Michele Massa's blog

Directed by James Toback. (R. 105 minutes. At the Roxie Cinema.)

Writer-director James Toback ("Two Girls and a Guy") has entered that
enviable career stage where his movies are automatically interesting because
he made them. Like those of the best auteurs, his films are invitations to
wallow in a sensibility that's hard to resist.

But Toback isn't coasting. His latest, "Harvard Man" has everything you
could ever want from a Toback movie: lurid sex, shocking excess and an out-of-
nowhere thoughtfulness that's not put on; it's real. As early as "Fingers"
(1978), Toback was showing how the highest and lowest impulses could be raging
within a single individual. That same fascination is at work in "Harvard Man."

Adrian Grenier plays a young Harvard student with a complicated life. He's
a college basketball player whose cheerleader girlfriend (Sarah Michelle
Gellar) is the daughter of a Mafia boss. He is also a philosophy major having
an affair with his professor, played by Joey Lauren Adams.

Toback isn't afraid of talkie scenes. He is comfortable using a single
setup and letting the characters whip through pages of dialogue. Grenier and
Adams have a long bedroom scene in which she tries to warn the drug-friendly
youngster away from using LSD. "It's cyanide," she says.

But Toback never indulges himself at the audience's expense. He earns the
right to take his time, when needed, by crafting an overall story of genuine
tension — the Mafia girlfriend ropes our young hero into a plot to throw the
game. He also knows how to play with time with seeming ease, to juggle past
and present in the editing to illuminate both.

Grenier is a find, and "Harvard Man" should mark Gellar's entrance into
full-fledged adulthood, as far as her castability is concerned. Yet the
performer most worth noting is Adams, who would be an unlikely choice to play
a philosophy professor, except that she seems to understand every word she
says. Adams sparkles with quick-mindedness and verbal agility. This is a
worthy and underused talent.

Advisory: This film contains drug use and sexual situations.

– Mick LaSalle

'LOLA'

Romance. Starring Anouk Aimee. Directed and written by Jacques Demy. (Not
rated. 90 minutes. In French with English subtitles. At the Lumiere today
through April 18; at the Rafael Film Center in San Rafael today through April
15.)

Soft and evanescent, lyrical but bittersweet, Jacques Demy's first film is
like a dream that one enters — and then recalls for years afterward with
absolute pleasure.

Filmed in 1961, "Lola" is an ode to yearning and enchantment — a valentine
to France, to beautiful women, to the foolish but delicious notions of romance
that we receive from Hollywood. Anouk Aimee ("A Man and a Woman") is heavenly
as Lola, a dance-hall girl in the port city of Nantes (Demy's hometown). Part
phantom and part voluptuary, Lola is the kind of woman who wants "always to be
alluring," who wiggles when she walks, who's fond of a drink, who likes to
primp and smoke and speak in a breathy voice.

As a young girl, Lola dreamed of becoming a ballet dancer but "got lost,"
she explains. Early in the story she runs into Roland (Marc Michel), an old
flame who becomes smitten all over again. Lola rebuffs him; she still pines
for Michel, the broad-shouldered Adonis who loved her and left her with a 7-
year-old son.

Demy shot "Lola" in black and white, dedicated it to filmmaker Max Ophuls
("The Earrings of Madame de . . .") and constructs an Ophuls-like daisy chain
of interconnecting chance encounters. Like Ophuls, he lets his camera glide
and swirl around his characters — as if he were embracing them and their
heady illusions. Demy died in 1990 and his widow, director Agnes Varda,
supervised the restoration of his exquisite, muted jewel of a film.

– Edward Guthmann

'FESTIVAL IN CANNES'

Drama. Starring Anouk Aimee, Greta Scacchi, Maximilian Schell and Ron
Silver. Directed by Henry Jaglom. (PG-13. 99 minutes. At the Embarcadero
Center Cinema.)

Henry Jaglom keeps making Henry Jaglom films, and they're always compelling,

sometimes in a car-wreck sort of way and sometimes in a truthful way that's
only his. "Festival in Cannes" is one of his better efforts — a wry and
sometime bitter movie about love, set against the wheeling and dealing
atmosphere of the world's most famous film festival.

Jaglom, like the French director Eric Rohmer, is in love with love. Unlike
Rohmer, Jaglom is a cynic. More artist than thinker, Jaglom says more than he
thinks he's saying in "Festival in Cannes," and that's all to the good. The
festival backdrop may be intended to lend enchantment to a tale of three
generations of lovers finding each other over a span of days. But under the
steady gaze of Jaglom's camera, Cannes looks like a worn beach town defaced by
movie billboards. Nothing of value will come of this festival — or of these
relationships. That's the cynical and refreshing message being communicated
here.

Anouk Aimee plays a French actress juggling two offers: a starring role in
an independent film from a first-time director (Greta Scacchi) and a small
role in a blockbuster being fronted by Ron Silver as a big-time Hollywood
sleaze. Through this false dichotomy — there's no reason the actress can't
accept both offers — the movie gives Aimee a chance to shine and illustrates
the difficulties actors face. Everyone flatters them; everyone wants to use
them.

Maximilian Schell is well cast as Aimee's ex-husband, a great director who
hasn't made a film in years. "It's so hard to make a film," he says.
"Sometimes I think it's enough to dream them."

The younger generation is represented by Jenny Gabrielle, as a novice who
comes to Cannes an unknown and overnight finds herself the talk of the
festival. It's a dream come true, but Jaglom is too honest to present the
upheaval in her life as anything other than emotionally disconcerting, the
kind of thing that would make any young person want to latch on to a new lover
just to hold on to something.

– Mick LaSalle

'HUMAN NATURE'

Comedy. Starring Patricia Arquette, Tim Robbins, Rhys Ifans and Miranda
Otto. Directed by Michael Gondry. (R. 96 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)

"Human Nature" is a sly comedy that lives up to the promise of its title.
It explores the contest between civilization and brute impulse and does so
with a combination of screw-loose zaniness and intellectual rigor. The result
is a satisfying and original picture.

Patricia Arquette plays Lila, a young woman who, at puberty, started
growing fur all over her body. As an adult, in order to pass in society, she
spends a lot of time shaving herself — everywhere. Meanwhile, her boyfriend
Nathan, played by Tim Robbins at his uptight best, researches ways of teaching
civilization to mammals. He gets the ultimate chance to test his behavior
theories when he comes upon a man (Rhys Ifans) who was raised by apes. He
brings him to his laboratory and sets about teaching him to be an ascot-
wearing, wine-drinking lover of opera.

Written by Charlie Kaufman, who wrote "Being John Malkovich," "Human
Nature" is characterized by smart, quirky dialogue throughout, though the
funniest moments are sight gags involving the newly civilized ape man, who may
have the veneer of refinement but is clearly hanging by a thread. In one scene
he is taken to a restaurant and, in the midst of placing his order, leaps from
the table and starts rubbing against the waitress. The fact that he is wearing
an electric collar and knows he will be punished for this makes it all the
funnier.

The point of "Human Nature" is that, left to our own devices, all of us
would be as impulsive and animal-like. That would hardly be worth saying, but
the movie has a more subtle point — that civilization itself, far from being
an instrument of civility, is the most efficient tool through which people are
able to implement and get away with their most monumental acts of selfishness
and sensual gratification.

Advisory: This film contains nudity, sexual situations and strong language.

– Mick LaSalle

'FRAILTY'

Suspense. Starring Matthew McConaughey and Bill Paxton. Directed by Paxton.
(R. 100 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)

In his directing debut, actor Bill Paxton has made a truly awful picture
instead of a merely vapid one. "Frailty," about a single father who thinks God
wants him to kill evildoers, is dumb but also unrelentingly dark and ugly,
thereby depriving the viewer of any camp value.

Daddy the Demon Slayer is played with maniacal fervor by Paxton, who could
have used a good director to rein him in. He apparently directed his fellow
actors, including Matthew McConaughey and granite-faced Powers Boothe, to look
as morose as possible while he filled in gaps with dark filters and ominous
music.

The script by Brent Hanley veers from silly and hackneyed to gruesome and
hackneyed. When McConaughey guesses that Boothe became an FBI agent after
Boothe's mother was murdered, the agent replies, "Have you thought about a
career in law enforcement? You really have a feel for it." He's serious.

McConaughey, as Paxton's grown-up son, has approached the FBI because he
believes his brother grew up to be a serial killer like Pops. In flashback, he
recalls how the dad enlisted the boys to lure people into his van, "Silence of
the Lambs" style.

"Frailty" focuses on the kids' trauma to an unseemly degree. The boys
witness numerous killings, and one is nearly starved to death by the dad. The
movie enumerates the horrors these kids experience without a glimmer of hope
that they might emerge OK. Matt O'Leary, the abused kid in "Domestic
Disturbance," had it easy in that picture compared with what he endures here.

Director Paxton bludgeons where he could finesse. When the father pulls the
shade down before the umpteenth ax slaying, you think you'll be spared the
carnage. No dice. The whack happens off-camera but the blood spurts into the
frame.

Visual cliches run rampant. Fog shrouds the public garden where the bodies
are buried. Shadows from the partition in a cop car play on McConaughey's face.

You can say one thing for novice director Paxton, though: The scene of a
miniature angel descending through a carburetor is a true original.

Advisory: This film contains violence and raw language.

– Carla Meyer

'BORSTAL BOY'

Drama. Starring Shawn Hatosy, Danny Dyer and Michael York. Directed by
Peter Sheridan. (Not rated. 91 minutes. At the Opera Plaza.)

"Borstal Boy," about the early life of Irish playwright Brendan Behan, is a
sincere piece of work with good performances and some illuminating moments.
But it's dragged down by a slow pace, an intrinsic lack of dramatic tension
and a somewhat naive treatment of the subject. The result is a film that will
probably please people already fascinated by Behan but leave everyone else
yawning with admiration.

The picture, based on Behan's memoirs, begins with young Brendan (Shawn
Hatosy) as a 16-year-old IRA zealot who is captured by British officials
before he can follow through on a plan to blow up something in Liverpool. He
is sent to a British borstal — a kind of reform school — which turns out to
be the best thing that ever happened to him. Run by a sweet-natured warden
(Michael York), the place is more like a boy's camp than a prison.

Some scenes have a casual truth about them that feels right. At night,
chilling newsreels of the Battle of Britain are shown on a movie screen, but
the boys barely react — they just clown around and talk, waiting for the
feature to start. The growing friendship between Brendan and a young gay
sailor (Danny Dyer), treated with sensitivity and detail, becomes the center
of the film.

Yet something in the film's handling of Behan's emerging homosexuality
feels a little too politically correct — too accepted, too cozy and too easy.
For a macho Irish kid in 1940, there had to be some inner conflict. Or if the
conflict wasn't there, where was it? Somewhere, for sure. Behan went on to
drink himself to death in his early 40s. Yet there's no hint here of anything
clouding this young man's psyche. It might be admirable that writer and co-
director Peter Sheridan avoids cheap theatrics, but no one should be
congratulated in avoiding all theatrics. That's just denying the dictates of
the medium.

Advisory: This film contains strong language, violence and some sexuality.

– Mick LaSalle

'THE OTHER SIDE OF HEAVEN'

Drama. Starring Christopher Gorham and Anne Hathaway. Directed and written
by Mitch Davis. (PG. 113 minutes. At the Galaxy.)

In the 1950s, John Groberg left his hometown of Idaho Falls and went
halfway across the world to the Kingdom of Tonga, a South Pacific archipelago
where he was sent as a missionary by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints.

Groberg was 19 when he left his home and spent the first months on Tonga
struggling with language barriers, hurricanes, mosquitoes and the islanders'
suspicions. His 1993 memoir, "In the Eye of the Storm," has been adapted as
"The Other Side of Heaven," a film that recaptures his early adventures and
uses them as an example of the benefits of missionary work.

"The Other Side of Heaven," made without church sponsorship, is handsome
and sincere but slightly awkward in its combination of entertainment and
evangelical boosterism. Directed and written by Mitch Davis, it focuses
primarily on Groberg's cultural adjustments on the island of Niuatoputapu but
slips occasionally into sermonettes extolling the virtues of Christian service.

Christopher Gorham, who looks a bit like the young Tom Hanks, is appealing
as Groberg. Arriving at the island where he will live for three years, Groberg
cuts an odd profile in his suit and narrow tie, surrounded by skeptical island
men in grass skirts and women who titter that he looks "whiter than soap."

Groberg learned Tongan by reading the Scriptures, but for some reason the
islanders, played mostly by New Zealand actors, speak English once he has
learned Tongan. The South Pacific photography by Brian Breheny is very strong -
- the film was shot in the Cook Islands — and Anne Hathaway ("The Princess
Diaries") is lovely as the girlfriend Groberg leaves behind.

– Edward Guthmann

'SON OF THE BRIDE'

Drama. Starring Ricardo Darin, Hector Alterio and Norma Aleandro. Directed
by Juan Jose Campanella. Written by Campanella and Fernando Castets. (Rated R.
124 minutes. In Spanish with English subtitles. At the Lumiere.)

In Buenos Aires, a workaholic restaurant owner neglects his daughter and
mother and hasn't time for his girlfriend. "Your life's like a marathon," a
potential buyer observes. "You remind me of a juggler spinning plates."

Rafael, the lead character in "Son of the Bride," is one more manifestation
of a cinematic cliche: the pent-up, cell-phone-addicted businessman who has to
hit the wall before he can smell the roses. Juan Jose Campanella directs with
such care and affection, however, and Ricardo Darin plays the lead character
and his transitions so gracefully that it all goes down quite easily.

Nominated for an Oscar as best foreign-language drama — it lost to "No
Man's Land" — "Son of the Bride" finds Rafael suffering from tax pressures,
reduced profit margin and a financial climate that allows chains to buy at
wholesale but penalizes mom-and-pop businessess. All that madness has made him
a monster, but after a mild heart attack and extended hospital stay he's a
changed man — and wants off the fast track.

"Son of the Bride" manages to be affectionate without drawing too deeply
from a well of sugar and schmaltz. After Rafael's breakthrough, his dad
(Hector Alterio) announces that he wants to remarry his mother in a church
wedding. There's dubious virtue in turning the Alzheimer's-stricken mom (Norma
Aleandro) into a spunky, slightly raunchy woman-child, but Campanella, whose
own parents remarried late in life, finds the right tone and creates a very
sweet moment with the elders' wedding.

Advisory: This film contains raw language and sexual situations.

– Edward Guthmann