..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..RJ Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

A heady case of the PSD: the urge to surf

Amid the Post-Sundance Doldrums, there's always reading dispatches by people you know-in this case, producer and Filmmaker magazine editor Scott Macauley, hopscotching around Rotterdam and Berlin and seeing many, many interesting movies. Meanwhile, the most disconcerting on this end may be the software glitches that prevented posting at the Movie City Indie site or the Pride, Unprejudiced blog since the first of February. After three months of daily foraging for the most provocative and inspiring links about indie film, documentaries and foreign language movies, it's been tough resisting the urge to surf. Those problems should be gone soon, when there'll be increased coverage of DVDs and movies on a more timely basis on the "Pride" page. Sampling and comments are encouraged at both: Movie City Indie and Pride, Unprejudiced.

In this catch-all February column, a lot on childhood and childishness, including Born Into Brothels, Nobody Knows, Constantine, Imaginary Heroes, Sky Blue, Son of the Mask, In the Realms of the Unreal: The Mystery of Henry Darger, Bride and Prejudice, Vodka Lemon, Bad Guy and Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior. Plus: an elegy for A Love Song for Bobby Long and a few notes on Diego Lerman's tasty Argentinean road movie, Suddenly, out on DVD.

Point and shoot: Born into Brothels

Pointing a camera: how simple is that? Not simple at all, as the ceaseless daily weft of representation we're surrounded by seeks to hide. There are agendas that some imagemakers seem not to even realize they're fulfilling, and as awards season wends its way into spring, there are subjects that seduce filmmakers in what could be taken as cynical ways: mothers, children, suffering caused by exotic forms of disadvantage. Making a picture is a perilous feat.

By the first whiff of a description of its content, the unflinching, enthralling Born into Brothels, (*** ½) a documentary by Ross Kauffman and Zana Briski, seems custom-built for the getting of gongs, winning an Audience Award at Sundance 2004, as well as more than twenty other major plaudits to date, including that Oscar nomination.

But Born into Brothels it is both tough and magical, a heartwarming, heart-breaking movie about kids, kids who live in squalor who dreamy like kids, hopeful like kids, oppressed like grownups, born to mothers in the red-light district of Calcutta, with the girls expected to follow in the trade once they reach puberty.

Briski, a British photojournalist, took off for Calcutta in 1998, hoping to document the lives of the estimated 7,000 women who are sex workers in the red light district there. Her life changed in unexpected ways. Documentary, at its best, is different from writing fiction in a room alone, functioning a journey toward facts, a process of discovery rather than an illumination of what the filmmaker already knows. (Still, I believe writer-directors who say that they don't know what interested them truly about a story until after they've completed the movie.) Different phrases are used: "documentary kismet" is one I've heard applied to the catnip moments that demonstrate to the eye behind the camera that, yes, my instincts are right, there's something here. Albert Maysles calls it "providence." And famed French critic and theorist Andre Bazin sometimes seemed to think photography was truth itself.

"I had no intention of photographing prostitutes until a friend took me to Calcutta's red-light district," Briski says. "From the moment I stepped foot inside that maze of alleyways, I knew that this was the reason I had come to India." As might be expected, there were barriers, objections. But "the children accepted me immediately. They were mesmerized by me and my camera." She wanted to see the world through their eyes, deciding to teach them photography, bringing ten point-and-shoot cameras on her next trip to India.

Two years into her travels, she asked Kauffman to collaborate. Kauffman had spent most of the 1990s as a documentary film editor, cutting projects like HBO Undercover's "Hookers at the Point." He was anxious to make a transition to shooting from cutting. He admits he was intrigued by the stories she told, but passed on the chance, "feeling that I didn't want to be a poor, struggling filmmaker for the next three to five years."

Briski sent him four videotapes from Calcutta, asking for his criticism, as she had never shot video before. One simple sentence says it: "Within ten minutes of viewing the first tape, I knew I was going to Calcutta," Kauffman says.

"Even when I had access," Briski says, "living in the brothel and knowing the people, there were always times when I was aware that I couldn't shoot. There were plenty of times when there were fights, or a suicide, or a murder, and you know there's a person who doesn't want their photo taken." Or as Kauffman puts it, "You can't put your finger on the exact reason, but you put the camera down."

Kauffman also encouraged Briski to appear on camera, capturing her awe as well as directly confronting the potentially conflicted reasons they had for being there. "The joy on the kids' faces was just so amazing, and it's just so different than you'd expect," he says. "During my second trip, I found the story became not just about the kids, it was about Zana trying to get the kids out of the brothels." Briski was working 18-hour days to teach the kids, working to get them passports and birth certificates and get them into schools: not a prescription for being an eager interview subject.

Still, it's the work of the eight children, ranging from 10 to 14 when the footage was shot, more than their faces, more than Briski's hope, more than their emotional resilience that makes Born Into Brothels an emotional and not estheticizing experience: the uplift, the outrage are earned, unforced, forced, inherent to the story being told. When one of the boys spits, ''I take pictures to show how people in this city live, I want to put across the behavior of men," the fire of lived passion, the fire of art, burn, despite the heartbreak, violence and obscenity of some of what we are shown.

A couple days before the end of Sundance 2005, I ran into a jet-lagged Kauffman, after the movie was nominated for an Oscar. He'd just returned from Calcutta, where he showed the film to his now-older subjects. Watching the nomination announcements with them, he tried to offer them context for what that worldwide notice might mean to their storytelling ambitions as well. He said he didn't think they really understood, but they were excited; they were happy. Look at the photos and the faces: you'll understand.

The photographers' work can be seen at Kids with Cameras, a foundation extending Briski's original project. Their goal in expanding to an international reach? "By teaching the art and skills of photography, Kids with Cameras empowers children growing up in difficult circumstances and allows them to appreciate the beauty and dignity of their own expression."

Lasting fears: Nobody Knows

Adult fears, childhood fears: c'mon, one's not so different from the other. An adult should know how to cope, has seen and listened and experienced a world larger than one's own bedroom or playlot. Things go astray? Losses mount? The world seems senseless? You've heard the words, repeat them, perhaps. You've at least seen others make their way through mistakes you know better than to copy.

The inspired, relatively young Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda, whose quiet, assured movies include 1995's Maborosi and 1999's After Life, has made his most tender and heartbreaking film. With 2004's Nobody Knows (Dare mo shiranai) (****), finds an ideal setting for dealing with childhood fears that never go away, unto death: Abandonment. Failing. Falling. Poverty. Shame. Loneliness. Dishonor.

Kore-eda took inspiration from a real event known in Japan as "The Affair of the Four Abandoned Children of Nishi-Sugamo," which took place almost two decades ago, in 1988. He wrote a first draft fifteen years ago, but worried when it took it up again, the story would no longer make sense. He shouldn't have feared: it is painfully timeless, endlessly topical. Born of different fathers, four children live happy as can be in a small Tokyo apartment, never having gone to school. Their mother, Keiko (You), hides the existence of three of them from the landlord, insisting they stay quiet. The apartment is their domain, they play and study and wait for mom to return from her work at night, sometimes very late at night. The space turns inward as the story takes its steady toll-you'd almost swear the walls of the set grow increasingly close-like a Nautilus shell, like a deprived adolescent's imagination.

But 12-year-old Akira (Yuya Yagira, an intense, brooding boy who became the youngest actor ever to win the Best Actor prize at Cannes 1n 2004) has to take charge when Keiko leaves, for several weeks, it seems, leaving a flighty note and a few thousand yen. The others must stay in. They seem used to her mercurial departures and arrivals, welcome whatever affection they can get from her. He can't go to the authorities: it's suggested the quartet were separated once before. Akira finds ways to get handouts, visits the father of one of the others, resorts to petty theft. The gas is cut off. The electricity. There's no money left for food. The water. Mom doesn't return. The landlord grows suspicious. Summer turns the apartment fetid. Piles of garbage seem almost comforting.

Kore-eda shot with the seasons, editing each segment as he went along from autumn 2002 to summer 2003. The changes in each child's behavior and physical growth become part of the story; it's not only a matter of hair growing longer, costumes being dirtier and rattier. "Yuya grew taller and his voice changed," Kore-eda says in the press kit, "His initially shy personality gradually gave way; in the second half of the filming to a boy who could lead his younger brother and sisters. The story is fictional, but a part of my own life and a part of Yuya's life are indelibly recorded in this film." (As is an indelible, contemporary, urban parallel to the "songlines" which Australian aboriginal children were sent along in order to "invent" their world.)

Kore-eda's documentary impulse leads to an exceedingly subtle, mature and masterful 141 minutes, finding a rhythm that goes beyond Japanese culture to the universal impulses of a child to grow beyond solitariness, to fiercely protect one's family, to prevent a life of loneliness.

There is more gesture and behavior than dialogue. The sound is acutely worked, and the spare score evokes Jim O'Rourke-style guitar plonking. Kore-eda works with acute framings, with forceful geometry as well as an eye for light and shadow. In his earlier, equally reserved Maborosi, the beam of a tiny bicycle headlight swaying alongside a roaring commuter train becomes a profound vision. Here, near the end, the gentle arc of an airport monorail on the edge of a body of water is his own transformation of an earlier clutch of Ozu-like shots of passenger trains cutting through a city center into something lonelier. Images like these are suggestive, concrete, but not specific. The same description applies to the final shots, open-ended, hopeful, embracing the spirit and survival instinct of a few unsullied souls, yet still reinforcing that lovely, terrible, and even at the end of the movie, true title: Nobody knows, which also serenely, angrily, righteously earns the concomitant and nobody cares. This is beautiful, humanist work, worthy of every moment it will haunt you afterward. Who wants for horror when real life is right behind every closed door?

Neo realism: Suicide in Constantine and Imaginary Heroes

Suicide is painless, the glib lyric went to the theme song to Robert Altman's version of M*A*S*H,  penned by his then 13-year-old son. (It reeks of kid-doggerel or something to peeve the ever-peevish Michael Medved.) Constantine (** ½), the adaptation of the DC-Vertigo comics series "Hellblazer," has a slightly more sophisticated take, with Keanu Reeves under-underplaying as a freelance exorcist trying to find his way back into the good graces of Heaven after a youthful suicide attempt that left him with the stench of Hell in his nostrils. In Imaginary Heroes (** ½), written and directed by 25-year-Dan Harris, one of the writers of the teen-knowing X2: X-Men United (as well as with screenwriting partner Michael Dougherty the Bryan Singer-produced Logan's Run and Singer-directed Superman Returns and a year of upcoming issues of "Ultimate X-Men" comic books) worries the dissolution of a suburban family after the suicide of a swim-champion son. Pain eddies outward. The center, as Yeats would say, cannot hold.

While both films confront the subject of death (or more precisely, suicide) and what comes after with intent, lurid fascination, a popcorn movie like the CGI-heavy Constantine usually grabs its tens of millions of dollars from a couple of leveraged sources, the resources for a small, script-and-actor-driven movie like Imaginary Heroes can draw on will always b more convoluted, starting with its nine producers and the presentation credit of its German and Belgian financiers: "Signature Pictures International Presents An ApolloProMedia QI Quality International Co-Production In Association with Signature Pictures."

The script, which Harris wrote when he was 22, impressed others beyond Bryan Singer, who saw an early draft and signed him to work on X2. The cast is strong, but Harris lined up other estimable collaborators, such as executive producer Art Linson (The Untouchables, Heat) composer John Ottman (The Usual Suspects) editor James Lyons (Far from Heaven, Safe), and cinematographer Tim Orr, none of whose luminous work, which include George Washington, Undertow and Raising Victor Vargas, ever looks the same.

As Harris is said to have put it in the press kit for this clever feel-bad-now-feel-good accumulation of sorrow and spite, in what could be dubbed his "Ordinary Ice Storm American Beautiful People, The Squid and the Whale", reaching, "The Greek tragedies of Aeschylus begin with a single action, a single mistake-the 'original sin'. It is the seed from which the story grows, like the branches of a tree, or the butterfly effect of the chaos theory. Someone makes a mistake in the past. What happens when that mistake changes history so much that it informs everything that happens over the next 20 years? What happens when the mistake itself is a secret? Where do people think their problems come from?" In the case of the year-in-the-life of Imaginary Heroes, one small thing will inexorably lead to an unraveling will lead to small disasters, such as Weaver's experimentation with marijuana leading to a midlife bust.

Michelle Williams, Kip Pardue, Jeff Daniels, Emile Hirsch and Ryan Donowho have their moments-Hirsch and Donowho's drug-addled experiments in life are plausible and uneasy-but the movie belongs to Weaver. Imaginary Heroes is an uneasy mix of black comedy and intense alienation that comes to life in the faces of the younger actors, particularly in moments fraught with homoerotic tension, and the timelessly strong and sculptured features of Weaver despite unconvincing motivations for some of her actions, and an ending that manages to bring the disparate strands together. John Hughes' suburbia was another century altogether.

Constantine is another time-slipping mix of elements, most perplexing for fans of The Matrix-era Keanu Reeves in that he plays a man battling the forces of an alternate universe kitted out in the same sort of black-suited, white-shirted, black-tied garb as his nemesis, Mr. Smith (Hugo Weaving) back in Wachowski World. Constantine is a man who's smoked since he was 13, riddled with the cares of the demonic world, eaten alive by cancer while still mediating battles between high and low a small, Los Angeles-set portion of Hell and Earth. Does it have anything profound to say about loss, any significant, powerful statements to make about Good, Evil and how choices lead to results? Unless a viewer can decipher the relentless borrowings from Catholicism and the seldom-revealed "rules" of the comic book series, Constantine works best as a study of faces: Reeves glaring through his ruinously pretty, stolid, fortyish, polyethnic features while holding an athletic stance; Rachel Weisz squinting and lightly pouting her wondrous mouth; Tilda Swinton's otherworldly hauteur as the gender-ambiguous archangel Gabriel; and a post-Coen Bros. Peter Stormare as just another guy in a white suit named Lou who longs for Constantine's soul. Genre stories ought to work as metaphor as well as simple narrative; the suburban disaffection of Imaginary Heroes is familiar, as is the dystopian, deteriorating post-Blade Runner L.A. sci-noir landscape of Constantine. Both dabble in damage, and believe at least in pain, if not Good or Evil or Heaven or Hell.

Dystopian limbo: Sky Blue

Moon Sang Kim's dense, seemingly heartfelt seven-years-in-the-making 2003 hybrid of two-dimensional and 3-D animation, miniatures, CGI and terrifically peculiar acting and writing, Wonderful Days, remains one of the larger-budgeted failures of South Korea's mostly impressive new wave of films and filmmakers. The cut, re-voiced, rewritten, English-language edition, Sky Blue (**), highlights its visual virtues, which are substantial, drawing from a parallel matrix of cool cultural references. In a dystopian 2140, a denuded earth is about to go cold as the light of the sun is shielded by pollution, the usual past-their-sale-date bromides are uttered while mostly amazing things slide, slice, zoom and boom from every possible direction. Too bad about those damn characters.

CGI hell: Son of the Mask

Remember the graphics, green, cool and gleaming, of green vertical streaming lines of computer data in The Matrix? Imagine that as numbers being crunched, the inner workings of software that determines how cheap, how bad, how bafflingly misguided creatively yet spot-on fiscally you can be and still say, "Look! I've made a sequel to a movie that made Jim Carrey a star and in three months thousands and thousands of young men will buy the DVD at Best Buy and we'll all be in the peaches and cream!" Such re the distances worth going to in order not to make a laundry list of all the terrible puns and jacked-up insults scribbled into my notebook while watching Son of the Mask (0*). Here's what we get from the director of Cats and Dogs: The likable but awful-to-behold-here Jamie Kennedy is Tim Avery (homage alert: a-OOOO-gah!), a failed, untalented cartoonist working in a brightly-colored playhouse run by a scowling, jokeless Stephen Wright (with a little black leather hat jammed on his shiny dome), whose wife (Traylor Howard) whines and wheedles for a child, which is conceived after Tim's been at a party wearing the Mask of Loki that his Cute Dog discovered in the backyard after it was lost by Loki (Alan Cumming, gritted-teeth visible throughout), much to the chagrin of his one-eyed father, Odin (Bob Hoskins), who barks insults from the clouds. Among the jokes? A five minute opening scene with a braying, nasal, needless say, as-funny-as-a-urethral-catheter-at-play Ben Stein setting up the plot; and my favorite, young Mr. Avery coming within millimeters of feeding his squalling young minion the base of a smashed light bulb in the middle of the night.

The other side of the distribution coin: The Take

Man, where's a Sunday New York Times "think" piece when you need one? Here's my rhetorical question I can't let go of: Why are there so many superlative, multi-faceted, gripping, compelling, memorable documentaries, when creative studios like New Line are grinding out sequels to The Mask and Final Destination and other corporations are letting their release schedules out to billionaires with free-'n'-easy bucks like Philip Anschutz? (See: Aliens of the Deep, Around the World in 80 Days, Ray.) The answer, of course, is that is the rhetorical question that summarizes the perplex the entire production-distribution system finds itself stalled in today, with only the worldwide revenues from DVDs forestalling any sort of structural accounting for a few more months at least. In the meantime, there are movies like The Take (***), a wrenching, stirring Canadian Broadcasting documentary directed by Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein (journalist and author of the anti-globalism text "No Logo") about life in modern-day Argentina. Lucid, stirring, achingly alert, The Take, is as bravura as a thriller, as idealistic as a 1960s protest song. The filmmaking, Michael Moore-skeptical, is a fact-filled depiction of the factors that led to factory closings, and their reopening once occupied by the workers who had been dispossessed by the maneuvers of the International Monetary Fund and a succession of failed presidencies. (Tan, ancient Peronist former president Carlos Menem makes a hissable villain, almost as spooky as an unkillable spirit in an Asian horror pic.) The clarity of the storytelling makes it unnecessary for you to know about the travails of everyday Buenos Aires life, but if you are even modestly aware of the news in the world today, the spirit of the workers followed by Lewis and Klein does the soul good.

Strange and troubling life: In the Realms of the Unreal

Oscar-winning documentarian Jessica Yu spent five years, off and on, working on her latest labor of love, In the Realms of the Unreal: The Mystery of Henry Darger (***). A portrait of the late Chicago artist, hermit and repository of rich urban legends, who died in 1973, Realms does a frightening thing. Talking to Yu recently, she told me she felt that her two trips to Darger's preserved, moldering, dusty abode, before its 2000 dismantlement, were like "stepping into Darger's mind." One of the several layers of her methodic approach to the mysteries of this self-taught obsessive's teeming mind is to discern how Darger himself viewed that overflowing space, what perspectives he took on the layers and layers of paper detritus that were more loam than rubbish for the making of his troubled visions. Another is a bifurcated narration: Broadway actor Larry Pine intones material from Darger's 15,000-page-plus typewritten manuscript of the stunningly beautiful, deeply disturbing battles of his flocks of "Vivian Girls" against armies and winged creatures and the boundaries of imagination. 8-year-old actress Dakota Fanning reads the "omniscient" narration, in a touch that sounds glib but is in fact oddly ideal. Glimpses of a long-gone Chicago, centered on his longtime apartment near Wrightwood and Lincoln, are buttressed by animations of some of Darger's visions, with seven animators bringing them to fluttery, haunting life. Darger's work defies comprehension more than description, but I leave it to Yu's loving, sometimes wondrous, deeply personal and inquisitive documentary to bring out the fascinating complications of this little-known man's mind.

Bend it like Harvey: Bride and Prejudice

Gurinder Chadha expends much of the masala of good feeling and high hopes she stocked from the lovely, likable Bend it Like Beckham on the colorful misfire, Bride and Prejudice (* ½). Considering that the effort is a reimagining of the most promiscuously bastardizing filmmaking style on the planet-the epic Bollywood musical-one probably shouldn't complain. There are superficial allusions to the plotting of Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice," but that's the least of the film's problems. The bursts of song and dance-lousy lyrics, bright costumes and "Grease"-level choreography-are weighted down by uninteresting broad caricatures. Nothing wrong with caricatures-if they're funny or fresh. Superstar Aishwarya Rai, whose beauty is arrogant delight even as she is merely standing still, is mismatched against a series of haircuts named Martin Henderson, who co-starred with the liquescent rush of CGI effects in the motorcycle fantasia Torque. He's awful, undercutting any romantic tension, making about as much impression as a lost Wopat cousin hoping to get cast in a Dukes of Hazzard remake. As cultural viruses go, this one shouldn't last longer than a common cold in U.S. theaters.

An elegy for A Love Song For Bobby Long

Over the holidays, I discovered my mother has been freezing the ham.

Authentic, capably salted, zing-zing-zo go the tastebuds: Kentucky cured ham is one of my culinary lust objects, a savor that connects me to the ground from which I have come. This stuff? It's just ruint. I watched A Love Song for Bobby Long (***) during that week, and at first took John Travolta's ripe performance as just so much ruint country ham. But it's a much better movie than that, and I let my memory run farther south to the Louisiana reaches of the story. The smells are unavailing: Many things about the city of New Orleans and the legends about New Orleans and the palaver that seeps through New Orleans can be called strong but the smells linger in memory: a precious ripeness.

Shainee Gaibel's endearing writing-directing debut is several things, but memorable mostly for being a shamelessly overstuffed, lingo-laden slice of Southern chitchat, zinging with literary citations and bibulous banter. The story opens with an extended series of shots of John Travolta's Bobby Long, a middle-aged man with platinum-white hair and a floppy straw hat, making his way across town at a modest yet determined rate of speed, outside of the usually shown French Quarter and deeper into the Bywater and Ninth Ward. Cinematographer Elliot Davis (Thirteen, King of the Hill) captures the bright colors of storefronts, the dustiness of streets and sidewalks, with sweet acuity.

Late of a June, early of a July, N'awlins is dust and smell, but hardly ever to the rank of stench. New Orleans: a dusty bayou fug encourages all manner of moistness. Pick up a paperback in a used bookstore that's not air-conditioned, and you can smell the rot in the moment. Barroom smoke and beer waft reside outside each tavern and club. The Gulf is ripe, and you can also drive by the factory where fried fruit pies are tendered in the middle of the night, the big door out front is raised and workers smoke outside and the air is sticky with powdered sugar and peach and cherry and more.

This sort of scented, deeply romantic, foolishly self-destructive fug is the bed that A Love Song for Bobby Long makes for itself: You meander or you mosey, but the scents, they manage to trickle alongside.

Bobby Long is an academic whose chosen stink is failure. He's steeped in it. Quick with the secondhand apercu, Bobby is a day-long Quote-o-Matic, slapping down citations from the likes of Robert Frost like quarters on a bar counter, "Happiness makes up in height what it lacks in length." With unspecified damage that's sure to slowly unpeel as it does in humid tales like these, Bobby shares his domicile with his former student, Lawson Pines (Gabriel Macht), a writer who is less Bobby's protégé than witness to a mutual day-to-day pickling. They live in a small, apt house, hardly larger than a shotgun shack, and the décor hits so many notes, including the dusty kitchen that's a little too large with a card table off to one side that's a little too small. Look and space and scent: it's like taking a walk on a different side of that self-consciously forlorn city.

But that's not the story, nor the lit'ry self-consciousness of its stalled characters on the skids; the plotting kicks in with the entrance of one Pursey Will (Scarlett Johansson), daughter to a saloon singer everyone in the district had loved when she was a younger spitfire: much like young Pursey. There are drawn-out complications about just who owns the property, allowing the odd, Tennessee Williams-styled trio-alcoholic, loquacious failure; procrastinating, self-denying acolyte; statuesque, headstrong young beauty-to dabble in emotional fireworks. The house is stacked wall-to-wall with more volumes than furniture, like the inside of a neglected mind. Pursey reads books, too, notably a battered, mass-market paperback of Carson McCullers' classic of the sensation of being an outsider, "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter."

Cut through the clutter of plotting and see-it-from-a-mile-away family relations, and there is a generous and hopeful tenor to the entire prospect: provisional families are sometimes thicker than blood, literature can be more alluring than life, Scarlett Johansson can embody a particular sort of rarely depicted intelligence in twentyish women, and a belief in romance can lead us to make proper sacrifices the moment we are called upon.

Kurds and screwball: Vodka Lemon

Kurdish director Hiner Saleem's Vodka Lemon (*** ½) is a screwball comedy of snow-crusted village life, set in broke, broken-down post-Soviet Armenia and made with bracing comic assurance. Yes, whimsy is possible most anywhere, in the right hands, it's short and sweet, a marvelous taste of poetry in light, landscape and wry behavior. With a deadpan that might raise one, if not both, of poker-faced Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki's eyebrows, Saleem finds love and optimism in the most unlikely and barren of reaches-after the fall of socialism and before a pair of sexagenarian lovers reach the end of their lives. ("Vodka Lemon," piquantly, is also the name of a bar in town.)

Good provocation: Bad Guy

Kim Ki-Duk, one of the better-known South Korean directors in U.S. arthouses after 2000's provocation, The Isle and the more bucolic Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring, (2003), follows a strange and personal path, filled with unpredictable, sudden and beautifully measured moments. He is not afraid of fear, and not fearful of looking foolish. The titular Bad Guy (***) is Hang-gi, a sullen pimp sauntering through downtown Seoul in the opening scenes, looking grubby and dodgy. He sneers at Sun-hwa, a college student sitting on a park bench. He sits beside her; her bland boyfriend joins her. Hang-gi doesn't like this equation, and grabs Sun-hwa, kissing her forcefully. Does he have her at hello? Soon enough, he does, providing a path into prostitution that she tumbles haplessly down. "Hatred" is a word Kim has used in relation to his work, "the feeling that I get as I live my life and see things that I do not understand. That's why I make movies: I see something which I do not understand and I make a film in order to understand it." As powerful, polarizing allegories for the strictures of looks and class structures, Bad Guy excels in the eye-widening fashion Kim has made his own.

The world is his trampoline: Ong-bak

Tony Jaa: the world is his trampoline. The nonstop series of brawls that constitute the middle forty minutes of Ong-bak: The Thai Warrior, (***) (2003) a reportedly recut version of a box-office sensation in its native Thailand, cannot but take your breath away. Pretty fantastic pop-pulp mayhem with a newly minted action star it's beautifully orchestrated bunk, a showcase for Jaa's multiple fighting skills, with a framing plot involving the abduction and search for a village's missing Buddha head-known as, yes, "Ong-bak"-an excuse for oily baddies and rotten dialogue. Yet Jaa jumps, rolls, kick-boxes, and moves like a water bug on the surface of a lake in every street-level fight or back-alley battle set in Bangkok. Director Prachya Pinkaew is kind enough to repeat additional angles of the cool stuff-"no computer graphics, no stunt doubles, no strings attached," the ads rightly brag-like outtakes within the sequence itself or multi-angle pornography. It's happy, clever stuff when the characters keep their yaps shut, with one sequence of limber beauty-a forest of Buddha heads are suspended in netting in the aqueous blue beneath a bay-and one bout of fisticuffs and footicuffs played out in front of the graffiti, "Hi, Speilberg: let do it together" [sic].

Jarmusch note: Suddenly

Like a bracing burst of lost early Godard, Argentinean director Diego Lerman's modest comic caper Suddenly (Tan de repente) (*** ½) (Empire Pictures DVD, $27) posits a pair of twentysomething pixie-dyke criminalettes, calling each other Mao and Lenin, who passive-aggressively kidnap a melancholy lingerie salesgirl named Marcia. Lerman starts with quick glimpses of central Buenos Aires, shooting in a grimy black-and-white akin to Jim Jarmusch's Stranger than Paradise, capturing the broken-down, mildewed character of that beloved city's crumbling streets and graffiti-adorned walls. While smoking and playing pinball, Mao catches a glimpse of the sturdy, malcontent Marcia walking past and declares her love, first in frank sexual terms, then by knifepoint, and finally, by games-playing. They travel inland to the small town Rosario, where Lenin's family is from-"Lenin is very passionate" is a sample of the deadpan dialogue-meeting up with her elderly aunt, the trio staying there for a while, trying on roles, clothes, the next stage of their lives. Unexpectedly poignant, it's one of the sneakiest, craftiest, sweetest little gems I've seen in an age. Extras include a trailer, director's bio and a few grimy stills.

February 23, 2004

- Email Ray Pride