I'll see just about any movie set in Brazil: I like the sound of Portuguese being spoken and I find the urban landscape fascinating (as in the opening aerial shots of "Bus 174"). With these things said, Carandiru is the first Brazilian movie that has really let me down. It is a poorly connected, highly speculative, and overly long retelling of the riot and subsequent massacre that occurred at the Carandiru prison in Sao Palo in 1992. Most of the first 1:55 minutes is spent introducing us to a colorful selection of inmates, and especially their backstories (after the 2nd or 3rd flashback things get a little tedious). Also we meet the unnamed physician (Luiz Carlos Vasconcelos) at their center, who spends most of his time, apparently, listening to said backstories with a compassionate look on his face. Then all of a sudden, the riot occurs, and the cops are called in to squelch it, and they end up massacring everyone. There is no hint of what motivates either the prisoners to riot or the cops to react so forcefully. This causal gap makes me wonder why the film was made in the first place.

4/10

All movies made under the "Dogme 95" rules involve hand-held cameras, natural lighting, and ultrarealistic acting. They also have the tendency to be grossly over-rated-- except for this one, which I saw for the second time after an interval of a year or so, and found even more affecting after another viewing.

The story involves family members and friends returning to the family-run hotel for its patriarch's 60th birthday. The first 25 minutes introduces you to the children. There's Michael, who has serious anger issues and a rather unhealthy relationship with his wife (the only scene in the movie that perhaps takes the realism a bit too far involves these two), and also is, well, not really invited to the reunion. Helene is the rebellious daughter; she acts carefree but looks a bit worn down. And finally there is Christian (played by Ulrich Thomsen, who somewhat resembles the brother on "Frasier"): he is quiet and sensitive and likable, the most reliable of the siblings, who runs a couple of successful restaurants in Paris. We also find out early on that their sister (Christian's twin) has recently committed suicide in that very house.

Things start to get rolling about a third of the way in, when Christian stands up to give a toast, and then rather nonchalantly announces that when he and his deceased twin sister were younger the father whose birthday they are all there to celebrate sexually molested them. "Cheers to my dad, a rapist and murderer." Then he sits back down. And amazingly, for a while the reunion dinner continues on as if nothing at all has happened. Oh Christian, he is under a lot of stress, you know, from managing those restaurants. And he always had the most vivid imagination. But at the center of the film, and what keeps things moving along so well, is the notion that nothing is more powerful than the truth, that it has a sort of inexorable force, albeit a slowly working one, on those who are aware of it. The rest of the film is an increasingly bitter, bizarre, and disturbing struggle, but it's one with what seems to be the very moral order of the universe at stake.

Apparently this was the first Dogme film, and I can't say that I've seen another in which the style is so well adapted to the story. The handheld cameras, for one thing, contribute very well to the family reunion atmosphere. It makes you feel like you are a family cousin or something watching the whole thing unfold in front of your eyes via home video. The acting too is so realistic it makes you wonder how they ever did it.

10/10

From the previews Stranger Than Fiction looked like another movie in the vein of "The Truman Show," "Bruce Almighty", or "I Heart Huckabees." And since the latter three were all right, so-so, and utter crap, respectively, I wasn't expecting much from this either. Surprisingly, though, STF is the best of metaphysical comedy genre since "Groundhog Day". In fact, its plot and the way it plays out make it more like Gogol's "The Nose" than anything that has come out recently.

But whereas Gogol's story is very much a matter of a literary artist using a fantastic device to send up the conventions and pretentiousness of bureaucratic life, here the roles are reversed. Will Ferrell plays a dull IRS auditor (his favorite word is "integer") who all of a sudden hears a voice inside his head narrating the events of his life in an erudite English accent. When psychiatry fails to cure him, he goes to an English professor (Dustin Hoffman) for advice. The professor attempts to help him by running through all of the conventions of the literary form, in the hope that they can somehow outwit the narrator. In other words, it as if Gogol's nose suddenly stepped back off of the page and sneezed at him.

Movies like this depend almost entirely on their cleverness. STF gets high marks on this score--most of it seems like it was written by someone a lot smarter than the rest of us. Unfortunately, though, the ending is so horrid and overwrought that I can't entirely recommend it.

7/10

"Long" is the operative word: well nigh three hours of family members screaming at each other and then hugging, hugging each other and then screaming. And they stay in that god-awful house the whole time! At one point you are thinking that the setting will finally shift, as they are all going into town for one reason or another, but then . . . the movie jumps ahead, and there they are again in that god-awful house, screaming at each other then hugging. . .

LDJIN shares a single-day alcohol consumption record with "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" There are lots of other similarities between the two, but the latter is far superior. For one thing, its characters' vices are more depraved and, well, more entertaining. (If I had heard Mary, Jamie, or little Edmund complain about their father being a cheapskate one more time, I would have gone on a little journey of my own.)

The acting in LDJIN is brilliant, of course, but this is expected since it is an adaptation of a play. Also, its closing sequence, if you can make it that far, is fantastic.

5/10

I watched this again the other day for the first time in 6 or 7 years. My favorite scene is the Godfather and his grandson in the garden, where he pretends to be an ogre and plays hide-and-seek with the kid, then keels over and dies as the kid squirts him with the tomato-sprayer. "Lifetime is a child at play . . . Kingship belongs to the child."


10/10