hurt Locker crashes and burns, my average is going be way off this year, since I've basically bet the farm on it.

Review: ''Alice in Wonderland''

You have to give Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland time to get going. For a long, terrifying while, the movie looks as if it's going to be just like every picture Burton has directed since 1994's Ed Wood (with the notable exception of Sweeney Todd): A lavishly designed, visually entrancing, emotionally hollow bore.

The early going confirms your suspicions. A 19-year-old Alice (Mia Wasikowska), having dismissed the fantastical adventures in Wonderland she experienced in Lewis Carroll's novels as mere dream, once again chases a smartly dressed rabbit and falls down a hole. A crippling stupor and much seat-fidgeting set in as Alice reacquaints herself with the denizens of this strange world: The bickering twins Tweedledee and Tweedledum (both played by Matt Lucas), the White Rabbit (Michael Sheen), the Blue Caterpillar (Alan Rickman) and the grinning Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry). Even Alice's trademark "Curiouser and curiouser" remark falls flat. "Duller and duller" would have been more apt.

Most important, there is the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp), the only character in the bunch not computer-generated. The Mad Hatter seems a little less mad and a lot more morose than you may remember. He's sad, the way most of Wonderland's residents are, due to the Red Queen (a delirious, scene-stealing Helena Bonham Carter), who wrested the kingdom from her do-goody sister the White Queen (Anne Hathaway) and now rules mercilessly, shouting "Off with their head!" to anyone who dares so much as look at her the wrong way.

Because Depp is under the orange frock of hair and oversized eyes, the Hatter's role is greatly (and pointlessly) increased in the story, which was written by Linda Woolverton (Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King) in a disappointingly literal-minded manner. Alice in Wonderland is curiously devoid of metaphors and allegories about a young woman on the cusp of adulthood, about to be engaged by arrangement to a loathsome toad of a man she can barely stomach. The lack of psychological subtext is hugely disappointing.

But wait. Just around the time Alice and the Red Queen first meet, and the tyrant with the giant head and tiny body shows her guest her preferred choice of footstool (a live pig), Alice in Wonderland starts to do something different: It begins to develop narrative steam. At this point Carroll fans will grate their teeth and start groping in the dark for vegetables to throw at the screen, because Burton has settled on the hoariest of all fantasy-adventure tropes - the oblivious warrior who discovers she is destined to save the world - as the narrative spine for his wild tale. Why Burton didn't just make a straightforward adaptation of Carroll's novel is unclear. Perhaps the director felt the tale was too familiar to bother remaking.

But although the replacement the filmmakers came up with will rankle purists, there is considerable fun to be had in Alice in Wonderland, particularly in the movie's second half, if you're willing to look past the cliches and savor Burton's inventions: The blood-red moat littered by bobbing severed heads that surrounds the Red Queen's castle; the warrior Dormouse (Barbara Windsor) plucking out the eyeball of a rampaging monster with a sewing needle, the way you'd skewer an olive with a toothpick; the disgusting ingredients the perky White Queen cheerfully mixes into a potion to help shrink Alice from her giant size; the notion of Depp and Crispin Glover (Knave of Hearts) - two of Hollywood's all-time great weirdos - squaring off on a giant chessboard.

Unlike Avatar, Alice in Wonderland was not shot with 3D cameras - the process was added in post-production - which explains why the movie looks like such a blurry mess when viewed through a pair of those annoying plastic glasses. Throughout the screening I attended, I kept wishing I could watch the movie in plain 2D: The extra dimension adds nothing but distraction and headaches. Burton's framing and imagery are striking enough that they don't need artificial adornment. Alice in Wonderland isn't quite the natural fit of director and material that it seemed to be on paper, but most of Burton's recent movies have been far more disappointing. "Do you think I've gone 'round the bend?" a young Alice, fearing for her sanity, asks her father. "All the best people are," he replies. Only Burton could make going a little crazy seem like a heartwarming way for a dad to bond with his child.

(**1/2 out of ****)

Alice in Wonderland opens in South Florida on Friday, March 5.

Review: ''Brooklyn's Finest''

Did The Wire ruin cop movies forever? So many cast members of the former HBO series are scattered throughout Brooklyn's Finest, and so many situations are reminiscent of the show, that the movie is practically a reunion special. Unfortunately, reunion specials tend to suck. And the presence of Omar and Wee-Bey and Sen. Clay Davis (someone yelled out his signature, unprintable line from the show at the screening I attended) does the film no favors, serving as a reminder of how much better and more intricately The Wire depicted the eternal dance between the police and drug dealers.

 No two-hour movie, of course, could achieve the same complexity as 60 episodes of a weekly hour-long drama. But Brooklyn's Finest covers the same thematic turf the show did on a more modest scale, focusing on three cops whose lives overlap during one violent night. Actors love playing tortured cops, because the roles are showy and flamboyant and offer an excuse to go deep with the angst and gravitas of trying to remain good men in a rotten world.

Of the three leads, Ethan Hawke fares best playing Sal, a father whose family has outgrown its modest house and whose wife (Lili Taylor) is pregnant with twins. Sal is trying to come up with the money for a down payment on a sweet deal for a new house, but the deadline is approaching, and his salary simply can't cover it.

Hawke has been quietly devoting his career to playing desperate men driven to extreme measures (he played similar roles in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead and What Doesn't Kill You), and he's in top-notch form here, making you share in the constant anxiety and frustration of a man torn between providing for his family and upholding the law. In the film's best scene, he delivers a terrific monologue as to why cops should feel free to dip into the stacks of money drug dealers leave lying around before they are confiscated and placed into evidence. Yes, it's highly illegal, but Sal makes a convincing argument.

The other leads - Richard Gere as a veteran seven days away from retirement and Don Cheadle as a narcotics officer who has spent too long undercover and is starting to lose his moral bearings - don't fare nearly so well, because their characters are pure cliche. Gere's troubled loner wakes up in the morning by taking a swig of bourbon, and his only friend in the world is a prostitute. Cheadle feels guilty about having to betray the drug kingpin (a terrific Wesley Snipes) who considers him a brother.

Director Antoine Fuqua (Training Day, Shooter) clearly loves actors: He fills the screen with their faces and holds on them for unusually long takes, letting them do as much with silence as they do with dialogue. Fuqua also pulls off one terrific sequence, exactly at mid-film, in which he cuts back and forth among his leads, all stranded in tense situations. As the suspense mounts to a near-unbearable pitch, Fuqua expertly plays the audience like an orchestra conductor.

The movie is never that good again. Brooklyn's Finest has a biblical sense of justice to go along with all the Christian iconography peppered throughout. But the movie becomes less interesting once you realize that the characters' fates are inextricably linked to their actions - once you know that no bad deed will go unpunished and that, unlike in the real world (or The Wire), sin always carries comeuppance here. By turning Brooklyn's Finest into a morality tale, Fuqua lets the movie slip right through his undeniably talented fingers.

(** out of ****)

Brooklyn's Finest opens in South Florida on Friday, March 5.