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The closest thing to being on the Riviera for the Cannes Film Fest?... Plugging into on-the-pulse movie buffs' web site "Film Scouts" (http://www.filmscouts.co m) who concocted a special millennium multicast featuring "seaside chat" with key directors such as David Cronenberg, Pedro Almodovar, Werner Herzog and David Lynch, during the 52nd international film festival. Plugging themselves as "the premier movie site" specializing in "cutting-edge Internet broadcasting," the Film Scouts team provide year-round cinema coverage, in partnership with Hewlett-Packard. G.O.

 

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Still Crazy

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Extreme

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The Barbier of Siberia

June Cineview

By Lisa Nesselson

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Message in a Bottle

(Une bouteille à la mer)

Here in France, where posters for the French film "Romance" featured a bigger than life nude female abdomen and pubic area only partially occluded by a hand over the hirsute site, it feels oddly quaint to watch a protracted onscreen relationship in which a widower (Kevin Costner) and a divorcee (Robin Wright Penn) merely snuggle together and go for lots of long walks before deciding to take the plunge and go all the way. Of course, "Message in a Bottle" is probably a lot closer to the way that real people  even those not nearly as attractively lit as Costner and Wright Penn  behave, but if it weren't for Paul Newman as Costner's congenially crusty old dad, the movie would capsize into the Straits of Boredom.

Theresa, a researcher at the Chicago Tribune (where everybody is really, really supportive and the staff couldn't even find a co-worker's back in order to stab it) drops off her son (always referred to as "my terrific son") with his remarried dad and takes a break on Cape Cod. Where, while jogging along the shore, she finds a genuine message in a genuine bottle washed up at her feet.

Typed on a manual typewriter and on stationary with a distinctive logo, the titular message, addressed to one "Catherine," is a lush love letter calculated to go to a woman's swoon centers as surely as Viagra proceeds to sluggish blood vessels. Being a researcher and all, Theresa manages to figure out where the bottle and its heartfelt contents came from. She goes there. So can you. But be warned that Newman is the only unsmarmy ingredient. (June 30)

 

Badlands

(La balade sauvage)

Iconoclastic writer-director Terence Malick burst on the scene in 1973 with "Badlands," a gorgeous and gleefully deadpan interpretation of a real-life Midwestern killing spree, starring compactly hunky Martin Sheen and uber-waif Sissy Spacek. Spacek's ditzy yet poetic voiceovers ("Kit shot a football that he considered to be excess baggage") put a delirious and dreamily distanced spin on random acts of senseless violence. It was a rotgut American movie filtered through Euro-style narrative filters and, in a different register, it was as exciting to the film buffs who saw it then as "Star Wars" later proved to be for the multitudes who prefer Yoda Yoda Yoda to Seinfeld's Yadda Yadda Yadda. Malick made "Days of Heaven" in 1978 and then stayed away from directing until last year's "The Thin Red Line" ended the semi-legendary auteur's hiatus from the screen.

"The Thin Red Line" is too nebulous to be completely satisfying but, a quarter of a century after its debut, "Badlands" remains the genuine article: the perfect convergence of director, setting, subject matter and cast. Of course, as with so many quietly trailblazing works of art, the subtle innovations on display in "Badlands" have been thoroughly assimilated into the way stories are now told. But if somebody were to make wallet cards for the cinema like the ones listing the truly great winemaking years, thanks to this film and a select crop of others, 1973 would be listed as boasting visual grapes such as could make Dionysus weep for joy. (June 30)

 

Still Crazy

The highest compliment I can pay Brian Gibson's "Still Crazy" is that by the end I felt like I'd been a lifelong fan of an imaginary band. "Still Crazy," a sweet comedy about the reluctant reunion of a '70s-vintage rock 'n' roll outfit called "Strange Fruit," is peppered with sly observations about middle-aged men trying to recapture the strutting vibes of their aggressively misspent youth. It's utterly delightful.

As Hughie (Billy Connolly) the "road dog" tells us in voiceover, "Divine intervention pulled the plug on the Fruit's last concert." The estranged members have all gone their separate ways since a bolt of lightning cut short their set at the Wisbech festival in 1977. When the keyboard player, Tony Costello (Stephen Rea)  now a small businessman with a miniscule business  bumps into the son of the original Wisbech organizer, he agrees to get the band back together for an anniversary appearance. Which is infinitely easier said than done.

Gibson, who also directed the impressive "What's Love Got to Do With it?" (starring Laurence Fishburne and Angela Bassett as Ike and Tina Turner), has a knack for deftly capturing the way musicians interact offstage and on. The entire cast is terrific, but Billy Nighy as desiccated lead singer and 12-step program devotee Ray Simms is alone worth the price of admission.

You'll walk out humming and you'll also get some excellent pointers on how to play a game where the winner is the person who comes up with the most musical groups whose names include body parts (Badfinger, Heart, etc.). If you go, be sure to remain seated until the bitter end of the closing credits. (June 2)

 

Extreme and Olympic Glory

Not unlike the Internet in France, IMAX has taken a while to really come into its own internationally. When Disney releases "Fantasia 2000" in the fabulously crisp, all-enveloping format, people may get into the habit of going to their local IMAX screen (if they have one) instead of only checking out whatever happens to be playing when they're being tourists.

IMAX facilities were initially part of science museums and theme parks. About 100 films, most of them documentaries and some of them quite brief, have been made to date in the format. London recently launched an IMAX screen in an architecturally dazzling shell. The Paris area is blessed with two IMAX facilities, La Géode at La Villette and the privately owned Le Dôme IMAX theater at La Défense (which, with 467 steeply raked seats and the biggest hemispherical screen in the world, is something to behold.).

Although having a screen the size of an apartment building is one thing, the unique way IMAX films are shot and projected (sideways through the gate in 70mm and at 30 frames per second instead of the usual 24) is what gives them such depth and immediacy. "Everest," made with a hefty IMAX camera under incredible physical duress, has been an international smash. While it's not every day that a real life adventure lends itself so perfectly to the special format, there are other "you are there" subjects to explore, starting with the so-called "extreme sports" on display in "Extreme," which began an open-ended run at Le Dôme in early May.

It's thrilling to watch some of the world's best skiers, snowboarders, wind surfers, surfers, rock climbers and ice climbers doing what they do best. The production team waited over six weeks in Hawaii and was rewarded by being on location on June 28, 1998, for "Biggest Wednesday"  a record-breaking day of mammoth waves as high as 22 feet. How much fun any of the physical exploits in "Extreme" appear to be depends on your fear of drowning or plunging into a crevasse or smashing your bones into subatomic particles on a rock. As engaging as this footage is, I got the biggest kick out of the closing credits' "afterthoughts" giving a glimpse of what the cameramen went through to film people doing dangerous things in remote spots. For a hint of "Extreme" on the piddly screen of a computer, visit www.extreme70mmfilm.com.

"La Patrouille de France," a five minute film shown before "Extreme," is an incredibly exciting look at France's most skilled stunt formation pilots and the view from their cockpits as they trade horizons "Top Gun"-style as if flipping crepes. This is a superb instance of using film to show ordinary folks something we'd never ever see otherwise, unless taped to the bottom of a jet in flight.

Also running at Le Dôme is "Olympic Glory," a documentary about the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan, that required three years of pre- and post-production to complete. Highlights include a crystal clear explanation of what ski jumpers are trying to achieve and how they do it, and the innovations in skate design that have revolutionized speed skating. IMAX films are dubbed, never subtitled; "Olympic Glory" with its original English language narration by Stacy Keach shows Saturdays at 11:15am (for 30F, whereas other showings are 57F).

With few exceptions ("Everest," with an appealing score by George Harrison, being one of the best), the world's most exciting film format is inevitably and repeatedly paired with the world's least innovative music and smarmiest narration. No less a luminary than Thomas Keneally (author of "Schindler's List," among other books) wrote the voiceover drivel for "Olympic Glory." Final line: "Behind their faces lies the incarnate flame which the rest of us can't help but celebrate." I guess that makes them a bunch of muscular jack 'o' lanterns in warm-up suits.

In October, "Michael Jordan to the Max" will be released, followed by "The World's Game," about the 1998 World Cup, in December.

 

The Barber of Siberia

(Le Barbier de Sibérie)

Russian director Nikita Milhalkov has made no secret of his political ambitions, and his first major feature since the Oscar-winning "Burnt by the Sun" could be seen as an overextended campaign ad  way overextended. It is certainly not much of an excuse for a movie. If the reactionary Mikhalkov means to bring the same organizational ability, dramatic sense and speech-writing talent to running Russia as he does to "The Barber of Siberia," the country could be in even bigger trouble than it already is.

As a military cadet in an 1880s Moscow where everyone is always practicing his English, the charismatic Oleg Menshikov strives boyfully to convince, but he is 38 and his character perhaps 20. English actress Julia Ormond (four years younger than Menshikov) plays the Older Woman, an American adventuress. The miscast pair struggle with ludicrous situations, stilted dialogue ("Can it be that human life means nothing in this country?"), rampant anachronisms and silly hats. The viewer struggles to care anything about them, hour after hour.

The $45 million production is sumptuous and has its lovely moments, such as the set piece where Czar Alexander III (Mikhalkov himself, getting in some practice as world leader) addresses the adoring cadets. Among the strong Russian contingent in the cast, Alexei Petrenko is particularly funny and touching as Ormond's aging suitor. Richard Harris, on the other hand, is just awful as the inventor of a giant machine (the eponymous "barber") that clear-cuts Siberian glades in nothing flat. One looks in vain for a note at credits' end reassuring that "No trees were nicked or felled in the making of this film." Can it be that sylvan life means nothing in this country? (May 12) R.B.

 

 

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issue: June99

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