Hey, folks. Capone in Chicago here, with a few of films that are making their way into art houses around America this week or at least expanding to more theaters (maybe even taking up one whole screen at a multiplex near you. Enjoy…



BRIGHT STAR
While all of the performers in writer-director Jane Campion's long-overdue return to the lives of cloistered women in frocks who want nothing more than to tear them off for the right man (or possibly the wrong man) are quite good, but I find it quite funny that American Paul Schneider (AWAY WWE GO, THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES, LARS AND THE REAL GIRL, "Parks and Recreation") completely swipes every scene that he's in away from the film's stars. New Zealand-born director has constructed a convincingly angst-ridden love drama about British characters played by Americans, Kiwis, Australians and, yes, one or two Brits with BRIGHT STAR, about a secret love connection between struggling poet John Keats (Ben Whipsaw) and his high-society neighbor Fanny Brawne (the astounding Abby Cornish).

Living in the early 1800s, Brawne is a fascinating and seemingly contradictory young woman. She's considered an expert on fashion and sews her own exquisite dresses, yet her artistic sensibilities seem not quite in tune. She's eager to learn about poetry and classic literature from Keats, and while she doesn't understand it all initially, she's smart enough to figure it out and absorb. She's also a creative comprised entirely of extreme emotion. When Keats goes away to work and travel, Fanny is devastated beyond consolation from her family, especially her mother (played by Campion regular Kerry Fox). Keats, on the other hand, is impoverished, sickly and surprisingly incapable of expressing his feelings verbally. The scene-stealing Schneider plays Charles Armitage Brown, Keats' closest friend and someone who was utterly against his relationship with Brawne--primarily, it would seem, because it distracted Keats from his work. Schneider's boorish behavior cuts through everything that was considered proper at the time and cuts so deep as to be almost cruel...if he wasn't so damn funny.

BRIGHT STAR lags a bit in the second half, when Fanny gets so swallowed up by her own sorrow at being separated from Keats that it seems ridiculous and a bit obnoxious. Still, Cornish's performance is so strong that Fanny's behavior is never laughable. And some of the things she does to occupy her time and cheer herself (such as start a butterfly farm in her bedroom) are quite amusing and stunning to witness.

I've been a fan of Cornish (STOP-LOSS, SOMERSAULT, CANDY), Whishaw (BRIDESHEAD REVISITED, PERFUME), and Campion for quite some time. Campion faltered a bit with her last feature, IN THE CUT, but with films like SWEETIE, AN ANGEL AT MY TABLE, HOLY SMOKE and especially THE PIANO as part of her body of work, she's been at the forefront of making movies about strong women who aren't afraid to acknowledge their sexual needs and bottomless emotional capacity. There is a kind of dance between men and women that Campion never tires of exploring, and BRIGHT STAR shows us an aspect to that dance that she's never explored before. The love between Brawne and Keats is steeped in passion but not the type that manifests into actual sex. I know that's going to disappoint some of you, but the way this is examined is so intriguing that I found the relationship (not the movie) frustrating at times. That's a good thing.

Watching Cornish and Whishaw together is interesting. He is not the manliest of men, and it made me wonder if Brawne fell for Keats because he was so overwhelmingly non-threatening, especially when you juxtaposed him against Brown. Even the way the pair bond over Keats' brother, who was chronically ill almost from birth, and her desire to help the seemingly helpless appear to be a part of their glue. Campion doesn't explicitly address each of these issues, but they are their out in the open waiting for the curious among us to dive in and question. BRIGHT STAR (taken from the title of a Keats' poem that many believe is about Brawne) gives us an explosive romance in a quiet celestial body, the kind we know will burn out quickly but that doesn't stop up from admiring its brilliance. I can't think of a better way to describe this lovely film.



NO IMPACT MAN
The story of a year in the life of author Colin Beaven and his family is an interesting dissection of a man trying to set an example for good environmental behavior and a rampant self-promoter whose ultimate goal is to sell books and get pageviews on his blog chronicling his year of attempting to have no environmental footprint. This issue of Beaven's motivations is honestly dealt with in the film, from directors Laura Gilbert and Justin Schein. The question is never 100 percent answered, and that's because I don't think there is an easy answer. I do think Beaven honestly believes that he's doing good by living an extreme lifestyle and hoping that people hear about it and perhaps pick up two or three of his ideas on minimizing consumption and waste. And regardless of whether he's trying to make money or whether he's a selfless, altruistic saint, the movie NO IMPACT MAN is quite entertaining and thought provoking. But the no-toilet-paper thing might be more than most human beings can handle in thought or practice.

The thing you have to realize first is that Beaven and his wife Michelle don't go cold turkey for a full year. They phase out all consumptive and wasteful practices during the first six months of the year in New York City, concluding with shutting off the power to their apartment at the six-month mark. Slowly over the first six months, they eliminate buying any non-food, non-local consumer goods (his wife having to give up coffee is a real bone of contention through the year); they compost their organic waste with the help of a bin filled with worms; they visit a farmers market on an almost daily basis; they don't take any motorized form of travel; they walk up stairs rather than take an elevator; and the list goes on. Michelle, a Business Week reporter, does get to experience some creature comforts at the office, but Colin is vigilant about his behavior. The only electricity in his house is for his computer, which is connected to a single solar panel on the roof that he installed himself. The things that they struggle with in terms of what they are capable of giving up and not always what you'd expect. For example, the first couple of weeks without power almost break them. And did I mention the toilet paper thing?

The global publicity Beavan generates during the year is extraordinary, and he's happy to grant as many interviews as he can. "Good Morning America" has him come into their studios or they visit his house every couple of weeks, and most news organizations focus on the suspicious motivations he might have. Is he a liberal extremist crackpot? Is he out to make a buck promoting something he himself has only done for a short time? I think the answer lies somewhere in the midst of all of this, and the film doesn't attempt to answer the questions; it only wants to give as much information as possible and let you decide. But the simple fact is, the guy actually did this. His wife's healthier eating habits in this year brought her back from the brink of a pre-diabetic condition. Their young daughter seemed to take to the new lifestyle without complaint. The scenes of the family enjoying this shared experience--such as doing laundry in the bathtub by stepping on the soapy clothes like they were grapes at a vineyard--are some of the film's best.

Even if Beavan and his wife both broke their limitations every day (which they didn't; cheating was monitored carefully and was simply part of the experience), their ideas are still solid ones that can be attempted in any combination. I believe that is the true purpose of NO IMPACT MAN: to give us as much of the total picture as it can in the most entertaining way possible, and considering how much screen time is devoted to showing Beavan suffer due to some pretty harsh negative allegations, I'd say the truth is in their somewhere.



AMREEKA
Films about people immigrating to the United States and finding out the American dream is an exclusive club that might not want them have been made many times before. And films about how Arab-Americans were treated quite badly when the Iraq War began have been covered as well. The latest work to cover both quite thoroughly, if not all that originally, is AMREEKA, about Muna (Nisreen Faour) and her teen son Fadi (Melkar Muallem) who are allowed to legally migrate from Palestine to America and move in with Muna's sister (Hiam Abass from THE VISITOR and LEMON TREE) in a small Illinois community. Although Muna had a job in banking back home, her efforts to find equivalent work are fruitless. She is forced to take a job at a White Castle but insists on hiding this fact from her family, instead letting them think she works at the bank next door.

Fadi is relentlessly bullied at school and eventually falls in with a couple of kids who are nice enough but smoke a tremendous amount of pot and get into a whole lot of mischief. Aside from some very strong performances, the one aspect to AMREEKA that I really liked was that both Muna and Fadi find friends and allies slowly over time and not immediately upon arrival. These helping hands emerge slowly from the landscape and come through at key moments in both their lives. Fadi's principal becomes a champion of their existence in America and a possible love interest for Muna. Muna also makes friends with a co-worker who has dropped out of high school, and she encourages him to return so he can get a better job than the one they both have. Since so much of AMREEKA is built on moments we've seen before, I appreciated these scenes most of all.

We also get scenes I fully expected, such as Muna's sister and her husband fighting about letting them stay. The husband is a doctor who is losing patients and money because the war is driving them away. The sister won't hear of kicking them out. Muna's self worth is a big part of this story. Her husband left her for a younger woman, and clearly the experience not only hurt Muna emotionally, but it made her feel ugly, fat and worthless. Part of her starting a new life in America is about reclaiming her self worth, and that, too, feels like a fresh angle to this oft-told story. AMREEKA is not great or original storytelling, but that doesn't mean it's not a story worth repeating. The film has humor, heart and an authenticity that makes it a work of beauty is so many ways. Faour's performance is emotionally death-defying, and I was rooting for her every step of the way. She's a magnificent character, and when the film ended, my mind immediately wanted to know how her life was going to continue from this point forward. In the end, I guess that's what every movie strives for, and so on that level, AMREEKA is triumphant.



THE BURNING PLAIN
Lord spare me from self-important, overly dramatic to no end, telescoping the big reveals kind of dramas like the one from writer-director Guillermo Arriaga, a fine screenwriter in his own right (AMORES PERROS, 21 GRAMS, BABEL, THE THREE BURIELS OF MELQUIADES ESTRADA) who is stepping behind the lens for the first time as a feature director with THE BURNING PLAIN. On the surface, the film appears to be about three different women of different ages--a teen girl (Jennifer Lawrence), her adulterous mother (Kim Basinger), and a restaurant owner (Charize Theron) who likes to sleep around. Their three lives do not appear to intersect, but since this film belongs to Arriaga, we know the connection between the women will be made clear eventually. And moreover, you'll figure it out waaaay before the reveal.

There's not much to say about the plot here. Basinger is cheating on her husband who appears to be impotent since her left breast was removed after a cancer diagnosis. She has found a Mexican man who loves her long time in a mobile home in the middle of the desert. Basigner's daughter is highly suspicious of her mother's behavior and discovers the affair. Meanwhile, Theron's character seems primed for a life of self-destruction and isolation, until a mysterious man lands on her doorstep with news she never thought she'd hear. Theron does an admirable job keeping her gloomy character interesting, but when the film is done, I felt I never learned anything of value about her.

The screenplay is deliberately looping and deceptive with its timelines to make for a more interesting way of hiding its secrets. The problem is that if you unraveling the story and told it chronologically, it would be dreadfully dull. OK, so I'll give Arriaga the benefit of the doubt and assume his means of telling this story was to make it more intriguing, but it just isn't there, not in any construction. THE BURNING PLAIN is just oppressively heavy and dark, as if the filmmaker believes that by shooting everything in grey tones and making everyone mope around like their puppy just died, that somehow is going to add to the dramatic weight of the film. It doesn't. In fact, my immediate response after watching this was, "If everyone in this movie died in the last five minutes, I would not have cared. In fact, I might have thrown a little party to celebrate." And that's all I'm willing to say about this film. If you're still driven to see THE BURNING PLAIN, you're a stronger and slightly dumber person than I am.



-- Capone
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