The acting may be only good and not outstanding, but the film is flawed not because of the actors but due to the product they’ve been asked to deliver. To take just one example, Ash is not only Lauren’s father and Telly’s companion but also, serendipitously, a former New York Ranger, complete with the physical prowess and lightning reflexes necessary to foil the plots of men in black and extraterrestrial beings alike.

The best aspects of the film are all there in that wickedly misleading trailer: the disconnect between Telly’s memory and that of those around her and the viscerality of our shock as she reveals the history beneath the façade in Correll’s daughter’s room, demonstrating the Oz-like nature of the world they inhabit. As it progresses, however, these ideas and feelings recede into the background, pushed out by car chases, government conspiracies, and, of all things, aliens.

Certainly, I got some shudders and had to jump in my seat a few times, but I hadn’t come for that—and even for a thriller it didn’t make much sense, by film’s end. The Forgotten turned out to be the kind of film from which you can expect to walk away at least with a vision of the darker side, of the stuff of nightmares and dystopian visions, a new cinematic trick in your bag of coping mechanisms for what life throws at you.

The end here, though, is sunny—a grave stylistic misstep. In a climate of uncertainty, where parents are never sure their children will survive to come home, a film that builds up their brightest hopes is merely pandering. At the end, we see the crazy lady isn’t actually crazy: It’s her world that is insane. The validation of her fears should have been enough of a conclusion, and in our world it would have been, but, for The Forgotten, it was not. (ABM)

Head In The Clouds

Within the first ten minutes of Head in the Clouds, you realize the significance of the title. It’s about idealism at both ends of the spectrum: the idealism of political activism and the idealism of political apathy. From there, the movie goes on hammering you with that idea of idealism for as long as you’re willing to stay put in front of the screen.

Charlize Theron, in a starkly contrasting follow-up to her role in Monster, embodies this second kind of idealism as Gilda Bessé. Gilda is the kind of clichéd wise-cracking beauty that can only exist in movies: she’s bold, intelligent, entirely immodest and incredibly provocative. Her only fault, as far as her love interest Guy (Stuart Townsend) can see, is that she lives “in a cocoon” and completely ignores the caustic contemporary politics that consume his passions; she doesn’t care about anything or anyone beyond herself and those immediately close to her. This often translates into meaningless amorous relationships of convenience that further her various careers or otherwise allow her to continue to live in the manner to which she is accustomed. Normally, this would look like superficiality, but with her it’s merely incorruptibility. She’s a girl who just wants to have fun.

Leading a life of careless fun, however, can be difficult when you live in Paris during the 1930s. To the south, the Spanish Civil War is raging with the fascist Nationalists slowly crushing the Republican freedom fighters, and just ahead lies the impending Nazi invasion of France. Although she is eager to ignore these things, Guy and her Spanish roommate Mia (Penelope Cruz) won’t allow her to, by constantly moping and debating over the most recent news reports and, ultimately, by leaving her to join the Republican Army in Spain. Guy and, to a lesser degree, Mia obviously (far too obviously) represent the deluded idealism of the enraged youth just itching to make a difference.

In the end, everyone in this movie has their head in the clouds in one way or another: the characters, the director, and the viewer, because there’s no way that this movie is going to work. While the film has its merits, it falls flat on most fronts. In addition to having fairly poor production value—the bulk of the “stunning” Parisian backdrops are clearly matte paintings—the movie’s three primary characters never achieve humanity; they start out as and remain types. Gilda is the extroverted and rambunctious bohemian socialite, Guy is the wide-eyed British schoolboy with a conscience, and Mia is the long-suffering martyr who has made it through the school of hard knocks and is turning around to take another long lap. Even real-life lovebirds Theron and Townsend fail to make their on-screen relationship believable. It’s impossible to either identify or sympathize with their tumultuous affair.

Head in the Clouds makes a feeble and heavy-handed stab at depth and profundity, and, to its credit, it nuances the subject matter enough to show that things weren’t quite so clear-cut as all Nazis are evil and Allies are good, but it just gets in way over its head. Maybe that would have made a better title. (SNJ)

September Tapes

As Iraq dominates headlines and political conversation, director Christian Johnston would have us remember America’s other war—the increasingly peripheral conflict in Afghanistan. Johnston’s assessment of the original War on Terror largely echoes Sen. John Kerry’s recent charge that official assertions of stability and freedom in Iraq constitute a “fantasy world of spin.”

Filmed entirely in Afghanistan, “September Tapes” investigates American progress in that nation and offers compelling evidence that claims of success there have been thoroughly fictionalized. Inexplicably, however, Johnston chose to fictionalize his exposé, creating an elaborate ruse in order to criticize what he seems to view as a far more elaborate—and more pernicious—ruse. The result is a bizarre and unconvincing distortion of otherwise mesmerizing original footage.

The film purports to be a series of eight tapes obtained from Northern Alliance forces after “the last known battle involving the leaders of al-Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden.” It remains unclear whether the Northern Alliance is responsible for the slick slow-motion editing.

The tapes chronicle the efforts of American documentary filmmaker Don Larson, dazed and embittered by his grief over losses in the Sept. 11 attacks, to understand, record and possibly join the hunt for Osama bin Laden. He is accompanied by his translator, Wali Zarif, and a curiously laconic cameraman who is either a failed attempt at comic relief or simply an emblem of the film’s utter weirdness.