THE WATCHER

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Any kid in Filmmaking 101 knows that the easiest thing to shoot, and have it hold an audience's attention, is a chase scene. Almost every movie ever made contains some form of a chase scene, and it can be fun to pick it out in every genre of film.

But debut feature director Joe Charbanic (music video director for Keanu Reeves' band Dogstar) dilutes any hope for captivating cinematic entertainment in The Watcher by beating this otherwise innocent cinematic device until there is nothing left. People run, cars chase, helicopters search, and somewhere along the way a suspense movie pretends to happen.

It doesn't help matters that Keanu Reeves, as David Allen Griffin, insists on crystallizing his worst-actor-in-Hollywood title by playing a serial killer about as menacing as a sleeper sofa. And James Spader (sex, lies and videotape) comes off more as a desperate actor in search of a script than as Joel Campbell, a drug addled F.B.I. agent hot on Griffin's trail.

The Watcher is a textbook study in oversights that music video directors make in directing poorly written feature films, the most grievous disregard being the choice of script. Joel pours out tons of weakly disguised exposition to his unskilled therapist Polly (Marisa Tomei). The therapy session dialogue is so slanted toward Joel gabbing about his tortured life of tracking an elusive serial killer that Joel should be the one interviewing Polly.

Charbanic leverages the shrink/patient relationship for much more than it's worth, then blows his only shot at an even marginal movie by failing to produce compelling visuals and refusing to mix up the rhythm of the story. Every labored flashback feels like two giant rusty cogs turning so that the audience can get yet another glimpse of Keanu in black leather, threatening to break out of his notoriously flat-line readings.

It's hard to believe that Reeves has actually worked in a movie with Al Pacino (The Devil's Advocate), a master of vocal inflection, and didn't learn a single thing from the experience. The only real question is how many movies Keanu Reeves will be cast in before casting directors realize that not only does the emperor have no clothes, he hasn't even got the energy to sit on a float in the parade. When Keanu does a victory jig to some metal-grunge music before squatting down with his fingers stuck against his temples like little Satanic horns, it's so laughably bad that you want to write a letter.

Spader keeps his focus strong, but can't help seeming like a weakened Atlas trying to carry the weight of the world on his exhausted shoulders. The weathered Marisa Tomei looks like an aging ingenue pulled out of some community theater production and given her first film role. Tomei cheats her psychiatrist role as Polly by evoking a damaged girlish quality that begs for another, more experienced actress to come along and relieve her of the burden of acting.

No stars for this lame attempt at stylish suspense and psychological voyeurism.

Rated R. 93 mins. 

ZERO STARS

 

THE NINTH GATE

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The Ninth Gate is a well-crafted and entertaining horror film. While director Roman Polanski chooses to lilt over the horrific trajectory that tugs mercenary book dealer Dean Corso (Johnny Depp) toward the gates of Hell, rather than embrace his protagonist's terror as he did with such shockers as Rosemary's Baby (1968) or The Tenant (1976), Polanski stakes out his own ground rules and adheres to them flawlessly.

The sense of suspense is formal as it is purposeful. 

From the film’s textbook opening scene in which Polanski's subjective camera discerningly divulges aspects of a millionaire's library in which imminent death approaches, to the thorough European pacing over which the devilish story unfolds, The Ninth Gate takes the audience on a joyfully evil descent into perplexing other-worldly shadows.

Based on Arturo Perez-Reverte's best-selling novel El Club Dumas, this is a modern gothic horror story woven from the proposed power of satanic literature to conjure up the Devil himself. Dean Corso is an unscrupulous book broker hired by Satan scholar Boris Balkan (Frank Langella) to travel from New York to Toledo, Portugal, and Paris to compare Balkin's recently acquired 1666 edition of a rare, hand-bound manual of satanic invocation, supposedly written by Satan himself, against the only two other copies in existence to verify the tome's authenticity.

Balkan tells the amoral Corso: "There's nothing more reliable than a man who can be bought." Corso's cynical character trait of temptation is written in the sanguine fluid of money from the film's beginning. Corso wears death on his sleeve like a war zone journalist hot for action. Johnny Depp uses a vocal texture that rumbles from the screen in a dark pitch that catches you off guard. His economic but heavy timbre establishes a hollowness in his character, dying to be filled with some unknown organic passion. At times, Depp seems to recede into the film's creaking metal and dry tinder-in-a-box settings. He suggests a precise mortal puppet being manipulated by collaborating evil forces to trace steps he cannot help but follow.

Polanski and his two collaborating screenwriters, John Brownjohn ("Tess") and Enrique Urbizu, orchestrate their Faustian script in a cinematic shorthand that magnifies tiny details like subtle differences in the nine diabolical engravings which comprise the murderous puzzle that Corso attempts to unravel amidst the three volumes. Polanski drops in sudden repulsive images that give terse nods to such horror films as Hitchcock's Frenzy, and Nicholas Roeg's Don't Look Now. He allows scenes to play without the ersatz aid of musical accompaniment, resulting in a delightfully intimate game of call and response for the audience to conceive while the action unfolds. There are so many highly polished cinematic elements to enjoy in every frame of the movie that repeated viewing beckons.

Pauline Kael said that "great movies are rarely perfect movies," and this truism certainly applies to The Ninth Gate. Actress Emmanuelle Seigner's (Frantic) sub-plot as Dean Corso's mysterious, dark guardian angel slips through the film as a sexy and enigmatic mascot that Corso accepts too easily. There are plenty of silly bumps and loopy twists that don't sufficiently fulfill a dynamic dramatic arc for the film's slightly long running time, but no jolting scares. Still, there is plenty to enjoy in director of photography, Darius Khondji's ("Seven") hand-in-glove association with the masterful vision of a director who believes that content is more important than form.

In the end, Dean Corso could readily be an alter-ego fugitive that Polanski recognizes in the mirror of the camera lens. It's an image you can almost imagine.

Rated R. 133 mins.

 

THE YAKUZA — CLASSIC FILM PICK

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Robert Mitchum was a hot property coming off the success of “The Friends of Eddie Coyle” when he made Sydney Pollock’s “The Yakuza” in 1974. It was the same year that “The Yakuza’s” co-screenwriter Robert Towne scored big with his screenplay for “Chinatown,” which Roman Polanski crafted into a timeless masterpiece of political and familial corruption in Los Angeles. Why not write a script that guarantees a trip to Japan for some extravagant location filming?

For his debut screenwriting effort, Paul Schrader works with Towne on “The Yakuza” to create an ambitious cinematic apologia for the atrocities levied on Japan by the U.S. during World War II, albeit on a deep personal level. The screenwriters are quick to point out in stark narrative terms the awful damage done to the Japanese by America’s fire-bombing missions that paled even the horrific destruction done by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The film is a crash course in the ethical codes of the Yakuza, Japan’s transnational organized crime syndicate. Robert Mitchum’s World War II vet Harry Kilmer still carries a torch for Eiko (Keiko Kishi), the Japanese woman whose life he saved while serving as a U.S. Marine. Kilmer went so far as to borrow money from his fellow Marine George Tanner (Brian Keith) to help Eiko open a bar in Tokyo.

Tanner has since switched from being a private detective to selling guns to the Yakuza. A lost gun shipment has caused the Yakuza to kidnap Tanner’s daughter. Kilmer agrees to do his old War pal a favor and travel to Tokyo to track down Eiko’s Yakuza-connected brother Tanaka (played by the amazing Ken Takakura) to help rescue Tanner’s daughter. Tanner hooks Harry up with Dusty (Richard Jordan) as a personal bodyguard whose instincts for survival are no match for Harry’s fast-twitch defense mechanisms.

The convoluted narrative holds secrets about Tanner, Eiko, and Tanaka that cause Mitchum’s stoic character to take violent action, even against his own flesh. Although clunky by modern editing standards, “The Yakuza” is a fascinating film that earns its sequences of shocking violence, and pays off with a crisis of personally expressed morals that transfer from Eastern to Western philosophy through Tanaka and Harry Kilmer.

Robert Mitchum was in his stride when he made “The Yakuza,” doing a movie every year and making it look easy yet poignant with every performance. “The Yakuza” is a beautifully flawed film that nonetheless catches you off guard when you least expect it.

Rated R. 112 mins. 

Documentarian Jeremy Workman ("Who is Henry Jaglom," "Magical Universe") joins the boys to talk about Sydney Pollock's THE YAKUZA (starring Robert Mitchum, Keiko Kishi, Ken Takakura, and Richard Jordan). 

Although it was Cole's idea to do Mitchum's follow-up to "The Friends of Eddie Coyle," Jeremy still had his diary notes from seeing THE YAKUZA way back in 2001. Cole broke out a bottle of Hitachino Nest's REAL GINGER BREW because it only seemed right to have a legit Japanese craft beer on the show. This is one damned fine beer. Bon appetite.