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Director:
Dean Deblois
Chris Sanders

Starring:
Daveigh Chase
Tia Carrere
Jason Scott Lee
Chris Sanders
David Ogden Stiers
Kevin McDonald
Kevin Michael Richardson
Zoe Caldwell

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OTHER REVIEWS:
A.I.: Artificial Intelligence
Spielberg, 2001

E.T.: Extra-Terrestrial
Spielberg, 1982

The Emperor's New Groove
Dindal, 2000

The Iron Giant
Bird, 1999

Star Wars: Episode I -- The Phantom Menace
Lucas, 1999

Lilo & Stitch comes to life on the screen unlike anything people would have expected from a stagnant Disney animation division. Barring their work with Pixar and Fantasia resurrection, Disney has not had anything near a masterpiece since Beauty and the Beast, also their last work with completely classical animation and storytelling. Lilo & Stitch is inarticulate, immature, and troubled -- at first glance, it might be considered a departure, but what about Dopey, Tramp, and Dumbo?

Stitch, despite what the Disney ad department would have you think, could fit in with a clique of incorrigible deviants seen in the many years of Disney animation; likewise, the filmmakers Dean Deblois and Chris Sanders have more importantly embraced the styles of Hamilton Luske and Ben Sharpsteen, choosing to give Lilo & Stitch the look and feel of Dumbo, not Dinosaur.

In retrospect, Lilo & Stitch is not set in any real time, it is given a temporal freedom that fit so well in almost all of the classic Disney masterpieces. Outside of a recognition of the Hawaii’s place as a tourist destination and the hinting towards men in black, most of the film is set in a world that is timeless (perhaps a comment on the fact that Hawaii, despite a continually growing tourist industry, has remained essentially timeless). More so, the filmmakers use this lack of a time factor to enhance the story with an impression of its unquestionable universality -- at first glance, a Hawaiian story would seem unconnected to the lives of contiguous state Americans, but Deblois and Sanders perfectly inject it with values that impact anyone.

The film follows the travails of the two title characters as they forge some form of relationship despite the hindrances that are inherent in their forms. Lilo (voiced by Chase) is an orphaned, rebellious child, trying to make a family out of just herself and her adult sister Nani (Carrere). Stitch, on the other hand, is a space alien, genetically created to destroy everything that it touches. Some might say their meeting is kismet.

After the Space Confederation deems Stitch an abomination, banishes his creator Jumba (Stiers), and prepares to destroy him, Stitch’s inventiveness (an asset Jumba built into him) gets him into an escape module and heads to the planet Earth, placed under strict protection as the breeding ground for mosquitoes. The leader of the confederation sees Stitch’s existence on the planet unlikely since it is mostly water, but soon panics when the module lands on Kauai and sends Jumba with lackey Pleakley (McDonald) to capture Stitch before he can cause any damage.

Stitch is resourceful, though, convincing the islanders that he is a dog and making it into Lilo’s life when Nani finally agrees to get her a pet. This is a last resort attempt to give the young girl something to love since none of the girls around the island want to have anything to do with her and an exceedingly creepy social worker named Cobra Bubbles (Rhames) is keeping a close eye on the household for any dissatisfaction from Lilo.

The destructiveness of Stitch becomes a major problem for Nani and Lilo, as they find his shenanigans destroy nearly everything he can touch. Even the pretenses of his relationship are questionable: the only reason he lightens up to Lilo in the animal shelter is to keep from being shot by Jumba. Stitch is an antihero to the core, allowing his most unlikable actions to well inside an entity that cannot turn its back on what it learns to be ‘ohana’ or ‘family.’

And that is doubly true for the producers bringing Lilo & Stitch to theatres. Disney has been incorrigible for a decade now, producing marginal fare that it tried to portray as some sort of achievement comparable to the work of Walt Disney. As they turned their back on classical animation to enrich their CGI studio with A Bug’s Life, Toy Story, and Toy Story 2, they effectively began eating away their own history. I’m of a generation that grew up with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Dumbo, and Cinderella through re-releases -- even into a 1980s Disney revival, the magic was still there for children who knew E.T. better than Peter Pan. Lilo & Stitch may be the first step at a renewal of this Disney ethos -- if they continue to make this level of quality animated films, they might have a new collection of films to raise future generations on. Even if they do fail to do so, the youths of 2025 can still have their copy of Lilo & Stitch suitably close to their copies of Bambi and Beauty and the Beast.

The issues dealt with in the movie are not quite as heavy as what Warner Bros. surprisingly pulled off with The Iron Giant, but that does not mean that Lilo & Stitch comes as a mere trifle to see in the summer’s saturated family film market (Lilo & Stitch, Scooby-Doo, Hey Arnold! The Movie, and The Powerpuff Girls all come out over the course of a month). Deblois and Sanders deal with more sentimental questions that may not bring any real change in how people -- regardless of age -- look at society, but they do bring some welling in the heart that cannot be ignored. The six-year-old I saw the film with said he almost cried a couple times; I cannot say that he was the only person in the theatre touched by the movie.

Director:
Laurent Cantet

Starring:
Aurélien Recoing
Karin Viard
Serge Livrozet
Jean-Pierre Mangeot
Monique Mangeot
Nicolas Kalsch
Marie Cantet
Félix Cantet

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OTHER REVIEWS:
The Business of
Strangers
Stettner, 2001

Human Resources
Cantet, 2000

The Piano Teacher
Haneke, 2002

The Talented Mr. Ripley
Minghella, 1999

With a Friend Like
Harry
Moll, 2001

Enron, ImClone, Tyco, WorldCom, Xerox -- this is certainly not a good time to be in the business world. While Neil Cavuto and Lou Dobbs do gangbusters reporting on these collapsing and corrupted corporations, the workers -- most of whom had nothing to do with the wrongdoings going on at the higher levels -- pay with their jobs. A domino effect soon follows, as corporations close, corollary industries lose business and more jobs are lost, finally ending with the occupations most expected to gain from these events falter too (like Reuters recently cutting 14% of its workforce).

The character of Vincent (Recoing) at the center of Laurent Cantet’s Time Out (L’Emploi du Temps) is just one of these casualties. However, instead of using his lost job to move into another job (like Anderson employees moving to another accounting firm or Enron workers stripping for Playboy), Vincent just decides that a fictitious job would be more suitable. So afraid of telling his ‘weak’ wife Muriel (Viard) of his unemployment, Vincent just tells his family that he’s left his old job as a consultant for a new one with the United Nations.

To keep the façade of a job, Vincent commutes to Switzerland every week to seem like he is spending all his time at a Geneva UNCI office. He goes through the actual office one day, listening in on a meeting and reading through UN-African employment initiatives -- hey, he’s got to have some work information to tell his family about.

But he soon learns that spending his days driving around and loitering around various locales cannot continue the mode of life his family has become accustomed to. To make the needed income to support his wife and kids in their upper-middle-class existence, Vincent gets embroiled in a scam to embezzle money from friends and relatives that will bring in the money to pacify his wife from questioning his secretive job. Before long, he has a dozen people handing him money (some of whom contacted him through word-of-mouth) in a shady bank transaction that is supposed to give them a some net earning but really just gives him the cash to buy children’s clothes and a new SUV. He even convinces his father to give him 200,000 francs for a fictional apartment.

In all this searching for a place to kill time between weekend visits home, Vincent finds the famed friendship among crooks. Fake-designer item peddler Jean-Michel (Livrozet) sees Vincent at work on a couple old school chums and offers him a small place in his business. Even if the white-collar jobs may be out of his reach, there’s always room for a few more thieves.

Laurent Cantet’s last film was Human Resources, an indictment of the way factories essentially use its workers’ lives for work horses before dropping them whenever that vitality is gone. The director has already been dubbed as France’s ultimate director of the modern working class, but that almost marginalizes what the director has proven to be so good at: working conditions are mere subplots to his stories that are more intent on the human condition.

Time Out exceeds anything that one might have expected for his follow-up to Human Resources. It is smarter and, thankfully, more subtle in its tale of existential employment milieu. As his workmanship has become more slowly paced (his first feature clocked in at 67 minutes, Human Resources was 107, Time Out finished just over 132), Cantet has come to terms with his own storytelling attributes. Using his glacial pace to help understand his characters, the movie is allowed more breathing room and, much to the satisfaction of the audience, thus becomes more intimate in its portrayal of a man drowning in his own lies.

Aurélien Recoing gives the striking performance to make all those moments worthwhile. With a pudgy face and a quizzical look, the actor brings to mind Larry Miller, though using a much different discourse than you’d ever get from Miller’s films and his The Weekly Standard columns. Since Recoing is in nearly every scene, the move must rely on his ability to turn the audience to his plight -- even though the lack of a job is not his fault, it would be awfully hard to empathize with anyone as he swindles his friends and deceived his family.

The aloofness Recoing brings to the screen is perfectly joined with a cautious Robin Campillo editing, a cold Pierre Milon photographing, and a reserved Jocelyn Pook score (whose work on Eyes Wide Shut has still not been forgotten three years later). Time Out is a cooperative that shows what many great workers can do well. Perhaps the film industry is the only one not affected negatively by the current multi-industrial collapse.

Director:
Fabián Bielinsky

Starring:
Ricardo Darín
Gastón Pauls
Leticia Brédice
Tomás Fonzi
Óscar Núñez
Ignasi Abadal
Elsa Berenguer

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OTHER REVIEWS:
Heist
Mamet, 2001

Our Lady of the Assassins
Schroeder, 2001

The Score
Oz, 2001

Son of the Bride
Campanella, 2002

Training Day
Fuqua, 2001

Last year, director Barbet Schroeder took us on a journey to his homeland, the rarely documented violence-infested underworld of Columbia. First time filmmaker Fabián Bielinsky attempts to similarly use a fictional story to tell of his South American home. In this case it is Argentina, where the loaded guns have been replaced by stacked cards. It’s a world of swindlers and grifters, a land that has been waiting for the watchful eye of David Mamet to uncover and relate around the world.

Surprisingly, Bielinsky’s film, Nine Queens, was regarded as the representative film for the Argentine entry for the Academy Awards in 2000 -- is the country regularly creating such intriguing, inventive little stories of Argentine shysters and the search for the all too important mark? If so, let’s send some Sony Picture Classics reps down there pronto.

The film may seem old hat by now: American genres used last year as the dumping ground of as many good heist films as possible, including Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s 11, Frank Oz’s The Score, and Mamet’s Heist. All of those films were perfectly formulated, intriguing to the core, and effectively absorbing. Nine Queens may have subtitles, but it would fit perfectly with those other films in any drive-in double feature. (Which, considering the xenophobia inherent in today’s cinema, an English-language remake seems almost inevitable; though some of the thrill would be lost without the film’s pitch-perfect understanding of the Buenos Aires criminal underworld.)

The film opens as Juan (Pauls), a wet-eared swindler, pulls a slight of hand to confuse a convenience store employee out of some of the till. The trick works, but his neophyte mentality causes him to press his luck by trying the trick again when the checker changes shifts. In the middle of his second swindle, the previous checker returns and realizes her earlier mistake, bringing the manager into the altercation. Watching all along, Marcos (Darín) introduces himself as a cop, arrests Juan, takes the money as evidence, and swiftly leaves the store.

Anyone who’s seen a heist film previously can tell right away that Marcos is just another conman, looking to make a couple bucks from the confusion of others. The slightly older, more talented, and less moral Marcos sees Juan’s possibilities as an asset that he can use: like the ineptness of a waiter in a restaurant, the tiniest amount of aptitude from an accomplice can make all the difference.  In the end, using your far superior abilities at conning, the professional conman can then swindle the accomplice out of his share. It’s underhanded Darwinism.

When onetime partner Sandler (Núñez) suffers a heart attack at the Buenos Aires Hilton while trying to make a deal that could mean hundreds of thousands, the same Hilton where Marcos’ sister Valeria (Brédice) works in between her catwalks across the hotel lounge, the deal falls into Marcos’ lap. Through some conniving, he gets all the information he needs to continue the deal -- which involves the sale of some priceless Weimar stamps called the Nine Queens to a shifty Spanish businessman (Abadal) -- and soon learns that the tricks of the trade Juan learned from convicted father has made their pairing the best grifter cooperative since Ryan and Tatum O’Neal joined forces against Midwesterners in Paper Moon. Now, the only question is who will ultimately cheat whom out of his cut.

At the heart of the film is a snaky performance from Ricardo Darín, perfectly echoing a little Robert De Niro with some Kevin Spacey (possibly the finest instigator of a swindle in film history). Darín popped up a couple weeks ago in a completely different performance, though no less notable, in the midlife crisis comedy-drama Son of the Bride. His raw cunningness gives the film more bite than would have been brought by some of the more famed but less dark actors (as a glib and overly suave George Clooney proved in Ocean’s 11). Based upon these two films, I have little doubt that we’ll be seeing some more important films come from Argentina with this talented actor.

The rest of the cast follows in suit, ranging from the naïveté of Pauls to the cattiness of Brédice. Speaking the double-talk that Bielinsky wrote, the actors have the smooth criminal satisfaction that has marked some of Mamet’s best films, especially House of Games. Though Lindsay Crouse’s equivalent character has been relegated to a bystander for the first half of Nine Queens, the competence that marks this movie -- like Mamet’s films -- convinces the audience that everyone will be important to the scam, and thus the movie, by the end.

While not quite as satisfactory as its American contemporaries (how rare is it that I say something like that?), Nine Queens succeeds nonetheless. The breathtaking ease of the character’s double-crossings feel less forced compared to most of this genre’s films because the director-writer has the sense to introduce the audience to the fact that almost everyone in Buenos Aires is interested in swindling each other. By the end, as all the cards begin to fall into place, the audience is among the few who do not feel cheated.

Director:
D.J. Caruso

Starring:
Val Kilmer
Vincent D'Onofrio
Doug Huchison
Anthony LaPaglia
Peter Sarsgaard
Deborah Kara Unger
B.D. Wong
Luis Guzmán
Adam Goldberg

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OTHER REVIEWS:
Blow
Demme, 2001

Jesus' Son
Maclean, 2000

Memento
Nolan, 2001

Requiem for a Dream
Aronofsky, 2000

Snatch
Ritchie, 2000

Drug chic is what killed the once growing Calvin Klein market and, as time progresses and DEA administrators come and go, the idea of a drug subculture has moved more and more into an underground craze. No longer are there backups for cocaine lines club bathrooms, the billboards have moved from addiction to anorexia, and unproductive Thomas A. Constantine and Donnie Marshall have been replaced by Asa Hutchinson for the most thankless job in America.

This is a movie that panders for every good grace it gets. Fine actors like Vincent D'Onofrio and Luis Guzmán are literally wasted in roles that are far below their level, unfortunately making them seem just as irrelevant as the always deficient Kilmer (could they have gotten a less interesting actor?). Even the occasionally enjoyable moments (like a recreation of the Kennedy assassination using pigeons) are countered with reductive scenes of unpleasantries among the unpleasant. The oft-intoned mantra for Tom Van Allen is to simply ask the audience to answer his question: "Who am I?" From start to finish, the unanimous answer is: who cares?