March: The Ring Two | Be Cool | Maria Full Of Grace | Les Choristes (The Chorus)

The Ring Two

Directed by: Hideo Nakata
Starring: Naomi Watts, Simon Baker, Sissy Spacek, Daveigh Chase, David Dorfman

Creepy for all the wrong reasons, "The Ring Two'' is the latest cynical attempt by a mainstream studio to separate eager horror/chiller film fans from their money.

Like most bad sequels, it is a patchwork quilt of themes and images from other, better films, most notably its predecessor - Gore Verbinski's 2002 "The Ring'' - and that film's Japanese source, Hideo Nakata's trend-setting 1998 horror landmark "Ringu.''

The blame appears to lie not at the feet of director Nakata, who makes his English-language directing debut here, but with screenwriter Ehren Kruger. Kruger's script - a term I use advisedly - repeats all the original's 'beats' while displaying contempt for such niceties as logic and character development. For Kruger and DreamWorks, who together financed this film and shortchanges its fans, it's all about the dosh.

Kruger, whose credits include the excellent "Arlington Road,'' the mediocre "Scream 3'' and "The Ring'' recycles his own "Scream''-like opening scenes from the previous "Ring'' in which a desperate young person tries to get someone else to watch the mysterious video tape. Beautiful reporter Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts) and her spooky looking son Aidan (David Dorfman), made up (or is he perhaps naturally hideous?) to look like a weird wee man, meanwhile, have relocated from Seattle to Oregon and Rachel is settling into a new job at the Daily Astorian newspaper.

After seeing that Edvard Munch-like facial expression (gub-wide open a la "Scream'') on a victim, Rachel realises Samara (Kelly Stables), the vengeful ghost-child in the well from the original, is back. Why is she back? Well, apparently because DreamWorks wanted to squeeze another $100 million out of the poor, little wet thing. Why the studio couldn't come up with a better-written vehicle for her and her fans is a sadder, more cynical story.

What Samara wants is to possess Aidan so she can have Rachel as her 'mommy'. The subsequent action combines elements from "The Exorcist,'' "The Omen'' and, of course, "The Shining'' without coming anywhere near the power of those films. No mention is made of the male friend who tried to help Rachel and Aidan in "The Ring'' but I guess he paid the ultimate price, no doubt because Rachel has a new male friend (Simon Baker), and we wouldn't want to give away what happens to him!

While Rachel is striving to defend her son from evil, everyone else, including a psychiatrist (Elizabeth Perkins in a role similar to one played by Jane Alexander in the previous film), thinks she is guilty of child abuse. What they don't know - and what this idiotic script asks us to believe - is that Rachel has to abuse Aidan to save him. Once again, Rachel goes on a quest to find the truth (the truth about what, we are not sure), ending up at the Morgan Horse Farm (apparently, they abused more than horses there). Carrie herself shows up - well, OK, Sissy Spacek, as Evelyn, a dotty old woman locked up in an asylum who spends her days cutting paper with plastic scissors. "Listen to the voices,'' Evelyn intones. (From where I was sitting they were all murmuring "this film is shite"!)

One can only imagine what it must have been like for Watts to play this role again, recyling variations of such lines as "How are you?'' and "Is there anything wrong?'' over and over to her obnoxious offspring, especially when the obvious answers are, "I'm possessed, you ninny'' and `"Yes, something is terribly wrong.'' I hope the cheque she got for this piffle was sufficient compensation.

The film's frights are all the equivalent of being patted on the bum with a soft slipper. For the climax to work, we must believe no one notices a murder victim sitting in a hospital room or that a child patient has gone missing. Even the spooked horse sequence from `"The Ring'' is recycled, although this time with angry deer! Still, as in the original, the sequence is nightmarishly poetic and offers a tantalising glimpse at what this film could have been if anyone involved in its making had actually been given the opportunity to make it any good.

Be Cool

Cast: John Travolta, Uma Thurman, Vince Vaughn, Cedric the Entertainer, André (3000) Benjamin, Steven Tyler, Robert Pastorelli, Christina Milian, Harvey Keitel, The Rock, Danny DeVito.
Directed by F. Gary Gray.
Screenplay by Peter Steinfeld.
Based on the novel by Elmore Leonard.
Produced by Danny DeVito, Michael Shamberg, Stacey Sher, and David Nicksay.
114 minutes.

Get Shorty had all the spot-on prerequsites of cool, humour and calibre to make it a success. Sadly, this mediocre sequel Be Cool comes up short on all counts with director F. Gary Gray continuing his streak of poor films with this overlong, unfunny sequel.

The number of stars on offer is impressive and there is a rich underbelly of character connotation - The Rock's eyebrow, John Travolta dancing - to this otherwise superficial film, enhanced by cameos from music industry notables. Music names and faces are also given pride of place in the storyline. Aerosmith front man Steven Tyler spends more time on screen than is aesthetically bearable and Andre 3000 gives a mildly entertaining performance as Dabu, a trigger-happy member of the WMDs. The range of characters results in a number of subplots that interweave to create a tangled story arc. The length of the cast list also prevents Be Cool from containing much plot development and thus we are presented with an array of personalities with whom we struggle to sympathise.

Travolta enters the role of Chili Palmer with ease, rehashing the same attitude from the first film. His co-stars are lacking considerably in the style and presence that the players in Get Shorty exuded continually, Uma Thurman quite frankly and disappointingly being a miserable replacement for the sexy Rene Russo. Replacement is a key word here.

The story is an exact replica of the first film, with new actors in what are basically the same roles. Gray even hits us with tediously similar scenes - Chili in bed with a woman as someone waits downstairs, getting his attention by turning on the stereo instead of the television as in the first. The Rock takes the role of the cuddly bodyguard that James Gandolfini made his own and does a great job playing against type, providing most of the film's funny moments. Vince Vaughn plays the vastly irritating "badass," who's just looking for his name on the credits, a la Delroy Lindo as Bo Welch.

This is a simple good vs bad tale, in which the heroes never come across as being the underdogs. Chili's constant presentation of cool results in the audience's unflinching confidence that he'll come out of it alive and Edie's (Uma Thurman) complete lack of resistance to him means he'll get the girl, too, which we weren't so sure about first time around. The result is a supreme lack of tension, which elongates an already lengthy film, causing the cringe-making and self-conscious John and Uma dance sequence to drag on relentlessly.

The comedy is reliant solely on racial stereotypes. Everyone knows that all black people carry guns and wear their trousers around their knees and everyone knows that Russians hate black people just a touch more than everyone else. And, of course, the music industry is run by old gangsters like Nick Carr (Harvey Keitel), who put out hits on people if they break a contract.

Be Cool needs to get real. Gray is out of his depth once again, getting lost in numerous plot lines and depicting Peter Steinfeld's script with the sad, empty philosophy that if he shoots from many different angles, it will make the film more interesting to watch. He should have concentrated his efforts on script rewrites and meaningful story boarding. The Rock brings entertainment to the proceedings, the Aerosmith concert footage is under edited and grotesquely mainstream, corporate and mannered, and the final redeeming feature is the way this sequel makes Get Shorty look like a modern masterpiece.

Be cool and avoid.

First-time US filmmaker Joshua Marston has written and directed the Spanish-language film Maria Full of Grace in a semi-documentary style about the experiences of a teenage girl working in the Colombian drug-trafficking racket.

Maria Full of Grace is a sincere and worthy effort. The straightforward treatment of narcotics transportation stands in sharp relief to the sensationalised approach taken by so many films about the subject (Traffic, Blow, etc.) Maria Alvarez (Catalina Sandino Moreno) lives in cramped accommodation with her grandmother, mother, sister and infant nephew in an impoverished town outside of Bogotá. She helps support the family by working in a pesticide-saturated rose plantation, where workers, largely unprotected against the chemical toxicity, labour in a sweatshop environment. (In an interview, director Marston pointed out that Colombia is the second-largest exporter of cut flowers in the world and that due to the toxic conditions of work, and there are still a dramatic number of birth defects associated with plantation workers in Ecuador and Colombia)

Pregnant and yearning for better prospects than are offered by the town including a loveless marriage proposal from her child's father. Maria sets off for Bogotá to connect up with a friend who is working as a maid. En route she meets Franklin, a young procurer for the drugs mafia, who talks of hooking her up with a cool job that involves lots of travel. In the same breath, he mentions the word 'mule'; Maria is well aware that he is talking about illegal drug transportation.

Maria is enticed by the $5,000 mules are paid per trip, a sum that would radically change her family's life. She meets with the disarmingly paternal drug boss, Javier and at this point the film becomes a graphic and horrifying exposé of the risks and perils endured by the most exploited layer of the narcotics industry. The illicit heroin is stuffed into latex glove fingers and sealed with dental floss. After Maria's throat has been numbed by an analgesic soup, she swallows 62 pellets and is told that no matter what, she is responsible for her internal cargo. Threats against her family are made.

With a grainy composition and its heroin-as-host metaphor, Maria Full of Grace is an exploration of one of the deadly avenues that young people and other layers of the population (mules are as young as 17 and as old as 82) take to mitigate economic blight in countries such as Colombia. But escaping poverty is not the only motivating factor. Maria is bold and rebellious enough to want a decent future for herself and her baby. She must therefore flee from the dead-end existence centered on the flower plantations of her village life. The film provides a glimpse into how bleak and crushing are the economic and social prospects, particularly for the youth.

The tagline for Maria Full of Grace reads 'Based on 1,000 true stories' ostensibly referring to the fact that approximately 1,000 people per year make the journey as drug mules from Colombia to the United States. In the film's production notes, director Marston states: 'There are over a billion people on the planet living on a dollar a day or less; they're not all drug mules. So the question poses itself: what does cause a person who is in desperate straits to become a drug mule? Well, there are as many answers as there are people who do it'.

One of the film's characters is Don Fernando, played by Orlando Tobón, a native-born Colombian. For the last 20 of his 35 years living in Queens, New York, Tobón has raised money so that the unclaimed bodies of Colombians who have died in the US as mules are not sent to Potter's Field, the cemetery for paupers, and buried in unmarked graves. He has rendered some 400 bodies back to their families in Colombia.

Director Marston exposes the gruesome fate of many who, like his character Maria, undertake the risks of becoming a mule. He reports that it's not uncommon to find bodies by the side of the road two miles from the New York airport, cut open with their intestines pulled out. Another interview quotes the director elaborating on his motives for making Maria Full of Grace: 'I think it's very common with all the rhetoric and ideology of the drug war, to pitch drug mules and drug traffickers as criminals and demonise them. Reduce them and flatten them to two-dimensional cut-outs of people who need to be put in prison, and thereby justify a whole politics and machinery that's geared towards spending more and more money on prisons, and tanks and helicopters in order to fight the drug problem. I think if we've seen anything in 40 years of fighting the drug war, it's that that doesn't work. And what we need to be doing is spending more money on the other side of the problem, on the human side.

'In Colombia that would mean spending more money on schools, and investing in the economy, and in creating more possibilities for somebody to earn a living with dignity. And on the United States side that means spending less money on prisons and police and putting non-violent offenders in prison, and more money on helping people to rehabilitate themselves and treating the drug problem as a public health problem rather than as a criminal problem.'

Marston's humane and thoughtful approach to the conditions of young people like Maria and their journey into the drug world endows the film with its overall sincerity. The film argues that mules are essentially victims, the most vulnerable and dispensable targets of the so-called 'drug wars'; It makes clear that the real beneficiaries of the massive and lucrative international drug trade are not those who illicitly transport the contraband across borders. It also shows that working as a mule is a form of cheap labour that, at its core, is not fundamentally different from other forms of exploitation; for example, being forced to slave away on a flower plantation. This interpretation has value in an atmosphere of chronic and hypocritical moralising by the political establishment, which presides over the social misery that propels young people into the drug trade all over the world.

Maria Full of Grace locates itself politically as taking the viewpoint of a person whose voice would be marginalised; according to Marston who describes the conditions that lead Maria to get involved in the mule subculture." 'The largest economy in Bogotá is the oil industry. There's a lot of foreign industry that's coming in and pumping oil out of the country. After oil, there are obviously drugs, cocaine and illicit narcotics, which a lot of people do get caught up in. Then there are other things, like coffee and flowers.... Beyond that, it's very much a rural economy, mired in a civil war where in many regions the guerillas and the paramilitary are at odds. There's a lot of crossfire in towns that causes people to leave in great numbers, and go to the outskirts of places like Bogotá. They end up living in shanties or small houses with no electricity and no power, trying slowly to rip into an economy that doesn't have enough room for them, with unemployment being 15 to 20 percent' states the director. This is the background to Maria's decision to become a mule.

Marston has created a film with many convincing aspects. When the camera is firmly focused on objective conditions and processes, Maria Full of Grace is at its strongest. Unfortunately, when the filmmaker lifts his eyes and starts to generalise, his work loses its sharpness, assuming a more complacent and passive character. The scenes of Colombia, of Maria, her family and the village youth, as well as those involving the drug muling - contrasting innocence with a terrible underworld are compelling and authentic. The film's story of Maria in New York is less acute, tending in the direction of a certain self-satisfaction. Airport security officers at New York's point of entry are a little too benign. A more uncritical subtext begins to make itself felt, hinting that Maria will fulfill her dreams in America.

This attitude finds expression in the film's production notes: 'Maria finally emerges at the threshold of a new future, one that will be defined by what she wants rather than what she rejects'. This is a somewhat too rosy prognosis - indeed the opposite of the reality faced by many poor immigrants in the USA.

This type of political softness detracts artistically and blurs the piece's edges. However, by offering an honest, unvarnished look at one of the barbaric options pushed onto the economically disenfranchised, Maria Full of Grace offers a paradigm for how the virginal and pure of soul come of age under capitalism.

Les Choristes (The Chorus)

Directed by Christophe Barratier;
Written by Christophe Barratier and Philippe Lopes-Curval, (inspired by the screenplay of "La Cage aux Rossignols," written by Noel-Noel, Rene Wheeler & Georges Chaperot
Music by Bruno Coulais, with selections by J. P. Rameau
Produced by Jacques Perrin, Arthur Cohn, Nicolas Mauvernay
Running time: 1:36

Cast:
Clement Mathieu - Gerard Jugnot
Rachin - Francois Berleand
Chabert - Kad Merad
Pierre Morhange, as child - Jean-Baptiste Maunier
Pierre Morhange, as adult - Jacques Perrin
Violette Morhange - Marie Bunel
Father Maxence - Jean-Paul Bonnaire
Pepinot, as child - Maxence Perrin
Pepinot, as adult - Didier Flamand